A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday suggests that Russia suffered a major nuclear accident in 2017.
Led by George Steinhauser, a nuclear chemist at Leibniz University, the study uses atmospheric data to report a likely accident at the Mayak facility in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Speaking to Live Science, Steinhauser said the radioactive material released was “between 30 and 100 times the level of radiation released after the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011.”
Fortunately, atmospheric dilution of the material likely means that no one became ill.
Still, this is another reminder of Russia’s continuing aversion to nuclear accountability. As with the 1986 explosion at the Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl, a Russian investigation into the Mayak explosion was a whitewash. The Russians say that inadequate collected data meant they were unable to prove whether the Mayak facility suffered an accident at all.
Don’t blame the scientists responsible for that report. They were probably ordered to find no proof.
But if scientists outside of Russia can use data analysis of the spread of an atmospheric radiation cloud to identify Mayak as the source of that cloud, then something almost certainly happened at Mayak. The issue here is a familiar one: Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t want this failing publicized because that publication would undercut his increasingly unpopular rule. Much comparison can thus be found between this incident and the Chernobyl cover-up.
We are lucky our nuclear sector is accountable to the law rather than to Putin and a select number of oligarchs.
