Get a round-up of all our stories published during the past week delivered to your email every Saturday. Instances of cancer, birth defects and other major health problems remain high among inhabitants of the region to this day . This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. People were not told what happened, just asked to pack their bags and leave. The Soviets had a lot of catching up to do. The villagers were not told of the research, and were kept in the dark as to why so many of them were sick. Even then, one pediatrician estimated that 90% of the village’s children suffered from genetic abnormalities, and only 7% were considered healthy. They worked without protection from radiation, and then they went back to their homes. The safety features of the plant have been vastly upgraded from those of Soviet era. K-19 was one of what the Soviets called their Project 658-class submarines, … The Kyshtym disaster was a disastrous explosion of buried nuclear waste from a plutonium-processing plant near Kyshtym, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia (then in U.S.S.R.), on September 29, 1957. It wasn’t until the breakup of the Soviet Union, that the true scale of the accident emerged. And Soviet suppression of information and documentation makes current research on the incident extremely difficult. On both sides of the road, as far as one could see, the land was 'dead’: no villages, no towns, only the chimneys of destroyed houses, no cultivated fields or pastures, no herds, no people...nothing. Like its two younger brothers, the Kyshtym explosion was born in secrecy and nurtured by naiveté. Radioactive waste produced from spent nuclear fuel was stored underground, but when the site ran out of space, instead of halting production until new underground facilities could be built, the highly radioactive material was dumped into the slow-moving Techa River, which was used by more than a hundred thousand people living in communities downriver. Soviet scientists themselves thought that atomic weapons were unfeasible and aside from carrying academic merit, nuclear research had no practical applications. There were rumors, but no concrete details until 1976, when biologist and Soviet dissident Dr. Zhores Medvedev published an account of the disaster in New Scientist. The Kyshtym disaster. It only seems that the world is moving away from the biggest accident of the nuclear age. The most notable accident, the so-called “Kyshtym disaster” happened on 29 September 1957, when the cooling system of one of the waste storage tanks failed but went undetected until the tank exploded with a force equivalent to about 70 tons of TNT. The local press speculated about polar lights appearing exceptionally far south. Soviet leaders did not have much faith in nuclear energy. One of the first recorded accident occurred in 1953, but went unnoticed until a worker developed severe radiation sickness requiring amputation of both legs. Photo credit: Ecodefense/Wikimedia. Solid waste was dumped on-site, and smoke was released into the air with no regard to its contents. 1). Lavrentiy Beria, a Marshal of the Soviet Union, the chief of secret police, and the head of the nuclear program, forced over 40,000 Gulag prisoners and POWs to build the plant and the closed city of Ozersk on the outskirts, where the staff and their families would live. A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/May . The Kyshtym disaster was a radiation contamination disaster on 29 September 1957, in Mayak, a nuclear plant in Russia (then a part of the Soviet Union).It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima disaster are the only accidents listed as more serious than this one). Horrific History Podcast’s co-hosts, Eric Slyter and Curtis Bender discuss radiation poisoning in history, beginning with late Renaissance alchemy research in 1603 and continuing on to address more modern history including the Manhattan Project, Kyshtym Disaster, Chernobyl, and … There is one catastrophe, noted by multiple Reddit users, which would be the perfect follow up to Chernobyl: the Kyshtym disaster. 2010 Jan Rieke Click here to view Wikimedia source. The Mayak plant stopped processing weapons-grade plutonium in 1987, but still operates in Chelyabinsk, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel shipped in from all over Russia. Tumerman, who later emigrated to Israel, wrote letters to the Jerusalem Post, and to The London Times stating: About 100 kilometres from Sverdlovsk, a highway sign warned drivers not to stop for the next 20 or 30 kilometres and to drive through at maximum speed. Those who remained were pressed into service to clean up the debris by destroying contaminated crops and livestock. Search for: Kyshtym accident Chernobyl History > Kyshtym accident. The creation of the Mayak nuclear plant dates back to the period immediately after end of the Second World War. Only Georgy Flyorov, a Russian physicist, noticed the complete lack of papers on nuclear science from German, British, and American scientists, and knew that something was up. But after Fukushima and Chernobyl, the third biggest nuclear disaster is called Kyshtym. These reports were systematically denied by Soviet Government officials. Until Chernobyl, Mayak was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. In the village of Korabolka, farmers thought a global nuclear war had begun when they saw the explosion. Mayak was to be Russia’s largest nuclear reactor. Vague reports about a possible catastrophic accident began appearing in the Western press as early as 1958. It was in the town of Chelyabinsk-65 (which was renamed Ozyorsk in the early 1990s); this town, according to the Soviets, did not exist. Time gives a person one more . The picture became somewhat clear only in 1976, when Zhores Medvedev, an exiled Soviet biologist living in England published a series of articles about the disaster in New Scientist. Other villages around the region report elevated rates of cancer, genetic abnormalities, and other illness. The facility was built shortly after the end of the Second World War to serve as the location for the emerging Soviet nuclear program. [1] The Accident Mayak is the name of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the Soviet Union. Protective gear for the workers was minimal, and most of it was believed to have been done with forced labor from local prisoners. 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.. © Amusing Planet, 2021. Only about 10,000 people were evacuated, over a period of two years. Thirty years before the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, in what became one of the most devastating nuclear accidents in history, there was another major mishap at yet another Soviet nuclear power plant. Kyshtym disaster. As a result, the Soviet Union quickly established the Mayak plutonium between 1945 and 1948. {{posts[0].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, {{posts[1].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, {{posts[2].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, {{posts[3].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, Bolton Strid: A Stream That Swallows People, Why The Soviet Union Exchanged Warships For Pepsi, Wrangel Island: The Island of Polar Bears And Wooly Mammoth, Loughareema–The Lake That Randomly Vanishes, Hotel Belvédère: The Iconic Swiss Hotel on The Edge of The Rhone Glacier. The Mayak nuclear accident had a magnitude of level 6 on the INES scale. A waste tank exploded, sending a cloud of radioactive material into the air, which fell over an area of 20,000 square kilometers. It was hushed up by officials for more than three decades. Then there was the large scale dumping of nuclear waste into the Techa river which several villages used for fishing and drinking water. When you think of nuclear disasters, you think of the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine and the Fukushima plant in Japan, and maybe Three Mile Island. The future town of Ozyorsk grew up around the facility. The cancer rate for Korabolka, now called Tatarskaya Korabolka, is five times that of an uncontaminated village. Never heard of it? According to Zhores Medvedev, the Kyshtym disaster was worse than Chernobyl because of the release of a larger quantity of the long-term radioactive substance Strontium-90 than Chernobyl. Even the name is a misdirection, because it didn’t happen in Kyshtym. Because of the intense secrecy surrounding Mayak, it is difficult to estimate the death toll of Kyshtym. 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. Flyorov urged Stalin to restart the Soviet nuclear program. Unlike Chernobyl, it has received very little attention. Ecodefense, Heinrich Boell Stiftung Russia, Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina via, Carl Anderson, US Army Corps of Engineers via. Though 270,000 people lived there, only 11,000 were evacuated (and that took up to two years to accomplish). That’s because it happened in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, deep in the eastern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. A forbidding sign near the closed city of Ozyorsk. From the very beginning, Mayak was a dangerous facility. It was the first of dozens of incidents at the facility that continued for decades. The area around the reactor site has been called the most contaminated place on earth. Chernobyl: another chance. Never heard of it? Kyshtym Disaster and the Mayak plutonium plant, Russia. Nuclear waste tank explosion in 1957 and decades-long radioactive contamination made Mayak one of the most radioactive places on Earth. The Mayak Production Association runs plutonium facility No 817 in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. That afternoon, residents of the Chelyabinsk district noticed unusual colors in the sky. It took more than 30 years for the Soviets to admit the incident took place and the … Over the next few days, the radioactive cloud drifted northeast for hundreds of miles contaminating an area of roughly 15,000 to 20,000 square kilometers and putting at risk the lives of 270,000 people. Four other workers were affected as well. In personal correspondence with researchers of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Tumerman further stated: What I saw personally, was a large area in the vicinity of Sverdlovsk (no less than 100 to 150 sq. On September 29, 1957, one of the Mayak plant’s cooling systems failed. Moscow suppressed the details of the accident for nearly three decades. We will probably never know how many people died from nuclear contamination, for several reasons, and it's also difficult to pinpoint the extent of the contamination a half-century ago. km and probably much more), in which any normal human activity was forbidden, people were evacuated and villages razed, evidently to prevent inhabitants from returning, there was no agriculture or live-stock raising, fishing and hunting were forbidden. The blast measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which places the Kyshtym disaster behind Chernobyl and Fukushima (both Level … The event occurred in Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, a closed city built around the Mayak plant. 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 In September 1957, Ozyorsk, Russia was a closed city, built around the Mayak plant which produced plutonium… The Kyshtym disaster is not the only reason that Chelyabinsk is so contaminated. A fact from Kyshtym disaster appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? Soviet Submarine K-19. … The Soviet reaction was a puzzle to many of the peasants who lived near the Mayak plant. Map of the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster. Satellite image of the Mayak nuclear facility. No one noticed until it was too late. The facility was built in a hurry just after World War II in order to catch up with the Americans in nuclear weapons technology. You should know: Although rumors of a nuclear accident in Russia circulated in the West for years, the Soviet cover-up was so effective that the Kyshtym disaster was only officially admitted in 1990. Specifically, the facility produced plutonium for Soviet nuclear weapons from 19… Because of the secrecy surrounding Mayak, these villagers were not informed about the accident. At the time, relatively little was known about the effects of radioactive materials on human workers, and even the dangers that were known were disregarded by Soviet authorities in their haste to develop nuclear weapons. The Kyshtym disaster was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site in Russia for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant of the Soviet Union. Map of the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster. The waste that was dumped in the Techa River from 1949 to 1956 still claims victims in the villages downriver. The Kyshtym disaster 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 in the Soviet Union. Evacuation of the nearest settlement began one week later. Photo credit: Ecodefense/Wikimedia. The Soviet nuclear program started sluggishly. Currently, it is the third-worst nuclear disaster in history. A Copenhagen newspaper broke the story first which alleged it was a factor in the Soviet decision to suspend nuclear tests unilaterally in March of that year. 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 was built in 1948 in great haste. Map of the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster. That’s because it happened in 1957, at … As late as 1982, scientists in the West displayed doubt that contamination in the area was due to a nuclear accident instead of industrial pollution. Its primary purpose was to produce plutonium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Within a few years, the countryside and all water bodies around Mayak became heavily contaminated. While there was no immediate casualties from the explosion, the violence sent a plume of radioactive fallout soaring into the sky to an altitude of one kilometer. Kyshtym disaster - Wikipedia The Kyshtym disaster was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site in Russia for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant of the Soviet Union. First there was a nuclear waste tank explosion that contaminated a huge swath of land. Almost 40 percent as much radioactivity was released at Kyshtym than was flung into the air over Pripyat during the Chernobyl disaster 20 years later. Furthermore, the reactors were cooled using water from Lake Kyzyltash in an open-cycle cooling system where the contaminated water was discharged directly back into the lake. Consequently, most of the research done on the subject was unclassified and published under public domain in academic journals for anyone to read. In 1957 Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster, one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. Soviet officials emphasized that the Kyshtym accident released only a small fraction of the total amount of radiation released by the accident at Chernobyl. The plant covers over 90 square kilometers, and is surrounded by an exclusion zone of 250 square kilometers. The occasion was the 51st anniversary of what came to be called the Kyshtym disaster – a sort of dry run and unheeded warning within Russia’s nuclear industry for the Chernobyl disaster 29 years later – when a waste storage unit at the Mayak Chemical Combine exploded and spewed radioactivity over 20,000 square kilometers. Kyshtym is a small town in Russia near the southern Ural Mountains, about ninety kilometers from Chelyabinsk. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripiat, in northern Soviet Ukraine, near … In … The villagers who were affected by the disaster and the long-term industrial pollution are still fighting for relocation and compensation. The remaining half of the village were ethnic Tatars, who were left in place. The true number of fatalities of the Kyshtym disaster is difficult to assess, partly because of the secrecy and partly because the Mayak facility had already contaminated the area by routinely releasing dangerous quantities of radioactive waste into the environment for many years. 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. Medvedev's allegations were corroborated by an account by Lev Tumerman, a Soviet scientist who in 1960 traveled through the alleged contaminated area. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event … Information came out in small pieces until the fall of the Soviet Union. The plant, which included six reactors, processed nuclear materials to develop weapons-grade plutonium. Over a period of 45 years more than 500,000 people were exposed to radiation, many of them at levels 20 times greater than the victims of Chernobyl. Kyshtym Disaster - Biggest Nuclear Disaster Before Chernobyl The Soviets disclosed details to no one, not even the people affected. The event occurred in Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, a closed city built around the Mayak plant. Chernobyl disaster . Image credit: Goran tek-en/Wikimedia. Fukushima Vs. Chernobyl: Still Not Equal Though Fukushima and Chernobyl are both level 7 nuclear accidents, the consequences in Japan to date are much less severe. Although the existence of a vast contaminated area was confirmed by a report prepared by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, no concrete evidence was found that the contamination was caused by a nuclear accident. In reality it was more than just on incident. The Western press knew very little about the event. In the absence of verifiable information, many doubted Medvedev’s account. But after Fukushima and Chernobyl, the third biggest nuclear disaster is called Kyshtym. Even today, Russia doesn't welcome challenges to its official version of the story. During the Soviet era, its location was a secret to anyone who didn't work there. 1. According to Zhores Medvedev, the Kyshtym disaster was worse than Chernobyl because of the release of a larger quantity of the long-term radioactive substance Strontium-90 than Chernobyl. Kyshtym is located near the Mayak Production Association, then known as Chelyabinsk 40 which produced plutonium for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons starting in 1948 as a result of World War II. All Rights Reserved. Chernobyl (Ukraine) Source: Wikipedia The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred between April 25 and 26, 1986 in the nuclear reactor No. Russia's nuclear accident that was worse than Chernobyl. The current level of danger from radiation at the plant is in dispute. column on 1 May 2009, and was viewed approximately 7,400 times (check views). Radioactive waste was disposed of by dumping it into the Techa River. Little thought was given to worker’s safety or to the responsible disposal of waste materials. It was only in 1992, when Soviet records were declassified, that the nature of the Muslumovo experiment was uncovered. An evacuation was planned, but only ethnic Russians were relocated. The Kyshtym nuclear energy complex lies approximately 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym in the eastern foothills of the south-central Ural Mountains and on the south shore of Lake Kyzyltash (see Fig. The Kyshtym accident was a nuclear accident that took place on September 29, 1957 in Mayak. The accident took place at Mayak, one of Russia’s biggest nuclear facilities, located near the town of Kyshtym in the Chelyabinsk district in the Southern Ural mountains. Within a few days, 300 of the village’s 5000 residents died of radiation poisoning. Instances of cancer, birth defects and other major health problems remain high among inhabitants of the region to this day. However, due to a lack of personnel with adequate expertise in nuclear physics, various safety concerns existed since the … In the more than 50 years since, many villagers are convinced they were left as an experiment. The Kyshtym Disaster was an accident in the world's largest nuclear complex Mayak in Russia and is today one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the world. Continue Reading. It was known as Chelyabinsk-40 after the postal code, and the nearby community was named Chelyabinsk-65. It was big enough to be a city, but Mayak and Ozersk was nowhere to be found on Soviet public maps. The great leader had shut it down and sent his scientists to work in the metallurgy and mining industry instead. Kyshtym disaster, explosion of buried nuclear waste from a plutonium-processing plant near Kyshtym, Chelyabinsk oblast, Russia (then in the U.S.S.R.), on September 29, 1957.Until 1989 the Soviet government refused to acknowledge that the event had occurred, even though about 9,000 square miles (23,000 square km) of land were contaminated, more than 10,000 people were evacuated, and … The plant was dangerous from the beginning. It was only when the Soviet leaders saw the tremendous power of nuclear weapons demonstrated during the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did they realize how seriously behind were they in the nuclear arms race. Less well known than the events of Chernobyl, the Kyshtym … In Muslumovo, those who weren’t evacuated in the 1950s and '60s were left in place and were tended to by national radiation experts who were studying the subjects of “a natural experiment” to glean information on the effects of nuclear war on humans. Improper safety protocols resulted in several fatal accidents. These reports were, however, in the eyes of the scientific community nothing more than hearsay. Given that the United States had made significant advancements in the research and production of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union felt the need to invest in a similar program. Another video on a nuclear disaster: fhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5wZoswSNwcHelp the Channel Grow Like, Comment & Subscribe! One year later in 1959, another account appeared in an Austrian newspaper. It ranks behind the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disasters (both level 7 according … Its existence and location was kept a secret. Cows and a radiation danger warning sign at the river Techa. [Deep in the Cold War, the Soviet Union suffered a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl – a catastrophic explosion that affected thousands, though many fewer died. 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