“Today’s environmental protest is in response to the fact that construction has begun on a new nuclear power plant near St. Petersburg,” said Rashid Alimov, editor of Bellona Web’s Russian-language pages.

Sosnovy Bor is already home to the original Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, an aged and scandal plagued facility that runs on four fatally flawed Chernobyl-style RBMK 1000 reactors.

Saturday’s protest was marked by activists dressing up in skeleton masks and hazmat suits to lay cement for the foundation of the new nuclear power plant.

Photo: Anna Kireeva/Bellona

1.) Environmentalists were not allowed to conduct an independent environmental impact study of the LNPP 2 project.

2.) Documents relative to an accident at the original Leningrad Nuclear power  Plant in 1975 remain classified.

3.) The original Leningrad NPP runs on fatally flawed Chernobyl-style RBMK 1000 reactors.

4.) Problems of safely storing nuclear waste have not been solved by any country in the world.

5.) There are as yet no plans that have been worked out for the decommissioning of the original Leningrad NPP.  

6.) The engineered life-spans for two reactor blocks at the Leningrad NPP were illegally extended without the conduction of an environmental impact study.

7.)  Some 78 percent of Russian are against the construction of new nuclear power plants according to a ROMIR poll.

8.) Even under safe operating conditions, there is a rise of 2.5 times in the chances that children living near a nuclear power plant will become ill with leukaemia.
 
9.) According to the general city plan, St. Peterburg and its 5 million residents fall within the path of any prospective catastrophe at the Leningrad NPP.