Three former soviet countries - world’s most polluted

Three former soviet republics are among the ten most polluted places in the world, according to a ranking made by blacksmithinstitute.org, cited by Info-Prim Neo. They are the Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Kyrgyzstan. The first place is held by Chernobyl, Ukraine. The world's worst nuclear disaster took place on April 26, 1986, when testing in the Chernobyl power plant, 62 miles north of Kiev, triggered a fiery melt-down of the reactor's core. Thirty people were killed in the accident, 135,000 evacuated, and one hundred times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was released. To this day, the 19-mile exclusion zone around the plant remains uninhabitable. Within seven months, the reactor was buried in a concrete casing designed to absorb radiation and contain the remaining fuel. The second place is also held by a former USSR country – Dzerzinsk, Russia. In Dzerzhinsk, a significant center of the Russian chemical manufacturing, the average life expectancy is 42 years for men and 47 for women. Until the end of the Cold War, the city was among Russia's principal production sites of chemical weapons. Third place – Haina, Dominican Republic. This highly populated area known as Bajos de Haina is severely contaminated with lead from a closed down automobile battery recycling smelter. The most common symptom of Haina's pollution is lead poisoning, which affects children's health and development. A study revealed that at least 28 per cent of the children require immediate treatment. Fourth place – Kawbe, Zambia. Mining and smelting operations were running almost continuously up until 1994 without the government addressing the potential danger of lead. This smelting process was unregulated during this period and these smelters released heavy metals in dust particles, which settled on the ground in the surrounding area. The potentially affected persons constitute 250 thousand persons. Fifth place - La Oroya, Peru. Since 1922, adults and children in La Oroya - a mining town in the Peruvian Andes and the site of a poly-metallic smelter - have been exposed to toxic emissions from the plant. Currently owned by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation, the plant is largely responsible for the dangerously high blood lead levels found in the children of this community. The sixth place is held by Linfen, China. The Shanxi Province is considered to be the heart of China's enormous and expanding coal industry, providing about two thirds of the nation's energy. Seventh place - Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgystan. There are twenty-three tailing dumps and thirteen waste rock dumps scattered throughout Mailuu-Suu, home to a former Soviet uranium plant. The eighth and tenth places are held by Norilks and Rudnaya Pristan, Russia. The first one houses the world's largest heavy metals smelting complex, and over 4 million tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc are dispersed into the air annually. In the second city, the residents suffer from serious lead poisoning from an old smelter and the unsafe transport of lead concentrate from the local lead mining site. According to the report, about 10 million people in the world live in conditions hard to imagine. Their life expectancy is low and because of the pollution they got sick of cancer and gave birth to disabled or retarded children.