Minatom: The grab for trash

摘要

Of all of Siberia's far-flung nuclear cities, Krasnoyarsk―a gritty industrial hub 1,500 miles east of Moscow―holds pride of place as Russia's preeminent nuclear town. Surrounded by a maze of uranium mines, a massive underground plutonium plant, the country's largest spent-fuel storage facility, a large uranium enrichment plant, and two spent fuel-reprocessing plants, Krasnoyarsk is nuclear to its core. Stalin chose this remote city as a nuclear center in 1950. Ever since, its fate has been inextricably tied to the labyrinthian Moscow office block near the Kremlin that was home to the Soviet, now Russian, Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom). Two years ago, when Minatom officials put Krasnoyarsk at the center of a bold, $20 billion plan to reprocess spent nuclear fuel imported from around the world, few in the city were surprised―and, after years of starvation wages at nuclear plants impoverished after the Soviet collapse, most were relieved.