Russia Wants Faster Aid for 'Rotting' Nuclear Subs

Sunday, May 16, 2004

(5:42 AM ET)

By Mark Trevelyan

Reuters

Antipov said Moscow was concerned about some talk among G8 members of extending the $20 billion program to cover more countries, diluting the funds available in Russia itself.

BERLIN -- Reuters
Russia faces grave environmental and terrorist threats unless donors accelerate a slow trickle of international aid for dismantling its rusting nuclear submarines, a senior official said.

Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Sergei Antipov said Russia would raise its concerns next month at a meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) leading nations in the United States.

He said Moscow was very worried at the slow rate of funding, despite a much-trumpeted G8 initiative at a 2002 summit in Canada to spend $20 billion over 10 years to secure stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological materials.

"The longer a submarine remains without being scrapped and without the nuclear fuel being removed... the more danger for the environment, the greater the risk of these materials falling into the hands of terrorists or other groups for malicious purposes," Antipov said in an interview.

"Any of the submarines -- and we have 96 waiting to be scrapped -- could sink. Any of them could rust through or break up. Anything could happen," he told Reuters in Berlin, where he attended a 14-nation meeting on the issue last week.

The submarines are decommissioned vessels of the former Soviet fleet, some of which "have been rotting at their piers for several decades," Antipov told parliament last November.

Dismantling them involves removing the highly radioactive reactor compartment, hermetically sealing it to prevent leakage, and eventually transferring it to be stored for decades at a special site which Russia is building, with German help, in the northern region of Murmansk.

* DILUTING THE AID

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Dan