Landslide threatens waste dump in Naryn

A potential landslide in the central Kyrgyz province of Naryn could affect a uranium waste dump, threatening up to 50,000 people, according to the Kyrgyz emergency ministry. "The danger of a landslide is very serious. Currently, according to an expert who has been monitoring the situation on the ground since August, the landslide is moving by 1 to 1.5 cm per day," Emil Akmatov, a ministry spokesman, told IRIN from the capital, Bishkek, on Monday. According to the emergency ministry, a special inter-ministry commission has just completed an assessment of the situation in the Min-Kush settlement of Naryn province, where in August a land mass of some 700,000 cubic metres started to slide down in the Tuyuk-Suu area. Experts from the emergency ministry, the academy of sciences and some scientific research institutions say that if the landslide collapsed it would create a natural dam 30 m high and a subsequent reservoir 200 m long. They warn that this would destroy the Tuyuk-Suu nuclear waste dump and that the rivers Min-Kush, Kokomeren and Naryn (a tributary of the Syrdarya river, one of the major water sources in Central Asia) would be polluted with radioactivity. "If that were to happen, up to 50,000 people could be affected," Akmatov said. There are four uranium waste dumps in the vicinity of Min-Kush with a total volume of 800,000 cu m, of which 400,000 cu m are radioactive, according to the emergency officials. "It is very difficult to determine when the landslide might collapse as no equipment has been installed in the body of the landslide to detect any sudden movements," Akmatov said. But he added that the emergency agency was now working to develop measures to prevent the potential landslide from causing flooding and destroying the waste dump. Options include using machinery to clear up the dam or using explosives to release the water, the emergency official said. In 1994, a team of local scientists investigated the nuclear dump in Min-Kush and proposed a number of solutions to the problem. One of them was to move the dumps to a more secure area, a move endorsed by the inter-ministerial commission on the issue. According to the US-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), an NGO working to strengthen global security by reducing the risk of the use and preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, there were 36 uranium tailings sites and 25 uranium mining dump sites in Kyrgyzstan by 1999. Many waste sites, a legacy of the Soviet Union, are located in areas prone to earthquakes and landslides, and thus pose an environmental safety hazard to Kyrgyzstan and the Central Asian region.