A Bermuda company is at the heart of an international environmental row, it has emerged.

NPT International intends to ship thousands of tons of nuclear waste to Russia for storage, claiming that this will raise money to help clear up the existing nuclear waste storage mess in that country.

Environmentalists are fighting the proposal and yesterday they overcame a huge obstacle.

Greenpeace had raised a 2.5 million signature petition calling for a national referendum in Russia "on plans to turn Russia into the world's nuclear dump'' but Russian authorities rejected the petition, claiming some signatures were invalid.

Yesterday the Russian Supreme Court overturned this decision. Under the constitution, the Russian president must now call a referendum on the issue as more than two million signatures were collected.

NPT International is the subsidiary of the Delaware-registered corporation, Non-Proliferation Trust, and will administer the money and the project. It is owned by three charitable US trusts : the Minatom Development Trust (60 percent), the Russian Environmental Trust (30 percent) and the Russian Humanitarian Trust (10 percent).

On its website, NPT claims: "NPT will raise $15 billion by constructing and operating a spent fuel storage facility in Russia for the storage of 10,000 tons of foreign spent nuclear fuel from countries other than the US. To implement the project NPT created a Bermuda subsidiary, NPT International, so that billions of dollars of aid to Russia will not be diminished by US taxation.

"The three trusts were formed to fund and oversee key initiatives in their respective areas. The NPT project was not founded to earn a profit and all of its revenues, after covering operating expenses, will go to fund approved initiatives in Russia.'' In its mission statement the company says: "With the end of the cold war, both the US and Russia were faced with a variety of challenges associated with winding down their nuclear weapons production enterprises, including widespread environmental contamination, disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive waste and other important needs. In both nations resolution of these challenges continues to demand substantial financial resources.

"However Russia presently does not have sufficient funds to resolve many of these important challenges. Financial assistance from other governments, including that of the US, has been extremely limited notwithstanding nearly universal recognition of the importance of the tasks at hand. NPT was created to raise such funds privately and expeditiously.'' The company claims that the spent fuel will be placed in a geologic repository in Russia, which will cost the company around $2 billion. It insists that no processing of the spent fuel for its plutonium content will be allowed.

Plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel is traditionally used in nuclear weapons around the world.

NPT also claims to have been created "by several prominent US citizens in consultation with the Russian government, the US government, the arms control community and the environmental community''.

The list of those involved reads like a who's who of the US military and nuclear industries: Admiral Daniel Murphy, former deputy director of the CIA and director of antisubmarine warfare and ocean surveillance programmes; Admiral Bruce DeMars, former director of the US naval nuclear propulsion programme; General PX Kelley, former commandant of the US marine corps; William von Raab, former commissioner of US customs; Hon. William Webster, former director of the CIA; Dr. Thomas Cochran, nuclear programme director for the natural resources defence council in Washington DC; William E Bridegum, a businessman and leading freemason; and Joseph R Egan, a Washington DC attorney.

Minatom, Russia's atomic ministry, is trying to get the law changed in Russia to allow importation of foreign nuclear waste. Minatom is also the 60 percent stakeholder in NPT. Minatom has claimed it could import nuclear waste under contracts valued up to $21 billion. By doing this it claims it could upgrade its own nuclear waste storage, remediate some heavily contaminated land and expand its nuclear reprocessing operations at the Mayak nuclear complex in the Ural mountains.

Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace International said: "The fairy tales about nuclear cleanup by Minatom are nothing but public relations for their crude attempt to get Western money for an expansion of the Russian nuclear industry, whose disregard for safety and the environment is starkly demonstrated by the nuclear nightmare of Mayak and Krasnoyarsk.'' This is backed up by a statement from GJ Dicus, a commissioner for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said: "As a result of early operational practices and some accidents at Mayak, workers at the plant and populations around the site were exposed to unusually large amounts of radiation and radioactive materials. In many cases the doses were comparable to those received by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.'' But through Bermuda-based NPT International the organisation claims: "Of the $15 billion, $11.25 billion will be allocated to Russia in the form of security related, environmental related or humanitarian related expenditures.'' The remaining $3.75 billion " will be managed by NPT International to purchase shipping casks and special purpose transport ships, build and operate the storage facility and cover NPT's administrative, legal and operational expenses''.