Soviets Ready to Discuss Liability Pact for Nuclear Mishaps : Moscow Won’t Compensate West for Chernobyl Damage but Will Consider Question for Future

In the winter of 1978, when a nuclear-powered Soviet spy satellite plunged into the atmosphere and sprinkled radioactive debris across northern Canada, the government in Ottawa added up the cost of finding and retrieving bits and pieces of the satellite and presented the Soviet Union with a cleaning bill for 6,041,174.70 Canadian dollars.

The Soviets balked at first, but after two years of negotiations they finally agreed, in April, 1981, to pay 3 million Canadian dollars.

The Soviet settlement with Canada would seem to have established a precedent that in nuclear accidents affecting other countries, the polluter pays. But in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, and the vastly larger scale of the contamination it released, Moscow has adamantly refused to consider any form of compensation to the West.

Now, however, with Chernobyl damages in Western Europe estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the Soviets say they are willing to talk about an international agreement on nuclear liability--but for future accidents, not this one.

Reaction ‘Unjustified’

“It’s true that some anxiety was raised in Western countries, but who raised this situation? Who organized this?” the Soviet ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Oleg Khlestov, said in May. “Those who organized this, let them pay those who suffered.”

As if to emphasize its refusal to talk about Chernobyl damages, Moscow suggested in a formal statement last month that the West may be equally liable to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself for “material, moral and political damage” stemming from the West’s “unjustified” reaction to the Chernobyl accident last April.

The hard Soviet line on compensation has angered a number of Western governments, which have begun to press for negotiations leading toward a new international agreement on liability in nuclear accidents.

In recent weeks, Moscow has indicated that it is willing to discuss the liability question in principle, as long as it relates to future accidents. But if the outcome of a recent special session of the IAEA was an accurate indicator, any such agreement may take years to produce.

2 Agreements Completed

The special session, on Sept. 24-26, did complete two multilateral agreements on nuclear accidents in what diplomats agreed was probably record time--four months from the start of technical negotiations. But the two agreements aroused virtually no controversy and did little more than commit the 50 or so nations that immediately signed them to do what most would consider obvious and natural.

One requires any country that suffers a major nuclear accident to notify its neighbors promptly if contamination appears likely to affect them. The second is meant to speed emergency aid from other countries by granting people who provide it immunity from taxation, arrest and other legal problems.

“The question of compensation is going to be much more complicated,” a ranking Western diplomat at the IAEA session observed. “It may be impossible to cover the whole world with a single agreement. Circumstances vary so much from one region to another, from Asia, to Europe to Latin America, that we may have to solve this on a regional basis, with regional agreements.”

While no one has drawn up a definitive account of Chernobyl’s costs outside Soviet borders, West European officials said the total easily runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Huge quantities of fresh vegetables and milk had to be discarded because of short-lived iodine 131 contamination during the spring and summer. The effects of radioactive cesium 137, which takes 30 years to decay by half, may persist for decades.

Reindeer Contaminated

In northern Sweden, in Lapland, cesium threatens to make more than half of this year’s reindeer herd unfit for human consumption. Reindeer are the lifeblood of the Lapp economy, and while alternative outlets are being found for contaminated meat--mainly mink and fox fur farms--Swedish officials said the accident has been traumatic for a fragile culture.

A report published in June by Sweden’s National Institute of Radiation Protection notes that deposits of cesium 137 have been found “in quantities up to 20 times the cumulative deposition from all past nuclear tests.”

Birgitta Dahl, Sweden’s minister for the environment and energy, said at last month’s IAEA session: “Measures to mitigate these consequences will have to be taken for many years to come. They will cost us hundreds of millions of Swedish crowns.”

In Britain, where rain showers washed higher levels of contamination onto the landscape than in many parts of continental Europe last spring, a costly system of monitoring radioactivity in food continues, along with restrictions on the slaughter of cesium-contaminated sheep.

While iodine from the Chernobyl reactor has virtually disappeared by now, cesium continues to complicate international trade in foodstuffs.

Radioactive Food Banned

The European Communities have extended a ban on Eastern European food imports containing more than a specified level of radioactivity--600 becquerels per kilogram--and is expected to make the ban permanent next February. (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity equal to the disintegration of one atom per second).

Malaysia, meanwhile, has ordered nearly 100,000 pounds of imported butter shipped back to the Netherlands on the ground that it contained excessive cesium. The Malaysian government also reported last week that it had rejected a British shipment of powdered milk for animal feed for the same reason.

With these experiences in mind, Britain’s minister for energy, Peter Walker, told the IAEA’s special session that “the British government is anxious to see a general system of compensation in respect of nuclear accidents, and we would support a binding international regime to provide that compensation.”

West Germany, Austria and Luxembourg voiced similar support for a compensation agreement.

“The ‘polluter pays’ principle must apply with regard to compensation for damage,” Walter Wallman, the West German minister for the environment and nuclear safety, said, adding that “an effective global system of liability for nuclear damage is indispensable.”

Proposal by Soviets

Wallman noted that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in a letter to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl last June, agreed that financial compensation should be given “increased consideration” in the future. But a more detailed and diffident Soviet response on the question appeared in a nine-point program on international nuclear safety that Moscow proposed to the IAEA last month.

The eighth point of the Soviet program acknowledges that the question of liability for nuclear damage is “important,” but it contends that the “issue of material, moral and political damage caused by nuclear accidents has not yet been sufficiently studied.”

The Soviet position is that a multilateral agreement “could envisage the liability of states for international damage.” But the Soviets suggest that any such agreement would have to work two ways, assigning liability not only for the effects of nuclear accidents on other countries but also for “material, moral and political damage caused by unwarranted action taken under the pretext of protection against the consequences of nuclear accidents.”

In an apparent reference to Western reaction to the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet declaration lists such actions as the “spreading of untrue information” and the “introduction of unjustified restrictive measures,” which it contends were designed to create tension and mistrust between nations.

Angry U.S. Response

The Soviet position brought an angry rejoinder from U.S. Energy Secretary John S. Herrington, who told reporters at the IAEA session that the Soviet Union needs to “appreciate that their nuclear program, although cloaked in secrecy, has had a profound impact beyond their borders.”

“Radioactive releases from Chernobyl . . . have cost other countries hundreds of millions of dollars,” Herrington went on, “yet there has been no serious talk of restitution. Whatever happened to the concept of right and wrong?”

He added in an interview that while compensation should be voluntary, it is clear that the IAEA will have to deal with the issue more formally.

“If they can’t do it, who can?” he said. “And if they don’t want to, or are politically unable to, what kind of credibility are they going to have?”

Differences in Standards

Diplomats noted, however, that any consideration of liability would have to grapple with the problem of large differences in radiation protection standards among the IAEA’s 111 member countries.