EU To Fund Toxic Clean-Up in Northern Europe

European Union officials want to spend 1.8 billion euro ($1.77 million) to remove environmental and radioactive pollution in northern Europe. Donors from EU member states and other governments as well as international financial institutions are expected to put up 100 million euro ($98.6 million) in starter funds on Tuesday to get the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP) off the ground.

The funds will be used to co-finance and leverage additional funding for the NDEP project, which will tackle the most urgent environmental problems in an area stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Barents Sea and over northwest Russia. In addition to reducing water and air pollution in the region, the NDEP will spend just under a third of its budget on dealing with dangerous nuclear waste in Russia, much of which is left over from the Cold War and stored in unprotected, often leaking containers.

"The problems of environmental degradation and, particularly, those of nuclear waste are matters of international concern. Future generations will not forgive us if we fail to act now," said Chris Patten, EU Commissioner for External Relations in a statement.

The pledging conference follows the launch of the G8 Global Partnership at the summit in Kananaskis, Canada, against the spread of weapons and materials of mass destruction. The NDEP effort has gained new impetus in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the US-led anti-terrorism campaign. Western leaders are worried that terrorist groups could obtain the poorly protected radioactive waste and use it to build "dirty bombs," conventional bombs which have been packed with radioactive material and can contaminate a large area when detonated.

Nuclear landscape

Russia’s Kola Peninsula, between the Barents Sea and the White Sea and just east of Finland, is of special concern to EU officials. It contains the largest repository of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste in the world, much of it coming from the nuclear submarines of Russia’s Northern Fleet.

At Andreeva Bay, 45 kilometers from the Norwegian border, some 21,000 spent fuel elements are stored in three concrete tanks. The containers have been filled to capacity since 1991 and are stored in the open without protection, a practice which violates both Russian and international regulations for the handling of nuclear waste.

The major concentrations of both liquid and solid radioactive waste has pushed radiation levels around the bay up to the same levels as those found at Chernobyl.

The NDEP project hopes to create an infrastructure at Andreeva Bay to properly store the waste according to international agreements or to remove it from the area.

Air and water quality

The other two thirds of the 1.8 billion euro project will go toward cleaning up the air and water around northwest Russia, primarily in the Baltic Sea and Barents Sea regions.

The region, some two times the size of France, is noted for its immense forests, rich fish stocks and large deposits of minerals such as copper, nickel, iron ore and diamonds. As commercial exploitation of the area has increased, so has environmental contamination.

Because many of the countries in the region have little or no track record in environmental protection, there is a lot of ground to be covered. Decades of untreated air and water emissions from energy plants, industrial plants and traffic along with poor or non-existent waste management have led to significant environmental hazards.

For example, half of the waste water of the city of St. Petersburg (population 4.7 million) is discharged untreated directly into the Baltic Sea.