smh.com.au
Nuclear wasteland faces a new threat
Polluted Russia is poised to poison itself further, Craig
Nelson reports from Muslyumovo.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/07/world/world8.html

The Soviet Union paid a high price for breaking up the US monopoly on atomic weapons.

The gently flowing Techa River curving through the southern Urals has been contaminated by five decades of radioactive discharges from a state-run factory that produced most of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

The village of Muslyumovo is 47 kilometres downstream from the plant.

Critics say the Government is going to make a grim situation worse. Legislation to allow the Atomic Energy Ministry to import spent nuclear fuel is speeding through Parliament.

Within months, tonnes of irradiated waste produced by nuclear power plants in Asia and Europe could be bound for storage and reprocessing in a region that doctors and environmentalists already call "the most contaminated area on earth".

For nearly 40 years, the secret factory, known as Mayak, was the heart of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons production. It processed fuel for its first atomic bomb and assembled up to 40 per cent of its nuclear arms stockpile.

From 1949 to 1956, Mayak dumped 76 million cubic metres of toxic nuclear waste into the Techa, according to a joint report by Norwegian and Russian experts. In 1957 a radioactive waste container at the plant exploded, sending a plume over a 1,000-square-kilometre area and exposing more than a quarter-million people to dangerous levels of radiation.

About 10,700 residents of what is now called the "Eastern Ural Radioactive Trace" were moved away. But neither they, nor the so-called "liquidators" recruited to raze their contaminated farms, were given any explanation. It was not until 1989 that the Kremlin admitted an accident occurred.

Today the level of radiation in the river near Muslyumovo is 400 curies, and the amount of radiation still absorbed by the residents of the village is 10 times the internationally acceptable levels, according to regional environmental officials.

Looking back, Lubov Chuchkalova is horrified.

"People swam in the Techa. They washed their clothes in it and they drank from it. Women raved how it made their hair soft," said Chuchkalova, a 42-year-old kindergarten teacher in Muslyumovo who grew up on the banks of the river.

The health effects of the contamination have been devastating, a reality the Russian authorities try to hide. Health records are off limits. In 1992 and again last year, Muslyumovo's 4,500 residents, mostly ethnic Bashkirs, a local Muslim nationality, were transported to a regional hospital for examinations by specialists. They have never been told the test results. Local doctors also refuse to supply them with their medical records.

However, experts quoted in the 1997 Norwegian-Russian study concluded that the region had experienced a 200-500 per cent increase in cases of radiation-related illnesses.

To date, Mayak is responsible for releasing at least 16.7 million curies of radiation into the region's air, soil and water. By comparison, the Chernobyl accident in April 1986 released 5.8 million curies.

The lower house of parliament, or State Duma, recently approved legislation that would multiply the 15,000 tonnes of nuclear waste Russia already has in temporary storage and keep Mayak solvent.

Under the legislation, the Atomic Energy Ministry would import and store up to 21,000 tonnes of spent fuel, most of which would end up at Mayak, where it would be recycled for resale abroad or for use in Russia's nuclear plants.

The bill's authors, which include the brother of one of the ministry's deputy ministers, say Russia could earn up to $US20 billion ($36.3 billion) over 10 years by entering the $US100-billion-a-year nuclear waste business.

But the residents of cities and villages near Mayak oppose the plan, saying it would turn their already benighted land into a nuclear waste dump.

Under a remedial 1993 law, the inhabitants of Muslyumovo are supposed to receive food rations due to traces of plutonium-239, strontium-90 and cesium-137 found in their food chain. However, no supplies have arrived in months, so residents must rely on food from gardens cultivated in contaminated soil.

In an extraordinary political initiative, environmental groups around the country collected 2.5 million signatures for a petition demanding a public vote on the issue. But what would have been the first national referendum ever in Russia was quashed last month, when the Central Elections Commission rejected the petition on technical grounds.

"Practically speaking, we are now powerless," said Natalie Mironova, president of the Movement for Nuclear Safety, a group that gathered the signatures of 57,000 citizens. "We live in another country now. We live in 'Nuclear Wasteland'."

The plan still has to clear two more votes in the Duma, pass the upper chamber of Parliament and be signed by President Vladimir Putin. Easy passage is expected.