Russia’s last deadly nuclear mishap shows cover-ups becoming harder

Bloomberg

The shroud of mystery surrounding Russia’s latest deadly nuclear accident will become increasingly difficult to maintain once the data starts to roll in.
That’s the lesson of a team of scientists who showed last month — days before the explosion that killed five Russians — that “a sizeable, yet undeclared nuclear accident” had occurred two years earlier in Russia, possibly from a nuclear-fuel facility once used to manufacture plutonium for weapons.
In a report for the US National Academy of Sciences, the team reconstructed data to demonstrate why it’s becoming harder to suppress information about nuclear accidents. New radiation-detection networks, satellite constellations and even social-media streams all help to open novel pathways to pry into states’ most closely held secrets.
“Here we see the powerful nature of an independent, science-based network,” said Georg Steinhauser, one of the report’s lead authors.
Radio-chemistry techniques used to reverse-engineer nuclear incidents are nothing new.
They deployed global detection networks to sniff out and collect radioactive particles released by atomic tests in order to get restricted information out from behind the Iron Curtain.
What’s changed since the demise of the Soviet Union is that new layers of highly-sensitive detection technologies have been added to global monitoring networks and that much of the data being generated is available to researchers, according to Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
“We live in an era of data ubiquity,” said Lewis, who routinely uses satellite imagery and models once only available to intelligence services.
One of the most powerful detection networks available is run by the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The Vienna-based body operates a $1b international array of 320 stations spread around the globe, which monitor the air, land and sea for signs of nuclear explosions.
Russia has provided little information about this month’s blast involving a failed missile test, which killed five atomic scientists and was followed by reports of a brief spike in
local radiation levels.
President Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed a simulation tweeted by the CTBTO chief showing how the nuclear particles would have moved across Russia.