A nuclear physicist denounces unsafe practices at a Bulgarian nuclear power plant but European institutions are deaf to his pleas.
What Georgi Kotev is trying to uncover is
more than just a dodgy deal between greedy businessmen. It is a
criminal case in which the actors knowingly profit from activities that put human lives and the health of the environment at risk. If it were a hollywood movie, Steven Segal would have already come to the rescue of this 44 year old nuclear physicist who has dedicated the past two years of his life to revealing the truth about the dangerous trade in nuclear waste. But although his story sounds like the plot of a gripping bestseller, the truth is that Georgi Kotev stands alone.
With his finger firmly pointed at Russian, Bulgarian and European nuclear giants he waits, patiently but tiredly, outside the European Commission in Brussels for someone to listen to him.
The story starts at the beginning of 2007, when Kotev, an employee of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in northern Bulgaria, first
notices that there was something wrong with the nuclear fuel being used in the plant. In 2004 the Kozloduy NPP had begun
phasing-in a new kind of fuel which subsequent investigations suggest is reprocessed fuel from Russia. As Greenpeace reveals in a 2005 report,
Europe's Radioactive Secret,
European countries began sending their spent nuclear fuel to Russia in the 1990s, 10% of which is reprocessed and sent back to Europe.
What happens to the remaining 90% remains a mystery. Or did, until Kotev began his investigations.
In the summer of 2007 Kotev contacted officers from what was then the National Security Service (NSS) expressing his fears that Kozloduy NPP was handling unsafe nuclear fuel and that there could be unpredictable and dangerous consequences. By the time the findings are released, the NSS has become the State Agency for National Security (SANS). Their inquiry revealed that the new fuel was in all probability reprocessed fuel and that it did not meet with safety requirements as no safety analysis report was ever carried out on it. But at that point the SANS refused take matters further. Other inspections followed, in 2008, but again led to nothing as did the pre-trial Kotev was summoned to in 2009.
On June 23, 2008 Kotev decides to leave Bulgaria to push his cause forward somewhere safer. Settling in Vienna, he sought the help of the local police and tried to meet with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials. The meeting lasted 10 minutes and the future meetings he had been promised all fell through.
Today, Kotev lives a train ride away from Brussels. For a few brief hours he pitched a tent in Schuman Square but was promptly kicked out by police and he now spends his days protesting in front of the European Commission. Early last week he had announced hunger strike but says he isn't interested in dying of starvation: “my goal … is to draw attention to the problem and cause an investigation”.
VITAeurope spoke to him on the telephone last night.
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