RUSSIANS ADMIT HAZARD FROM N-PLANT

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 30, 1993                   TAG: 9301300131
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Short
RUSSIANS ADMIT HAZARD FROM N-PLANT
Russian officials, disclosing new details about a series of nuclear disasters in the Ural Mountains, have admitted that 450,000 people were contaminated by radiation from the giant Mayak atomic plant between 1948 and 1967, and that the site remains a potential hazard.
The disclosures accompanied a $20 million government allocation, sent Friday to the Supreme Soviet, to provide compensation and health services to victims and to improve waste management at the plant near Chelyabinsk, which made weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear warheads.
Vasily Voznyak, head of a government commission on the consequences of nuclear accidents, told reporters this week that some of the plant's radioactive wastes were still stored in unsafe conditions.
"Of course, not all of this can explode at once tomorrow, but there are still some containers [of the kind] which leaked in 1957, and therefore potentially the danger exists," he said. "If there were a major accident, the radioactive dumps on the territory of the plant are still capable of producing much more pollution than the 1986 accident at Chernobyl."
Chernobyl, site of the worst ever nuclear disaster, in Ukraine, sent radioactive clouds over much of Europe and halted the development of nuclear energy throughout the Soviet Union.
The safety of waste dumps at Mayak is a critical environmental issue in Russia because the government now plans to resume construction of atomic power plants.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB