Mayak area- Radiation levels last fall 1,000 times above normal

Radiation levels near this Siberian village were 1,000 times above normal last fall. But no one worried much, LA Times, By SABRA AYRES, FEB 16, 2018 sabra.ayres@latimes.com, KHUDAIBERDYNSK, RUSSIA “…. this Siberian landscape on the edge of the Ural Mountains bore the brunt of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. On Sept. 29, 1957, decades before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima entered the lexicon of landmark nuclear disasters, a buried cache of liquid radioactive waste from Mayak exploded. More than a quarter-million people were exposed to radiation, and nearly two dozen villages, home to more than 10,000 people, had to be vacated forever.

From March 1949 to November 1951, environmental activists have learned, radioactive waste was poured directly into the nearby Techa River, and nearby lakes were inundated with pollution as well.

The Soviet government kept the accident secret until 1976, when a dissident published an article about it in New Scientist magazine. By that time, thousands of people who had remained living in the area around the plant had fallen ill with cancer or given birth to children with birth defects…….

over the last few months, residents here have been reminded that the threat posed by Mayak, operated inside an officially “closed” city that is off limits to most outsiders, has never really gone away.

In October, European radiation safety agencies detected a cloud containing a radioactive isotope, ruthenium-106, that could be traced to somewhere near Mayak.

The Russian government and its nuclear agency issued a series of denials. Then on Nov. 21, nearly two months after the French and German safety agencies said they had first detected the cloud over Europe, Roshydromet, Russia’s meteorological agency, confirmed that levels of ruthenium-106 had been recorded in late September at levels almost 1,000 times higher than normal in Argayash and 440 times higher in Novogorny, two frequent testing spots within 10 miles of Mayak.

That meant alarming levels of radiation… halfway between Argayash and Novogorny, on the road to Ozersk, the closed city…….

Rusatom, the Russian state nuclear energy company that owns Mayak, continues to deny that its facility could be the source of the cloud that drifted over Europe in the fall.

Test samples from Mayak showed “no presence of ruthenium-106,” a Russian interagency investigative commission said in a December report, suggesting that the emissions could have come from a satellite that burned as it fell from the sky.

The French nuclear safety agency rejected that hypothesis, saying there was no record of a satellite falling to Earth during the period of the radioactive cloud’s detection over Europe.

Still, Russian officials seem determined to dispel any fears. Shortly after the news broke of the unusual levels of ruthenium-106, Chelyabinsk’s head oncologist, Andrei Vazhenin, said there was no public health danger; ruthenium-106, he said, isn’t a “pure carcinogenic.”

He had a suggestion for anyone who was worried about their health: They should stay indoors, he said, and “watch football and drink beer.” http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-russia-mayak-20180216-story.html

February 17, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, Russia

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