A Nuclear-Tainted Russia Hunts for Affordable Cure : Radiation: Its economy in disarray, the country tries to cope with the world’s worst environmental poisoning.

Alexei V. Yablokov, a key player in Russia’s version of Mission Impossible, stands on tiptoes to pull a map from a shelf in his Kremlin office that will make the daunting scale of his assignment clear.

Unfolded, the map shows a 500-mile stretch of the Yenisey River coursing through Siberia, with sine waves indicating modulations in radiation levels. Downstream from Krasnoyarsk, one patch of the bank is fouled with radioactivity three times more intense than in lands that had to be evacuated around the Chernobyl atomic power plant.

“So, what can we do?” asked Yablokov, a bearded biologist who is state counselor to President Boris N. Yeltsin for ecological and health affairs, shrugging his shoulders. “We can put up a sign saying, ‘Guys, don’t fish here!’ But that’s about it.”

What, indeed, can a country beset with a shrinking economy and struggling to create a free market and a democracy do to cope with the world’s worst case of environmental poisoning by radiation? In many places, including swaths of Siberia irrigated by the Yenisey, the exact magnitude of the problem isn’t even known.

The West’s readiness to dip into its wallet to help make Soviet-built reactors less accident-prone has made headlines, but until now, little work has actually been done.

Sergei V. Yermakov, the chief of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry’s press center, reports that as of this week, not a cent of the $270 million allocated by the European Community last year to boost safety at Soviet-built power plants has reached Russia. Likewise, he said, the $100-million pledge last July by the Group of Seven major industrialized nations is still just that--a promise.

But even if the money is actually spent, will it buy what the West hopes for--totally safe nuclear power reactors?

“It’s impossible for these units to correspond to international standards,” was the equivocal answer of Yevgeny A. Reshetnikov, Russia’s deputy nuclear power minister. “But can we operate them safely? That’s a different affair.”

Meanwhile, the atomic Establishment here is reviving, seeking commercial links with its counterparts abroad and asking good questions about why a hard-pressed country like Russia should not take advantage of the trump cards it holds--like nuclear power plants and an industry capable of building more.

Subsumed into Russia’s government, the old bureaucracies seem to grind on much as before. For instance, Russia’s Ecology Ministry has been trying, without success, to secure from colleagues in the Defense Ministry data about the dumping of nuclear reactors and other irradiated garbage by Soviet ships in the Kara and Barents seas off northern Russia.

“Even now, people who have firsthand knowledge of the situation with radioactive waste are not allowed to participate in working out programs to deal with this most serious problem,” complained Georgy P. Kolyadko, a department chief at the Ecology Ministry.

It is this seamless bureaucracy that has especially troubled John Ahearne, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He wrote Russian officials to warn that “with the apparent decision to maintain the existing nuclear safety agency, the same individuals who accepted the RBMK (Chernobyl-type reactor) design and the operating practices at Chernobyl may now assume safety responsibility for Russia.”

In Kursk, a Russian city of 434,000, construction has resumed on a “new generation” RBMK-1000 reactor that should be in operation by the year’s end. “It’s nothing like the old; it’s like comparing a car from the 1960s with an improved contemporary version,” Yermakov said reassuringly.

But like the ill-fated Chernobyl unit, he said, the latest model lacks a dome to capture any radioactive emissions that might escape.

And lest the world think bad old Soviet ways have disappeared, the actions of officialdom during a March mishap at the Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant outside St. Petersburg are illustrative. A valve on one of the plant’s four RBMK reactors failed, and a four-inch tube holding 400 pounds of uranium fuel burst, spewing radioactive steam into the air.

International regulations passed since the 1986 Chernobyl power plant catastrophe required the Russian government to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna of the accident.

It didn’t.

The IAEA heard of the problem when tipsters on the London stock market phoned to query about a “second Chernobyl.” The agency had to call Moscow to find out what was going on.

How are Russia and the other former Soviet republics going about coping with the legacy of the Soviet atom? The strategies are varied, often flawed:

DISARMAMENT--Plutonium, the poisonous isotope used to make nuclear bombs, is so indestructible that, as one Russian joke goes, the only way to eliminate a nuclear weapon is to explode it.

Russia’s government hasn’t yet signed off on a plan but has proposed building a Ft. Knox-like repository at Tomsk to store the softball-sized, hollow spheres of plutonium now in Soviet ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles. The project would take five years and reportedly be financed with $400 million in U.S. aid.

The balls would be reformed into disks looking like hockey pucks or bagel-like bubliki , weighing nine to 11 pounds each. A separate charge of enriched uranium that is another component of thermonuclear weapons would also be refashioned. About 100,000 of these pucks or bagels would be warehoused at the Siberian facility.

Physicist Frank von Hippel, a professor at Princeton University, objects to the plan because the estimated 100 tons of plutonium and 500 tons of uranium to be stored could be molded back into spheres for weapons. He prefers the balls be pulverized and the resulting dust added in minute doses to high-level waste being made into lumps of radioactive glass for storage near Chelyabinsk.

Since plutonium is costly and has potential civilian uses, there are competing ideas, some of which involve foreign interests. The German firm Siemens has proposed building a “mixed-oxide plant” in Russia that could consume about five tons of weapons-grade or six to seven tons of reactor-grade plutonium a year by mixing it with uranium to make reactor fuel.

But Von Hippel cautions that such fuel, if stolen, would give the bearer “nuclear weapons potential,” since every half-ton contains enough plutonium to make three Nagasaki-sized atomic bombs.

The Japanese have also proposed the construction of a Russian breeder reactor that would use plutonium as fuel. But because of the physics of the reaction, the breeder would actually produce more plutonium as it worked (hence the name).

What to do with Russia’s large plutonium reserves is not a problem that is going away: At the Mayak facility near Chelyabinsk, used fuel rods from power plants throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe are being chopped up and dipped in chemical baths, yielding 2 1/2 more tons of plutonium every year.

WEAPONS STORAGE--By Yablokov’s estimate, his country now has the capacity to warehouse the charges to no more than 300 nuclear bombs or missiles, dismantled each year. That means most of the 27,000 Soviet-made warheads will remain in weapons form for the foreseeable future, something Yablokov says spells trouble--despite assurances from the Russian Defense Ministry and the Commonwealth joint command.

“You can’t watch over that many warheads,” Yablokov warned. “Something, somewhere will happen to them; this is a scientific certainty and not merely a question of security and vigilance. They will disintegrate, disappear, be stolen--who knows what.”

Alarmed at what such large stocks of weapons-grade materials might become in the hands of terrorists or unfriendly nations, and to give a boost to the disarmament process, the White House announced Monday that the Energy Department will buy at least 10 metric tons of highly enriched uranium each year from dismantled Russian weapons.

The uranium will be diluted for use in commercial reactors, putting even more nuclear fuel on an already glutted market. The American action leaves unanswered for now the question of what to do with Russia’s plutonium stockpile.

Another proposal to get rid of thermonuclear weapons, which Yablokov regards as environmental madness, is to load 5,000 or so warheads into a cave at Novaya Zemlya, the former test site off Russia’s north coast, and explode a nuclear bomb to enclose the charges in a permanent subterranean “bottle” of vitrified rock.

An additional disarmament quandary that, in Kolyadko’s words, is proving “hard to solve” is what to do with Soviet nuclear submarines and warships that have reached the end of their service lives. Previously, the Russians scuttled irradiated reactors and entire submarines in the ocean. They now have asked the Americans for advice.

DISASTER ZONES--An exhaustive map of Russian regions contaminated by radiation is supposed to be completed by the end of 1992 on orders from Yeltsin himself. By next year, a register is to be compiled of the countless Russians exposed to radiation because of accidents or their jobs, to determine who deserves compensation.

Plans now call for cleanup of Lake Karachai, the world’s greatest concentration of exposed radioactivity, by 1995. To ensure that radioactive pollutants are not blown about from the lake bed, as they were by a tornado in 1967, more than 5,000 hollow construction cubes about a yard on each side have been dumped in the lake and filled with rocks. The lake has already shrunk to less than half its former 110 acres; when the blocks are all laid, they will be covered with dirt.

But radioactive nuclides like cobalt-60, strontium-90 and cesium-137 still lurk in the sediment and have leaked into the underground aquifer like ink spreading through a blotter. The radiation, moving at a rate of more than 60 feet a year, has reached points two miles from Karachai proper, including a small river.

The latest news from Chernobyl is also disquieting. The “sarcophagus” covering Reactor No. 4 at the Ukrainian power station is reportedly failing, with dust said to be leaking from cracks that riddle 11,000 square feet of its shell. Hundreds of spots around the evacuated zone where irradiated dirt or hardware used in the Chernobyl cleanup were hastily buried also pose a “serious danger,” said Georgy Gotochits, Ukraine’s minister for Chernobyl.

“There may be serious pollution of the River Dnieper, which provides drinking water for 35 million Ukrainians, and flows into the Black Sea and the ocean,” he explained.

Scores of entries have flooded in on how to replace the man-made mountain designed to smother Chernobyl’s stricken reactor. The plant itself is to be closed by 1993, by decision of Ukraine’s Parliament.

‘NO MAN’S LANDS’--For a government short on money, leaving irradiated spots alone seems often the only option. For comparison’s sake, the U.S. Department of Energy wants an estimated $60 billion to clean up Hanford Military Reservation in Washington state, which, like the Mayak facility that polluted Lake Karachai, produced plutonium for bombs.

“We don’t have your trillions, so our strategy by necessity will be to concentrate first on the heaviest pollution spots and where the biggest number of people are,” Yablokov said. Other hot spots, including the Yenisey near the underground reactors at Krasnoyarsk-26, which were cooled with water dumped untreated into the river, will be fenced off in perpetuity, if possible.

The health costs of so-called sacrifice areas will be high, activists charge. Much of the Chelyabinsk region was fouled by radioactive particles in three separate discharges from Mayak. “Today, the state’s policy is to keep people on those areas, regardless of what it does to them,” asserted Natalya I. Mironova, a local legislator.

In Belarus, plans call for trucking away the top four inches of soil dirtied by Chernobyl fallout. But the work is going slowly--the Soviet breakup means the Belarussians can no longer buy small bulldozers and excavators from Russia or the Warsaw Pact countries for rubles.

“At least a century will pass before we see the bulk of our land decontaminated,” Romuald A. Shatyrnik, an official with the Belarussian State Committee on Chernobyl, predicted.

WASTE DISPOSAL--Getting rid of waste--from slightly contaminated water to red-hot, used fuel containing many poisonous isotopes--that is generated by power plants and military reactors throughout the former Soviet Union is an urgent matter.

“The problem is, Russia has storage capacity sufficient for only two to three more years, and that’s it,” Kolyadko explained.

This problem is bigger than Russia. In January, after the Soviet collapse, the Krasnoyarsk nuclear complex stopped sending special railway cars to Ukraine to fetch high-intensity discharges from power plants there.

“If we accept the nuclear waste for storage, we should get corresponding compensation,” insisted Vyacheslav Noviko, chairman of the Krasnoyarsk regional council.

Russia’s Ecology Ministry proposes that starting next year, Russia take other countries’ waste, treat it by sealing it in glass or reducing it to sludge, then ship it back where it came from. Each country with Soviet-made reactors, from Lithuania to Bulgaria, would need its own long-term storage site.

In dealing with dirty byproducts of nuclear power, the Russian government faces conflicting obligations. In December, 1991, Parliament adopted a law forbidding the importation of foreign radioactive waste. But Russia also inherited the obligations of the former Soviet Union to process and bury waste from Soviet power plants built abroad, from Finland to Bulgaria.

The issue is still being debated inside the Russian government. Kolyadko said a rival faction wants to keep accepting waste from foreign power stations for burial, but charge a fat fee. “We’d end up with a lot of dollars, but living on one big atomic waste dump,” he objected.

NUCLEAR REVIVAL--In a development plan drawn up this year, “local consent” has become the watchword of the Atomic Energy Ministry; unlike in the days of the Soviet command economy, nuclear plants will not be put in communities that don’t want them.

In the five years after Chernobyl, 60 projects were abandoned, setting development plans back a decade. Once the darling of the state, the nuclear complex is so broke now that half of the 40,000 plant employees haven’t gotten their salaries on time. Wounded by the collapse of industry, it can build only one reactor a year, instead of four.

Such troubles notwithstanding, 28 reactors at nine power plants generate 11.3% of Russia’s electricity. And on orders from Acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar, building of new reactors has resumed at sites where there is local support, including two 500-megawatt water-cooled reactors three miles from the city of Voronezh; a 1,000-megawatt unit at Balakovo, and the “modified” new version of the Chernobyl-type reactor at Kursk.

Ecologists like Mironova say the nuclear Establishment’s passion for covering Russia with new reactors is akin to “the love French revolutionaries had for the guillotine.” But the ministry has weighty environmental arguments, too: A 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant produces 27 tons of high-level waste annually, while a coal-fired plant that size would belch more than 300,000 tons of ash.

In earthquake-prone Armenia, whose two aging 440-megawatt nuclear reactors near Yerevan were turned off after the disastrous 1988 earthquake, leaders are debating whether to restart them. Ukraine, which derives about 30% of its power from fission, has no plans to close its four nuclear power stations besides Chernobyl.

Meanwhile, chary neighbors are helping improve existing plants: Sweden is aiding in a safety assessment at the Ignalina nuclear plant in Lithuania, and Finnish experts brought to Sosnovy Bor are checking pipes and cables. An early warning system is to be completed this autumn to connect reactors at Sosnovy Bor, Ignalina and another power station on the Kola Peninsula with Finland’s nuclear safety center.

ATTITUDES--Yablokov, an avowed enemy of the “nuclear state within the state,” opposes Western aid money for Soviet-built reactors--”this benefits General Electric, not the Russians,” he said. He thinks that all Russian nuclear plants should be converted to gas turbines because, as he explained it, the Russian mentality is not yet ripe for atomic power.

“In America, in other capitalist countries, the very conditions of life, the market economy, force people to bear responsibilities,” Yablokov said. “But for 70 years we have been taught that responsibility is borne not by you but by your boss. We have always put faith in the archetypal Russian ‘maybe’--as in, maybe disaster will not strike.”

His investigation of Soviet nuclear submarine accidents revealed that 75% of the time, the “human factor,” not hardware, was to blame. “Sailors welded where they shouldn’t have, they made unauthorized short-circuits in wiring. All this was expressly forbidden, but they did it. And caused disasters.”

Changing such willingness to flout security regulations will take two generations, Yablokov said.

LOCAL INITIATIVES--Industries that pollute are supposed to pay fines to the All-Russia State Ecological Fund, and 90% of most funds are supposed to stay in the offended locality to finance environmental cleanup.

“But so far, we’ve yet to see the money,” Yablokov said. “The reason is, we haven’t yet got the proper system for exacting these payments. We still have grossly inadequate tax collection service, poor control over industrial activities, et cetera.”

In Ukraine, a “Chernobyl tax” of 12% is tacked on to goods and services; in Belarus, enterprises must turn over 18% for a similar reason.

Russia’s cities and regions affected by radioactivity are supposed to draw up cleanup plans in concert with the State Committee on Chernobyl. A Russia-wide commission on radiation protection, chaired by Anatoly F. Tsyb, a member of the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences, has also been set up to formulate specific recommendations for the government.

All of this is only a beginning, Yablokov admitted. “We have only made the first hairline crack in the wall of secrecy.”

“It is sad that we are leaving a whole array of tough problems for our children to solve, like what to do with nuclear power stations after they exhaust their potential,” Leonid Y. Tabachny, chief of radiation control for the Ukrainian State Committee on Chernobyl, mused. “And how to utilize them. And how to decontaminate radioactive waste. We are too preoccupied with the urgent matters of today, and we are leaving a lot of problems to be settled later.”