A radiation accident in the southern Urals in 1957

Comparison of remote consequences in Taraxacum officinale seed progeny collected in radioactively or chemically contaminated areas

“…Currently, 90 Sr is the main contaminant in EURT area. Additional EURT contamination by 137 Cs occurred in 1967 as a result of the silt and fine sand transfer from the shores of shoal Lake Karachay used as an open storage for radioactive waste (Nikipelov et al 1989;Aarkrog et al 1997). Recent levels of radionuclide contamination in the EURT were shown in our earlier investigation (Molchanova et al 2009;Pozolotina et al 2010).…”

Windscale and Kyshtym: a double anniversary

“…About 740 PBq of fission products were released from containment, of which 10% was dispersed to the atmosphere (Nikipelov et al, 1989;Kabakchi et al, 1995). Despite the scale of this release, the Western scientific community only became aware of it in the late 1970s, based on information from the exiled Soviet dissident scientist Medvedev (1976)).…”

“…That said, in the Western scientific literature the first scientific evaluations of the scale and environmental consequences of the incident were based on a review of many papers from the 1960s and 1970s in the open Russian radioecological literature, reporting 'large scale experimental applications' of mixed fission products to grassland, forest and freshwater ecosystems (Trabalka et al, 1980a,b). It was not until 1989, during the era of glastnost, that the Soviet Union provided an official account of the circumstances (Nikipelov et al, 1989). The event is known as the 'Kyshtym accident', taking the name from the centre of population closest to the source, rather than the Mayak reprocessing plant itself; it has been retrospectively rated at 6 on the International Nuclear Event (INES) scale (IAEA, 2001).…”

The history of plutonium and cesium-137 contamination of the Ob River delta sediments

“…The amount of Sr-90 was 27 kCi while Cs-137 amounted to 0.35 kCi (Nikipelov et al, 1989;Trabalka & Auerbach, 1990). An area of 15,000 square kilometers was contaminated to the north-east of the "Mayak'' facility ( Fig.…”

“…16). Nikipelov et al (1989) characterized the radionuclide composition of waste which was dispersed out of the exploded storage tank. Cs-137 contribution was only 0.036% and Pu-239,240 was measurable (Table 5).…”