Green peace says it has collected enough signatures to force a referendum on the Russian government's controversial plans to earn billions of dollars by treating the world's nuclear waste.
The ecology group, fighting a draft bill that would lift a ban on the import on spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, said 2.5 million people had signed a petition calling for a national poll on the issue.
The referendum would allow Russians to vote on the import of foreign nuclear waste, the creation of an independent environmental protection agency and the restoration of a forestry service scrapped in May by President Vladimir Putin.
"The legal change being promoted by Russia's cash-strapped atomic ministry is designed to allow Russia to become the world's nuclear waste dump," Green peace said in a statement here.
Russia's atomic energy ministry argues that the funds generated by treating overseas nuclear waste would allow it to upgrade it own nuclear waste storage facilities, clean up contaminated land and expand a reprocessing plant in the Urals.
According to Green peace, the ministry is seeking contracts worth 21 billion dollars over the next decade to treat waste from China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan.
Under the Russian constitution, Putin must call a referendum within two to three months if election officials validate at least two million of the signatures.
If Putin refuses, the constitutional court has 30 days to rule on the president's decision -- MOSCOW (AFP)
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