PROLOGUE

Over the second half of the century, vast quantities of radioactive waste and numerous radioactively contaminated sites resulting from the production of nuclear weapons, nuclear accidents, bad practice of early days of nuclear industry, as well as routine and normal functioning of nuclear power plants have accumulated in the world. Especially it refers to the United States and Russia. Once released to the environment, radioactive material can become a significant transboundary problem, thus cause an international concern about its impact on the health and environment.

The end of the Cold War made it possible to remove the secrecy curtain that covered nuclear industry from scrutiny insight of public and ecological organizations. This opened the way of a systematic, comprehensive and interdisciplinary international effort to study the problems of nuclear inheritance of the past half of the century and thus facilitate management and decision making to achieve technically sound, publicly acceptable and cost effective policy oriented to remediation and/or stabilization of the burden put by this inheritance.

In response to this situation, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) had established a project on Radiation Safety of the Biosphere (RAD project) supposing to conduct it as a series of studies. The Advisory Committee of the RAD project (chaired by Dr. J. Ahearne and Academician N. Laverov) recommended to start with the problems of the nuclear inheritance of the former Soviet Union (FSU) as the severe radiological problems are located in the FSU and the difficulties with radioactive waste problems are complicated by the ongoing social, economic and political changes in this region.

It is, of course, a big task to collect and verify data to provide an overview of the contamination that could serve as an input to risk assessment and other applications, such as transboundary risk management, radionuclide material flows, etc. Keeping in mind that the data relevant to the nuclear inheritance of the FSU are too big for any one institution to collect and collate, and that these data, as well as statistical data on generation of the radioactive material, its content, distribution, etc., are partially published in some documents for restricted or in-house use, partially stored in archives and are being declassified, the decision was taken to address the International Science and Technology Centre (ISTC) in Moscow to start Russian sister project aimed at creation of a network of scholars and professionals at participating institutions in Russia with the goal to develop Data System for Evaluation of the Radiation Legacy of the FSU.

This approach has been approved and encouraged by Dr. N. Egorov, Deputy Head of the Russian Ministry on Atomic Energy (Minatom), Academician E. Velikhov, President of Russian Research Centre-Kurchatov Institute (RRC-KI).

IIASA helped to develop detailed Russian proposal to the ISTC and provided a methodological support of Russian studies.

In 1995 the Russian sister project started under the name ISTC project # 245 "Radleg", and IIASA became its foreign collaborator.

In 1996 Radleg delivered to IIASA a first version of the Sector Overview that represented a review of information about radioactive waste accumulated and about plans for nuclear material management available in organizations participating in Radleg project (about 20 organizations).

IIASA critically evaluated this sector overview and found that it could not be a stand-alone report for common IIASA-Radleg publication (as it was previously planned) because it did not give comprehensive and uniform description of the problem. RAD project jointly with Radleg formulated more precisely a revised and uniform requirement for the material pertinent to each sector of the nuclear complex of the FSU. It was recommended to have individual description of the following sectors: uranium raw materials mining and processing; uranium conversion and isotope enrichment; nuclear fuel fabrication; nuclear power plants; nuclear propulsion power installations, including the nuclear navy and civil nuclear-powered ships; research nuclear reactors and nuclear research centers; plutonium production and radiochemical reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel; manufacturing and utilization of nuclear warheads; nuclear explosions, including nuclear weapons test and nuclear explosions for civil purposes; storage and processing of non-reactor RW and sources of ionizing radiation; social aspects of the nuclear inheritance.

The text of each individual chapter must answer the following questions:

1. General information:

1.1. Brief characteristics and functional role of the sector

1.2. Structure of the sector (what enterprises does a sector consist of)

1.3. Geographical location and ministerial subordination of the sector's enterprises

1.4. Enterprises' production capacities and operation characteristics

2. Characteristics of accumulated radioactive material (RAM) and radioactive waste (RW) for the sector, total and by individual enterprises by 01.01.1996, if the data by 01.01.1996 are absent, it is necessary to explain why and present available data for the nearest time.

2.1. Amount of accumulated RAM and RW (volume and activity)

2.2. Nuclide composition (if available)

2.3. Aggregations state (liquid, solid) and specific activity levels (low, medium, high)

2.4. Radionuclides' releases and discharges into the environment (absolute and in % of the permissible levels)

2.5. General characteristics of RAM and RW storages

2.5.1. Storage type

2.5.2. Capacity (total and percentage already filled)

2.5.3. Storage age

2.5.4. Storage location

2.6. Territories contaminated by radionuclides as a result of the enterprise operation

2.6.1. Accidents in the sector's enterprises resulting in radioactive contamination of the environment

2.6.2. Contamination of sanitary and protective zone and territory outside of the zone

2.6.3. General data on the contamination (area, specific activity)

To facilitate the preparation of a new edition of the Sector Overview, IIASA RAD Project found it possible to provide an additional financial support for the work in Russia.

Actually what is presented below is a new version of the Sector Overview which we hope, could be considered as a stand-alone document. This document provides general coverage of the nuclear inheritance of the former Soviet Union that received official verification of key Russian nuclear organizations.