Russian village evacuated in nuclear accident
MOSCOW — Russian authorities on Tuesday announced the evacuation of the village nearest to the site of a nuclear accident in northern Russia, suggesting dangers more grave than initially reported.
The still-mysterious episode last week killed seven people and released radiation, apparently when a small nuclear reactor malfunctioned during a test of a novel type of missile near a naval weapons testing site.
Russian officials have released a flurry of misleading or incomplete statements playing down the severity of the accident, which the military first reported Thursday as a fire involving a liquid-fueled rocket engine. It was not until Sunday that Russian scientists conceded that a reactor had released radiation during a test on an offshore platform in the White Sea.
That pattern of murkiness continued Tuesday, as news reports and official statements offered only the vaguest explanation for the evacuation and hours later later seemed to indicate that it had been called off.
Still, the possibility of evacuating the area raised the question of whether authorities see a continuing threat from Thursday’s explosion or may be preparing to retrieve the radioactive source, potentially posing new dangers.
On Saturday, Tass, a state news agency, cited an unnamed official at the Russian nuclear company Rosatom as saying that the explosion on the test platform had knocked the scientists who died into the sea, suggesting the reactor or what remained of it also wound up in the water.
Aleksandr Nikitin, a researcher with the Norwegian environmental group Bellona and an authority on radiation safety in Russia, said in an interview that the military might have to fish the damaged reactor from the seabed. For now, he said, “there are mostly questions without clear answers.”
Officials have insisted radiation levels are not elevated and that the displacement of the population of the village, home to about 450 people, should not be called an evacuation, a word redolent of disaster.
“There is no evacuation,” the governor of the Arkhangelsk region, Igor Orlov, told the Interfax news agency Tuesday. “That is complete nonsense.”
Residents of Nenoksa, the village closest to the incident, were told to leave on a special train that would be sent to their community, TV29, a local news outlet, reported Tuesday.