ENVIROWATCH
HOW HUMANS TREAT
THEIR SURROUNDINGS,
EACH OTHER, THEMSELVES
Russian Anti-Nuke Activists Visit Washington
By Helen Wheatley
Earlier this month, two representatives of the Siberian group Ecological Initiative (EI) came to Washington. Hosted by the nuclear waste cleanup advocacy group Heart of America, Boris Nekrasov and Valeriy Konyashkin toured Hanford and the Tri-Cities, met with media, learned about relations between government and public interest groups in the United States, and gained a measure of stateside cachet that can still make a difference when dealing with Russian government officials.
We caught up with Boris Nekrasov at Heart of America headquarters in Seattle. Sporting a checked wool lumberjack shirt and reluctantly swigging a can of Coke, the soft-spoken journalist described the huge task the small core group of five or six activists has taken on over the past seven years in Tomsk, an industrial and university city southeast of the Siberian oilfield. Paired with Tomsk is the Secret City, Tomsk 7, a Russian version of the Hanford nuclear complex. Ecological Initiative formed in 1988 to uncover and distribute information about Tomsk 7. The handful of savvy EI activists compiles records of nuclear accidents and exposures, publishes informational inserts in the local papers, and lobbies the government to clean up the facility and shut down production.
Ecological Initiative has won recognition for the important role it plays as a source of independent information and evaluation. The group has waged an effective campaign to shut down a plutonium extraction plant by mounting public protests and distributing informational leaflets to politicians. "The legislature went crazy when it found out about plans to build a plutonium waste storage facility," said Nekrasov.
The core group has a wider active membership of about 30 Tomsk residents who are able to provide scientific and professional support, and Ecological Initiative counts a high-ranking government official among its members. "Our success is still personality driven," says Nekrasov. "We want to maintain our access to government, but we want to be seen as independent."
A red oil explosion in 1993 helped Ecological Initiative to break the silence around the Secret City. (Red oil is a byproduct of the plutonium extraction process.) Winds carried the fallout away from Tomsk, but outlying villages fell under the nuclear cloud. The Medical University in Tomsk carried out health studies on children in the villages and found chromosome abnormalities resulting from the explosion.
That was not news to Ecological Initiative. In addition to more than thirty accidents, EI has uncovered evidence of fifty years of steady contamination in communities near the facility. The group worries that waste has been flushed into the Tom river. According to Nekrasov, nuclear waste has been injected into deep wells despite the presence of extensive wetlands in the area.
At the time of the explosion, Hanford was about to put its own plutonium extraction facility to work, despite having had an explosion of its own two decades ago. Under the guise of the clean-up, the Department of Energy planned to extract weapons grade plutonium from recycled waste. Heart of America's Hilary Harding set out to learn more about Tomsk 7, and now she works to bring Russian and American activists together.
The friendly atom, russian style. This is a cover of a pamphlet extolling the safety & benefits of nuclear power
"We need to challenge the culture of nuclear secrecy shared by both countries," says Harding. Her own visits to Tomsk 7 have helped open up official press brief-ings to Nekrasov after years of exclusion. Nuclear workers and scientists are accustomed to living in a closed world. There have been few whistleblowers ("We call them 'Greens,'" says Nekrasov), and the mainstream newspapers have been accustomed to reporting the party line. "One of my journalist colleagues says that whenever he goes to the Secret City, he comes back enlightened," says Nekrasov. "I tell him he glows with more than enlightenment!"
Years of secrecy have yielded some ironic results. The Russians kept systematic records of radiation exposure and its health effects on workers in the nuclear complex - data that our own Department of Energy would never have dared to compile. Ecological Initiative is pulling this kind of information out of the Russian government before it clamps shut again.
Activists like Nekrasov and Konyashkin fight an uphill battle for funding. An independent journalist association called Asmo Press keeps food on Nekrasov's table, but that association itself is struggling to stay alive. "Our next step," says Nekrasov, "is to be seen as a resource that is paid to provide information." In a country accustomed to state-sponsored journalism and with only a fledgling network of public interest groups, that step will be a big one.
B.C. Rainforest Threatened
After a month long blockade defending land of the Nuhalk Nation from International Forest products (INTERFOR), 22 people were arrested at Ista (Fogg Creek) "British Columbia" in sovereign Nuhalk Territory on Sept. 26. Those arrested for "tresspassing" included hereditary chiefs and elders, as well as members of the Forest Action Network (FAN).
The Nuhalke have never entered into a treaty with Canada. They have never ceded, traded or sold any of their land to Canada. By Canadian and international law, the Nuhalk have every right to their traditional lands. According to the Forest Action Network, Canada is selling cheap logging permits to clearcut and destroy Nuhalk forests.
The people who were arrested faced the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Dec. 4. This court case will set a precedent for future conflicts between native peoples and the timber industry throughout British Columbia. This trial could determine whether or not the Canadian government has to respect its own laws and the rights of sovereign native nations. It could also affect Canada's policy of of allowing timber companies to clearcut on land belonging to native peoples.
To help get INTERFOR off of native lands and show support for the Nuhalk, write:
International Forest Products
P.O. BOX 50
Hagensburg, B.C. VOT 1HO
CANADA
The Honorable Mike Harcourt
Premier of British Columbia
Parliament Buildings
Victoria, B.C. V8V 1X4
CANADA
This story was updated at length in Issue 20 of the WFP.
Please see "BC Natives Want Trees, Not Treaties"
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Contents on this page were published in the December/January, 1996 edition of the Washington Free
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