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Little progress has been made on cleaning up the surrounding region. There is no equipment to decontaminate topsoil, and contaminated groundwater is backing up behind a concrete barrier near the reservoir that supplies water to the 2.6 million residents of Kiev. More than 700 peasants evacuated in 1986 have quietly moved back to their farm plots, where they consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 90, some of the icons have probably entered the world art market.
Hot spots abound in the buildings and equipment around Chernobyl. A disabled bulldozer sets off alarms on hand-held radiometers, showing 10 times the internationally accepted exposure level for nuclear-power workers. The big Mi- 8 helicopters that were used to drop sand into the blazing reactor in 1986 -- collecting such heavy radiation that some pilots died -- rest in a field along with hundreds of contaminated trucks and armored personnel carriers, many stripped of engines and electronic gear. The radiation is not enough to cause immediate illness, but looters are taking long-term risks. Health officials estimate that 10,000 deaths will result from fallout-induced cancers.
Chernobyl is only one of many examples of nuclear contamination and carelessness throughout the former Soviet Union. A devastating 1957 nuclear- waste explosion and subsequent dumping of contaminants near Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Moscow, is now thought to have released pollution totaling 1.2 billion curies, a unit measure of contamination. That compares with about 3 million curies from the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Says Murray Feshbach, co-author of Ecocide in the USSR: "The new evidence of widespread nuclear pollution is so incredible, it's hard to believe."
For more than 30 years the Soviets intentionally dumped enormous quantities of radioactive rubbish into the environment. Russian authorities have pinpointed a series of such sites along the country's Arctic coast, where currents can carry contaminants to Alaska and the north coast of Canada.
< The worst of the poisoned sites is Novaya Zemlya, two Arctic islands used as a nuclear-weapons test range. Already contaminated by bomb fallout, the islands were turned into a nuclear garbage bin. The Russians admit they dropped as many as 17,000 barrels of radioactive waste into the surrounding seas since 1964. Sailors reportedly shot holes in some of the barrels when they failed to sink.
At least eight marine reactors, three from the nuclear icebreaker Lenin and the others from decommissioned submarines, have been scuttled in Novaya Zemlya's shallow bays. The dead reactors are encased in layers of steel and may be harmless for many years. But inside, their cores contain dangerous isotopes.