MOSCOW -- While the United States was busy worrying about Russian nuclear-weapons scientists hiring themselves out to predatory despots around the globe, another deadly danger was overclouded.
Nuclear materials used for peaceful purposes here threaten the world virtually as much as those designed to blow it up -- and more immediately, at that. The accidental leak of radioactive gases from a nuclear power plant near St. Petersburg last week offered a grim reminder to anyone who had begun to forget the lessons of Chernobyl, where in 1986 the worst nuclear reactor accident in history left 31 dead and fears that thousands might have been affected by the fallout:
Nuclear materials here are handled in a way many other nations would find almost cavalier.
Nuclear power plants fall dangerously short of international safety standards, and nuclear waste is dumped with little oversight.
Most worrisome, the cost of setting things right is way beyond what this poverty-stricken nation can afford.
The damning evidence is spread across this vast land. At Chelyabinsk, a city just beyond the Urals on the edge of Siberia, high-level nuclear waste is dumped into Lake Karachai, and environmentalists fear it will seep into the water table. An hour spent standing next to the lake can produce a dosage of radiation strong enough to cause cancer, environmentalists say.
Dangerous levels of plutonium isotopes have been found in the Yenisei River in Siberia; a plant on the river in Krasnoyarsk processes nuclear waste.
Industrial wastes are often deposited wherever factories feel like dumping them. Two years ago, when Estonia was still part of the Soviet Union, children in a northeastern town began losing their hair. Officials eventually discovered a kindergarten had been built on top of a dump filled with radioactive waste.
Nuclear-powered ice breakers are refueled at sea off Murmansk, instead of taking them out of the water and to a contained area. Used reactors have been dumped into the Kara Sea, near the Arctic Ocean.
And millions of people depend on electricity from 16 Chernobyl-style reactors, although Western nations condemn them as disasters waiting to happen. Last year, 52 accidents were reported at nuclear reactors throughout the former Soviet Union, 10 of which were rated as 3 on a 7-point scale. Chernobyl was a 7.
Other similar reactors are operating in the former East Bloc countries of Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
The explosion at Chernobyl plant's reactors sent a cloud of radioactive dust over large parts of Europe. Wide swaths of agricultural land in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus remain contaminated and closed to farming.
European countries dread that another Chernobyl-style accident might occur at any time, and there is little cause for optimism that their cause for fear will be eliminated.
"This country is a mess," Dmitri Litvinov, Moscow coordinator for the Greenpeace environmental group, said last week. "Every issue we work on globally is a critical issue here."
He said Greenpeace began investigating nuclear issues in the former Soviet Union two years ago with a visit to the nuclear testing region at Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic.
"We were absolutely overwhelmed by the scale of the problems," Mr. Litvinov said. "The more you know about it, the scarier it gets."
The despoiling of the environment by nuclear and other wastes in the former Soviet Union is subject to few controls. The government of the Soviet Union ruled by edict; today laws are being discussed that would protect people and land from harm, but they have not yet been passed.
Until recently, environmental research was the responsibility of 1,065 different institutions answering to 70 different ministries. The lax nuclear policy was part of a larger disregard for the environment.
"Toxic wastes are handled here just like in any other undeveloped country," Mr. Litvinov said. "They bury it or burn it."
In the days of Communist power, pollution was officially impossible. Because communism was supposed to be based on a system where workers were not exploited, the trappings of such exploitation -- pollution included -- could not be acknowledged.
"We feel about 25 percent of all the territory of the former Soviet Union is in an unbearable ecological situation," Nikolai F. Reimers, head of the Ecological Union of Russia, said in a recent interview, "and 15 percent is an ecological catastrophe zone."
Today, the general environmental situation is more dangerous than ever, he said. Russia is desperately trying to extricate itself from serious social and economic problems. A nation threatened with its very survival has little time or money to devote to environmental concerns.
"If we have no bread and our houses are not heated," Mr. Reimers said, "our ecological problems will be pushed aside."
The overall picture of nuclear power in Russia and the other republics of what is now called the Commonwealth of Independent States shows just how tenuous the entire structure is.
Although it has been clear ever since Chernobyl that the "graphite-moderated" reactor type poses serious dangers, 16 are still operating here because there are no alternatives. In the former Soviet Union, there is no reserve generating capacity; thus, whenever a plant is taken off line, it creates significant power shortages.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, studied the smallest of the Chernobyl-type reactors last year and concluded that to keep them operating safely for just two years, until they can be shut down, would require about $50 million per reactor.
To bring them up to world standards, so that they could remain operational, would cost somewhere between $200 million and $400 million, Maurice Rosen, the IAEA's safety chief, said in a telephone interview.
The larger reactors could cost even more, and the money just isn't there.
The World Bank and the European Community have expressed interest in financing the upgrades, Mr. Rosen said, "but it's a slow process -- maybe too slow."
Part of the financial problem facing nuclear plants is the unrealistically low cost of other forms of energy and the fact that the nuclear production was not being repaid for its costs. The government of Boris N. Yeltsin has announced that it will end subsidies of oil and coal in May, but for years the only way nuclear plants could compete was to cut corners and crank out as much electricity as possible with no hope of having any income to invest in capital improvements.
The 16 Chernobyl-type RMBK reactors are the most flawed in design, but none of the 45 power-generating reactors here was built with structures adequate to contain serious accidents.
Nuclear oversight agencies existed in the former Soviet Union, but they were closely tied to the industries they regulated.
L "There's no real independent monitoring," Mr. Litvinov said.
When a Greenpeace delegation visited Murmansk, the official in charge of monitoring radiation there said she depended on getting information from the nuclear industry itself, Mr. Litvinov recalled. Samples were sent to St. Petersburg for analysis and returned a week later without any sense of urgency, she said.
At one time, nuclear supervisors reported to the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which designed and built reactors.
Nuclear operations were supervised but not regulated, and the supervisors were very much a part of the industry, said Alexander A. Matveyev, an official of the State Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear and Radiation Safety, which Mr. Yeltsin created in December.
Their offices were typically in the plants they monitored, and it was considered bad for their careers to report problems.
"Those being supervised were usually involved in discussions about how they should be supervised," Mr. Matveyev said, "and they demanded a compromise."
The committee is drawing up regulations and hopes to begin inspecting and licensing nuclear plants. But it is still very much in the paperwork stage.
The old system of administrative edict has been steadily eroded and has yet to be replaced. In some ways, controls are even more lax now than they have ever been. "Now as the system becomes more free everyone wants to see where it's written that they have to do something a certain way," Mr. Matveyev said.
A year and a half ago, he said, the predecessor to his supervisory body wanted to curb the capacity of the Chernobyl-style reactors out of concern for their safety.
"The nuclear plants could ignore those orders by saying they would lose power or profits," Mr. Matveyev said.
Mr. Matveyev said he doesn't know what the new regulators will find when they begin inspecting plants toward the end of this year, but he doubts all the plants will meet safety standards.
"But it's quite difficult to decide to close a plant when there are no substitutes for it," he said. "That's a political decision, and they are adopted at a different level than our committee."