Not many people outside of Russia have heard of Chelyabinsk. And that’s just fine with the Russian government. They’ve been trying to hide this region of 3.6 million from world scrutiny for over 50 years. But word, like Chelyabinsk’s nuclear waste, is beginning to leak out that it festers as the most polluted place on earth.
Over the last five decades Chelyabinsk’s history reads like a contemporary version of the Book of Revelations. Not one, not two, but three nuclear obscenities have brutalized this region in the name of the Cold War. Radiation levels are so high that to compare it with Chernobyl would be like comparing a 361 car pile-up with a fender-bender between two Lexus SUVs in a 5 MPH school zone. Yet so few people, including its citizens, know the true shock of Chelyabinsk’s nuclear recklessness.
Located about 1,000 miles east of Moscow in the dark shadows of the southern Ural Mountains, the region exploded during World War II as an industrial military mammoth, producing Katyusha rocket launchers and T-34 tanks. In 1948 Chelyabinsk secretly gave birth to the Soviet’s nuclear program in a massive structure called the Mayak Chemical Combine (MCC).
Faced with Cold War pressures of keeping pace with the United States’ nuclear arms program Mayak officials adopted a build-now-worry-later mindset with zero regard for human safety.
Consequently, from 1948-1951 contaminated waste from Mayak was directly dumped into the nearby Techa River which feeds into the Ob River, Russia’s fourth longest, and ultimately the Arctic Ocean. In order to maintain nuclear secrecy the residents from the 24 villages along the Techa were not warned even though they were exposed to radiation levels 20 times higher than at Chernobyl.
In 1951 when the Arctic Ocean began setting off Geiger counters the Soviet government forced Mayak to stop fouling the Techa; a move necessitated by military secrecy rather than concern for public health.
Until “proper†storage facilities could be built Mayak officials for the next two years used nearby Lake Karachay as its new dumping depot under the crazed logic it would be safer since it was an enclosed body of water. During this time officials also fitted the Techa with a series of dams — now leaking — to stem Mayak’s radioactive filth from advancing downstream.
With nowhere to drift, the radioactive material settled into the river’s banks, further fouling the water used by local villages for drinking and irrigating. Warnings about the water were issued, but without explanation, providing little reason for residential alarm.
In 1957, horror number two occurred when the cooling system in one of Mayak’s nuclear waste storage facilities kaboomed — with the force of 75 tons of TNT. A five mile wide radioactive cloud wafted across the Chelyabinsk region for 600 miles infecting 270,000 inhabitants, and contaminating food and drinking water. Only 10,000 of these people were evacuated, some not until 18 months later.
A decade later in 1967, horror number three resulted when a two-year drought caused Lake Karachay to disappear, exposing its radioactive-drenched bottom to the open air. Subsequently, an apocalyptic wind storm collected the contaminated sediment and dispersed a banshee-like cloud containing the same amount of radiation as Hiroshima across an area the size of Maryland.
Almost 400,000 people, many unlucky repeat victims from 1957, were irradiated, while only 180,000 were evacuated. Over 50 years later the lake’s sediments contain more than 100 times the amount of high-level radiation that was released at Chernobyl. The fishing, not so great.
Despite the insane magnitude of these nuclear disasters Chelyabinsk’s residents were told little. Fearing that an outbreak of irradiated citizens would betray the secrecy of its nuclear program, the Kremlin, seat of the Soviet Union, prohibited doctors in the region from pinpointing and treating the truth. Instead they duped cancer-plagued patients blaming their ills on blood problems, heart diseases, and “vegetative syndromes.”
Amazingly, not until Glasnost in the late 1980s were doctors allowed to utter the word cancer. Despite this knowledge residents to this day still naively refer to their radiation-influenced maladies as the “River Disease.”
Today, out of the region’s 3.6 citizens over 1.5 million have bonus radiation. Cancer in every form is so grotesquely rampant that the average human life expectancy in Chelyabinsk hovers around 55 years old. About a third of the children born there enter life crippled with birth defects. Miscarriages and prematurely born babies are common. And over half the population of childbearing adults are sterile. Yet, despite such howling evidence the Mayak Chemical Combine, at last count, has financially compensated two victims. After it was forced by the courts.
Denial at Mayak has a longer half-life “20,000 years” than the plutonium still stored there. Despite the shameless contradictions the evidence continues to build that perhaps Chelyabinsk isn’t a name, but perhaps an acronym:
Country Hides Environmental Legacy’s Yesteryears As Balefully Immoral Nuclear Serial Killer.
That is scary. I’m not surprised that the ruskies would cover up something like this. Will wonders never cease?
Why hasn’t someone stepped in and at least get the people out of harm’s way?
[...] Chelyabinsk, Russia Posted on 08.26.05 by Jeff Wozer @ 4:09 pm Sproldex Tags: Weapons, Nuclear, Pollution, Transformation, Disasters, Russia [...]
Hey Sprolers!
Please always put in one satellite picture or global/continental scale map that show immediately where on the globe we are. The way it is right now the first thing anyone that reads the article does is to look the the place up.
Cheers, B.
Cover up” has not been by only Russian, but also by all military systems, US, UK,, French nuclear system, over near 30 years.
Military have detected the radioactivity clouds of this disaster and covered
The occidental nuclear systems are not more reliable. Only free information can limit.
.
I remember around the 1975 year, on some “ecolo” newspapers pointing on the reality of Chelyabinsk (after detection by a russian biologist surprised by the number of strange large scale russian scientific studies on radiations effects!! )
The reaction of some french nuclear chiefs were “you will not believe all what are writting the journalists” !!!
I was concerned,because in 1974, I was buying a piece of land in Gif sur Yvette for housing my family, and some around these chiefs kindly informed me that this was in the past (1920) a firm processing radium needles (a student of Pierre and Marie Curie). It had been decontaminated but some gossip that ” this has not been well made”.
As a physicist in the French Comissariat à l’Energie Atomique (working out of nuclear i.e. on superconductivity,) I made measurements and I was surprised by the dangerous levels of radiations on a piece of land authorized officialy by the french nuclear safety system (Professor Pelerin) and governement for private housing!!. I never bought thanks to theses nuclear chiefs (who would never accept to live there) but others are living on this piece of land.
I informed the journalists and press showing the reading of a Geiger counter and the decontamination has been slightly improved thanks to journalists and free information.
It is not possible to trust nuclear sytems in any contry without free independent informations.
Depleted uranium use is a recent proof, and all gouvernemnts are denying its danger ; US, French and UK.
In 1986, after Tchernobyl, professor Pelerin SCPRI (i.e. Service de Controle et Protection des Rayonnement Ionisants) was famous to say on french TV that Thernobyl clouds were not dangerous after the french frontier, so that no safety protection were taken, contrary to others Europenas country, like Germany, a few kilometers from this frontier!! Salads were thrown away in Germany but not in France.. .
Certainly Chelyabinsk, worse than tchernobyl, was detected by all the nuclear military systems and all covered up, US, French, UK….
I have a cousin moving there with a new job need more info that she might not have Please help
you have a film see http://www.logtv.com/films/chelyabinsk/
http://www.filmakers.com/indivs/Chelyabinsk.htm
Nevertheless Explore the Beautiful Chelyabinsk of Russia
http://www.russia.com/cities/chelyabinsk/
I understand you might want to move to Chelabinsk, Russia. What is important is that you take protective steps to counter the negative effects of radiation. These would include vitamin C, 3,000 milligrams per day (minimum), vitamin E, mixed tocopherols (400 to 800 I.U./day with a meal) and super-green foods such as chorella, wheat grass and barley grass. Folic acid, a B-vitamin in the amount of 10 milligrams per day as well as all the other B-vitamins. Selenium would be 200 micrograms per day. Adequate sunshine during the summer months will help your immune system (via production of vitamin D in the skin). These measures would also help those who want to get pregnant w/OUT suffering from birth defects. However, such persons MUST not smoke or drink alcohol either. Also, a woman wanting to have a healthy child must get super healthy first by eating as healthfully as possible, not smoking or drinking and taking the aforementioned supplements, especially folic acid and vitamin C.
It will take more than this e-mail to help you, however, it is a start. Anyone moving to (or living in) Chelyabinsk will have to learn about nutrition so as to be healthier. Of course, getting uncontaminated food is also important and I don’t have a solution to this problem except to say to buy a geiger counter and check your food for radiation before you eat it. Obviously, you would NEVER eat locally caught fish!
Tom Petrie
Nutritionist
845-425-6549
United States
Sorry, my Russian is not too good. Hopefully you or a friend can read this for you.
chrablinsk is a pwr-1 swimming pool reactoer. that leek’s in to the donnia river. barrys below reactoer have both killed russion spyinengland and or russan reporter’s. barry’s not salf.
$2.0 billion was figured to cleen up the mess. But russia had no money.
Thomas Petrie, you are wrong. Chelyabins is an avarage russian city with plants and factories, but it’s not radioactive. The measurements show that the amount of radiation in the city is normal! The radioactive pollution have some little villages on the river Techa. The trace of the explosion hasn’t touched Chelyabinsk. Don’t frighten people!