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Don Bradley has demonstrated that he is the undisputed heavyweight authority on what is known in the West about the management, or more appropriately "mismanagement," of radioactive materials in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Bradley and his colleagues at Battelle's Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) for years have been collecting and analyzing nuclear waste and related data of the former Soviet Union for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This latest book represents an update of Bradley' three volume work, Radioactive Waste Management in the USSR, released between 1990-1992. Behind the Nuclear Curtain is an exceptional piece of work. It now becomes the reference book on the subject. Written primarily for use by nuclear and health physics professionals, Bradley's book is well researched and the data are extensively referenced. There are some 300 tables, figures, and photographs which make it a particularly valuable resource.After an introduction and overview Bradley provides us with a short chapter on waste management agreements between the U.S. and FSU which should have been relegated to an appendix. This is followed by a description of the Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) and other institutions with nuclear waste management responsibilities. The next 16 chapters review the entire Soviet/Russian nuclear fuel cycle-civil and military from uranium mining to highlevel nuclear waste management. There are separate chapters devoted to the principal plutonium

in conducting the experiment. We are especially thankful for the analytical work performed on the leach solutions by A. C. Leaf, B. Vandercook, and R. Ko of the Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory.

Spent light-water-reactor (LWR) fuel with an average burnup of 28,000 MWd/ MTU was leach-tested at 25°C using a modified version of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) procedure. Leach rates were determined from tests conducted in five different solutions: deionized water, sodium chloride (NaCl), sodium bicarbonate (NaHC0 3), calcium chloride (CaC1 2) and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) "B" brine solutions. Elemental leach rates are reported based on the release of 90Sr + 90y, 106Ru , 137Cs , 144Ce , 154 Eu , 239+240pu , 244' Cm and total uran i urn. After 467 days of cumulative leaching, the elemental leach rates are highest in deionized water. The elemental leach rates in the different solutions generally decreased from deionized water to the O.03~ NaCl solution to the WIPP "B" brine solution to the 0.03~ NaHC0 3 solution and was a factor of 20 lower in 0.015~ CaC1 2 solution than in deionized water. The leach rates of spent fuel and borosilicate waste-glass were also compared. In sodium bicarbonate solution, the leach rates of the two waste forms were nearly equal, but the glass was increasingly more resistant than spent fuel in calcium chloride solution, followed by sodium chloride solution, WIPP "B" brine solution and deionized water. In deionized water the glass, based on the elemental release of plutonium and curium, was 50 to 400 times more leach resistant than spent fuel.

Over a 50-year period, the Soviet Union and the United States developed the largest nuclear weapons complexes in the world. In doing so, they also created the world's largest inventories of radioactive waste. Although some of the waste has been stored in safely managed systems such as tanks or converted into stable and storable forms such as glass, significant amounts of it have been released into the environment. This article focuses primarily on these weapons-related discharges because of their size and less-well-known nature.