Rafael Arutiunian, First Deputy Director of Nuclear Safety Institute

– Russia has a system of supervisory bodies like Rospotrebnadzor and Ministry of Natural Resources that independently controls the radiation background and makes its findings open to the public

Sept 28 the Ekozaschita group and the Council of People’s Deputies of Murom held public hearings on the construction of Nizhniy Novgorod Nuclear Power Plant in Navashino district of Nizhniy Novgorod region. Ekozashita says that 98% of the participants said “no” to the project because, as they say, “nuclear waste will be released into Lake Svyato” and “the plant may have a negative effect on the psychical health of children.”

Each Russian territory and city (whether it has a nuclear power plant or not) has its radiation-hygienic passports issued by Rospotrebnadzor on an annual basis. The passport clearly says how much radiation the local population receives and from what sources: medicine, nature, other facilities (from hospitals to nuclear power plants). These passports are ratified by the chief sanitarian of the country. Everything is official. And we can see that nothing has changed in the passports in the last years: the exposure dose received from nuclear power plants is 10,000 times lower than the dose received from nature or medicine.

Today, in order to record radioactive emission, one should have modern equipment. But what really matters is not how much radiation is emitted but how much of it is received by the population. If the dose produced by nature is 1 or 10 millisievet a year, the dose produced by NPPs is 10 microsievert a year, i.e. 1,000 or 10,000 less.

The system of standards in our country so rigid that any slightest deviation – something they in the west would never notice or would just ignore – causes panic among our population. When we say that the allowable exposure limit for the population is 1 millisievert, in case of NPPs, the limit is 1,000 times lower. When people hear the word “limit” and the expression “allowable limit,” they assume that if they receive more radiation they will die immediately. It is not so. For example, in Altay the natural radiation background is 10 millisievert because of the high concentration of radon. In Finland it is 7.5 millisievert, in Belgium – 6 millisievert. But this background has no negative effects on the human health. 

In any case, Russia has a system of supervisory bodies like Rospotrebnadzor and the Ministry of Natural Resources that independently controls the radiation background and makes its findings open to the public. After all, we have a web-site showing the natural background on a real time basis. Even if some five values are exceeded by five times, this would have no negative impact on the human health.