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103-518: The Mayak Production Association ( Russian : Производственное объединение «Маяк» , Proizvodstvennoye ob′yedineniye "Mayak" , from Маяк 'lighthouse') is one of the largest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing a reprocessing plant. The closest settlements are Ozyorsk to the northwest and Novogornyi to the south. Lavrentiy Beria led the Soviet atomic bomb project. He directed

206-649: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in

309-510: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to

412-546: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017 European monitoring networks declared increased radioactivity levels in Europe, coming from Eastern Europe, in the first days of October: An assessment of the French nuclear safety institute IRSN indicated that while there

515-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate

618-479: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but

721-572: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between

824-770: A lifetime exposure to radiation in less than a week. During the following decade, ten additional communities were resettled from the river, but the largest community, Muslumovo, remained. Researchers investigated residents of Muslumovo annually in what has become a four-generation living experiment of people living among chronic, low doses of radioactivity. Blood samples showed its villagers took in caesium-137 , ruthenium-106 , strontium-90 , and iodine-131 , internally and externally. These isotopes had deposited in organs, flesh and bone marrow. Villagers complained of various illnesses and symptoms—chronic fatigue, sleep and fertility problems, weight loss, and increased hypertension. The frequency of congenital disabilities and complications at birth

927-607: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it

1030-516: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in

1133-634: A release had not been seen on a continental scale since the Chernobyl accident. In January 2018, the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) reported that the source of the contamination is located in the Volga – Southern Ural region between 25 and 28 September for a duration of less than 24 hours. The report excludes the possibility of an accidental release from a nuclear reactor, stating that it seems related with irradiated fuels processing or

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1236-521: A result of heavy rains causing Lake Karachay , a dried-up radioactively polluted lake (used as a dumping basin for Mayak's radioactive waste since 1951), to release radioactive material into surrounding waters. The second occurred in 1967 when wind spread dust from the bottom of Lake Karachay over parts of Ozyorsk ; over 400,000 people were irradiated.. Source : 55°42′45″N 60°50′53″E  /  55.71250°N 60.84806°E  / 55.71250; 60.84806 Russian language Russian

1339-605: A variety of areas (including several lakes and the Techa River , along which many villages lay). Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents. The most notable accident occurred on 29 September 1957, when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a chemical (non-nuclear) explosion having an energy estimated at 75 tons of TNT (310 gigajoules ). This released 740 PBq (20 MCi) of fission products, of which 74 PBq (2 MCi) drifted off

1442-527: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,

1545-475: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under

1648-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of

1751-593: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this

1854-647: Is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and

1957-485: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to

2060-613: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There

2163-563: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially

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2266-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which

2369-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and

2472-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to

2575-576: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in

2678-610: Is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and

2781-408: Is the central administrative territorial district. As part of the Russian (formerly Soviet) nuclear weapons program, Mayak was formerly known as Chelyabinsk-40 and later as Chelyabinsk-65, referring to the postal codes of the site. Mayak's nuclear facility plant covers about 90 square kilometres (35 sq mi). The site borders Ozyorsk, in which a majority of the staff of Mayak live. Mayak itself

2884-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using

2987-585: Is widely suspected as the source. Authorities there and at Rosatom , the Russian state company running the nuclear industry, have denied a link. On 21 November 2017, Russia reversed itself by confirming that a radiation spike was recorded at two monitoring facilities within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the plant. Russia states the published data is not sufficient to establish the air pollution source and government denies it has had any measurements or admissions of any incident. Rosatom initially stated that it had not carried out any operations that could have led to

3090-461: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population

3193-966: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian

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3296-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in

3399-481: The Techa River , a slow-moving hydraulic system that bogs down in swamps and lakes. As many as 40 villages, with a combined population of about 28,000, lined the river at the time. For 24 of them, the Techa was a major source of water; 23 of them were eventually evacuated. In the 45 years afterwards, about half a million people in the region have been irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to up to 20 times

3502-575: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On

3605-694: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to

3708-508: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as

3811-465: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home

3914-688: The Biophysics Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow, disclosed what he knew of the accident around the same time. Russian documents gradually declassified from 1989 onward show the true events were less severe than rumoured. According to Gyorgy, who invoked the Freedom of Information Act to open up the relevant Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files, the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for

4017-467: The European scientific project Borexino . Mayak PA had agreed to deliver cerium-144 in fall 2016, but canceled the contract in December 2017. Mayak PA was the only facility capable of producing cerium-144 from "fresh" spent nuclear fuel 2–3 years old. Usually spent fuel is not processed earlier than five years after extraction. The Ru106/Ru103 ratio in analyzed environmental samples during the pollution spread

4120-519: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,

4223-526: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this

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4326-515: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of

4429-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated

4532-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from

4635-405: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian

4738-525: The Techa River. The tritium concentration alone in the river near the village of Muslyumovo exceeds the permissible limit by 30 times. Rosatom, a state-owned nuclear operations corporation, began to resettle residents of Muslyumovo in 2006. However, only half of the residents of the village were moved.  People continue to live in the immediate area of the plant, including Ozyorsk and other downstream areas. Residents report no problems with their health and

4841-460: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of

4944-640: The accident and denied it happened for nearly 30 years. Residents of Chelyabinsk district in the Southern Urals reported observing "polar-lights" in the sky near the plant, and American aerial spy photos had documented the destruction caused by the disaster by 1960. This nuclear accident, the Soviet Union's worst before the Chernobyl disaster , is categorised as a Level 6 "Serious Accident" on the 0–7 International Nuclear Events Scale . When Zhores Medvedev exposed

5047-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter

5150-516: The construction of the Mayak Plutonium plant in the Southern Urals between 1945 and 1948, in a great hurry and secrecy as part of the Soviet Union 's atomic bomb project . Over 40,000 Gulag prisoners and POWs built the factory and the closed nuclear city of Ozyorsk, called at the time by its classified postal code "Forty". Five (today closed) nuclear reactors were built to produce plutonium which

5253-562: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language

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5356-646: The disaster in a 1976 article in New Scientist , some exaggerated claims circulated in the absence of any verifiable information from the Soviet Union. People "grew hysterical with fear with the incidence of unknown 'mysterious' diseases breaking out. Victims were seen with skin 'sloughing off' their faces, hands and other exposed parts of their bodies." As Zhores wrote, "Hundreds of square miles were left barren and unusable for decades and maybe centuries. Hundreds of people died, thousands were injured and surrounding areas were evacuated." Professor Leo Tumerman, former head of

5459-686: The early years of its operation, the Mayak plant directly discharged high-level nuclear waste into several small lakes near the plant, and into the Techa River , whose waters ultimately flow into the Ob River . According to the data of the Department of Natural Resources in the Ural Region, in the year 2000, more than 250 million cubic metres (8.8 billion cubic feet) of water containing thousands of curies of tritium, strontium, and cesium-137 were discharged into

5562-530: The eastern Urals, causing sickness and death from radiation poisoning . The Soviet government kept this accident secret for about 30 years. It is rated at 6 on the seven-level INES scale. It is third in severity, surpassed only by Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan. Mayak is still active as of 2020, and it serves as a reprocessing site for spent nuclear fuel. Today the plant makes tritium and radioisotopes , not plutonium. In recent years, proposals that

5665-713: The emissions as coming from a nuclear reactor, estimating that it should have come either from a treatment site or from a center producing radioactive medicine. They estimated the source to be south of the Ural mountains, between the Urals and the Volga river, in Russia or Kazakhstan . Roshydromet then issued a report describing a rise in beta activity of aerosols and surfaces at all monitoring posts in South Ural from September 25 to October 1, 2017. In two aerosol samples, an increase in Ru-106 activity

5768-503: The entry of oxygen, however, radiolysis reactions can make the more volatile compound ruthenium(VIII) oxide , which has a boiling point of approximately 40 °C (104 °F) and is a strong oxidizer, reacting with virtually any fuel/ hydrocarbon . The use of a solution of tributyl phosphate in the hydrocarbons kerosene or dodecane , is frequent – as part of the nuclear reprocessing method known as PUREX . Accidental airborne releases of Ru-106 have been through this pathway in

5871-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,

5974-451: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or

6077-499: The fledgling US nuclear industry. " Ralph Nader surmised that the information had not been released because of the reluctance of the CIA to highlight a nuclear accident in the USSR, that could cause concern among people living near nuclear facilities in the USA." Only in 1992, shortly after the fall of the USSR, did the Russians officially acknowledge the accident. In December 1968, the facility

6180-617: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to

6283-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and

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6386-442: The health of Mayak plant workers. However, these claims lack verification, and many who worked at the plant in 1950s and 1960s subsequently died from the effects of radiation. The administration of the Mayak plant has been repeatedly criticized in recent years by Greenpeace and other environmental advocates for environmentally unsound practices. The Mayak plant is associated with two other major nuclear accidents. The first occurred as

6489-455: The incident. The French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) provided a report to the committee in January 2018. The report concluded that the most likely source of the pollution is a spent fuel treatment facility located in a region between Volga and Ural. A possible reason for the release of radioactivity at Mayak PA might be an unsuccessful attempt to produce cerium -144 for

6592-399: The isotope's release into the atmosphere "for many years". In December 2017, however, senior Mayak executive Yuri Morkov admitted that ruthenium-106 is routinely released as part of the plant's processing of spent nuclear fuel. Morkov characterized the amount released as "insignificant" and denied Mayak was the source of the radiation spike. Domestic investigation within Russia is hampered by

6695-516: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of

6798-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to

6901-455: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,

7004-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held

7107-662: The past, such as the UK's B204 reprocessing incident in 1973, where 34 employees were exposed. With corrosion of the fuel rod -cladding in the MAGNOX -reactor, spent fuel pools (an issue in the British case, due to the selection of magnesium for the coating on the fuel rods), reprocessing needed to occur within a few months at the B205 facility; most other facilities (like the French La Hague ) place

7210-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or

7313-407: The plant reprocess waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise to controversy. An incompletely reported accident appears to have occurred in September 2017; see Airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017 . The nuclear complex is 150 km south of Ekaterinburg , between the towns of Kasli and Tatysh, and 100 km northwest of Chelyabinsk . The closest city, Ozyorsk ,

7416-455: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian

7519-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in

7622-558: The problem that Mayak is in the walled-off closed city of Ozyorsk , which non-resident Russians are barred from visiting without special permission, and by government harassment of nuclear critics. In Russia prominent nuclear critics experience government raids, are accused on state TV of "exploiting the nuclear issue to foment revolution", and risk criminal prosecution on charges of incitement of hatred against nuclear energy employees. The Russian Academy of Sciences 's Nuclear Safety Institute set up an international committee to investigate

7725-608: The production of sources from fission products solution. It may point to Mayak's aborted attempt to manufacture a capsule of highly radioactive component cerium-144, for the SOX project in Italy. Both the Russian government and Rosatom denied at the time that another accidental leak took place at Mayak. The release of a cloud of ruthenium-106 is similar to the B205 reprocessing accident in Britain in 1973. In

7828-475: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration

7931-466: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,

8034-399: The radiation suffered by the Chernobyl disaster victims outside of the plant itself. Investigators in 1951 found communities along the river highly contaminated. On discovery, soldiers immediately evacuated the first downriver village of Metlino, population 1,200, where radiation levels measured 3.5–5 rads /hr (35–50 mGy /hr or 10–14 μGy/s). At that rate, people would get the equivalent of

8137-481: The reactors were all optimised for plutonium production, producing many tons of contaminated materials and utilising primitive open-cycle cooling systems which directly contaminated the thousands of gallons of cooling water the reactors used every day. Lake Kyzyltash was the largest natural lake capable of providing cooling water to the reactors; it was rapidly contaminated via the open-cycle system. The closer Lake Karachay , too small to provide sufficient cooling water,

8240-450: The release of the noble gas isotope krypton-85 is routine during nuclear reprocessing , the noble metal ruthenium , which is generated in a fission product yield rate of from 0.39% to 3.103% of every fission of a nucleus of uranium or plutonium respectively, is by contrast generally in metallic form, with a high boiling point of 4,150 °C (7,500 °F) in spent fuel. Owing to the ionizing radiation environment of spent fuel and

8343-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed

8446-481: The site, creating a contaminated region of 15,000–20,000 square kilometres (5,800–7,700 sq mi) called the East Urals Radioactive trace. Subsequently, an estimated 49 to 55 people died of radiation-induced cancer , 66 were diagnosed with chronic radiation syndrome , 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation. The Soviet Union did not release news of

8549-658: The source in the east, at more than 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) from Germany. A later report from the German Federal Radiation Protection Service ruled in the South of the Urals and other potential locations. The Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring of Russia (Roshydromet) said that Ru-106 activity in St. Petersburg was at 115.4 μBq/m from October 2 to 6. The French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) ruled out

8652-484: The spent-fuel in spent fuel pools for about a decade , until the Ru-106, which has a half-life of ~ 1 year, has safely decayed into Rh-106 and finally the stable Pd-106 . All attempts at PUREX to less aged spent-fuel need to take into account the presence of the oxidative and volatile ruthenium(VIII) oxide. Initially, there was no indication given for the source of these radioactive particles, apart from an October 2017 statement coming from German authorities estimating

8755-675: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In

8858-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to

8961-770: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic  * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature

9064-506: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to

9167-682: The world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has

9270-626: Was a flash of light and heat. After the complex had been evacuated, the shift supervisor and radiation control supervisor re-entered the building. The shift supervisor then entered the room of the incident, caused another, larger nuclear reaction and irradiated himself with a deadly dose of radiation. Abnormally high levels of radiation were reported in the area of the facility in November 2017. Simultaneously, traces of radioactive manmade isotope Ruthenium -106 spread across Europe in September and October. Such

9373-537: Was characteristic of "fresh" spent fuel. While the non-Russian members of the committee accepted the conclusions of IRSN's report, the Russian members maintain that an inspection by Rostechnadzor of the Mayak PA facility in November 2017 showed no anomalies and a rare meteorological event may have transported the ruthenium-106 from somewhere else to the apparent region of origin. In 2019, a number of European nuclear scientific research groups published "clear evidence" that

9476-516: Was detected. On September 26 and 27, Ru-106 decay products were detected in the Republic of Tatarstan . On September 27 and 28, high pollution levels of aerosols and surfaces was detected in Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don. In two aerosol samples from Chelyabinsk Oblast, 986- and 440-fold activity increases were measured, as compared to the preceding month. The Mayak reprocessing and isotope production plant

9579-437: Was experimenting with plutonium purification techniques. Two operators were using an "unfavourable geometry vessel in an improvised and unapproved operation as a temporary vessel for storing plutonium organic solution." "Unfavourable geometry" means that the vessel was too compact, reducing the amount of plutonium needed to achieve a critical mass to less than the amount present. After most of the solution had been poured out, there

9682-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian

9785-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of

9888-413: Was no health risk for the vast majority of people in Europe, the radioactive quantity released was significant, estimated from 100 to 300 terabecquerels, which would require an evacuation of people from a radius of several kilometers from the source, as yet then unidentified. The source of the aforementioned 100–300 TBq activity corresponds approximately to 1–3 grams of the ruthenium-106 isotope. While

9991-453: Was not shown on Soviet public maps. The location of the site together with the plant city was chosen to minimise the effects that harmful emissions could potentially have on populated areas. Mayak is surrounded by a ~250 square kilometres (97 sq mi) exclusion zone. Nearby is the site of the South Urals nuclear power plant. Built in total secrecy between 1945 and 1948, the Mayak plant

10094-580: Was refined and machined for weapons. Later the plant came to specialise in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. Once production began, engineers quickly ran out of underground space to store high-level radioactive waste. Rather than cease production of plutonium until new underground waste storage tanks could be built, between 1949 and 1951, Soviet managers dumped 76 million cubic metres (2.7 billion cubic feet) of toxic chemicals, including 3.2 million curies of high-level radioactive waste into

10197-491: Was the first reactor used to create plutonium for the Soviet atomic bomb project . In accordance with Stalinist procedure and supervised by NKVD Chief Lavrentiy Beria , it was the utmost priority to produce enough weapons-grade material to match the U.S. nuclear superiority following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . Little to no consideration was paid to worker safety or responsible disposal of waste materials, and

10300-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between

10403-627: Was three times greater than normal. In 1953, doctors examined 587 of 28,000 exposed people and found that 200 had clear cases of radiation poisoning. In 1957 Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster , which at the time was the worst nuclear accident in history. During this catastrophe, a poorly maintained storage tank exploded, releasing 20 million curies (740 PBq ) in the form of 50–100 tons of high-level radioactive waste . The resulting radioactive cloud contaminated an expansive territory of more than 750 km (290 sq mi) (a nine-mile radius) in

10506-419: Was used as a dumping ground for large quantities of high-level radioactive waste too "hot" to store in the facility's underground storage vats. The original plan was to use the lake to store highly radioactive material until it could be returned to the Mayak facility's underground concrete storage vats, but this proved impossible due to the lethal levels of radioactivity (see Pollution of Lake Karachay ). The lake

10609-461: Was used for this purpose until the Kyshtym Disaster in 1957, in which the underground vats exploded due to a faulty cooling system. This incident caused widespread contamination of the entire Mayak area (as well as a large swath of territory to the northeast). This led to greater caution among the administration, fearing international attention, and caused the dumping grounds to be spread out over

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