Radioactive Fish Fed to Orphans, Patients

For the past year, officials in the Chelyabinsk region knowingly supplied orphanages, kindergartens and hospitals with radioactive fish from a lake near the Mayak nuclear complex, environmentalists say.


Officials insist the fish is safe to eat, and say they only stopped the supplies in August because "phobias of radioactivity started developing among the residents." The fish are still being fed to pigs and chickens.


The Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals is considered to have been poisoned by radioactivity to a degree found almost nowhere else on Earth due to the nuclear disasters that occurred decades ago at the Mayak complex, where the Soviet Union developed its first atomic weapons.


The dispute concerns fish coming from Lake Alabuga, located in the Kasli district some 30 kilometers from Mayak. About a year ago, the local Kasli administration began allowing commercial fishing in the lake and then bought the fish for distribution to local institutions.


The fish f carp, bream, perch and pike f also were being sold in markets in the district, which has a population of about 50,000.


The Kasli orphanage and a hospital in town said they have no choice but to trust that the food the government sends them is safe.


"We don't have money to choose what we want to buy. We receive bread from a bread factory, milk from a milk factory. By the order of the administration, we get fish from a private supplier," said Larisa Maltseva, chief doctor at the Kasli hospital.


She said the hospital believes it is no longer getting radioactive fish, but the fears have not gone away.


"Rumors are circulating that you should not buy pork since pigs are fed with fish from Alabuga," Maltseva said.


Concerns were raised first by a Kasli-based environmental organization, the Ecological Fund. It ran reports in its newspaper Pozitsia beginning in January claiming that fish that tested positive for radioactivity was being approved for distribution to kindergartens, hospitals and orphanages.


The fund activists got hold of documents showing the distribution of some two tons of radioactive fish and passed them to the Greenpeace office in Moscow about a month ago. Greenpeace representatives held a news conference last week at which they displayed the documents.


Chelyabinsk regional health authorities insisted that only 300 kilograms of the fish was supplied.


Eleonora Kravtsova, deputy chief doctor of the regional health inspection department, confirmed that strontium 90 f a deadly radioactive isotope of strontium present in the fallout of nuclear explosions f was found in the bones of the fish from Lake Alabuga.The half-life of strontium is 30 years, and it decays to negligible levels after about 300 years.


Kravtsova acknowledged that she personally approved the supplies. "It was my decision, and I'm responsible for it," Kravtsova said in a telephone interview from Chelyabinsk.


She insisted the fish was safe to eat because the strontium 90 was found only in the bones. "Normally, we don't eat bones, do we?" Kravtsova said.


For that reason, none of the health officials could say what amount of strontium 90 is considered safe when found in the bones.


The problem is that some times the fish and its bones are ground together to make cutlets or ***pirozhki.*** Both dishes are on the menu at the orphanage, which is home to 62 children from three to 14 years old, director Galina Vislyayeva said.


"We really hope that the mayor could not have done that to us [supplied the orphanage with radioactive fish]. He is local, he was born here. That makes us feel safe," she said.


Health inspectors suspended the supplies of the fish in August. "We haven't violated the law, but phobias of radioactivity started developing among the residents, and we canceled the order," Kravtsova said.


However, the Kasli veterinary service, which is responsible for testing products sold in markets, issued a document a year ago saying that the fish from Lake Alabuga was unsafe to eat. The document, addressed to Nikolai Gvozdev f mayor of Kasli and head of the regional administration f said the fish could be added to the feed of chickens and pigs, but in limited proportions.


Gvozdev said he was unaware of the veterinary service's report. But he said that the same service performed more tests and concluded last week that the Alabuga fish was safe. "The fish meets the existing requirements, and the veterinary service only confirmed it," Gvozdev said.


Igor Forofontov of Greenpeace in Moscow said the problem might be even more serious than existing tests have shown.


"We know that the radioactivity in some fish samples was more than the summarized radioactivity of strontium and cesium in it. That gives reason to assume some other radioactive element is present that cannot be identified yet. But that requires further tests," Forofontov said.


Until the mid-1980s, all activity in the lake, including fishing, was forbidden, he said. Until last September, no fish from the lake were supposed to be fed to people.In 1957, a tank containing nuclear waste exploded at Mayak, sending up a mushroom cloud that turned the sky red. Ten years later, winds picked up and spread radioactive dust from drought-stricken Lake Karachai.


These two incidents together irradiated more than 500,000 people and forced the state to relocate 18,000 of them. The 1957 and 1967 incidents are legendary in the world's history of nuclear disasters and were not surpassed until the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, which released nearly 2 1/2 times as much radiation as the 1957 blast.