Moscow admits building highway via radioactive site

Moscow’s powerful mayor on Friday acknowledged that a planned highway project would pass a radioactive waste site, but pledged to clean it up after months of protests by residents.

In his first comments on the environmental dispute, Sergei Sobyanin said officials will continue to build a highway and bridge over the Moscow river, but would “ship out the radioactive soil”.

Moscow, which has a population of around 12 million, has invested heavily in highway links between outlying districts as part of a push to modernise one of Europe’s biggest cities.

Activists have protested since 2018 against one of the links, called the South-East Chord highway, in particular against a section that would cross the Moscow river near the Soviet era Moscow Polymetal Plant on a site that is contaminated by radioactive waste.

Officials have claimed that construction would not touch radioactive spots, but activists say road works will disturb buried waste and warn that some could slip into the river.

On his website, Sobyanin said the highway project “has hit a unique, extraordinary problem.”

He called contamination in the planned highway space “insignificant” and promised “constant radiation monitoring” during its construction.

Spots with higher radiation levels nearby would undergo “full-scale recultivation” by the city, the mayor said, without providing any figures on those levels.

A Greenpeace statement said the planned highway includes five sites where detected surface levels were more than one microSievert per hour, about three times natural levels, indicating possible waste underground.

In another spot exposed by erosion, radiation levels were more than 61.40 microSieverts per hour, said Andrei Ozharovsky, a nuclear physicist who has been monitoring the site and recorded the level last year during a joint inspection with emergencies ministry officials.

Long-term exposure to such levels increases the risk of cancer.

Ozharovsky told AFP the site is relatively safe if left undisturbed, and that the main concern was the prospect of dust and water pollution during construction, which could lead to the ingestion of dangerous alpha particles.

Earlier this month, activists monitoring the site blocked construction vehicles, he said, adding that Sobyanin “understates the problem.”

Locals have now established a permanent camp to obstruct work.

“There cannot be any construction in the area,” Ozharovsky said, “residents will not allow any thoughtless decisions.”

“If they want to build a bridge – they can build it somewhere else.”