Radioactive waste uncovered
By Russell Working Posted Sat, Sep 1 2001
Reporting on nuclear waste can be almost as hazardous to journalists as nuclear waste itself. And it is definitely no way to win friends in President Putin’s Russia.
Igor Kravchuk is known in the Northern Pacific port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky for his stories on the security risks and environmental dangers in Russia’s nuclearsubmarine fleet. Drawing on sources within the navy and the prosecutor’s office, the reporter for the daily Vesti has detailed how impoverished sailors are stripping submarines of everything from radio equipment to radioactive isotopes and selling them to organized criminals. In one case last year, Kravchuk reported, two sailors prying palladium parts from a mothballed submarine came close to sparking a nuclear accident that would have vented radioactive material over an area where hundreds of thousands of people live.
As a result of his work, Kravchuk says his phone has been bugged by the Federal Security Service, known by its Russian acronym, FSB, and representing the main domestic successor to the KGB. FSB agents have castigated him for reporting on matters of public record. When he covered the June trial of two sailors accused of stealing valuable parts from a submarine, the FSB implied that Kravchuk could be jailed.
“It was an open trial, but when my story came out, our editor received a letter from the FSB headquarters saying that I had broken several articles of the law on preserving military secrets,” Kravchuk says. “I have packets of these letters already. It isn’t excluded that I will end up in jail.”
His fears are not idle. Reporters and media observers say a chill has set in for those writing about nuclear environmental issues in Russia, especially when the military is involved. The most celebrated case is that of Capt. Grigory Pasko, a navy journalist who is facing a second trial this summer on high-treason charges after he reported on the dumping of radioactive waste in the Sea of Japan. Formerly a reporter for the paper Boyevaya Vakhta in the Sea of Japan port of Vladivostok, he was acquitted of treason only to be found guilty on a lesser charge of unmilitary conduct in 1999. He was released for time served—20 months in jail—but the FSB is seeking to overturn the verdict in a second trial this summer.
Analyst Anatoly Lebedev, head of the Bureau for Regional Public Campaigning in Vladivostok, said the Pasko case was a resounding blow against environmental journalism. Pasko’s dismissal from the navy removed the only inside source for information on the Pacific Fleet’s nuclear issues.
“Very few people have access to the fleet’s nuclear sites the way Pasko did, and very few now have the courage to touch upon the subject,” Lebedev says.
Lebedev, who compiles the annual Anthology of Environmental Journalism in the Far East, says journalists increasingly shun tough environmental stories for easier topics, like tiger poaching in Primorye, the region flanked by China, North Korea and the Sea of Japan.
He adds, “There are regions of the Far East where environmental issues are not being covered at all, like Chukotka,” an expanse opposite Alaska on the Bering Sea.
Russia, under the burden of its Soviet past, has been described as in a state of ecocide and is awash with potential stories on environmental catastrophes. Through the years of communist governance, Moscow’s central planners built industries that fouled the air, polluted watersheds and spread radioactive waste. When a disaster occurred, the party bosses’ first instinct was to cover up the matter. In 1985 a nuclear reactor exploded on a submarine in Chazhma Bay, and the government didn’t announce the disaster or warn citizens in nearby Vladivostok to stay indoors. Soviet secrecy about environmental disasters peaked in April 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear accident resulted in the immediate death of about 30 people and the subsequent death of a disputed number in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.
Even in post-communist Russia, Putin, a former KGB agent, has shown decidedly Soviet instincts. He made clear his priorities when he canceled the federal environmental department last year.
In Murmansk, Russia’s Northern Fleet has tried to quash coverage of nuclear incidents, the most notorious of which was the sinking of the submarine Kursk last year. The accident killed all 118 crew members and left the submarine and its reactors at the bottom of the Barents Sea.
Yelena Larionova, coordinator for the regional journalism association, Barents Press International, says the navy consistently misled reporters and tried to interfere with coverage.
“Our region is just stuffed with nuclear devices, both active and decommissioned ones,” she says. “The situation with the Kursk submarine showed that the fleet is not prepared to work with the press at all. They lied, and they didn’t even let reporters talk to relatives of the deceased sailors. A reporter couldn’t make a single step without being controlled.”
The navy’s stonewalling of the media became a nationwide scandal, as did Putin’s delay in accepting help from the West. Top brass refused to release the names of the dead, even to their families. Their identities were revealed only because the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda bribed authorities to get a list of the deceased and published it.
The situation was reminiscent of Soviet times, when the foreign press provided a better picture of what was going on than did the national media. Svetlana Babayeva, political editor for the national daily Izvestiya, says, “It was abnormal when the basic information on the Kursk was coming from Scandinavian sources.”
The Kursk situation was not isolated, believes Larionova, a long-time radio reporter who has often clashed with the navy. The Barents Sea is polluted from the dumping of radioactive waste, but reporters have trouble getting access to the most important sites. The town of Severomorsk, a fleet base, is closed even to Russian reporters. And foreign reporters have trouble covering any navy-related story.
“The fleet says, ‘Go get permission from the Moscow headquarters,’ but I don’t know of a single case in which a foreign journalist got permission to go cover the fleet,” Larionova says.
At times newspapers are guilty of shrugging off environmental coverage. Izvestiya refuses to cover Greenpeace or other organizations, says Oleg Zhunusov, an Izvestiya reporter based in the Russian Far Eastern region of Primorye. He has proposed stories on logging in the area, an issue highlighted by Greenpeace, but his editors always refuse.
Izvestiya was stirred into a tougher stance when the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, voted in June to import nuclear waste into Russia. Izvestiya attacked the decision. It published a poll that showed only four percent of respondents approved of the plan, which was rushed into law without thorough hearings or scientific studies. The Federation Council, the upper house of the parliament, still must approve the plan, but Speaker Yegor Sroyev said senators would not consider it. Yabloko, a liberal party, has vowed to push through a national referendum on the issue.
Perhaps it is not an especially daring stand for a large national daily to cover an unpopular decision that has also divided the political elite. The paper has faced no pressure on the matter, admits Babayeva. But Izvestiya at least plans to keep fighting the import of nuclear waste.
It is often in the provinces that reporting on environmental issues becomes riskier. Kravchuk says he cannot get navy approval to cover seemingly innocuous events. Last year U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson visited Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to discuss proposals for processing nuclear waste. Kravchuk called Factory No. 49, a facility that repairs nuclear submarines, and asked if he could go along with Richardson when his group inspected the factory. After all, he figured, if a U.S. government official was touring the place, how secret could it be?
Factory managers agreed. “First they said, ‘No problem, send us a fax on who you are and the [license plate] number of your car,” Kravchuk says. “An hour later they called back and said I couldn’t go. There was this FSB colonel, Migachov, who asked me why I wanted to go with them. I said, ‘Because I am a reporter, and we have a newspaper, and readers want to know about this.’ So he hung up on me.”
The Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky region is far from the eye of the world press, and Kravchuk isn’t counting on an international outcry if he gets arrested. All this makes him even more apprehensive about the FSB.
“Their job is to look for enemies,” he says, “so they decided that journalists will be their enemies.”
— Nonna Chernyakova, a Russian freelance reporter based in Vladivostok, also contributed to this report.