Lake Karachai, in the Chelyabinsk region, has served as a dump for liquid radioactive waste formed by the Mayak Production Association. The Mayak facilities, located near the city of Chelyabinsk, was the largest production site for weapons grade plutonium in the Soviet Union during the Soviet era.
The 'plume' of salts, irradiated by decades of top secret Soviet era nuclear waste dumping at Lake Karachai in the southern Urals, is creeping its way through rock and soil at a speed of 80 metres a year. At present it is within 1.5 to 2 kilometers of the most dangerous zone.
Fed by a lake as radioactive as the cloud of debris that shadowed Europe after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, if the plume reaches the River Techa and the Arctic, the effect on the precious eco- systems of Western Siberia and further afield could be devastating.
Yuri Vishnevsky, head of Russia's nuclear inspectorate, Gosatomnadzor, warns that the build-up of radioactive waste under the lake threatens ''nuclear catastrophe on a global scale''.
He estimates that the five million cubic metre plume, 100 metres under the lakebed, also threatens the Siberian Tobol, Irtysh and Ob river systems.
''If the plume reaches this system, Western Siberia and the Arctic Ocean will be polluted with radioactive waste, triggering a global disaster within ten years, where international intervention may be required,'' Vishnevsky says. ''No technology is available now to keep the plume in place.'' Simulation of the radioactive brine flow
Lake Karachai occupies 50 acres and was constructed in the late 1950 inside the grounds of the Mayak Chemical Combine, Russia's main nuclear reprocessing plant and formerly a major nuclear weapons production site. It was created to hold liquid nuclear wastes previously dumped in the River Techa.
But these discharges had to stop when the river, which eventually flows into the Arctic Sea, became highly contaminated and forced the evacuation of the villages along its banks.
It is estimated that Lake Karachai contains 120 million curies (Ci) of
radioactivity, similar to the total amount released by the 1986 Chernobyl
accident with released 150 Million curies. Put another way, the total amount of radioactive discharges from the
Russian Navy's fleets adds up to only 0.5 per cent of the radioactivity in Lake
Karachai.
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| General location of the Chelyabinsk province | Location of the zone under study within the Chelyabinsk province |
In 1991, U.S. experts measured a dose rate of 300 to 600 millirems per hour near the shores of the lake, which is three to six times maximum U.S. safety levels. It was estimated that just one minute standing on its shore without full protection would mean certain death.
Over the years contamination from Karachai has spread throughout the region. In 1967, during a particularly hot summer, the lake dried up and winds carried radioactive dust over a large area, forcing more evacuations. Approximately 600 curies of contanimation was spread over 2700 square kilometers. One can clearly envision the severe spread of contaminates if a tornado or hurricaine were to strike this region. On another occasion, radioactive contamination found at a children's summer camp was traced to bats who live and breed near the lake.
Efforts have been made to fill in the lake with large rocks and concrete, but have only contributed to the problem. Vishnevsky says this is partly responsible for the groundwater contamination as filling that lake has only forced the poisonous waters down through the seabed. According to Yuri Vishnevsky, chairman of the Russian agency responsible for oversight of nuclear facilities, polluted water from the lake is now forming an underground pool which is drifting at a rate of approximately 80 meters per year toward the Irtysh water system. Some of this accumulation is likely due to efforts to fill the lake pushing the water downward. The fill and linings have also served to increase downward spread of radiation through the earth under the lake.
Just over a third of the project to 'close' Lake Karachai has been completed. The containment plan involves covering the area with u-shaped blocks to keep radioactive silts at the bottom of the lake, and filling in the water with gravel. The project has received only meagre funding each year, and does not yet include any measures to prevent downward contamination.
But Karachai is only one of many sources of radioactive contamination within the Mayak site. From 1949 to 1951 Mayak discharged about 2.76 million Ci of liquid radioactive wastes into the River Techa.
Plutonium levels in the river bed remain high. When the Techa river was dammed in 1956 and 1963, releases of irradiated waters were reduced. However, the series of pools and marches created by the dams continue to be a source of pollution. The Assanov Marshes, which cover a 30 square kilometre area below dam number 11 contains about 6,000 Ci of strontium-90 and cesium-137, and this is still seeping into the Techa river system.
Karachai is not the only ''storage'' lake inside Mayak. Another, called Staroye boloto, contains about 200,000 Ci of radioactive waste. In addition, large quantities of solid wastes, measured at around two million Ci is buried on site. Radioactive sediments removed from liquid waste, and liquid wastes itself, measured at about 150 million and 976 million Ci respectively, are kept in special storage tanks on site.
In 1957 one of liquid waste containers exploded, spreading irradiation over an estimated 23,000 square kilometers, much of which is still a restricted area.
Then there are the routine atmospheric discharges arising from day-to-day operation of the facility. In all, a total area 26,700 square kilometers are affected by surface contamination.
Mayak is estimated to be responsible for producing a billion Ci of wastes, all of which poses a major threat to the region's water supply. Already, 437,000 people have been exposed to increased levels of radioactivity as a result.
If the underground reservoir beneath Karachai reaches the Irtysh River system, the radioactive contamination could eventually reach the Arctic Ocean. In an official Kremlin International news broadcast Monday, chair of the Russian Federal Committee for Nuclear and Radiation Safety Yuri Georgiyevich Vishnevsky, said the "lens" of radioactive salts is about five million cubic meters in volume and of a "medium level of activity." If the lens of radioactive waste gets into the watershed, the whole region of Western Siberia and the Arctic Ocean will be polluted," said Vishnevsky.
Even if only a small percentage of the total radiation in the lake were to travel into international waters, the threat would easily exceed any posed by Russia's nuclear submarines, which are currently the main focus of international attention.
Of the many radioactive contamination problems in the former Soviet
Union, the pollution at Lake Karachai is one of the sites most deserving
international attention. As is apparent from the inadequate funding for the
project, the Russian government is not willing or able to sacrifice other
priorities to remediate the lake. Furthermore, there are heavy political
pressures in the
Russian government to ignore environmental problems caused by the military.
Vishnevsky's nuclear facility oversight agency (Gostomnadzor) was relieved of
responsibility over military sites, including Mayak and surrounding polluted
areas, by a presidential decree signed by Yeltsin on July 26, 1995. At the time,
Yeltsin was hospitalized for heart trouble, and Vishnevsky has accused the
military nuclear lobby of taking advantage of Yeltsin's illness and unstable
position at the time.10 There is little indication that Lake Karachai will
be made a higher priority any time in the near future.
Foreign involvement in remediating the lake is appropriate not just
because of the extent of local contamination, but because of the possibility of
significant spread into communal waters. If the underground reservoir described
above, which is increasing in volume steadily, reaches the Irtysh River system,
the radioactive contamination could eventually reach the Arctic Ocean.11
Even if only a small percentage of the total radiation at the lake were to
travel into international waters, the problem would easily rival or even surpass
the scope of threats caused by all Russian radioactive naval discharges.
Increased technical and financial assistance to, as well as political pressure
on, the Russian government to facilitate adequate containment of the
radioactivity at Lake Karachai would therefore seem to be a wise act of
self-interest on the part
of many northern hemisphere countries.
Lake Karachai Details
The geological cross section at the Lake Karachai site is
represented by fractured moderately metamorphosed effusive Lower-Silurian rocks.
The major water-bearing horizon in fissured volcanic rocks is unconfined. U nder
natural conditions groundwater is recharged primarily by precipitation. The
average annual recharge rate makes up 10-25% of the annual precipitation.
The source of contaminants --- Lake Karachai --- is located within the watershed between two river valleys. The valleys serve as groundwater discharge area. The total aquifer transmissivity was estimated according to the data of about 200 multi-well pumping tests and slug tests. The test results demonstrated the complex and strongly heterogeneous nature of the transmissivity in this area. The brines recharging into the aquifer are radioactive and of high density (between 1.005 and 1.06 g/cm^3 depending on sodium nitrate concentration). The total volume of leakage was about 3.5 million cubic meters over the period 1951--1995. During this period the leakage rate varied between 50 and 400 m^3/day.
There are about 100 observation and prospecting wells at the Lake Karachai site. It has been established that the solutions contain a wide range of long-living artificial radionuclides (such as strontium-90, cesium-137, ruthenium-106, cobalt-60, cerium-144, and isotopes of uranium and plutonium). Their activity in the vicinity of the reservoir attains levels up to 0.5 mCi/L (18.5 MBq/L). Nitrates, dissolved organic matter, strontium, rubidium, cesium, cobalt, and tritium all serve as major indicators for monitoring groundwater pollution.
A preliminary analysis of monitoring data showed that the contaminant plume is
of ellipsoidal shape in plan view and that the preferential flowpaths of brines
differ considerably from the direction of the regional natural-gradient flow.
Cross sectional groundwater quality stratification results from the differences
in density between radioactive brines and ambient water. The velocity of the
advancing front of the contaminant plume ranges between 0.2 and 1.5 m per day.
The sun shines on a pale-blue wooden mosque in Muslyumovo, a picturesque village of 4,500 people on the Techa River. Cows meander through fields of clover, lush grass, and marijuana. A group of schoolchildren giggle on a bridge.
In the middle of the village, on Lenin Street, Nurzhigan Galipova takes an angry swing at the river with her walking stick as she recalls how three of her children died: two of leukemia, one of heart failure.
"The river killed them," Galipova says. "Radiation."
The river--as well as the marijuana plants, the grass Galipova's cows feed on, and everything else that grows in Muslyumovo--emits up to 250 microrem of radiation per hour, more than four times the level scientists consider acceptable. Less than an hour’s drive upstream from Galipova's house stands the source of the contamination: the Mayak plant, Russia's only nuclear reprocessing factory, which polluted Muslyumovo and hundreds of other settlements in the region for generations to come.
No place in Russia symbolizes the country's inability to manage the reprocessing of its spent nuclear fuel better than Chelyabinsk region in the Urals with its fields, rivers, and lakes contaminated with deadly radio nuclides. And as Russia speeds toward accepting spent nuclear fuel and waste from abroad for reprocessing and long-term storage in exchange for billions of dollars, environmentalists warn that this lucrative plan will turn Russia into the world's nuclear dump.
According to a recent report compiled by Russian and Norwegian scientists, the quantity of radioactive materials the Mayak plant has released since it first opened in 1948 is five times greater than every other major accident or nuclear test on earth since then: the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, the 1957 leak at the British Sellafield nuclear plant, and all the nuclear tests ever conducted.
Mayak has been a source of constant nuclear contamination in the region since the day it was built in 1947. For years, it dumped its nuclear waste into the Techa River; then an explosion at the plant's storage facilities sent deadly waste into the air, and a storm carried radioactive dust from a dried-out lake over towns and villages.
Residents in the region are 40 percent more likely to get leukemia and 3 percent more likely to get cancer than residents in areas not contaminated by radiation, said Alexander Akleyev, head doctor at the Chelyabinsk-based Ural Research Center for Radiation Medicine. A study conducted by regional health authorities in 1998 showed that children in the area were three times less healthy than children in other parts of Russia.
What they don't know will kill them
Soviet authorities never explained to the region's residents what deadly neighbor had settled in their land, even as they relocated tens of thousands of residents from their contaminated villages, and as leukemia and heart disease rates drastically increased in the region. Almost 40 percent of the world's nuclear weapons were built at Mayak, and the Soviets considered everything related to nuclear activities a state secret.
From 1949 until 1951, the plant dumped 228 million cubic feet of highly toxic nuclear waste into the Techa River, irradiating approximately 31,000 people, according to Akleyev.
Authorities now say that the radiation effects were under-researched at the time, and plant officials were hoping that the deadly strontium-90 and cesium-137, which have half-lives of roughly 30 years each, would simply dissolve in the river.
But when the people who lived alongside the Techa started dying of radiation sickness in the early 1950s, the plant officials stopped dumping waste into the river and began storing it. They also put up barbed wire along the shores and relocated a dozen villages spread along the river--but they let Muslyumovo residents stay.
"The village was big, about 6,000 people, and it was too expensive to move them all," explains Svetlana Kostina, a researcher at the Chelyabinsk regional government's department for environment and radiation.
Because the plant authorities did not tell local residents about the pollution, Muslyumovo residents eventually took the barbed wire down and let their cows feed on the river's appetizing green flood plains. Even after the villagers learned in 1993 what deadly waters run in their backyards, they continued to take their cattle to the irradiated pastures.
"We've been living like this for years," says Saifetdin Gainitdinov, 65. "Why stop now?"
The current dose of radiation absorbed by Muslyumovo residents is 10 times higher than internationally acceptable levels, according to a study put out by Kostina's department. Only 18 percent of the village children aged 6 to 14 can be called healthy, while the rest of the children suffer from acute memory loss, attention deficit disorders, and exhaustion.
In 1957, soon after it began to store its nuclear waste, Mayak--then called the Plutonium Plant--had a malfunction at the temperature control system of one of its storage facilities. Uncontrolled, the 80 tons of highly active liquid nuclear waste in the storage self-heated until all the liquid evaporated.
Soon, the container overheated and exploded, releasing 20 million curies of deadly strontium and cesium--about 40 percent of that released by the Chernobyl disaster--into the air. A toxic cloud crept across hundreds of miles of farmland, engulfing over 200 towns and villages, and exposing over 270,000 people to lethal doses of radiation.
Within 18 months after the explosion, regional authorities relocated about 10,700 residents of the 23 most polluted villages; their farmhouses were torn down. Officials did not explain to residents why they were being forced to leave their homes. The Soviet Union only admitted that the accident happened in 1989.
Local residents who were ordered to plow over farmland in the contaminated areas were also never told that they were cleaning up after a nuclear catastrophe. Nurislan Gubaidullin, 62, who had no protection from radioactive fallout when he plowed the polluted lands on his tractor after the explosion, only found out in 1989 that the constant pain he feels in his legs was caused by the high dose of radiation he received during the cleanup.
"I have a bouquet of illnesses. They say that I might lose both my legs," Gubaidullin says.
Gubaidullin's son, 40, and daughter, 37, both suffer from heart disease. His wife died of stomach cancer several years ago. His wife's mother, brother, sister, and niece also died of cancer.
"We've got a bad environment here. That's why we are all ill," Gubaidullin says.
Fighting fire with fire
Even though the plant stopped dumping its highly active waste into Techa, it continued to discharge its medium-active waste into the marshy lake of Karachai, located on the territory of the plant. In 1967, the waters of Lake Karachai evaporated after a drought. The radioactive sludge turned into dust containing radio nuclides, mostly cesium-137 and strontium-90, and was carried by the wind about 15 kilometers north.
Today, Mayak--whose main job now is to reprocess and reactivate fuel for nuclear power plants, submarines and icebreakers--continues to pour liquid waste into Karachai. The lake now contains about 120 million curies of radio nuclides, Mayak spokesman Yevgeny Ryzhkov asserts.
Ryzhkov said Mayak is gradually covering Karachai with clay and sand. But the plant can only afford this costly procedure by reprocessing more spent nuclear fuel--and dumping more waste into the lake even as it is trying to destroy the old.
In order to pay for burying Lake Karachai completely, Mayak needs to reprocess more fuel than Russia can provide. That's why it is important that Russia accepts foreign spent nuclear fuel, he says.
"As soon as we get more spent nuclear fuel to reprocess, we will thrive," Ryzhkov promises.
Last month, the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, passed in second reading a bill that would allow Russia to accept spent nuclear fuel from at least 14 countries in Europe and Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Switzerland. The third and last reading of the bill is scheduled for June.
The deal, the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry says, would raise up to $20 billion and would then be spent on anything from cleaning up the sites of nuclear catastrophes to paying off international debts.
But environmentalists say Mayak is not ready to safely reprocess this amount of fuel.
"I think that most people don't know how this fuel will be treated in Russia," charges Thomas Nilsen, a researcher at Norwegian environmental group Bellona, which is actively lobbying against the bill. Nilsen says that the contaminated water from Techa and Karachai would eventually seep into the Arctic Ocean through the system of Siberian rivers and lakes.
"If the Germans, for example, ship their fuel to Russia they might receive it back on their tables when they are eating fish," Nilsen asserts.
Natalya Mironova, head of Chelyabinsk-based Movement for Nuclear Safety, said Mayak is simply unable to handle 22,000 tons of fuel.
"In 30 years, Mayak has reprocessed 3,000 tons of fuel. They are proposing to send in 22,000 tons more. That's 175 years of work for Mayak," Mironova alleges.
But Ryzhkov said Mayak is able and ready to reprocess all this fuel--and more.
"Our reprocessing techniques have been polished to perfection," Ryzhkov says. "We have been doing this for 30 years with no negative effect on the environment."