Russia says radiation spiked 4-16 times above background levels after suspected missile explosion.
The radiation spike that followed the apparent explosion of a nuclear-powered missile engine in Russia -- an event that left seven dead and has been cloaked in secrecy -- was higher than previously indicated by the country's officials, Russian government weather agency on Tuesday said.
The spike was still low, but above what Russian authorities said on Sunday, when officials from a nuclear research center noted the spike had been double the norm. "It's not really dangerous for health if it's not for really long and this spike was for less than an hour," Konstantin Fomin, a media coordinator on energy issues at the environmentalist group, Greenpeace, that has gathered its own readings in the area showing the spike was 20 times above the norm, told ABC News on Tuesday."The real problem is lack of transparency."
In the first days after the accident, Russia's defense ministry initially made no mention the engine had contained nuclear materials and then denied there had been a spike in radiation. The local city administration on the Friday released a statement saying there had been a spike to a similar level of radiation reported by the weather agency on Tuesday, but then deleted it from its website.
Experts said the radiation levels recorded did not appear to pose serious dangers. Roshydromet's said its sensors had picked up readings of 2 microsieverts per hour; the European norm for the total natural radiation that an adult will absorb in a year is 1000 microsieverts and the spike had lasted only around an hour according to the weather station and local people monitoring it. The most contaminated areas at Chernobyl by contrast had been thousands of times higher.
On Tuesday, the state news agency TASS reported that several doctors who had treated the three engineers injured in the explosion had now been voluntarily flown to Moscow for examination and that they had signed non-disclosures agreements.
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