A visiting Russian parliamentarian and Russian experts voiced mixed views yesterday on whether Russia should become the destination for Taiwan's nuclear waste once the State Duma passes a bill to allow Russia to import highly radioactive waste from foreign countries.
While some said economic interest was what drove a majority of Duma deputies to support the bill, others opposed the import of Taiwan's nuclear waste for the sake of environmental protection.
"The main purpose [for the amendment of the law] is to attract foreign currency which Russia badly needs," Alexandr Alexandrovich Karelin, a member of the State Duma, said after emerging from a briefing on Taiwan's development at the Government Information Office yesterday afternoon.
Russian Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has claimed that Russia would earn up to US$20 billion over the next 10 to 15 years by importing foreign waste.
Karelin, who won medals for wrestling at the 1988, 1992 and 1996 Olympics, said that projects would involve transnational cooperation.
"There is an international aspect to the project. Not only Russia, but other countries will have shared responsibilities," Karelin added.
Although polls in Russia have shown that the Russian public is unequivocally opposed to such imports, Duma deputies last December passed the first reading of a government-backed bill with a vote of 319-38 that would allow the country to import highly radioactive waste from foreign countries. The second reading of the bill is scheduled to take place tomorrow.
The London-based Guardian newspaper reported from Moscow on Monday that a leaked document showed that the US had backed plans to turn Russia into an international nuclear dump to accommodate waste from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
The US Department of Energy denied on Monday that it had played a role in pushing for the shipment of nuclear waste from Taiwan to Russia for permanent disposal.
However, a spokesperson for Taipower (
One Russian analyst based in Taipei voiced his opposition to the proposal, saying that imports of high-level radioactive nuclear waste could only jeopardize what they described the already "serious environmental problems" in Russia.
"If the authorities decide to do this, I will be against it because it's contrary to the interests of our country ... it is a problem of environmental security," Michael Kryukov, a professor at the Institute of Russian Studies at Tamkang University, said.
Noted US journalist Colin McMahon has said that it's estimated that 60 million out of 145 million Russians live in "environmentally dangerous" conditions.
Russian officials such as Adamov have argued that spent nuclear fuels are valuable commodities which can be reprocessed and recycled.
Meanwhile, some Moscow-based analysts such as Pavel Felgenhauer have argued that it was "defense considerations" that drove the Russian political elite to support the passage of the bill -- which would allow Russia to develop a new generation of weapons by reprocessing nuclear waste from other countries.
It was immediately after Russian President Vladimir Putin -- in his capacity as then-secretary of the Security Council -- ordered the nuclear power ministry in April 1999 to speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons that Adamov started to clamor for foreign nuclear waste and the bill was introduced in the Duma, Felgenhauer wrote in the Moscow Times on Jan. 4.
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