testament

The faces of Mayak and Krasnoyarsk radiation victims speak louder than words of the human costs of decades-long nuclear travesty. Their past was blighted by radioactive pollution, their future looks just as bleak.

In June 2001, Russia's parliament voted to free the way for nuclear waste imports. If the government continues to support this madness, Russia will become the world's largest repository of radioactive nuclear waste, with imports of up to 20,000 tons from 15 countries.

With their eyes on foreign capital, Russian politicians appear blind to history and deaf to the radioactive victims whose pain-filled lives and disfigured children attest to a disastrous and unaccountable nuclear complex.

The two storage sites being considered, Mayak and Krasnoyarsk, are already some of the world's most radioactively contaminated.

At Mayak - where more than 70% of Russia's nuclear waste is stored - accidental and intentional releases of radioactivity have polluted drinking water and an entire lake. A 1957 explosion at the site was the world's second worst nuclear accident, sending radioactive clouds over 23,000kmē, and affecting 272,000 people. More than 28,000 people have been "severely irradiated" and at least 8,015 have died as a result.

In this landscape the very continuity of human life becomes tenuous. In Muslyumovo, a village 30km from Mayak, half the men and half the women of child-bearing age are sterile and one-third of newborns suffer some type of physical disorder or defect.

16-year-old Ramzis Zainullovich Faizullin of Kurmanovo was born with hydrocephalus and other problems due to exposure to radioactive waste from the Mayak nuclear complex. His appeal to the Russian parliament went unanswered.