Radioactive waste on the move, possible threat - NGO

Kazakhstan is moving radioactive waste from the Baykonur space centre to a former nuclear testing ground in the northern Kazakh city of Semipalatinsk. Environmental NGOs told IRIN the move carried health and safety risks. "The preparatory work [on transporting the radioactive waste] has been going on for a while. It is very likely that the actual work on moving them has already started," Sergey Chelnokov, a senior expert on substance control of the Kazakh committee on nuclear energy, told IRIN from the Kazakh commercial capital of Almaty. Russia rents the Baykonur space launching site located in central Kazakhstan. "These are not nuclear substances, they are closed sealed sources of radiation that had been used to control some technical processes," Chelnokov explained, adding that the amount of radioactive waste awaiting transportation was not big. "They don't expose any threat to environment or people's health," he claimed. According to the nuclear energy committee, the radioactive waste will be stored in special containers to prevent radiation and exclude radioactive pollution in case of an accident. "All the security measures should be adhered to and the waste will be transported by a company that has a special licence to do that," he said. During Soviet times, the Baykonur space centre was used for various space programmes and some radioactive sources have remained there since. "They need to be moved to a special storage place in Semipalatinsk to be kept under secure conditions," the nuclear energy body official added. According to the local environmental Ecocentre NGO, based in the northern city of Karaganda, there are numerous radioactive sources, the so-called sources in ampoules, in the country. The issue is aggravated by a fact that there are also many unattended radioactive substances that can easily be accessed by people. "They all should be moved to the Baykal-I radioactive waste storage facility in Semipalatinsk," Kaysha Atakhanova, head of Ecocentre, told IRIN from Semipalatinsk. "Baykal-I is the only facility that meets international standards." She gave an example when some local people took out the protective lead layer of the containers with radioactive material to smelt it and sell to scrap metal dealers, exposing themselves to radioactivity and others by selling radioactively polluted metal. Some unofficial estimates suggest that around 5,000 radioactive ampoule waste items should have been moved to Baykal-I, but reportedly only 400 have been sent there so far. Facilities that have them mainly don't have resources to do that. "But if the safety requirements while transporting those substances fail, for example in case of an accident or other incidents, it can cause harm to the environment and people's health. The risk is always there," Atakhanova said, adding that the relevant bodies should ensure the necessary safety measures.