Putin leaves Kazakhstan without deal to build nuclear plant
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.
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Publish date: January 30, 2008
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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
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.
Russia is formally withdrawing from a landmark environmental agreement that channeled billions in international funding to secure the Soviet nuclear legacy, leaving undone some of the most radioactively dangerous projects and burning one more bridge of potential cooperation with the West.
While Moscow pushes ahead with major oil, gas and mining projects in the Arctic—bringing more pollution to the fragile region—the spoils of these undertakings are sold to fuel Russia’s war economy, Bellona’s Ksenia Vakhrusheva told a side event at the COP 29, now underway in Baku, Azerbaijan.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.