In these times when the most insignificant frivolity can cross the world in just one second, we have been condemned to wait many months to know an important truth. In September there was a huge radioactive leak that spread across Europe and 100 days later people do not know exactly what has happened. The truth is that, given the silence of the big media ... Has anything happened?

On 9 November, the French Nuclear Safety Institute (IRSN), which met in two days, reported that the radioactive isotope Rutenio 106 was detected in France and other European countries in early October. The letter of IRSN simulators showed that the event occurred in Russia, south of the Ural Mountains, where numerous accidents have been reported. In the coming weeks, the Moscow authorities have begun to put down the evidence of what has happened in the most prominent style of the Soviet bureaucracy, for which they have more than one reason, as we shall see later.

After denying that there had been no atomic accident in Russia, the weather agency Rosguidromet acknowledged that in the Cheliabinsk region the remains of Rutenio had been located 106, 1,000 times more than usual. On the contrary, the public company Rossatom, one of the world’s largest atomic corporations, continues to argue that none of its facilities has seen such a spill. They began from Moscow to cite international conspiracies as the source of an alleged leak, sending a commission to Cheliabinsk..., which had not so far found anything.

Later a more curious hypothesis was used in Moscow: perhaps some military satellite from another country would open up the radiation when it landed uncontrollably from space. This phenomenon was denied by the Russian scientists themselves. When the news about the radioactive mist was rather confusing, Yuri Mokrov has shown the next episode of truth.

In the Cheliabinsk II region. Yuri Mokrov has been an advisor to the director of factory Maiak, who has been playing with atomic fuels since the World War. He himself acknowledged that on 13 December, probably, the radioactive issue has spread via webcast from Maiak. In particular, he has indicated that in the operations carried out there to reprocess used fuels, Rutenio 106 is usually created, albeit in very small and controlled quantities. You don't have to be too fast to realize that Mokrov's confession seems like a controlled explosion of earlier lies.

With what we have learned so far, Tantaka, we seem to be talking about an accident in the handling phase of nuclear waste. Norwegian physicist Nils Bøhmer, director of the Bellona association, who is monitoring nuclear risks, said that the ruthenium leak probably occurred at the Maiak factory in Ozersk. The nuclear waste is stabilized as glass for later burial in a warehouse, and one of the risks of the process is that in the glazing operations Rutenio 106 it is transformed into gas and that if the oven does not have an adequate filter, the contaminant is spread through the air.

Celebration of the 60th anniversary

Chance wanted Maiak to spread radiation across Europe 60 years after one of the most serious accidents in the world in the same place. Built in 1945 by the Soviet Union to deal with the military superiority of the United States, the Maiak nuclear laboratory produced in 1948 the first plutonium with which Stalin had the first Soviet atomic bomb exploded.

Between 1948 and 1956, the factory caused great contamination by the discharge of radioactive water to the Tetxa, a tributary of the Ob River. 124,000 people living in the area received drinking water from this river and suffered radiation for a long time. At one point 7,000 people were evacuated, although it is reported that 8,000 people per hour had died from pollution. The rubble was also dumped on Lake Karatxai in western Siberia. After the 1967 drought, the wind dispersed the radioactive ash over two thousand square kilometres.

However, the Kyshtym disaster was the most terrible one caused by Maiak. In 1957, one of the reactor cooling systems blew up and more than half of the accumulated radioactivity fell into the atmosphere. The particles spread in 54,000 square kilometers of the environment, contaminating 220,000 inhabitants. On the scale of nuclear accidents, Grade 6 is given to Kyshtym, the largest ever after the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters. How many would be the ones that would cause his death?

It will never be known, because the authorities have made no effort to investigate it seriously. On the contrary, they silently covered the disaster, first in the Soviet Union itself. The Western authorities also shut him down, although the explosion in Ozersk was detected at the time by the Cia, who stopped him. At the heart of the Cold War was first the competition for nuclear weapons and then the prestige of the nuclear power plant business. In 1976, Russian biologist Jaures Medvedev was in charge of publicizing the accident in the West.

Half a century later, in the city of Ozersk (90,000 inhabitants), which asks for a special permit to go, the Maiak Production Centre – in Russian the Mayans are headlights – employs 17,000 people in facilities of 90 square kilometres and is surrounded by 2,050 square kilometres of prohibited spaces. Today, the fuel used in atomic reactors is treated and buried forever.

Together with the Tetxa River, it accumulates about 10 million cubic metres of radioactive water each year from the treatment of old fuels brought from all over the world. In 2001, the Washington Government approved the import of nuclear waste by Russia, which saw Moscow moving a $20 billion business in ten years. That is how Russia has become a subcontract to take the garbage they want to remove from the West's power stations.

In addition, Russian Rossatom is getting into competitions to build new nuclear power plants around the world, winning contracts in countries like Egypt, India or even Hungary. Because globalisation causes continuous worldwide distribution of works, now offers to build atomic power plants are often in competition between China and Russia. Always in a hazardous nuclear industry, we are now going to have the quality standards of Russian subcontractors also in safety.