Informant38

Certainly, Putin has hugely reduced environmental regulation and monitoring in Russia, which has had a deadly impact on environmental science. If they decide they want to go back to an authoritarian state, they could do it quickly....
there is always the risk that we will be arrested for investigating pollution from what we did not realise was a military facility. That's a big worry for us, because if we're arrested for researching pollution from a military facility, we could be charged with spying on it. Other scientists charged with spying have spent years in jail even before their cases are tried. The trials are usually secret, and proving your innocence is horribly difficult. We stay out of closed areas....
We found very alarming levels of radiation near Tomsk, where there is a plutonium-producing reactor which, although it may possibly have an undisclosed secret military purpose, is used to generate electricity. We found extremely high radiation levels in the Tom River downstream from the reactor, including traces of plutonium. There was an explosion at the plant in 1993 but many of the isotopes we found were too young to derive from any historical accident.
The Tom joins another river which runs into the Arctic Ocean and we think the pollution levels are high enough to pose an extensive threat to the ocean. Our study suggested that the plant is the world's largest radiological polluter