Nuclear Disaster in the Urals

By Zhores A. Medvedev

Book Overview

The story of the explosion and contamination was and still is suppressed in the Soviet Union and, the author contends, by the CIA and other Western intelligence organizations fearful of public resistance to nuclear power plants. Now, after an intensive study of Soviet scientific articles (written to disguise the fact that they were about the Ural explosion) and after many interviews and reports from friends in the scientific community as well as from witnesses, the author has pieced together the story of what actually happened. He analyzes the extent and consequences of the contamination and draws forbidding conclusions about the possibility of similar disasters in the rest of the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393334112
• ISBN13: 9780393334111
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating story of ecological research

This book presents a very plausible explanation of events surrounding a documented explosion at a Soviet nuclear plant in the southern Ural Mountains during the winter of 1959-60.The author is an ecologist, many of whose university colleagues disappeared from the ecological literature for a period of about six years, then suddenly began to publish data on radiological damage to a 400-sq.-mi. area between Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk in the southern Urals. A series of chapters looks at different parts of the ecosystem; one deals with large ungulates, one with field rodents, another with fish populations, etc. The author believes that the only explanation for the type of radiological contamination studied is a non-nuclear explosion of stored radioactive waste. Water leaching into the area where leaky barrels of waste was heated by the radioactive isotopes, causing a steam explosion which spread the waste material over a very large area. His theory is corroborated by residents of the area who later emigrated from the Soviet Union to the West and told their story.This book is a fascinating read, even for someone with limited background in the science of ecology.