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www.reuters.com, 18.06.2009, «KAZAKHSTAN REMEMBERS HORROR OF SOVIET A-BOMB TESTS»
SEMEI, Kazakhstan, June 18 (Reuters) - More than 20,000 people gathered in a small Kazakh town on Thursday to mark 20 years since the closure of a site where the Soviet Union conducted lethal nuclear tests for much of the Cold War.
Moscow used the vast open steppes of now-independent Kazakhstan to test some 500 nuclear bombs between 1949 and 1989, poisoning swathes of land and entire generations of people, and feelings among the population still run high.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, despite being a close ally of Russia, used some of his strongest words yet to describe the grave legacy of the Soviet nuclear past.
"Millions of Kazakh citizens fell victim to this nuclear madness," he told the crowd gathered at the town's memorial site. "The scar inflicted on our environment is so serious that it will not disappear for at least 300 years."
"By pulling together, Kazakhs were able to win the war against totalitarianism and a system that shamelessly conducted experiments on an entire nation for decades."
But many locals, although reluctant to talk about their problems in a country where criticism of the state is taboo, feel their own government should be doing more for them.
Many of those in the crowd could still remember the deafening sound of nuclear explosions and the ensuing earthquakes that rocked their steppe.
"It's been 20 years and I remember it like today," said one man in his 50s who asked not to be named.
"Pompous ceremonies like this reflect nothing. A lot of people around here still feel emotionally neglected."
More than a million people who lived close to the 19,000 sq km (7,300 sq mile) site at the centre of Moscow's nuclear arms race with the United States were affected by radiation.
Kazakhstan says it is committed to cleaning up the disaster area in partnership with Western organisations and has spent about $250 million in various compensation schemes.
The incidence of cancer, mental illness and other health problems in the region is among the highest in Kazakhstan, but officials say more needs to be done to quantify the impact.
"The government will do everything to make sure future generations do not feel the toxic breath of the Semipalatinsk test site," Nazarbayev said.
Officials say the disaster area, home to steppe herder communities as well as industrial cities, is now largely safe for living. About 10,000 people live within the old test site and hundreds of thousands more in nearby cities.
"It's not that people are disappointed with what the government is doing," said Galia Zhospayeva, a local health official. "But the general feeling is people want more help."
plasma -- a form of radioactive gas -- at extremely high temperatures.
It will also test a number of key technologies for fusion including the heating, control and remote maintenance that will be needed for a full-scale fusion power station.
Preliminary trials would use only hydrogen. Key experiments using tritium and deuterium that can validate fusion as a producer of large amounts of power would not take place until 2026.
Launched in 2006 after years of debate, the pilot project at Cadarache, near Marseille, has seven backers: the European Union (EU), China, India, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the United States. Kazakhstan is poised to become the eighth member.
Nuclear fusion entails forcing together the nuclei of light atomic elements in a super-heated plasma, held in a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak, so that they make heavier elements and in so doing release energy.
The process, used by the Sun and other stars, would be safe and have negligible problems of waste, say its defenders.
In contrast, nuclear fission, which entails splitting the nucleus of an atom to release energy, remains dogged by concerns about safety and dangerously radioactive long-term waste.
Four years ago, ITER was priced at around 10 billion euros (13.8 billion dollars today), spread among its stakeholders, led by the EU, which has a 45-percent share.
Five billion euros (6.9 billion dollars) would go to constructing the tokamak and other facilities, and five billion euros to the 20-year operations phase.
Last month, the British science journal Nature said construction costs "are likely to double" and the cost of operations "may also rise."
"We are in the process of calculating the final cost of the project," ITER spokesman Neil Calder told AFP. "The financing plan will be presented in November at the next meeting of the council."
If ITER is a success, the next step would be to build a commercial reactor, a goal likely to be further decades away.
Статья аналогичного характера была также опубликована на следующих Интернет-сайтах: The Kiyv Post, ALERTNET.ORG, ссылка скрыта,
The Sindh Today, 18.06.2009, KAZAKHSTAN OBSERVES ANNIVERSARY OF DECISION TO END NUKE TESTS
Over 25,000 locals, Kazakh dignitaries and world media assembled at Semipalatinsk on Thursday to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s decision to stop nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS).
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who presided over the function, traced the origins of the anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan.
He also spoke about the selflessness, fearlessness and enthusiasm of Kazakhs to end what he described as “a crime against life.”
The total power of nuclear charges in the atmosphere and on the surface of the STS was 2,500 times more than that of the power released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The accumulation of radioactive material in the region exceeded that released by the Chernobyl accident in 1986. In all, 456 nuclear tests were carried out at the site, the last being carried on October 19, 1989.
The almost irreparable environmental damage played havoc with the health of the local population (high rates of cancer, childhood leukemia, impotence and birth defects).
The total number of Kazakhs subjected to the effects of radiation is thought to be more than million people and the effects of residual radiation remains unpredictable.
To restore the disrupted environment and ecology to its original state will take more than 300 years.
President Nazarbayev has already expressed the need for the creation of a cluster of radiological medical treatment centers to diagnose and treat oncologic diseases and other maladies caused by radiation.
“Our country has the absolute historical and moral right to be recognized as one of the leaders of the world anti-nuclear movement”, said Nazarbayev.
Nazarbayev was entirely behind the grassroots movement from the very moment Kazakhstan declared its independence in 1991.
The de-nuclearised zone in Central Asia has a number of unique features:
1. Kazakhstan once had the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
2. The de-nuclearised zone was the first to be created in the Northern Hemisphere.
3. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was the first multilateral security agreement to bring together all five Central Asian countries.
4. Finally, for the first time ever, a denuclearized zone has been created in a region that borders two nuclear states (Russia and China).
The Semipalatinsk Test Site was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. It is located on the steppe in northeast Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh SSR).
The scientific buildings for the test site were located around 150 km west of the town of Semipalatinsk (later renamed Semey), near the border of East Kazakhstan Province and Pavlodar Province with most of the nuclear tests took place at various sites further to the west and south.
Lavrentiy Beria, political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project, selected the site in 1947.
The first Soviet test- Operation First Lightning – was conducted in 1949 from a tower at STS, scattering fallout on nearby villages. Later tests were moved to the Chagan River complex and nearby Balapan in the east. Once atmospheric tests were banned, testing was transferred to underground locations at Chagan, Murzhik (in the west), and at the Degelen Mountain range in the south.
The site was officially closed on August 29, 1991.
Today, Semipalatinsk hosts two of Kazakhstan’s four nuclear reactors — The IGR complex hosts one 50-megawatt graphite moderated reactor and the Baykal-1 complex – a 60-megawatt water moderated reactor.
The laboratory complexes also contain two cyclotron laboratories and two particle accelerators.