The government and the NATO Support and Procurement Agency have reported the successful completion of a joint project to clean up a nuclear waste dump dating from the Soviet era in Ukraine.
During a press conference in Kyiv on Feb. 14, NATO and government officials reported that work at the dump, situated near the town of Vakulinchuk in Zhytomyr Oblast, some 200 kilometers east of Kyiv, had been completed on Jan. 17.
Vakulinchuk, a former military town with a population of 2,000 nestled deep in the Polessian forest, had served as a Soviet nuclear weapons base from the 1960s.
“This highly classified object was a Soviet armed forces missile unit, which was later reorganized into a radioactive waste dump,” Oleksandr Hura, a representative of Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service, told the Kyiv Post.
“In 1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unit was signed over to our agency. This object proved to be extremely dangerous – highly radioactive materials were being stored in shallow underground depositories, and in 2002 our experts found that in some sections the level of radioactivity was as many as 1,000 times higher than acceptable.”
According to a NATO Support and Procurement Agency press release, monitoring groups surveying the site found massive sources of highly radioactive cobalt-60, caesium-90 and plutonium-239 and other sources giving off up to 2,500 milliroentgens of radiation per hour.
There was constantly the threat of leaks of radioactive substances from the Vakulinchuk nuclear dump – threats made even more worrying given the unit’s vicinity to a town.
“All these years the dump had been a time bomb,” Ukrainian Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Ostap Semerak said during the press conference on Feb. 14. “The townspeople used to walk nearby, not always realizing how real the threat was. Radioactivity has no smell, no visual signs, and one cannot detect the danger without special equipment.”
The dump had even been the target of thieves: In 2001, unknown persons dug up a concrete well containing radioactive boxes, presumably while searching for scrap metal.
The potential nuclear hazard eventually came to concern Ukraine’s Western partners. During a Sep. 28 press conference kicking off the Ukraine-NATO project, Norbert Ness, the defense attache at the German embassy in Kyiv, said one of the main reasons to help Ukraine clean up the dump was to prevent nuclear waste falling into the hands of terrorists, who could use it to make a dirty bomb. (A dirty bomb uses conventional explosives to spread harmful radioactive material over a wide area.)
By November 2015, Ukraine’s state department for managing the Chornobyl exclusion zone and the NATO agency had finalized all formal procedures, and launched a tender to carry out the clean-up work, which was later won by Ukrainian company NT-Engineering.
Throughout the project, a joint team monitored radiation levels, and the contractor company drew up project plans, conducted preparation work, transferred the nuclear waste into special containers and then transported them to a burial area, the press release reports.
“In total, over 30 tons of (radioactive) waste was transported from the site to special repositories in Chornobyl and to the Kyiv Specialized Utilities Plant,” the head of Ukraine’s Chornobyl exclusion zone state agency, Vitaliy Petruk, said during the press conference on Feb. 14. “There, we have all the necessary capabilities and infrastructure for safe storage.”
NT-Engineering director Rostislav Maraykin said at the press conference that the land had been returned to its natural state.
“Our working crews completely purged a storage site 50 by 50 meters in area, and then reclaimed it by removing any signs of artificial structures, and planting trees. Everything was done to return the site to its previous state,” Maraykin said.
According to the contractor company, the former nuclear waste dump now has radioactivity levels that are 2.5 times below the maximum acceptable limit.
According to Mitia Mertens, a representative of the German embassy in Kyiv, the total value of the work carried under the project was EUR 850,000, with Germany being among the biggest donors.
“There are as many as five similar old Soviet-era nuclear waste dumps in Ukraine – potentially harmful to the environment and people,” Semerak said. “Two are situated in Russian-occupied Crimea, and there is another one in the Russian-backed militant-controlled city of Donetsk.
The clean-up of the Vakulchik dump ended up being very successful, and we hope that in future our NATO partners will continue to support us in eliminating nuclear hazards in our country.”
