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. Many of the remaining adults suffer from lymph node swelling so severe that their words are unintelligible to visiting physicians. Moscow suppressed the details of the accident for nearly three decades. It creates an impression that they try to save maximum money on construction. Until 1961 the directive of the sanitary and epidemiological service was effective and during that time it was prohibited to keep cattle, to pick up mushrooms and berries, and to keep gardens and farms. In 1961 the Techa River banks were fenced with barbed wire. The population of Muslyumovo Eastern Urals State Reserve (russ. In 2015, the Ministry of Justice declared her legal aide group, Planeta Nadezh, a foreign agent. 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. The government uses the poverty of the aggrieved village to tie the people to the contaminated land. Is it up to the task? 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. : VUGZ), established 1966 after the Kyshtym accident. Unlike Chernobyl, it has received very little attention. Later the orphanage was closed and the former pupils dispersed all over the country. It was called "river disease". This exact place has been chosen for the construction of the Muslyumovo new quarter. After World War II, the Soviets began the construction of multiple nuclear plants in the USSR with little concern to safety. (Wikimedia Commons: Jan Rieke) 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. This is usually referred as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace or the "Kyshtym disaster". Pingback: The worst Nuclear Accident you never heard of. 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). There is a similar half-ruined building nearby which housed on orphanage until the 1990-s. Others decided what Rosatom was offering was a raw deal. In 1957 Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster, which at the time was the worst nuclear accident in history. 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. The Kola NPP is located on the peninsula on the bank of Lake Imandra. Even in the shadow of these unsettling facts, it falls to Mayak to digest much of the gristle left by the Soviet nuclear legacy. The alleged Kyshtym disaster has been an intriguing intelligence puzzle for almost 25 years. 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. 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. After the Kyshtym disaster in 1957 the Karachay Lake on the territory of the Mayak facility was used for open-air "storage" of liquid radioactive wastes. We, children, always managed to find ways in. Underneath here it shows up to 4,500 micro R/h. The experts counted that 250 accidents had happened during 50 years of the Mayak activity. Map of the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster. After the accident 248 villages were resettled from the Techa river. Kyshtym Disaster - September 29, 1957. On September 29, 1957 a liquid waste storage container exploded and released 20 MCi of radioactivity. 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. 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 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. The director general was granted an amnesty which marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian State Duma and it saved him from criminal penalty. In many places it exceeds the natural background by 100 times. According to expert research just the tritium concentration alone in the Techa River near the village Muslyumovo exceeds the permissible limit by 30 times. There are 7 graveyards for only the four and a half thousand residents. Kyshtym disaster. Medium level waste is discharged into the Karachay Lake from where along with subsurface water it migrates into the same Techa Cascade. The barbed wire remained only in kitchen gardens. It affected the same territory of the Eastern-Ural Radioactive Trace and again the residents of the local settlements became victims of radioactive exposure. The Soviet fake news name stuck. The blast issued into the earth’s atmosphere 20 million curies. This accident resulted in a regional disaster and a radioactive cloud that contaminated more than 300 square miles… many people received very high radiation exposures, some suffered acute radiation syndrome. 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. This article was first published by Bellona on October 2, 2017 and is republished with kind permission of the author. Nobody knows whether in future they will do it or not. 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. Mayak as seen from across the Techa River, which it has contaminated for decades. Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, meanwhile refuses to respond to specific charges of ongoing dumps, instead issuing general statements that Mayak operates within “environmental guidelines” and that the Techa complies with “sanitary standards.” Indeed, because the river is already so contaminated, establishing further contamination might seem merely academic. Miscarriages continue to climb, and children carried to term are born with malformed limbs and organs. It is named for Kyshtym, the nearest known town that was marked on maps. 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. But what could they do to us? 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. Today Mayak is a nuclear fuel cycle facility on which the whole military and civil nuclear complex of Russia is based. The history of radiation accidents in the former Soviet Union originated in the Chelyabinsk region at the plutonium facility No 817 which is known today as the industrial enterprise "Mayak". Kyshtym disaster There were problems at the Mayak nuclear reprocessing facility from the getgo. Any nuclear power plant produces spent nuclear fuel and radioactive wastes which are extremely dangerous to all living things. Unfortunately, people continue living on the river bank and pasture cattle in the overflow land. Even the Kyshtym cleanup was sold to terrified locals with euphemism and misdirection. When the time for the move came, bureaucrats took issue with their paperwork or their medical records, dooming them over clerical errors. Exposure standards were violated and maximum exposure limits were sufficiently exceeded. Conscript soldiers and even schoolchildren were involved in the decontamination effort of the accident area. (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 actual accident happened a few kilometers down the road in the closed city of Ozersk. Nadezhda Kutepova speaks in Freiburg, Germany in 2012. Specifically, the facility produced plutonium for Soviet nuclear weapons from 19… … 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. They received an annual maximum radiation dose in just one day, over and over again. Later, the circumstances by which an official version of the accident emerged were almost accidental. The high accident risk at nuclear facilities at that time was not so much due to complication and novelty of the process as to all pervasive urgency and disregard of human lives. 400 million m³ of radioactive waters and bottom sediments will spread over the villages downstream the Techa River and migrate into the open hydrographic network of Tobol-Irtish-Ob and the Arctic Ocean. 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 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. Non-workers, like children and pensioners, receive $2 per month, working residents receive $6 per month. The waste that was dumped in the Techa River from 1949 to 1956 still claims victims in … The liquid radioactive waste was discharged directly into the Techa river. However, it only confirms that they remain to live on the same contaminated territory near the radioactive river. House in Muslyumovo. Spent nuclear fuel is still transported to Mayak and radionuclides are continuously released into water bodies of the Techa cascade. Spent nuclear waste generates heat, the tank cooling systems failed and containment of the material also failed leading to a non-nuclear explosion on the order of 70-100 tons of TNT. The total number of officially registered casualties is more than 500,000 people not including the military personnel of the construction battalions. A column of radioactive dust and smoke rocketed skyward for a half mile, which sent down a sooty fallout. Its forgiveness depends on it. A large number of people were involved in the accident mitigation process acting manually without even elementary means of protection. The reception was not kind. 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. 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. Stock up on tins of beans, round up your loved ones and head for the nearest fallout shelter… because things are about to get nuclear From atomic explosions occurring at the height of the Cold War to alleged North Korean nuclear tests – get ready for 10 Shocking Nuclear Disasters That Were Covered Up. Regardless of where they live, however, they continue to be visited by doctors who keep detailed records of their decay. 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. The Kyshtym disaster is the second largest devastation after Chernobyl. If the country is to grant this once-uncharted territory any absolution, Rosatom owes it complete transparency in exchange. The information in this section is extracted from the DVD "WASTELAND" by Greenworld, Sosnovy Bor Leningrad region. 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. And during Perestroika any patrolling stopped. The Mayak Production Association was a primary site for the Soviet nuclear program after World W… But various investigations by environmental non-profits have cast doubt on that claim ever since. As a result an area of approximately 1,800 km² was contaminated with radionuclides. Because of the intense secrecy surrounding Mayak, it is difficult to estimate the death toll of Kyshtym. A lot of accident clean-up workers acquired lethal radiation doses of more than 100 Roentgen. Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": There is the mill of the merchant Zlokazov behind me. Rosatom is just a department, it's an enterprise. The Soviet government didn't acknowledge the East-Ural Radioactive Trace for 32 years. For decades after Mayak was founded to produce plutonium for Soviet atomic bombs, it dumped untreated radioactive waste directly into the nearby Techa River. Old women were sitting here all day long pasturing geese. 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 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. 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 strontium 90 flowing through the river, the doctors have concluded, has settled into the population’s bones. They all are responsible because Mayak is a highly polluting industry. Russian regulators say the plant stopped its dumps in 2004 – after a lawsuit and criminal charges unseated the plant’s scandal-tarred director. During the clean-up, each person could only afford to spend a maximum of 40 seconds inside or near the facility. These water storage basins contain millions of curies. Now the Russian Government is considering plans to import nuclear waste to Mayak from around the world.[2]. But his images do not forget the numerous incidents which took place nearby, including the 1957 Kyshtym disaster which exposed locals to up … 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. Thousands have died and many more live with its debilitating legacy: sickness, sterility and poverty. In 1945, the Soviet Union built the … Many residents of Muslyumovo and other contaminated villages haven’t gone anywhere at all. After the accident 248 villages were resettled from the Techa river. The only other nuclear accident to be rated a 7, the highest on the international scale, was Chernobyl in 1986 in Ukraine. Furthermore, 39 of them occurred during the last 8 years (as of 2009). Only the diseased winds blowing north in the aftermath gave any indication it was there. The first nuclear reactor and radiochemical plant were built here in mid-40s of the 20th century. (Photo: Sloth/Wikimedia Commons). Whatever radioactive contamination that flowed was deposited here. Vitaliy Sadovnikov, Director General of PO Mayak until 2006: At the moment there is no discharge of waste into the Techa River. Currently, there’s a 20 km (12 mile) exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi. 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. Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": The barbed wire worked only for cattle. Charles Digges holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Russian literature from Harvard University. [1], 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. Due to the contamination of the territory the plant was closed. People in the town were issued cards identifying them as residents of an irradiated zone, entitling them to certain lusterless perks. The people in Muslyumovo suffered from strange diseases, died mysterious deaths. People resent the situation. People were warned that it was prohibited to use the water from the river and they had to tend their cattle in another place. 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