News
Publish date: January 30, 2008
News
The activists were released about an hour later.
Rashid Alimov, editor of Bellona’s Russian pages, along with Alexey Snigirev, also of Bellona, and Tatyana Kulbakina, of Murmansk’s Nature and Youth, where arrested near the Izotop radioactive waste facility in the Leningrad Region.
A photographer with the newspaper Moi Raion was also detained with the activists.
Alimov said by telephone that he and the other activists established that radiation background levels around the waste were higher than normal. No reason for the detention was given by police.
On January 24th, Bellona and Ecodefence, another Russian environmental organisation, staged a protest against continuing shipments of uranium tails to Russia from Germany in central St. Petersburg.
Specifically, the protest, in which some 40 environmentalists participated, was aimed at the arrival of the MV Shouwenbank, which arrived in St. Petersburg carrying 2,000 tons of uranium tails – the radioactive and toxic waste produced during uranium enrichment.
See also an article by the St Petersburg Times : Environmentalists Held For Trying to Measure Radiation
An accident aboard numerous Volgoneft oil tankers in the Kerch in mid December clearly show what can happen to aged ships when they are operated in bad weather—and when economic and military objectives are prioritized over the lives of crews and environmental safety.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution and climate change.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
A visit last week by Vladimir Putin and a Kremlin entourage to Astana, Kazakhstan sought in part to put Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, on good footing with local officials.