Friday, December 16 2005 19:01 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

St. Petersburg: An explosion in a smelter on the site of a Russian nuclear power plant killed one worker and severely injured two others, but the state nuclear agency Rosenergoatom said today (Dec 16, 2005) that radiation levels were normal.

The blast occurred yesterday at the Leningrad nuclear power plant in the closed nuclear town of Sosnovy Bor, outside the northern city of St. Petersburg and about 600 km northwest of Moscow. The smelter is operated by Ekomet-S, a company reprocessing scrap metal.

The blast threw a spotlight on what environmentalists called uncontrolled operations by such companies on sensitive sites. "The enterprise functions illegally because there was no mandatory (state) environmental impact assessment on its construction," Dmitry Artamonov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace, told sources.

Rosenergoatom said that the smelter was in the grounds of the plan's second unit and plant spokesman Sergei Averyanov said it was about 1 kilometer from the reactor. The plant has four units in all.

Oleg Bodro, a physicist who heads the Green World ecological group in Sosnovy Bor, said the reactor was only about 700 meters from the smelter, which also lies some 50 meters from a liquid radioactive waste pond.

Three people were injured in the blast, Rosenergoatom said. The Emergency Situations Ministry said that two of the injured had urns over 90 percent of their bodies.

A 33-year-old worker died of his injuries this morning, Yri Lameko, chief doctor of the Sosnovy Bor hospital, told the sources.