More recently, a decades long pile up of the Soviet navy’s nuclear fuel left to rot at Andreyeva Bay has begun to wend its way for reprocessing at Mayak – suggesting the once doomed plant might be able to atone for past sins. People resent the situation. Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": There was a directive prohibiting the construction on this site because of radon concentration up to 200 Bq per m³. Thousands have died and many more live with its debilitating legacy: sickness, sterility and poverty. Spent nuclear fuel is still transported to Mayak and radionuclides are continuously released into water bodies of the Techa cascade. The Nuclear Disaster of Kyshtym 1957 and the Politics of the Cold War Thomas Rabl Summary In the late afternoon of 29 September 1957, a major explosion at the Soviet military nuclear facility “Mayak” located in Kyshtym in the Southern Urals, caused the contamination of an area of 20,000 square kilometers, home to 270.000 people. The Kyshtym disaster contaminated an area up to 20,000 square kilometres, known as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace, and thousands of people near the plant were evacuated. Mayak as seen from across the Techa River, which it has contaminated for decades. The goal is for the 80,000 or so residents forced to evacuate to eventually be able to return.Decontamination has never been done on such a large scale before. Because of the intense secrecy surrounding Mayak, it is difficult to estimate the death toll of Kyshtym. Its forgiveness depends on it. Specifically, the facility produced plutonium for Soviet nuclear weapons from 19… But too much of Mayak’s history – a history written in the illnesses and deformities of its witnesses – has come to light only by accident and happenstance. In 1961 the Techa River banks were fenced with barbed wire. Rosatom made a decision to resettle only a part of the village, another part, called Muslyumovo station which is only 2 km away and also unsuitable for life will stay where it was. I know that according to sanitary norms construction is prohibited in case the radioactivity level is 100 Bq - in this place and area is subject to compulsory resettlement in case of 200 Bq. The Kola NPP is located on the peninsula on the bank of Lake Imandra. The Kyshtym disaster is the third worst nuclear disaster in history, reaching Level 6 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) after Chernobyl in Soviet Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan … After the accident 248 villages were resettled from the Techa river. It was not until 1976, when the writings of Soviet dissent Dr. Zhores Medvedev began to appear, that wider attention was given to this subject. To follow the river’s northerly flow is to draw a morbid map of mortality and disease: record rates of chromosomal abnormalities, birth defects and cancers vastly higher than the Russian average mark each new village it passes. Originally known as Chelyabinsk-40, the complex was later renamed to the Mayak Production Association and served as the location for the emerging Soviet nuclear program in the years immediately following World War II. Out of sight, out of mind. In the early morning hours of September 29, 62 years ago, a tank containing nuclear weapons waste exploded on the grounds of the Mayak Chemical Combine, Russia’s primary spent nuclear fuel reprocessing center, which is still in operation. But what could they do to us? Pingback: The worst Nuclear Accident you never heard of. He has argued that a vast contaminated area exists east of the city of Kyshtym … Underneath here it shows up to 4,500 micro R/h. : VUGZ), established in 1966 after the Kyshtym accident, the village long bearing the brunt of the contamination, was resettled a mere two kilometers upriver. Like its two younger brothers, the Kyshtym explosion was born in secrecy and nurtured by naiveté. Nadezhda Kutepova speaks in Freiburg, Germany in 2012. Even in the shadow of these unsettling facts, it falls to Mayak to digest much of the gristle left by the Soviet nuclear legacy. It’s called the Kyshtym disaster and before the mid 1980s the town’s official location wasn’t even designated on a map. Those who live along the river, they say, have cancer at rates 3.6 times higher than the national average, and suffer 25 times more from incidence of birth defects than in other places in the country. The tank held highly radioactive waste which overheated and blew, belching up a 160-ton cement cap buried twenty-four feet underground and tossing it in the air. In the investigation of the criminal case it was determined that through the body of the worn-out dam and side dikers 10 million m³ of liquid radioactive waste was discharged annually into the open hydrographic network. A lot of accident clean-up workers acquired lethal radiation doses of more than 100 Roentgen. People were warned that it was prohibited to use the water from the river and they had to tend their cattle in another place. The blast issued into the earth’s atmosphere 20 million curies. Residents of the Muslyumovo village have a humiliatingly meager compensation. Any nuclear power plant produces spent nuclear fuel and radioactive wastes which are extremely dangerous to all living things. 5 Unknown Nuclear Disasters: Chernobyl Is Far from the Only One, Chernobyl is not the world’s only nuclear disaster, there are plenty of others to keep you up at night., Interesting Engineering, By Marcia Wendorf, 2 Aug 19 The Kyshtym Disaster A lot of accident clean-up workers acquired lethal radiation doses of more than 100 Roentgen. After the accident 248 villages were resettled from the Techa river. The "Kyshtym Disaster" is the third biggest nuclear disaster in history, according to the International Nuclear Event Scale, behind the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster… Charles Digges holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Russian literature from Harvard University. The Kyshtym disaster or Kyshtym incident was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. The people who leave Muslyumovo loose their rights for compensation, it is as if the health ruined by radiation could be restored at once. The first peep of it came in 1976, when a dissident scientist named Zhores Medvedev was the first to publish his suspicions that the government wasn’t telling the whole story. It might be one of the worst offenders in polluting the environment. It creates an impression that they try to save maximum money on construction. According to expert research just the tritium concentration alone in the Techa River near the village Muslyumovo exceeds the permissible limit by 30 times. The first nuclear reactor and radiochemical plant were built here in mid-40s of the 20th century. Whatever radioactive contamination that flowed was deposited here. It was only in 2008 – more than a half a century after the dumps began – that Rosatom undertook to evacuate some of the rural villages supping on this radioactive bilge, but only partially, and only halfheartedly. Since the 1950s, accidental and deliberate releases of radiation have exposed over a quarter of a million people living around the plant to high levels of radiation. The government uses the poverty of the aggrieved village to tie the people to the contaminated land. As a result an area of approximately 1,800 km² was contaminated with radionuclides. Specialists warn that the destruction of the Techa dams may lead to environmental disaster and it is fearful to imagine its devastating effect. He has worked in Bellona’s Russian program/team since 2001. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for the Ecological Policy of Russia, Moscow: People from North-West Russia, the Kola and Leningrad NPPs, Murmansk, from this whole region should not think that when the spent nuclear fuel is transported for re-processing elsewhere, their social responsibilities cease. Many clean-up workers faced lethal radiation doses of more than 100 Roentgen. There is the Karachay Lake on the territory of Mayak which is used for open-air storage of liquid radioactive wastes. Known as the Kyshtym Disaster, the incident occurred at Mayak, a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant sequestered in the closed city of Ozyorsk, near the town of Kyshtym. And during Perestroika any patrolling stopped. The fallout coated more than 200 towns and villages and exposed 272,000 people — a small portion of which were quietly evacuated over the subsequent two years — to radiation. A large number of people were involved in the accident mitigation process acting manually without even elementary means of protection. They all are responsible because Mayak is a highly polluting industry. Kyshtym disaster There were problems at the Mayak nuclear reprocessing facility from the getgo. Less well known than the events of Chernobyl, the Kyshtym … Since the late 70-s the spent nuclear fuel from the VVER-440 reactors of the Kola NPP has been processed to produce new fuel for the RBMK reactors of the Leningrad NPP. NIST Time Capsule Helping to Clean Up a Disaster Inside the Chernobyl ‘Mega Tomb’ It’s been used for everything from bridge construction to paint-stripping aircraft, and NASA once even considered basing an all-terrain lunar rover on it. Medium level waste is discharged into the Karachay Lake from where along with subsurface water it migrates into the same Techa Cascade. Even the Kyshtym cleanup was sold to terrified locals with euphemism and misdirection. The Kyshtym Accident was a chemical explosion in a highly radioactive waste liquid storage tank, which led to a cloud of radioactive material spreading contamination to the north-east of Mayak, forming the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT). Unlike Chernobyl, it has received very little attention. The information in this section is extracted from the DVD "WASTELAND" by Greenworld, Sosnovy Bor Leningrad region. There is no smoke visible from the NPP chimneys. In the history of nuclear disasters, it’s easy to forget that a radioactive explosion back in 1957 near an obscure village with an unpronounceable name in the Ural Mountains was the true original. The frequency of birth defects and complications at birth were up to three times greater than normal. According to research of the Mayak experts in the case of the dam destruction radioactive water will reach the Muslyumovo village in 8 hours. Furthermore, 39 of them occurred during the last 8 years (as of 2009). Russian regulators say the plant stopped its dumps in 2004 – after a lawsuit and criminal charges unseated the plant’s scandal-tarred director. Kutepova, who has long battled Chelyabinsk officialdom on behalf of Mayak’s afflicted, became an irritant the government grew tired of hearing. Of course, it is not the Lake of Geneva, but the water in the river is pure. In 1941 a glue production factory was moved to here from Leningrad. For decades after Mayak was founded to produce plutonium for Soviet atomic bombs, it dumped untreated radioactive waste directly into the nearby Techa River. The Kyshtym Disaster of 1957: The largest nuclear disaster we’ve never heard of Jan 17, 2018 Martin Chalakoski The nuclear-arms race of the Cold War era, particularly when “fought” between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, nearly brought humanity to the brink of disaster. But various investigations by environmental non-profits have cast doubt on that claim ever since. No one knows their future ... Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": There is the highest radiation background in the village since the dam functioned until its closure in 1954. He was kicked out of the country. Whole villages evacuated without giving the residents an explanation. The liquid radioactive waste was discharged directly into the Techa river. Secrets of Chernobyl spill out more than three decades after the nuclear disaster A group of foreign tourists visits the Wormwood Star Memorial in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The strontium 90 flowing through the river, the doctors have concluded, has settled into the population’s bones. The Mayak Production Association was a primary site for the Soviet nuclear program after World W… Photo exhibition on the Mayak disaster 1957, http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/half-life-living-with-effects-of-nuclear-waste, http://www.nuclear-heritage.net/index.php?title=Kyshtym_Disaster&oldid=83553. On September 29, 1957 a liquid waste storage container exploded and released 20 MCi of radioactivity. In 1945, the Soviet Union built the … Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": There is the mill of the merchant Zlokazov behind me. The Kyshtym disaster, which occurred at Mayak in Russia on 29 September 1957, was rated as a level 6 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the third most severe incident after Chernobyl and Fukushima. The authorities should have intervened and stopped the waste discharge. Shortly after this interview the General Prosecuter's Office of the Ural Federal District initiated a criminal case against Vitaliy Sadovnikov, Director General of PO Mayak. Medvedev, an exiled Soviet geneticist, claimed in several articles and books that a "disaster" occurred near Kyshtym in 1957/58. Within 10 hours radioactive cloud spread over the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen regions over 23,000 km². The Soviet government included details about it in a report on Chernobyl that it submitted to the United Nations in 1986 – finally blowing its cover. In many places it exceeds the natural background by 100 times. These measurements are not suitable for to a severe Ural climate. Due to the contamination of the territory the plant was closed. 1). We, children, always managed to find ways in. The 'Kyshtym Accident', which happened on 29 September 1957 at the Mayak Production Association (PA) nuclear complex, located about 10 km to the east of the town of Kyshtym in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian Federation, although rated on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale as one of the most severe nuclear accidents in the world, remained little known in the … In 1957, there was a nuclear disaster in a city called Cheliabinsk-40 in the Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union, the blow came from an underground tank filled with radioactive waste. (About the new houses provided by Rosatom:) The foundation is 15 cm deep and only one spade wide, the wooden walls are 18 cm thick. The Mayak nuclear facility, until recently deleted from all Russian maps, is the size of a small city and has been used to manufacture plutonium for nuclear weapons and reprocess nuclear reactor fuel for over 50 years. Moscow’s accounting of the disaster has by now taken on a shopworn ring: A failed cooling system and an uncontrolled reaction within a stew of uranium and plutonium caused it all to overheat and explode; assertions that scientists plodding through the dim pre-history of the atomic age should be forgiven for not knowing any better. The director general was granted an amnesty which marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian State Duma and it saved him from criminal penalty. Old women were sitting here all day long pasturing geese. The river militia used to patrol and fine us. Because of secrecy in the nuclear establishment it is not clear what exactly happened but estimates are at least 200 people died of “excess” cancer and scores of villages and towns were permanently abandoned due to the sever radioactive contamination. In 1957 a tank of liquid, highly radioactive waste left from reprocessing nuclear fuel, exploded in a region of the Soviet Union called Kyshtym in the Ural Mountains of Siberia. There is one catastrophe, noted by multiple Reddit users, which would be the perfect follow up to Chernobyl: the Kyshtym disaster. In the coming months, Russia’s official television stations began ginning up a panic that she herself might be a spy. An amount of 1 million rubles is appropriated for each house, but its real cost is at least 200,000 rubles less. Moscow suppressed the details of the accident for nearly three decades. A post-war population of mostly women and children were given rags and mops – and no protective gear – to sop up what they were told was the mess from a coal boiler explosion in the village of Kyshtym. A post-war population of mostly women and children were given rags and mops – and no protective gear – to sop up what they were told was the mess from a coal boiler explosion in the village of Kyshtym. The Soviet fake news name stuck. A mid-air collision of two passenger aircraft in the skies over the Soviet Ukrainian city of Dniprodzerzhynsk on August… ... or in the clean-up operation afterwards. In 2006 a new management of Rosatom at last started a resettlement programme of the Muslyumovo village under the pressure from non-governmental organizations. The nuclear disasters that we don’t hear about – The Kyshtym Disaster. - The Colorado Coalition, Nuclear news – last week of September « nuclear-news, Nuclear news Australia for the last week in September | Nuclear Australia, The worst nuclear disaster you’ve never heard of — Beyond Nuclear International « nuclear-news, The worst nuclear disaster you’ve never heard of — Beyond Nuclear International « Antinuclear. The managers of the enterprise knew that any remedial actions would have to be taken under conditions of high radiation but they silently reconciled themselves to possible victims. It was called "river disease". Map of the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster. They decide for themselves whether to purchase or not to purchase. The data is confirmed by expert opinion and also by the research performed by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Until Chernobyl, Mayak was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. 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