EVEN WHERE SAFETY STANDARDS EXIST, THEY ARE RARELY FOLLOWED Douglas Holdstock, Lis Waterston 2000 (Phd working for Meact, "Nuclear weapons, a continuing threat to health" Lancet 2000; 355: 1544–47 Radioactive materials have been released from some at least of these sites. Furthermore, information about releases has not always been reliable and standards of handling waste have been ignored at Dounreay (where reprocessing has now ceased) and have been appalling at the Russian complex at Mayak,25 where Lake Karachay maybe the most radioactively contaminated site on earth. Leaks of strontium and caesium are over five times the combined releases of these isotopes from atmospheric nuclear testing, Chernobyl, and Sellafield taken together. In the 1957 Kyshtym accident in this region of the Urals high-level waste was dispersed by a chemical explosion in a storage tank, and a later report will describe environmental and health effects around the Mayak site.
