Российская наука и мир (дайджест) - Февраль 2000 г. (часть 2)

FROM the bluff overlooking the Tom river, where Tomsk's war memorial commemorates 60,000 dead, you can see the chimneys of Seversk smoking in the distance. This nuclear complex in western Siberia - perhaps the largest on earth and also one of the oldest - encapsulates within its wire perimeter fence all the intractable problems created by Russia's long love affair with nuclear power.
The idea, back in the 1950s, was to harness the power of the atom to the service of communism. Nuclear reactors promised abundant and cheap energy; nuclear weaponry was the core-component of the Soviet Union's rivalry with the United States. If big was good, bigger was glorious. Fast-breeder reactors were to provide a never-ending stream of cheap plutonium, useful for both weapons and power. But big science ran amok. Russia's engineers built their reactors fast, vast and with scant regard for safety, and sometimes barely trained the people who ran them. Since the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine in 1986, Europeans have worried that the rickety old nuclear-power plants of the former Soviet Union may have another accident that blows radioactivity over nearby countries. They fret, too, about the security risk posed by the 650 tonnes or so of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium-enough to make more than 40,000 nuclear bombs - scattered over more than 50 sites in Russia and the former Soviet Union. And they know that Russia is adding to those stocks not just by dismantling around 1,000 to 2,000 nuclear warheads a year, which is welcome, but also by reprocessing spent fuel and by continuing to run three plutonium-producing reactors. Seversk, formerly called Tomsk-7, was established in 1949 to produce and process, on an astonishing scale, materials for the Soviet nuclear-weapons programme. Its two working nuclear reactors (three more are mothballed) are military relics which produce about a tonne of plutonium a year. There is also a uranium-enrichment plant; a reprocessing facility, since the waste from the reactors is too dangerous to store; the world's biggest underground storage site for nuclear waste, into which highly radioactive waste from the reprocessing facility is still being pumped; a chemical plant at which warhead components were once made, using plutonium; and one of Russia's two main storage sites for HEU and plutonium recovered from dismantled weapons, sitting around in 23,000 canisters. Russia has one other plutonium-producing reactor in operation, with an attached reprocessing site, at Zheleznogorsk, also in Siberia. It has one other site for reprocessing spent fuel from civilian nuclear-power plants, at Mayak, in the Urals. Both sites also have hideously contaminated waste-storage facilities. But nowhere else is on the scale of Seversk, the biggest headache of them all. The plutonium-producing reactors present the most immediate problem. All the plants at Seversk are at least 40 years old. The two reactors are graphite-moderated and water-cooled, precursors of the design used at Chernobyl. Enormous stacks of graphite blocks surround vertical rods containing fuel. There are no containment vessels, no emergency core-cooling systems. "It was the design from which the Russians learnt the lessons they subsequently incorporated in Chernobyl," ironically observes Matthew Bunn of Harvard University. Today the graphite is swelling and cracking as a result of years of irradiation, changing shape in ways that are hard to predict. That creates the risk of another Chernobyl: if the rods or tubes in the core begin to buckle, engineers cannot control the speed of the reaction by withdrawing the fuel rods. Russia's relatively new nuclear-safety authority, GAN, has wanted for some time to shut down the Seversk reactors on safety grounds. GAN's concern is all the more alarming because Alexander Dimitriev, the deputy chairman, used to run the reactors: he oversaw their upgrading after Chernobyl and refers to them as "my babies". But the babies provide all the heat for Seversk and 30-40% of the heat for Tomsk. Last year GAN relented and issued the plants with a licence, on condition that they were operated at a lower level of peak power than in the past. Seversk is also home to the largest quantity of high-level nuclear waste on earth, accumulated as a result of its reprocessing activities. Most of Russia's nuclear waste, in terms of curies (a measure of potency) if not of volume, was generated and is stored on three sites in Siberia: Seversk, Zheleznogorsk and Mayak (where 120m curies have been dumped in one small lake). All told, says Don Bradley of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Russia has "released into the environment" 1.7 billion curies of waste: of that, he reckons, 1 billion curies is at Seversk. By contrast, America has released 3m curies all told. In the traditional Russian manner, most of the Seversk waste has been injected into deep storage sites in impermeable clay layers 400-500 metres underground. The Russians think this is safe, and the preliminary results of a joint Russian-American safety review are reassuring. Local environmentalists are sceptical: they worry that the storage sites are not far below the level from which Tomsk's drinking water is extracted. In addition, some 125m curies of waste is in ponds. This does not mean, Mr Bradley explains, "a little bitty piece of water with a couple of drums thrown in. If these were in the United States, you'd be talking about billions and billions of dollars to clean up." As it is, the waste threatens to leak into the groundwater and blow about in the air if the ponds dry up. A similarly contaminated pond at Ozersk, near Mayak, caused a disaster in the 1960s when its edges dried up and radioactive dust blew away in the wind. Seversk has had several serious accidents of its own. One of these, at the reprocessing plant in 1993, contaminated three villages to the north; fortunately, the wind that day was blowing away from Tomsk, where about half a million people live. But the villagers still complain of high levels of illness. New cases of thyroid cancer in the Tomsk region have risen sharply. In the early 1980s, there were three or four new cases each year; in the second half of the 1990s, more than 50. The city's few environmentalists and the regional environmental agency are powerless.All environmental monitoring at Seversk comes under the direct control of Moscow. So, says David Banks, a British hydro-geologist who has worked in the region, the Tomsk agency does one lot of monitoring, the Seversk one another, and data are not always exchanged. The environmentalists are keen to draw attention to their plight; but the Russian government scorns the anti-nuclear brigade, and the outside world seems not to care much. Many locals do not care much, either. They have learned to live with their poisonous neighbour, and even to depend on it. Seversk was once a hidden city; it did not appear on maps, and its population did not count as part of the region's total. Today, like many nuclear cities, it has become a sort of gated suburb. Some 120,000 people live next to its mighty arsenal, within its long perimeter fence. Its citizens head into Tomsk for a day's shopping, or go to work or to study at one of the town's impressive array of universities and colleges, many of them set up to train people to work at Seversk. They pass through a checkpoint and a search when they go and return; outsiders are rarely allowed in. Still, the people in Tomsk envy them. Seversk has a better supply of food and heat, better health care and better public services than Tomsk. Moreover, unlike most of Russia's nuclear cities, Seversk makes money, and actually expanded employment in the 1990s. It is now easily the region's biggest employer-which makes it hard for local people to campaign against it. It has contracts with several countries, including France, to reprocess their spent fuel, and benefits under a programme for dismantling Russia's nuclear arsenal. The United States has agreed to buy 500 tonnes of HEU from Russian weaponry, a scheme designed partly to keep Russia's nuclear engineers busy and fed. Seversk removes the nuclear components from Russian warheads and converts them into "low enriched uranium" to be used to fuel American nuclear plants. This dilapidated complex may be a monstrosity, but it helps Russia's balance of payments and keeps plenty of Siberians working. That, besides the scale of the pollution and the size of the plutonium stockpiles, is why it is so hard to clear Seversk up.

The price of help

Throughout the 1990s the United States negotiated a series of agreements with Russia, aimed mainly at securing and dismantling military nuclear weapons and the bomb-making materials that went into and came out of them. The top priority has been security. In the autumn of 1998, after the fall of the rouble, an American inspection team found that the guards at Seversk were "not receiving enough nutrition to perform their duties" and were refusing to go outside into the Siberian winter because they lacked winter coats. Now a programme known as Materials Protection, Control and Accountancy is paying for various security improvements, including the installation of detectors at the gates to sound an alarm if anyone tries to steal plutonium or HEU. Attitudes to security have changed within Russia too, says Rose Gottemoeller, the assistant secretary for non-proliferation at America's Energy Department. Facility directors, she says, have now been warned to expect Chechens driving up to the gates and trying to bash their way through, and Russia is also heeding American requests to concentrate the most dangerous nuclear materials in fewer sites. However, all the documented cases of nuclear theft so far have involved insiders smuggling material out, rather than outsiders breaking in. It will be a mistake if Russia focuses on deterring Chechens, and ignores the risks of theft by employees in the plants.
Improving security is simple, compared with the next-highest priority: that of shutting down the two nuclear reactors and their fellow at Zheleznogorsk. The United States has been negotiating this issue with Russia since the early 1990s. In 1994, Vice-President Al Gore signed an agreement with Viktor Chernomyrdin, then Russia's prime minister, to close down the reactors by 2000. The first studies, conducted principally by the nuclear industry and its proponents in both countries, improbably suggested that alternative fuels would be too costly. So a supposedly cheaper option was agreed on: to convert the reactors to use fuel that would produce far less plutonium and would not require subsequent reprocessing. That plan, also originally supposed to be implemented by this year, has run aground. Mr Dimitriev and GAN oppose it, arguing that its extremely complex and experimental nature might well make the ancient reactors even riskier. Safety, though, is only one problem. Another is that the converted reactors would run on HEU which would have to be fabricated and shipped to the plant. That, say some, would be even more perilous than adding more plutonium to Russia's existing gigantic stockpile. A third problem is cost. Not only has it risen since the plan was first mooted, to $300m for the three plutonium-producing reactors; in addition, since the rouble crisis, Russia can no longer afford even its share of a bill split with America. And conversion will be more expensive still if the rickety state of the reactors means they must anyway be shut down before 2010.
What might replace them? Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, Minatom, is keen to build a new nuclear reactor at Seversk, though it does not have the money at present. It has its eye on a joint project to design a gas-turbine modular helium reactor with the United States, Japan and France. America is putting in about $5m a year to finance research, but has no interest in financing a plant. If such a reactor could meet the targets claimed for it by its proponents (a big if, says Harvard's Mr Bunn), it has the potential to be cheaper than existing types of nuclear energy, safe from Chernobyl-style large accidents, and more proliferation-resistant than typical reactors.
On January 25th, the ministry held hearings in Seversk which one bus-load of Tomsk citizens was allowed to attend. Sergei Vorobyev, a local environmentalist, says that protests were brushed aside and the local newspapers, unwilling to alienate the powerful nuclear lobby, reported that the plans were not opposed. He is lobbying for public hearings to be held in Tomsk itself.
In mid-February, however, Minatom told the United States that it wanted to abandon the idea of converting the reactors at Seversk so that they would no longer produce plutonium. Instead, it proposed to develop alternative, non-nuclear, sources of heat and power to replace them. Southern Siberia has plenty of natural gas and coal. There is also ample scope to improve the efficiency with which energy is used in the region. In 1994 a study found that 55% of the heat produced in Tomsk was wasted. Russian buildings leak energy like sieves: they use 425 kilowatt-hours per square metre a year, compared with 135 in Sweden and 120 in the United States. In icy Tomsk, the potential for heat loss is even worse: astonishingly, the pipes that carry warm water around the district heating network of Seversk and Tomsk are completely uninsulated.

Will Russia co-operate?

Closing the reactors would help on three fronts. It would reduce Russia's output of plutonium; it would remove the danger of a serious accident; and it would reduce the amount of Russian nuclear waste that requires storage. The United States has also been negotiating a separate agreement with Minatom to end the reprocessing of waste from Russia's civilian reactors, which takes place at Mayak. On February 7th, Bill Richardson, America's secretary of energy, said his department would provide $100m in the coming fiscal year if Russia would stop reprocessing at Mayak and improve the security of the plutonium that has already been reprocessed. But this deal, like so much else associated with Russia's nuclear mess, may take years to put in place. For the moment, America has nothing more than an oral agreement with Yevgeny Adamov, the head of Minatom - and an oral agreement with Russians on this subject, in Sam Goldwyn's immortal phrase, is "not worth the paper it's written on". Minatom may yet demand compensation for losses from terminating existing reprocessing contracts, and money for re-employing the reprocessing workers. (Ironically, one of the contracts is with the Pentagon, to reprocess fuel from decommissioned Russian submarines - a type of reprocessing which is not covered by the proposed moratorium.) Much of the rest of the American proposal is dependent on Russia's agreement to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran after the first joint reactor there has been completed. This stumbling-block looks unbudgeable. It has already blighted congressional generosity, frustrating people like Ken Luongo, who served in the first Clinton administration and is now lobbying with a body called the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council to increase spending on a programme to help Russia's nuclear cities. Under this scheme, federal cash is used to redeploy Russia's nuclear workers on clean-up or research programmes. This, says Mr Luongo, means that 30,000-50,000 technical people, mostly in their late 40s and early 50s, can be "extracted from their dependence on Russia's nuclear complex and put into real jobs until they are ready for retirement." America's Energy Department reckons the cos of the programme at perhaps $600m over the next six years. So far it is committed to spending up to $22.5m, and has asked for another $17.5m.
Where else might the money come from? The most ingenious initiative comes from the Non-Proliferation Trust, an eclectic group whose backers include a former CIA staffer and Thomas Cochran of the National Resources Defence Council, a giant American environmental group. The group suggests putting together two urgent needs: that of Russia for clean-up money, and that of many countries, especially in Asia, for somewhere to store their spent nuclear fuel.
Minatom has already spotted this neat coincidence, and has lobbied hard to change a law that forbids Russia to import spent fuel from abroad merely to store it, rather than reprocess and return it. Last year, Greenpeace joined forces with Russia's environmentalists to rout an attempt to change the law in the Duma. The Non-Proliferation Trust wants to set up a sanitised version of this plan. The trust would acquire the spent fuel and would build storage facilities for it (and for Russia's own spent fuel) to best western standards and supervise them. The facilities would be large enough to take Russia's own 15,000 tonnes or so of spent fuel as well as some 10,000 tonnes from other places. In exchange, the trust would receive around $15 billion, of which rather less than $4 billion would be needed to pay for storage and the rest could be used for other work, such as cleaning up or pensions.
Under this scheme, Minatom itself would not control either the cash or the fuel. But this has not soothed environmentalists in America or Russia. Neither group trusts Minatom, and the westerners also feel, as a general principle, that each country should look after its own waste, in order to discourage the use of nuclear power in the first place. The need for a change in Russian law is not the only barrier. Some 70% of the world's spent fuel - more in the case of Japan, Switzerland and South Korea, the countries with the most pressing storage problems - comes from fuel originally supplied by America. The United States retains "consent rights" to decide what happens to it, and Congress's permission would be needed for Russia to import it. That in turn would require Russia to abandon its nuclear co-operation with Iran. Mr Cochran is hopeful; he thinks the new Russian government is behind the plan, and so it may be. Russia has already made some progress. It has improved security, grasped the need to clean things up, and showed itself willing to halt plutonium production. Now the government of Vladimir Putin, himself not much of a green, has to be persuaded that cleaning up is more lucrative than continuing to reprocess spent fuel from other countries. The money must come from somewhere. Some of the plans on the table look useful; but if America's Congress opens its wallet, can it trust the Russians to keep their side of the bargain, ceding control of a programme on which they have long pinned so much of their national prestige? On that question may turn the future of the dirtiest and most dangerous nuclear experiment in the history of the planet.

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Reuters / Tuesday February 1 5:38 AM ET

Russian Spaceship Launched to Supply Mir Lab

By Oleg Akhmetov

С космодрома Байконур запущен грузовой корабль, который доставит топливо и оборудование на космическую станцию Мир для приема космонавтов в марте.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) -- A Russian cargo craft carrying fuel and vital equipment for space station Mir blasted off on Tuesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome to prepare the station for a manned mission next month.
The spacecraft, named Progress M1-1, took off at 0647 GMT and is due to dock with Mir at 0800 GMT on Thursday, officials at the cosmodrome said. Apart from fuel and water, the craft carries equipment to restore air pressure inside Mir which has been losing air due to a minor leak. A two-man crew is scheduled to travel to Mir on March 31.
Russian officials have said that if Progress failed to automatically dock with Mir, the crew consisting of cosmonauts Sergei Zaletin and Alexander Kaleri, could be sent up earlier to do this manually.
Some officials say that the early manned mission could start off on February 17, while others say the date could be February 8.
Russia was set this year to junk Mir, the pride and joy of its once-proud space program but decided later to prolong the life of the station after finding a foreign investor willing to pay $20 million to finance one more manned flight.
During its 14 years in orbit, Mir has overcome a number of serious technical defects but Russian officials say Mir is in good shape.
"What we are doing cannot be called a re-animation of Mir because Mir is functioning normally," Yury Semyonov, president of Energiya rocket corporation which owns Mir told Reuters.
"According to our plans Mir will fly until end-August on a piloted regime and after that we shall decide what to do with it," he said in an interview.
Russia is a participant in the $60 billion International Space Station (ISS) which unites the United States, the European Union and Japan and is due to take off this year from Baikonur.

West Wants Russia To Focus On ISS

The foreign partners are closely watching the Mir situation because Russia which is building the living quarters for the station has fallen behind on its obligations to the ISS program.
The United States has urged Russia to devote its resources to ISS whose launch has already been delayed several times.
But Semyonov said work on Mir did not necessarily contradict the ISS. He added that the two stations could run in tandem for a while. For instance the Progress M1 could be used for carrying supplies for the ISS as well, he said.
"Of course Mir is not eternal but we have still not exhausted its potential," Semyonov said. "At the same time ISS is a perspective for the next 15 years so we shall not set one program against another."
Tuesday's launch was the first in 2000 from Baikonur, which Russia rents from Kazakhstan for $115 million annually. A Zenit booster rocket carrying a Tselina satellite is scheduled for launch on Wednesday.
Russia also wishes to launch a Proton rocket on February 12 though Kazakhstan has yet to lift its ban on Protons, imposed last October when the second subsequent rocket of that type crashed on the Kazakh steppes soon after takeoff.

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AP Worldstream / 02 February 2000

Russians to test inflatable descent vehicle for spacecraft

На следующей неделе в России будут произведены испытания надуваемого транспортного аппарата для мягкого приземления космических кораблей. Этот эксперимент может открыть новые возможности для космических исследований.

MOSCOW, (AP Worldstream via COMTEX) -- In an experiment that could open new possibilities for space research, Russia next week is to test an inflatable recovery vehicle intended to bring spacecraft to a soft landing on Earth, officials said Wednesday.
The vehicle, developed by the Russian NPO Lavochkin company in cooperation with DaimlerChrysler Aerospace, would protect spacecraft from heat during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
After entering the atmosphere, the vehicle would then inflate to soften the landing, said Vyacheslav Mikhailichenko, a spokesman for the Russian Aerospace Agency. He did not give details on how the inflation would occur. The vehicle is to be tested in a launch next Wednesday in which a dummy payload is to be sent into orbit and return protected by the device. The final stage of rocket's engine also is to be returned with an inflatable vehicle.
The European Space Agency is also taking part in the experiment, Mikhailichenko said in a telephone interview Russians hope to use the vehicle to carry out commercial launches of spacecraft for the European Space Agency, he said.

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The Associated Press / Monday February 7 9:31 AM ET

Kazakhs Lift Ban on Russian Proton Rocket Launches

Казахстан снял запрет на запуски ракеты Протон

ALMATY, Kazakhstan (Reuters) -- Kazakhstan has lifted its ban on launches of Russia's Proton rocket boosters from the Baikonur cosmodrome, clearing the way for a Feb. 12 mission, a senior space official said Monday.
"The Proton ban was lifted over the weekend after a meeting of a special government commission," Nurlan Utembayev, deputy head of Kazakhstan's National Space Committee, told Reuters.
The vast Central Asian state, which inherited Baikonur after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, suspended Proton flights last October after a Proton-K booster crashed to earth, scattering debris over its remote, barren steppe.
Launches of other types of rocket, including the Zenit and Soyuz, were allowed to continue.
The accident was a virtual repeat of a Proton failure in July, which also prompted a temporary ban.
Utembayev said that a Russian investigation had established the likely cause of the second crash.
"It was apparently due to the presence of metal and mineral parts, which led to the engine igniting," he said. He added that the next scheduled Proton blast off was on Feb. 12, with an Indonesian Garuda satellite on board.
Russia plans to make 12-14 Proton missions in 2000.

Proton A Key Part Of Russian Space Program

Moscow will be relieved to see the Proton, a major workhorse for its commercial space program, blasting off again.
Launches like the Garuda satellite are a key source of cash and the Proton is also vital to the International Space Station (ISS), a $60 billion joint venture between Russia, the United States, the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan.
Russia is building the living quarters for the ISS, but funding problems have held up its completion and several planned launch dates have come and gone. The Zvezda service module is due to be lifted into orbit by the powerful Proton booster.
Yuri Koptev, head of Russia's space agency, said last month that the service module launch was now planned for late July. Ties between normally friendly neighbors Russia and Kazakhstan were soured by the Proton failures. The Kazakh media accused Moscow of imperialistic arrogance reminiscent of the Soviet era for its handling of the first accident. Moscow was more diplomatic in the second case, and agreed to pay $370,000 in compensation for the October crash. Russia has also failed to keep up regular payments on the $115 million annual rent charge for the Baikonur base.

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Reuters / Wednesday February 9 5:16 AM ET

Russians Launch 'Revolutionary' New Space Model

Oleg Akhmetov

В России в научно-производственном объединении им. Лавочкина создан новый блок ускорителя, который является, по словам генерального конструктора Валериана Байкина, "новым словом" в ракетной технологии. Он компактен и обладает способностью включать и отключать двигатели ракеты во время полета.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) -- A new, reusable space launch vehicle, with engines that can be turned on and off in orbit, lifted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome on Wednesday. Officials from Russia's Lavochkina Science Production Association, which constructed the "Fregat" accelerator block said the equipment could revolutionize space flight.
"This block is the new word in rocket technology," Lavochkina's deputy general constructor Valeryan Baikin said.
"It has an effective, compact design, a triple-axis steering system and the ability to switch on the engines several times during a flight," Baikin told reporters. "Furthermore, it can return to earth and be used again."
The test mission involves circling the earth five times in around eight hours before returning to earth. If the mission and a second test planned for March are successful, the Fregat is due to make two launches this summer with equipment for the European Space Agency.

New Space Technology On Display

The Fregat is capable of carrying space equipment weighing up to 4.2 tons to an altitude of 875 miles and lighter loads far higher.
It has a special cone-shaped braking system, which allows the block to return to earth after it has completed its mission in space as well as serving to soften the impact on landing.
It also boasts its own parachute system, meaning that if a launch goes wrong the Fregat block and its load could return to earth largely undamaged. Two Russian Proton rocket boosters failed last year shortly after blasting off from Baikonur, raining debris down on the remote Kazakh steppe and triggering temporary suspensions of Proton launches.
Vladimir Yefanov, the deputy head of the Fregat project at Lavochkina, said the block could be launched on all of the main rocket boosters used for Russia's space program.
"The Fregat is a universal model. It can be used with the Proton, Zenit, Soyuz and Dnepr boosters," he said.
Wednesday's launch was on a Soyuz booster.

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