The Techa River meanders through this tiny village of ramshackle cabins and garden plots on the southern edge of the Ural Mountains, seemingly a source of life for a sleepy farming hamlet that has lived off the land for nearly three centuries.
For decades, villagers swam in the Techa, ate its carp and pike, and grazed their cattle along the banks, unaware that the river had become a conduit for lethal radioactive waste from a Russian plutonium plant upstream.
Today, Russians in the region surrounding the plant get thyroid cancer at nearly twice the nation’s average rate, according to a recent study. The incidence of lung cancer in the Techa region is 70 percent higher than the average for Russia; the rate of colon cancer is 44 percent higher.
“We think of ourselves as mice–laboratory mice,” said Vera Ozhogina, 57, a retired math teacher from Muslyumovo. She blames the plant for the heart disease that killed her 47-year-old husband and now afflicts her 31-year-old daughter.
Located near the source of the Techa River in the closed city of Ozersk, the sprawling Mayak complex once was a vital cog in the Soviet Union’s rush to build up its nuclear arsenal. Mayak produced 73 tons of plutonium from 1948 until 1990, supplying plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb.
Plutonium is one of the world’s deadliest substances; a millionth of a gram is enough to cause cancer. Its half-life is 24,000 years.
Mayak and other weapons production plants that made up the Soviet military complex existed behind a Cold War shroud of secrecy, and the extent of the harm they caused to the environment was not fully disclosed until after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. By the early 1990s it became known that Mayak had dumped more than 20 billion gallons of radioactive waste into the Techa River.
Environmentalists say Mayak has made thousands of Russians in the region sick and believe scores more will fall ill. Victims include Russians who were children when they took part in cleanup work after a 1957 tank explosion that released twice the radiation associated with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. And they include children who today eat fish from the Techa and berries from contaminated fields.
Mayak, which stopped producing weapons-grade nuclear material in 1990 and now reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, continues to dump radioactive waste into the Techa, Russian prosecutors say. As a result, prosecutors opened a criminal case against the company last month, a rare move in a country that has a history of hushing up environmental disasters.
Villagers in Muslyumovo and the rest of the Techa River valley doubt the government’s actions will amount to much.
“We feel any efforts now are useless,” said Roza Valayeva, 53, of Muslyumovo, who had a uterine tumor removed in 1994. Her 67-year-old father died of lung cancer; skin cancer claimed her 43-year-old brother. A grandson’s teeth have begun to crumble, she says.
“This has gone on for decades, and we don’t believe anyone anymore,” Valayeva said. “We cannot start from scratch somewhere else, so we’re trapped. We cannot leave–and we cannot survive here.”
Environmental secrets
Valayeva’s skepticism is understandable, given Russia’s legacy of environmental neglect.
Aside from Mayak, major Cold War radioactivity discharges at weapons manufacturing facilities in the central Siberian cities of Seversk and Zheleznogorsk were kept secret for years by Soviet authorities. Today, dozens of submarines containing nuclear fuel rust in ports along the Barents Sea and the country’s Pacific coast, awaiting dismantling.
Just weeks after he was inaugurated in 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin abolished Russia’s environmental and forest protection agencies, assigning their functions to the Ministry of Natural Resources, which regulates mining and oil exploration. Russia also has aggressively pursued a program to import the world’s spent nuclear fuel, an effort environmentalists warn would turn the country into the world’s nuclear waste dump.
“Since Putin came to power, state environmental bodies have been systematically dissolved,” said Vladimir Slivyak, head of the Moscow-based Ecodefense environmentalist group. “How can the system work if government officials responsible for the environment report directly to those who manage, utilize and eventually destroy natural resources?”
Built in 1946 deep within the birch forests at the foot of the southern Ural Mountains, Mayak was rushed into operation with untested technology and design flaws, according to a 1997 article written by Russian and Finnish scientists for the journal Environment.
One design flaw forced workers to clean by hand the filters that separated plutonium from other, unneeded radioactive isotopes. Other flaws caused critical pieces of equipment to explode, causing spills that filled Mayak’s radioactive waste storage tanks. Facility officials faced a crucial decision: Shut down the plant or dump radioactive waste somewhere else.
“The immediate solution, of course, was simply to use the Techa River as a dumping ground,” the scientists wrote.
A deadly decision
For 20 months in 1950 and 1951, Mayak dumped into the river deadly radioactive waste that should have been stored in special tanks. Mayak workers were sent to the river to take samples for tests. Saviya Zubareva, then 21, was one of them. Up until the ninth month of her pregnancy, she waded knee-deep in the river every day, wearing boots, overalls and gloves that Mayak never changed. Protective masks that the plant gave Zubareva and other Mayak workers were replaced infrequently.
Zubareva and her co-workers wore gauges that measured the levels of radioactivity they were receiving while in the water, but when they had reached the maximum dose at midday, their supervisors told them to keep working. Zubareva took two months off when her daughter was born, then went back to work taking samples for five more years before quitting in 1960.
“We were young and stupid, and no one ever explained to us the danger,” said Zubareva, 75.
While she worked, Zubareva suffered severe headaches “that I thought I would die from.” Doctors later confirmed that her daughter, Galina, suffered severe health problems from being exposed to radioactivity as a fetus. As a teenager, Galina’s bones became brittle and frequently fractured. She worked at the plant’s cafeteria until she turned 45, when she became too ill to work.
Mayak recognizes that Galina’s disability results from Mayak-related radioactivity exposure and pays her $27 a month as compensation.
“She looks older than I do,” her mother said. “She has gray hair, one tooth, and she’s bedridden.”
Worse than Chernobyl
On Sept. 29, 1957, a catastrophic release of radioactivity occurred at Mayak that shot into the air more radioactivity than the blast at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A cooling system on a radioactive waste storage tank failed, causing an explosion that rained contaminants on an area the size of New Jersey.
Thousands of Russians were evacuated without being told why. Thousands more, most of them ethnic Tatars, were not evacuated and never told what had happened. Officials at collective farms in the region told children to head into farm fields to gather potatoes so they could be buried later.
Gulnara Ismagilova, a Tatar who was 11 at the time, remembers seeing the sky darken with a greenish fog as she piled potatoes in heaps.
“It was raining the night after the blast, and we could see green spots everywhere,” said Ismagilova, 59. “It was some kind of green substance falling from the sky. I can remember seeing blood coming from people’s noses and mouths, and people retching.”
Ismagilova’s village, Karabolka, was half Russian, half Tatar. The Russian side of the village was evacuated; the Tatar half was not. The Tatar half’s population then was 4,000. Today, 400 people live there, a dilapidated village of corrugated-roof huts and rutted dirt paths, ringed by eight cemeteries.
Because the village’s fields and pastures remain contaminated, villagers are barred from selling crops or livestock, Ismagilova said, “The village is literally dying of hunger.”
Though she is a doctor, Ismagilova said she is too afraid to seek medical help about a 3-by-3-inch tumor on her liver. She said she wants no further tests performed to find out whether it is malignant, instead preferring a regimen of herbal medicine.
“I really don’t want to know,” she said.
Other threats
Environmentalists say even more threatening are the billions of gallons of waste stored in a reservoir called Lake Karachai, where radioactivity is so concentrated that some Western scientists have called it the most polluted place on Earth. Radioactive contaminants from the lake have been detected in the groundwater.
Mayak plant officials did not respond to a request for an interview. In a statement, prosecutors accused Mayak of “flagrantly violating environmental laws” by continuing to dump into the Techa. If their investigation produces charges against company officials deemed criminally liable, a conviction could mean a prison term of up to 5 years.
Like Techa River valley villagers, environmentalists say they remain doubtful that the opening of a criminal case will lead to charges against plant officials. They would hold out more hope, they say, if Russia’s attitude toward health and the environment would change.
“It’s all about setting priorities,” said Nadezhda Kutepova, head of the Planet of Hopes environmental group based in Ozersk. “And right now, protecting the health of Russians is not a top priority in this country.”
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ajrodriguez@tribune.com
