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The United States-Russian comprehensive Arctic agreement, 

 which Ambassador Colson had referred to earlier, attempts to ad- 

 dress in a comprehensive way issues in the Arctic. The Presidential 

 Directive on the Arctic, which Ambassador Colson also alluded to 

 just a few moments ago, are all frameworks in which implementa- 

 tion of any specific project at least has a policy framework. 



Many of these agreements do not have a road map to implement 

 them, but in at least the case I am going to discuss with you today, 

 Murmansk, we are beginning to develop a kind of road map and 

 a means by which the full resources of all of our agencies can be 

 brought to bear on these problems. 



Murmansk has been mentioned many times and you have been 

 promised that I would say something in more detail about it, so let 

 me deal with that. From our leadership on the environment com- 

 mittee of the Gore-Chernomyrdin process and as a result of Rus- 

 sia's difficulty in acceding to the terms of the London Convention, 

 we have been very interested in seeking ways to ensure that radio- 

 active dumping in all of the oceans and in the Arctic is stopped. 



We have been motivated, I think to a large extent, by discussions 

 with Norway. They have been a key partner in terms of our discus- 

 sions with Russia and have been early-on in helping us to identify 

 the opportunities that exist at the Murmansk facility. While it is 

 primarily a facility for processing civilian radioactive waste, low- 

 level waste, there are enormous implications and enormous oppor- 

 tunities that emerge from a successful collaboration between the 

 United States, Russia, and Norway to upgrade this facility to proc- 

 ess more than the current cubic meters of radioactive waste and, 

 at the same time, to ensure that the Russian military uses it in 

 their process of the decommissioning of submarines under the 

 terms of international agreements. 



So beginning in fall 1993, we began to have discussions with 

 Norway and Russia and the United States about the technical is- 

 sues related to this facility and what it would take to upgrade it 

 to begin to process more of the low-level radioactive waste. In the 

 course of the period since fall 1993, the facility in Murmansk has 

 been visited by several technical groups. We have hosted Russian 

 technical experts to the United States with the help of the Depart- 

 ment of Energy. I believe. Congressman Weldon, you yourself have 

 been at the facility. Many of my EPA colleagues have been there. 



We are now at an absolutely crucial point in this process, be- 

 cause we designed this in three stages. There is the stage which 

 is about to be completed, the assessment stage, which is can we ex- 

 pand the facility, whether technical difficulties, what kind of tech- 

 nology will be used, what are the engineering specifications, this 

 whole range of assessment functions. That is about to be completed 

 and next week in Norway we will have a meeting to finalize those 

 assessment reports. 



The second phase is the construction phase. That is to expand 

 this facility and make it operational, to go from the 15,000 cubic 

 meters of radioactive low-level waste to the 5,000 that it is being 

 designed for. 



And beyond that, there is another phase. There is the operational 

 phase of assessing that we have done this correctly, that every- 

 thing fits together, and that the Russian Government is going to 



