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| Russia |
| Hunting nuclear waste dumped in Moscow |
| 2004-08-11 |
| All of Russia's Soviet-era pigeons have yet to come home and roost. The true impact of incompetent and inept handling of these dangerous materials will be reflected in anomalously high cancer rates and birth defects for decades to come. This is the true legacy of communism. C. J. Chivers/NYT NYT Fallout of arms race hits close to home Wednesday, August 11, 2004 MOSCOW The radiation experts arrived at Viktor Avram's auto repair shop last month, appearing beside the wall separating the shop from an enormous factory next door. The men warned Avram to take care where he strolled. "They told me I could walk on the road," he recalled, nodding toward a dirt track that descends to the Moscow River. "But they said I should stay to the left. To the right is radiation." Avram works beside a disquieting legacy of the early years of the nuclear arms race, a large radioactive waste site inside a city of 11 million people. In the territory of the Soviet Union the work of finding and recovering radioactive waste does not go on solely near the plutonium-producing reactors in Siberia or the Urals and on the test range in Kazakhstan where Moscow's first atomic bomb was detonated in 1949. It also proceeds in the midst of daily life in Moscow - near offices, factories, train stations, highways and homes. It is a result of the peculiar history of a rushed Soviet effort to tease secrets from the atom. Every country with atomic programs has been left with the difficult task of recovering the byproducts and waste. But the Soviet Union, under orders from Stalin, undertook extensive nuclear research in its most populated and central place, its capital. "The program of creating the nuclear bomb, the atom bomb, started in Moscow," said Sergei Dmitriyev, general director of the Moscow region's branch of Radon, an arm of the Russian government charged with locating, retrieving and securing radiological waste. Radon works to undo the consequences of an incautious time, when researchers, working in totalitarian secrecy and with only an incomplete understanding of radiation's dangers, built a network of institutes and factories with little planning for dealing with the discarded material. These sites left behind all manner of radiation-emitting waste; more than 1,200 abandoned sources have been retrieved in Moscow over the years, according to Alexander Barinov, chief engineer of Radon's Moscow branch. Moscow's own development made matters worse. Some radioactive material piled up at factories or laboratories. Much was hastily dumped in forests that, at the time, were outside the city limits. Then Moscow grew, overtaking its outskirts and sending down roots into illicit radioactive dumps. |
| Posted by:Zenster |
| #3 No, nothing new, BigEd, but still something insufficient numbers of people are aware of. Communism has usually had many "hidden costs" which are most often footed by the lowest ranking members of their regimes. Socialists need this fact |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-11 17:00 |
| #2 and central Nevada... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-08-11 12:03 |
| #1 This is nothing new in and of itself. The Russians are just admitting it. Remember, there was a story some years ago about the higher than normal cancer rates in St George, Utah, downwind from the Nevada open-air Nuke tests performed in the 40's and 50's. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-08-11 11:30 |