The Green Party of Ukraine is holding on September 6-7 an all- Ukrainian campaign to forestall disasters at radioactive waste burial grounds. According the Green leadership, all Radon state-run enterprises in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Lviv are in a precarious condition. Since the burial grounds were established in 1959 to 1962 and have not been modernized since then, one can only guess what kind of danger they represent not only to the nearby populated areas (the burials are situated in the suburbs) but also to big cities.
The Greens put forth three demands as part of their campaign: to draw up a comprehensive state nuclear-waste treatment program, to set up a national special unit based on the Radon Enterprise, and to provide for up to UAH 10.5-12-million government funding of Radon.
The pickets in Kyiv in front of the Cabinet building and in the village of Pyrohova gathered primarily young Greens who, besides carrying anti- nuclear placards, were to hand in their demands to Cabinet representatives. As we were going to press, it became known that only Ivan Zayets, Minister of Ecological Policies, came out to meet the pickets. But, with the campaign to last for two days, it is quite possible that the Greens’ demands will be handed to Viktor Yushchenko or his representatives.
As Borys Koltunov, Candidate of Sciences (Engineering), former director of the Radon special-purpose facility, told The Day’s Oleksandr FANDEYEV, the storage places, built in 1959-1962 with less than perfect designs, no longer meet the increasingly tough nuclear safety demands. Wastes were stored in bulk, without being conserved in layers of cement, as technology now requires. Moreover, the storage places have not been repaired for ten years, while the equipment, special transport, and the special-purpose enterprises themselves have exhausted their thirty-year service life. This is what in fact caused a local accident at the Kyiv special-purpose facility in 1992.
It will be recalled that during that accident atmospheric precipitation got into a few open-air storage places, and tritium-contaminated water began to seep through cracks in the radioactive preserves. It will take UAH 3-4 million to stop this process, Volodymyr Honcharov, chief of the radiological safety department at the Kyiv Ecological Safety Authority, said. Otherwise, in about fifty years, tritium, a hydrogen isotope and hydrogen bomb component that affects the human genetic apparatus will reach the river Vita which empties into the Dnipro.
However, according to Messrs. Koltunov and Honcharov, a more serious threat emanates from a gigantic garbage dump in Pyrohova, which excretes from of its bowels the poisonous filtrate and tritium (4-5 thousand becquerels per liter). The point is that a great deal of dubious, including radioactive, waste was illegally disposed of there, and now, as Mr. Koltunov noted cautiously, the dump could constitute a major hazard.
In his words, the Kyiv-based Radon, which receives 60% of the total radioactive stuff, including 50% from Kyiv, is the first in Ukraine to have adopted a more environmentally friendly method of storing hazardous wastes in robot-operated containers. It is planned to rebury the containers in the National Storage Facility to be built by 2005 in the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant ten kilometer zone.
