Vocabulary

viable - one which can work successfully; a viable proposition/alternative/method; economically/commercially viable; viably (adv); viability (n).

allocate – to decide officially that a particular amount of money, time or sth such as a house or a job should be used for a particular purpose: allocate sb sth; allocate sth for sth; allocate sth to; allocation (n).

grapple with – to try hard to deal with a difficult problem; to fight or struggle with someone, holding them tightly.

immensity – the great size and seriousness of the problem; immensely (adv) – extremely; immense (adj).

beset – (usually passive) – to make someone experience serious problems or dangers: beset with; besetting sin/weakness – (humorous) a particular bad feature or habit.

sparse – existing only in small amounts: sparse vegetation; sparsely (adv) sparsely populated, sparseness (n).

Divert – to change the direction or purpose of sth: diverted traffic; divert sth into; divert attention/criticism; divert people – entertain them; diverting (adj) – entertaining and amusing.

1. Find the words and expressions which mean the same.

A winner of the contest; drinkable, potable water; countries with limited water reserves; suffering from malnutrition; caused by; limited; not completely provided with water.

2. Explain the meaning of the following expressions.

Alarm bells that rang on many a deaf governmental ear; to bridge the gap; far greater scope for alternatives; to come to the fore; to protect the dignity of individuals.

3. Answer the following questions.

- What makes the author think that “water, not oil, is the most precious fluid in our lives”?

- What is the most critical failure of the 20^th century according to Peter Gleick?

- What are the roots of the water crisis?

- Why has it become especially difficult to manage the water recently?

- What illustrates the immensity of the task?

- What are the main issues of the 21^st century?

- Is Africa the only continent suffering from deforestation and desertification?

- What are the possible ways of lessening the gravity of the problem?

4. For discussion

- Are you concerned about the problem raised by the writer? Do you think she exaggerates?

- Do you think the availability of potable water is a topical problem for our country? Why or why not?

- What other high-ranking environmental problems need immediate consideration in our country?

■ 3.6 B. The Nuclear Wasteland

By Masha Gessen

Russia's plan to import spent nuclear fuel risks making a bad situation worse

MUSLYUMOVO, RUSSIA-A man dressed in gray cotton-padded pants and jacket and a tatty rab­bit hat lies on his stomach very still, pressing his face into a hole in the ice. A warm spring here means the Techa River never freezes, forcing fish to come up for air right in this spot, where he can grab them with his bare hands. Hearing two visitors come down from the road, the man gets up to look. "That's a Geiger counter," he says, noting the device they're carrying. "You looking for radiation? I heard it's all gone away."

It has not. The Geiger counter gives a reading of 154 microrads per hour, roughly seven times the maxi­mum safe dose of back­ground radiation. When the snow melts away, background radiation in some places along the shore will measure over 1,000.

The village of Muslyumovo is less than 50 miles from Mayak ("Beacon"), the world's oldest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which has been dumping liquid ra­dioactive waste into the river since the late 1940s. Accidents regularly shake Mayak-at least five occurred in the 1990s—but the best-known one is the 1957 waste-con­tainer explosion, one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. About 10,000 people were evacuated from the contaminated area that year, and tens of thousands more probably should have been. But a lethal combination of ignorance, poverty, and of­ficial indifference keeps people living on the land and feeding off it—with night­marish consequences.

Despite the alarming record of opera­tional mishaps and regulatory laxness, the

Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, wants authority to import thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants in Europe and Asia. The ministry envisions earning billions of dollars-money that could expand its already con­siderable political clout and finance con­struction of new nuclear power plants. The far-fetched plan, which calls for the construction of 40 new reactors in the next 20 years—an impossible undertaking even for a wealthy country—has proved popular with Russian officials, and the parliament is set to give its OK this month. Most of that spent nuclear fuel would end up at Mayak. Up until now, Russia has by and large banned such imports of spent nuclear fuel; the relatively little that it does import, along with domestic fuel, uses virtu­ally all capacity at Mayak and the two other radio­active-waste storage facil­ities in Siberia. If the Min­atom plan is approved, Mayak would reprocess

some of the spent nuclear fuel, yielding plutonium. Next, the atomic energy ministry would construct a new nuclear power sta­tion next to the plant, employing a so-called breeder reactor, which both uses and extracts plutonium-based fuel.

Ignoring public opinion. There's opposi­tion from the Russian nuclear regulato­ry agency, the State Committee for Atom­ic Oversight (GAN). Minatom's response? It is pushing for legislation to curtail the powers of the safety agency, which envi­ronmental activists say is already exceed­ingly permissive.

Minatom—and its allies in the parlia­ment and the Kremlin—are prevailing in the face of opinion polls showing that 70 percent to 90 percent of Russians oppose importing radioactive waste. Last fall, environmentalists gathered 3 million signa­tures in support of holding a referendum— an unprecedented grass-roots success in a country where such organizing efforts are rare. But the Central Election Com­mission threw out just enough votes to quash the initiative. Complains former presidential adviser Alexei Yablokov, one of the organizers, "If we had collected 5 million signatures, they would just have thrown out that many more."

In the villages around the Mayak plant, opposition often gives way to tired indif­ference. "We are worried about feeding our kids, and we really can't give much thought to all this radiation stuff," says Maria Akhmadeyeva, who teaches ele­mentary school in Muslyumovo. "We are soaked with this nuclear stuff anyway," adds her colleague, Russian language teacher Guzal Yalalova.

"I guess the region needs this new nu­clear power plant," acknowledges Muslyu­movo Mayor Gaynulla Kamalov. "But no one's promising us any of the benefits." In­deed, in the past, funds earmarked for res­idents of the contaminated region were consistently siphoned off. An early 1990s deal, in which the United States bought Russian plutonium, was supposed to pro­vide $5.9 million for environmental relief in the region contaminated by Mayak; in fact, according to a General Accounting Office report, only $158,000 was used for the specified purpose: improvements in the local health center. And the medical diagnostic equipment that was purchased has proved a mixed blessing for residents, who still have little money to pay for treat­ment. Mayor Kamalov, 56, knows all about this: He has had to scrimp, save, and beg to pay for five operations for his now 3-year-old grandson, who was born with several tumors around his chest.

Invisible peril. In this remote Ural Mountains region 1,000 miles east of Moscow, residents live with the bitter con­sequences of pollution they can neither see, nor taste, nor smell. Gilmenur Karimova recalls the day four years ago that her granddaughter Alina was born with severely deformed legs and five fingers missing. "We cried so much," she says. The family managed to pay for two operations that enabled Alina to walk, but they are terrified at the $600 per finger they have been quoted for the hands. Alina, who makes beautiful ballpoint-pen drawings of mermaids and her mother despite her handicap, believes her fingers will even­tually grow out.

The contamination is spreading. An un­derground reservoir of radioactive waste from Mayak is inching ever closer to a river that will carry it through the region to the Arctic Ocean. An aging dam that blocks the Techa River poses another danger, which GAN warns will grow if more spent fuel is brought to Mayak for reprocessing.

But these are just the most immediate risks from the possible deregulation of the Russian nuclear industry. Other potential nuclear disasters: a dozen very old reac­tors, including six Chernobyl-type reac­tors and one reactor in the center of Moscow that happens to be the world's oldest. GAN has tried to shut down these monsters in the past, but Minatom has al­ready said it plans to keep them going— and even to re-launch one Chernobyl-type reactor this spring.

Minatom also hopes to build several fast-neutron breeder reactors, a technol­ogy opposed by the United States because it extracts plutonium that could be stolen to make black-market nuclear weapons. The Russians should have their own rea­sons to reconsider: The one existing Russ­ian breeder reactor, at the Beloyarsk power plant, has had 26 accidents. But in Moscow, the issue seems more about po­litical power and its benefits than about nuclear power.