MOSCOW. Jan 27 (Interfax-AVN) - To destroy chemical weapons is safer than to store them, Sergei Kiriyenko, the chairman of the State Chemical Disarmament Commission, wrote in an article published by the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily on Monday.
"Our chemical weapons destruction facilities are much safer and more reliable than storage facilities. There are several thousand tonnes of chemical weapons at storage facilities, and the Gorny scrapping facility, for example, cannot destroy more than 750kg of yperite at a time. Second, the protection of a chemical weapons destruction facility is about the same as that of a nuclear power plant," Kiriyenko's article reads.
Speaking about rumors about danger for the population posed by chemical weapons stocks, he noted that "regular monitoring of chemical weapons storage and destruction areas has exposed only one disease, this being chemiophobia." The disease cannot be cured by pills, it is only treated by provision of necessary information, he wrote.
Kiriyenko recalled that eight experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are permanently staying in Gorny to control each move of Russian specialists.
"The inspectors are marking each container and each charge so that nobody is able to replace them secretly. OPCW inspectors can make a request for checking any facility, and they will be there in 24 hours. Russia has never been reproached for failing to meet its commitments in this field," the official stressed.
Kiriyenko said that the yperite content in the products of reaction is 0.00001 percent, while the standard requirement is 0.001 percent. Such content of poisonous agents in the products of reaction is equal to that in household chemical waste.
"The whole estimated mass of the products of reaction will be about 200,000t, which is nothing if compared to Russia's 40 million tonnes of annually produced household and industrial waste," he concluded.