Tea with polonium, duck with ruthenium
The collective West is not abandoning its attempts to discredit Russia and create the public opinion it needs shortly before the presidential elections. The latest attempt to create an unhealthy stir is associated with the so-called. “a leak at the Mayak plant and an increased background of radioactive ruthenium in the EU countries.”
Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Telegram, Facebook, Classmates or In contact with
As you know, over the past 30 years, everything related to reports of radiation contamination has been perceived extremely painfully by society.
Apparently, the organizers of the scandal remembered the panic that broke out immediately after the news of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the spring of 1986. Radiophobia, caused by blind panic, brought the country much more troubles and negative consequences than the accident itself. Another large-scale radiation alarm was associated with the unsuccessful London tea party of the defector Litvinenko, who drank a hefty portion of polonium from Berezovsky and the British intelligence services.
With this in mind, the organizers of the “ruthenium alarm” used a full range of clichés to prove that from Russian citizens “the authorities are hiding everything and downplaying the danger,” while “radioactive clouds are gathering over the heads of Russians.”
As is usual in such cases, the transmitters of radiophobia to the masses were “independent environmental activists” with a humanitarian education, financed from Western funds and with very murky connections.
Half a century ago, Western intelligence services involved Soviet citizens, sometimes openly and out of selfish motives, and sometimes blindly, to obtain images of land and water from the vicinity of a security facility of interest to them and to understand its purpose. A seemingly innocent request, if caught, threatened the “tourist” with a non-illusory charge of espionage.
After the collapse of the USSR, different times came and whole broods of “independent ecologists” and “monitoring missions” conducting the same technical espionage began to unhinderedly dig into the locations of sensitive objects of the Russian Federation. One of the most famous “environmental monitoring missions” was the Norwegian “Belluna”, which was strongly interested in the locations of Russian nuclear submarines and hired former Russian Navy officers for espionage under the guise of concern for the ecology of the Barents Sea.
After a series of revelations of eco-spies, which resulted in specific criminal cases, professional eco-espionage in Russia has subsided and has become more the lot of those who like to spoil the Motherland for foreign grants. Today, all kinds of Western funds demand from “environmental activists” from Russia not espionage, but political actions and all sorts of scandalous news stories. Suffice it to recall the “ecologists of the Khimki forest”.
The choice of the Ural enterprise Mayak, which has been disposing of radioactive waste since the beginning of the atomic era, as a radiation scarecrow, was not accidental. There have been accidents and leaks of radioisotopes into the environment at the enterprise, which is not surprising, given the complexity and danger of the technologies used. But similar accidents have happened in other countries where there are large nuclear production facilities.
Things like the “China syndrome” and the severe accident at the American Three Mile Island nuclear power plant with the melting of part of the reactor core are no longer remembered in the West.
The attention of the international environmental community to Mayak could be understandable if similar attention were paid to other potentially dangerous nuclear facilities. But, for example, for some reason no one is interested in the nuclear dump that has been operating for ten years, pouring radioactive rubbish into the environment, on the site of the Japanese nuclear power plant in Fukushima.
The choice of the radioisotope “emitted into the atmosphere” is hardly accidental. Ruthenium-106 appears in the news feed. The platinum group element ruthenium is named after Russia (Ruthenia in Latin). This achieves a doublet shot into the public consciousness.
The scandal began to develop at the end of September with the publication in the European press of air pollution monitoring data by French and German specialists. Based on the fact that European ecologists have discovered an increased concentration of the radioactive isotope Ru-106 over several EU countries. The highest concentration of the isotope was found over Romania and Bulgaria (145000 µBq/m3). Half as much - over Italy, even less - over Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine.
“Observation stations across the continent have recorded an increase in the content of Ru-106, analysis to identify its source is believed to be located 1000 km from Germany, in Eastern Europe. Since the content of only this radioactive isotope was recorded, an accident at a nuclear power plant is excluded as the cause of its occurrence. With a fixed concentration of Ru-106 in the air, a danger to human health is excluded.”
It would seem that what could be more transparent and correct than this statement?
But the “experts” from grant-eating organizations think completely differently. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that Romanian gypsies had stolen and torn apart a warehouse with special anti-cancer applicators and needles coated with radioactive ruthenium, the “experts” put forward the version that the leak could have happened at the Ural enterprise "Mayak".
On the same day, the French Institute for Radiation Protection IRSN gave its own interpretation, but with a touch of unhealthy sensation - “ruthenium-106 blew from the Urals.”
And in vain Roshydromet and Rosatom presented evidence that there were no leaks at Mayak. Even if a release had taken place, atmospheric currents could not carry traces of ruthenium such a distance. But it’s all in vain. The mallard of radiophobia has already fluttered into the media space and began to spoil. Official data on air pollution in major Russian cities did not help. The only city in Russia with a high content of Ru-106 in the air was St. Petersburg, which in itself suggested that ruthenium was carried into the city atmosphere by the western wind, but not by the wind from the Urals.
The main carrier of the infection in the minds of the public was a certain Nadezhda Kutepova - an extremely active and enterprising woman of 45 years old, a sociologist by training.
Kutepova positioned herself as an “ecologist and human rights activist, sociologist and lawyer,” and led the NGO “Planet of Hope,” which was recognized as a foreign agent in May 2015, receiving money from the famous grant-eating NED, the National Endowment for Democracy. She considers herself a major specialist in the field of ecology of nuclear production, since she was born and lived in the ZATO Ozersk, Chelyabinsk region.
From the open dossier on Nadezhda Kutepova
For many years she has been terrorizing Mayak and the state corporation Rosatom, and has been conducting destructive propaganda in the cradle of the domestic nuclear industry. In 2008-09, he was involved in a tax evasion case. Winner of the 2011 international award “For a nuclear-free future” in the “Resistance” category. She was listed as the head of the Public Reception for Human Rights of the ZATO Ozyorsk, and an adviser to the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Chelyabinsk Region.
In the summer of 2015, after accusations of industrial espionage and high treason were voiced on the Rossiya-1 TV channel, she fled from Ozyorsk to France, where she settled at the expense of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), Amnesty International and the Dutch organization “Women of Europe - for the Common”. future”, having received political asylum:
“I realized that I could no longer delay, I wrote to human rights activists, two hours later FIDH sent me tickets, and on the evening of July 6 we left the city. I took all the necessary security measures, so it didn’t look like leaving. They took everything out in advance, and it was like they just went for a walk. The phone was left at home. We went to Yekaterinburg in a car that has nothing to do with me, and early in the morning we flew to Paris via Istanbul.”
According to some reports, he actively cooperates with the French intelligence services.
In 2016, in an interview with the BBC, she defined her task as “through international structures to influence the Russian Federation and Rosatom.” She took part in a number of events of an openly anti-Russian nature. Participates in “research projects”, is engaged in “consulting” and the formation of the social movement Against Nuclear For Justice.
In short, the handshake meter is off the charts.
The dog howls - the wind blows. Following Kutepova, Russian “ecologists”, “human rights activists”, “privileged listeners of the radio “Echo of Moscow” and the entire “Open Russia” to boot, howled, delivering a verdict: ruthenium-106 leaked over Europe from “Mayak”: “it’s all about volatile ruthenium oxide and very high chimneys of the enterprise.” Any official statements by Rosatom that the situation at the radiochemical plant is being monitored, the background is normal and no spreading of the radioactive cloud has been detected, were not taken into account.
The information “duck” hovered over our heads and quacked for almost two months until it was squashed by an IAEA report, which did not confirm the conclusions of European “experts.” The distribution of zones with a high content of ruthenium-106 in the air over Europe shows that the center of distribution of the isotope is located on the border of Bulgaria and Romania, and from the Urals it could only have arrived by teleportation or was sprayed from space.
By the way, when it became clear that the version “ruthenium came from the Urals” was untenable, a version about a Russian space probe that fell in Europe was immediately thrown in, which, however, had no resonance. Ruthenium-106 is not used in spacecraft.
Fortunately, the scandal has subsided, and the IAEA has once again shown itself to be a competent and serious organization. Unfortunately, no versions explain where the Romanian gypsies got such an amount of ruthenium-106 that they managed to spread it throughout Eastern Europe, significantly raising the background radiation.
Also left out of the scandal note from The Ecologist, from which it follows that the Sellafield coast in the UK contains such an amount of americium (it does not exist in nature, it is obtained artificially in reactors by neutron irradiation of plutonium, it is extremely radioactive) that its background is “similar to the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones.” But there’s nothing you can do about it: it doesn’t stink, and Russia won’t suffer any damage from it.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.