Six nuclear Newsweek pages: THE NEXT CHERNOBYL

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@hotmail.com>]

The Oct. 18 issue of Newsweek has six ”nuclear” pages (icluding the front 
page). The front page reads: ”THE NEXT CHERNOBYL// Radiation Symbol// ”They 
say it can’t happen again…”

The article starts out with Sosnovy-bor, St. Petersburg, Russia (”…rusting 
cranes loomed like mutant insects…”). There is no doubt that there have 
been, and still are a lot of problems relating to radioactivity in former 
Soviet Union. The point here is about the reporting.

I just browsed through the articles and found the following text about the 
Mayak complex & problems:
”…the Mayak Production Association, a reprocessing plant... In 1957, there 
was a mysterious explosion of the highly toxic radioactive isotope 
strontium-90 at Mayak, which injured 450 residents and workers; another 
28,000 were officially classified as ''affected" by the releases. Since 
then, there have been half a dozen fatal incidents, including a 1967 
explosion of cesium-137, a highly dangerous isotope, that spewed radioactive 
particles...”

I ask: How can a worldwide distributed magazine like Newsweek keep writers 
who don’t check the simplest facts – especially as these are readily 
available on the Internet and from many other sources? Mayak is much more 
than a reprocessing plant. The 1957 accident wasn’t only about Sr-90 and the 
1967 event was a typhon the whirled around more than cesium (”a highly 
dangerous isotope” – isn’t it more about the amounts...? - the K-40 etc in 
my body should also be ”highly dangerous” with analogous terminology).
The number 28000 seems like the only population number that the writer(s) 
could find (is this just a case of lazyness??) – I could easily give several 
dozens of population numbers for the Mayak area – all from published 
scientific or technical papers – depending on the subtopic one wishes to 
empasize. The wording "mysterious explosion" seems again to mean: "I am 
really too tired to check the facts".

There is more loose language in the article like that relating to the 
incident in South Korea. The text about the latter reads ”…exposed 22 
nuclear workers to low level radiation…”. Sorry about repeating this point 
(what were the doses?) but to me such text is mainly political and clearly 
unclear.

The bottomline is that when one finds a few examples of such bad writing – 
one must conclude that one cannot trust _anything_ from the same writer(s). 
They only want to sell the story (”the 1967 explosion spewed cesium...”).

It has not escaped my attention that the fission product Cs-137 exploded 
(these are, I suppose, ”unimportant details” – no doubt very different from 
writing that Alan Greenspan is a famous NHL player which probably would 
cause more objections).

My own opinions, thoughts etc

Bjorn Cedervall     bcradsafers@hotmail.com
PS. I met a 12 year old boy 2-3 years ago who told me that Sosnovy-bor – 
where his father works – is absolutely safe. I didn’t argue but asked 
myself: How well have KI tablets been distributed in the St. Petersburg area 
(does anyone in Radsafers land know?). Another detail BTW is that Newsweek 
forgot to put the Sosnov-bor on the ”Nuclear Europé” map on p. 26.

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