Norway and Sweden to help clean up Kola

Norway and Sweden will spend $250,000 U.S. on a project to overhaul radioactive waste storage facilities at a plant on Russia’s Kola Peninsula.

The Radon plant, established in 1964, stores 800 cubic meters of radioactive waste.

Plant officials in Murmansk told the Interfax news agency that Russia’s 2002 national budget has no money for any clean-up, as the plant “poses no threat to the environmental security of the region.”

The Nordic project will see the plant’s radioactive waste moved from underground containers to concrete ones on the surface, where it can be safely stored for 50 years.