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Publicatie Laka-bibliotheek:
A First Assessment of Radiation Doses and Health Effects in Workers and Communities Exposed Since 1948 In The Southern Urals (1994)

Auteur	A.V. Akleyev et al.
Datum	maart 1994
Classificatie	2.34.8.80/19 (RUSLAND - MAYAK/TSJELIABINSK (incl. ramp Oeral 1957))
Opmerking	From: The Science of the Total Environment: vol 142 (1-2)
Voorkant

The Science of the Total Environment 142 (1994) ix-x

Preface

The history of radiation protection is also a history of painful experience learned 
through human suffering. Much of the suffering was connected to war and the 
weapons of war. When the house of Habsburg built its empire, it based it on the arms 
that were forged from metals dug out of the Tyrolian and Hungarian mines where 
countless men perished from lung cancer that is now known to have been due to 
radon and its inhaled decay products.
When new, still more sinister weapons were created 400 years later, and when they 
destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they produced, through their 
radiation, the late effects that are still being studied among the atomic bomb survivors 
and, at the same time, they released a race towards the development of similar and 
ever more powerful nuclear weapons in the East and West. Again unnumbered people 
paid the price. Hundreds of thousands of uranium miners were exposed to radon 
concentrations that were, at least in the first years, not less than those in the mines 
of the middle ages. The fallout of the atomic weapons tests affected the entire 
northern hemisphere, and other parts of the dark heritage of the cold war are still 
uncovered, and most are unresolved.
Even before the catastrophe of Chernobyl, there was rumour and scant information 
about the environmental impact of the early nuclear weapons program of the Soviet 
Union. But only the political changes of the last years have made it possible for the 
health physics community of the West to learn the details of the grave events that had 
happened and of the unique experiences that resulted.
The problems reflected the conditions of the most critical phases of the cold war, but 
the wide-spread contaminations and the exposures both from 'normal' operations and 
from accidents transcended the failures and the harm that one would expect even in 
military programs. The total releases of long-lived fission products such as 
strontium-90, caesium-137 and of plutonium-239 and other actinides were orders of 
magnitude larger than those from Chernobyl. The exposures of workers and of some 
cohorts of the general population exceeded the average doses experienced by the 
atomic bomb survivors. There were four circumstances that lead to major exposures: 
breeding and handling bomb materials in the production association Mayak: large 
releases into the river Techa system, which was used as source for drinking water 
in downstream communities; explosion of a high level nuclear waste tank in 1957 
(Kystym accident); and resuspension from an open intermediate level nuclear waste 
repository (lake Karachai) in 1967. There is a common obligation in the lessons that 
need to be learned and in our responsibilities towards man and nature. The 
international science community is in the center of this obligation, and its 
involvement needs to follow two main thrusts: helping those who have been 
affected and learning from the unique experience, tragic as its origins may be.
Even when shrouded in total secrecy, dedicated groups of health physicists and 
medical personnel accepted the charge of seemingly unresolvable problems. 
Confronted with an unknown situation with unknown dangers, they had to mitigate 
the releases and the exposures. We are impressed by the high standard of 
professionalism that these colleagues have shown in their work and in their 
perseverance.

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