By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Staging a two-week march on the Russian capital, nuclear power workers have forced the government to agree to pay out large sums in overdue wages, in an episode that has also focused attention on the dangerous state of the country's under-funded nuclear facilities.
Workers from the Smolensk Nuclear Power Plant arrived here on July 16 after a 360-kilometre hike from their workplace near the city of Desnogorsk, in Smolensk province in western Russia. More than 200 people marched along at least part of the route.
Spokespeople for the marchers told journalists they had begun their action on July 3 after funds pledged by the government for repair and maintenance work at the plant had failed to arrive. At that point, workers said, they had not been paid for three months.
Dressed in their orange work coats, and carrying placards with messages such as "A hungry operator is a threat to the safety of a nuclear power plant", the workers received wide television coverage as they neared Moscow.
Colleagues from at least four other nuclear plants joined in. At Obninsk, south-west of the capital, nuclear researchers from the Moscow region met with the marchers to discuss the grievances of the nuclear sector.
Meanwhile, the government's handling of what was clearly becoming a highly popular protest was aggressive and clumsy. In interviews while the Smolensk workers were on the march, nuclear power minister Viktor Mikhailov said his department would not "encourage these egoists" by singling them out to have their back wages paid.
The wage delay suffered by the nuclear workers was "survivable", Mikhailov argued, since their average monthly salary of about 2 million roubles (US$345) was well above the Russian average.
Mikhailov was eventually summoned to President Boris Yeltsin's holiday retreat for what seems to have been a blunt dressing down. The minister was instructed to pay all back wages to workers at the Smolensk plant by August 10, and to other nuclear power workers by October 10.
On July 17, the marchers demonstrated outside the House of Government in Moscow, and their leaders were received by deputy premier Boris Nemtsov. Promising to make the safety of nuclear facilities a "top priority goal" for the government, Nemtsov announced that 24.8 billion roubles (US$4.3 million) would be transferred immediately for the workers at the Smolensk plant.
A further 123 billion roubles would be assigned in July and August to pay wages owed to other nuclear power workers, and the wage backlog in the industry would be wiped out by the end of the year.
As has happened with coal miners in the past, the Yeltsin administration showed that it has little stomach for a public fight with workers on such unfavourable terrain as the failure of enterprises to meet wage bills.
Recent surveys have shown the issue of wage non-payments to be the greatest single cause of dissatisfaction in Russian society. Early in July Yeltsin was forced to pledge that, at least where workers on the state payroll were concerned, the problem would be overcome by the end of December.
The Smolensk nuclear power workers thus seem assured of finally receiving their pay packets. Nevertheless, their demands have only begun to be satisfied. All along, they have insisted that their prime concern is the decaying safety situation at their plant.
Nuclear energy minister Mikhailov was forced recently to admit that the nuclear sector has received only 30% of the money allocated for it in the 1997 state budget. Russian nuclear plants are also kept on short rations by the state- controlled national electricity company, United Energy Systems.
"UES currently pays us only 1% of the income from energy sales", Igor Fomichev, chairperson of the nuclear energy workers' trade union, told the English-language Moscow Tribune. "To function normally we need at least 8%."
The result for the Smolensk plant, as the marchers explained to journalists, is that money is acutely tight even for indispensable maintenance. Reactor engineer Maksim Kataev told a Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent that for lack of funds, the plant management this year had been unable to replace several broken water meters.
The Smolensk workers are calling on the government to provide funding of 2.7 trillion roubles (US$467 million), which they say is needed to upgrade safety at their plant and to replace an obsolete reactor.
Posed in this demand, however, are issues that need detailed debate within broad social circles. Curbing the worst dangers at the plant, and maintaining its output in the long term, would be extremely expensive. Should the plant be kept functioning at all?
A study commissioned by the environmental organisation Greenpeace, and carried out by the Berlin-based Oeko Institute of Applied Ecology, suggests that non-nuclear options might offer much cheaper ways to meet western Russia's energy needs. Released in June, the report examines the energy system of north-west Russia, where two nuclear plants are located.
The report's authors conclude that technical upgrades of existing hydro-electric and gas or oil-fired power plants could produce 25% more electricity for about one-fifth of the cost of continuing to use north-west Russia's nuclear reactors. It seems unlikely that the situation in the provinces further south is fundamentally different.
But if phasing out the Smolensk nuclear plant might well bring savings for Russia as a whole, that would not provide much comfort to the plant's employees.
Their city of Desnogorsk, with a current population of about 60,000, was founded in the early 1970s specifically to service the new plant. Today Desnogorsk is a classic example of a depressed one-enterprise Russian town. Local unemployment reportedly stands at 24%. Winding down operations at the plant would create thousands more jobless, unable to seek work in other regions for lack of alternative housing.
Always a bad choice, nuclear power is revealing some of the long-term costs it exacts even without Chernobyl-type disasters. The Smolensk marchers have shown that they will not accept more than their share of these costs without a fight. But an adequate defence of the interests of these workers implies a much broader struggle.