The activists were released about an hour later.

Rashid Alimov, editor of Bellona’s Russian pages, along with Alexei Snegirev, also of Bellona, and Tatyana Kulbakina, of Murmansk’s Nature and Youth, where arrested near the Izotop radioactive waste facility in the Leningrad Region.
A photographer with the newspaper Moi Raion was also detained with the activists.

Alimov said by telephone that he and the other activists established that radiation background levels around the waste were higher than normal. No reason for the detention was given by police.

On January 24th, Bellona and Ecodefence, another Russian environmental organisation, staged a protest against continuing shipments of uranium tailings to Russia from Germany in central St. Petersburg.

Specifically, the protest, in which some 40 environmentalists participated, was aimed at the arrival of the MV Shouwenbank, which arrived in St. Petersburg carrying 2,000 tons of uranium tailings – the radioactive and toxic waste produced during uranium enrichment.

The waste came from the German-Dutch fuel giant Urenco, which, as part of a contract with Russian nuclear fuel company Teksnabexport, has been shipping Uranium tailings tailings to Russia since 1996.

The contract envisions that Russia will receive a total of 100,000 tons of uranium tailings from Urenco. According to Urenco, some 80,000 have already been shipped, and another 20,000 will be shipped before 2009.

Last night, containers of the waste were sent from the St. Petersburg port by road to town of Kapitolovo, where they will be loaded on a train and shipped most likely to Novouralsk in the Ural Mountains, where Urenco’s uranium tailings have been sent since 2003.

from http://www.bellona.org