Thirty years before the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, another accident occurred at a Soviet nuclear plant that was covered up by authorities for more than three decades.
The accident occurred at Mayak, one of Russia’s largest nuclear facilities, located near the town of Kyshtym in the Chelyabinsk district in the South Ural Mountains, according to Amusing Planet. The facility was built shortly after the end of World War II, serving as the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear program. Its primary purpose was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The Mayak plant was hastily built in 1948. Mayak housed Russia’s largest nuclear reactor. The plant covered more than 90 square kilometers, surrounded by a 250 square kilometer exclusion zone. The facility was as large as a city, but its existence was kept secret.
Mayak was a dangerous facility from the start. Authorities paid little attention to worker safety or waste disposal responsibilities. Radioactive waste from spent nuclear material was stored underground, but when the site ran out of space, rather than shutting down production until new storage could be built, the highly radioactive material was dumped directly into the slow-flowing Techa River. More than 100,000 people living downstream used this water source. In addition, the reactors were cooled by water from Lake Kyzyltash in an open-loop cooling system. The contaminated water was discharged directly into the lake. Within a few years, the countryside and all the water around Mayak was heavily polluted.
Inadequate safety regulations led to several fatal accidents. One of the first recorded accidents occurred in 1953, but went unnoticed until a worker suffered severe radiation poisoning and had both legs amputated. The most notable accident, the “Kyshtym disaster,” occurred on September 29, 1957, when a cooling system malfunctioned in one of the waste storage tanks and was not detected in time. The tank exploded with the force of about 70 tons of TNT. Although there were no direct casualties from the explosion, the force of the impact sent a column of radioactive dust flying a kilometer into the sky.
That afternoon, residents of the Chelyabinsk region saw unusual colors in the sky. Local newspapers speculated that it was an aurora borealis. Because of Mayak’s secrecy, the villagers were not informed about the accident. Over the next few days, the radioactive cloud drifted northeast for hundreds of kilometers, contaminating an area of 15,000 to 20,000 square kilometers and threatening the lives of 270,000 people. The evacuation of the nearest settlement began a week later. People were not told what was happening, just told to pack up and leave. Only about 10,000 people were evacuated over the course of two years.
News of the accident began to appear in the Western press in 1958. In 1959, it appeared again in an Austrian newspaper. However, Soviet officials denied the accident. The incident only became clear in 1976 when Zhores Medvedev, an exiled Soviet biologist, published a series of articles about the disaster in the New Scientist website. Medvedev’s information was corroborated by Lev Tumerman, a Soviet scientist who had traveled through the contaminated area in 1960.
The true number of casualties from the Kyshtym disaster is difficult to assess, partly due to the secrecy and partly because the Mayak facility contaminated the area by dumping large amounts of radioactive waste into the environment over many years. According to Medvedev, the Kyshtym disaster was worse than Chernobyl because it released a larger amount of long-term radioactive strontium-90 than Chernobyl. Cancer, birth defects, and other serious health problems are still prevalent among residents of the region today.