Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an OGONEK interview by Vanda Beletskaya with Academician Anatoliy Petrovich Aleksandrov, former president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Aleksandrov blames the Chernobyl accident on an ill-considered experiment prepared by Donenergo that violated operating instructions. He also describes earlier nuclear plant defects, Legasov's suicide, and his dealings with Beria and Kapitsa. He argues for continued atomic power engineering and a law on nuclear power.
“Pacific Ocean”1 page
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 6 of 16 power plants people with a special diploma, and not with any technical or physical diploma, as now. 149. Personnel are obliged to be checked periodically for professionalism. After leave and illness, when skills disappear, before starting work they are obliged to take examinations. Strictly speaking, at one time long ago, in the beginning, it was also that way. 150. I would insert in the law a provision on the disposal of radioactive waste. This is to be done only on hard rocks, in regions where there are granite and basalt. Limestones and sands are unsuitable, but they were used at times, in spite of our protests. And so that during the danger period (300-500 years), in practice never, they would not be dug up through the failure to understand. 151. OGONEK: Land dead for centuries, it is rather frightening... 152. A.P. Aleksandrov: Not dead, but protected, where no construction and no economic activity are performed. It is possible, after all, also to call it that. 153. OGONEK: Is the disposal of the radioactive waste of other countries being carried out on the territory of our country? The public protested, and now they assure us that it is not being carried out. But I cannot believe something... 154. A.P. Aleksandrov: And it is correct that you cannot believe. We take the waste from the countries, where we are building nuclear power plants in accordance with our own designs, and are supplying them with fuel for the reactors? Are we to refuse to act that way? I do not think that this is a reasonable statement of the question. They dispose of it worse in their country, there is little territory there. 155. OGONEK: All countries prefer to dispose of it not at home, but a little farther away. France, where nuclear power plants provide 70 percent of the power, is striving to send the waste to Pacific Ocean islands... 156. A.P. Aleksandrov: There were instances of disposal on Pacific Ocean islands. But for the most part the French are localizing the bulk of the waste on their territory. And there have not been, thank God, accidents at nuclear power plants, and there has also not been elevated radiation. 157. It is entirely a matter of the standards of production.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.