Washington and Oslo agreed in 1994 to invest in a new six-million-dollar (5.3-million-euro) disposal facility to recycle liquid waste from the Northern Fleet's ships that has been building up since the 1960s.

However, so far the installation, which would recycle up to 5,000 cubic metres of waste annually, had still not been completed, said the director of the Atomflot state company in charge of nuclear icebreakers.

"The main problem was in outlining the project. The original project was so raw it could not be realised," Alexander Sinyaev said.

The project would require an additional 500,000 dollars for final testing and launch of the facility, Sinyaev added.

However, local experts, including the Norway-based ecology group Bellona, charged Russian contractors with appropriating the funds allocated to the project.

"We have questions for the contractors regarding those funds. The project was changed several times, and someone got extra money that may be the very amount needed to complete the installation," Bellona's Murmansk bureau chief Sergei Zhavoronkin noted.

"What is worse, though, is that while the United States and Norway invested millions of dollars in this venture, Russia cannot even account for this money. This will undermine the investors' trust in our country," he added.

TERRA.WIRE