Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 8, 1993 TAG: 9304080041
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
RADIOACTIVITY FROM EXPLOSION DOWNPLAYED
Russia described Tuesday's explosion at a secret nuclear-weapons complex in Siberia as the worst nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, but insisted Wednesday that it poses little danger.Workers and civil-defense troops scraped up snow and earth from a contaminated area near the city of Tomsk, where a tank holding radioactive waste exploded Tuesday. Local officials said air-defense units had spotted a radioactive cloud moving northeast toward the Yenisei River and the town of Asino.
A spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Ministry in Moscow, Georgy Kaurov, said that only one fireman received a significant dose of radiation during the explosion at Tomsk-7, a nuclear-weapons facility about 10 miles from Tomsk that is closed to foreigners.
The environmental organization Greenpeace described the Tomsk plant as a separation facility for plutonium, the highly combustible core of nuclear weapons.
The accident already has provoked calls for a thorough review of nuclear-production facilities in the former Soviet Union and for a halt in the production of plutonium. According to Greenpeace, Russia has the world's largest stockpile of plutonium, an estimated 180 tons, most of it dedicated to military use.
"This has been the single worst accident since the Chernobyl catastrophe," said Kaurov. "However, it cannot be compared to Chernobyl. . . . It is an accident without danger."
Ukrainian officials have estimated that 8,000 people died as a result of radiation-related illnesses, and tens of thousands were evacuated from their homes, after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear-power station in Ukraine on April 26, 1986.
Kaurov said preliminary estimates suggest the Tomsk-7 accident was likely to rate a 3 on the International Atomic Energy Agency's 7-point scale of nuclear accidents, compared with a 7 for Chernobyl. A rating of 3 indicates a "serious incident" involving the release of a harmless amount of radiation.
According to the Atomic Energy Ministry, the explosion followed an unexplained buildup of pressure in a stainless-steel tank containing uranium products. The explosion tore off a reinforced concrete slab covering the tank, short-circuiting the plant's electrical systems and starting a fire.
The director of the Tomsk-7 plant, Gennady Khandorin, told the independent Moscow newspaper Izvestia that most of the radioactive contamination had been confined to the immediate vicinity. He acknowledged, however, that a small amount of "localized radiation" had been observed on a road to the nearby village of Samus.
"There is no reason to close the road. We are monitoring the vehicles on it, and they show up clean," he said.
A senior science adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Svyatoslav Zabelin, said the "political consequences" of the accident could be more serious than the radioactive contamination.
"I hope this will bring some common sense into this area," he said. "The construction of a plutonium-processing plant so near to a major city is crazy."