On the way to the plant, constructed in
the 1940s, our crew was forced to avoid several checkpoints, and to
conceal our cameras - we made do, in the end, with a small camera
mounted on the windscreen.
Thus equipped, we drove to within a hundred metres of the plant gates.
It's like a city. Families work and live here. Teenagers chased each other in the snow just beyond the fence.
Mayak
is surrounded by silver birch forests, and signs by the road warn
people not to enter the woodland or pick the wild mushrooms.
It
also once provided the Soviet Union with around 40 per cent of the
world's weapons-grade plutonium.
The country's first atomic bomb was
built here, too. Between 1949 and 1951, the plant dumped hundreds of
tonnes of highly radioactive waste into the nearby Techa.
Hundreds
of villages have been resettled since then but, incredibly, four remain
in the contaminated area. Residents say they don't know why they were
never moved.
Many people we spoke to say they are being used as
human guinea pigs. They talk of a secret government experiment looking
at the effects of radiation exposure on humans.
Further, the
nearest hospital that can treat the various radiation-related illnesses
they suffer from is in the regional capital of Chelyabinsk, about 50km
away.
One woman described her visits:
They must have tested new drugs on us. You come from the hospital where you spend a month then get sick for a month at home. They don't treat you. They hurt you. They don't say anything."more in Al Jazeera
