In the shadow of nuclear catastrophe The area around Russia's Mayak reactor is one of the most toxic on the planet. In one village, 'everybody is just waiting to die'.

KARABOLKA, RUSSIA -- When he looks around, Mors Abdrakhimov sees that he is among the living dead.

In his bedraggled village of 460 people, just east of Russia's rugged Ural Mountains, there are seven overflowing graveyards -- a reminder of a time, not so long ago, when the Tatar community was 10 times its current size. Those still alive, even those in their 30s and 40s, have a habit of talking about their imminent deaths. Few residents expect to see 50.

At 61, Mr. Abdrakhimov has lived longer than most in Karabolka, but even in his job as director of the village's only school, he sees little reason to hope for its future. When he started teaching 40 years ago, the school had nearly a thousand students. Today, there are 55. And none, according to Mr. Abdrakhimov, has a clean bill of health.

"There are no healthy people in this town, and no healthy children in the school," he said simply. "Everybody is just waiting to die."

Mr. Abdrakhimov is not alone in his pessimism. Walk around the empty streets of this farming community and almost everyone you meet seems to share the same outlook. Death is coming. Soon.
The harbinger can be seen a few kilometres south, along a bumpy road, in the form of two smokestacks stretching skyward over a cluster of trees. It is the Mayak nuclear operation, site of the first successful Soviet nuclear tests and some of the worst environmental catastrophes in history.
Because of the plant, Karabolka, its neighbouring villages and the regional centre of Chelyabinsk, home to more than a million people, are ranked among the most dangerous places on the planet to live. In the region surrounding Mayak, estimates of the number of people affected range as high as 450,000. Those living closest to the nuclear complex -- 28,000 in all -- received doses of radiation as much as 60 times higher than seen during the 1986 Chernobyl explosion.

For all its dangers, Mayak is just one of dozens of aging nuclear facilities that dot the former Soviet Union, each posing the risk of another Chernobyl. In Russia alone, 10 cities are still closed to the outside world because of the nuclear work that goes on there. The number of people across the former empire who have died or are suffering from radiation-related illnesses is believed to be in the millions.

At Mayak, cleaning up the mess would take decades and cost the Russian government many millions of dollars -- money it says it does not have. But instead of beginning the long task, President Vladimir Putin's government wants to bring thousands more tonnes of nuclear waste here, importing it by rail from neighbouring countries and processing it at the creaky facility.
In the early days of the Cold War, the work being done at Mayak was so secretive that residents of the surrounding villages did not know the massive nuclear complex was there. When one of its reactors exploded in September of 1957, after a cooling system failed in a storage tank containing radioactive waste, many villagers looked at the horizon and thought they were witnessing a giant forest fire.

What they were seeing was a blast equal in force to 70 tonnes of TNT. But unlike the Chernobyl explosion, when winds carried the fallout across a large chunk of Eastern Europe, approximately 90 per cent of the radioactive material released in the Mayak disaster settled in the immediate vicinity.
The Soviet government of the day quickly began a cover-up, keeping the accident a secret even as they began removing and eventually resettling many of those who lived in the path of the fallout. But when officials got to Karabolka, which then had more than 5,000 residents, a strange and still unexplained decision was made in the resettlement program: The smaller part of the village where ethnic Russians lived was moved. The larger part, known as Tatar Karabolka, was left behind.

Mr. Abdrakhimov was 16 at the time. He remembers a day, soon after the 1957 accident, when he and other high-school students, including the woman he was later to marry, were marched out to the fields where Russian Karabolka once stood and ordered to plant trees. As their teachers instructed students to dig into the soil and cover up the remains of the Russian half of the village, no one spoke about the dangers of radiation.
Today, Mr. Abdrakhimov suffers from a list of symptoms common to almost the entire population of Tatar Karabolka. High blood pressure. Severe headaches. Anemia. Crippling arthritis. A tumour. His wife, Maysufa, ticks off the same conditions, which are simply referred to here as the "soup mix." Their 35-year-old daughter has breast cancer. Their 30-year-old son has a tumour but can't afford to travel to a hospital to find out whether it's malignant. The fate of Mr. Abdrakhimov's three young grandchildren is a constant worry.

"People die young here," said Gulfira Sahilova, the only paramedic in the village. "I think it's definitely because of the radiation, the ecological situation. It's not normal for young people to be dying like this."

Ms. Sahilova works out of a grim one-room office. At 48, her hands are badly gnarled by arthritis. And like many here, she is suspicious of why the Muslim section of the village was left behind.
"I think we were left here as an experiment. I think they are surprised we are still living at all, that we are not dead."

The experiment, many believe, is continuing. Locals testify that a tiny creek flowing through the centre of the village rises sporadically even on days when there has been no rainfall or melting snow. They believe Mayak is dumping nuclear waste into the creek.

Last year, a 13-year-old girl died mysteriously, three days after wading into the creek. Those who were with her just before she died say her skin had blackened and in places was being eaten away.
The Russian government now plans to turn the region into a nuclear dump for domestic and foreign waste, with as much as 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel expected to be imported from around the world. The reward could be as much as $21-billion (U.S.) for Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, known as Minatom, a highly independent organization that effectively runs the closed cities. But for the residents of this region, it has been taken as one more sign that the authorities are willing to take enormous risks with their lives.
"As a human being, it's easy for me to see we don't need this waste. We've got plenty of our own," complained Yarifula Khabibulin, a 55-year-old farmer. Of the 38 people in his graduating class from high school, 35 are dead, most of them from cancer. "Nobody cares about this dying village," he said.

A short drive south from Karabolka, just on the Asian side of the Urals, is Muslemovo, another Tatar village that was left behind in 1957 while the ethnic-Russian communities around it were relocated. The Mayak explosion touched every life, but it isn't the main nuclear tragedy people talk about.

After the Second World War, Mayak became the centre of frenzied work to develop a Soviet atomic bomb to match the one the United States had just dropped on Hiroshima. The weapons-manufacturing plant, however, had no place to store its waste, so it poured the material directly into a nearby lake. Today, Lake Karachai is known as the most radioactive spot on the planet, with seven times the levels of strontium 90 and cesium 137 released by the Chernobyl explosion.

For at least four years, from 1948 to 1952, the plant's waste was dumped into Lake Karachai and the Techa River, which splits Muslemovo in two. It is estimated that about 76 million cubic metres of waste, much of it radioactive, was poured into the river system.

Not knowing they were poisoning themselves, residents swam, drank and let their children play in the Techa. Many of them died. Half a century later, a tiny forest of birch trees with black ribbons tied around their trunks stands outside the city as a silent memorial to the victims of an unknowing folly. There are now 65 trees in the Valley of Memory, each planted by a family who believes a relative died because of Mayak.

A few years ago, the federal government warned residents that the banks of the Techa qualified as "solid nuclear waste." Yet people here still fish in the river and grow food on its banks.

"We have to use this water for washing and to feed to our cattle," said Raya Khammatova, a farmer whose potato patch is separated from the Techa by only a small barbed-wire fence. "It's the only water we have. We have no choice."

Her husband spent three years helping to build that fence, which now has several breaks in it to allow people and cattle to reach the Techa. He is in hospital in Chelyabinsk suffering from chronic radiation illness, with levels of internal radiation several hundred times what doctors deem acceptable.

"Of course we are afraid," Mrs. Khammatova said. "We know we are ill, but we live as we can."
The plant, the Atomic Energy Ministry says, cannot afford a safe disposal system, and dumps radioactive waste into Lake Karachai.

In both Karabolka and Muslemovo, what angers residents most is the government's refusal to adequately compensate them for what happened and what may still be happening. Those that are recognized as victims of radiation receive pitiful amounts of money -- sometimes just a few dollars a month, in many cases just a few dollars a year.
Even at those low amounts, the government has been stingy in deciding who is a victim and who isn't. In Muslemovo, families living on one side of Lenin Street have been granted compensation, while those across the thin, muddy lane have yet to receive anything.

But even as compensation is doled out, authorities don't like to talk about their nuclear problem. Repeated visits to the Radiation Rehabilitation Department in Chelyabinsk proved almost fruitless. The director is out, journalists are told, and no one else is authorized to talk to us.

In Moscow, government officials and nuclear scientists say Russia has the technology to store and process its imported waste. The plant's operators, Minatom, even hope some of the money received for storing other countries' nuclear waste will be invested in new safety standards to ensure another accident does not happen.

The regional government in Chelyabinsk is beginning to take those risks seriously. Though Lake Karachai is dammed, it's still an open-air nuclear waste pit. Its levels rise every spring with the melting snow, often reaching within 30 centimetres of the top of the dam. If the lake overflowed, it would be "a major potential source of radiation disasters and catastrophes," Chelyabinsk Governor Pyotr Sumin wrote in a letter last year to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. The radioactive waste would pollute dozens of Russia's rivers that eventually make their way to the Arctic Ocean, the letter warned.

There are even some in the federal government who warn of a looming disaster. Yuri Vishnevsky, Mr. Putin's official nuclear watchdog, recently wrote that the Mayak plant was unsuitable to handle foreign waste for several reasons, including the fact the plant was not up to international safety standards and continues to dump waste into the open environment. He even questioned whether taking on the waste would end up being a profitable endeavour, once all factors were taken into account.

An examination of the facts, Mr. Vishnevsky wrote, "confirmed the impossibility of receiving foreign spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing."

Nonetheless, the waste-importation plan is scheduled to go ahead, provided it receives approval from the United States, which controls, legally and contractually, most of the world's nuclear waste.

For residents, however, the very thought of an agreement is at once infuriating and perplexing: The government knows the risks, has seen the damage done in the past, and is willing to gamble again. "I don't understand their chain of thoughts," said Venera Khayazova, 63, of Muslemovo, whose family members are almost all suffering from chronic radiation disease or other illnesses she believes are linked to the Techa River.

As Mrs. Khayazova spoke, her grandson Denis stared out the window of their tiny four-room wooden home. Born with cerebral palsy, he is now 16 and attending a special school in Chelyabinsk while his family fights for compensation. Both his father and grandfather were diagnosed as having chronic radiation illness.

Self-conscious of his awkward manner of speech, Denis is nonetheless a passionate orator when the subject is the Mayak plant, which he blames for his illness.

"I feel humiliated. They hurt me to make nuclear bombs," he said after a long pause to search for the right words. "They are not human beings who did this."

The Globe and Mail; 12 August 2002

The “Hell on Earth” series was a finalist for the 2002 National Newspaper Award for international reporting.