nuclear-news

Up a small hill from the Moskvorechye commuter station in southeastern Moscow, there is a hole in a green corrugated fence. Radioactive warning signs, fly-posted by a group of local activists, are a clue to the mystery on the other side. 

Equipped with rubber boots, air masks and radiation counters, a motley crew is carrying out an inspection of the radioactive waste dumps behind the fence, on the perimeter of Moscow’s decommissioned Polymetal factory.  

It’s part of a last-gasp attempt to stop local authorities from building a bridge and eight-lane motorway across part of the site – controversial plans, the activists say, that run the risk of releasing buried radioactive material into the air and adjacent Moskva river. 

• The new evidence appears to directly contradict the official position that construction of bridge and highway would avoid any contaminated areas.
• In among the human-made forest of bare trees, decommissioned factory bricks and reinforced concrete, at five spots in the area covered by projected road plans, radiation peaked at between five and 15 times above natural background radiation. In one area about 150 yards away from the proposed construction work, counters registered 9.2 µSv/h (microSieverts per hour), or 45 times above normal levels. This is higher than most spots in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (generally 1-7 µSv/h).

  “The builders say there is nothing here, but we see with our own eyes everything is very bad,” says Ivan Kondratiev, a local organiser whose father lives close to the proposed highway.

• “These levels of radiation on their own aren’t going to kill you. But they tell you what lies underneath, and what will happen when building work unsettles it.”

  Anton Kulbachevsky, head of the Moscow department for the environment, says he does not believe the Greenpeace claims.

  “No matter how much I’ve come across Greenpeace, its very rare that what they are saying is backed up by real evidence.”

• The secret garden near Moskvorechye station is the legacy of 1950s and 1960s, the earliest years of the nuclear arms race. That was a time when Russia looked to reverse, in Joseph Stalin’s words, “fifty or a hundred years” of backwardness in ten years. Achieving that giant leap meant cutting corners on nuclear safety, the dangers of which were not completely understood at the time…….
• For many decades, the activity of the Polymetals factory remained a state secret. The full extent of what it produced will likely never be revealed. But we do know it was primarily concerned with extracting uranium and thorium from ores. It disposed of thousands of tonnes of waste products from these processes in areas adjacent to the factory.

  The Polymetals factory was not the only plant in Russia – or the world – to disperse of radioactive waste so incautiously. The Soviet network of institutes and factories left hundreds of such dumps across the country. But the volume of byproducts, and the tens of thousands now living nearby, make the plant’s legacy particularly troublesome.

  In 1999, Radon, the agency of the Russian government responsible for securing radiological waste, made a major survey of the site. That inspection revealed 40 separate zones of contamination, and authorities immediately embarked on an operation to make the area safe. But they stopped short of a full decontamination operation. In a 2006 interview, Alexander Barinov, Radon’s chief engineer for Moscow, explained that removing all the contaminated soil was “impossible”. Instead, engineers chose to lay new soil every year to keep the waste buried.  …….

• Pavel Tarasov, a municipal deputy for the Communist Party backing local protests against the highway, says authorities had presided over a “cover-up”.

  “They know about the radiation danger, but the only thing that matters is their multibillion-dollar project,” he says. “They can’t get the thing through legally, so they are lying.”

  Moscow officials have denied any illegal activity and have promised to continue monitoring the site…….. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-moscow-nuclear-radiation-chernobyl-highway-moscow-a9171991.html