The nuclear accident at the Tomsk-7 reprocessing plant in Siberia on April 6 was much bigger than first reported, and now may seriously impede expansion of the nuclear fuel cycle in Australia.
Spokesperson John Hallam for the antinuclear groups Friends of the Earth and Movement Against Uranium Mining said, "Proposals to build a replacement research reactor in Sydney and a nuclear waste repository in the NT based on Synroc technology would be compromised by a public realisation that both projects depend on the same sort of technology for waste handling that failed so badly at Tomsk".
Hallam said that information from Russian green groups indicated that the accident was not a 3 on the international nuclear event scale, as earlier claimed, but at least a 5. Chernobyl was a 6.
This means that it had significant consequences off the site. "There are suggestions of some panic in Tomsk itself, that some villages have been issued with iodine, and that the Russian air force has picked up a radioactive plume travelling at an altitude of 3000 metres in a north-easterly direction", Hallam said.
Hallam claimed that a key point not clearly reported was that plutonium, not just uranium, was released in the accident.
"The accident actually happened during the process of plutonium separation. This is how all reprocessing is done in the nuclear fuel cycle.
"Similar processes to those that went wrong at Tomsk, involving nitric acid and organic reagents, are used in reprocessing plants in the UK and France, and were used in weapons-related facilities operated by the US Department of Energy. In fact, some spent fuel from Lucas Heights is still officially due to be reprocessed at a DOE facility, and any Australian waste disposal of that same fuel using Synroc would also require reprocessing."
The accident occurred at a reprocessing complex described as being "the size of Paris". Plutonium from warheads dismantled under the START treaty will be stored there indefinitely.
According to the chairperson of the Tomsk Parliamentary Environment Commission, "A large amount of plutonium from dismantled weapons has been delivered to Tomsk-7, and the way it is being kept is bordering on a crime". The plutonium, which explodes if it is placed together in too great a quantity, is to be stored in stainless-steel containers stacked 14 metres deep in concrete-lined basins under massive concrete roofs.
"According to UK reports, up to eight tons a year will be added", Hallam said. "However, the Tomsk regional parliament has tried to veto the scheme. Even before the accident, the people of Tomsk didn't want to be Russia's and the world's plutonium dump, and presumably want it even less now. Who can blame them?"
Hallam said that the Tomsk explosion "has repercussions that affect not only the Russian nuclear establishment, but also reprocessing and the global nuclear industry as a whole". This includes the plans to build a new research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney.
"It's not just a question of uniquely awful Russian nuclear technology, bad though that is. Risk is inherent in the whole nuclear enterprise, and we should never say 'It can't happen here', because it can.
"Nuclear accidents, albeit not quite as bad as Chernobyl — or the Kyshtym accident of 1957, which happened in a weapons reprocessing plan like that at Tomsk — have happened in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. The US has had major emissions from weapons complexes, and the multibillion dollar clean-up at contaminated DOE sites may be the biggest environmental clean-up task on the planet.
"The UK has major problems at Sellafield, and its nuclear industry has just about ground to a halt. Even the nuclear programs of France and Japan, touted by the industry as the way to go, are mired in insuperable technical, economic and political problems."