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Part 1 of 2 Parts
      In southeastern Moscow, Russia, behind a green corrugated fence is the ruins of the decommissioned Polymetal factory. Inside the fence lies radioactive waste dumps left over from the operation of the factory. Local residents who live near the fenced area have posted signs warning of radiation danger. The local activists are fighting to prevent the local government from building a bridge and an eight-lane highway across part of the fenced site. They fear the release of buried radioactive material into the air and the nearby Moskva river during construction.
     Greenpeace has recently carried out tests of topsoil from the Polymetal site where construction would be carried out and they have published reports of the tests. The Greenpeace tests have shown that the radiation level in the soil that would be disturbed are dozens of times above the allowable levels for public safety. Samples a couple of feet below the surface had even higher levels. The researchers said that there was a danged of cancer from the radiation.
    The official position on the construction of the bridge and highway is that contaminated areas would be avoided during construction. The new evidence presented by Greenpeace would seem to contradict official claims. In five different areas inside the planned construction areas, radiation was between five and fifteen times higher than natural background radiation. In one area about five hundred feet from the proposed construction, the radiation was forty-five times the normal level. This is higher than most radiation readings in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
     Ivan Kondratiev is a local organizer whose father lives close to the proposed highway. He said, “The builders say there is nothing here, but we see with our own eyes everything is very bad.  These levels of radiation on their own aren’t going to kill you. But they tell you what lies underneath, and what will happen when building work unsettles it.”
     Anton Kulbachevsky is the head of the Moscow department for the environment. He does not believe the Greenpeace reports. He said, “No matter how much I’ve come across Greenpeace, it’s very rare that what they are saying is backed up by real evidence.”
    The contaminated Polymetal factory site is left over from the earliest years of the Cold War nuclear arms race. Stalin said that the Russia had to jump forward a hundred years in capability in a mere ten years. Making that jump resulted in cutting corners in nuclear safety which was poorly understood at the time.
     Kondratiev said, “My aunt worked as a sample collector at the factory in the early fifties. She was just 18 when she started and they never told her the truth of what she was working with. All she remembers is getting two big, painful injections every year.” 
    Russia kept the existence of and the work at the Polymetal factory secret for decades. The world may never know exactly what was done at Polymetal. It is known that work there focused on extracting uranium and thorium from ores. Thousands of tons of waste products from the extraction processes were dumped in areas around the factory.
     There were other plants in the Soviet Union where radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production were disposed of so casually. There are hundreds of such nuclear waste dumps scattered across the territory of the old Soviet Union. However, the sheer volume of waste at the Polymetal site and the tens of thousand of people living nearby make that site especially dangerous.
     Radon is the Russian government’s agency that is responsible for securing nuclear waste. It made a major survey of the Polymetal site in 1999. Forty different zones of contamination were identified in the survey. Steps were immediately taken to reduce the danger of the contamination. However, the steps taken by Radon did not amount to a full decontamination of the site.
Please read Part 2