A green organisation is taking legal action against the Russian government over what it claims is environmental genocide.
Citizen has accused the authorities of systematically ignoring the plight of thousands of villagers living near the country's largest nuclear waste processing plant.
Many of them have developed serious illnesses as a result of radiation poisoning in the Chelyabinsk region near the Ural Mountains.
In the village of Musluymovo hundreds of people have succumbed to radiation sickness.
At first glance it is a scene of rustic beauty but stay long enough in the village and your eyes are soon drawn to the radiation warning signs sprouting from the ground.
Musluymovo straddles the River Techa, which is downstream of the Mayak plant.
A major accident 50 years ago and numerous other leaks have caused an environmental holocaust.
At the time it was hushed up by the Soviet authorities but the disasters are considered by experts to have been more lethal than the Chernobyl accident.
It means the villagers around Chelyabinsk are being slowly poisoned.
Every month Ramzis' family measures his head. At the age of 22 his body has stopped growing but his cranium is still expanding.
Doctors say his life will be short. Campaign groups say the Russian government refuses to move villagers, like Ramzis, because they are part of an experiment.
They claim villagers are being used as human guinea pigs for the study of the long-term effects of radiation poisoning.
A spokesman for the campaign group Citizen told us: "The authorities are doing everything not to resettle the villagers too far from the area. It's a crime. It is genocide."
In the provincial capital Chelyabinsk there is a special hospital for the sick and dying. On the ground floor the chief doctor Vladimir Ivanov shows us thousands of files charting the effects of the nuclear leaks on the population's health.
He says it is a unique study. But it is not just the living that are part of a freakish scientific report.
Villagers gave us a video showing deformed foetuses aborted from women in the contaminated area.
They are now on display in a local research centre. We posed as science journalists and were given a viewing.
Inside a locked room we were shown dozens of aborted children, their deformities immortalised in formaldehyde.
The director described them in their final resting place as a textbook example of the causal relationship between birth defects and the environment.
The local authorities deny local people are being used as scientific test cases but environmentalists point to the evidence.
Some people have been offered money to relocate but many villagers say the cash on offer is not enough and the resettlement zone is also in a contaminated area.
It appears that villages such as Muslomovo will continue to pay the price for Russia's creaking nuclear industry. One teenager called Ratmir - who suffers with heart problems - asked us how many other generations will have to suffer before someone listens to their plight.
Russia's Nuclear Village Of The Damned
A remote Russian village, the scene of a nuclear accident 50 years ago, is at the centre of a battle between an green campaign group and the Kremlin, which has been accused of environmental genocide. Sky's Alex Rossi has been to the village of the damned
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