Chelyabinsk Region residents still being irradiated 50 years on
- UPDATE: Accident at Mayak leads to apparently contained radiation leak, and seriously injures one worker
- Chelyabinsk region commemorates the Kyshtym disaster, Chernobyl’s secret older brother
- Russian government denies to high court it plans to build nuclear plant that is already approved for construction
- Fate of Southern Urals Nuclear Power Plant to be decided in Russia Supreme Court
- Russia’s president looks to eliminate social inequality – or does he?
- Resettling Muslyumovo to a Potemkin Village not a solution to ongoing ecological tragedy
- Muslyumovo: A look inside
- Radioactive material leaks during transport at Mayak - no one hurt, says plant
- UPDATE: Muslyumovo residents remain Russia’s nuclear guinea pigs
- Residents of contaminated village to be resettled across river from former dwelling
- Techa-2006 competition hit by legal problems and environmentalists' doubts
- Duma demands an end to nuclear reprocessing at Mayak
- Tender to Solve the Mayak Problem
- Radiation pollution trial against Mayak plant begins
- Revoked License Grinds Mayak to a Halt
- Duma Deputy Mitrokhin to Fight for Evacuation of Mayak Area
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The incident – which has only been outdone in the history of nuclear power by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 – is known officially as the Kyshtym accident. But that is misleading, a hold over twist of the Soviet nuclear tongue to disguise the location of where the accident actually took place: Ozersk, the secret town were the Stalin built his first atomic bomb, and home to Mayak, the facility that made it possible. Kyshtym was just the only nearby town that was on a map, so it made sense to the Soviet nuclear machine to say the accident emanated from there – much to the bewilderment of Kyshtym residents.
The village of Muslyumovo was directly in the path of the fallout of the 1957 explosion of a container holding highly radioactive waste at the Mayak Chemical Combine. Some 20,000 square kilometres settled by 270,000 people was left radioactively contaminated. While maintaining secrecy about the cause, the Soviet government resettled the populations of many of the small villages just inside the southern Siberian portion of Russia that surround Mayak, in the Chelyabinsk Region.
But in Muslyumovo’s case, only the part of the inhabitants – the ethinic Russian ones – were immediately resettled. The remainder – Muslim Tarters - were left to fend for themselves.
Today, the combine, which reprocesses some 200 tons of spent nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium per year, continues to dump liquid radioactive waste into surrounding water bodies. The waste eventually ends up in the Techa River, which runs right through Muslyumovo. Unaware of the dangers in the tiny Muslim enclave, but fully conscious of the ravages brought on her home in the war-torn separatist Muslim enclave of Chechnya, Dashubik Menzhayeva took her two children and moved 1,000 kilometres Northeast to Muslyumovo to live with relatives.
“When I moved here in 1996, I didn’t know there was radiation here. But even if I had, I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” said Dashubik.
Dashubik, whose legs went numb from a nerve disorder after the bombardment of Grozny, the Chechen capital, moved in with her sister in Muslyumovo.
The smattering of Chechens who have moved there, fleeing the genocidal Kremlin-driven violence of their region that has been raging since 1994, would seemingly fit in with the Muslim population of Muslyumovo. But the Menzhayevas nonetheless report a feeling of alienation from their fellow residents.
Dashubik’s sister, Ayznat, and her husband have lived in the village since 1987, when they moved there after they graduated from vocational school. They have three children of their own, and their youngest is in the third grade here.
“We didn’t hear anything about the (radiation) dangers until my sister came,” said Ayznat in an interview in her home with Bellona Web.
“We didn’t know anything in 1987 and thought we had lucked out – there was no work in Chechnya then. If we had known, we would have left immediately. My husband worked on construction sites all around the region. We had our choice of places to settle.”
The village of Muslyumovo is still inhabited primarily by Muslim Tartars and is located on the banks of the contaminated Techa River. About 10 percent of the locals are Russian.
Muslyumovo has stood for 250 year. In 1950, around 8,000 people lived here – by 1990 only 4,500 remained. Today that number has fallen to 2,500.
The village residents only began hearing about what had happened at Mayak in the 1990s in the post-Glasnost era. And only then did they start hearing about what goes on at the Combine. Before that, the government had kept its lips sealed about the secret nuclear installation where Russia developed its first atomic bomb. After the accident in 1957 – which was topped only by another Soviet nuclear disaster, Chernobyl in 1986 – many villages in the area were evacuated.
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| Ismagilova'a class. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
“They told us – they found oil on the other side of the river, and they moved your neighbors there to drill it,” recalled Gulchara Ismagilova from the village of Tatar Karabolka.
Ismagilova and all of her classmates in 1957 and 1958 were put to work on the colossal job of gathering the radioactive harvest that was later interred. Of her 33 classmates, only 13 are still alive today. The rest have died of cancer.
Techa River snake oil
Along the Techa River, which is cordoned off by barbed wire, rumours began to spread. For instance, the talk in Muslyumovo was of a woman who suffered from chronic leg pain, walked across the river, and then her legs stopped hurting.
“I was really suffering from pain, which meant I was a burden to everyone,” said Dashubik. “I found out from neighbours that the river drives out infections. Then I heard something about the river being dangerous, but I still believed out of desperation. So when I was still walking with a cane, I went down to the river, laid down in the water and lied there for about an hour, two hours, three, while my sister and brother and law weren’t home.”
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| On the Geiger counter – 1113 micro-roentgens an hour. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
In the 80s there used to be a children’s boarding school on the banks of the river not far from Dashubik’s home. The background radiation along that part of the river measures a staggering 1,100 micro-roentgens per hour. A normal background reading is 20 micro-roentgens an hour. Along other parts of the river, the background radiation level soars to 20,000 micro-roentgens per hour. Most of the radiation is buried in the sediment around the river.
“The water there is so clear, gentle and warm as if it had been heated up,” said Dashubik.
“And the rocks in the water are completely black. I lied on those rocks, thinking I was getting better. On the third day, my sister and brother-in-law came home from work earlier than usual and caught me. They really laid into me, saying that on top of everything else, all I needed was radiation poisoning.”
Ayznat did what she could after finding out about the radioactive river.
“When we found out about the radiation, we started to try to stop the kids from swimming there, but try keeping with kids,” she said.
Dashubik suffers from spinal multiple sclerosis, which has only gotten worse since her trips to the river, and now she is confined to a wheelchair. Her condition is considered incurable. But eight years ago in Moscow, doctors began performing cellular transplants along the spinal column with full recovery rates for people in Dashubik’s conditions. The operation costs about EUR 18,000.
“I won’t even ever find a thousand Euros. But if anyone around wants to help,” added Dashubik desperately, “please publish my address: Chelyabinsk Oblast, Kunashaksky Region, Muslyumovo, Ul. Tsentralnaya Usadba, no number, to Menzhayeva, Dashubik Magomedovna.”
“There are probably a million out there like me. I put an ad on the internet, they didn’t send me a kopek, but hope dies last,” she said.
Resettlement
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| Activist Milya Kabirova. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
According to local activist Milya Kabirova, the government-funded resettlement is going piecemeal.
“Now the resettlement is going house by house,” she said. “They give you a new house or money for your old one, independent of how many people live in it.”
Moreover, Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear power agency, which is responsible for executing the resettlement by the decision of it’s chief, Sergei Kiriyenko, clearly for whatever reason doesn’t want the residents to leave.
For instance, Rosatom inspectors go from house to house in Muslyumovo to see if they are inhabited. If no one is home, the house and the names of its residents are taken off the registry of those to be evacuated, and they loose out on their chance to get their guaranteed million roubles ($33,000) to purchase another home elsewhere.
Kabirova is on of the few who managed to get her government payment and was able to relocate to the city of Chelyabinsk, the largest city in the southern Urals with a population of just over a million residents.
With the million roubles, she and her husband were able to purchase a one room flat on the industrial outskirts of town in an apartment building that could more accurately be described as a dormitory with its long, characterless common corridors.
“The residents have two choices – take the million, with which you can only buy a room, or move into a house built by Rosatom in so called Novomuslyumovo,” or New Muslyumovo, Kabirova said.
But money changes everything.
“Many residents of the village are afraid to have anything to do with that kind of money and decide to move,” said Greenpeace Russia’s Vladimir Chuprov.
Novomuslyumovo is in practically the same spot as its namesake, where there is no grazing land for cattle, besides the banks of the Techa River. Moreover, in May 2007, the region’s chief health official put a ban on drilling wells in the area because alpha-radiation from plutonium and beta-radiation from tritium and strontium-90 exceeded norms by twofold.
Both Muslyumovo and the promised alternative to its contamination, Novomuslyumovo, are located on contaminated territory.
“I don’t have my own home I have been left at a broken trough,” said Dashubik. Hers is a familiar story that is repeated by many in the village.
Activists Kabirova sees the Rosatom system of house trading and million-rouble payments as essentially flawed.
“Can you really trade a house for a house? In one house lives one person and he gets a million – in another house live two families, two or three children, and for them for everything the same million,” said Kabirova.
“These are citizens of Russia, who lived through tragedy, came here and, what, now throw them overboard?”
An experiment on human 'lab rats'?
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| Memorial Alley. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
Environmentalists and local activists can’t comprehend the stubbornness with which Rosatom strives to resettle people from one contaminated tract of land to another piece of contaminated land in Novomuslyumovo.
Many have come to the conclusion that the absolute inefficacy of the plans proposed by Rosatom are part of a larger experiment to measure the effects of long term radiation exposure. The yearly medical inventories that are taken of local residents – wherein doctors don’t even disclose what they are looking for, let alone tell the residents what they have found – would seem to support that theory.
Add to the ludicrous conditions in Novomuslyumovo, which are just as radioactively dangerous as those in Muslyumovo, and the theory acquires more credibility. It would not be the first time Russia carried out radiation experiments on living humans. Military rotations in and out of the Semipalatinsk atomic bomb testing range in Soviet Kazakhstan were revealed in the early 90s to be experiments using humans as lab rats to determine damage inflicted by nuclear weapons.
“Why invest money in nothing?” We waned a compacted resettlement closer to Chelyabinsk, where people could find work and make money to live on. The refused us. Just maybe it’s some kind of experiment, huh?” said Kabirova.
“If it is an experiment, tell us. And suggest a worthy payment to people,” she added.
All residents of Muslyumovo are in a database kept by the Ural Centre of Applied Sciences of Radiation Medicine, where doctors refer to them as a “unique cohort.” In fact, the latest book published by the Centre was called “50 Years of Observation” – not “treatment” but “observation.”
“In Soviet times, the most important condition for local doctors was to be able to predict how radiation would work in conditions of nuclear war. And today, many doctors think with this outmoded mentality,” said Chuprov.
Muslyumovo resident Venera Vafina noted that December will see the closing of the local hospital. “After all, people get sick here, their relatives are dying,” she noted dryly.
Not far from Muslyumovo is the so-called Memorial Alley. For each victim of cancer, a tree is planted along the small trail.
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| Gulchara Ismagilova. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
“In each family, at least three people have died from cancer,” said Ismagilova of Tartar Karabolka, who has for many years worked as a physician’s assistant.
“The government and the atomic industry still hasn’t made any apology to us. In 50 years,” she continued.
“They all say they forged the nuclear shield. Now they want to build a nuclear power plant here. What kind of nuclear plant would you get if they still haven’t tied these ends together?”
Rashid Alimov wrote and reported from Muslyumovo, Tatar Karabolka and Chelyabinsk, Russia. Charles Digges wrote and translated from Oslo. This article is the first in a series.
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| (Rashid Alimov / Bellona) |
