Dec 20 - Tulsa World

Molten metal splashed from a smelter at a Russian nuclear power plant, killing one worker and severely burning two others, but authorities said Friday that no reactors were affected and no radiation escaped.

While relatively minor, the accident Thursday occurred on the same day prosecutors announced a "catastrophic radioactivity situation" involving improperly stored materials at a chemical factory in the southern Russian region of Chechnya.

The incidents were the latest to draw questions about how Russia stores, handles and disposes of nuclear materials and waste in the wake of the 1986 explosion of a reactor at Chernobyl that spewed out radioactivity for days in the world's worst civilian atomic accident.

"The level of nuclear safety, although it has been significantly increased after the Chernobyl disaster, is still not sufficient," said Vladimir Slivyak at Ecodefense, a Russian environmental group. "They used to think that there is no need for extra safety measures and they still think that now."

The smelter accident happened at the Leningrad electricity generating station in the closed nuclear town of Sosnovy Bor, 50 miles west of St. Petersburg.

Russia's nuclear agency, Rosenergoatom, initially reported an explosion. It later changed course and described the incident as a "splash."

It said radiation levels remained normal. The Norwegian environmental group Bellona, a longtime critic of Russia's nuclear programs, and officials in nearby Finland also said they had not detected any spread of radiation.

A 33-year-old worker died of injuries Friday, and two others were injured, Yuri Lameko, chief doctor of the Sosnovy Bor hospital, told The Associated Press. The Emergency Situations Ministry said two of those involved suffered burns over 90 percent of their bodies.

Rosenergoatom said the smelter -- run by a scrap metal reprocessing company called Ekomet-S -- is on the grounds of the plant's second unit, where a reactor was shut down for repairs in July. The plant has four reactors in all.

Plant spokesman Sergei Averyanov said the smelter is a half-mile from the reactor. Oleg Bodrov, a physicist who heads the Green World ecological group in Sosnovy Bor, said the facility is also about 150 feet from a covered liquid radioactive waste pond.

Averyanov blamed the accident on violations of technical and production rules.

Bodrov accused Ekomet-S, which also reprocesses metal from nuclear submarines and disassembled oil and gas pipelines, of violating environmental laws. He also complained a lack of funding had caused the shutdown of the only environmental monitoring laboratory in the town of 65,000.

"There is no independent environmental monitoring in the nuclear city of Sosnovy Bor," Bodrov said, adding that he visited the Ekomet- S facility Friday afternoon and found radiation levels were normal.

He said Ekomet-S workers told him more than two tons of molten metal were in the smelter and several hundred pounds splashed out for unknown reasons.

He said a previous accident involving Ekomet-S injured two workers in summer 2003. In March 1992, an accident at the power plant let radioactive gases and iodine leak into the air, according to nuclear watchdog groups.

Experts and environmentalists say Russia's nuclear industries and companies that handle radioactive materials have improved procedures in the years since the Soviet collapse. Washington has provided an estimated $7 billion the past 14 years to help Russia and other former Soviet republics destroy and safeguard atomic weapons.

Russian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation Thursday into the improper storage of radioactive materials by a state-owned company in the Chechen capital, Grozny.

Tests found radiation at the Grozny Chemical Factory, which stands not far from residential buildings and a bus station, exceeded normal levels by tens of thousands of times, prosecutors said. They called it a "catastrophic radioactivity situation."