Anonymous workers at Mayak predict ‘nuclear Armageddon’

A group claiming to be anonymous nuclear workers has warned the Russian president, the prime minster and the “global public” that a disaster is brewing at Russia’s Mayak Chemical Combine that will outdo all previous natural and industrial disasters in an letter sent to several newspapers in the Chelyabinsk Region where the plant is located.

Bellona

First some might wonder what is Mayak.

The Mayak plant was built in 1945–48, in a great hurry and in total secrecy, as part of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapon program. The plant's original mission was to make, refine, and machine plutonium for weapons. Five nuclear reactors were built for this purpose. Later the plant came to specialize in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors, and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. Today the plant makes tritium and radioisotopes, but no plutonium. In recent years, proposals that the plant reprocess, for money, waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise to controversy.

Mayak

During the whole Japan nuclear crisis, and all the studying of nuclear power and accidents it caused me to do, I could not help but come to the conclusion that nuclear power is much to dangerous to leave in the hands of private corporations and should be managed by an international organization comprissed of experts from all nuclear nations. With accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima we can longer longer afford to be lied to. The permanent damage caused by these events is too large for one nation to handle as both Chernobyl and Fukushima have proven.

Today i'm shocked when I stumble across this article. What the heck is Mayak I asked myself. Turns out I wish I never learned of it.

Mayak’s contaminated history

Mayak, located in the closed nuclear town of Ozersk, is Russia’s only operational facility for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from VVER-440 type reactors and spent fuel from nuclear submarines, and has long borne the moniker of being the most radioactively contaminated place on earth. It also takes fuel from other countries that it has little hope of reprocessing.

In 1957, it saw the so-called Kytshym disaster – the precursor to Chernobyl – when a waste storage tank exploded, spreading radioactivity throughout the region and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands. It was dubbed the Kyshtym disaster by Soviet nuclear authorities to divert attention to a neighboring town where they said a conventional power plant had exploded.

Thousands were press-ganged – included children and pregnant women – into cleaning up the nuclear fallout with little more than rags. The legacy remain today in highly irradiated land, elevated cancer rates and birth deformities.

In 2000, disaster was only barley averted when the cooling system to the plutonium reactor operated on the Mayak site was knocked out by inclement weather.

In 2003, the plant briefly lost its operational license over radioactive leakage into area rivers. Yet still, the Techa River cascade remains irradiated with liquid radioactive waste from the reprocessing facility from years of dumping.

And nearby Lake Karachai, which also used to be a dump for liquid waste, is fast evaporating, exposing radionuclides to the atmosphere when they are picked up by wind and spread throughout the region.

Truly unbelievable and it just gets worse.

Letter reopens old corruption case

According to the Moscow Times, the allegations are not new, and were originally brought by a Chelyabinsk blogger in 2009.

Ensuing checks of the piping and sewage system revealed numerous serious violations that were taken up by the regional economic crimes unit, which filed criminal charges, but they were later dropped, the authors of the letter said.

The website of the prosecutor general for the Urals Federal District on Friday announced that Zolotov has ordered a reexamination the decision to close the original investigation into the alleged use of counterfeit Chinese piping in repair works at Mayak.

Can you believe this? Serious violations found in the piping and they have done nothing. They dropped the case. I guess we should feel better because they decided re-examine the case 2 years later.

"The natural disasters and technological accidents of the past are nothing compared with the nuclear Armageddon that awaits us!" the authors said, according to Novy Raion and various other regional newspapers.

Mayak's response to the letter claims its all part of a business disagreement and there's nothing to worry about. We sure have heard that alot lately.

If there ever was a reason that nuclear power should not be in private hands or even under the control of a single government, this is it.

Russian village huge human nuclear experiment

wow scary, i wonder what the full effect of this scenario coming true would be?

Originally posted by lewman
wow scary, i wonder what the full effect of this scenario coming true would be?

Indeed. The video at the end shows at one point what appears to be workers in the Mayak plant standing over exposed nuclear waste.

Russian governments sure scare me with their disregard for life.

Edit:Added video link

Here's one more good video about Mayak.
Markus Reher visits Russias Mayak nuclear facility | Journal Reporter

Chelyabinsk The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet

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. Mayak, 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.
For forty-five years, the Chelyabinsk province of Russia was closed to all foreigners. Only in January of 1992 did President Boris Yeltsin sign a decree changing that. As a result, western scientists who studied the region, declared Chelyabinsk to be the most polluted spot on earth.

Just wow.

What else can one say? Why are people still being forced to live there?

Impact of the Environmental Crisis

Soon after the Mayak nuclear complex became operational, death and diseases in the region increased dramatically due to the dumping of medium and high level radioactive waste into the river system. As a result, 22 villages on the riverbanks, in a 50 km downstream zone from the complex, were evacuated. The village of Muslymova, just outside the 50 km zone was particularly contaminated, but it was never evacuated. Muslyumova lies 45 km north west of Chelyabinsk city and has 4,000 inhabitants. The village had no wells and until recent years depended on the river Techa, for drinking water.

The villagers of Muslyumova grew increasingly ill following contamination of their water. The number of birth defects and cancer deaths soared, but the authorities refused to take remedial measures. Statistics show that gene-mutations in the villages just outside the evacuated zone were 15 times the average for the Russian Federation. The local authorities attributed the high level of birth defects among newborns and the high mortality rates to a low standard of living.

Quite frankly I don't understand how this accident is only listed as a level 6.

I just posted this in another thread so hope this is not seen as a violation but I think it belongs here as well

Yes I agree with you about not using nuclear power but the fact is we have it. More to the point, they have it.

Even if we/they now choose to get rid of it as far as I am aware it is not like flipping a switch.

In the mean time WE need to have control over the risk that nuclear power is. They, the power producers and the governments must be relieved of a responsibility they have proved they are not responsible or capable of controlling

Do you think they, the power mongers would be so ready to go down the nuclear energy path if they could build their bombs cheaper another way?

Like kids they have abused this toy and so should have it taken away from them and the more of us that demand this is done the more likely this will happen.

Whatever you wish to call it and I see no problem with calling it a new world power as long as that power is in our hands. Our meaning the citizens of the world.

Our leaders have shown they are all corrupt and that is our fault because we give them the power that corrupts.

Japan is as much our fault as the powers that have put them in this position. We allowed the dead of chernoyal to go unnoticed and those responsible not made to accept their part.

We allowed three mile island to pass into history as an un learned lesson.

So what happens now? Do we let more people pay the price for greedy power hungry world leaders and corperation’s letting the true guilty go unpunished? Ourselves.

You know that feeling you get when you see the pictures and hear the stories of the victims. You may think its anger in reality it is guilt. Guilt that we allow abuses like this to happen pretty much unchallenged.

This place is truly a nightmare.

400 million cubic meters of radioactive waste threaten the Arctic area

The reservoirs filled with liquid radioactice waste in Mayak is about to flow over. The governor of the Chelyabinsk region is now warning against a radioactive disaster that may affect the river system leading to the Ob in Siberia and the Arctic Ocean.

In a shocking letter sent to the Russian prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, this summer, the district governor of Chelyabinsk, Pyotr Sumin, writes that within three or four years the water reservoirs will have reached their maximum capacity. In the letter, disclosed by the environmental group Ecodefense, Sumin warns about catastrophic consequences.

"One of the biggest and most acute problems is the risk of the ponds giving after and consequently a flood which would inflict serious consequences on the river system leading to Iset, Tobol and Ob."

The district governor goes on: "The situation has been reported repeatedly to the president, the government and the federation council. Unfortunately, in spite of a number of declarations and recommendations from the security council, nothing has been done in order to initiate any remedial actions to prevent the flooding of radioactive water."

The situation was particularly critical this spring, due to substantial amounts of melt water. Only 26 cm prevented the water to overflow the bottom rampart of reservoir number 11. The majority of the radioactivity is located in this reservoir. On a total, the radioactivity is calculated to 10,5 PBq of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90. By comparison, the British reprocessing plant Sellafield operates with a maximum discharge limit into the Irish Sea, of 100 TBq.

This region is a ongoing disaster for 50 years now and hardly any mention of it anywhere.

To top the insanity take a look at this.

As means of reducing the water level of the reservoirs the vice governor, Pyo Sumin, expressed a wish to resume the building of the South Ural nuclear plant. The nuclear plant will be put up right next to the water reservoirs, and will use the water reservoirs as cooling water. In this way, they hope to reduce the water level of the reservoirs.

The local environmental activist in Chelyabinsk, Natalia Mironova, defines this project as dangerous.

"Imagine what would happen if one of the ramparts gave in and the water would flow out. The nuclear plant would lose its cooling water for their reactors, and a new Tsjernobyl accident would be reality", Mironova says.

reply to post by colin42


I agree with you. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Nuclear power will be used but, as we both agree, private corporations and even governments should not be in control of it. We need a international body with experts from all over the world to govern nuclear power. When a accident happens we need immeadiate action, not weeks or months of assesment before a decision that affects lives is made.

If there ever was a more blatant case of money being put before lives I have yet to find it.

The more I dig the more I realise that Mayak may be a larger problem than Fukushima.

Japan dumps radioactive water into sea

Japan has begun dumping more than 11.5 million litres of radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific.

Chelyabinsk

Every year, 10 million m3 of liquid radioactive waste are dumped in the water reservoirs along the Techa River. Today, radioactive water is held back from the river system only by a simple rampart, which would easily be torn down by heavy rains.

Every year Mayak dumps as much contaminated water into the environment as Fukushima was forced to do.

This video claims the Mayak facility has caused 2.4 billion curies of radiation compared to Chernobyls 50 million curies.
Deadly Secret - Russia

How is this place allowed to exist?

reply to post by FreeSpeaker


Freespeaker

I am amazed that your thread and the info contained has got so little response.

The info you have given shows the nuclear power industry is corrupt, not to be trusted and put profit before people and could care less for a clean air future.

Added to the incidents we know have happened we can start to really see the cost of electricity generated this way and it is by no means cheap and no way clean.

reply to post by colin42


I have more flags than replies.

Maybe its a case of overload but I did expect more of a response. A major accident at Mayak would make chernobyl and fukushima seem very small from what I have read. I truly hope to never hear of this place in the future because its already a nightmare.

That is just unbelievable.
The Russians need to be held accountable for this

Originally posted by FreeSpeaker
reply to post by colin42

 

I agree with you. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Nuclear power will be used but, as we both agree, private corporations and even governments should not be in control of it. We need a international body with experts from all over the world to govern nuclear power. When a accident happens we need immeadiate action, not weeks or months of assesment before a decision that affects lives is made.

If there ever was a more blatant case of money being put before lives I have yet to find it.

Gee like the UN? Americans holding their government accountable is they only way.

reply to post by Steve8511


No not like the UN.

The first step is to make all the information open to the public gaze and then an accountable body set up to oversee

And if you tell me that is unachievable then Atomic power is unacceptable

edit

And you missed the point. Americans holding their governments to book. We all pay the price for these disasters, there are no boundarys or borders

I have had a few dreams telling me of future collective disasters way before they happened. I dreamed about planes hitting the world trade center for example - around 1994. I was told in that dream never to stay in the US after that date. I moved back to Europe.

Now I had a dream once in those periods full of predictive dreams which said a terrible tragedy would unfold in Russia which will overshadow the devastation caused by the world war and I could see it was a big circle of darkness in the middle of the map - on the border of European Russia and Siberia..

It could be a Mayak event.

And that would certainly force people to shut down reactors untiol there is a safe technology of storing spent fuel rods.

I remember the emotional mood of the world as if seen from America - there was trememdous sympathy for the suffering population. That is not the case if the danger is from an unbridled dictatorship's excesses which is also a legitimate fear.

Then I read a report on the secret Mayak installations in the Hungarian press.
I had a feeling that this was going to be a major problem. I have seem people from Muslimovo who came to Budapest to stage a small demonstration in the streets so that Hungary would stop sending spent nuclear waste to Russia. Deformed people themselves sentenced to an early and painful death were explaining to translators at a main intersection what it is like to live there.

The government stopped all support of the demonstrators and quietly sent them home.

Originally posted by MrSandman
That is just unbelievable.
The Russians need to be held accountable for this

My thoughts exactly.

Originally posted by Steve8511

Gee like the UN? Americans holding their government accountable is they only way.

Nope. I think a new organization run by the top scientists of every nuclear nation should be formed. A new nuclear regulater run by the minds that know it best, free of corporate and government obstruction. I think the staff of every nuclear plant should be trained and managed by this new organization. Nuclear nations should fund it and thats it, no influence.

Any nuclear power plant has the potential for world wide fallout, so its seems its only common sense that nuclear power plants should be overseen by a independent world body.