At Grist, Jess Zimmerman has an interesting piece about a lake near a
notoriously leaky former Soviet nuclear research site, where the
radiation level is so high that an hour on the beach can be enough to
kill you.
You can’t really blame Lake Karachay for acting up — it
comes from a really rough area. The lake is located within the Mayak
Production Association, one of the largest — and leakiest — nuclear
facilities in Russia. The Russian government kept Mayak entirely secret
until 1990, and it spent that period of invisibility mainly having
nuclear meltdowns and dumping waste into the river. By the time Mayak’s
existence was officially acknowledged, there had been a 21 percent
increase in cancer incidence, a 25 percent increase in birth defects,
and a 41 percent increase in leukemia in the surrounding region of
Chelyabinsk. The Techa river, which provided water to nearby villages,
was so contaminated that up to 65 percent of locals fell ill with
radiation sickness — which the doctors termed “special disease,” because
as long as the facility was secret, they weren’t allowed to mention
radiation in their diagnoses.
Read the rest at Grist
No comments:
Post a Comment