The Forsaken: The Unfinished Business of Making Plutonium in Russia

For Nadezhda Kutepova, the path to becoming a human rights lawyer started in her hometown in the Southern Russian Urals. I met Kutepova in the summer of 2009 while doing research on Ozersk, a closed city specially built in the 1940s for workers of the vast Soviet plutonium plant called Maiak. One thinks of a nuclear site as being staffed with highly educated scientists and technicians, gingerly and knowledgeably running complicated machinery to irradiate uranium and process it into plutonium. But unlike a weapons lab, a plutonium plant is a vast factory employing thousands of blue-collar workers who push carts, run bulldozers, measure solutions, plumb, build, scrub, repair, and guard doors. And like most factories, the plutonium plant polluted liberally. In fact, plutonium production is the messiest stop on the vast assembly line of nuclear weapons production.