ISAR | Past Successes: Events

A Panel Discussion With

• Arjun Makhijani, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER)
• Natalya Manzurova, Chelyabinsk Branch, Russian Union of Chernobyl Invalids
• Cathie Sullivan, Peace Action New Mexico

The March 18, 2003 Forum on NGOs and Nuclear Safety: Grassroots Activism in Russia and the US was sponsored by ISAR: Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia. ISAR a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, has been conducting citizen exchanges and partnerships designed to reduce the threat of nuclear war for twenty years. ISAR supports grassroots citizen initiative groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that address local environmental problems.

Cathie Sullivan and Natalya Manzurova met during May 2002 ISAR exchange. 10 US grassroots women activists traveled on our exchange program and spent a week in cities from Murmansk, in the northwest artic region of Russia, to Novosibirsk in Siberia comparing notes on women in activism and challenges faced by communities affected by the nuclear industry. Our program is intended to foster partnerships between activists from both sides.

Cathie is from Santa Fe and has been an activist for a long time. She works closely with Peace Action New Mexico. They promote nuclear safety and educate the public about the reality of the nuclear legacy in the US.

Natalya is from Ozersk, one of 10 Russian closed cities, where the plutonium for the first Russian atomic bomb was created, at the Mayak nuclear facility. She was one of 600-700,000 liquidators who participated in the cleanup after the Chernobyl catastrophe.  Natalya has suffered debilitating health effects from her exposure at Chernobyl. She was a radiation biologist who now works for the Russian NGO Union of Chernobyl Invalids. She is director of the local branch of this NGO in Ozersk.

This partnership has been sustained through friendships and energy spent on joint projects. Now they are working on a project together sponsored by ISAR, meeting with citizens' groups across both countries.

We've also invited Arjun Makhijani to talk about the nuclear situation in both countries. Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He has written extensively about energy, environmental security, and nuclear safety issues, most recently authoring Securing the Energy Future of the United States , a critique of the security vulnerabilities of the Bush administration s energy plan and a set of concrete alternatives. Arjun has been a consultant to the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Lower Colorado Authority, and the Edison Electric Institute, and has appeared on national television and radio programs including ABC World News Tonight, William Buckley s Firing Line, and 60 Minutes. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley, where he specialized in controlled nuclear fusion in the Electrical Engineering department.

My previous work led to this project sponsored by ISAR. In 1997 my colleague and I were attempting to leaflet outside the Los Alamos Laboratory museum and were arrested for our efforts. We subsequently won a settlement with the lab on the basis of our free speech rights. At the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, access to the visitors center was granted for the purpose of giving an alternative perspective. When we heard about this in Santa Fe we also asked for access, so since 1993 activists have had some access to the Los Alamos Lab museum. For the purpose of traveling I put together this portable exhibit giving an overview of the US nuclear weapons program and what US activists are doing to inform the public about them.

We were just in Chelyabinsk where people s health has been affected by the nuclear industry. We produced and distributed flyers about health and nutrition and how to deal with toxic metal and particulate matter contaminated with radiation in the body, which organs are susceptible to radiation, and so on. Also of interest to us was the parallel between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island-not in scale but in how our governments handled the event. Releases at Three Mile Island as well as health effects of radiation have been denied by the US government.

One example came to light during preparation of this material: Admiral Rickover, "father" of the US nuclear navy, designed the first reactor for a submarine. No one had more prestige than Admiral Rickover in that era. During the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, Carter commissioned a report and asked Rickover to comment on it. Rickover reviewed it and suggested to him that the information be suppressed and not revealed in its entirety. Rickover commented that: "If that were published in its entirety it would destroy the civilian nuclear power industry in the US." He later came to regret his support of keeping the report secret and advocated control over it.

Graphics displaying the Nevada test site and other western areas of the US show that they were crossed by more than 1 radioactive cloud from aboveground nuclear testing, fallout was carried all the way to the northeast.

That was my effort in preparing for my trip to Russia. I have worked with most activist groups in New Mexico, and am most familiar with these types of NGOs.

Many people think that when the USSR dissolved the problem went away, but that's far from true.

I'm grateful to ISAR and State Department funding that helped us in building this partnership. I've worked hard on Russian but the language hurdle has been the most difficult one.

I'm very glad to see so many people interested in these issues in Russia and here. For 60 years we were separated by the Iron Curtain. It was difficult to imagine then that I could someday speak freely here in Washington, DC.

For fifty years I've lived in a closed city which never even had a name, it was not marked on a map, people there could not even say where they came from. I am glad much of the secrecy has disappeared and that NGOs of Russia and the US can work together. It has been less than a year since Cathie and I first met. When we first met in Tomsk, it was difficult to imagine that a woman who lives on the others side of the earth could be so similar to me. Maybe this is why such a difficult project became easy for us and we were able to make it happen.

I have learned a lot about my own country by taking Cathie to these different places. When putting together my presentation about NGOs in Russia, Cathie used almost all of my materials. I didn't expect the public to be so interested in all of this. And I have figured out that Russians from closed cities can be more outgoing than I thought, judging from the questions they asked at presentations. They asked things such as what programs do you have, what does your president think, what do average people think, they were interested in Iraq, and these people lived through a catastrophe, more than one nuclear disaster, and know what it can be like.

When I put together my presentation I knew that Americans are interested in exactly what happened through the eyes of people who experienced these disasters. More and more people are interested in nuclear safety as well. I also have a small presentation, not quite like Cathie's, but I have a booklet of these postcards of Ozersk. I will pass them around. Right before I left I noticed these pictures of my town in stores in Russia and I was shocked, because before the city was a ghost town.

Fifty years ago in the southern Urals, an area with many lakes, a small secret town was created. Here you can see how this island looks from space. The old part of town can't even be seen because they built the houses only 2-3 stories high so that the forest would hide the houses from satellite photos. Most people who live in this town are nuclear scientists who had something to do with creating the first atomic bomb.

The first accident in 1957 covered three regions, as a result 19 villages had to be evacuated. It was a big secret, and before Chernobyl nobody knew it happened, so it's not surprising that half the citizens of that town became liquidators who cleaned up after the Chernobyl incident. Many of you may have seen the map showing radiation-affected areas after Chernobyl, the fallout went to many countries (showing pictures).

Right now it's scarier than ever. The United States is about to go to war in Iraq. Nuclear war is especially terrifying. The irony is that radiation hurts not only Russians and Americans- it will not spare any human being. It is not discerning.

The materials that Cathie put together were translated into Russian and put into flyers and brochures. Our NGO would like to share them so that our colleagues and communities know what is happening in the US and maybe we'll be able to get them to become more active.

The 26 of April is the anniversary of Chernobyl. Cathie brought us two films about the accident. We will disseminate these with our organizations' members on April 26. Each NGO in Chelyabinsk will show this film to the public. We made a film about the 1957 Urals disaster, about the people who were building a city to create the bomb. We put together a lot of materials about the Chernobyl accident and we will take all of it to Los Alamos, where Cathie and her colleagues can use all those materials in their work.

It's an interesting project, an educational program, so these people can find out more about what happened and work together to see how two countries can partner together. I hope this is not the end of our work together.   Whether or not we have a project together we will continue to work together.

During Cathie's visit to Russia she had several meetings with liquidators and she was accepted as an honorary member of the NGO Union of Chernobyl Invalids, so now you have one of the liquidators in the US.

I sincerely hope that people will remember accountability and that the nuclear industry will become obsolete in the future.

Q: Intern at the US Ukraine Foundation. Are there any projects connecting US & Ukraine?

A: Natalya Manzurova: We work with MAMA 86, a children's NGO there. I worked 10 yrs as a nuclear biologist so I keep contacts in Ukraine and Russia, and see them at conferences on nuclear safety, its influence on people and the environment.

Lucy: If you don't mind, let's hold questions until everyone has presented. Thank you. Arjun?

In 1998 I went to Idaho, to the small town of Chellis, with intensive mining and logging industry, and where environmentalists are not well received. This was one of the most contaminated spots from fallout. Lots of farmers and ranchers drank contaminated milk, and gave it to their children.

I met Sharon Akers at a public meeting where we had a 3 percent turnout (30 people out of the 3,000 population), which is the biggest event I have ever held. It affected me in a way no talk I've ever given has. Sharon had given birth to a child with cancer before he was even born. I was stunned silent (something that doesn't happen to me often). I didn't know what to say. I interviewed her again in January of last year (2002) and asked her whether any US government officials ever came to explain what they had done there for a supposedly national program. As far as I know the only person who has come there to meet with the community is this Indian immigrant.

Another community member, Nikki Dahl, called up her brother in Washington state who had similar water systems, and said "you grew up in a high fallout area, tell your doctor, turned out he had thyroid cancer caught in early stage. So, I feel my talk had valuable consequences. I played a part in saving a life.

We have been trying for 5 yrs to have the US Government go to this place and have public meetings, to train doctors to ask these kinds of questions, because otherwise no one will know how to address this!

Lisa Crawford, a working class person (sorry that this is not US way to describe something), is a mother. She had a job in a hospital helping people, had no political ideas, never thought about the federal government, then found out that there was an accident in a "feed materials factory." Everybody thought it was a cat food factory, but they actually processed uranium, used in weapons in the Gulf War in 1991 and probably in 2003. There was lots of talk when the USSR opened up. She asked somebody who came to test her well what he was doing. It was contaminated with uranium. This was in January 1985 and they had known that since 1981. Lisa had been mixing infant formula with radioactively contaminated water. She sued the company that made the uranium and won.

But in our culture, capital equals profit which equals power. So the nuclear industry is hard to challenge. Even though we have found that the scientific reports were wrong, fraudulent, the government had not taken even basic measurements, and had not calibrated the instruments for 30 years. We also w orked with the USSR on a joint project to study the nuclear establishment (also China, India Pakistan, North Korea, and France). These are all alike in some respects! Every nuclear country has hurt its own people in the name of national security.

The nuclear bureaucrats feel they are more important than people.

I also know Tom Bailey, a conservative Republican with a farm near Hanford Washington (the American equivalent of Mayak where plutonium was made for the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs.) After he became ill he told me, "If they had only told me 'you have to suffer radiation to defeat the communists,' I would have said okay." He said it would have seemed "like volunteering for war." Many people would even accept these risks if they knew they were there, but they are not told. So why is the US nuclear industry behaving exactly the same as it would if this were a dictatorship?

The Mayak accident was not revealed until 1989 but we knew when Zhores Medvedev and the CIA knew in 1959. Yet they didn't make it public in the US even though it would make the USSR look bad -- didn't make it public because similar tanks of waste that could explode were here. Savannah River was not maintaining high level waste tanks properly, and hydrogen had built up to more than the explosive limit.

If there is one difference between the US and USSR, it is not differences in the character of the nuclear establishment but in the determination of the American people to have information. The nuclear establishment has always been afraid of the public eye. This has been the case ever since July 16 1945, when Leslie Groves and the Manhattan project detonated the first atomic bomb. No one knew what the explosions were at the time, and people stopped their cars and came out on their lawns to observe the brightly lit horizon. Since then, the government has worried about lawsuits.

Semipalatinsk is a lot like the Nevada test site, our friends in Mayak suffered similar problems, people started talking to one another. Natalya Mironova has been here many times, she is a good friend, and we started working near Tomsk-7 (largest nuclear weapons plant in the world).

I cannot say enough about the importance of this partnership work, a project that goes beyond national borders. I don't trust governments. I'm a Tom Paine fan.

By showing that tanks were not being maintained, with the publication of our work in the New York Times, and the Washington Post, this kind of work has resulted in safety. The fellows who lived there don't want to die just because they're accustomed to working near plants.

The name of national security is compromising people's interests and safety. Today, we could not get access to the kind of information that we got in the 1980s.

There is a reason that all these bureaucracies look the same. Their fundamental interest is themselves. And it has been that way since December 1944. When they discovered that Germany had no bomb, they did not release that information. Since that time the nuclear establishment has existed only for itself. They see themselves as all-powerful all determining, just because they can wipe out cities. So nationalism can be used against our own interests.

Nuclear power not born as energy system but child of cold war, born when Eisenhower made atoms for peace speech in the United Nations, we will give magical source of energy, propaganda campaign that American atom was peaceful, and that the Soviet atom was bad (good and evil rhetoric is not new).

Chernobyl was worse because closed bureaucracies without public feedback dangerous, but then instead of the close calls we had, huge disasters. I'm afraid that in the climate of big corporations unregulated, where Gosatomnadzor has little authority, Russia will have more secrecy.

So I believe this project is important, we have to go beyond the people to people diplomacy of the 1980s, we have to have global advocacy. Nuclear weapons are too dangerous not to.

I would like to add that in contrast to the Cold War, our governments are now helping each other's nuclear programs. They are signing agreements together to build a storage facility of nuclear waste in Russia, one has already been built in my city. The have signed many other agreements as well. American scientists live at Mayak now.

One sad element of this is that Russian and American doctors have worked together but not to benefit the sick. According to agreements our doctors get research money to study radiation victims and this information is shared with American doctors. But it is not shared with people. This too is science for science, not science for people. People who have suffered from radiation are being researched like guinea pigs. It's important to know that average people can understand themselves.   Public organizations of both countries must find ways to work together. I never imagined that our joint project would develop so rapidly and have such warm public reception. First we came up with a small issue, presentation, small program, people told people, info spread rapidly, like a chain reaction.

Q: What kind of help are the two governments giving each other?

Sullivan: There are two main projects: One proposes that America build a waste storage site in Russia. The Defense Department and Minatom can't pay each other, so the lobby is to import foreign waste. However, international law says each country should bury its own waste on its own territory. Russia was the first to break this law by allowing waste onto its territory. Natalia Mironova, a Russian activist, led the drive to oppose this and prevented much of it, now nuclear weapons and waste are all about politics and money though it takes 200,000 years for plutonium to decay and the money will be spent long before that. Russians have a proverb that says "let it happen to somebody else." The US would have to release the nuclear waste that it controls, which is 75% of waste throughout the world, and this conversation is going on without public oversight.

Makhijani: There are three things going on here. One is imports. Two is nuclear material protection (as in the Nunn Lugar program, where the U.S. spends money to protect Russian materials). Three is the joint radiation studies being carried out on survivors of Chernobyl and Mayak, trying to get the DOE out of health studies (spending the money to study but not inform). There is more discussion on comparing the Chernobyl situation, using soviet data to justify relaxing regulations, leaving the public out of it.

Q. I visited a closed city in the Gorbachev area, and don't know of any public outcry. Is there an NGO movement fighting for the public now?

Manzurova: I can tell you why people wait and wait and die of leukemia and cancer. Some people came to our town to ask questions and had no knowledge of radiation's effect on health. My father started to work in the first nuclear reactor long ago in the dirtiest reactor of all. He wore a dosimeter on his jacket, and there was a reactor leak. He got radioactive waste all over him. He could not get clean, he even shaved his head, but eventually he just removed his dosimeter. He could not let the higher-ups see that he was receiving such high dosages, otherwise he would not have gotten a vacation, promotion, compensation, they could take it all away, and yet if he didn t care for the reactor, there could have been accident that would have killed many many people. He knew what he was doing in his job as few others would have, and so he couldn't not do his job.

In the hallway was a large bucket of hard alcohol; people would drink a glassful on the way out. Most men did not live to age 55. But my father couldn't leave during the Stalin era, he couldn't quit or he would be shot. This is why we can't judge these people. Doctors must be judged for not allowing people to know what doses they got, but then they were under strict orders too. And they call it radiophobia. Even around Chernobyl I asked people to give me an individual dosimeter, and said that people shouldn't work there long in the places in the plant I indicated. But I was turned down by my boss. A person to the government is nothing. The government would have been more honest if it had admitted fault and offered help, but they said that people were at fault for having bad health practices-drinking too much and so on.

There are two villages on the Techa-Karabolka and Muslyumova-that have 3 or 4 generations of genetic defects. But the government, for whatever reason, says its ok. America is a rich country, perhaps it can afford to compensate people for heath problems, but at the same time they also seem to deny responsibility.

Sullivan: I'll just throw in my response that at TMI they blamed low birth weight babies on mothers who drank, smoke, and ate poorly.

Manzurova: It's ironic that the US and Russian government act the same, but if the fact is that if they admitted fault it would cost big money. This is money that our governments aren't willing to pay.

Lucy: I want to respond to the question as well to note that the movement is growing, NGOs are fighting for many causes, and we can give you more information about that after wards if you're interested. But I'm afraid our time here is up. Thank you to the speakers and thank you for coming.

For more information about ISAR's Partnerships and Exchanges program, please contact Alice Hengesbach.