[meteorite-list] Chelyabinsk a "closed" city?

From: Wil <pml_wil_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2013 18:22:12 -0500
Message-ID: <00ed01ce0c9c$782e3a10$688aae30$_at_yahoo.com>

At Sat, 16 Feb 2013 Nicholas Gessler, Ph.D passes along a message that he
received from a friend:

> "About getting on-site ? I am guessing that unless you happened to live
right under the
fall, you won?t get very close to it now! (Chelyabinsk was for decades a
?closed? city
because of all the nuclear and other sensitive installations. Also the most
polluted
city in the world. I doubt they want foreigners running around picking up
things!)"
>
> Good luck hunting...
> Nick

Short answer: Not only the city but the entire province of Chelyabinsk was
strictly off-limits to all foreign travelers until 1989. You can travel
there now, but there are lots of areas in that region that are still
strictly forbidden to be near, even for Russians. There are many towns
there that simply did not appear on the map until the 1990s, and even just
mentioning their names (to Russians, much less to foreigners) was treated as
a very, very serious offense. Things are of course looser now, but don't
assume they are wide open, because they're not.

The Chelyabinsk region is home to a number of Russian nuclear weapons
facilities. The area between the southern Ural Mountain cities of
Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg was the site of the 1957 "Kyshtym disaster" at
the "Chelyabinsk-65" facility (now known as the "Mayak" complex in the city
of Ozyorsk, a town whose very existence was a closely held secret until
1994), which was the worst nuclear accident in history. (Twice as much
radiation was released as in the Chernobyl disaster 29 years later, and more
than 20 villages were depopulated.) The U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis
Gary Powers that was shot down in the southern Ural Mountains in 1960 is
commonly believed to have been on a mission to photograph the infamous "dead
forest" there, 3 years later. There are plenty of other plutonium-handling
facilities in the Chelyabinsk area, and lots of them have experienced
accidents that released radiation, as well. Consequently, the Chelyabinsk
region is known as "the most contaminated spot on earth". If you do get a
visa and travel there, then for heaven's sake be acutely aware of where you
can, and cannot, go. Being spotted walking in the woods where a nuclear
weapons plant is located, and taking pictures and picking up rocks to carry
off, well... The incredibly tall double fences that are patrolled by the
soldiers with Kalashnikovs and the largest German Shepherd dogs I've seen in
my life are pretty intimidating, trust me.

Wil
pml_wil at yahoo.com
Received on Sat 16 Feb 2013 06:22:12 PM PST