The cost in illness and death is harder to measure. Ecologists say thousands of people have been affected by radiation sickness, and health officials report 40 percent more leukemia cases in the region than in the rest of Russia. But the true human toll will probably remain a secret, owing to the 40-year coverup by Soviet authorities. All locals can do is to guess at what makes them ill. Every day, the people of Muslyumovo, a town of 4,500, lead their cows around what is left of a barbed wire fence that runs along the banks of the Techa River to let the animals graze in the seemingly fertile grass at the water's edge.
Children play on the riverbank and fish from a bridge.
Everything here emits up to 250 microrems per hour, or four times the maximum radiation that scientists consider safe. The fence is the only visible sign that something is wrong with the river. It is also a fitting symbol of the belated, futile attempts of Soviet, and later, Russian authorities to protect people from the radiation. Soviet authorities put up the fence in the early 1950s to prevent people from using the water. But it was not until 1989 that they began to tell people that in the late 40s and early 50s, in the early years of the nuclear weapons program, Mayak dumped toxic waste into the Techa, contaminating the riverbed with strontium 90 and cesium 137.