A radiation cloud, and a mystery, from Russia

MOSCOW — When a container of radioactive waste exploded at the Mayak factory 60 years ago, in one of the worst accidents of the nuclear age, the episode was so shrouded in secrecy that even residents of nearby towns had little clue of the danger.

That secrecy proved deadly. Among the estimated 272,000 people who were exposed was a newborn girl who withered and died from radiation sickness. Taisia A. Fomina, a friend of the family’s, recalled that the girl’s father, ignorant of the danger, welded a bed frame from irradiated metal recycled from the nuclear plant. The child was poisoned as she slept.

Residents learned of the radiation risk only a year after the accident, said Fomina, now 84. “Some rumors went around town that something blew up at the factory, but we didn’t know what,” she added. “Of course, they didn’t tell us.”

Now, another possible accident at Mayak, a plant at the heart of Russia’s nuclear program, and the paucity of information coming out about it, is again raising alarms.

Last month, French and German radiation safety officials identified the southern Ural Mountain region, home of Mayak, as the likely source of a cloud of a radioactive isotope, ruthenium 106, they detected wafting over Europe. The plant at Mayak reprocesses spent fuel and produces isotopes.

Ruthenium 106, which is obtained from spent fuel, is used mostly in medicine. It is considered not particularly dangerous because of its short half-life, 373 days, and harmless at the low concentrations that have turned up in Europe.

But mystery lingers around the cloud all the same.

The German Federal Office for Radiation Protection reported the radiation cloud, and then on Oct. 9 pinpointed its likely origin as the southern Ural Mountains in Russia or Kazakhstan. That is near the closed town now called Ozersk but known as Chelyabinsk-40 when Fomina worked there as a young woman from 1954 to 1960. The agency said that the cause of the cloud “is still not clear.”

French radiation safety authorities mapped wind patterns and reached the same conclusion: the contamination was floating in from somewhere near Mayak, a region of cedar forests, lakes and swamps about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.

The French nuclear safety institute, which tracked the cloud, said that if the accident had occurred in France, authorities would have taken measures to protect the local population within a few miles, and taken precautions over longer distances to halt the sale of contaminated crops. But the concentrations in the air over Europe, the institute said in a Nov. 9 report, “are of no consequence for human health and for the environment.”

Puzzlingly, on Oct. 9, regional authorities in the Chelyabinsk region, home of the plant, issued a statement saying the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, had regularly tested the air and that “the radiation background in the region is within norms.”