Soviet-era waste causing concern
SILLAMAE, Estonia: When they withdrew from this seaside Estonian town that
for five decades supplied the Soviet Union with enriched uranium to make
nuclear bombs, the Soviet military left behind something to remember them
by: 12 million tons of greenish-brown radioactive waste.
The sludge is in a pond-sized deposit that lies behind a mud-and-rock
containment wall just yards from the Baltic Sea. Chemical wastes and
nitrates seep around and through the wall into the sea, which during storms
can slap up against the dam, pulling parts of it off.
``It makes us think that we shouldn't wait too long to deal with the
situation here,'' Anti Siinmaa, one of the engineers responsible for
ensuring environmental safety at Sillamae, said Thursday.
``Romania goes to show you can't always know what can happen, or when. Let's
hope nothing like that happens in Sillamae,'' he said.
In Romania, a January 30 cyanide spill from a containment dam at a gold mine
killed tons of fish and contaminated rivers in neighboring Hungary and
Yugoslavia. That focused public attention on the lethal residue left behind
by the Soviet Union in its former republics after it collapsed a decade ago.
The European Union included Sillamae, 110 miles east of the capital Tallinn,
on a list of about 800 hazardous waste deposits in the former communist
bloc. It determined there was a real danger its containment walls could
collapse and its toxins splash into the Baltic Sea, poisoning one of
Europe's major waterways.
For years, Sillamae has been the largest single source of nitrate pollution
in the Baltic, according to the U.S.-based Los Alamos National Laboratory,
which recently studied the site.
``The Sillamae deposit is already doing damage to the Baltic on a very large
scale,'' said Valdur Lahtvee of the Estonian Green Movement.
While no health dangers have been documented, some of Sillamae's 20,000
residents claim the incidence of cancer, including in children, is higher
than average.
The waste deposit covers about 99 acres and is about 20 feet high, rising to
within a yard of the top of the containment wall, which is perhaps 50 feet
thick at the base, narrowing to 10 feet at the top.
After it won independence in 1991, Estonia appealed for international help,
saying it didn't have the expertise to deal with Sillamae alone and could
not afford the clean-up costs.
Last October, Estonia signed a $20 million plan to fortify the site with
concrete walls, construct a breakwater to prevent waves from pounding it,
and seal the entire dump with a waterproof cover. The EU provided $5 million
of the funding. Estonia will contribute $3 million; and Norway, Sweden,
Finland and Denmark will pay most of the rest.
``This waste is a byproduct of the Cold War, and that makes it an
international problem,'' Dennis Hjeresen, an American researcher at the Los
Alamos laboratory, said during a recent NATO-sponsored conference on
Sillamae. ``This is part of the clean-up of the battlefield after the war is
over.''
Siinmaa said the first step will be to secure the base of the dam with a new
concrete wall. That could take til the end of next year to complete.
Covering the site could take another five years.
Estonia says Sillamae is only one of a host of environmental problems
inherited from the Soviet military, which once had more than 1,500 bases
here that sprawled across more than two percent of Estonia's territory. The
government has estimated it could cost five billion dollars to clean them
all up. (AP)
For reprint rights: Times Syndication Service
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