By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — In the first referendum of its kind in Russia, residents of an economically hard-hit rural area voted overwhelmingly during December to halt the building of a nuclear power plant.
The victory for anti-nuclear campaigners in the province of Kostroma, 400 kilometres north-east of Moscow, is now expected to strengthen the hand of environmentalists battling plans for new nuclear facilities in other regions of the country.
Kostroma voters on December 8 rejected the nuclear option by 87% to 10%. With 59% of electors taking part, well above the required minimum of 50%, the result will be binding unless reversed by a further referendum. The Russian Atomic Energy Ministry later issued a statement saying it had "no plans to resume the construction of the Kostroma nuclear power plant ... either at present or in the foreseeable future".
The ministry ran an advertising campaign before the referendum, claiming that the plant would be safe and would create 20,000 jobs in a region where there is widespread unemployment. The plant also received vigorous backing from the provincial governor, a Moscow appointee.
But Kostroma residents decided that poverty was better than living with the danger of another Chernobyl-style nuclear catastrophe.
Work on the Kostroma plant began in 1981, and was suspended in 1990, at a time when the Soviet nuclear power industry was on the defensive following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In 1992, as the new Russian authorities gave the thumbs-up to an ambitious program of nuclear power expansion, work at the site resumed.
New legislation opened the possibility of taking the issue to a popular vote, and the local environmental group In the Name of Life began collecting the required 10,000 petition signatures.
An attempt to force a referendum in 1993 failed when a petition with 16,000 signatures was declared invalid. But a 1996 petition, with 36,000 signatures, could not be ignored.
Russia currently has three nuclear power units due for completion within the next three years.
The successful campaign against the Kostroma plant is among a growing list of instances in which local environmentalists have fought to block new nuclear power facilities. In Rostov province, the soon-to-be-completed plant has come under fierce criticism from the organisation Green Don.
In the Khabarovsk District in the Russian far east, environmentalists have been campaigning against the projected Far East Nuclear Power Plant. Late in 1995 the district legislature named a commission to study plans for the plant; in violation of federal law, representatives of public environmental organisations were not included.
In mid-1996 the commission concluded that work on the plant should go ahead. Meanwhile, environmentalists had sponsored their own public study which warned that because of technical and geographical factors, the plant would be unusually dangerous.
On December 11 a court rejected a lawsuit submitted by opponents of the plant. A redrafted suit was filed on December 16.