(May 21, 1993) A formerly Soviet factory for fuel rods is still contaminating the coast of Estonia: the population hopes for western aid.
(391.3812) WISE-Amsterdam - The Estonian Greens already gave out warnings a long time ago about the danger posed by the factory. An investigative report recently published by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) agrees with them: contaminated water is flowing into the Baltic Sea from the former soviet Uranium milling plant in Sillamäe. The wastewater is coming from a cooling pond for radioactive wastes and should by now be just seeping through and being absorbed by the nearby soil. The US report comes to the conclusion that Sillamäe could be "as dangerous" as Chernobyl. Swedish and Finnish environmental groups fear that the whole Baltic Sea is going to be contaminated.
Nobody really knows what the former Soviet Union left behind there. Last year western journalists could for the first time examine Sillamäe. This still relatively secret installation, called the 'Chemical-Metallurgy Factory', went into operation in the beginning of the 1950s. The Uranium milling plant served for a long time for the production of fuel rods for Soviet nuclear facilities. It is possible that fissionable material for A-bombs was produced here too. According to the data that has become known so far, at least 5.4 million tons (non-metric) of radioactive waste were dumped over the past thirty years in an artificial lake. The lake, which is 300,000 square meters, is separated from the shores of the Baltic Sea by only a ten-meter high earth wall. Inhabitants from Sillamäe report that the dirty-green water dries up during long dry periods and contaminated muddy pits are the result.
Meanwhile, a Swedish-Finnish-Estonian team has started an analysis of the contents of the pit, but so far, no findings have been published. Inhabitants living nearby are complaining of a significant frequency of allergies and loss of hair (see WISE NCs 313.2127 and 315.2152). At some points during the tides, the level of the radioactive lake is much higher than the Baltic Sea. The present director of the factory estimates that about 3000 to 4000 cubic meters of radioactive water is seeping through the artificial earth walls every year.
The US study estimates that already more than 1000 hectares of land are contaminated. Solid radioactive waste from the Uranium Milling Factory was just dumped behind the ten-meter high earth walls; the pits are covered only with a layer of gravel. The wastes contains approximately about 1200 tons of pure uranium.
The factory itself is a huge complex with more than 8000 employees. It is situated in an outlying district of the town Sillamäe. The city and surrounding area were, during Soviet times, a protected zone. Mostly Russians and other people from other parts of the former Soviet Union were settled in the area. Officially, there was no resistance or opposition against the complex. Now people are worried, they fear the contamination of the groundwater, think the plant is an urgent danger for them, and require the shutdown of the complex (though it will mean loss of jobs). Even more because a number of children in Sillamäe are suffering from loss of hair and strange cutaneous diseases.
The Estonian government made a point at the last Baltic Sea Environmental Conference in Helsinki for the very first time of the necessity of a renovation of Sillamäe: but Tallinn (the capital) has no money - and from Moscow they got a clear 'no'. In Estonia, everybody now hopes for western financial aid.
Source: Die Tageszeitung (FRG), 27 April 1993
Contact: Estonian Green Movement, Box 3207, 200090 Tallinn, Estonia. Earth Embassy, Box 1633, S-74200 Östhammar, Sweden.