The haunting nuclear ghost

The remains of the once powerful Soviet nuclear submarine fleet are lying in crumbling shipyards. Many of these are in the northern Kola Peninsula. With Russia lacking the money to dispose of the nuclear waste safely, the radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel pose a tremendous environmental hazard. At least 104 decommissioned submarines are resting in shipyards and docks, many of them still have their nuclear fuel on board. The Northern and Pacific fleets have 72,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies.

Shady deal

environmental group Greenpeace has released a document revealing secret efforts by Russian officials to secure lucrative contracts to allow illegal dumping of nuclear wastes from Switzerland, Germany, Spain, South Korea and Taiwan in Russia.

Campaign launched

THE Russian branch of Greenpeace has launched a campaign for a more rational use of forests, Russia's greatest assets. The former Soviet Union occupies one sixth of the world's land surface, much of which is covered by evergreen trees. Yet the plumpest, best-shaped firs at the Moscow market are imported from Denmark and cost US $50 per metre, the equivalent of a month's salary for an average Russian.

Bear orphanage

FATHER Valentin and son Sergei Pazhetnov were former hunters. But now they specialise in training orphan bears to survive in Russia's deep forests. With help from international donations, the Pazhetnovs have raised and released 64 bear orphans in the last eight years. The facility is the only one of its kind in Russia. The orphanage is unique in the sense that the environment is deliberately kept unfriendly and tense. The bears are taught with "tough love" and the contact with the humans is kept at a minimum. Any gesture of friendliness from the bears is met with hostility.

Victims protest

RUSSIAN and Kazakh experts explained why they did not like the recent nuclear tests in India and Pakistan at an anti-nuclear conference. "We are still suffering from the radiation effects of nuclear tests carried out by Russia and China," said Tatiana Leschenko, an eye specialist and president of the Union of Nuclear Tests Victims in Barnaul, capital of Russia Altay region. Kazakhstan has witnessed more than 400 test explosions between 1949 and 1989.

Depleting ozone layer

A NEW ozone-destroying chemical has been found in the atmosphere, muddying repair efforts of the ozone layer. Halon-1202, a firefighting chemical suspected of being used by the Russian military, has increased five-fold in the atmosphere over the past 20 years, say Australian scientists. For the last two years, the chemical level has increased by 17 per cent every year.

Russia's nightmare

RUSSIA today is sitting on a bomb - thousands of bombs really. The real nightmare is not that it cannot get rid of more than 36,000 metric tonne of chemical weapons, but that it cannot find the thousands of bombs that lie in abandoned and uncharted weapons dumps, according to a report in the International Herald Tribune.

Sick soldiers

THE cases of mv infection in Russian soldiers have quadrupled in the past one year. Half of these soldiers are in Moscow's military district itself, say army officials. They blame the rise of drug abuse among the country's abused and hungry soldiers.

Jump, they say

JUMPING genes, also known by other names (one of them being "transposable elements"), are quite extraordinary in themselves. These fragments of parasitic DNA found within the genetic material of almost all organisms, can jump from one gene sequence to another with no apparent difficulty. Their existence implies that genetic material of an organism is unstable and undergoing a kind of flux. As their name suggests, "jumping genes" cannot stay put in one place.

Cleaning up the Iron Curtain

Moscow and Oslo have signed a landmark deal that allows Norwegian companies help clean up Russia's nuclear debris. The long-overdue agreement should also pave the way for companies to work on Russian nuclear projects. Norwegian officials say the deal became possible when Russia stopped insisting that Norway should pay for any accidents during the clean-up processes. Oslo has already budgeted a substantial amount of money for seven remedial projects, five at radioactive dumps around Murmansk on the Kola peninsula and two at nuclear sites elsewhere in Russia.