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A sign warning of radiation danger at the river Techa near Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Region, home of the nuclear waste reprocessing facility Mayak.
Brainwashing Russia at its own expense: Rosatom’s post-Fukushima PR carpet bombing
The recent – and still ongoing – nuclear crisis in Japan came as a frightening reminder of the dangers of nuclear energy, something that the world, once staggered by the horrors of Chernobyl, was starting to let fade into the distant past. In Russia, the disaster did little more than serve as a cue for the Nuclear Corporation Rosatom to boost its investments into nuclear PR. On the taxpayers’ dime, no less.

In a late July entry on his LiveJournal blog (in Russian), the famous social activist and anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, who Time Magazine has called Russia’s Erin Brockovich, reported that the government of Chelyabinsk Region – a territory in the Urals which is home to the closed town of Ozyorsk and the nuclear reprocessing facility Mayak, considered to be among the worst radioactively contaminated places on Earth – announced a tender seeking to scrub the Internet of any unsavoury mentions of the ecological devastation wreaked by the enterprise’s operations, including the infamous Kyshtym disaster of 1957.

“As a result of the services rendered,” reads the snapshot of the tender announcement, posted by Navalny on his blog, “the materials appearing in the first ten search results generated by the specified search engines on the following 15 queries (keywords): ‘Ozyorsk,’ ‘Karabash,’ ‘[Production Enterprise] Mayak accident,’ ‘Ozyorsk [Production Enterprise] Mayak,’ ‘river Techa,’ ‘Muslyumovo,’ ‘radiation in Chelyabinsk,’ ‘Kyshtym disaster,’ ‘Karabash ecology,’ ‘the dirtiest city in the world,’ ‘the dirtiest city in Russia,’ ‘Karabash ecology,’ ‘ecology Chelyabinsk,’ ‘ecology of Chelyabinsk Region,’ [and] ‘ecology of the Urals’ must contain positive or else neutral assessments of the ecological situation in Chelyabinsk and Chelyabinsk Region. Exception will be made for links to articles on the website ru.wikipedia.org The content of negative materials must not exceed 20 percent, or 30 lines out of 150 generated by each of the search engines.”

If you don’t yet know what Karabash, Muslyumovo, or the accident at Production Enterprise Mayak are, hurry to Google them now, writes Navalny – before it is too late. Ironically, the very list of queries would seem to suggest the situation in Chelyabinsk Region is indeed badly in need of whitewashing.
More: www.bellona.org