Greenpeace Friday blamed the Russian government for failing to evacuate the hundreds of thousands of people who still live in the country's numerous regions hit by nuclear accidents.

"According to a federal decree, thousands of towns and villages and hundreds of thousands of people are still officially situated in areas that were exposed to nuclear radiation," said Greenpeace's Vladimir Chuprov Friday.

The group gathered in front of the Japanese embassy in Moscow to mark the 59th anniversary of the 1945 Hiroshima nuclear bombing and to protest Russia's nuclear policy.

Instead, the group claimed, Russia is carrying out research to study the impact of radiation on people.

Greenpeace cited the example of the village of Muslyumovo, in Russia's Chelyabinsk region in the Urals, where thousands of people continue to live after a site containing nuclear waste exploded in 1957.

"What can inhabitants think when they constantly see people in white coats taking samples of the water and the air, people who don't have enough money to go to hospital or buy medicine," he demanded.

He said locals received between 40 and 200 rubles (about one and seven dollars) compensation per month for having been exposed to radiation.

Greenpeace also criticised a proposed 60-billion-dollar (50-billion-euro) programme to build 60 new reactors in the next 20 or 30 years.

The group said the Siberian regions of Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk were most affected by radiation, along with Russian areas near the border with Ukraine.

Ukraine suffered the world's worst nuclear accident after a nuclear power plant exploded in the city of Chernobyl in 1986, killing 30 people immediately and irradiating thousands.

TERRA.WIRE