Russia’s worst flooding in decades has submerged Soviet-era uranium mines in the Kurgan region, the investigative news outlet Agentstvo reported Monday, sparking fears that radioactive and chemical pollution could seep into the Tobol River.
"I have seen the dead forest with my own eyes, it's a very eerie sensation,” Andrei Ozharovsky, a nuclear physicist and antinuclear campaigner, told The Moscow Times. “The explosion happened in the 1970s but in one direction, for about two or three kilometers, there are still dead trees standing.