FEATURE - Liability row delays Russian nuclear sub clean-up
Date: 19-Nov-02
Country: RUSSIA
Author: Jon Boyle
But billions of dollars needed to help neutralise the environmental threat are on hold because Western states say Russia refuses to exempt them from legal liability should anything go wrong while they help Moscow clean up its mess.
Experts at an international forum in the Pacific port of Vladivostock said an inter-ministry fight, pitting Russia's Foreign Ministry against the Defence and Atomic Energy Ministries, appeared to be at the heart of the controversy.
Russian scientists say the radiation locked inside the corroding hulls of 122 decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines, once the pride of the Soviet fleet, represents 3,000 times the levels of the A-bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
"Early generation submarines are in a desperate state" because they were not designed with dismantling in mind", Ian Downing, the man in charge of British efforts to help Russia put its nuclear house in order, told Reuters.
"They haven't been looked after, they are sinking. Most of them have still got the spent fuel on board," while others risk capsizing, he said on the sidelines of the British-funded forum on decommissioning Russia's nuclear submarines.
ALARM BELLS
Some fear that early submarines still have their weapons on board, corroded into place, said Downing, director of the Nuclear Industries Directorate at Britain's Department of Trade and Industry. "But that's informed speculation, shall we say."
Downing said he was absolutely mystified why Russia was refusing to grant Britain the same liability exemptions written into U.S. and Norwegian accords.
"Nuclear liability never goes away so you need to extend the exemption from liability into the future. All previous agreements with the Russians have done that.
"When we came to put that condition into our agreement, they said 'no, we no longer accept the idea of continuing liability'.
"So we said to them, what about all these agreements you've already signed? To which they replied, 'they are not enforceable in Russian law.'
"That's set some alarm bells going around the world. It's one of the reasons the G8 Global Partnership might never fly, unless we get this issue sorted. So my parochial problem has become an international problem."
That agreement, forged during the June G8 summit of leading industrial nations in Canada, would provide Russia with $10 billion from the United States and $10 billion from the club's other rich members (excluding Russia) over a decade.
Several projects agreed with Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy only need the dispute to be resolved to commence. British Prime Minister Tony Blair raised the issue in Moscow talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in October.
SUMMIT HAGGLING
The liability issue "caused a lot of trouble at the Kananaskis summit", said one British official familiar with the debate. "It was quite clear, but not explicit, that they were trying to do a deal. They would give in on liability if the G7 would give in on debt relief.
"Because they've got into this wider kind of trading thing, they cannot do a deal that would undermine their wider objective," the official said.
U.S. projects are also suffering from the liability issue, says Dieter Rudolph, programme director of the U.S. national Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation programme.
"We have been trying to get our own legal agreement for over three years and not had any success", said Rudolph, whose programme comes under the U.S. Department of Defense.
He has only been able to help develop a spent nuclear fuel cask for U.S. and Russian submarines by using the existing Cooperative Reduction Threat programme with Russia, which provides the legal protection Rudolph needs.
"I think we all have concluded that the problem really is within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that their priorities do not appear to be the same as the priorities of the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Atomic Energy", Rudolph said.