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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
On September 29, 1957, at 4:20 p.m., an enormous explosion in a tank containing highly radioactive waste occurred in the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in the southern Ural mountains of the Soviet Union. The fallout plume spread strontium-90 and other dangerous radionuclides over about15,000 square kilometers, which remain contaminated to this day.
1. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: IPPNW Press, 1992), chap. 4.
2. Ibid.
3. Pat Ortmeyer and Arjun Makhijani, “Worse Than We Knew,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1997.
4. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The Health and Environmental Risks of Nuclear Weapons Testing in, on, and Above the Earth (New York: Apex Press, 1991), chap. 4.
5. Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing 1947-1974 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 43.
6. Philip L. Fradkin, Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1989), p. 148. For a history of nuclear testing, see.
7. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, p. 59.
8. Ortmeyer and Makhijani.
9. “Polynésie: Le Mensonge Nucléaire,” Le Figaro, May 19, 2005.
10. IPPNW and IEER, Plutonium, p. 143 (U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff evaluation of the 1946 tests at Bikini Atoll).
11. The total committed dose equivalent to the global population through the year 2100 is estimated at 544 million person-rem. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, p. 37. The doses are much larger if estimated for longer periods, mainly due to the very long- lived radionuclides, of which the most important is carbon-14, which gets into food and becomes incorporated into our bodies and all ecosystems. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, meaning that significant amounts will remain for tens of thousands of years in the atmosphere in the form of radioactive carbon dioxide, to be taken up by plants. Carbon-14 also occurs naturally, created mainly by the interaction of cosmic rays with nitrogen in the atmosphere.
12. Arjun Makhijani and Ellen Kennedy, “Human Radiation Experiments in the United States,” Science for Democratic Action, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1994).
13. Arjun Makhijani, Bernd Franke, and Hisham Zerriffi, “Preliminary Partial Dose Estimates From the Processing of Nuclear Materials at Three Plants During the 1940s and 1950s,” 2000. Available at.
14. Arjun Makhijani and Lisa Ledwidge, “Back to the Bad Old Days,” Science for Democratic Action, vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
15. Press release of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, August 9, 2005, on the web.
16. Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih eds., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 and 2000), chap. 5.
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