Hanford Activist Group Hosts Russians From City Of Tomsk

Two Russian visitors say the province of Tomsk is having trouble getting its national government to deal with contamination and health problems at the plutonium plant called Tomsk-7.

Tomsk-7 is a secret city of 110,000 containing five nuclear reactors about 10 miles from Tomsk, the provincial capital of 500,000.

It is one of three ex-Soviet plutonium-making nuclear complexes in western Siberia - a Russian version of the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Production has stopped at a Chelyabinsk complex but continues at Tomsk-7 and a plant near Krasnoyarsk.

Two of five reactors at Tomsk-7 still operate, simultaneously making plutonium and producing electricity for Tomsk.

Tomsk-7 is the site of a 1993 radioactive waste tank explosion that contaminated about 50 square miles of Siberia. The radiation hit two villages, and only favorable winds kept radioactive particles from reaching Tomsk.

That explosion was incentive for local government to look behind the barbed wire at Tomsk-7, said Valeriy Konyashkin, assistant to the Tomsk region’s vice governor for ecology.

But the Russian Federation on Atomic Energy, Russia’s counterpart to the Department of Energy and called “Minatom,” has fought efforts by the regional government and the public to gather information on Tomsk-7, said Konyashkin and Boris Nekrasov, a Tomsk journalist.

The two Russians addressed the Hanford Advisory Board on Friday. They are guests of Heart of AmericaNorthwest, a Hanford activist organization.

“These secrets are not held from foreign intelligence services, but from our own people,” Konyashkin said through an interpreter.

Minatom “wants to prove that its largest plutonium factory is more harmless than a confectionery plant in Tomsk,” he said.

So far, Tomsk’s government has learned other radiation accidents have occurred at Tomsk-7 but cannot get details, he said.

A visit to Tomsk-7 in 1993 by U.S. scientists showed the explosion occurred in a plant similar to Hanford’s closed Plutonium-Uranium Extraction plant (PUREX). Errors in mixing nitric acid with a uranium solution filled with organic compounds caused the explosion.

The chemical processes at Hanford and Tomsk-7 are different enough so that particular mixing mishap would not occur at Hanford, the Department of Energy concluded at the time.