It's NOT Just Chernobyl. The REAL Disaster Is 10,000 Blocks Deep.

Kind: captions Language: en There is a lake in Russia that is a pure killer. Lurking beneath the water is a concentration of radiation that is deadlier than the entire Chernobyl disaster. Standing on the shore for just 60 minutes will sign your death warrant. When international panic exploded over rising local illnesses, the Russian government rushed into act. Instead of cleaning it, they tried to erase it from view. The cover up worked, but it created a new nightmare. Millions of tons of water formed a massive underwater radioactive plume, and it was moving. Now the fear is that it's heading straight for the Arctic Ocean. Russia didn't solve the problem. They created an aquatic nuclear bomb. Deep in Russia's southern Eirl Mountains, not far from the border with Kazakhstan, lay lake gar. It was shallow and tiny, surrounded by the forests and countless other lakes. At first glance, it didn't look like anything special, but appearances can be deceiving. What made this body of water so terrifying was what stood a short distance away, one of the most secretive places in the entire Soviet Union. Behind fences and armed checkpoints, stood the Mak nuclear complex. It was quickly built after the American military had vaporized parts of two Japanese cities with an atomic bomb, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted a bomb of his own. As long as the Americans were the only country with a nuclear weapon, the balance of power was very much in their favor. Stalin with his bloodthirsty secret police chief Lentia Barriia pushed their engineers and workers at hypers speed with little regard for safety. Close to the plant, an entire closed city had been constructed to house the people who worked there. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been shipped in to build it. Many of the scientists and workers who worked there enjoyed privileges unavailable to other Soviet citizens. Why? Because this place was like nowhere else on Earth. What happened there stayed there. Those who lived in the city were effectively trapped behind fences [music] and told their lives were now classified information. The city was so secret it didn't even officially have a name. It became known as Chelabinsk 40 and then later Chelabinsk 65. Today they call it Ozorsk and it's one of the last places in the world where you would want to live. It is the so-called graveyard of the earth. If you went there today you'd find a perfectl looking town, clean, orderly, aesthetically much more appealing than most of Russia's bluecollar towns. But it [music] is a twilight zone because nothing is as it seems. It is the most contaminated city on the planet. Every resident knows that almost anything they touch, the berries on the trees, the mushrooms they forage, the water they drink, is contaminated with radiation. The children keep falling ill. The adults keep dying young, but the residents are proud. Once told they were the saviors of the world because the people of Oosk served Mayak for countless years. They still [music] do. For decades, they were inside one of the Soviet Union's best and biggest secrets of the Cold War. It was also one of the country's dirtiest secrets. Mak turned out nuclear waste. It was the worst kind of all because no matter how hard you try to get rid of it, it just refuses to go. Beginning in 1949, Mak started dumping radioactive liquid waste in arguably the most reckless way imaginable. Officials told workers to dump it directly into the Teta River, a body of water that ran through countless villages. For the people who lived downstream, it was devastating. They drank from the river and caught its fish. They watered their crops with the same water and fed it to their animals. Between 1949 [music] and 1956, more than 100 pedarels of radioactive material were discharged into the tetra system. That is like dumping three tons of radium into a water supply. [music] It's devastating. Mixed among it were large quantities of the deadly fision byproducts strontium 90 and cesium 137. Due to their chemical structures, strontium 90, also known as the bone seeker, mimics calcium and it works its way into human teeth and bones. Cesium 137 mimics potassium, so the body absorbs it into its soft and muscle tissues. Seesium is eventually flushed out of the body in a few months, but [music] the bone seeker that remains trapped in the bones for decades. They both cause cancer, and for the people who lived along the Tenure River, it was a slow, agonizing death sentence. For decades, cancer rates skyrocketed. genetic mutations and severe birth defects passed down through generations. Back when officials realized that dumping waste in the river was extremely reckless, they started looking for a new dumping [music] ground. They looked over in the distance and they saw a small insignificant lake. It was perfect. Soon, Lake Heritch became the home of mountains of radioactive waste. No river fed into it, so why not? They reasoned that the waste would be trapped. Throughout the 50s, a massive amount of radioactive material started to build up at the lake. But before authorities realized just how dangerous this actually was, another disaster struck. On September 29th, 1957, [music] the cooling system of one of Mayak's radioactive waste tanks failed. The waste heated up until a chemical explosion tore through the facility. Around 20 million curries of radioactive material escaped into [music] the atmosphere and were carried northeast by the wind. The radioactive cloud left behind a long scar across the landscape that became known as the East Ural's radioactive trace. The contamination stretched for hundreds of miles. The media would later report that 8,900 square miles of territory containing 217 settlements and around 270,000 people were affected. Mayak had now contaminated a river and poisoned [music] a vast strip of the countryside. The CIA knew about it, but the rest of the world, including the people of the Soviet Union, didn't. The Soviets had successfully built an arsenal of atomic bombs, but it came at [music] a deadly cost. Thousands of people exposed to Mayax pollution were now suffering from radiation sickness. The government reportedly told doctors to call it a special disease. Any mention of radiation in their diagnosis was completely forbidden. The aftermath of the 1957 explosion was bad enough for the Soviets to eventually evacuate around 10,200 people from the villages. Some of the worst affected communities were evacuated within days. But for others, it took months or even years before they left. By that time, their bodies were already riddled with cancer-causing toxins. Initially, food and animal fodder were destroyed, grazing was restricted, farms were ordered to change what they produced. Animals had to be slaughtered and buried, and a sanitary exclusion zone was established. But the damage had already been done, not just to the villagers, but to those people unfortunate enough to be called up for the cleanup operation. The environmental organization Balona would later write that civilians, including children and pregnant women, were quote press ganged into cleaning up the highly radioactive mess with rags and mops. Chernobyl had its liquidators, Mayak had mops. And then 10 years later, another disaster hit the region. This time, the problem wasn't an accident or contaminated water, but the weather. The 1967 drought. A drought that dried up much of Lake Kachche and turned mud into dust that was then blown into the sky and carried for miles. For weeks, winds picked up the contaminated dust and dropped it all over the countryside. Radioactive material was detected as far as 46 miles away, contaminating an area roughly the size of greater London. It affected 63 populated areas containing more than 40,000 people. The number has been put at half a million, but this might be an exaggeration in the Western media. But for those tens of thousands living closest to the lake, they received an average external radiation dose of around 13 mill severts, 5 years worth of normal background radiation. Not enough to kill, but enough to create a scenario where the person was now more at risk of developing a form of cancer. The dust drifted into schools and into people's gardens. It was breathed in by farmers and it stuck to the shoes of children out playing. And little did any of those people know that this harmless looking dirt contained cesium 137 and strontium 90. After the dust incident, the Soviets realized that they couldn't allow Kerachche's radioactive shoreline to become exposed again. So they came up with a solution. Make the lake disappear. From 1967 to 1971, workers filled the shallowest, most troubling parts of it and rehabilitated the surrounding ground. That reduced the amount of radioactive sediment that could have been exposed during another drought. But it didn't solve the problem. The lake was tested again in the early 1990s and was found to contain an accumulation of 4.44 exabarels of radioactivity within a square mile of water. It amounted to the output of Chernobyl. The lake sediment which went down to a depth of 3.4 m was according to one report almost entirely of highle radioactive waste. If something wasn't done, the waste would spread. In 1991, Nuclear Engineering International called Lake Kachchai the most contaminated place on Earth. The US-based Natural Resources Defense Council reported radiation levels of 600 rungrrens per hour near the radioactive waste discharge line on the shore. Enough to deliver a lethal dose within an hour. Worse, millions of cubic meters of contaminated water had seeped underground, forming what became known as the radioactive lens. This vast body of polluted groundwater extended across roughly four square miles and in places reached around 328 ft below the surface. It wasn't just a matter of what could be seen. [music] The real problem was what lie beneath. The days of secrecy were mostly over. Russia didn't allow any of its citizens to go near the lake. The area was blocked for public access, but it did allow the world to access the damage. Scott Miller, an American radio biology expert, was given unprecedented access to all of Russia's most contaminated sites, and that included Karache, the most contaminated of all. When he returned from a visit, his words were sobering. It's the kind of place, he told the media, that if you went there for an afternoon picnic, you'd be dead. It's that radioactive. If you were lucky, you'd need a bone marrow transplant. Even if you just drive by, if you want to be safe, you have to speed. In 1994, scientists testing a bore [music] hole two miles from Kachche found groundwater more than 160 ft down containing huge amounts of strontium 90 and cobalt 60. The poison was spreading beyond the lake. The Russian authorities needed a more aggressive approach, so they slowly started filling what remained of the lake with giant concrete blocks. It was like they were trying to suffocate the lake and trap the radiation underneath. This was a process that would last many years and would only be completed in 2015. The solution wasn't ideal, but what else could they do? Digging out the bottom wasn't an option. It contained highly radioactive sludge, and disturbing it risked throwing contaminated sediment into the air. And neither could the engineers just dump mountains of earth into the water. Loose material could sink into the sludge and displace it in ways that would have been hard to predict. So, at the time, filling the lake with 3-FFT hollow reinforced concrete blocks seemed like the best option. Because they were hollow, the water could flow through and around them as they were lowered into place. This would stop the water from being violently displaced. The blocks could settle into the lake and provide a framework on which engineers could gradually pile rock, gravel, and soil. Little by little, they were essentially building new ground across the surface of the lake. It was painstaking work, but it was necessary. [music] It wasn't just about protecting the locals, either. Decades of super toxic waste that had contaminated the groundwater could have migrated from the lake and moved toward the entire regional river system. Millions of people could have been affected. But even more concerning was the regional drainage connected to the Obish River system, whose waters reached the K Sea in the Arctic Ocean. It turned out that Joseph Stalin's frantic nuclear race had created a monster. Decades later, his obsession had threatened something much bigger than just a few unfortunate Soviet villages. Russian scientists know exactly what this kind of contamination could do. They've known for a long time because they have found the evidence inside people's bodies. Among the many contaminants found in dead people's bones was strontium 90. We've known about how dangerous this stuff is for years. In the 1950s, American scientists rang the alarm bell after large amounts of it were found in children's baby teeth during the period when the US was testing atomic weapons. When the Russians tested the teeth and cadaavvers of 5,400 people who had died in the area along the river tetra region, the results showed how pollution had entered the human food chain. Researchers estimated that an adult living in the heavily contaminated village of Muslimova in the 1950s could have been taking as much as 5,700 beckarels of strontium 90 every day. By 1952, the average adult skeleton in the upper and middle tetra region was estimated to contain around 100,000 beckarels of strontium 90. In layman's terms, that meant that radioactive atoms inside their bones were breaking apart around 100,000 times every second, day and night. Some of the highest concentrations were found in people who had been children and teenagers during the worst years of dumping. Their growing skeletons had been hungry for calcium. Researchers examining people who still lived in the contaminated villages found something else. Their blood cells contained significantly more chromosome abnormalities than those of the people in an uncontaminated comparison group. The long-term studies of the Teta population would eventually confirm that increasing radiation exposure was associated with an increasing risk of dying from solid cancers. Radioactivity had not only polluted their river, it had become a part of them. It was trapped in the very marrow of their lives. The workers at MAK have also been affected. Thousands of workers have been exposed to high levels of radiation over the years. 26,000 were tested in an international study. The results entered into a database. Scientists at the University of Utah have said that the findings are proof that there is quote a significant association between occupational exposure to plutonium and bone, lung, and liver cancer in humans. It's disastrous for those affected, but 50 years of tests have helped scientists create guidelines for radiation exposure. In the past, such guidelines were based on data taken from the Hiroshima at Atomic Bomb. The MYAK worker data is now used by the International Atomic Energy Association and the National Council for Radiation Protection and Measures. This is something positive that has come out of Mayak, but for the people of the region, many face danger without compensation. A local wrote online, I grew up in Chelabinsk. Half of the people I knew are dead of cancer, [music] some as young as 20. Fighting back in Russia has always been hard in a country where censorship and draconian laws can make activism next to impossible. Nadesh Nakoutipova, who grew up in Ozerk, became a thorn in the government's side. >> [music] >> She lobbied for compensation to be paid to the victims of Mayak's contamination. In 2012, her activism led to her group Planet of Hope being labeled as a foreign agent under a 2012 law developed that makes NGO work even more difficult. In what became a trial by the media, she was accused of being a spy with some newspapers calling for her to be tried for treason. She and her family were forced to flee to France and claim asylum, but that left critics of Maka and supporters of its victims with one less voice. And voices are a rare thing in Russia when it comes to Macak and its disastrous history. But away from what the waste has done to the locals, recently engineers have released new concerning data. The lake might have been filled in, but all those decades of dumping have created a massive plume of contaminated groundwater. Even worse, it is currently on the move. Estimates suggest it's creeping through the ground at around half a foot every day, and there's nothing the authorities can do about it. It doesn't sound like a lot, but what if it keeps moving? How far will it go? Inching along year by year, decade by decade like a slowmoving glacier. The problem of Lake Karachce might have been concreted over, but its radioactive legacy will continue for generations. Lake Kartiche devastated Russia, but America has had its own share of radioactive nightmares. Watch nuclear accident that left a man too radioactive to bury to see what happens when the US military loses control. Or click on this.