Nuclear dumps pose growing health threat

The mountainous and isolated republic of Kyrgyzstan has suffered greatly from natural disasters this year. But now a new environmental and health threat is emerging in the south: uranium waste dumps located in areas prone to flooding and landslides. The dumps are posing huge problems in the densely populated Ferghana Valley, home to 10 million people. Sharipa Habibullaeva lives in the southern town of Mailuu-Suu. She has worked in the epidemiological department of the local authority for a long time and is familiar with the health problems associated with radioactivity. "When our men were building our houses, they were obviously bringing the stones from the quarries near the dumps, so we are getting our radiation doses gradually," she told IRIN. She added that she had just attended the burial of a five-year-old son of a close relative, and suspected that his death was closely related to the fact that he had regularly played on or near one of the many radioactive dumps in the suburbs of the town. The radioactivity was slowly killing the community and many had left town because of the threat, Habibullaeva said. "All my friends and acquaintances have long ago left this place," she added. According to the chairman of the local council, almost one-third of residents had left, reducing the population to just 23,000 from 35,000 a decade ago. For years, many locals have complained of headaches, drowsiness and worse. According to staff at the Kyrgyz Ministry of Ecology and Emergency Situations, the edge of the one-sq-km dump has a radioactivity level of around 40-60 micro-roentgen an hour (MRH). But parts of the site register much higher levels. "Some anomaly points in the body of the dumps have radioactivity from 500 to 600 MRH, but we isolated them by covering them," an official of the Ministry of Ecology and Emergency Situations told IRIN. "There are no complaints on behalf of the town dwellers. We are old residents here ourselves and don't have complaints regarding our health," one municipality official said. But when IRIN visited the waste site, its reporter complained of a severe headaches and nausea after just 20 minutes on site. "In some town blocks, the number of blood, stomach and lung cancer cases have started to grow," Batma Baltagulova, a doctor at the Mailuu-Suu town hospital, told IRIN. Although the sites around the town currently present only a low-level threat, the serious danger comes if their highly radioactive cores become exposed. The main enemies are landslides, floods and erosion of soil on the dumps. There are more than 200 places around the town prone to landslides, three of which, named respectively Tectonic, Koi-Tash and Izolit, present the highest potential of sliding. "The dumps are very fragile structures - trenches with the pit filled with clay, gravel and sand, covered just with soil," explained Biymyrza Toktoraliev, a Kyrgyz ecology scientist. However, not only local communities in the vicinity of the nuclear site would be affected in the event of a major flood or landslide in the area. "Washing-out of radioactively polluted soil to the Mailuu-Suu river flowing into the Syrdarya river would mean ecological catastrophe for the whole region of Central Asia," Meleshko warned. The development of uranium mines in Kyrgyzstan started after World War II, when the Cold War race to nuclear equality with the USA spurred the Soviet Union into aggressively mining the mineral in mountainous areas, with no regard for potential damage to health and the ecology. About 10,000 mt of uranium ore was extracted at the Mailuu-Suu mine and processed at two local refineries between 1946 and 1968. According to the emergency ministry, 2 million cu. m. of uranium waste remains buried in 23 sites and dumped above ground in 13 locations around Mailuu-Suu. Huge masses of Torium-230 with a decay period of 80,000 years, Radium-226 with a half-decay period of 1,600 years, uranium waste and its long-lasting isotopes with a half-decay period of hundreds of thousands of years were buried there. Due to the relentless unplanned mining and deforestation during the Soviet era, coupled with diversion of rivers for power and industrial use, parts of the region are prone to landslides and flooding. Catastrophe has already struck: the first big emergency occurred in the Mailuu-Suu valley in 1958 when 6,000 cu. m. of radioactive waste was washed away after flooding breached a protective dam. Since then, there have been several landslides in the region between 1992 to 1996 caused by tectonic movements, resulting in wash-out, partial destruction of waste dumps and leakage of polluted materials. Last spring, a source of strong radiation was detected after the site of a local electric insulation plant was flooded. In an effort to tackle the issue, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan signed a declaration in 1996, stating that the dumps posed a serious threat to the entire region, and an inter-governmental coordination group to assess the problem was established. However, in spite of this, nothing significant to tackle the problem has been done, due to bureaucratic obstacles, lack of resources and regional rivalries. Last year, a special parliamentary commission was established in Kyrgyzstan with a remit to investigate the status of the buried waste and exposed nuclear dumps. Anarkul Aitaliev, responsible for monitoring radioactive waste dumps within the emergency ministry, told IRIN that there were several alternatives for action. "One of the options is to move the huge mass of material to other, more stable places. Another suggestion is to construct a tunnel for the Mailuu-Suu river - in case a landslide blocks the river bed," he said. Both alternatives would be extremely costly. One expert estimated that stabilising the most problematic area would cost a minimum of US $3 million, while making safe or shifting all the dangerous waste would mean more than $21 million would be needed. However, the Kyrgyz ministry estimated it less - $17 million. Outside help of a kind may be at hand. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) centre in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, has reaffirmed its intention to establish a database on the condition of the country's uranium dumps to be prepared by Kyrgyz authorities in conjunction with scientists from the USA, Germany, Russia and Central Asian countries. The database would contain maps, photographs, technical drawings, radioactive and chemical pollution metering results, and would be published on the Internet in order to make it possible for organisations and experts working on the issue to access up-to-date information. During a recent workshop, the OSCE, Kyrgyz emergency ministry experts and Western scientists stressed that it was possible to solve the problem only with the concerted efforts of the whole international community. And the issue was not only one of raising funds but also of engaging the best specialists in the world to tackle the problem.