She was Russian and began to tell me about Russia's way of dealing with nuclear waste. She said that European countries also send their nuclear waste to Russia. Russia in turn dumps it all in Siberia.
I need to investigate this further when time allows but this BBC article linked below from a few years ago details a major mess in the Andreeva Bay. You see Russia has little environmental oversight. The waste is dumped, and that's about it.
The NYPIRG worker told me that nuclear waste in Russia is transported in train cars and that often the cars are joined to passenger train cars. The people riding are unwittingly exposed to radiation. How's that for adding unknown insult to unknown injury.
So when the GOP yaps on (and I use the word yap intentionally implying animal intelligence level behavior) about wanting to do away with the EPA and wants to allow big business to simply do what it wants, as the Koch Brothers so warmly advocate, we might also include how that brilliant strategy is working in Russia around nuke waste.
October 2006, BBC: uclear waste poses Arctic threat
About halfway between Severomorsk and the Norwegian border lies Andreeva Bay, an environmental nightmare where the waters are completely devoid of life.
Leaks from the region's largest nuclear waste storage facility mean no fish will ever swim in this fjord. Onshore, both the soil and the groundwater are badly contaminated.
On this vast site, 32 tons of highly radioactive waste with a high uranium content is stored in crumbling concrete bunkers and rusting tanks and containers - about a third of the nuclear waste mountain that can be found on the Kola Peninsula.
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