Dark Secrets: The World’s Third Worst Nuclear Accident

The Mayak nuclear plant is still one of the dark secrets of the cold war. On September 29, 1957 not far from the town called Chelyabinsk-65, the third biggest nuclear disaster happened — known as the “Kyshtym Disaster.” When we think of nuclear disasters, we think of Chernobyl and Fukushima, maybe even Three Mile Island. However, at the height of the Cold War, deep in the eastern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union, a disaster occurred that is so frightening and horrifying that it’s almost beyond belief.

The secret

Yet even though it was the worst nuclear accident at the time, the Soviets disclosed details to no-one, not even the people who it affected. Even the name “Kyshtym Disaster” is a misdirection, as it happened in the town of Chelyabinsk-65 (renamed Ozyorsk in the early 1990s). This town, however, according to the Soviets, never existed.

The Mayak nuclear plant was the Soviet Union’s key nuclear complex, with a massive set of plutonium production reactors (for nuclear weapons), fuel production facilities, and reprocessing and waste storage buildings. It was regarded as Russia’s most important nuclear weapons factory.

Before the event

In their long decades of anonymity, the engineers at the site spent most of their time having nuclear meltdowns and dumping radioactive waste into the river. Between 1948 and 1956 radioactive waste was poured straight into the Techa River ultimately flowing into the Ob River, which was the main source of drinking water for many villages.

The diluted waste was a cocktail of radioactive elements, that included long-lived fission products like Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 — each with a half-life of around thirty years. The actions exposed 124,000 people to medium and high levels of radiation. The waste was also dumped into the lakes of West Siberia, where storms had blown nuclear dust across a massive area around the lake.

The disaster

The cooling system in one of the tanks that contained around 70–80 tons of liquid radioactive waste had failed, and was never repaired. The temperature inside the tank started to rise, resulting in the liquid evaporating. What was left was dried waste, consisting mainly of ammonium nitrate and acetates. The result was a chemical explosion (non-nuclear) which had the estimated energy of around 75 to 100 tons of TNT.

Although there were no immediate casualties as a result of the explosion, it had released 740 PBq (20 MCi) of fission products that drifted off the site, creating a plume that measured 31 miles (50 km) wide and 621 miles (1,000 km) long, measuring as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).

A few of the villagers were evacuated, however, most were not. There were at least 270,000 people that were exposed to chronic levels of radiation. Soviet authorities did evacuate a few towns within a week, although for most of the other towns it took over two years. The authorities had also chosen to disregard the smaller populated places that had less than 1,000 inhabitants. Because Mayak was a top-secret secure facility no-one was told what had happen.

As radiation sickness spread throughout the population of the affected area, panic began to settle in. People became scared of this mysterious disease that caused people’s skin to fall off and sores to appear on their skins. However, little did they know, the worst was yet to come for the people living in the Kyshtym area.

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