nuclear-news

“……..Uranium mining protest
In the Kurgan region, Rosatom’s subsidiary company, Dalur, has been mining uranium and the local communities fear an environmental disaster. In the summer of 2019, the state environmental appraisal revealed a discrepancy between Dalur’s documentation and the Russian legislation

requirements, but the company started the deposit’s development anyway at the end of 2019.(22)

• The ‘Dobrovolnoe’ uranium deposit is located in a floodplain of the Tobol river basin. This means that all the water that flows into the river will pass through the aquifer, flushing out radioactive and toxic compounds into the surrounding environment. (23)

• Since 2017, Kurgan activists have been protesting against the development of the deposit. They have appealed to the authorities and begun protests. One of their videos, ‘Uranium is Death for Kurgan’, has already reached 50,000 views. (24)

Several times, activists have tried to start a referendum and demand an independent environmental review, but so far, have received only refusals from the local officials.In February 2018, Natalia Shulyatieva, the spouse of activist Andrey Shulyatiev and mother of three children, died after falling into a coma. (25)

Activists believe this occurred in reaction to learning that Dalur had filed a lawsuit against her husband, accusing him of undermining the company’s reputation. The lawsuit was withdrawn following Shulyatieva’s death. (26)

In March 2020, the Federal Security Service in the Kurgan Region initiated a criminal case against local eco–activist Lyubov Kudryashova for her ‘public justification of terrorism using the Internet’. (27)

Activists attribute her persecution to her work at the Public Monitoring Fund for the Environmental Condition and the Population Welfare which she led back in 2017. The Foundation has repeatedly published information on the possible environmental damage resulting from Dalur’s mining activity. (28)

9

Rosatom Importing uranium waste
In the fall of 2019, environmentalists revealed that radioactive and toxic waste (uranium hexafluoride, UF6)were being imported from Germany through the port of Amsterdam into Russia. This is the waste from the uranium enrichment process which will be sent to the Urals or Siberia and stored in containers above the ground. Thus, under the auspices of a commercial transaction, the German uranium–enriching enterprise, Urenco, avoids its nuclear waste problem, while Rosatom profits by taking the hazardous waste into Russia.

• In response to this transaction, the groups Russian Social–Ecological Union, Ecodefense and Greenpeace Russia called on Russian civil society to protest. More than 30 organisations and movements joined the common statement (29), and various demonstrations have taken place in Russia, as well as in Germany and the Netherlands. (30)

As a result of protests, the question of importing radioactive waste was taken up by the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg (31) and the transportation of the waste was delayed for three months.However, in March 2020, when people in Russia were further restricted from protests during the Covid–19 virus quarantine, the import of radioactive waste was resumed through the port of the less populated town of Ust–Luga in Leningrad Region. Additional organisations and residents of the Leningrad region then decided to join the earlier anti–nuclear statement and protest. (32)

• Following these protests, a number of activists have faced persecution. Like Sosnovy Bor, Novouralskis a nuclear industry–dominated and closed city of Sverdlovsk region, and is the end destination of the transported uranium hexafluoride. The city has rarely seen protests before. In response to a series of one–person protests, authorities have initiated legal cases against three pensioners in the beginning of December 2019 (33). Charges were later dismissed. Another example is Rashid Alimov, an expert from Greenpeace Russia, who protested in the center of Saint Petersburg. Later the same day, two police officers together with six other people without uniform detained Alimov from in front of his house. He then faced charges and a substantial fine. (34)

Charges were later dropped.Environmental organisations that had previously opposed the import of uranium waste were listed as Foreign Agents.

Ecodefense was the first of such, listed in 2014. In 2019, the pressure continued and the organisation’s leader, Alexandra Korolyova, was targeted. (35)

Five criminal cases were initiated against her, which forced her to leave the country. (36)…..”