Reference no: EM133367471

Case Study: Research Paper Writing Model English 099
Spring 2023
technologies were just being developed. However, as Alex Rodriguez states in "Cold War Secrecy's Fallout: In Russian Village, Nuclear Waste Points to Legacy of Neglect," the plant was constructed with many flaws. One such flaw required "workers to clean by hand the filters that separated plutonium from other, unneeded radioactive isotopes." Other structural mistakes caused explosions of equipment and enormous consecutive spills that quickly filled the waste tanks, which eventually forced the facility officials to dump the waste in the nearby Techa River and later in Lake Karachay (Rodriguez).
With so many defects in its construction and maintenance, it is no surprise that in 1957 the cooling system of one of the tanks failed. The failure caused an explosion with a force of about seventy to one hundred tons of the explosive TNT and the release of seventy to eighty tons of radioactive waste. Journalist Alexander Zaitchik reports the memories of the witnesses
1 Ksenia Laney, born Senenko Ksenia Yurievna, is a former student at Truman College in Chicago. She learned of the Kyshtym disaster while she was attending high school in Chelyabinsk, Russia, just fifty-one miles from the Mayak nuclear plant.
Mayak: The Unknown Disaster Ksenia Laney1
The world knows about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the only nuclear event that rated the highest- level International Nuclear Event Scale. The event drew great publicity, which eventually contributed to the complete shutdown of the facility in 2000. However, many people are unaware of a comparable catastrophe at another nuclear plant on September 29, 1957, near the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. The event has had lasting effects on both the population and the environment surrounding the facility.
The event is called the Kyshtym disaster, and it happened at Mayak, a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The plant was build hastily and secretly in 1945-1948, because its original goal was to produce plutonium for weapons. That time can be called the dawn of Russian nuclear industry because so many

Research Paper Writing Model English 099
Spring 2023
of the disaster in his article, "Inside the Zone." Villages heard first the loud boom away from the town and then felt shocks strong enough to rattle plates and crack the windows. As one of his interviewees, Gulchara Isnagilova, who was eleven years old at the time, remembers, "Around the smoke it was the color of sunsets."
The beauty of the scene masked the terrible for the people in the area. Soon after the explosions, they began to fall ill, and, even after policemen arrived to "protect" them, citizens never received any explanation for their illnesses. Moreover, children and young people in the area were sent to destroy the contaminated objects: to burn crops, bury animals, and dismantle buildings. As Chelyabinsk state records show, around 1,800 adolescents worked with no protection while clearing. In recent years after a long court process, the government was forced to compensate those people who could prove to have worked as cleaners at the time. Their compensation was 280 rubles ($11) a month (Zaitchik). Even that meager compensation was not given to people until 1990 because the Soviet government tried to conceal the event, even from the people of the region. The area was renamed the East-Ural Nature Reserve by the government and, therefore, was closed to any unauthorized access (Zaitchik).
Officials finally acknowledged the disaster and its effects only thirty-five years later, in 1992. It was then revealed that approximately 800 square kilometers (almost 500 square miles) of inhabited territory were contaminated long-term as a result of the explosion. Zhores A. Medvedev, an ecologist, writes that animals and vegetation suffered radiation damage from nearby stored nuclear waste released by the heat of the explosion.
The revelations about the previous spills and explosions eventually followed. It was admitted that a large amount of moderate to highly radioactive waste had been dumped into the Techa River from 1949 to 1956. During its entire existence, the Mayak nuclear unit released about seventy-six million cubic meters of waste into the river, which greatly affected more than 28,000 people in the area (Medvedev). Moreover, the documentary film by Slawomir Grunberg, "Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet," states: "Russian doctors who study radiation sickness in the area estimate that those living along the Techa River received an average of four times more radiation that the Chernobyl victims." The BBC (British Broadcasting Company) News also reported that a massive amount of waste had been "pumped from Mayak into a lake that even today is capable of delivering a fatal dose of radiation within an hour." This area is now named East-Ural Radioactive Trace, and its previously fertile soil is no longer used for agriculture (Grunberg).
Scientists who compare the Chernobyl and Kyshtym disasters rate Kyshtym one level lower in the International Nuclear Event Scale. However, the level of radiation emitted is less important than the government's treatment of those near the two disasters. The Chernobyl area was largely evacuated after the accident, whereas the survivors of Kyshtym and their descendants still live in the radioactive area. The consequences of this lifelong presence are terrible. "Russians in the region surrounding the plant get thyroid cancer at nearly twice the nation's average rate. The incidence of lung cancer in the Techa region is 70 percent higher than the average for Russia; the rate of colon cancer is 44 percent higher" (Rodriguez). The worst and the saddest effect is on children. Lena Morozova, a villager in the area, comments, "We're all sick. As for the children, I don't know. It's some kind of dying generation" (Grunberg).

Research Paper Writing Model English 099
Spring 2023
When Grunberg was making his documentary, he met children fishing on the Techa River. His Geiger counter showed that the fish contained twenty times the normal amount of radiation. He then visited a famous osteopath whose patient told him that many, many children in the area of the Mayak complex are born without hands, legs, and feet. Physiological problems are not the only ones that occur. "At the time of Mayak's construction in the late 40s, mentally handicapped students were a rare occurrence at the school. Today, 80 out of 1,360 students are categorized as having mental handicaps" (Zaitchik).
Considering all the terrible consequences of the Mayak explosion, one would expect that, after the Soviet Union dissolved, the plant would be shut down completely. However, this is not the case. Mayak is still working and still dumping all the waste into the river and the lake. Moreover, the majority of the population of the area still lives there, with no meaningful support from the government, experiencing a financial ruin that is sickening and killing the population that radiation did not wipe out already.
Works Cited
"World: Analysis of Dangers of the Soviet Nuclear Legacy." BBC News, 23 April 1998. Web. 11 Feb 2011.
Grunberg, Slawomir, Dir. Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet. LogTV, LTD: 2005, Film .
Medvedev, A. Zhores. Nuclear Disaster in the Urals. New York: Norton. 1980.
Rodriguez, Alex. "Cold War Secrecy's Fallout in Russian Village, Nuclear Waste Points to Legacy
of Neglect." Chicago Tribune 20 May 2005, Chicago Final Edition: 1. Print.
Zaitchik, Alexander. "Inside the Zone." Freezerbox Magazine. Infocraft. LLC, 17 October 2007.
Web. 28 Feb 2011, . Questions about the Model

Questions:

1. What is the thesis statement of the paper? Circle it.
2. Find the topic sentences in each body paragraph. Which transitional phrases relate to the content of the preceding paragraph? Underline them.
3. Why does Laney make a number of comparisons in her paper?
4. What is the function of the quotations in the paper? Why are they necessary?
5. How is the paper organized - chronologically, topically, or a combination of the two?
6. How does Laney initially identify the sources in the body of the text, and how does she handle a subsequent reference to the same source?
7. Why would readers want to see a list of works cited?