Former Soviet Union Shows Worst-Case Scenarios of Cancer Cases, Ill Children

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Sunday October 10, 4:49 pm Eastern Time

Company Press Release

SOURCE: Newsweek

Newsweek: Visit to Nuclear Plant and Surrounding Region in Former 
Soviet Union Shows Worst-Case Scenarios of Cancer Cases, Ill Children 
 
Demand Down for Nuclear Plants; Britain Shuts Down Reactor After 
'Hot' Particles Found on Beaches  

NEW YORK, Oct. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- A visit by Newsweek to a nuclear 
power plant in the former Soviet Union found not only decrepit 
equipment and lax security measures, but worst-case scenarios of 
nuclear power plant fallout with high cancer rates in a small town's 
population and ill children in a school. (Photo: 
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/19991010/HSSU004 )  

Two recent nuclear power plant accidents in Japan and South Korea 
have increased awareness and concern over the safety of plants. 
Newsweek reports in the current issue that not only are these and the 
former Soviet Union's plants a concern, but aging nuclear power 
plants in Western Europe have their own problems. In Britain, 
authorities decommissioned a reactor, the Dounreay plant near Thurso, 
on Scotland's northern coast, after they acknowledged that waste-
storage units were leaking. Earlier this year, on local beaches they 
also found mysterious ``hot'' particles, which were radioactive 
enough to blister someone who sat on them and dangerous enough to 
kill a child who swallowed them. Cleanup and shutdown will take up to 
100 years and cost $740 million.  

Although industry executives insist that nuclear power in Asia, 
Western Europe and the U.S. remains safe, construction of new nuclear-
power plants is down. ``Now, many European countries are saying that 
the risk is unacceptably too high,'' says Mohamed ElBaradei, the 
International Atomic Energy Agency's chief, in the October 18 issue 
of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, October 11). Nuclear-reactor 
orders and start-ups ranged from 20 to 40 per year in the 1980s; in 
1997, there were just two new orders, and five start-ups worldwide. 
Last year, construction began on only four new nuclear reactors, in 
China, Taiwan and Japan. And output from U.S. nuclear plants has 
declined dramatically in recent years with tough new regulations. 
``There's no real future for the nuclear industry,'' says Helen 
Wallace, a physicist and Greenpeace campaigner in England. ``It's 
clear nuclear power is on its way out.''  

Early this year, Newsweek visited the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant 
(LNPP) in Sosnovy-Bor, a distant suburb of St. Petersburg, and the 
surrounding region. Some of the discoveries:  

--  Rusting cranes looming over piles of building materials, 
seemingly abandoned, which are supposed to be used to revamp the 
plant's safety systems.  The overhaul originally was scheduled for 
completion by year's end, but that has been postponed until 2001.  
"If the ruble crises goes on," says spokesman Karl Rendel, "it seems 
pretty clear it won't be done even by then." 

--  Many employees didn't wear the protective gear or plastic boots-
which are required for visitors, nor the dosimeters, that measure 
radiation.  (During a brief visit, a Newsweek photographer's personal 
monitor pegged off the scale, far above permissible limits.) 

--  Critics of the plant have discovered that at least three LNPP 
employees were heroin addicts.  One of them died of an overdose last 
winter, the others were sent to undergo treatment.  Russian 
environmentalists claim at least one addict had access to the vital 
control room of the facility, and others to radioactive-waste 
facilities.  The deputy chief safety engineer confirmed the heroin 
cases but insisted "none of them had a critical position." 

--  The mayor of Novogorny, a town near the nuclear reprocessing 
plant Mayak Production Association, says they're suffering from 
nuclear fallout.  "There is 15 times the limit of strontium-90 in the 
soil, 38 times the limit of cesium-137, 10 times the plutonium 
limit," Aleksandr Genilo tells Newsweek.  "But the authorities don't 
believe that when the wind blows, people here all get headaches.  
They say it's just radiophobia."  Newsweek was denied permission to 
visit Mayak. 

--  A medical doctor in a village near Mayak, Timirbai Galyulin, says 
nearly every member of his family has some chronic medical problem; 
his youngest granddaughter was born with only six fingers.  "We don't 
have concrete statistics to prove it," he says. "But I was born in 
1939 and there used to be 50 people in the village my age, and now no 
more than ten are left, and most of them are oncological cases." 

--  At the Novogorny hospital, the medical doctor says they haven't 
had a single normal birth in two years.  "In a population of 10,000, 
we have 30 or 40 new cases of cancer every year."  At a local school, 
chronic illnesses are so common that a third of the 230 students are 
out sick on any given day.  Researchers from Mayak tested the 
children's blood, but never gave results.  "Novogorny should be 
evacuated," says the mayor.

Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net 
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening 
the mouth, is to close it again on something solid"
              - G. K. Chesterton -
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