Too hot to handle

摘要

In september 1957, an explosion at a nuclear bomb factory in the Soviet Union released a vast plume of radioactivity into the air. The fallout covered hundreds of square kilometres of populated countryside. The accident was not revealed to the world until 1976, and the area is still heavily contaminated. This year our correspondent Fred Pearce became the first Western journalist to visit the exclusion zone. His report reveals how the explosion was just one of many massive contamination events (see page 36).