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Russia urges no panic over Chernobyl-hit regions
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Russia urges no panic over Chernobyl-hit regions
AFP - Thursday, August 12
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MOSCOW (AFP) - – Fires in Russia have hit areas contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster but much of the pollution remains deep in the soil and there is no reason for panic, officials and experts said Wednesday.
Officials said they closely monitored the contaminated areas, including the Bryansk region bordering Ukraine and Belarus whose soils were heavily contaminated by the 1986 disaster in then Soviet Ukraine.
Experts admitted the fires may reshuffle the location of the contaminated particles by moving them to other areas but added that much of them had already seeped into the lower layers of soil.
"There is no reason for panic," Alexei Bobrinsky, deputy director for the state-run Russian Centre for the Protection of Forests, also known as Roslesozashchita, told AFP.
"Part of the contaminating substances will be shifted with the smoke," he said. But "what's burning is on the surface, part of the contaminating substances has gone into bed deposits which are the last to burn."
Some 3,900 hectares (9,750 acres) of land in Russia deemed to be radioactive have been hit by the wildfires, according to the state forest watchdog Roslesozashchita.
Those included 28 fires covering an area of 269 hectares in the Bryansk region, 11 fires covering 173 hectares in the Kaluga region, 401 fires over 1,431 hectares in the Chelyabinsk region and 34 fires over 82 hectares in the Penza region.
The state-run Forestry Management Office for the Bryansk region said in a statement Wednesday that "the situation is complicated but stable and under control."
A spokeswoman told AFP separately that the contaminated areas in the Bryansk region were not currently on fire.
The deputy head of the state organisation's regional firefighting unit, Vyacheslav Yakushev, said his unit closely monitored the polluted areas but also said the threat of a spike in contamination was insignificant.
"Radionuclides (atoms with an unstable nucleus) have seeped into the lower layers of soil over the past 20 years," he told AFP.
Officials from the Russian emergencies ministry had earlier this week denied there had been fires in the Bryansk region, after concern was raised over nuclear particles being lifted out of the soil by the blazes.
On Wednesday, the ministry however put out a statement, saying experts had been monitoring irradiated forests for the past week and had not detected any radiation in the smoke in Bryansk and three other regions
Greenpeace in Russia also said the danger was insignificant.
"This is not a repeat of Chernobyl," Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy programme at Greenpeace Russia, told AFP, adding the authorities in the Bryansk region had cordoned off the contaminated forests.
Chuprov however criticised the government's information policies, saying authorities should have done a better job of informing Russians of potential dangers near the radio-contaminated areas.
Russian official sources moved quickly to dismiss the threat from the fires. "I am asking not to sow panic," Gennady Onishchenko, head of Russia's health protection agency, said on the popular radio Echo of Moscow.
"There is pollution in the north-west of the Bryansk region but it's background contamination and there was a fire outbreak only in one area," he said.
Amid what is described as the worst heatwave in Russia's millennium-long history, hundreds of fires have raged, affecting nearly all areas of life and threatening to cost it 1.0 percent of gross domestic product, or 15 billion dollars, according to some estimates.
Russia's Nordic partners, which would be in the line of radioactive particles blown on by the wind, also played down the dangers posed by radiation.
Russia is known for whitewashing what it considers humiliating disasters ranging from the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to the sinking of the Kursk submarine in 2000.
The federal government has yet to confirm that daily mortality rates in Moscow doubled as a result of the heatwave and smog after city authorities this week released death statistics.
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