Blast at Russian Nuclear Plant Kills One

16/12/2005| IslamWeb

An explosion in a smelter on the site of a Russian nuclear power plant killed one worker and severely injured two others, but the state nuclear agency Rosenergoatom said Friday that radiation levels were normal.

The blast occurred on Thursday at the Leningrad nuclear power plant in the closed nuclear town of Sosnovy Bor, outside the northern city of St. Petersburg and about 400 miles northwest of Moscow. The smelter is operated by Ekomet-S, a company reprocessing scrap metal.

The blast threw a spotlight on what environmentalists called uncontrolled operations by such companies on sensitive sites.

"The enterprise ... functions illegally because there was no mandatory (state) environmental impact assessment on its construction," Dmitry Artamonov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace, told The Associated Press.

He said Greenpeace had appealed against Ekomet-S to the Sosnovy Bor prosecutors' office but it took no action.

The plant has four units, or reactors, in all. Rosenergoatom said that the smelter was on the grounds of the plant's second unit, and plant spokesman Sergei Averyanov said it was about half a mile from the reactor.

Oleg Bodrov, a physicist who heads the Green World ecological group in Sosnovy Bor, said that the reactor was only some 700 yards from the smelter, which is about 50 yards from a liquid radioactive waste pond.

Three people were injured in the blast, Rosenergoatom said. The Emergency Situations Ministry said that two of the injured had burns over 90 percent of their bodies.

A 33-year-old worker died of his injuries Friday morning, Yuri Lameko, chief doctor of the Sosnovy Bor hospital, told the AP.

"There were no violations of safety levels and operating conditions of the energy units of the Leningrad nuclear plant," Rosenergoatom said in a statement.

The second unit had been shut down for planned major repairs in July, it said.

The plant spokesman, Averyanov, said that the blast had caused molten metal to spurt out of the smelter. Usually Ekomet-S reprocesses scrap with low levels of radioactivity, but on Thursday the metal was clear of radiation, Averyanov said.

He blamed the blast on violations of technical and production rules.

Bodrov said Ekomet-S had begun operating two years ago and was itself in violation of the law since it had undergone no state environmental impact assessment. At about the same time as it was founded, the only environmental monitoring laboratory in the town of 65,000 was shut down for lack of funding, he said.

"There is no independent environmental monitoring in the nuclear city of Sosnovy Bor," Bodrov said.

He said this was the second accident to occur at Ekomet-S, which he alleged was built by a company headed by a local member of Russia's upper house of parliament. The first happened in summer 2003, injuring some workers.

In March 1992, an accident at the Sosnovy Bor plant caused radioactive gases and iodine to be leaked into the air, according to nuclear watchdog groups.

One of the reactors at the 30-year-old plant is of the same type as the one at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that exploded in Soviet Ukraine in 1986 in the world's worst nuclear accident.

The station is the main supplier of electricity to St. Petersburg, and there are plans to transport some of its power to Finland.

In addition to the nuclear plant, Sosnovy Bor is home to a regional radioactive waste reservoir, and an experimental laboratory and training center for nuclear submarines.

PHOTO CAPTION

A general view of the Leningrad nuclear power plant in the closed nuclear town of Sosnovy Bor, outside the northern city of St. Petersburg and about 600 kilometers (400 miles) northwest of Moscow is seen in this Oct. 2004 file picture. (AP)