This article in
Izvestiya January 4, 1996 dealt with the difficulties facing the nuclear
regulatory agency GAN
Alexander Kanygin, is the head of
the Yaroslavl office of Gosatomnadzor[GAN], the supervisory agency created
by the Russian government in 1992 to provide oversight of facilities that
work with nuclear or radioactive materials in Russia. Although GAN has
instituted a system of monitoring and tracking radioactive materials used
in the civil sector, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, which has operated for
decades without any sort of outside supervision, has resisted GAN's
attempts to introduce external controls on many aspects of the nuclear
industry. Much of GAN's effective power was stripped from the agency when
Yeltsin signed a decree on July 26, 1995 which exempted military facilities
from GAN oversight, which many observers see as a payback to the military
for their role in Chechnya.
In this article, Mr. Kanygin protests that as long as the military is not
subject to GAN oversight, he can make no guarantees for the safety of the
public.
"A Small-scale 'Chernobyl' Threatens the Russian Hinterlands;
or What the Ministry of Defense is Hiding from GAN"
Alexander Kanygin, head of Upper-Volga Inspectorate Gosatomnadzor RF
Recently I have been getting a lot of calls from traffic cops who say, "We
have stopped a suspicious convoy of military trucks with signs on them that
say "Danger, Radiation," but the soldiers won't show any documentation. We
don't know what they are carrying or to where, and to all our questions
they tell us to move on: they say "It's secret, searching is forbidden."
This is happening not on the deserted ice of the Far North or in the
uninhabited Taiga, but in a heavily populated region of Russia, not far
from the capital. And you don't have to be a specialist to understand what
could be the result of a small-scale 'Chernobyl' if something in this
secret column were to break. But, as if this wasn't paradoxical, it has
already been almost six months since the time when the GAN inspectorate was
stripped of the right to control the radioactive security of the military
branches. This happened as a result of the order of the Russian President
No. 350 of July 26, 1995, according to which control for the use of atomic
materials and radioactive wastes from the divisions of the Ministry of
Defense... was given to the very same Ministry of Defense. Personally,
this makes me very uneasy, since military units are not under civil control
at this time, and are bringing about an extreme radioactive danger for the
population of Russia.
I am openly speaking about this -- far from a dilettante, I recently was a
colonel, having served more that 27 years in the Armed Forces and having
fulfilled my duty as head of the Radiation, Chemical, and Biological
defenses of the Army. That is, I am a person who is familiar with the situation. I will say directly: storage and utilization of nuclear materials in
military units is much worse than in the objects that are under the control
of GAN. Special training of personnel is not considered important. There
is no analysis is being carried out of the effect of nuclear materials on
people and the environment. The guarding of the secret objects is not very
good. I was very surprised by the recent announcement by the director of
the Minatom Center for Information and Public Relations Kaurov, that they
say that in the last 50 years not one nuclear warhead has been lost; in
America they have been lost, but not here. But, first of all, who can say
for sure if all the information has been hidden or is still hidden under
the words "Top Secret"? And, second, now that all sorts of property and
weapons are being sold, why would it not be profitable to sell a nuclear
warhead, and if one were stolen, write it off.
By the way, the military units (including in the Yaroslavl region) have
their own serious radioactive dangers (although not reaching the
'Chernobyl' level), both for the environment and for the civil population, of
thousands of sources of ionizing radiation in the form of mobile and
stationary chemical labs and radio-ometric apparatus. But the army's
relation to this is even more negligent. If they lose something, then
nobody goes to look for it; they simply write it off. During my time in
the army, nobody understood proper storage of radioactive substances. Now,
when there is a lot less order in the army, the situation, probably, has
gotten worse. Slow death in the form of radioactive substances is
gradually accumulating, so that later it can be "lost." In the military
units of the neighboring Tver Region they are still fighting the
radioactive pollution that happened several years ago from the burning of
coal along with radioactive materials which ended up in the incinerator.
As we see, the Ministry of Defense (without a doubt, the initiator and
inspiration for the presidential order for complete lack of societal
control over the military in questions of radioactive safety) does have
something to hide from the population under the all-powerful words "Top
Secret." And not just for the average citizen of the Yaroslavl region, but
in cities and towns, in the fields and forests in which without penalty,
hidden by these words, the military is going about, and neither the organs
of GAN or Gossanepidnadzor, nor even the Governor of Yaroslavl know what is
going on today in the military units of the region, and what the
radioactive situation is there.
It is not surprising; after the July presidential order, a hole opened up
for the menacing forces in the regulatory system of administration and
control for radioactive security in the region. And not only in the
Yaroslavl region. After the societal controls were done away with, the
military became even more dangerous. So I am certain that this danger is
even higher than was the danger for our potential enemy, of whom we were
scared for decades. I don't want be a provocateur, but I am certain that,
if we don't once again set civil control over nuclear security in military
units, that sooner or later this will end badly for Russia: and many
innocent people will suffer. The hour of doom may yet occur.
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