Russia builds road over radioactive dump

MOSCOW: Moscow authorities have begun work on building a highway over a Soviet-era dump of radioactive materials, despite months of public protests and warnings from environmental campaigners.

Greenpeace and other activists have l ong campaigned against the project to build an eight-lane motorway over the top of a tree-lined slope in southern Moscow that contains radioactive waste buried in the Soviet era.

“Works are beginning next to the Moscow Polymetals Plant,” Greenpeace Russia said in a statement, referring to the plant that originally dumped the waste.

The former top-secret facility produced the radioactive element thorium for nuclear reactors until the 1970s.

As construction equipment arrived, dozens of police cordoned off the slope that descends to the Moskva River, activists said.

An excavator dug a hole in the ground, while workers uprooted t rees and r emoved a f ence around the plant even though the builders lacked the necessary permits to begin work, Greenpeace said.

Using a loud-hailer, police asked several dozen activists and other people to disperse, an AFP journalist saw.

Sergei Vlasov, a local councillor and activist, said police made no arrests on Wednesday and allowed campaigners, who have been monitoring the site roundthe-clock from a minivan, to remain there.

He said, however, the activists had already registered higher than usual radiation at the site.

“We have r e gi s t e r e d 0 . 4 microsieverts,” while the permitted level in Moscow is 0.3,” Vlasov told AFP, adding that he expected those levels to increase in the future.