Radioactive Waste 172 - Mayak Reprocessing Facility in Russia Has A Bad History Of Dumping Radioactive Waste In The Techa River
Russia is aggressively marketing nuclear power reactors around the globe, especially in developing nations. They are working on creating breeder reactors which will be able to produce plutonium that can be used to fuel reactors in competition with uranium. They are also reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to produce more fuel. The Soviet Union was very sloppy with nuclear waste during the Cold War as they manufactured nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, even though the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is carrying on the Soviet Union's bad habits of nuclear waste management.
The Mayak Production Association is one of the biggest nuclear facilities in Russia. It is the site of plutonium production reactors and a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. It is located in southwest Russia close to the city of Ozyorsk near the Russian - Kazakhstan border. The complex was part of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and is currently part of the Russian nuclear weapons program.
For decades, the Mayak complex has dumped waste from nuclear reprocessing into the Techa River which flows into the Arctic Sea. In the 1940s and 1950s, it is estimated that over a hundred million cubic yards of high-level waste were dumped into the river. In 1957, a storage tank exploded and spread up to one hundred tons of high-level radioactive waste over three hundred square miles. This considered to be the third worst nuclear disaster in history behind Chernobyl and Fukushima. The Soviet government kept it secret for thirty years. It was called the Kyshtym disaster after the nearest town. Ten years later, a lake in the area dried up and radioactive dust from the lake bed was blown over areas where over forty thousand people lived. In 1993, Russia admitted that these accidents might have exposed almost half a million people to dangerous levels of radiation. Between 2001 and 2004, a billion cubic feet of untreated waste was dumped into the Techa River.
The villages along to Techa river report record rates of chromosomal abnormalities, birth defects and cancers which are much higher than Russian averages. In 2008, Russia began an evacuation program to move villagers inland from the banks of the Techa River.
Hundreds of tons of spent nuclear fuel from other nations arrive at Mayak for reprocessing annually. The Nuclear Safety Institute says that the spent fuel processing going on at Mayak "presents no danger to the surrounding population." Representatives of Rosatom, the government owned Russian nuclear company stated in an email that the facility "follows all the environmental protection guidelines and has all the approvals it needs for operation." He went on to write that “The level of pollution in the Techa River today completely complies with the sanitary standards of the Russian Federation."
Environmental activists claim that dumping is still going on but given the secrecy of the Russian government with respect to nuclear operations, it is impossible to prove. When an Associated Press reporter visited the area, a Geiger counter near the river registered a hundred times the usual level of background radiation. The Nuclear Safety Institute says that the pollution is far lower than it used to be but it used to be very high so this assurance is not much comfort to people living in the area.
