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| Russia |
| Environmentalists lash out at Russia on anniversary of Hiroshima bomb |
| 2004-08-07 |
| Despite its WTF? title, the article has merit. Fri Aug 6, 1:11 PM ET MOSCOW (AFP) - Environmentalists accused Russia of treating victims of nuclear catastrophes as experimental subjects, saying hundreds of thousands of Russians still lived in irradiated zones. Greenpeace blamed the Russian government for failing to evacuate the hundreds of thousands of people who still live in the country's numerous regions hit by nuclear accidents. "According to a federal decree, thousands of towns and villages and hundreds of thousands of people are still officially situated in areas that were exposed to nuclear radiation," said Greenpeace's Vladimir Chuprov Friday. This remains one of Russia's dirty little secrets. America's superfund toxic waste sites look like nursery school flower beds compared to many of Russia's old Soviet-era radiological and chemical dumps. Baikonour launch emissions and re-entering booster components have poisoned vast areas. Siberia has few sights more spectacular than the soaring peaks, thick forests and fast-flowing rivers of the Altai region - but they come complete with chunks of rockets streaking across the sky before crashing into the world's largest space junkyard. As dramatic as the rockets' lift-off can be, their booster engines' free fall to earth is likened by locals who have seen the show to "an angry red eye in the night", "a comet" and, on impact, "a small earthquake". Having put up with the downpour for decades, local people are sounding the alarm at an increase in cases of cancer and other illnesses in the valleys bordering the drop zone. In particular, they fear heptyl, the highly toxic fuel used in the huge Proton rockets that sends their second-stage engines shattering into remote terrain north of Mongolia in what are known as Fall Areas 310, 326 and 327, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Western experts describe heptyl as "supertoxic, nerve-paralysing and carcinogenic", deadlier than phosgene gas and a cause of hepatitis, immune system problems, blood disease and mental illness. Yellow patches on pastureland, raging fires on the hillside and high concentrations of the chemical that remain in the permafrost on mountain tops for up to 30 years are all part of heptyl's legacy in the Altai. The group gathered in front of the Japanese embassy in Moscow to mark the 59th anniversary of the 1945 Hiroshima nuclear bombing and to protest Russia's nuclear policy. Instead, the group claimed, Russia is carrying out research to study the impact of radiation on people. Greenpeace cited the example of the village of Muslyumovo, in Russia's Chelyabinsk region in the Urals, where thousands of people continue to live after a site containing nuclear waste exploded in 1957. "What can inhabitants think when they constantly see people in white coats taking samples of the water and the air, people who don't have enough money to go to hospital or buy medicine," he demanded. Perhaps the inhabitants should think that Russia's government has yet to abandon their elitist mentality which has always characterized it from its earliest history. He said locals received between 40 and 200 rubles (about one and seven dollars) compensation per month for having been exposed to radiation. Greenpeace also criticised a proposed 60-billion-dollar (50-billion-euro) programme to build 60 new reactors in the next 20 or 30 years. Given the track record for Chernobyl, a large degree of concern might be in order. The group said the Siberian regions of Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk were most affected by radiation, along with Russian areas near the border with Ukraine. Ukraine suffered the world's worst nuclear accident after a nuclear power plant exploded in the city of Chernobyl in 1986, killing 30 people immediately and irradiating thousands. Although from a rabid ecological site, here is a sampler of Soviet environmental disasters: 1957: September 29, 2000 was the 43th anniversary of the terrible explosion at Mayak facility, for the whole nuclear history of USSR it's the only accident that can be compared to Chernobyl catastrophe. As consequence of Mayak explosion tens of thousands of people were resettled from contaminated areas, many thousands died as direct consequence of contamination (a tank at the plant containing radioactive waste exploded, releasing several million curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere - Thousands of square kilometers were polluted.) ... Chelyabinsk (Mayak) USSR located its nuclear bomb production at one site, - "pork" not being a factor in the more centralized nation. During the cold war Russia routinely dumped radioactive materials in the Techa River. Three disasters with Mayak's nuclear waste--in 1946, 1957 and 1967—have caused cumulative damages comparable to, and probably worse than, the Chernobyl meltdown. Even today, some 100 million curies of radioactivity, including six Chernobyls' worth of strontium 90 and cesium 137, remain in Mayak's Lake Karachay, which scientists from the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council have called "the most polluted spot on Earth." The groundwater is already contaminated, and the area is subject to Cyclones and earthquakes that could further spread the radioactivity. Rivaling Chelyabinsk is the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia, near the border with Norway. During the Cold War, the harbors of Kola were home to the Soviet Union's Northern Fleet, which dumped used submarine reactors, spent fuel and other nuclear debris into the sea with abandon. The waters now contain two-thirds of all the nuclear waste dumped into the world's oceans. "More than 1,200 incidents have taken place at Russian nuclear reactors, according to co-author Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of Ecodefense! and director of Anti-nuclear Campaign of the Socio-Ecological Union EMPHASIS ADDED Russia's legacy of environmental rape will haunt them for decades to come. Only the vastness of their Asian territory prevents these catastrophes from taking a more immediate toll. |
| Posted by:Zenster |
| #3 The Soviets spent a lot of time and energy rerouting rivers to irrigate their farmland. Why didn't they build dams and hydroeletric projects in the process? Great question, yank. I'd wager it had something to do with the cost ratio of labor and materials. The labor was probably much cheaper. Here's an old Soviet joke: Aparatchik: Comrade Commander, the canal excavation is off schedule! Commander: Well then, arrest another thousand people! There was an overabundance of strong backs in the Soviet Union, just not strong This reminds me very little of how (paraphrasing) Gorbachev told off an audience that was grilling him over shortages of government supplied bread. He replied, "So, how many of you should I arrest in order to bake the bread on time?" Anecdotes like that sketch out the current form of The disregard for human life that fascism breeds (let's face it, Nazism, Communism, Theocracy, [Non-Democratic] Socialism, Dictatorship, Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism are all essentially facism and nothing else), and therefore self-defeating. Atomic Conspiracy, most excellent article! Your link is precisely the sort of information I come to Rantburg for. No better proof of why America needs to shift towards high reliability (safety + security) nuclear power generation. While fusion is more desirable, we need to go with slightly-upgraded conventional technology to begin weaning ourselves off the oil teat. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-07 10:22:48 PM |
| #2 The Soviets spent a lot of time and energy rerouting rivers to irrigate their farmland. Why didn't they build dams and hydroeletric projects in the process? I know they probably loved the idea of nukes and nuclear knowledge and all of that but perhaps some dam building practice would have helped them win projects in the third world (aka Egypt). |
| Posted by: yank 2004-08-07 8:45:01 PM |
| #1 Google "Three Mile Island Catastrophe" and compare the returns to those for any of the above incidents. What would be the response if American industries dumped over a thousand tons of uranium, and twice that much thorium, into the environment every year? Exactly that is really happening, year in and year out, but it remains unknown because it is not the nuclear industry that is involved. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-08-07 7:55:05 PM |