MOSCOW — As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke. (Related article: The Lede Blog: Putin Pours Water on Fires and Critic (August 10, 2010))
Several fires have been documented in the contaminated areas of western Russia, including three heavily irradiated sites in the Bryansk region, the environmental group Greenpeace Russia said in a statement released Tuesday. Bryansk borders Belarus and Ukraine.
“Fires on these territories will without a doubt lead to an increase in radiation,” said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy program at Greenpeace Russia. “The smoke will spread and the radioactive traces will spread. The amount depends upon the force of the wind.”
Officials from Russia’s federal forest protection service confirmed that fires were burning at contaminated sites on Tuesday, and expressed fears that lax oversight as a result of recent changes in the forestry service could increase the chances that radioactive smoke would waft into populated areas.
It is unclear what health risks the radiation could pose, or to what extent radioactive particles have spread in the weeks that wildfires have been raging throughout Russia, consuming villages and blanketing huge tracts with thick smoke.
The danger comes from radioactive residue still coating large areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, years after the explosion of Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, in what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine.
“The Chernobyl catastrophe occurred and these areas were littered with radioactive fallout,” said Aleksandr Nikitin, director of the St. Petersburg office of Bellona, an international environmental group.
“This contaminated the trees and the grass.” he said.
“Now, when there is a fire and when all of this burns, all of this radioactivity, together with smoke, comes out and spreads to other territories, including populated areas where people breathe it in as smog.”
Russia’s emergency minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, warned last week that the fires could release radioactive particles.
But with the government coming under criticism for its handling of the fires, which have left more than 50 dead and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage, little official information has been made available about the radioactive threat.
Responding to the Greenpeace statement on Tuesday, Dr. Gennadi G. Onishchenko, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, played down the danger.
“There is no need to sow panic,” he told the Interfax news agency. “Everything is fine.”
Dr. Onishchenko and other officials have already come under fire for appearing to cover up information on above-average mortality rates resulting from the high temperatures and heavy smoke. On Monday, Moscow’s chief health official announced that the death rate had doubled in the capital because of the heat.
Russia has a history of whitewashing potentially embarrassing national disasters, a lingering legacy of the Soviet era. It took days for the Soviet government to inform its people of the Chernobyl explosion, leaving thousands unknowingly exposed to deadly radiation.
No one is saying that the radioactive fallout from the fires could reach the magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster. Scientists have known for years that fires in the contaminated zones have the potential to spread radioactive materials in small amounts.
The forest protection service has identified seven regions where dozens of fires have been burning in contaminated zones, with attention focusing on Bryansk, one of the regions most heavily contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/world/europe/11russia.html?_r=1
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Even as Muscovites choked under a blanket of thick smoke in the first week of August 2010, concentrations of a colorless, odorless gas spiked to dangerous levels (see image link above). A product of fire and a component of smoke, carbon monoxide is among the pollutants that wildfires spread across much of western Russia. This image, made with data from the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) sensor flying on NASA’s Terra satellite, shows carbon monoxide over western Russia between August 1 and August 8, 2010.
The highest levels of carbon monoxide are shown in red, while lower levels are yellow and orange. Western Russia, including Moscow, sits under a broad area of elevated carbon monoxide. Areas where the sensor did not collect data during the period—probably because of clouds—are gray.
MOPITT measures carbon monoxide in the atmosphere between two and eight kilometers above Earth’s surface. The image shows the composite of those measurements, not carbon monoxide levels near the ground. However, ground measurements of carbon monoxide during the period reached more than six times higher than acceptable levels in Moscow, said news reports.
The lower image shows the full extent of the smoke plume, spanning about 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) from east to west. If the smoke were in the United States, it would extend approximately from San Francisco to Chicago. The MODIS sensor acquired the right section of the image starting at 5:55 UTC (10:55 a.m. local time, 8:55 a.m. in Moscow).
Early analyses of data from the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR), another instrument on the Terra satellite, indicates that smoke from previous days has at times reached 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) above Earth’s surface into the stratosphere. At such heights, smoke is able to travel long distances to affect air quality far away. This may be one reason that the smoke covers such a large area. The pyrocumulus cloud and the detection of smoke in the stratosphere are good indicators that the fires are large and extremely intense.
Heres another page of maps, country by country:http://www.davistownmuseum.org/cbm/Rad7b.html
And anoter (scroll down the page a bit):https://earthchanges.ning.com/profiles/blogs/russian-fires-raise-fea...
The spread of radioactive contaminates into the atmosphere from the Chernobyl accident was eventually detected all over the world. Events, such as volcano eruptions and nuclear bomb testings, result in major effluent emission.... For data on previous Cherynoble Fallout see "Global Radiation Patterns" which includes a map that encompases Europe & Asia: http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/glbrad.html