Experts from the non-governmental organizations «Ecohome» and «Solutions for Resilient Communities Inc. (USA),» together with Andrei Ozharovovsky, an expert from the international program «Nuclear Waste Safety,» and Siarhei Besarab, an independent expert on radiation safety and technological risks, have presented the preliminary results of an independent expert review of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report for the project titled «Construction of a Radioactive Waste Disposal and Temporary Storage Facility» in Belarus.
The experts’ main conclusion is that decisions regarding radioactive waste management in the project have already been made in favor of hazardous and outdated Russian technologies, which are essentially being imposed on Belarusian citizens through «blind borrowing» without analyzing alternatives that exist globally. The experts insist that in its proposed form, the project is dangerous and must not be implemented.
- Russia already has a similar facility that poses a hazard to people and the environment: the radioactive waste disposal facility in Obninsk lost its containment just 38 years after mothballing, and the surrounding soil was contaminated to a depth of up to eight meters. This is a confirmed fact, not a projection for the future.
- The Belarusian project has Russian prototypes—the radioactive waste disposal facilities (RWDF) at the Mayak Production Association and the Siberian Chemical Combine (SCC)—from which the modular storage system has apparently been borrowed. The Russian developers of these projects account for a scenario where significant leaks and releases of hazardous radioactive substances into the environment are possible within the very first 100 years, whereas waste isolation must be ensured for a much longer period—at least 300 years (details below).
- This technology has less hazardous and far more globally widespread alternatives—for instance, long-term near-surface monitored storage. Developers are obligated to consider alternatives and compare them with the proposed solution, as required by the EIA procedure itself.
In addition, the document lacks basic technical information without which an environmental impact assessment is fundamentally impossible: specific technologies for managing spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and its reprocessing products are not named, the engineering characteristics of containers and protective barriers are not described, and data on emissions and discharges for each source separately are not provided. Therefore, independent experts are insisting on a complete overhaul of the project documentation and the EIA.
As a reminder, the radioactive waste storage and disposal facility (RWDF) in Belarus is planned to be built by 2030–2031, intended in part to handle waste from the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant (BelNPP). Potential sites under consideration include the Astravets District (near the plant), as well as territories in the Mahileu and Gomel regions.
