News
Publish date: February 21, 2008
News
The plan was announced during a meeting between Governor Yury Yevdokimov and the governor of Norway’s Finnmark county, Gunnar Kjonnoy, in Kirkenes, a Norwegian town near the Russian border.
The funds will be used to renovate the area around the Andreyeva bay nuclear storage facility – where much waste is stored in the open air – located 48 kilometres from the Norwegian border.
Europe’s largest nuclear waste storage facility holds some 21,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies with 35 metric tons of radioactive materials, and 12,000 cubic meters of solid and liquid waste, mostly removed from nuclear powered submarines and icebreakers.
The storage facility was set up some 40 year ago as a provisional facility. Foreign partners, such as the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden, were invited in the early 2000s to make preparations for the removal of nuclear waste from the site.
International experts have repeatedly raised concerns over environmental threats posed by the facility. Poor maintenance and the severe Arctic climate could cause severe leakage into the bay, which is located on a Barents Sea.
Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.
After years of inaction, Germany is working on its Carbon Management Strategy to resolve how CCS can play a role in climate action in industry. At the end of February, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action published first key points and a proposal to amend the law Kohlenstoffdioxid Speicherungsgesetz (KSpG). Bellona Deutschland, who was actively involved in the previous stakeholder dialogue submitted a statement in the association hearing.
In the midst of a global discussion on whether natural gas should be used as a transitional fuel and whether emissions from its extraction, production, transport and use are significantly less than those from other fossil fuels, Russia has developed ambitious plans to increase its own production of liquified natural gas (LNG) in the Arctic – a region with 75% of proven gas reserves in Russia – to raise its share in the international gas trade.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our main focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution risks and climate change.