The actual accident happened a few kilometers down the road in the closed city of Ozersk. For the last four years the instrumentation systems recorded ever-increasing radiation background in the Techa River. 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. These measurements are not suitable for to a severe Ural climate. They decide for themselves whether to purchase or not to purchase. The frequency of birth defects and complications at birth were up to three times greater than normal. The nuclear disasters that we don’t hear about – The Kyshtym Disaster. It creates an impression that they try to save maximum money on construction. Today Mayak is a nuclear fuel cycle facility on which the whole military and civil nuclear complex of Russia is based. Exposure standards were violated and maximum exposure limits were sufficiently exceeded. According to research of the Mayak experts in the case of the dam destruction radioactive water will reach the Muslyumovo village in 8 hours. In 1967 a strong wind raised the dangerous radioactive silt from the shallow banks of the Karachay Lake. Due to the contamination of the territory the plant was closed. [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. Now the Russian Government is considering plans to import nuclear waste to Mayak from around the world.[2]. 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. Pharit Kurmashev, head of the Muslyumovo administration: Today the most painful problem is regulations on repurchase of housing developed by Rosatom. He has argued that a vast contaminated area exists east of the city of Kyshtym … Residents of the Muslyumovo village have a humiliatingly meager compensation. Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": There was a directive prohibiting the construction on this site because of radon concentration up to 200 Bq per m³. 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). Even the Kyshtym cleanup was sold to terrified locals with euphemism and misdirection. She fled the country for Paris later that year. As a result an area of approximately 1,800 km² was contaminated with radionuclides. They received an annual maximum radiation dose in just one day, over and over again. Nobody knows whether in future they will do it or not. During the clean-up, each person could only afford to spend a maximum of 40 seconds inside or near the facility. 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. After Perestroika everything is allowed: they grow wheat and cut hay. The Kyshtym disaster is the second largest devastation after Chernobyl. 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. After World War II, the Soviets began the construction of multiple nuclear plants in the USSR with little concern to safety. Miscarriages continue to climb, and children carried to term are born with malformed limbs and organs. The director general was granted an amnesty which marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian State Duma and it saved him from criminal penalty. This article was first published by Bellona on October 2, 2017 and is republished with kind permission of the author. 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. The population of Muslyumovo Eastern Urals State Reserve (russ. No one is allowed to live inside it, and workers are bused in at all hours of the day and night to work at the plant. 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. 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. There is a similar half-ruined building nearby which housed on orphanage until the 1990-s. The Kyshtym disaster is shrouded in mystery and muddled by years of Soviet suppression of information. It is located on both banks of the Techa River. Many of the remaining adults suffer from lymph node swelling so severe that their words are unintelligible to visiting physicians. Because of the intense secrecy surrounding Mayak, it is difficult to estimate the death toll of Kyshtym. He has been a journalist for a number of major newspapers and media companies worldwide such as The Moscow Times, the International Herald Tribune, BBC, The Nation and The Amsterdam Volkskraant. For decades after Mayak was founded to produce plutonium for Soviet atomic bombs, it dumped untreated radioactive waste directly into the nearby Techa River. We, children, always managed to find ways in. : VUGZ), established 1966 after the Kyshtym accident. 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). Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": The barbed wire worked only for cattle. But various investigations by environmental non-profits have cast doubt on that claim ever since. In 1953, doctors examined 587 of 28,000 exposed people and found that 200 had clear cases of radiation poisoning. It might be one of the worst offenders in polluting the environment. A column of radioactive dust and smoke rocketed skyward for a half mile, which sent down a sooty fallout. Underneath here it shows up to 4,500 micro R/h. Out of sight, out of mind. Industrial equipment was seemingly much more valuable than health and the personnel lives and the dangerous impact of nuclear facilities on the environment and the residential population was not taken into consideration at all. The Mayak Production Association was a primary site for the Soviet nuclear program after World W… There are 7 graveyards for only the four and a half thousand residents. There is no smoke visible from the NPP chimneys. Later, the circumstances by which an official version of the accident emerged were almost accidental. Even the Kyshtym cleanup was sold to terrified locals with euphemism and misdirection. People in the town were issued cards identifying them as residents of an irradiated zone, entitling them to certain lusterless perks. Map of the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster. 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. Gosman Kabirov, NGO "TECHA": We are in the Hudoberdinsk village of the Sargoyashskiy region in the Cheyabinsk oblast located 5 km from the Mayak facility in a downwind area. 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. On September 29, 1957 a liquid waste storage container exploded and released 20 MCi of radioactivity. But what could they do to us? According to expert research just the tritium concentration alone in the Techa River near the village Muslyumovo exceeds the permissible limit by 30 times. Rosatom is just a department, it's an enterprise. 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. Media reporting of the nuclear accident near Kyshtym first appeared in 1958. 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. Later the orphanage was closed and the former pupils dispersed all over the country. In 1957, the cooling system for a large nuclear waste tank at plant failed. The liquid radioactive waste was discharged directly into the Techa river. 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. Of course, it is not the Lake of Geneva, but the water in the river is pure. Al White: The Story of a Marine Grunt in the First Battle of Khe Sanh (April 1967) - Duration: 1:19:39. Furthermore, 39 of them occurred during the last 8 years (as of 2009). (...) However, a price far too dear is paid for the wellbeing of the locals. 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. The Kola NPP is located on the peninsula on the bank of Lake Imandra. Charles Digges holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Russian literature from Harvard University. (Photo: wecf.eu). A lot of accident clean-up workers acquired lethal radiation doses of more than 100 Roentgen. The Soviet fake news name stuck. Non-workers, like children and pensioners, receive $2 per month, working residents receive $6 per month. 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. 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. Currently, there’s a 20 km (12 mile) exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi. The first nuclear reactor and radiochemical plant were built here in mid-40s of the 20th century. When the time for the move came, bureaucrats took issue with their paperwork or their medical records, dooming them over clerical errors. It was called "river disease". A forcible argument designed to convince the residents of Muslyumovo to resettle to a new place is that they will retain all privileges. 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. It is impossible to act only on the basis of these regulations while it is not governed by the law. 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. In 1957 Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster, which at the time was the worst nuclear accident in history. 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. ... or in the clean-up operation afterwards. 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. (Photo: Sloth/Wikimedia Commons). 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. People resent the situation. Actually, victims were expected. 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. They could only take away our fishing rods. But what it has come to connote in the years since has only grown in danger and magnitude. 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. None of us were ever supposed to know anything about it, and if not for a series of untimely revelations, we probably still wouldn’t. After the accident 248 villages were resettled from the Techa river. Medvedev, an exiled Soviet geneticist, claimed in several articles and books that a "disaster" occurred near Kyshtym in 1957/58. These water storage basins contain millions of curies. 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". The "Kyshtym Disaster" is the third biggest nuclear disaster in history, according to the International Nuclear Event Scale, behind the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster… After the accident 248 villages were resettled from the Techa river. Spent nuclear fuel is still transported to Mayak and radionuclides are continuously released into water bodies of the Techa cascade. Whatever radioactive contamination that flowed was deposited here. (...) A sadly famous village of Muslyumovo. 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. Specialists warn that the destruction of the Techa dams may lead to environmental disaster and it is fearful to imagine its devastating effect. But even getting those benefits through the local courts turned out to be a dangerous proposition. Medium level waste is discharged into the Karachay Lake from where along with subsurface water it migrates into the same Techa Cascade. In many places it exceeds the natural background by 100 times. 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. (Wikimedia Commons: Jan Rieke) It’s called the Kyshtym disaster and before the mid 1980s the town’s official location wasn’t even designated on a map. It is named for Kyshtym, the nearest known town that was marked on maps. And during Perestroika any patrolling stopped. (Courtesy of Alisa Nikulina/Ecodefense). Exposure standards were violated and maximum exposure limits were sufficiently exceeded. There is one catastrophe, noted by multiple Reddit users, which would be the perfect follow up to Chernobyl: the Kyshtym disaster. The people who leave Muslyumovo loose their rights for compensation, it is as if the health ruined by radiation could be restored at once. This is usually referred as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace or the "Kyshtym disaster". An amount of 1 million rubles is appropriated for each house, but its real cost is at least 200,000 rubles less. 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. 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. The Soviet government didn't acknowledge the East-Ural Radioactive Trace for 32 years. In the coming months, Russia’s official television stations began ginning up a panic that she herself might be a spy. The barbed wire remained only in kitchen gardens. Many of them died as a consequence of the exposure or later contracted cancer. The only other nuclear accident to be rated a 7, the highest on the international scale, was Chernobyl in 1986 in Ukraine. 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 children freely bathed in the river, fished and ate the fish. Kutepova, who has long battled Chelyabinsk officialdom on behalf of Mayak’s afflicted, became an irritant the government grew tired of hearing. It seems as if you could start living here happily, however, speaking kindly, a very strange place was chosen for this new village. The existing reality shows that transportation of spent nuclear fuel and fuel assemblies from submarines to another region is just a relocation of problems and it can not be a proper solution. The data is confirmed by expert opinion and also by the research performed by the Russian Academy of Sciences. A mid-air collision of two passenger aircraft in the skies over the Soviet Ukrainian city of Dniprodzerzhynsk on August… 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. The disaster occurred at the Mayak plant, a nuclear weapons production site and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The alleged Kyshtym disaster has been an intriguing intelligence puzzle for almost 25 years. 1). 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. Its forgiveness depends on it. However, it only confirms that they remain to live on the same contaminated territory near the radioactive river. The Kyshtym nuclear disaster was a Level 6 Disaster on the International Nuclear Event scale that occurred in Ozyork, Chelyabink in the Soviet Union. Under these conditions the so-called nuclear shield was created. Within 10 hours radioactive cloud spread over the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen regions over 23,000 km². Pingback: The worst Nuclear Accident you never heard of. 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