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Russia: Naval Fuel Cycle Foreign Assistance
Prepared by James Clay Moltz, CNS
Assistant Director
The status of nuclear materials in the Russian naval fuel cycle has been a matter of serious concern to several countries. Neighboring states like Japan and Norway have been concerned primarily with the environmental impact of Russian liquid radioactive waste, spent fuel, and, to a lesser extent, solid waste (reactor compartments). Other countries, like the United States, have been more concerned about the proliferation implications of the poor state of physical protection of highly enriched uranium submarine fuel and the arms control implications of the slow rates of Russian nuclear submarine dismantlement. Various national governments and groups of governments have created several distinct programs to combat these problems in the Russian naval nuclear fuel cycle. (For general information on nuclear assistance programs to Russia, please see the Russia Foreign Assistance section.) Japan began to become concerned about Russian radioactive waste developments
in 1993, when Russia resumed the dumping of liquid wastes into the Sea
of Japan after a break of several years. As part of a larger $100-million
package pledged in April 1993 to improve nuclear safety in the former Soviet
Union, Japan reached an agreement with the Russian government on providing
a floating filtration plant to the Zvezda
Far Eastern Shipyard to help eliminate the backlog of liquid radioactive
wastes for which the Russian Pacific Fleet lacked adequate storage facilities.[1]
After the Russian side rejected an initial all-Japanese design as inadequate,
Moscow agreed to a joint Russian-US-Japanese facility, which enlisted the
experience of Nizhniy Novgorod's Lazarit
Central Design Bureau and the US company Babcock and Wilcox (both under
sub-contract to Japan's Tomen group). In January 1996, construction
of the facility began at the Amurskiy
Zavod in Komsomolsk-na-Amure. The facility and a barge to transport
it to Bolshoy Kamen were completed in the spring of 1997, but opposition
to the plant by the residents of Bolshoy Kamen prevented its delivery until
late fall of that year. The facility, called
the Landysh, cost over $29 million to build and
will process 7,000 cubic meters of liquid waste per year.[26] A pier and associated
equipment to operate the plant are being constructed at Bolshoy
Kamen.[2] On 18 October 2000, the Landysh facility began
operations.[3] (For more information please see
the Landysh file.)
While the project will greatly increase
the Pacific Fleet's ability to filter and thereby reduce liquid nuclear
wastes coming out of decommissioned submarines, as of 1996 the facility's yearly operating
costs were estimated at $3.4 million. In addition, technical experts from
the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimate that
the Zvezda plant may need to hire as many as 150 specialists to maintain
it. While Japan has pledged to cover the costs of the first 12 months of
operation, Russia must find funds to cover subsequent years.[4] In October 2000, Viktor Akhunov, head of the Ministry of
Atomic Energy's Directorate for the Environment and Nuclear Facility Decommissioning,
stated that operation of the Landysh will actually be cheaper than other radioactive
waste processing facilities.[3] Unofficial sources, however, continue to aver
that processing costs will be prohibitively high, at about $400 per cubic meter
as opposed to $100-150 at other Russian facilities, while $700,000 will have to
be spent yearly on general upkeep at the Landysh.[5] In addition to funding the Landysh facility, in April 1999, Japan pledged to use an additional $35-38 million of the original $100-million package to help Russia with submarine dismantlement.[6,8] The project provides for dismantling a Victor-class SSN, reconstructing the Pacific Fleet's Pinega tanker for transporting containers of spent nuclear fuel, and upgrades to the Bolshoy Kamen-Smolyaninova railway.[7,8] Japan hopes to begin implementing the agreement in April 2001.[6] The Scandinavian governments have long been concerned about Soviet dumping of nuclear waste in the Barents and Kara Seas region, and about numerous decommissioned vessels containing nuclear reactors on board (some still fully fueled). From 1993 to 1994, Norway studied these problems and considered possible responses. The conclusions of this work appeared in a "Plan of Action" issued in 1994, which laid out priorities in four areas: safety at nuclear facilities, spent fuel management and radioactive waste issues, Russian dumping of radioactive wastes into the Barents and Kara Seas as well as inflow from Russian rivers and weapons-related environmental hazards. While Norway has provided significant assistance for the clean-up of air-borne emissions from a Russian nickel plant and in the nuclear safety field, it has been somewhat slower in providing direct assistance in the submarine area (largely due to initial lack of cooperation from the Russian side). In the mid-1990s, Norway funded a Norwegian-Russian study of Northern Fleet dismantlement issues, carried out by Kvaerner Maritime and the Russian company RCC Energiya. The report recommended measures to reduce bottlenecks in the dismantlement process and identified dismantlement costs and a possible timeline for dismantling 125 submarines by 2010.[9] As of August 2000, Norway is involved directly in the following activities: construction of a vessel for safe removal and sea transport of spent nuclear fuel, construction of four railroad cars for ground transport of spent nuclear fuel, and improvements for liquid radioactive waste storage tanks at Severodvinsk. Longer-term projects include additional efforts to empty and shut down existing storage facilities at Zapadnaya Litsa's Andreyeva Bay and construction of a new storage facility for solid radioactive wastes on the Kola Peninsula. The primary Norwegian firm commissioned to conduct these projects is Kvaerner Maritime. As of 7 June 2000, the Norwegian government promised to give Russia NKr105 million ($12.1 million as of 7 June 2000) to complete the projects [10]. Besides these bilateral programs with the Russian government, Norway is also an active participant in a trilateral liquid radioactive waste treatment project with the United States and Russia, a multilateral power reactor safety project with France, the United States, and the European Union, an interim spent fuel storage facility project on the Kola Peninsula with the four-state Industrial Group (composed of Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France), as well as the Lepse spent fuel reprocessing and Lepse "Village" projects initiated by the Norwegian environmental group Bellona (see below).[11,12] In May 1996, the Finnish Foreign Ministry gave $700,000 to the Finnish company IVO Power Engineering for a project using a mobile Finnish waste processing facility, Nures, to treat liquid radioactive waste from icebreakers at Atomflot. By May 1997, Nures had processed 300 cubic meters of waste. In August 1997, the Finnish Foreign Ministry discontinued funding for a similar project to process liquid waste from Russian nuclear submarines at Andreyeva Bay on the grounds that the funding provided for the project could be used to strengthen the Northern Fleet's military capability.[13] Two US programs are currently providing assistance to facilities involved in the Russian naval fuel cycle. One is the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program; the second the Department of Energy's material protection, control, and accounting (MPC&A) program (formerly the laboratory-to-laboratory program). US CTR activities in the naval sphere have focused primarily on the dismantlement of submarine launched ballistic missiles (particularly rocket fuel disposal) and on the dismantlement of nuclear submarine bodies. The US goal has been to hasten and facilitate Russian compliance with the START I agreement. To date, assistance has been provided to rocket dismantlement facilities in the Northern Fleet, the submarine dismantlement facilities at Nerpa, Sevmash, and Zvezdochka (Northern Fleet), and the submarine dismantlement facility at Bolshoy Kamen (Pacific Fleet). The equipment provided to Nerpa includes guillotine shears (for cutting up submarine bodies), a cable cutting machine, and a crane. The equipment began operation in March 1998.[14,15] At Bolshoy Kamen, the Zvezda Far Eastern Shipyard received $6 million worth of equipment from the United States in June 1995, including guillotine shears, cranes, conveyors, plasma cutters, and oxyacetylene torches. Including installation and training, the total assistance package for the Pacific Fleet totaled $8.4 million. In 1996, the United States was funding two contractors, an engineer from the US company Hughes Aerospace, and a mechanic from Bechtel to provide on-site assistance for CTR implementation in the Pacific Fleet.[4] These experts have now left the site, and the Russians are operating the equipment on their own. Another assistance program operated by the US government since 1996 has been the US Department of Energy's MPC&A program. The goal of this project has been to improve physical protection of fresh submarine fuel in order to keep it out of the hands of potential smugglers, rogue states, and terrorist groups. The project began with a trip in May 1996 by DOE physical protection experts to Site 49 at Severomorsk, a storage site for fresh fuel. In cooperation with the Kurchatov Institute (which acts as an intermediary between DOE and the Russian Navy), DOE designed a set of security upgrades for the facility and funded construction and the provision of necessary new technologies. A second project at the Murmansk Shipping Company provided upgrades at a storage site for icebreaker fuel. A third project, for the Pacific Fleet's Shkotovo Peninsula, involved upgrading ground-based and floating storage units for fresh and spent fuel.[16,17] (For more information on US CTR and MPCA assistance please see the Russia Foreign Assistance section.) The lack of adequate treatment facilities for liquid radioactive waste in the Northern Fleet has been a matter of some concern for many countries, but especially Norway. One US-Norwegian-Russian project, called the Murmansk Initiative, involves the construction of a treatment plant similar to the Japanese project in the Pacific Fleet to increase Russia's capacity for handling the increasing flow of liquid waste from decommissioned nuclear submarines in the Northern Fleet. The three parties are splitting the estimated $3.6 million cost equally. The facility began test operations in June 2001.[18] (For more information, see the Atomflot developments file.) The Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation Program began as a Norwegian initiative to combine the efforts of the United States, Norway, and Russia to address environmental problems in the Arctic region associated with Russian nuclear submarine decommissioning. The program officially started on 26 September 1996. AMEC priorities include: 1) development of containers and storage pads for interim storage and transportation of spent nuclear fuel, 2) development of mobile technology for treatment of liquid radioactive waste at remote sites, 3) implementation of technologies to reduce solid radioactive waste volumes and temporarily store solid waste, 4) cooperation in radiation monitoring and environmental safety, and 5) implementation of clean-up technologies.[19] A particularly acute concern in the Northern Fleet is the fate of the fuel storage vessel Lepse, which contains damaged fuel elements. A multilateral project, involving Norway, the US, France, and the European Union, aims at removing the damaged fuel elements and improving the safety of Lepse. In 1996, the cost of the first stage of this project was estimated at $9 million, which is being split among the parties.[11] This work is part of long-term cooperative efforts planned by the Euro-Arctic Barents Council, which includes Norway, Sweden (an EU member), and Russia, among other parties, in cooperation with the United States and France.[20] As of June 2000, the joint project was in danger of collapse. According to Deputy Minister of Atomic Energy Valeriy Lebedev, Norway had refused to finance the development of technical designs until an environmental impact statement was completed. The environmental study, however, was held up by the liability concerns of the European Union, United Kingdom, and France.[21] On 20 June 2000, Russia and France signed a bilateral liability agreement, lifting barriers to French participation in the project.[22] France, Norway, and the European Union are also involved in other cooperative assistance outside the submarine field. One project is aimed at the shutdown of two unsafe, VVER-440 civilian power reactors operating on the Kola Peninsula.[23] In 1997, a consortium of four western companies, called
the Industrial Group, consisting
of Swedish Nuclear Fuel and
Waste Management Company (SKB) of Sweden, British Nuclear
Fuels Limited (BNFL) of the United Kingdom, SGN of
France (Société Générale pour les Techniques Nouvelles, formerly Saint
Gobain Nucléaire),
and Kvaerner Maritime of Norway, and working with the St.
Petersburg All-Russian Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy
Technology (VNIPIET), signed an agreement with Russia to provide 25
million Swedish kroner ($3.3 million) for designing two modern storage
facilities at Mayak. These facilities were to store spent
fuel generated by the nuclear submarines and icebreakers on the Kola
Peninsula.[24,25]
The consortium and VNIPIET originally proposed the construction of a new,
dry storage facility for spent fuel, but Minatom favored completion of
a wet storage facility already licensed and under construction.[25] As of March 2000, the Industrial Group had put the Mayak
project on indefinite hold and begun work on the Federal Spent Nuclear Fuel Facility in Northern
Russia project to build interim storage facilities on the Kola Peninsula
instead.[12] For more information on the Industrial Group project
see the Mayak
Spent Fuel Reprocessing Developments section and the 12/99
entry in the Decommissioning
and Dismantlement Developments file.
Page last updated
14 August 2001
Comments or questions? Contact Cristina
Chuen at MIIS
CNS: Cristina.Chuen@miis.edu
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Foreign Nuclear Assistance
Naval Foreign Assistance
