nuclear-news

NUCLEAR LEGACY

NUCLEAR LEGACY Soviet nuclear tests still haunt Kazakhs canada.com By Maria Golovnina, ReutersJune 25, 2009 “…………………………

Moscow tested about 500 bombs here between 1949 and 1989, exposing 1.5 million people like Abishev to extreme levels of radiation and contaminating an area roughly the size of Germany.

The Soviet Union conducted its last test here in 1989 and the facility was officially closed in 1991 as the Soviet collapse brought the global nuclear arms race to an end.

Twenty years on, the Semipalatinsk test range is silent, a steppe wind blowing gently through the abandoned site dotted by ruined concrete buildings and giant hunks of rusty metal.

But hundreds of thousands of residents, subjected to the equivalent of 20,000 Hiroshima bombs during 40 years of Russian experiments, are still sickened by the legacy of their past.

The incidence of cancer, mental illness and fertility problems in this region is among the highest in Kazakhstan, a vast Central Asian nation west of China, and infant mortality is five times higher than in other regions………………………………scientists say more needs to be done to study the effect of 40 years of tests on the people. It is an issue still little understood by science, and researchers say mutations are already being passed down from parents to their children.

“The biggest issue is not so much those who experienced the explosions directly but the impact on their children and grandchildren,” said Mikhail Panin, an environmental scientist who is researching the matter in the Semipalatinsk area.

NUCLEAR LEGACY

June 26, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Kazakhstan, wastes | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear wastes, radiation, radioactive