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The Forsaken: The Unfinished Business of Making Plutonium in Russia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2010
Extract
For Nadezhda Kutepova, the path to becoming a human rights lawyer started in her hometown in the Southern Russian Urals. I met Kutepova in the summer of 2009 while doing research on Ozersk, a closed city specially built in the 1940s for workers of the vast Soviet plutonium plant called Maiak. One thinks of a nuclear site as being staffed with highly educated scientists and technicians, gingerly and knowledgeably running complicated machinery to irradiate uranium and process it into plutonium. But unlike a weapons lab, a plutonium plant is a vast factory employing thousands of blue-collar workers who push carts, run bulldozers, measure solutions, plumb, build, scrub, repair, and guard doors. And like most factories, the plutonium plant polluted liberally. In fact, plutonium production is the messiest stop on the vast assembly line of nuclear weapons production.
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- Reports from the Field
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- Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010
References
NOTES
1. In addition, there are an additional 900 million curies of high-level radioactive waste stored in underground storage containers at the plant. Novoselov, V.N. and Tolstikov, V.S., Atomnii sled na Urale (Cheliabinsk, 1997), 78–79Google Scholar.
2. For a full discussion of the role the European Court on Human Rights has played in Russia in the past decade and the difficulties human rights lawyers have had from official harassment, see Sperling, Valerie, Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability (Cambridge, UK, 2009), 221–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Moshkin, Mikhail, “Zarubezhnii grant—eto ne prebyl,” Vremia, June 15, 2009Google Scholar.
4. Valiev, Aleksandr, “Cheliabinskaia pravozashchitnitsa zhaluetsia na davlenie so storony FSB,” Radio Free (Cheliabinsk), July 22, 2009Google Scholar. See also Planeta Kutepova, Ekolog Kutepova Kutepova prosit zashchitit' ee ot davleniia FSB, http://www.ikd.ru/node/10369 (accessed July 21, 2009).
5. Dubicheva, Kseniia, “Obluchennye millionery,” Trud, December 8, 2006Google Scholar.