Russian Nuke Plant Blast Kills One

2 Also Hurt As Molten Metal Spurts; Sparks Calls For Regulation

(AP) 
He said Ekomet-S began operating two years ago and was in violation of the law because it had not undergone a state environmental impact assessment. When the firm was founded, the only environmental monitoring laboratory in the town of 65,000 was shut down for lack of funding, he said.

"There is no independent environmental monitoring in the nuclear city of Sosnovy Bor," Bodrov said.

Sosnovy Bor prosecutor Stanislav Rumyantsev said he opened a criminal investigation into charges of violations of safety regulations.

Bodrov visited Ekomet-S on Friday afternoon, taking along his own radiation monitor. He said radiation levels were normal.

He said this was the second accident at Ekomet-S, with the first happening in summer 2003 and injuring two workers.

In March 1992, an accident at the Sosnovy Bor plant caused radioactive gases and iodine to be leaked into the air, according to nuclear watchdog groups.

One of the reactors at the 30-year-old plant is of the same type as the one at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that exploded in Soviet Ukraine in 1986 in the world's worst nuclear accident.

The station is the main supplier of electricity to St. Petersburg, and there are plans to transport some of its power to Finland.

Sosnovy Bor, a center of nuclear technology, was founded 25 years ago and has 60,000 people. The town also is home to a regional radioactive waste reservoir and an experimental laboratory and training center for nuclear submarine reactors.

Almost everyone in Sosnovy Bor, which means Pine Forest, is connected with nuclear technology, and most are not native to the region.

In an unrelated development, Chechen prosecutors said they have opened a criminal investigation into the improper storage of radioactive waste by a state-owned company.

Prosecutors said a "catastrophic radioactivity situation" had developed at the Grozny Chemical Factory in the breakaway province in southern Russia. Grozny is Chechnya's capital.

Radiation levels at one storage center at the plant are 58,000 times higher than normal, the Russian Prosecutor General's office said Friday.

"It's a threat to the population because the leadership of the plant is taking no steps whatsoever to remove the radioactive material or isolate access to the plant," Chechen Prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov said.