Russia 110503 Basic Political Developments
Navalny Donors Fret About FSB 'Leak'
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- Luzhkov Applies for U.S. Visa
- Unknown actress earns £23million - nearly double Angelina Jolies wages
- April NPP chronicle - RBMK units hiccup in Russia, a bird shuts down a reactor in Ukraine
- A three-day outage at Kursk NPP
- Operating load reduced at Leningrad NPP
- Birds as a nuclear event risk factor
- Someone flew over Kursk NPP
Navalny Donors Fret About FSB 'Leak'http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/navalny-donors-fret-about-fsb-leak/436142.html 03 May 2011 The Federal Security Service has collected personal data on people who donated to whistleblower Alexei Navalny, and the information was later leaked to third parties, including possibly a pro-Kremlin youth movement, bloggers said. Yandex confirmed Monday that the FSB had requested information on people who used its web money system to donate to Navalny's Rospil.info project, an online watchdog monitoring murky state tenders. A company spokeswoman told The Moscow Times that Yandex was obliged to comply by law. Neither the company nor the FSB explained why the data were collected. But at least three bloggers reported that they had received cell phone inquiries about their ties to Rospil.info, and the caller had cited confidential information about their Yandex.Money payments. The caller's cell phone number is listed on the Vkontakte.ru page of Yulia Dikhtyar, a Voronezh-based member of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi, wrote a LiveJournal blogger identified as Nykolaich. The blogger, who said he was one of those asked about his donation, posted a screenshot of Dikhtyar's page on the popular social networking site. The number was out of service Monday. The three bloggers said the caller, who identified herself as Yulia Ivashova, had posed as a journalist and asked why they had donated to Navalny. Each time, the caller said she represented a different regional media outlet. The caller knew details about the personal Yandex.Money accounts and the transactions, the bloggers said. Prominent Internet expert Anton Nosik wrote in his blog Monday that the data "couldn't have been legally obtained by third parties." Navalny confirmed that data on contributors had been leaked to third parties and said he believed that the FSB has handed over the information to Nashi. "Instead of conducting investigations into corrupt officials exposed by our work they have collected information on our donors," Navalny said by telephone. "I could have understood if they just collected the information for themselves, but sharing it with Nashi passes all boundaries," Navalny said. He said he would ask the Prosecutor General's Office to open a check into the leak. Nashi, which has a history of harassing critics of the authorities, has not commented on the allegations. An FSB spokeswoman was unavailable for comment Monday, a public holiday. Navalny, who made headlines last year by leaking an Audit Chamber report that implicated state-owned Transneft in the embezzlement of $4 billion, opened Rospil.info in February. The web site is funded exclusively through public donations and has raised 6 million rubles ($218,000) since its inception. It claims to have identified rigged state tenders worth 1.6 billion rubles and prevented the embezzlement of 337 million rubles. Moskovsky Komsomolets claimed last week that Navalny's exposes serve his commercial interests and target only specific companies or agencies. The daily, which is seen as friendly with the government, suggested that Navalny's funding came from businesses, not grass-roots supporters, and promised a series of reports on the matter. The initial report did not refute any of Navalny's accusations. Luzhkov Applies for U.S. Visahttp://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/luzhkov-applies-for-us-visa/436163.html 03 May 2011 Former Mayor Yury Luzhkov has applied for a U.S. visa at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a source familiar with the situation said Friday. "Luzhkov plans to travel to the United States on a brief business visit," the source said, without elaborating. In February, Luzhkov requested a British visa, saying that he wanted to visit his daughters who are studying in London. But Luzhkov still has not received a reply from the consular service, the source said Friday, dismissing earlier unofficial reports that a visa was granted.
Larisa Belobrova, an unknown stage and film actress, has reported earnings almost double that of Hollywood star Angelina JolieLarisa Belobrova is said to have earned more than £23million in 2010 while Tomb Raider star Jolie picked up just £12million for her work last year. This has led to speculation over how the 46-year-old Russian, the widow of a murdered Mafia boss, came by the cash. Belobrova is a leading actress at a theatre in Vladivostok, east Russia, and has appeared in Russian films including 2009’s Footsteps On The Sand but is little known outside her native country. Belobrova was previously married to Igor Karpov, a gangster known as the Carp, who was shot dead by a sniper in 1998 during a power struggle for control of Vladivostok’s underground economy. She is now the wife of Sergey Darkin, governor of the Primorsky region. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr Darkin set up import-export company Rolis, called a ‘hornet’s nest of organised crime’ by the Interior Ministry in Moscow. Under Russian anti-corruption laws, Mr Darkin must publish an annual review of individual and family income and wealth. The 47-year-old said he earned about £75,000 while his wife earned more than 300 times as much. The report has led to allegations of corruption in internet chatrooms and forums. April NPP chronicle - RBMK units hiccup in Russia, a bird shuts down a reactor in Ukrainehttp://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/reactor_hiccups MOSCOW – Nuclear power reactors in Russia and Ukraine – which operates 15 reactors, all Soviet- or Russia-built, continue to experience operational disruptions. In April, automatic protection systems and a pump malfunction stopped reactors at Russia’s Kursk and Leningrad Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), and a unit at Ukraine’s Rovno NPP was shut down… by a bird. As of end April, 21 out of Russia’s 32 power units were in operation, two more were in reserve, and nine were undergoing maintenance. Andrei Ozharovsky, 02/05-2011 - Translated by Maria Kaminskaya A three-day outage at Kursk NPPJust as the 25th anniversary of the 1986 tragedy at Ukraine’s Chernobyl was approaching, Reactor Unit 4 at Kursk NPP – which is located in Kursk Region, in Central European Russia, and runs RBMK-1000 reactors, of the same design that exploded at Chernobyl – was shut down by the automatic protection system. According to a statement by the Russian State Nuclear Corporation Rosatom’s Crisis Management Centre, “on April 25, 2011, at 08:49 a.m., the unit, while operating at a capacity of 1,035 megawatts, was shut down by the automatic protection system actuated following a false emergency alarm.” A statement to the same effect also appeared on the website of the Russian NPP operating organisation, Concern Rosenergoatom, complete with a standard assurance that “no violations of the limits [or] terms of safe operation of Kursk NPP power units were detected. The radiation background at the NPP and on the nearby territory is unchanged.” Reactor Unit 4 had been commissioned in 1985; its useful service life expires in 2015. The outage at Kursk lasted for three days, from 08:49 a.m. of April 25 to 09:10 a.m. of April 28. During this time, around 72 million kilowatt-hours of power was undersupplied to the grid. Operating load reduced at Leningrad NPPJust like Kursk NPP (as well as Smolensk NPP), the Leningrad station – which is located in Sosnovy Bor, near St. Petersburg – runs RBMK-1000 reactors. According to Rosatom’s Crisis Management Centre, “on April 27, 2011, at 19:42 p.m., as the unit was operating at a capacity of 1,026 megawatts, a 2PEN-2 feedwater electric pump shut down. A 20-percent reduction in operating load was performed manually at the unit in accordance with the design-basis operation algorithm. At 20:05 p.m. of April 27, 2011, a reserve 2PEN-5 pump was engaged. At 00:30 a.m. of April 28, 2011, load was restored to 1,020 megawatts.” No information about this incident was posted on Rosenergoatom’s website. The unit was operating at reduced capacity for almost five hours. The grid lost around 1 million kilowatt-hours in undersupplied electricity. According to Rashid Alimov, a St. Petersburg-based environmentalist and co-chairman of the ecological group Ecoperestroika, incidents like this are not uncommon and testify to a lack of due control on the part of the Russian Federal Service for Ecological, Technological, and Atomic Supervision, Rostekhnadzor, which is Russia’s federal industrial safety oversight authority. “The old and dangerous reactors of Leningrad NPP are not reliable. Their useful service lives have been extended unlawfully, without proper state environmental impact evaluations. This latest incident is a consequence of Rostekhnadzor’s indulgence toward the atomic industry,” Alimov told Bellona.
Ukraine, another former Soviet state, has four nuclear power plants (not counting Chernobyl). All were built either during the time that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union or by Russia after the USSR disintegrated. Ukraine is heavily dependent on nuclear power, which accounts for almost half of all energy produced in the country. A statement with preliminary information about the incident at Rovno has been published on the Ukrainian page of the website of the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine. The event, registered at 12:17 p.m. of April 5, 2011, was caused by the differential bus protection engaged following a malfunction at the busbar, which tripped generator circuit-breakers and a number of other electrical devices at the plant’s Unit 2 – a VVER-440 reactor of Russian make – and led to its emergency shutdown. Traces of soot were detected at the place where the malfunction occurred. An electric arc was also reported by witnesses. A ground fault is named as a possible underlying cause of the incident, likely brought on… by a foreign object dropped by a bird. In other words, a bird – something that one would hardly think a candidate for risk assessment in an industry that has to take immense safety precautions against earthquakes, plane crashes, terrorist threats, or operational errors, among other major risk factors – can essentially take a nuclear power plant out of operation. It took the unit a week to restore operating capacity after the scram. “The incident at [Rovno NPP] with a foreign object that led to the actuation of the emergency protection system and a reactor shutdown is another testimony to the fact that it is impossible to predict all potential external impacts that can affect a reactor’s equipment. Therefore, absolute safety is impossible for an NPP, even theoretically,” Artur Denisenko, energy programmes coordinator at the National Ecological Centre of Ukraine, told Bellona. “It is also symbolic that power supply [was at the time] discontinued from the two oldest reactors [in Ukraine], Reactor Units 1 and 2 of Rovno NPP, on which enormous funds were spent to extend their operational lifetimes. If old nuclear power reactors cannot be protected from foreign objects brought by birds, these reactors must be taken out of operation.”
RBMK-running nuclear power plants in Russia are old stations. A number of alterations were made to the design after the Chernobyl tragedy, but these reactors still operate without containment vessels, which are among the main protection features of newer reactor models. But newer stations or those under construction, however, are not adequately protected against a plane crash either. And planes do fly over nuclear power plants in Russia – military and test aircraft, as well as passenger jets. That a plane crashing onto one of Kursk’s reactor buildings or an on-site spent nuclear fuel cooling pool would have caused major nuclear and radiation safety consequences is, alas, without doubt. Directory: gifiles -> attach attach -> British Forces – Akrioti, Greece Griffin Fighter Squadron (84 Squadron raf) MoD announced possible Typhoon and Tornado arrivals to the base France attach -> Russia 110204 Basic Political Developments attach -> Unclassified//for official use only attach -> Adaptability Sustainment attach -> Pop-up 1 ("C" Chechnya) Header Text: Emir of the Caucasus Emirate Doku Umarov Image attach -> Russia and Islam are not Separate attach -> Chapter 13: The Northern Caucasus attach -> Russia 100209 Basic Political Developments attach -> The evolution attach -> The devolution Download 212.12 Kb. Share with your friends:
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