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A fire last month in a bath house at the Mayak nuclear weapons plant
in Chelyabinsk, southwestern Siberia, triggered widespread rumours of a
major nuclear disaster in the Urals. The rumours were unfounded, but they
are symptomatic of growing concern about safety at Mayak.

In October, environmental activists warned a conference on nuclear energy
that the Urals could suffer a disaster ‘ten times worse than Chernobyl’
because of Mayak. The activists were not referring to the Mayak plant itself,
but to Lake Karachai, which for three decades has been used as a waste dump
for Mayak. They say the dump is now ‘out of control’. It contains an estimated
1 billion curies of radiation. Contaminated water from the lake is percolating
into the ground water and threatens to pollute the tributaries of the river
Ob.

Heavy rainfall washes through more contaminated water. But drought also
has serious consequences: as the level of the lake falls and the shores
dry out, the wind raises radioactive dust which can be blown long distances.
‘It is bad when it rains, and bad when it doesn’t,’ says Vitalii Chelyshev,
editor of the environmental newspaper Spansenie.

One of the first acts of Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government after the
failed August coup was to assign 1.5 billion roubles to clearing up Lake
Karachai. The money was allocated to the all-union ministry of nuclear energy
and the nuclear industry.

Aleksander Penyagin, then head of the USSR Supreme Soviet’s committee
on nuclear energy, defends this decision on the grounds that the ministry
knows what is in the lake and has the expertise to deal with it. Chelyshev
is less optimistic. ‘Those people have had money for cleanups before, but
it always seems to go on new nuclear technology,’ he says. ‘Some time ago,
they even proposed building a nuclear reactor right by the lake to boil
off the water so that they could get out the solid residues.’ According
to Chelyshev, this idea was abandoned after protests from local people.

The ministry’s latest idea is simply to fill in the lake. This plan
has also provoked vehement protests, both from a special environmental commission
of the Russian parliament and from the public. ‘Filling in is not the correct
solution,’ says Svyratoslav Zabelin, chairman of the Socio-Ecological Union,
which coordinates citizens’ pressure groups. ‘It will have to be a very
complex operation,’ he added, ‘and we are trying to collect material on
possible strategies.’

The problem of Karachai seems to bring out the fantastic in those planning
to deal with it. One of the most bizarre suggestions is to refrigerate the
most polluted parts of the lake bed. The contaminated water, together with
part of the silt, will then, in theory, come to the surface as ice and be
skimmed off. So far no one seems to have addressed the problem of what to
do with the recovered radionuclides. ‘Yes, it does sound way out,’ Chelyshev
commented, ‘but it’s worth looking into. The only really crazy thing would
be to do nothing.’