11 Russia To Suggest Global Nuclear Control System ITAR-TASS News
Agency, April 24, 2000
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov will present Russia's strategic
initiative on the development of the global control system over the
non- proliferation of missiles and missile technologies at the Nuclear
Weapons Non-proliferation international conference that is to open in
New York on Monday. The Russian foreign minister, in his speech at the
plenary meeting of the conference, will set out Russia's view on the
role of the Nuclear Weapons Non- Proliferation treaty and will dwell
on some results in the sphere of the nuclear disarmament reached by
Russia and the United States, Tass learnt from the Russian Foreign
Ministry. Attention will be payed on Russia's approaches to the
utilisation of surplus weapon-grade fissionable materials. However,
the global control system will be the core of the report as the basis
for the further tightening of control in the area of nuclear
armaments.
A matter tied with the development of such a system of global control
was preliminary discussed at Russia's initiative at the first
international meeting of experts that was held on March 16, 2000 in
Moscow.
Over 80 experts and observers from more than 40 countries and
international organisations attended the meeting. Russian Deputy
Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov made the main report. Mamedov recalled
that the idea of development of the global control system had been put
forward by the Russian president in June 1999, and proposed to the
world community at the 54th session of the United Nations General
Assembly.
The effect of the Nuclear Weapon Non-Proliferation Treaty will be
reviewed at the present conference in New York. Such a conference is
held once every five years. The latest one took place in 1999 when it
was decided on termless extension on the treaty. Representatives of
187 countries will discuss its effectiveness and a programme of the
further improvement of control of offensive nuclear arms
non-proliferation.
(back to top)
12 Ministry Official Promotes Nuclear Energy Case British Broadcasting
Corporation, April 28, 2000
Moscow, 18th April: There is no alternative to extending the service
life of the first-generation nuclear power plants, Deputy Atomic
Energy Minister Bulat Nigmatulin told a meeting of the board of the
union of territories and enterprises of nuclear power engineering held
at the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament.
This is due to the fact that the use of gas in Russia's power
engineering has been shrinking and will continue to do so, Nigmatulin
said.
Energy consumption in the country has increased following the
industrial recovery. The share of electricity produced by the nuclear
power plants... has grown in 1999 in comparison with 1998 and reached
120bn kilowatt-hours, which is tantamount to burning 36bn cubic metres
of gas, Nigmatulin said.
According to the Atomic Energy Ministry, the level of safety in
operating nuclear power plants remains stable and has even improved.
Russian nuclear power plants meet the international requirements...
Altogether, there have been 88 cases of malfunctioning at the nuclear
power plants, but these were all minor cases, and the radioactive
discharges have not exceeded the norm.
The Ministry of Atomic Energy believes that, with the attained level
of nuclear safety, it is quite realistic to increase the efficiency of
using reactors from 65 to 70 per cent.
(back to top)
13 Russia Wasting Millions in Oil and Gas Spillages The St. Petersburg
Times, April 28, 2000
Leaks, spills and waste eat up a hefty chunk of the nation's annual
crude oil and natural gas production, the Greenpeace environmental
group reported Tuesday.
The oil industry every year loses up to 20 million tons of crude oil
in spills - a volume comparable to 6 percent of national output.
Nor is the gas industry a paragon of thrift. According to Greenpeace,
up to 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas leak into the atmosphere
every year from gas pipes and wells.
That is roughly the amount of gas that the Gazprom natural gas
monopoly supplies every quarter to the national power grid, Unified
Energy Systems. Gazprom and UES earlier this month ended up in a
bitter public argument over gas supplies to UES, a bad Gazprom debtor.
Eventually, President-elect Vladimir Putin intervened, and Gazprom
agreed it would supply about 24 bcm of gas to UES in the second
quarter of this year - about half of what Greenpeace says it will lose
this year just in leaks.
Tuesday was the 14th anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion, and
Greenpeace activist Igor Forofontov cited the waste statistics to
argue that Russia could forego the use of all of its 29 nuclear power
reactors - about two-thirds of which are in the final years of their
recommended life spans - by plugging up the leaks in its oil and gas
industry.
The amount of gas and oil lost to waste is staggering, said Oganes
Targulian, an expert with Greenpeace on the oil and gas sector. In
Western countries, waste and spillage amount to less than 0.1 percent
of national production levels - or about 60 times less than in Russia.
"The Fuel and Energy Ministry alone annually reports 30,000 to 50,000
incidents involving oil and gas pollution," Targulian said. "For
Russia this is a day-to-day occurrence."
He said most of the leaks occur in Western Siberia, in the oil-and-gas
rich Tyumen region - where production workers are rotated through the
region on work shifts.
"This means that nobody actually lives there. Therefore, the level of
environmental care is low," Targulian said.
He added that oil production units in more populated areas are
accompanied by a smaller scale of pollution.
Greenpeace activists say the chief culprits in oil and gas spills are
not the major trans-continental pipelines, but the smaller local
systems that connect oil fields with the big pipelines.
The Greenpeace report was constructed on a mix of official and
unofficial data sources.
Government ecological data cited by Greenpeace from 1993 and 1994 -
the latest data available - suggested that Siberia's Ob River in 1993
delivered to the sea some 600,000 tons of oil and oil-related
chemicals.
Other sources used by Greenpeace suggest that the Ob River's basin
gets exposed to about 1.5 million tons of oil each year, some 1
million tons of which are carried by the river all the way to the
ocean.
(back to top)
14 Sewage System Failure Makes Khabarovsk Vulnerable to Typhoid
Interfax News Agency, April 24, 2000
The failure of the sewage system in Khabarovsk, the Russian Far East,
makes the spread of typhoid a real threat, the territory's chief
sanitation doctor Rita Liberova told the city extraordinary commission
on Monday.
What makes matters worse is that several water intake stations are
located down river from the spot where unfiltered sewage found its way
into the Amur river, epidemiologists say. The typhoid virus is able to
survive in cold water.
The winter ice covering the river has broken, increasing the pollution
of the water even more.
The chlorination of potable water has been stepped up and local radio
is urging people to boil water before drinking it.
Hospitals in Khabarovsk have been placed on high alert. People living
down the river, in particular in Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Amursk, have
been warned of the danger.
The machine room of Khabarovsk's most powerful sewage pumping station
was found flooded with sewage at nearly 8 p.m. local time on Sunday,
after which time unfiltered waters reached the Amur.
Nearly 3,000 cubic meters of sewage reach the river every hour,
according to the latest reports.
(back to top)
15 Greenpeace Seeks To Protect Baikal Seals The St. Petersburg Times,
April 28, 2000
Baby seals in Siberia can rest a bit easier this hunting season: Six
researchers are patrolling frozen Lake Baikal this month, taking a
census of the seal population and nabbing poachers while they're at
it.
The expedition, which began April 5 and is organized by Greenpeace,
aims to update official statistics on the nerpa, a species of seal
unique to Lake Baikal. Greenpeace contends the nerpa population has
fallen since it was counted in 1994 and says the number of hunting
licenses should be reduced accordingly.
As the team counts baby seals - known as "belki" because of their
white fur, which later turns black - it checks hunting licenses and
confiscates nets and other equipment from illegal poachers. Roman
Pukalov, who coordinates Greenpeace's Baikal campaigns, said the team
has also freed a handful of pups that it found trapped in nets.
"We suppose that this is a crisis situation and hunting must be
stopped entirely or dramatically decreased," said Pukalov, who led the
group during the first half of the expedition and returned to Moscow
this week.
According to official statistics based on the 1994 count, there are
120,000 nerpy, and the government gives out licenses based on these
figures.
Pukalov said the Greenpeace expedition has already had an effect. When
local fish and game officials found out about the planned trip, they
decided to give out fewer licenses - decreasing the number of nerpy
permitted to be hunted this year from 6,000 to 3,500.
Many of the licensed hunters are "professionals" who are growing
wealthy on the seals, Pukalov said. One hunter the group encountered
had a license for 500 seals. Meanwhile, a hat made out of nerpa fur
goes for about 700 rubles ($25) at the market in Irkutsk.
Pukalov said the government should simply outlaw nerpa hunting except
for that by indigenous peoples who have traditionally depended on it.
In addition to hunting, environmentalists also say pollution from the
Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill threatens the nerpy, which are especially
vulnerable to toxins because they are at the top of the lake's food
chain.
As it moves across the vast lake, the team, which consists of four
local scientists and two Greenpeace representatives, marks off 1.5-
kilometer squares. The researchers then travel back and forth over the
squares on motorcycle, counting the dens that the nerpy build to give
birth.
The group has counted almost two- thirds of the 112 planned squares
and is expected to finish next week. After that, scientists from the
Irkutsk-based Limnological Institute will process the data and come up
with an overall population count.
Pukalov said that while the expedition has so far enjoyed the support
of the authorities, it is not Greenpeace's job to look out for the
nerpy.
"Conducting a count and fighting poaching is actually the job of the
government," he said. "This should be done every year."
But the government has not managed to find the funds for such work in
recent years. Greenpeace raised 150,000 rubles (about $5,300) to
conduct the expedition.
(back to top)
16 Russia To Cut Black Caviar Exports by Third Interfax News Agency,
April 26, 2000
Russia will probably cut exports of black caviar by a third this year.
This year Russia "will be able to export about 60-80 tonnes of black
caviar, which is a third less than the 1999 figure," the deputy; head
of Russia's fisheries committee, Vladimir Izmailov, told Interfax.
The lower Volga region will begin the sturgeon-netting season at the
end of April. Russia's quota for catching sturgeon in the Caspian
basin totals 560 tonnes this year, down 62 tonnes on last year's limit
and almost two times lower than in 1998, when the catch exceeded 1,000
tonnes.
According to Izmailov, an intergovernmental commission, which consists
of fishing representatives from Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan is responsible for dividing the sturgeon catch-quota in
the Caspian region.
The total sturgeon catch quota allotted to these countries based on
scientists' recommendations for this year, has been set at 900 tonnes.
Iran, which is not part of the Caspian convention, will have a
sturgeon catch quota of similar size, Russia's State Fisheries
Commission reports.
Already in the 1970s, when Russia's annual sturgeon catch was at
10,000 tonnes, Russian scientists predicted that the country's
reserves of sturgeon, beluga, sevryuga and other types of sturgeon
would be depleted.
The main cause for the plummeting sturgeon numbers was the
construction of several cascade hydro-electric stations on the Volga,
as a result of which sturgeon breeding grounds were cut by ten times.
Moreover, industrial pollution of the Volga and its adjoining rivers
also took its toll.
At the same time, according to Izmailov, the sturgeon-netting season
in the Azov Sea basin is expected to reach last year's levels- 400-450
tonnes.
(back to top)
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