| MOSCOW - The fallout from a catastrophic nuclear
dumpsite explosion in
Russia's Ural Mountains 45 years ago and decades of radioactive
pollution
have gravely affected the local population's health, but authorities
have
done little to assess or limit the damage, environmentalists said
Thursday.
On Sept. 29, 1957, a waste tank at the Mayak nuclear weapons
plant in the
closed city of Chelyabinsk-65 exploded, contaminating 23,000 square
kilometers (9,200 square miles) and prompting authorities to evacuate
10,000 residents from neighboring regions.
The city, which was so secret that it didn't appear on Soviet-era
maps, has
been renamed Ozyorsk but is still closed to outsiders. Some details
of the
disaster were first released to the public in 1989 as part of
former Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization drive, but its impact
on the
local population remains largely unknown even now.
"We will never be able to learn all the consequences of
this terrible
catastrophe," said Alexei Yablokov, a former Kremlin adviser
on
environmental security and now head of the nongovernmental Center
for
Environmental Policy. "No one has kept track of what happened
to the
evacuated local residents and workers who were sent to clean up
the area."
Nadezhda Kutepova, the head of the Planet of Hope environmental
group based
in Ozyorsk, said that authorities had deliberately destroyed some
medical
archives to downplay the damage. "People who worked in the
disaster area
can't prove that," said Kutepova, whose father, a 19-year-old
technical
college student at the time, was among the men rushed to decontaminate
the
site several days after the explosion.
"The authorities simply called up all students at the college,
put them
into trucks, and drove them to the disaster area," Kutepova
said. "They
rounded up tens of thousands men - soldiers, students, prisoners
- all whom
they could find."
When Kutepova's father died of lung cancer 28 years after the
disaster, the
family thought the death was related to the radiation exposure
during the
clean-up works. However, they couldn't prove anything since they
had no
documents confirming that he worked in the disaster area, Kutepova
said.
Since then, regional officials have run medical checks of clean-up
workers
living in Ozyorsk and the population in adjacent territories.
Still, such
inspections involved only a small fraction of people who suffered
from the
disaster, said Yablokov and other environmental activists.
In addition to the radioactive fallout from the 1957 explosion,
Mayak has
contaminated vast surrounding areas by regularly dumping nuclear
waste into
nearby lakes since 1949, when it built the Soviet Union's first
reactor to
produce plutonium for atomic bombs.
Last year, the local governor warned the federal government that
a huge
amount of liquid radioactive waste could burst into the region's
rivers and
trigger an environmental catastrophe. Officials said that more
than 400
million cubic meters (14 billion cubic feet) of waste are stored
in the
Techa River cascade, a series of artificial ponds, channels, and
dams
intended to hold the waste from Mayak and protect the waterway
from further
pollution.
Local officials have proposed solving the problem by building
a nuclear
power plant in the area that would help reduce the amount of waste,
but the
environmentalists said it would only add to the region's burdensome
nuclear
legacy.
See also:
A
march of remembrance took place in Chelyabinsk Region on the 45th
anniversary of the disaster at the “Mayak” plant
Press Release, September 30, 2002
YABLOKO
Against Nuclear Waste Imports | 