The Wasteland.(storage of nuclear waste in Russia)

Sixteen years ago Ramzys Faizullyn had the misfortune of being born in Novaya Kurmanova, a poor village near the Ural Mountains in the shadow of the Mayak nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant. From birth he has suffered from hydrocephalus, a swelling of the brain that has left him with daily headaches and dizziness. The Russian government gives his family a small allowance, acknowledging his illness as a side effect of radiation exposure. That's more than the Soviets ever did. But the government doesn't recognize other, more common symptoms--constantly aching bones, bleeding gums, weak teeth and chronic exhaustion--that Faizullyn shares with thousands of other residents of the Mayak area.

Now Faizullyn and his neighbors are distraught over Moscow's latest project: to import thousands of tons of nuclear waste from abroad and store it indefinitely in remote places like Mayak. Officials of Russia's Atomic Ministry prefer the more palatable term "spent nuclear fuel," but the distinction is lost on many Russian citizens. In a letter to President Vladimir Putin in December, Faizullyn wrote that if Russia had to import nuclear material, "please bring it to Moscow. We don't need any more. We don't want to have children like us."

Right now the law forbids Russia to act as the world's nuclear dumping ground, but the Atomic Ministry is pushing for a new one. With the potential to bring in billions of dollars, the Duma is likely to pass it, perhaps as early as this week. If it does, Russia starts down a path that could possibly lead to a repetition of the horrors of the Soviet nuclear programs--the ones that made the Ozersk region, where Mayak is located, one of the most contaminated places on earth. Russia wouldn't be the only culprit in such an outcome. So would the nations that, in their use of nuclear power, have amassed a staggering amount of radioactive nuclear waste, yet are unable or unwilling to find a safe place to put it. And so would the United States, which, through treaties, controls most of the world's nuclear materials and whose approval is essential to the success of Russia's plan. Russia's dilemma is a symptom of the wider problem of nuclear waste around the globe.

Russia didn't invent the idea of taking in the world's spent nuclear fuel. Nuclear-power experts have long been kicking around the idea of establishing sites where radioactive waste could be stored safely and securely. The problem is finding a willing recipient. A few years ago Pangea, a consortium of British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. and other energy firms, looked into siting a secure repository in Australia, whose wide- open spaces and stable geology might have made it an ideal place to park nuclear waste for the very long term. The Australians were having none of it. More recently, a private group called the Non-Proliferation Trust, run by former U.S. government officials, has backed a similar proposal for Russia.

Every country that uses nuclear power creates radioactive waste. Currently 150,000 tons of the stuff have been produced worldwide, and the total increases by about 10 percent each year. And yet no permanent repository has been built--and none is even close to completion. The technical problems are tough: a storage container would have to withstand earthquakes, fires, floods and other natural and man-made disasters for 10,000 years without leaking. So far nobody knows quite how to do that. Scientists working on the U.S. Yucca Mountain repository, which, when it is eventually finished, will hold casks of waste in tunnels hundreds of meters underground, have repeatedly underestimated the potential of nuclear material to leach from a container and wreak havoc in the environment. "There are a lot of people who will say that waste disposal is only a political problem," says Matthew Bunn, a nuclear-fuel expert at Harvard and former adviser to President Bill Clinton. "That's false. The more we learn about predicting what will happen in tens of thousands of years, the more we realize how little we understand."

Not that Russia is proposing to build a permanent storage facility. It isn't. Officials at the Atomic Ministry instead say they would accept nuclear waste and hold it in "temporary" storage for as long as necessary. "We only want to import spent, irradiated nuclear fuel that we will store for quite a long time, until there is a need to solve its destiny," says Boris Nikipelov, an adviser to the minister. The ministry isn't saying how long, but it could be decades. That would require building storage facilities for 39,000 tons of fuel, both imported and Russia's own, in Zheleznogorsk in Siberia. Facilities to store 3,000 tons more would be needed at the Mayak plant. Since all these sites would be "temporary," building them in a hurry wouldn't be difficult. All that's required is a bunch of dry casks--15-foot-high concrete or steel cylinders, which can be filled with waste and then welded shut--and a flat slab of concrete to put them on.

Leaving highly toxic waste out in temporary storage is not exclusively a Russian practice. Everybody does it. Not only are there no permanent facilities, but even if there were, temporary storage is often the only politically palatable option. It's not even necessarily a horrible thing to do. Dry casks are built to last 30 to 40 years, but some experts see no reason why they wouldn't last a hundred. And many countries routinely ship nuclear waste abroad. Germany sends the nuclear waste its reactors produce to France for reprocessing. ...