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The Soviets kept a dirty secret about deadly radiation from
the villagers of Muslyumovo, and now the Russians want to cover
up old waste with new.
MUSLYUMOVO, Russia--The sun shines on a pale-blue wooden mosque
in Muslyumovo, a picturesque village of 4,500 people on the Techa
River. Cows meander through fields of clover, lush grass, and
marijuana. A group of schoolchildren giggle on a bridge.
In the middle of the village, on Lenin Street, Nurzhigan Galipova
takes an angry swing at the river with her walking stick as she
recalls how three of her children died: two of leukemia, one of
heart failure.
"The river killed them," Galipova says. "Radiation."
The river--as well as the marijuana plants, the grass Galipova's
cows feed on, and everything else that grows in Muslyumovo--emits
up to 250 microrem of radiation per hour, more than four times
the level scientists consider acceptable. Less than an hour’s
drive upstream from Galipova's house stands the source of the
contamination: the Mayak plant, Russia's only nuclear reprocessing
factory, which polluted Muslyumovo and hundreds of other settlements
in the region for generations to come.
No place in Russia symbolizes the country's inability to manage
the reprocessing of its spent nuclear fuel better than Chelyabinsk
region in the Urals with its fields, rivers, and lakes contaminated
with deadly radio nuclides. And as Russia speeds toward accepting
spent nuclear fuel and waste from abroad for reprocessing and
long-term storage in exchange for billions of dollars, environmentalists
warn that this lucrative plan will turn Russia into the world's
nuclear dump.
According to a recent report compiled by Russian and Norwegian
scientists, the quantity of radioactive materials the Mayak plant
has released since it first opened in 1948 is five times greater
than every other major accident or nuclear test on earth since
then: the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, the 1957 leak at the
British Sellafield nuclear plant, and all the nuclear tests ever
conducted.
Mayak has been a source of constant nuclear contamination in
the region since the day it was built in 1947. For years, it dumped
its nuclear waste into the Techa River; then an explosion at the
plant's storage facilities sent deadly waste into the air, and
a storm carried radioactive dust from a dried-out lake over towns
and villages.
Residents in the region are 40 percent more likely to get leukemia
and 3 percent more likely to get cancer than residents in areas
not contaminated by radiation, said Alexander Akleyev, head doctor
at the Chelyabinsk-based Ural Research Center for Radiation Medicine.
A study conducted by regional health authorities in 1998 showed
that children in the area were three times less healthy than children
in other parts of Russia.
What they don't know will kill them
Soviet authorities never explained to the region's residents
what deadly neighbor had settled in their land, even as they relocated
tens of thousands of residents from their contaminated villages,
and as leukemia and heart disease rates drastically increased
in the region. Almost 40 percent of the world's nuclear weapons
were built at Mayak, and the Soviets considered everything related
to nuclear activities a state secret.
From 1949 until 1951, the plant dumped 228 million cubic feet
of highly toxic nuclear waste into the Techa River, irradiating
approximately 31,000 people, according to Akleyev.
Authorities now say that the radiation effects were under-researched
at the time, and plant officials were hoping that the deadly strontium-90
and cesium-137, which have half-lives of roughly 30 years each,
would simply dissolve in the river.
But when the people who lived alongside the Techa started dying
of radiation sickness in the early 1950s, the plant officials
stopped dumping waste into the river and began storing it. They
also put up barbed wire along the shores and relocated a dozen
villages spread along the river--but they let Muslyumovo residents
stay.
"The village was big, about 6,000 people, and it was too
expensive to move them all," explains Svetlana Kostina, a
researcher at the Chelyabinsk regional government's department
for environment and radiation.
Because the plant authorities did not tell local residents about
the pollution, Muslyumovo residents eventually took the barbed
wire down and let their cows feed on the river's appetizing green
flood plains. Even after the villagers learned in 1993 what deadly
waters run in their backyards, they continued to take their cattle
to the irradiated pastures.
"We've been living like this for years," says Saifetdin
Gainitdinov, 65. "Why stop now?"
The current dose of radiation absorbed by Muslyumovo residents
is 10 times higher than internationally acceptable levels, according
to a study put out by Kostina's department. Only 18 percent of
the village children aged 6 to 14 can be called healthy, while
the rest of the children suffer from acute memory loss, attention
deficit disorders, and exhaustion.
In 1957, soon after it began to store its nuclear waste, Mayak--then
called the Plutonium Plant--had a malfunction at the temperature
control system of one of its storage facilities. Uncontrolled,
the 80 tons of highly active liquid nuclear waste in the storage
self-heated until all the liquid evaporated.
Soon, the container overheated and exploded, releasing 20 million
curies of deadly strontium and cesium--about 40 percent of that
released by the Chernobyl disaster--into the air. A toxic cloud
crept across hundreds of miles of farmland, engulfing over 200
towns and villages, and exposing over 270,000 people to lethal
doses of radiation.
Within 18 months after the explosion, regional authorities relocated
about 10,700 residents of the 23 most polluted villages; their
farmhouses were torn down. Officials did not explain to residents
why they were being forced to leave their homes. The Soviet Union
only admitted that the accident happened in 1989.
Local residents who were ordered to plow over farmland in the
contaminated areas were also never told that they were cleaning
up after a nuclear catastrophe. Nurislan Gubaidullin, 62, who
had no protection from radioactive fallout when he plowed the
polluted lands on his tractor after the explosion, only found
out in 1989 that the constant pain he feels in his legs was caused
by the high dose of radiation he received during the cleanup.
"I have a bouquet of illnesses. They say that I might lose
both my legs," Gubaidullin says.
Gubaidullin's son, 40, and daughter, 37, both suffer from heart
disease. His wife died of stomach cancer several years ago. His
wife's mother, brother, sister, and niece also died of cancer.
"We've got a bad environment here. That's why we are all
ill," Gubaidullin says.
Fighting fire with fire
Even though the plant stopped dumping its highly active waste
into Techa, it continued to discharge its medium-active waste
into the marshy lake of Karachai, located on the territory of
the plant. In 1967, the waters of Lake Karachai evaporated after
a drought. The radioactive sludge turned into dust containing
radio nuclides, mostly cesium-137 and strontium-90, and was carried
by the wind about 15 kilometers north.
Today, Mayak--whose main job now is to reprocess and reactivate
fuel for nuclear power plants, submarines and icebreakers--continues
to pour liquid waste into Karachai. The lake now contains about
120 million curies of radio nuclides, Mayak spokesman Yevgeny
Ryzhkov asserts.
Ryzhkov said Mayak is gradually covering Karachai with clay and
sand. But the plant can only afford this costly procedure by reprocessing
more spent nuclear fuel--and dumping more waste into the lake
even as it is trying to destroy the old.
In order to pay for burying Lake Karachai completely, Mayak needs
to reprocess more fuel than Russia can provide. That's why it
is important that Russia accepts foreign spent nuclear fuel, he
says.
"As soon as we get more spent nuclear fuel to reprocess,
we will thrive," Ryzhkov promises.
Last month, the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State
Duma, passed in second reading a bill that would allow Russia
to accept spent nuclear fuel from at least 14 countries in Europe
and Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Switzerland.
The third and last reading of the bill is scheduled for June.
The deal, the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry says, would raise
up to $20 billion and would then be spent on anything from cleaning
up the sites of nuclear catastrophes to paying off international
debts.
But environmentalists say Mayak is not ready to safely reprocess
this amount of fuel.
"I think that most people don't know how this fuel will
be treated in Russia," charges Thomas Nilsen, a researcher
at Norwegian environmental group Bellona, which is actively lobbying
against the bill. Nilsen says that the contaminated water from
Techa and Karachai would eventually seep into the Arctic Ocean
through the system of Siberian rivers and lakes.
"If the Germans, for example, ship their fuel to Russia
they might receive it back on their tables when they are eating
fish," Nilsen asserts.
Natalya Mironova, head of Chelyabinsk-based Movement for Nuclear
Safety, said Mayak is simply unable to handle 22,000 tons of fuel.
"In 30 years, Mayak has reprocessed 3,000 tons of fuel.
They are proposing to send in 22,000 tons more. That's 175 years
of work for Mayak," Mironova alleges.
But Ryzhkov said Mayak is able and ready to reprocess all this
fuel--and more.
"Our reprocessing techniques have been polished to perfection,"
Ryzhkov says. "We have been doing this for 30 years with
no negative effect on the environment."
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