Looks like substitution for coal and natural gas mainly.
Posted on 08/31/2007 12:27:48 PM PDT by F15Eagle
SEMEY, Kazakhstan (CNN) -- Kazakhstan's nuclear orphans are a distressing sight.
The first child I met in the local orphanage was lying limply in his crib. His giant, pale head was perched on his tiny shoulders, covered in bed sores, like a grotesquely painted paper-mâché mask. Peering out, a pair of tiny black eyes darted around.
It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing. The doctor told me he was 4 years old.
Through the bars in the next crib, I saw another child, twisted with deformities. His fragile legs and arms turned in impossible contortions.
These are the children of Kazakhstan's terrifying nuclear past.
Decades of Soviet nuclear testing unleashed a plague of birth defects. When the Soviet Union tested its nuclear devices, it chose eastern Kazakhstan, one of its remotest, most desolate areas. But no one bothered to evacuate the people living there. Watch the effects of nuclear bombs on villagers »
The testing began in 1949 at a site known as Polygon and continued until 1989. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, there were 456 tests, including 116 nuclear bombs tested above ground. The Polygon site officially closed on August 29, 1991 -- 16 years ago this week.
~~~
The people living in the villages scattered throughout this former nuclear testing zone have been through the unspeakable. Seriqkaisha is 62 years old. She remembers watching the mushroom clouds as a child.
"We were very frightened," she told me, "because the windows in our house would blow out and the walls would shake. My parents both died of cancer, and my own son is handicapped."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
fyi
Without God and only the State, people are just things to be used. The Soviets in their “wisdom” decided that some number of deformed children was not too high a cost in maintaining their nuclear program.
Can anyone think of another reason for CNN to run a story about birth defects in Kazakhstan? ...but no story about Mrs. Clinton's illegal campaign financing? ...and no story about the continuing success of the war in Iraq?
Then again, they might have wanted them as test subjects...............
Can anyone think of another reason for CNN to run a story about birth defects in Kazakhstan? ...but no story about Mrs. Clinton’s illegal campaign financing? ...and no story about the continuing success of the war in Iraq?
________________
They probably got some compelling video and an editor or producer noticed it. These were nuclear weapons tests not nuclear plants.
No doubt they wanted to study the effects of radiation on people too. Not much different than some Nazi scientists. I’ve even seen film of American troops walking towards a mushroom cloud during a test. Holy cow.
Of course the purpose of the article is to let people know that nukes are terrible. But the USA, Britain, France, Israel,etc., have had nukes for many years and there is nothing of the kind in those countries.
These atrocities are the fault of Communism, and nothing else.
Of course they were. But "No Nukes!" types have always worked hard to make the fear one and the same.
Nukes are nukes!
Can you imagine 456 tests on this one site including 116 above ground? If you haven’t already, read up on Chelyabinsk-40.
We have our own less than sparkling history regarding nuclear testing and the effects that it had on our civilian population, and all one needs to do is to begin with asking the average person in St. George Utah what they think about atomic testing to get a taste for what was going on in the 50’s in Nevada.
From 1951 to 1963, 126 atomic bombs were detonated at the Nevada test site, and after one such blast, troops were actually ordered to march right into Ground Zero in a simulation exercise of ‘occupying’ enemy territory (as if there would be any hospitable territory left).
While the United States Department of Defense may not have conducted itself with the totalitarian ruthlessness of the Soviets, the results of our own nuclear testing upon innocent men, women and children are not much different.
—my tagline could also apply to anything “nuclear” or anything related to it-—
By the way, nice to chat with you outside of a contentious Mitt Romney thread . . . : )
I remember the late ‘70’s when the anti-nuclear crowd was riding high. 30 years later and we are still funding our enemies and not-so-friendly “allies” by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of petroleum and are still worrying about gas prices at the pump.
I’m a supporter of nuclear plants because they make sense geopolitically.
It’s the no-nukes types who complain about deformed children yet support abortion on demand.
Yes. I do participate in the wider FR world as well. :-)
I’m a supporter of nuclear plants because they make sense geopolitically.
True. But nuclear power plants would mostly be pushing out coal-powered ones, so the effect on oil wouldn't necessarily be much.
Are there any oil-powered power plants? I honestly don't know.
The same types of awful deformities are in evidence in Belarus as well as surrounding areas. Little thing called Chernobyl.
Looks like substitution for coal and natural gas mainly.
60 Minutes once did a story where Ed Bradley visited Semipalatinsk including the medical museum. He said that one of the museum exhibits was a deformed baby with the tail of a fish. Besides nuclear explosions in the area, there was also plutonium processing.
Yep, even we were young and stupid, and totally ignorant of the effects of nuclear fallout. At least our troops were, somewhat, willing participants. They at least knew what they had just witnessed, and they also knew that during a war where such weapons were used, they would be ordered into battle. (I think the latter was to gauge what the psychological affects would be on the troops) They just didn't know what would happen afterwards, and really, neither did the egg heads.
This is analogous to more than just other examples of nuclear testing. The forty-year-long Tuskegee Experiment—in which poor, igorant sharecroppers were infected with syphilis—is just another example of some people’s desire to serve a “higher cause” through a malignant indifference to the fate of others.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Kazakhstan/Nuclear/4278_4313.html
“There are no fences around the perimeter of Semipalatinsk; people and animals roam freely across the former test site. Only the Baykal-1 and IGR research reactor complexes are cordoned off, according to National Nuclear Center officials. According to Kazakhstani nuclear physicists, extensive mining operations are underway at the test site: beryllium, coal, and gold are mined and table salt is produced from a lake located near the main test field. In addition, scrap metal is gathered illegally from the site. According to some reports, bore holes at Degelen Mountain have been breached by scrap metal gatherers, although National Nuclear Center officials deny this”........................................
“6/13/2002: RADIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TESTED AT SEMIPALATINSK UNDER USSR
On 13 June 2002, Vadim Logachev, a representative of the State Scientific Center at the Institute of Biophysics in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, revealed that radiological weapons were once tested at the Semipalatinsk test site. According to the Kazakhstani National Nuclear Center (NNC), this information was made public for the first time. During the tests, radioactive waste was packaged and dropped from an airplane or blown up with explosives on the ground”.........
(COMMENT- D’OH! And our US Govt has been dithering around about what to do with nuclear waste!) ...........................
“9/7/99: FORMER OFFICIAL CLAIMS EXTENT OF CONTAMINATION GREATER THAN REPORTED
The former head of the Department of Radiation Safety and Environment at the Institute of Radiation Safety, Musin Zholdybayev, said at a news conference that a National Nuclear Center report which found that only 10 percent of the Semipalatinsk test site’s territory was contaminated is misleadingly low. Zholdybayev, who worked at the Institute of Radiation Safety from 1994-1998, believes that up to 50 percent of the site is contaminated and not suitable for economic development. Zholdybayev also believes that the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy is interested in misinforming the public in order to avoid compensating victims of nuclear tests.”....................
“11/16/98: UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY FOCUSES INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION ON SEMIPALATINSK
On 16 November 1998, a draft resolution on the problems of the Semipalatinsk former nuclear test site was introduced in the UN General Assembly. Representatives of more than 50 countries signed the resolution containing an appeal to potential donor countries to aid Kazakhstan in the decontamination of the Semipalatinsk region.... Kazakhstanskaya pravda reported that the international experts had concluded that the consequences of the nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk site are a thousand times worse than those of Hiroshima or Chernobyl and that the level of radioactive contamination poses a threat to neighboring countries such as Russia and China....(monitoring problems are) due to the difficulty of securing important measurements in the absence of sustained monitoring, a product of the Soviet culture of secrecy. The report calls the Semipalatinsk test site territory a “region in crisis.” Over one million people in the region remain affected, about 30,000 seriously”.........................
“/25/98: HEALTH, ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AT SEMIPALATINSK POOR
Since the closure of the Semipalatinsk test site, the population of the city of Kurchatov has decreased to 11,000 from its peak of 30,000, and the area has become economically depressed. While some areas at the site remain heavily contaminated, the Kazakhstani government lacks funds and modern equipment for treatment of radiation-related illnesses. Between 1949 and 1989, an estimated 1.6 million people in the city of Kurchatov and surrounding areas were exposed to radiation from tests at the Semipalatinsk range, some as part of experiments on civilians and livestock. In 1997, 488 of every 1,000 babies born at the prenatal center in the city of Semipalatinsk suffered from birth defects or other health problems, and 47 died. [”Glowing, but not with health,” The Economist, 25 July 1998, pp. 3-4.]{entered 9/3/98 FW} “......
“4/6/98: INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR STUDIES EFFECTS OF TESTING AT SEMIPALATINSK
A seminar on the environmental and health effects of four decades of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk was held in Almaty the week of 6 April 1998...the seminar brought scientists from Kazakhstan, Germany, and other countries together to share information on the environmental consequences of nuclear testing....Academician Saim Balmukhanov said at the conference that about 1.5 million people were exposed to radiation from tests at Semipalatinsk. In addition....over 10.5 percent of children born in the neighboring Karaganda region were born with deformities, and that cases of cancer, dystrophy, spontaneous abortion, and mental illness were two to three times more frequent around Semipalatinsk than elsewhere in Kazakhstan.”...............
” A conference of scholars, Kazakhstani government officials and specialists, and accredited diplomats to Kazakhstan from “nuclear club” countries met in Almaty on 27 February 1998 to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the founding of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk international antinuclear movement. .... Statistics presented at the conference indicated that from 500,000 to 8 million people were directly affected by activities at the test site. Participants appealed to the United Nations and members of the “nuclear club” to extend multilateral assistance to eradicate the consequences of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, demanded that the Kazakhstani government compile a complete register of victims of radiation in the nuclear test area, and called for the establishment of an international radiological and dosimetry center in Almaty. “..................
“3/19/96: SARZHAL RESIDENTS ON THE EXISTENCE OF AN UNEXPLODED BOMB Residents of the village Sarzhal near the Semipalatinsk test site believe that an unexploded nuclear bomb was abandoned in Lake Chagan at the test site in 12/64. They also claim that above-ground tests at the site were conducted until 1/25/65. Village residents worry that radioactive gases, formed in tunnels where underground nuclear explosions took place, are now leaking from coal deposits near the village. Contaminated areas at the Semipalatinsk site are not fenced in or marked in any way, that would warn local people to avoid them.
[Kazakhstanskaya pravda, 19 March 1996”...............
Yeah. “we” are no better than the Russians when it came to exposing civilians to nuclear contamination... or exposing civilians to any other type of high risk governmen programs
(shall we talk about Sverdlosk and anthrax?)
SARC
Birth defects happen everywhere. This article does not provide an ounce of proof that the defects observed by the reporter are in any way related to nuclear fallout.
Don’t buy in to the hippies’ fear of all things nuclear.
There are some older oil fired boilers (or there used to be) and some gas turbine stations are dual fuel with oil fire capacity. They burn the fuel that is cheapest on any day. It used to be that natural gas was always cheaper, but these days I am not so sure.
After 456 tests in that area including 116 above ground, I’d say it’s pretty conclusive a lot of the population suffered from radiation sickness and gene damage.
The results, the intents, the recovery and reparations efforts (when things did go wrong) are many thousand times different. Don’t fall for this propaganda CNN is presenting.
The testing grounds at Semipalatinsk are 1000 times more radioactive than any measured in Hiroshima (if you bothered to read my post). In 1997 half the children born in the city hospital had birth defects. Civilians in the neighboring FSU republics in the path of the radiation plume are also suffering.
Not only is this article not only NOT “propagandistic lies”-it is way understated as to the death and misery suffered by people exposed to inhuman irresponsible Russian actions in pursuit of military and economic progress at any human cost.
There are many hundred oil-fired power plants. Most fossil plants are coal, many of the newer ones are natural gas - and almost all of the gas turbine plants are natural gas, but fuel oil plants are common.
Disastrous claims from opponents aside, the worst US event was the Japanese fishing boat washed with fallout in the Pacific. And they were cleaned up and compensated.
Walking/marching through fallout areas by military units does NOT equal the long-term exposure by these nearby residents.
I note that you are madly spinning and attempting to evade what I posted in response to your hysterical straw man arguments and distortions.
Do some research and get back to us when you’re able to discuss this rationally.
speaking of spinning-
I am still waiting for you to post a picture of a US “nuclear veteran” (civilian)exposed after the 1963 atmospheric test ban...
I have more pictures of Russian/FSU Republic civilians and their deformed children deliberately exposed to Russian military nuke radiation and other environmental poisons - through the late 1990’s...
tick tick tick
That’s the point I am trying to make!
Horse crap!
DISTRACTION. Using FEAR. Pure and simple.
You are 100% correct.
Here’s a series of photographic essays on the screwed-up environmental (nuclear and industrial) mess known as Mother Russia and her “former Republics”.
As we wait for some of the moral relativists here to direct us to similar modern day scenes of the effects of nuclear contamination and environmental pollution wrought upon American civilians by our government’s intent or neglect ... SARC
http://www.gerdludwig.com/html/stories_soviet.html
” From Vilnius to Vladivostok, across more than eight million square miles, a beleaguered environment bears witness to a legacy of irresponsibility. The rivers of the former Soviet Union are open sewers of human and chemical waste. The Aral Sea is drying up. In many Soviet cities the air is so polluted that it puts millions at risk for respiratory disease. Tons of nuclear waste are spread out all over the country and toxic chemicals poison the soil.
To document this defiled world —one sixth of the planet’s landmass— I spent five months on assignment for National Geographic. I traveled the low roads of the sundered fifteen nations —from the fouled shore of the Baltic Sea to the troubled forests of the Khabarovsk region touching the Sea of Japan, from the contaminated tundra in the permafrost north to the viscous pools of runoff from dilapidated and leaky oil wells near Baku in the south.
I set my foot on earth at places so polluted that neither man nor beast will survive in them for years to come. I visited plants and factories, sharing the misfortune and pain of workers exhausted after a day’s exposure to dust and toxic fumes. With mothers I shed tears over the needless suffering of innocent children born deformed into a world without hope. I traveled through a country where —for 70 years— Soviet rulers professed concern for workers and respect for nature but destroyed both with their environmental recklessness and flagrant neglect for fundamental needs.
My photographs record quite a different version of the former USSR than the one that had been projected by National Geographic during the gloomiest period of the Cold War. Images of the bald children of Chernobyl and the limbless children of Moscow disclose a deeply disturbing truth: birth defects and infant mortality —not just in the vicinity of a major atomic catastrophe, but even in the ailing empire’s once proud capital— strike the peoples of this land at twice the rate found in the industrial nations of the West.
Working on this assignment confronted me with specific problems. For a foreign photographer, permission to shoot mysterious candle-lit Orthodox churches and goose marching handsome soldiers in front of the Kremlin was difficult enough to obtain during the Brezhnev era. But once you found the appropriate place in the Soviet bureaucratic pyramid, one benevolent nod from above was enough to trigger a chain of permissions. When I arrived in the dissolving empire in 1992, however, I found myself in a maze of intricate relationships with willing liberal-minded bosses in the fifteen capitals and reluctant bureaucrats on the local levels. In the Baltic state of Estonia a powerful green movement has been part of successful resistance to Moscow’s domination. Even so, my Russian assistant Maxim Kuznetsov and I only had our ticking Geiger counter to help us find a highly radioactive uranium waste lagoon there. Local officials insisted that this place did not exist.
Not only was the emotional strain of the assignment overwhelming, but we also struggled with delicate questions of personal safety. Working on the radioactive shores of Estonia, we donned protective gear —respirators, safety overalls, rubber gloves and boots— but in many places we were asked not to wear any of it, since the people who labored every day on the sites did not have any themselves. You walk a thin line: you want to be safe but you also need people’s trust and cooperation to get the pictures.”
Gerd Ludwig
Same mentality in Ukraine, with Chernobyl
http://www.gerdludwig.com/html/chernobyl_victims.htm
Very true.
Much of the testing was done out in the SouthWestern desert of the US, and when TIME magazine did a photo shoot of nearby townspeople, they used STAND-INS.
They didn’t want YOU to see the real townspeople.
The MSM didn’t start lying to us recently, as many might think.
It has always been this way.
So there will always be those who do not see,
those who do not hear.
Soldiers of the Chelyabinsk Chernobyl
From Sto Velikikh Katastrof (The 100 Greatest Catastrophies), Moscow, 1999 pp 394-8, 1999 I.Ionina, M. Kubeev
In the early days of the Cold War, in one of Russia's most secretive regions, stood a city without a name. There, at a classified military facility, an explosion occurred which was been kept hidden for more than two decades. During those long years no one knew of it except for the few who lived in the region of the catastrophy. This tragic story and the name of the top secret city are now known - it was near Chelyabinsk, and the factory where the explosion occurred - Mayak. The area was also known as Chelyabinsk-40. The city that produced Russia's first atom bomb was later renamed Chelyabinsk-65, while nowadays it's known as Ozersk (City of Lakes).
There are a lot of lakes around Ozersk. For the longest time the Demidov industrial concern was located in this beautiful place. Their smelting plants produced high-quality copper and pig-iron, and Demidov's products were in use far beyond Russia's borders.
After World War II, an especially secret project was begun in this region. The Cold War with the US required the immediate construction of an atomic bomb as a counterbalance to the American weapon. In 1949, industrial-scientific co-op Mayak became the first in the nation to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Stories circulate that Soviet physicist I.V. Kuchatov carried the first capsules containing grams of this lethal element from the reactor in his naked hands. The successful test of the Soviet atomic bomb later that year had huge military-political consequences, and shook American president Harry Truman's administration fundamentally.
In 1957, little was known about the possible effects of radiation, and scientists were confused about this mysterious, invisible death. Soldiers and officers from the internal security force who guarded the secret facility, however, were already dying of it.
On the October 7th, 1957, a week after the disaster, internal minister N. Dudurov received the following report:
"Accidental gas explosion at special installation. Because of this a large quantity of radioactive particles were released into the air. The cloud of particles remained for over the area of the explosion for some time."The wind soon picked up and sent this cloud to the northeast. As a result, at the explosion site and all along the cloud's path a massive quantity of radioactive particles contaminated the installation, as well as areas all over the Kalinskiy region.
The explosion occurred due to internal overheating of one the reserviors used to store highly-radioactive liquid waste. During seven years of nuclear production, wastes were handled in the simplest of ways - just dumped in the Techa and Iset' rivers. Later on, wastes were dumped into Lake Karachai.
V. Novoselov and V. Tolstikov, authors of the novel The Secret of 'Forty', wrote that Sunday, September 29, 1957, was a warm, sunny day. City dwellers were occupied with the usual matters, and many were at the Khimik (Chemist) football stadium where there was a match between two local soccer teams. According to their book:
"At around 16:30 there was the thunder of an explosion in the area of the factory. For a time residents didn't pay attention, since there had been many loud noises coming from the secret installation. As eyewitnesses later recalled, following the explosion a column of smoke rose up and reached a height of almost a kilometer. From it twinkled a red-orange. It gave the appearance of the Northern Lights."Almost 30 years before Chernobyl, this turned out to be one of the most serious nuclear accidents in the world. For the longest time all reports were closely-guarded secrets, and practically nothing was known about it in the West. Not until 1979, when Soviet dissendent Zh. Mevedev published a science article called: "Nuclear Catastrophy in the Urals", in which he gave details of the September, 1957, tragedy. Even after its publication, many American specialists remained convinced that the Russians were producing and testing their nuclear weapons on the remote artic isle of Novaya Zemlya, and that one of the mushroom clouds from there had blown over the southern Urals.
A small brochure of articles has been published concerning the atomic industry in our country (Russia). Until this came out, the general public was unaware that, in 1957, 20 million curies of radioactive particles were released into the environment. The eastern Ural radioactive footprint covers a territory of 250 square kilometers and holds a population of 270,000.
Eighteen million curies of this contamination remained at the nuclear storage site, while about two million were picked up by the winds. The cloud covered many of the buildings at the Mayak chemical factory, as well as the fire-fighting and military units. A regiment of engineer troops was also contaminated, as well as a prison camp with about 3000 inmates, who worked in the factory.
A group of about 200 industrial interns from Moscow were also working at the plant on that day. They were billeted in an open barracks, and on September 30th they were assisting soldiers at the plant. When the explosion occurred, its force blew in the barracks windows, and the metal gates around the storage site were destroyed. The soldiers ran outside, and a few went to the park around the barracks where they assumed defensive positions. It was not known whether the source of the explosion was an accident or hostile action. One gate guard jumped into a sewer manhole and set up his foxhole there.
A huge column of dust rose above the site where radioactive wastes were stored, and it was blown by the wind in the direction of the regiment. Soon this thick, dark-brown cloud hung over the barracks, and brought twilight to what was a bright, sunny day. The men were frightened. Guard dogs howled without pause, and birds were nowhere to be seen.
In the first hours after the explosion, the largest radioactive particles rained down on the heads of the men, and the contamination was intense. Smaller particles, with a cottony consistency, continued to fall into the next day.
As soon as the cloud covered the base, the military immediately called for dosimeters. Contamination readings were off the scale and showed that the area needed to be evacuated. As a precaution, all servicemen were decontamined in a bathhouse, where they were hosed down for several hours in hot water. But this decontamination had rather poor results.
On the next day they began to remove weapons and ammunition from the contaminated area. Many of the arms were so heavily contaminated that they had to be buried inside a boiler. Weapons that were contaminated to a lesser extent, the soldiers tried to wash. The guns' wooden parts were rubbed down with sandpaper, while the metal was scrubbed using sand and steel wool. The weapons could not be completely decontaminated, and the armory refused to accept "dirty" weapons. Many soldiers spend their last hours on earth engaged in this bureaucratic nonsense. The next day most of them fell ill with symptoms of radiation poisoning: hair loss, diarrhea, burns, and anemia. An unknown but large number of soldiers died soon after.
In addition to the heavier particles, an eight to nine kilometer-wide "nuclear tongue", laden with Stontium-90, fell on the surrounding region. Carried by a strong southwest wind, the cloud passed through the forests, fields and lakes of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions - an area of 1000 square kilometers. It was necessary to evacuate more than 10,000 people from 23 villages surrounding the disaster site. Many of these also took sick and died.
In 1958, 59 thousand hectares were removed from agricultural use in the Chelyabinsk region, and 47 thousand hectares from the Svedlovsk region. For two years this land lay fallow. Even today the Russian government finds it necessary to disguise the origin of products from this region, and sanitary-health authorities allow the sale of Chelyabinsk products only on a rotating basis throughout Russia, to lessen the risk of overdose. To remove this region eternally from agricultural production has yet to enter the minds of the authorities.
As a result of the accident, more than 124,000 people received lethal overdoses of radiation, dying over an extended period ranging from days to years. In the spring of 1963, as if to punish mankind even further, the region suffered a severe drought. Shallow, boggy Lake Karachai completely dried out and a duststorm blew particles from the lake's highly contaminated bottom all over the area, adding to the eastern Ural radioactive catastrophy another 40,000 victims. These disasters were later known collectively as the Khyshtym tragedy, and caused more casualties than even Chernobyl.
Chelyabinsk-40
(various sources)
During the early days of the Cold War, weapons-grade Tritium and Plutonium were produced at only three closely guarded locations. Each of these was a "closed" city which did not appear on maps, and travel to and from these cities was all but prohibited. Even today, foreign visitors have been allowed to visit only two of the sites.
The most classified of these nuclear cities was called Chelyabinsk-40. Fifteen kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym in the southeastearn Urals, it is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa basin. Not very far away are its sister cities - Chelyabinsk-65, and Chelyabinsk-70, the other two classified military-industrial cities responsible for the production of nuclear warheads. Chelyabinsk-40 covers 90 square kilometers. All its reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on an open-cycle cooling method. To keep the reactors within safe operating ranges, water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.
Fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction on the first buildings began in November 1945, and was performed by over 70,000 prisoners from 12 labor camps, called "gulags." Less than two years later, physicist Igor Kurchatov, using data provided by Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anochka."
Nuclear waste from the early reactors was stored in large, water-filled tanks, which in turn were emersed in water. The contents were monitored from a control panel in the central complex, but the system was defective. On September 29th, 1957, one of the tanks filled with hot nuclear waste began to dry out, and coolant was not replinished, nor did an alarm sound in the complex. Steam was formed from the remaining water, and pressure built up in the thick, steel vessel. Suddenly the vessel exploded, with a force equivalent to 100 tons of TNT. The roof of the storage building blew sky high, and eighty tons of radiative waste were spewed into atmosphere. Twenty million curies of radioactivity became airborne.
About 90 percent of the radioactivity rained down in the immediate vecinity of the building. The rest formed a kilometer-high radioactive cloud that was carried through Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tumen provinces. Two hundred and seventeen towns and villages with a combined population 270,000 people in the area were contaminated. Virtually all the water supply sources in the area were now toxic.
The responce of the Soviet authorities was first and foremost - secrecy. No one outside of the highest levels of government was informed of the disaster, and the local population was kept in the dark. A belated evacuation of the most highly contaminated area, a village of one thousand called Bolshoe Toshkino, was not completed until 10 days after the accident. Other areas were not evacuated until a year later, after the population had become completely exposed. In the years following the accident, 515 square miles of land was plowed under or removed from agricultural use - the majority was not deemed safe for use until 1978. Eighty square kilometers remain "off limits" even today.
About 10,000 people lived in the 1,000-square-kilometer area contaminated with more than two curies of Strontium-90 per square kilometer. One-fifth of these people eventually showed a reduction of leukocytes in their blood. There are no records of deaths caused by the accident - but this is hardly surprising, given the secrecy surrounding the accident. Any report on the lethal effects on the local ecology was restricted, even from the people most affected by it. Many in the local area noticed their friends, neighbors, and relatives were dying of cancer, and every hospital in the region noticed that birth defects were rampant. But no one could guess why.
As bad as this accident was, it was but one of Chelyabinsk-40's deadly presents to the region's inhabitants. Until 1951 there was no management of radioactive waste at all. For almost three years, high-level nuclear waste was simply dumped directly into the river.
Workers at the complex have been exposed to astonishing levels of radiation. During its first full year of operation in 1949, workers at the Anochka Reactor received an average dose of 93.6 rem -- three times the standards then set by the ministry, where were much higher than US standards. Defense ministry limits for exposure were about 30 rem per year, while US and international standards are now about 5 rem per year, and soon to be lowered to 2 rem. By 1951 the dose received by the average worker at Chelyabinsk-40 had increased to 113.3 rem, with a few receiving up to 400 rem!
A secret study in 1951 found radioactivity carried by the Techa River from Chelyabinsk-40 had spread as far as the Arctic Ocean - though, unfortunately for the inhabitants, 99% remained within the first 35 kilometers downstream. This discovery prompted a change in dumping policy: the Techa and its floodlands were excluded from human use, some inhabitants were evacuated, and others were supplied with water from other sources.
A reservoir was created to hold this radioactive water, though plant wastes continued to be discharged into Lake Karachay. The lake, which has no outlet, quickly turned into a toxic bog, and eventually accumulated 120 million curies of the long-lived radionuclides Cesium-137 and Strontium-90. By comparison, the Chernobyl accident released only one million curies of these isotopes.
In 1967, Lake Karachay dried out, and its nuclear sludge was carried away by the wind and settled on farmland, contaminating about 18,000 square kilometers. Today, radioactivity in the ground water has migrated two to three kilometers from the lake. A person standing on the lake shore near the area where wastes are discharged from the plant would receive about 600 roentgens of radiation, a lethal dose, in an hour. The lake is now being filled with hollow concrete blocks, rock, and soil to reduce the dispersion of radioactivity.
The Techa River was originally cordoned off with a wire fence and people were forbidden to fish in it, or to pick mushrooms and berries or cut hay nearby. Today, the shattered remains of the fence rust by the riverside and regulations are widely ignored by the population. There are 400 million cubic meters of radioactive water in open reservoirs along the river. Fish in one reservoir are reported to be "100 times more radioactive than normal."
Russia's Nuclear Power Ministry claims that it has found the money and the cure for the consequences of these and other Soviet-era nuclear disasters: Russia would receive billions of dollars for accepting spent nuclear fuel from abroad for long-term storage.
In June 1999, the Nuclear Power Ministry and a U.S.-based company, Non-Proliferation Trust (NPT), signed a letter of intent. According to the letter, Russia would accept at least 10,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from Switzerland, South Korea, and Taiwan for storage for at least 40 years. For its services, Russia would charge between $1,000 and $2,000 per kilogram of spent fuel - much cheaper than other countries which store and reprocess foreign fuel. Great Britain, for example, charges between $5,000 and $7,000 per kilogram of radioactive material.
All in all, this business could bring Russia anywhere between $10 billion and $20 billion. Out of this amount, the ministry says it plans to spend $200 million on various environmental programs.
The plan has met with controversy - the nuclear fuel business will exacerbate the region's problems and turn the country into a nuclear waste dump. The Russian government has never specified what kind of environmental activities it is planning to finance with the money it would receive from the long-term storage.
According to the Norwegian-based environmental group Bellona, $200 million is an insignificant amount of money when compared to the scale of environmental catastrophy near Chelyabinsk alone. Moreover, the ministry is more than likely to spend its newfound wealth on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel in order to use it in its own nuclear reactors. Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has already admitted that he views the storage business as a way of financing Russia's nuclear military development, and that some of the money will be spent on upgrading nuclear warheads.
In fact, there is every reason for Bellona's pessimism. In 1995, a Cray supercomputer was purchased by the Mayak company which runs Chelyabinsk. The purchase was over the objections of many US congressmen who feared its use in advanced weapons design. After receiving assurances from the White House, and several personal briefings by Vice President Al Gore, the representatives relented and allowed Mayak to acquire the computer in order to "assist them with modeling patterns of polution." In 1998 the Russian government admitted that the computer had found its way to the warhead design facility at Chelyabinsk-70. Curiously, there was little reported about this in the US press.
Meanwhile, over 15,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is awaiting a permanent solution in Russia, and Chelyabinsk-40 remains "the most toxic place on the planet."
How do the deformity rates compare with other regions of the former USSR?
I agree with your view of US bomb testing. Very little protection was offered even though some actually knew what the results would be.
Try reading up on the Nevada Test Site as well just upwind from Las Vegas. They had 928 tests there, with 828 underground and 100 above ground on towers or in the air.
I believe they really knew what would happen but ignored it. I was in the Air Force at that time and I knew but most ignored the results. The mission was the important issue.
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