CHELYABINSK : The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet

I've never heard of this, sad.

CHELYABINSK "The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet" - a documentary film

For forty-five years, Chelyabinsk province of Russia was closed to all foreigners.Only in January of 1992 did President Boris Yeltsin sign a decree changing that.Shortly afterwards, I made my first trip to this region, which later Western scientists declared to be the most polluted spot on earth.

In the late 1940's, about 80 kilometers north of the city of Chelyabinsk, an atomic weapons complex called "Mayak" was built. Its existence has only recently been acknowledged by Russian officials, though, in fact, the complex, bordered to the west by the Ural Mountains, and to the north by Siberia, was the goal of Gary Powers's surveillance flight in May of 1960.

The people of the area have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters: For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks.The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago.Russian doctors who study radiation sickness in the area estimate that those living along the Techa River received an average of four times more radiation than the Chernobyl victims.

In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded.The explosion spewed some 20 million curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere.About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing 270,000 people to as much radiation as the Chernobyl victims.Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.

The third disaster came ten years later.The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951.In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating 436,000 people with five million curies, approximately the same as at Hiroshima.

In the past 45 years, about half a million people in the region have been irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to as much as 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl victims.