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these projects have been started within the past several years, 

 many go back a long time. Our work on agriculture, for example, 

 has been going on for decades. 



A related subject for intelligence is monitoring the nuclear power 

 programs in countries of concern. This is not a new issue for us. 

 And it brings me to the second and primary part of my presen- 

 tation: possible environmental threats arising from past Soviet nu- 

 clear activities. CIA has kept an eye on the Soviet nuclear power 

 program since the start-up of their first small prototype power re- 

 actor in 1954. In the years that followed, we compiled an extensive 

 collection of technical literature on the program and on the reactors 

 themselves. CIA integrates this data with information acquired 

 from our satellites to assess national security, economic, and safety 

 implications of the program. 



Since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, CIA experts have worked 

 closely with other U.S. government agencies to prepare detailed 

 studies of Soviet-designed power reactors. We are now working 

 with these agencies to determine the most effective way to improve 

 the s^ety of these reactors. At the same time, we continue to col- 

 lect information on reactor problems such as the recent accident at 

 the Chernobyl-type reactor located near St. Petersburg, in Russia. 



CIA has monitored Soviet handling of nuclear waste since 1948, 

 when the reactor that produced the plutonium for the first Soviet 

 nuclear weapon began operation. We now look at environmental 

 contamination due to a variety of nuclear activities, most of which 

 supported nuclear weapons acquisition and production, and ques- 

 tions about the safety of stored but radioactive liquid and solid 

 waste. This includes the reprocessing of fuel from civilian and 

 naval reactors and naval nuclear activities. 



The former Soviet Union's attitude toward safety in handling of 

 radioactive waste materials was, to say the least, lackadaisical 

 from the very beginning of its nuclear program. Radioactive wastes 

 resulting from the extraction of plutonium for the USSR's first nu- 

 clear weapons at Chelyabinsk-65 were discharged directly into the 

 Techa River, resulting in severe contamination of the watershed for 

 thousands of kilometers downstream. Subsequent practices were 

 hardly better; highly radioactive waste was dumped into Lake 

 Karachay at the plant beginning in 1951. Today, despite ongoing 

 cleanup efforts, 120 million curies of radioactive materials are in 

 the lake, and as little as one hour's exposure to the radiation at 

 the shoreline could be fatal. Radioactive contamination in the 

 groundwater has spread two to three kilometers from the lake. Ad- 

 ditionally, an explosion in a waste tank at the site in 1957 contami- 

 nated over 23,000 square kilometers, and much of the land remains 

 unusable today. 



The situation in Chelyabinsk, although perhaps the most severe, 

 is hardly unique. Similar plants in Tomsk-7 and Krasnoyarsk-26 

 also contaminated the local environment. Open pools of water at 

 Tomsk reportedly contain elevated levels of plutonium and other 

 radioisotopes, resulting in considerable wildlife contamination, in- 

 cluding elk, duck, fish and hare, which are consumed by the local 

 population. Reactors at the Krasnoyarsk plutonium production 

 plant use water directly from the Yenisey River for cooling, and 

 have contaminated the river with cesium, strontium, and other 



