The lasting Soviet nuclear menace.

It must have been hard for President Clinton to keep a straight face. At the Tokyo G-7 economic summit this summer, a journalist asked Clinton what was going to happen to the aging Soviet-made nuclear reactors--the kind that blew up in 1986 at Chernobyl in the worst nuclear power accident in history. Blithely, Clinton repeated what Boris Yeltsin had told him: Russia had "virtually completed" the task of "trying to decommission" its first generation nuclear plants.

This is a ludicrous claim. "I don't quite know what he's talking about," says Ivan Selin, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "When I talk about the first generation, I'm talking about the earlier Chernobyl reactors, and those are still operating." None of the Chernobyl-type reactors--seen as the most dangerous--has been shut down since the fall of the Soviet Union, except for two in Chernobyl itself. Worse, the Russians are upgrading the earliest reactors, a sign that they will keep them running at least until 2010. So why would Clinton repeat the Russian fib? Strobe Talbott, the ambassador-at-large for the republics of the former Soviet Union, may be hinting at the reason when he says, "We consider it to be in our interest to do everything we can to see to it that reform survives and prevails in Russia and the other former Soviet republics."

Events in the past few months have underscored the importance of treating democracy in Russia gently. But at what cost does the United States sanction a whitewash of the ex-Soviet nuclear danger? The notion of nuclear warheads falling into the hands of a terrorist or dictator has been the stuff of wild western nightmares since the fall of the USSR. But at the same time, 15 Chernobyl-type reactors are still chugging along in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and in Eastern Europe. At best, they are a quiet reminder of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who died in the infamous 1986 explosion, and of the estimated 300,000 people being treated for radiation-related diseases from that and other disasters. At worst, they are a warning that the risk of nuclear catastrophe may be even higher now than it was in 1986.

Of the 63 reactors in the CIS, 43 are so unsafe that Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt says, "if they were in the United States or Sweden, we'd close them down by yesterday." In October, the Ukranian government voted to keep Chernobyl itself up and running; in November, security at Chernobyl was so lax that t h i e v e s were able to break into the plant and steal $1 m i l l i o n worth of uranium-filled reactor rods. While the West has made a piecemeal effort to improve the design and operation of CIS and Eastern European reactors, Moscow has called home its resources, leaving some republics without the experts or even the blueprints necessary to run their plants. Nevertheless, Russia, strapped for cash and anxious to export energy, plans to build still another 23 new reactors in the next two decades. But the evidence is that the bureaucracy and lack of attention to safety that produced Chernobyl hasn't changed a bit since 1986--despite Clinton and Yeltsin's cheery claims to the contrary. Consider these examples of life inside the former Soviet nuclear culture:

* In April in Siberia, a tank exploded, poisoning the air over a 46-square-mile area. According to Valery Soyfer, a Russian biophysicist who studied the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, plant personnel initially ignored requirements to inform the central government, only complying when it was clear that the radiation would be detected anyway. He describes the incident as the "same scenario" as Chernobyl: The government severely underestimated the radiation released, then increased the estimate "several times."

* In July at the nuclear plant at Chelyabinsk--one of the most radioactive places on e a r t h - a s t o r a g e tank ruptured, leaking radioactive gas. While the R u s s i a n government claimed the leak was insignificant, plant workers told a different s t o r y , declaring that they could not guarantee n u c l e a r safety. And the government's announcement--delayed until two days after the accident--ominously resembled traditional Soviet denials and delays. As early as 1949, the plant at Chelyabinsk began spilling radioactive waste directly into a nearby river. In 1957, an explosion in a nuclear waste storage tank there released 300 times more radiation than the bomb at Hiroshima, poisoning an 8,900-square-mile area and irradiating more than 250,000 people. Ten years later, a drought left a lake used for waste dumping so radioactive that standing near it for an hour would be fatal. The plant is still running, and if there were another explosion there now, it could unleash 20 times as much radiation as Chernobyl.

* At Murmansk, decommissioned nuclear submarines float at port, persistently leaking radiation into the sea and the air; in 1989, one submarine sank in the Norwegian Sea, and another exploded near Vladivostok, spreading a cloud of radiation and killing 10 sailors. In September, Russia touched off a dispute with Japan when it dumped 900 tons of liquid radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan.

Waste dumping and scuttling marine reactors at sea are routine aspects of Soviet nuclear history, and most accidents have been successfully hushed up. In fact, one Russian scientist claims to have a map of dozens of nuclear accidents and radioactive waste disposals, which he is offering to sell to the West for $2 billion to establish a cleanup fund. He clearly knows the stakes of the problem that political leaders are glossing over. And remember that nuclear energy is disproportionately critical to the former Soviet Union. The average CIS citizen uses twice as much energy as the average Western European, and the productivity of electricity in the CIS is less than half that in Western Europe. Nuclear energy, however poorly produced, fills the gap.

From Russia, with Gloves

The danger of the plants begins with fundamental flaws in their planning. Like the Titanic but unlike U.S. plants (which have had their problems, too), former Soviet reactors were designed on the assumption that they would never have an accident. While U.S. reactors tend to shut themselves down if power rises too high, Soviet-designed plants keep heating up, possibly leading to a "China Syndrome" meltdown, the most dangerous nuclear scenario. Another major problem is in the area of redundancy. Where western plants have three to five redundant battery systems to provide power in an emergency, for instance, a Chernobyl-class reactor has only one. And where redundant systems do exist, they are often designed stupidly, with identical systems exposed to the same mishap.

Whatever safety equipment there is can handle only small problems. Take the VVER 440-230, the next generation reactor after the Chernobyl class. It has cooling equipment to compensate for the loss of only a small pipe; if a large one breaks, the reactor goes uncooled. Even more serious is the lack of a concrete shell around the reactor. Standard at U.S. plants, this was what prevented a radiation spill at Three Mile Island. But there is nothing like it in the early Soviet reactors. Instead," NRC chairman Selin explains, "the power plant is protected from the elements by a steel framed building, covered with sheet metal and a tar-paper roof. It is designed to keep rain and snow out and keep heat in for the workers. It is not designed to be a protective barrier between the reactor core and the public."

The same carelessness pervades the culture of reactor operators. Tom Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, describes the control room of these reactors this way: "It's a far cry from the quality of the equipment you'd see in an American plant. The equipment is run down, dusty, dirty. There's used equipment lying around, paint lacking ... The quality of the place looks entirely different." Lax housekeeping tends to mean lax operating standards. "Many of these plants are still without adequate operating procedures, and training programs are still lacking," says Laurin Dodd, manager of the reactor technology center at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, which has been aiding the ex-Soviets.

Particularly alarming is the situation in the former Soviet republics, which have been cut off from the Russian experts who designed, built, and ran the plants. "The Lithuanians have, basically been in the situation where they're trying to both operate and regulate these plants, and they're doing this without access even to the design drawings," says Dodd. If this sounds nettlesome for everyday operations, it could be catastrophic in an emergency. In the Ukraine, which along with Lithuania owns the only two extra large Chernobyl-class reactors, uncertainty about the reactors' future has led to postponed maintenance and hedging about whether the operators will keep their jobs. "They've got the worst [situation]," says Dodd. "They've got a plant that wasn't up to western standards to start with, they no longer have the direct connection to Moscow in terms of the support from the design organization, and all the people operating the plant are in an ambiguous situation with regard to employment."

In fact, the operators themselves have become a serious safety concern. Under the Soviet system, they held a privileged position. "The engineers and managers had their own towns, their own stores, top access to just about everything," explains NRC's Selin. Today, things have changed drastically, especially in the republics. Eastern Europe has its share of nuclear powered woes, too. "Bulgaria has been plagued with an inability to retain its skilled plant operators, shift supervisors, and key management personnel There is a problem when a cab driver in a city earns more than a nuclear plant operator." High staff turnover, low pay, and generally less-than-pleasant conditions have taken a toll on plant operations.

So why is the troubled ex-Soviet nuclear industry being allowed to lumber on? For two reasons--one classically bureaucratic, the other classically economic. First, many bureaucrats' livelihoods are tied to the future of the nuclear industry--and the bureaucrats are the ones who call the shots. "The people who are making these fundamental decisions are not necessarily nuclear experts; they are apparatchiks," says Selin. "They run institutions, ministries. They have personal, professional, and in some cases financial interests." Nicholas Lenssen, a senior researcher at WorldWatch, agrees: "People who have built their careers in the nuclear industry aren't going to retreat and choose new professions if they don't have to."

The other reason is decidedly practical. CIS nations have made it clear they intend to stick with nuclear power, and the West is hardly in a position to offer the estimated $24 billion it will take to make the reactors safe. "We have no substitutes" for power generation, Sergei Adamchik, of the Russian State Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear and Radiation Safety, told Business Week. The need for power is so desperate in Bulgaria, for example, that nuclear operators have foregone all but emergency maintenance. In Armenia, where a nuclear plant was shut down after an earthquake in 1989, people have cut down and burned telephone poles, books, and furniture for fuel; they also drained a vital lake for power.

Clearly, closing the first generation reactors is the first important step toward safety if the problem of a continuing energy supply can be solved. And there is a way to do that if the CIS takes just rudimentary steps toward conservation. As Jean Syrota, president of the COGEMA Nuclear Corporation of France, noted in Le Monde, it would be relatively easy for the CIS to cut its energy consumption by 30 percent; the Moscow Center for Energy Efficiency puts that number at 40 percent. "It would be technically and economically feasible to meet electricity demand while closing these higher risk plants by the mid-1990s," according to a report published in March by the World Bank and the International Atomic Energy Agency. And because the ministries for mining oil and gas are entirely separate in Russia, gas produced by an oil well is burned off rather than captured, and, as WorldWatch reports, gas pipelines leak so much that "inspection teams drop flares from aircraft and then watch for a flash." Dealing with such egregious waste would be far more efficient than building more nuclear plants. Here are some small ways to move in that direction:

* Installing boiler controls, thermostats, and meters would save nearly half the energy now used for indoor heating, according to the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment.

* The efficiency of factories stands to be vastly improved through retrofitting and cogeneration, according to WorldWatch and Greenpeace.

* Electricity, the World Bank reports, is sold too cheaply in the former Soviet Union, so raising prices would provide an incentive to conserve. Similarly, the focus of formerly Soviet industry on gross output rather than profit does little to make conservation attractive.

* Fixing gas pipelines should pay for itself. (Russia was able to pay Western companies for repairing leaking pipelines by selling gas that otherwise would have leaked out.)

* The former Soviet Union could cost effectively rehabilitate and build new gas-fired power plants, according to the World BANK/IAEA report. These investments could be made with money raised from savings and sales of energy due to conservation.

* While nuclear plants may be cheap to operate, their catastrophes can be, well, catastrophic. The cost of the Chernobyl accident will total $358 billion, including lost electricity production, according to an estimate by the Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering in the former Soviet Union. By this estimate--totalling 15 percent of the 1987 Soviet GNP--that one disaster cost so much that the Soviet economy would have been better off if the USSR had never even heard of nuclear energy.

Like all quick fixes, however, these are superficial, even considering the hundreds of millions of dollars in expertise and training the West has already provided. Bureaucracy is one problem; western funds are not translating very rapidly into specific aid in Russia. Lectures from the U.S. on saving energy are apt to be lost amid the cold realities of a hard winter and the growing pains of converting to a free market economy. And well-reasoned though it may be, the World Bank's recommendation to switch to conventional energy is like advising a beggar to invest his dimes in a certificate of deposit. Without strong, honest leadership, as 15 plants like the one that exploded in Chernobyl keep their chain reactions going while Russia embarks on a 20-year nuclear building spree, it seems clear that this game of reactor roulette could continue well into the next century.

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