Lithuania pledges over nuclear waste

Lithuania is set to build a dump for nuclear waste at the Braslau Lakes located on its territory.

Lithuanian nuclear energy experts recently met with the representatives of the public from the cross-border areas in Belarus, trying to convince them how the dump was going to be safe for their households and environment. It is a pity no translators were present in the audience in order to translate the scientific language into the language that people who came to the meeting could understand.

On Friday, April 20, a total of 100 local public leaders packed the hall of a professional college in the Belarusian border town of Vidza to hear an official delegation from Lithuania. Representatives from the Ignalina nuclear power plant and officials from the Lithuanian Ministry of Energy and the Lithuanian Institute of Nuclear Energy were talking about the planned construction of a dump which will bury nuclear waste from the power plant.

Local residents along with the officials from the Belarus’s Ministry for Natural Resources and Environment Protection posed them their questions. The town of Vidza is located some 20 km from the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, a proximity that could not but worry the local communities.

Lithuania plans to build the dump by 2009, when the second block of the nuclear plant will be shut down and the station will cease to exist. The closure of this nuclear power plan was one of the conditions for Lithuania to enter the European Union. Now time has come to fulfill the country’s commitment, according to Konstantin Degtirenko, the dump construction manager.

Konstantin Degtiarenko: “Burring the nuclear fuel waste is the major element of the program that envisages the closure of the station. For this purpose, Lithuanian through assistance from the European Union is allocating huge financial resources.”

Since the dump is to be located in proximity of the borders of Belarus and Latvia, the Lithuanian government has to obtain a go-ahead for construction from its neighbors. Not only the governments but also simple men that will live close to the dump are to express their consent. People need to be convinced that their lives will not be affected by the project, according to requirements from the European Union.

The Lithuanian scientists had lengthy presentations, showing slides and telling their arguments in support of the dump project. But it was almost impossible to understand them if you did not have a nuclear physics diploma in your pocket. That’s why people were listening in silence until Konstantin Degtiarenko summed up in simple words.

Konstantin Degtiarenko: “The reason why our project is so important from the point of view of safety and potential affects on the neighboring regions, because we will have brought the nuclear fuel, which is now being held in the reactor and cooling reservoirs, into a more safe condition.”

Only then, people started asking questions.

“Is this dump going to be a burial site for nuclear waste from around Europe – Germany, Austria, France and other countries?”

Project manager Konstantin Degtiarenko, revealed sincerely that the planned dump capacity could handle only the nuclear fuel that is currently being held in Ignalina. He said he was not in the position to say what happens in several years.

Officials from the Belarus’s Ministry of Environment Protection were interested in another issue. They asked if the waste containers could sustain an impact if a Boeing-737 would crash on them. Lithuanian energy specialists failed to answer this question, so Belarus officials conditioned them to clarify on this issue.

The ERB correspondent had an impression that crash of a Boeing on the dump site was the only concern from the Belarus’s environment protection officials. But Liudmila Ivasackina from the department of environmental expertise assured the correspondent that it was not the case.

Liudmila Ivasackina: “I had a presentation of our proposals and questions prepared with me, but due to technical reasons we were late for this meeting, and I failed to make a presentation.”

She said her ministry major concern is the level of radioactive influence on environment, the affect of radiation on critical groups of population and other issues. It is bad our specialists were late for the meeting and did not pose their questions.

What we understood from the Lithuanian specialists in a private conversation, these public hearings were organized because it was a condition set by the European Union. It means the public opinion will not play a key role for the future of the project and that the dump will be built anyway.

Konstantin Degtiarenko invited ERB correspondent to come to the stations and witness what and where is going to be built. That’s what we are going to do in the near future.

Photo by yabloko.ru