The Arctic as a resource base
What’s wrong with Russia’s official documents on the Arctic.
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Publish date: October 22, 1997
Written by: Thomas Nilsen
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The new additions to the Russian law on state secrets was signed by President Boris Yeltsin on October 6 this year. The law says that all information on military nuclear installations is concidered to be state secrets. But now the law itself may end up in the Russian Constitutional Court.
In an interview with St. Petersburg Times, Ernest Ametistov said that the amendment risked running even further afoul of the constitution. –According to Article 55 of the Constitution, information related to ecology cannot be classified, Ametistov said.
Human rights organisations in Russia are also concerned about a clause in the amendment allowing the status of disputed information to be determined by investigative committees drawn from the intelligence branches of the federal agencies concerned.
–Should this amendment be enforced, we won’t know anything about what is happening – right up to missing a new Chernobyl, said Boris Pustintsev, president of local human rights group Citizens’ Watch. He also stated that if the new amendment is enforced, there will immediately be thosands of new Nikitin cases.
Vladimir Lopatin, an independent Duma deputy and member of the Security Committee which worked on the amendment, dismissed any connection to the Nikitin case in the new law. The amendment was signed by the Duma on September 19.
What’s wrong with Russia’s official documents on the Arctic.
As uranium supplies from Russia fall under the shadow of potential sanctions, and while Ukraine’s allies look to wean themselves off nuclear fuel produced by Moscow’s Rosatom corporation, owners of left-for-dead mines in the US are looking to revive their deposits.
The European Union doubled its purchases of Russian nuclear fuel in 2023, data from Eurostat and the UN’s international trade service Comtrade show.
The output of Russian nuclear power plants in 2023 decreased by 2.8% compared to 2022. A decrease in output occurred for the first time in 10 years a...