Scary Shit: It appears that not much has changed in the Motherland

Activist forces the release of long hidden documents on radiation accident

A Russian human rights activist has scored a major victory by securing legal access documents detailing a three week long cancer provoking radiation leak at the Russia’s largest atomic research center at Dimitrovgrad—an event that Moscow and the institute have held close to thier chests for eight years.

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According to Piskunov, NIIAR’s information policy practice is to“not to say anything about radioactive discharges in order to avoid panic.”

But in fact, it is precisely the lack of information about situations at nuclear plants that causes the panic. A case in point is the February panic surrounding a leaking cooling pipe at the Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant that triggered an emergency shutdown of the effected reactor. For 24 hours, rumours circulated that a radioactive leak had occurred and panic spread among southern regions in Russia. Official comment on the state of the plant emerged a full day following.

During the NIIAR radiation release in 1997, which continued for 23 days, NIIAR officially claimed that “iodine concentrations in the air above the institute’s territory, Dimitrovgrad, and the nearby settlements is significantly lower than the allowable limits.”

The local department of the Citizens’ Defense and Emergency Situation ministry received the following information from NIIAR: “On July 28-29, the values of releases of rare gases do not exceed the allowed limits, the values of the daily releases of iodine-131 are 60-70 milliCuries.”

But, as Mikhail Piskunov points out, 60 to 70 milliCuries per day dramatically exceeds the norms for NIIAR of iodine releases, which are usually 3.3 milliCurie daily.

According to independent calculations made by Piskunov, on July 31st 1997, 64 milliCuries of iodine-131 were discharged into the air, exceeding the daily norm by more than 30 times.
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