Uranium therapy
Rosatom prescribed this procedure for residents of the Trans-Urals region.
In the Kurgan region, spring floods flooded uranium mining wells. Radioactive solution leaked into the Tobol River, which supplies drinking water to the Trans-Urals. Environmentalists are certain of this, and maps of uranium deposits and images of flooded villages confirm it—no matter how stubbornly the nuclear industry denies it.
NeMoskva spoke with experts and local residents about the potential consequences of the Kurgan local environmental disaster.
One day, Andrey Ozharovsky, an engineer-physicist and expert of the Radioactive Waste Safety program went for a walk in the forestHe took a dosimeter with him on his walk because he was going to the Dalmatovsky district of the Kurgan region, near old uranium wells.
At first, the device showed 0,06–0,07 microsieverts per hour (μSv/h)—a normal background level. But as we approached the well, the numbers increased, and the device began beeping annoyingly. In a depression near the well, it showed the maximum reading—3,79 μSv/h. A level of up to 0,6 μSv/h is considered safe.
This place isn't fenced off—someone apparently decided to save money on barbed wire. There are no radiation hazard signs, and anyone can enter, even if they're just out for a walk in the woods but somehow didn't think to bring a dosimeter—a very useful thing for a resident of the Kurgan region.
And this location isn't the only one: the Kurgan region has three active uranium deposits—Dalmatovskoye, Dobrovolnoye, and Khokhlovskoye. Uranium mining at these deposits is carried out by JSC Dalur, a Rosatom subsidiary.
The cheapest and most barbaric way
In the 1980s, near the Trud i Znanie collective farm, in the floodplain of the Tobol River, conducted test uranium miningSeveral hundred wells were drilled and a sulfuric acid solution was injected to a depth of 300–400 meters to dissolve the rocks and convert the uranium from a stable solid state to a liquid, which was then pumped to the surface.
"Nuclear scientists chose the cheapest and most environmentally barbaric method of uranium extraction—in-situ leaching. As a result, seas of radioactive uranium solution formed right underground," explains Andrey Ozharovsky.
Under the ground there are seas, and on the surface there are puddles. Ozharovsky even before April I saw the floodHow the old wells at Dobrovolny are "self-leaching" uranium solution: a rusty pipe protrudes a few dozen centimeters from the well, from which radioactive liquid slowly oozes, and a device records elevated gamma radiation. Rosatom's Dalur, however, claims that all the old wells have long been shut down. At Dalmatovsky, where Andrei Ozharovsky was walking with a dosimeter, the pressure of the uranium solution is low, but when nuclear workers pump it out, some still spills onto the ground—causing elevated radiation levels there, too.
Wells at the Dalmatovskoye field, surveyed by Andrey Ozharovsky. Photo: 74.ru
Forty years ago, development of the Dobrovolnoye deposit was abandoned for two reasons. First, the uranium deposits there are located in high-pressure formations, and the earth itself forces the uranium solution to the surface. According to Ozharovsky, there is evidence of this creating radioactive fountains tens of meters high. Second, part of the deposit is located beneath the Tobol River floodplain, in an area that floods approximately every eight years.
However, by the mid-2010s, Rosatom no longer considered these reasons to be serious enough—and now Dalur has won the tender for the development of Dobrovolnoye and is beginning construction of a “pilot industrial site for borehole in-situ leaching of uranium.”
And during the flood in the spring of 2024, wells - both old and new - ended up under water.
Rosatom, however, never acknowledged this.
«Reports of flooding of production wells The Dobrovolnoye uranium deposit (Kurgan Oblast) is deliberate disinformation. This was stated to TASS by the corporate communications department of JSC Atomredmetzoloto (ARMZ, Rosatom's mining division). It was, of course, "pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels and media" who disseminated "information about the flooding of old wells at the Dobrovolnoye deposit, where JSC Dalur mines uranium, and about uranium leaking into the Tobol River"—who else would they be?
Perhaps Rosatom forgot that the maps of the deposits and the flood images were published by the press service Governor of the Kurgan Region and the Ministry of Emergency Situations. Local residents are also reporting flooding: according to Ozharovsky, people from the nearby villages of Trud and Znanie told him that back in June, there was about one and a half meters of water above the wells. The physicist recently visited the area himself and saw new wells in the previously flooded area.
The uranium solution leaking into the Tobol River, which supplies drinking water to Kurgan, a city of 300, and the Kurgan region, is clearly not a positive development: even small doses of internal radiation—that is, from ingesting or inhaling radioactive substances—can trigger the development of dangerous diseases, primarily cancer. Concentrations of uranium and its decay products have increased in drinking water and fish, and in some places they have settled along the banks where cattle graze and ducks and geese swim.
But this is not the worst thing.
Radioactive water
"The flooding of part of the Dobrovolnoye field is a symptom that has drawn attention to the main problem. And that problem is now at another field, Khokhlovskoye, located near the town of Shumikha. People there are getting radioactive water from artesian wells. This is a real environmental disaster," says Andrey Ozharovsky.
Veniamin Khotko is a resident of Shumikha, the town on the southern outskirts of which the Khokhlovskoye field is located. In 2008, he noticed something had happened to the water from his 40-meter artesian well: a thick, whitish sediment had formed.
"I collected some of this water and took it to a lab in the region. They analyzed it for radioactivity and concluded that the standard was exceeded by 1,86 times. I contacted the regional radiation monitoring service. And they said, 'Did you conduct the tests yourself?' I said, 'Excuse me, I have the report.' And the employee read the report, called the service, and said, 'Who gave you the right to issue such a report without approval?' So he warned them to keep in mind in the future that they should issue accurate reports, not reports like this," Veniamin recounts.
According to Veniamin, the people tried to fight back: they collected over two thousand signatures to stop uranium mining—but how can they fight the powerful Rosatom? The administrations, both district and regional, are giving Dalur a green light—Veniamin himself was a member of parliament, so he's aware of the situation. They wrote to both the local and regional prosecutor's offices, but to no avail.
"The mining operations are located close to residential areas: it's 300 meters from my garden. But there has to be some kind of sanitary zone; Rospotrebnadzor should be constantly testing!" Veniamin complains.
He no longer drinks water from dangerous wells; he uses a homemade distillation apparatus. He says that while his well used to be the only one with radionuclides, now all his neighbors have them. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to get it tested, but that would require finding a lab willing to issue a "false" report.
"What should the state regulatory agency have done when someone like Veniamin shows up with tens of percent elevated radioactive concentrations in his water? They should have gone to Shumikha immediately and taken water samples from everyone for free. I suspect the entire underground drinking water reservoir there is contaminated," Ozharovsky comments.
A Popular Science Digression
There are two types of radiation exposure: external and internal. Dalur JSC employees who work with uranium solution are exposed to external radiation, but they knowingly accepted this work for money, and they are also subject to individual dosimetry monitoring.
Local residents have no control over the situation. Meanwhile, radioactive substances are released into the environment and can be ingested through mushrooms, berries—and, in Shumikha, through drinking water—and can end up in people's bodies. Or, for example, someone could chop down a tree and light a sauna—and all the radioactive substances stored in that log would escape up the chimney, and people would inhale them. In this case, we're talking about internal exposure, when radioactive substances enter the body in very small concentrations.
This is exactly what happened to Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with moderate concentrations of radioactive polonium. Polonium-210 is one of the daughter products of uranium decay.
Another important concept is collective or group dose. Let's explain with an example. Let's take a glass of water with a dangerous concentration of uranium. If one person drinks it, they are guaranteed to get esophageal cancer or other similar problems. But if this glass is diluted 1:100, the concentration in each of the 100 glasses will be within the normal range. 100 people will drink this solution, 99 will feel nothing, but one person will inevitably develop a higher sensitivity to radiation exposure and become ill.
This is why dumping radioactive waste into a river in the hope that it will dissolve without a trace or ignoring leaks of uranium solution is an extremely bad idea.
Schwartz warned
Alexey Schwartz is a physicist by training, the former coordinator of Navalny's Kurgan headquarters, and the main organizer of the uranium protests. His medical history includes six criminal cases, prison time, torture, and forced exile from Russia. Schwartz has been living in Germany for three years, but continues to closely follow the events in Kurgan.
On his YouTube page, among numerous videos with detailed analyses of the situation with uranium mining in the Kurgan region, there is one with a curious title. "Schwartz warned that the uranium deposit would be flooded.".
In the video, a Rosatom representative first explains that the site chosen for the Dobrovolnoye field is located on high ground, so "there's a 100% guarantee there won't be any water there." Then, district deputy Anatoly Kandalov practically shouts, "Listen to me! [When] the water is 10 meters high, it's at the level of Zverinka. If it's 12 meters high, you'll be washed away! You understand—you'll be washed away! So don't say things that will never happen! There's nowhere for the water to come from now."
"Rosatom plays on democracy and the rule of law. For example, it holds public hearings—but only in the most remote villages. Take the Dobrovolnoye deposit, for example. The district capital is the large village of Zverinogolovskoye, but the hearings are held in the small village of Trud i Znanie, where only old people with their dachas remain. Or the Khokhlovskoye deposit: uranium is mined there near the town of Shumikha, but the hearings are held in the village of Trusilovo, with a population of just over 100. And the funniest thing is: announcements of hearings in the Zverinogolovskoye, Shumikhinsky, or Dalmatovsky districts are published in a Moscow newspaper, 2000 kilometers from the mining site. But nothing is reported in the local media. So, I learned about the hearings because I had sympathizers at Rosatom. And they bring their own employees to the hearings, posing as local residents," Alexey explains.
He began to be seriously persecuted after he began organizing a referendum on the attitude towards uranium mining in the Kurgan region:
"In two weeks, I gathered more than 100 people ready to participate—those I had confidence in. Unfortunately, I was jailed, and I couldn't finish the job."
"You could believe and be scared"
Rosatom, as you might guess, denies not only the fact of well flooding, but also the leakage of uranium solution during mining, and, in general, any violations on its part.
"An inspection of Dalur JSC's uranium deposits in the Kurgan Region, conducted by Interregional Directorate No. 92 of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency of the Russian Federation (Interregional Directorate No. 92 of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency of Russia) and the Federal Budgetary Institution of Healthcare, the Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology No. 92 in the Chelyabinsk Region (FBUZ CHiE No. 92), revealed no violations of radiation safety standards or environmental contamination," the state corporation reported on November 27, 2020.
Attached to the message was a comment from Nikolai Poponin, then CEO of Dalur JSC, regarding "some obscure people" who were "measuring radiation levels using... a mobile phone and displaying terrifying numbers on its screen." Nikolai Anatolyevich himself, he said, could immediately distinguish truth from fakery, but "someone unaware of the measurement rules and mandatory instrument verification could, of course, believe it and be frightened." Therefore, Dalur's management contacted the Federal Medical and Biological Agency (FMBA) with a request to conduct the most detailed research possible. "I hope their results will once again convince residents of the Trans-Urals of the safety of in-situ leaching (ISL) for humans and the environment," Poponin concluded.
Unfortunately, the persuasiveness of his words was somewhat undermined by the fact that exactly one year after this comment, Poponin received 7,5 years in a maximum security prison colony for abuse of power and commercial bribery.
"The Kurgan local environmental disaster has its clients—those who use uranium mined using barbaric methods. These are, first and foremost, the defense industry and the nuclear power industry. The only solution to this problem is to stop uranium mining in the Kurgan region. This is also being driven by the decision of several foreign countries to stop purchasing uranium from Russia," says Andrey Ozharovsky. "Due to Rosatom's lack of oversight, a similar situation is developing in other places where companies within the state corporation mine uranium, for example, in the city of Krasnokamensk in the Trans-Baikal Territory, where I also visited. They use a different method of uranium mining there, but comparing them is like arguing which method of execution is better: the guillotine or hanging. Nuclear power in Russia is subsidized, and it is economically unviable." This means that if Russia, following the example of many other countries, begins to gradually close its existing nuclear power plants and accelerate the development of renewable energy sources, it will be possible to abandon dangerous uranium mining, and electricity will become cheaper.