MUSLYUMOVO, RUSSIA – A man dressed in gray cotton-padded pants and jacket and a tatty rabbit hat lies on his stomach very still, pressing his face into a hole in the ice. A warm spring here means the Techa River never freezes, forcing fish to come up for air right in this spot, where he can grab them with his bare hands. Hearing two visitors come down from the road, the man gets up to look. "That's a Geiger counter," he says, noting the device they're carrying. "You looking for radiation? I heard it's all gone away."
It has not. The Geiger counter gives a reading of 154 microrads per hour, roughly seven times the maximum safe dose of background radiation. When the snow melts away, background radiation in some places along the shore will measure over 1,000.
The village of Muslyumovo is less than 50 miles from Mayak ("Beacon"), the world's oldest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which has been dumping liquid radioactive waste into the river since the late 1940s. Accidents regularly shake Mayak–at least five occurred in the 1990s–but the best-known one is the 1957 waste-container explosion, one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time. About 10,000 people were evacuated from the contaminated area that year, and tens of thousands more probably should have been. But a lethal combination of ignorance, poverty, and official indifference keeps people living on the land and feeding off it–with nightmarish consequences.
Despite the alarming record of operational mishaps and regulatory laxness, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, wants authority to import thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants in Europe and Asia. The ministry envisions earning billions of dollars–money that could expand its already considerable political clout and finance construction of new nuclear power plants. The far-fetched plan, which calls for the construction of 40 new reactors in the next 20 years – an impossible undertaking even for a wealthy country – has proved popular with Russian officials, and the parliament is set to give its OK this month.
Most of that spent nuclear fuel would end up at Mayak. Up until now, Russia has by and large banned such imports of spent nuclear fuel; the relatively little that it does import, along with domestic fuel, uses virtually all capacity at Mayak and the two other radioactive-waste storage facilities in Siberia. If the Minatom plan is approved, Mayak would reprocess some of the spent nuclear fuel, yielding plutonium. Next, the atomic energy ministry would construct a new nuclear power station next to the plant, employing a so-called breeder reactor, which both uses and extracts plutonium-based fuel.
Ignoring public opinion. There's opposition from the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, the State Committee for Atomic Oversight (GAN). Minatom's response? It is pushing for legislation to curtail the powers of the safety agency, which environmental activists say is already exceedingly permissive.
Minatom – and its allies in the parliament and the Kremlin – are prevailing in the face of opinion polls showing that 70 percent to 90 percent of Russians oppose importing radioactive waste. Last fall, environmentalists gathered 3 million signatures in support of holding a referendum – an unprecedented grass-roots success in a country where such organizing efforts are rare. But the Central Election Commission threw out just enough votes to quash the initiative. Complains former presidential adviser Alexei Yablokov, one of the organizers, "If we had collected 5 million signatures, they would just have thrown out that many more."
In the villages around the Mayak plant, opposition often gives way to tired indifference. "We are worried about feeding our kids, and we really can't give much thought to all this radiation stuff," says Maria Akhmadeyeva, who teaches elementary school in Muslyumovo. "We are soaked with this nuclear stuff anyway," adds her colleague, Russian language teacher Guzal Yalalova.
"I guess the region needs this new nuclear power plant," acknowledges Muslyumovo Mayor Gaynulla Kamalov. "But no one's promising us any of the benefits." Indeed, in the past, funds earmarked for residents of the contaminated region were consistently siphoned off. An early 1990s deal, in which the United States bought Russian plutonium, was supposed to provide $5.9 million for environmental relief in the region contaminated by Mayak; in fact, according to a General Accounting Office report, only $158,000 was used for the specified purpose: improvements in the local health center. And the medical diagnostic equipment that was purchased has proved a mixed blessing for residents, who still have little money to pay for treatment. Mayor Kamalov, 56, knows all about this: He has had to scrimp, save, and beg to pay for five operations for his now 3-year-old grandson, who was born with several tumors around his chest.
Invisible peril. In this remote Ural Mountains region 1,000 miles east of Moscow, residents live with the bitter consequences of pollution they can neither see, nor taste, nor smell. Gilmenur Karimova recalls the day four years ago that her granddaughter Alina was born with severely deformed legs and five fingers missing. "We cried so much," she says. The family managed to pay for two operations that enabled Alina to walk, but they are terrified at the $600 per finger they have been quoted for the hands. Alina, who makes beautiful ballpoint-pen drawings of mermaids and her mother despite her handicap, believes her fingers will eventually grow out.
The contamination is spreading. An underground reservoir of radioactive waste from Mayak is inching ever closer to a river that will carry it through the region to the Arctic Ocean. An aging dam that blocks the Techa River poses another danger, which GAN warns will grow if more spent fuel is brought to Mayak for reprocessing.
But these are just the most immediate risks from the possible deregulation of the Russian nuclear industry. Other potential nuclear disasters: a dozen very old reactors, including six Chernobyl-type reactors and one reactor in the center of Moscow that happens to be the world's oldest. GAN has tried to shut down these monsters in the past, but Minatom has already said it plans to keep them going–and even to re-launch one Chernobyl-type reactor this spring.
Minatom also hopes to build several fast-neutron breeder reactors, a technology opposed by the United States because it extracts plutonium that could be stolen to make black-market nuclear weapons. The Russians should have their own reasons to reconsider: The one existing Russian breeder reactor, at the Beloyarsk power plant, has had 26 accidents. But in Moscow, the issue seems more about political power and its benefits than about nuclear power.