Chernobyl And Kyshtym: Two Eternal Disasters In USSR

A photo from Panoramio – Photo of ул.Ленина,41а by Natis at Google Earth: Chernobyl dolls sadly wait for their playmate to return…nevermore.

Everyone remembers Chernobyl simply because it was so public.  Mikhail Gorbachev broke the wall of Soviet denial and opened up the USSR to examination.  Chernobyl basically ended the USSR.  500,000 citizens were rushed in to fight the disaster and it ended only with a cover-up that didn’t stop the process. Like a dragon deep in a cave, Chernobyl’s monster is alive and breathing fire.  We just cannot see it.  And so the older nuclear disaster continues to be a great menace to everyone even as the new monster joins in Japan.  

 

Anyone who thinks the Japanese are doing their best should examine Chernobyl and the huge response the Russians made.  The Japanese to me seem to be doing the minimum and they certainly are not calling in half a million men to fight the all-devouring monster at Fukushima.  This is the British news story that got me thinking about the old USSR:

 

Chernobyl ‘gave Petrov cancer’ | News.com.au

 

Petrov, 32, was diagnosed with acute leukemia after feeling tired during Villa’s recent English Premier League defeat at Arsenal.

 

Dr Iliev added, “There are no other cases of such illness in this family, that is why I think Stiliyan is a victim of the old communist regime’s lack of information when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, and the radioactive cloud came to our country.”

 

One of the things that global warming people hid from the public is the ferocious but slow death rate caused by nuclear bombs and nuclear disasters.  Ever since the earliest major nuclear disaster, Kyshtym in 1957, the West has been very, very, VERY much in denial about the death tolls and the implications of these earlier Soviet disasters.

 

Many things can cause leukemia.  But since our environment has been hugely and significantly altered for the worst for the last 100 years, pin pointing exactly which hideous event causes cancer or autism or other things is nearly impossible.   The soldiers, firemen and miners who were brought in to battle the Nuclear Monster of Chernobyl had a huge death rate even the first days but the ones who survived the initial exposure all are seeing terrible problems even if they are alive still.

 

Today, I also continued pawing my way through the IAEA website to see what other goofy things I could dig up and attack and there is a rich trove of garbage there, this being one of them:  http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1229_web.pdf

ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ

DISCUSSION FOLLOWING THE PRESENTATIONS OF WOODHEAD, ALEXAKHIN AND PENTREATH
A.J. GONZÁLEZ (IAEA): Mr. Woodhead said that the fitness of a species is reduced by an increase in the mutation rate. In an environment that is changing as a result of factors such as industrial pollution, however, might an increase in the mutation rate not be beneficial in that it increases the possibility of adaptation?

 

I must inject here: WOW.  Maybe if we had two heads each, we might be geniuses!  These mutations are not good ones, they shorten the lifespan of the organisms and make it HARDER, not easier to thrive and survive!

 

D.S. WOODHEAD (United Kingdom): I think there may have been a slight misunderstanding. Dominant lethal mutations would appear as reductions in fertility. Some mutations reduce fitness, and that would affect mortality. So the effects of some mutations will to some extent be captured by other end points.

 

I was careful to say that I could imagine situations where mutations — particularly when they continue into subsequent generations and have perhaps adaptive advantages or change fitness in ways we do not yet recognize — might be important. However, I do not have either the information or the tools necessary for considering such situations, so I left them to one side. Not that the problem is unimportant, and if other people have the necessary information and tools they should tackle it. I know that that particular population-type model has been used in looking at genetic effects, so it can be done.

 

Sigh.  I wish I was there.  When the ENVIRONMENT changes, creatures with mutations that are BETTER for the new environment thrive.  I can’t see in any way how mutations causing cancers help survival at all.  This is the problem: the radiation makes it harder to survive.  It reduces the chance of success.  
A.J. GONZÁLEZ (IAEA): The thesis “if radiation safety standards protect humans, then biota is also adequately protected” presupposes that one is complying with the radiation safety standards. In my view, therefore, the Chernobyl accident and the Techa river situation are not helpful examples for testing the applicability of current international standards, since the radiation safety standards were not complied with.
That having been said, I recognize the value of the data presented by Mr. Alexakhin on radiation impacts on humans and various other species.

The study by the Russians is observations as to how nature has coped with a damaged environment.  Yes, life does continue.  But it is in bad shape.  Mutations happen that are not beneficial, it is merely accidental.  Even healthy living things get sicker if they are in these deadly zones.
R.M. ALEXAKHIN (Russian Federation): I agree with Mr. González; it impossible to use this information for checking the correctness of the ICRP paradigm if we consider the situation during the period immediately following an accident. These data are useful for studying long term effects in the field rather than under laboratory conditions.
R.J. PENTREATH (United Kingdom): The issue here is a difficult one. In a situation where there is serious radioactive contamination of the environment, you can protect humans by evacuating them, but what do you do with everything else in the environment?

 

Hello!  Are we protected when we flee?  Nope.  We see in Europe and Japan how the radiation insidiously moves silently into all sectors and ends up all over the place.  We pretend we can flee but since the entire planet is being fucked up, there is no ‘safe place’ really.  What the IAEA really wants is to continue the madness and pretend that every event is singular and accidental and no one has to stop.

 

And we haven’t had a full scale nuclear war yet!  Disarmament is a total farce with the US upgrading its nuclear arsenal and Russia announcing they were tricked into disarming so they will do the same and you can bet China is busy quietly doing this.

 

Here is a great video made in 2003 about Chernobyl’s real heroes, the men who sacrificed themselve to stop the disaster and bury the Beast:  Best Chernobyl Documentary 2006 The Battle of Chernobyl (HQ) 1hr 32min 1 clip – YouTube

This statue still stands in Pripyat , next to Chernobyl.  Below is the  present Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – 

Note the PERMANENT zones.  These areas cannot host humans for…forever as far as we know.  Perhaps an Ice Age can fix this.  Now, on to the earlier event, the one that erased many communities in the Urals early on in the Nuclear Age:  Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast

 

The Mayak plant was one of the largest producers of weapons-grade plutonium for the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War, particularly during the Soviet atomic bomb program. Built and operated with great haste and disregard for safety, between 1945 and 1957 the Mayak plant dumped and released large amounts of solid, liquid and gaseous radioactive material into the area immediately around the plant, ultimately estimated to equal to between 2-3 Chernobyl explosions worth of radionuclides. Prior to 1956, much of the waste was dumped into the Techa River, which it severely contaminated along with residents of dozens of riverside villages such as Muslyumovo, who relied on the river as their sole source of drinking, washing and bathing water.

 

In 1957, the Mayak plant was the site of a major disaster in which an improperly-stored underground tank of high-level liquid nuclear waste exploded, releasing more radioactive contamination than Chernobyl and contaminating thousands of square miles of territory (see list of military nuclear accidents) now known as the Eastern Ural Radioactive Trace (EURT). The matter was quietly and secretly covered up, and few either inside or outside Russia were aware of the full scope of the disaster until 1980.

 

After 1957, official dumping in the Techa ceased, and the waste material was dumped in convenient shallow lakes near the plant instead, of which 7 have been officially identified. Of particular concern is Lake Karachay, the closest lake to the plant (now notorious as “The Most Contaminated Place on Earth”) where roughly 4.4 exabecquerels of high-level liquid waste (75-90% of the total radioactivity released by Chernobyl) was dumped and concentrated in the 1/4 square mile lake over several decades.

 

In addition to the radioactive risks, the airborne lead and particulate soot levels in Ozyorsk (along with much of the Ural industrial region) are also very high—roughly equal to the levels encountered along busy roadsides in the era predating unleaded gasoline and catalytic converters—due to the presence of numerous lead smelters.

 

My older brother who was much more exposed in the womb and as a very little child to dangerous nuclear materials due to my parents being involved in the nuclear rocket program just died of cancer but he was sick with these problems even in college.  He spent his life trying to protect himself and cope with this.  But my parents lived to be well over 80 years.  And I fear none of those of us who were at China Lake will live nearly so long.

 

It is all so irritating since I was totally and completely against nuclear missiles, nuclear energy and chemical pollution since I was 16 years old in the mid sixties.  And had rip roaring fights with my father on these issues.  The scientists working for the government went along with any and all Pentagon and political leader’s lies even when they knew perfectly well what was really going on.

My father’s optical equipment was what the US U2 spy planes used and he analyzed the photos so you can bet, he knew about the Kyshtym disaster from the first day onwards.  But the Russian rulers and our own rulers both kept this thing secret.  Why?

 

AH!  The US wanted the public to believe that nuclear garbage was SAFE!  Ditto, the Russian rulers.  So they all colluded in hiding this hideous explosion:  Kyshtym disaster –

 

In September 1957, the cooling system in one of the tanks containing about 70–80 tons of liquid radioactive waste failed and was not repaired. The temperature in it started to rise, resulting in evaporation and a chemical explosion of the dried waste, consisting mainly of ammonium nitrate and acetates (see ammonium nitrate bomb). The explosion, estimated to have a force of about 70–100 tons of TNT threw the concrete lid, weighing 160 tons, into the air.[3] There were no immediate casualties as a result of the explosion, which released an estimated 2 to 50 MCi (74 to 1850 PBq) of radioactivity.[2][4][5]

In the next 10 to 11 hours, the radioactive cloud moved towards the northeast, reaching 300–350 kilometers from the accident. The fallout of the cloud resulted in a long-term contamination of an area of more than 800 square kilometers, primarily with caesium-137 and strontium-90.[2] This area is usually referred to as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace (EURT).[6]

Note how laggard the government was removing the population…just like the Japanese government took their sweet time, too:

Village	Population	Evacuation Time (days)	Mean Effective Dose Equivalent (mSv)
Berdyanish	421	7-14	520
Satlykovo	219	7-14	520
Galikayevo	329	7-14	520
Rus. Karabolka	458	250	440
Alabuga	486	250	120
Yugo-Konevo	2045	250	120
Gorny	472	250	120
Igish	223	250	120
Troshkovo	81	250	120

The same thing happened with Chernobyl.  No one warned the public for a crucial 36 hours that they were in grave danger!  Finally, after Gorbachev demanded information and showed up in person, did the guys running the nuclear plant admit they should evacuate everyone.

 

Rumours of a nuclear mishap somewhere in the vicinity of Chelyabinsk had long been circulating in the West. That there had been a serious nuclear accident east of the Urals was eventually demonstrated by Zhores Medvedev, who, after his reference to the disaster in a western publication was derided by western nuclear industry sources, showed that numerous Soviet scientific publications on the effects of radiation on plant life, supposedly derived from laboratory experiments, were in fact thinly disguised descriptions of the area contaminated by the disaster.[13]

 

According to Gyorgy,[14] who invoked the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the relevant Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files, the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident all along, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling American nuclear industry. In 1990 the Soviet government declassified documents pertaining to the disaster.[15][16]

 

The last paragraph is 100% correct.  I used to spy on my dad when I was a child.  I figured out there was something bad in the Urals but didn’t have an exact answer until the information began filtering out in the mid-1970s.  Of course, the CIA knew.  The U2 planes were still flying over the Urals back then until Gary Powers was shot down.

 

Miles and miles and miles of Russian plains are now ghost towns: Panoramio – Photo of Кожакуль, старая церковь

Like with Fukushima, the water systems are very dangerous to pollute with fission materials as we see in this Arctic site also in the USSR where nuclear bombs were manufactured and tested:  In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You • Damn Interesting

 

Thirty-nine years of effluent had saturated the lake with nasty isotopes, including an estimated 120 megacuries of long-lived radiation. In contrast, the Chernobyl incident released roughly 100 megacuries of radiation into the environment, but only about 3 megacuries of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. A delegation who visited Lake Karachay in 1990 measured the radiation at the point where the effluent entered the water, and the needles of their Geiger counters danced at about 600 Röntgens per hour–enough to provide a lethal dose in one hour. They did not linger long.

 

In other words, the materials in this lake are more dangerous and last longer than the fire debris of Chernobyl.  Strontium-90 is quite fatal.  

 

A report compiled in 1991 found that the incidence of leukemia in the region had increased by 41% since Chelyabinsk-40 opened for business, and that during the 1980s cancers had increased by 21% and circulatory disorders rose by 31%. It is probable, however, that the true numbers are much higher since doctors were required to limit the number diagnoses issued for cancer and other radiation-related illnesses. In the village of Muslyumovo, a local physician’s personal records from 1993 indicated an average male lifespan of 45 years compared to 69 in the rest of the country. Birth defects, sterility, and chronic disease also increased dramatically. In all, over a million Russian citizens were directly affected by the misadventures of the Mayak Chemical Combine from 1948 to 1990, including around 28,000 people classified as “seriously irradiated.”

 

Today, there are huge tracts of Chelyabinsk land still uninhabitable due to the radionuclides from the river contamination, the 1957 blast, and the 1967 drought. The surface of Lake Karachay is now made up of more concrete than water, however the lake’s payload of fission products is not completely captive. Recent surveys have detected gamma-emitting elements in nearby rivers, indicating that undesirable isotopes have been seeping into the water table. Estimates suggest that approximately a billion gallons of groundwater have already been contaminated with 5 megacuries of radionuclides. The neighboring Norwegians are understandably nervous that some of the pollution could find its way into their water supply, or even into the Arctic Ocean.

 

Sweden, Finland and Norway have a lot more to worry about than the idea that it might get warmer there and the Ice Giants might grow weaker (they actually laugh at that!).  That is, the garbage created during the Cold War is still stunningly ‘hot’ and is moving relentlessly through one ecosystem to the next on cat’s paws, unnoticed unless one is very diligent.

 

Even though Europe and the US were not nearly so reckless as the communists but it is nothing to boast about: whenever the Russians warned the West about the dangers, the rulers here all denied it and pretended all was well.  To this day, they are in denial.  Iran nuclear talks: west demands closure of Fordo underground facility but Obama: Iran can have nuclear program: even as the US ups the nuclear ante by upgrading our own weapons and while he also conceals Israel’s immense arsenal, both are going to ‘let’ Iran have nuclear power but on our terms.

 

I am against anyone having any of this.  But if the US and Israel insist on having this, they can’t stop anyone else.  China rejects Obama’s Iran oil import sanctions and this is due to China understanding that Iran having nukes doesn’t destabilize the world.  This reminds us that the gravest danger of any ‘civilian’ nukes is war: bombing these is obvious and WILL happen so of course, it will render whole countries uninhabitable.

 

And doesn’t respect borders, either!  Enough of this!  Outlaw ALL nuclear systems.  Humans are way too crazy to use this stuff…ever.

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