Which was marked on the maps.
The scale of the incident and the aftermath
The explosion took place in a container for radioactive waste, which was built in the 1950s. Work on the construction of tanks was carried out under the leadership of the chief mechanic Arkady Alexandrovich Kazutov (1914-1994), the chief engineer for the construction of Mayak at that time was V. A. Saprykin. The containers themselves were a stainless steel cylinder in a concrete jacket.
The mechanism for creating this repository was as follows: a pit was dug out with a diameter of about 18-20 meters and a depth of 10-12 meters. At the bottom and walls of this pit, reinforcement is often fixed, which is poured with concrete; as a result, the thickness of the walls is approximately one meter. After that, the waste container itself is assembled inside by welding with separate stainless steel sides. A dome is built on top of it on radial metal trusses, which in the center are attached to a metal cylinder with a diameter of up to one and a half meters. Above these farms, concrete of the highest grades is poured into a cover about a meter thick and weighing about 560 tons. A layer of earth two meters thick is poured over the structure, green turf is laid on top of this for masking.
There was no doubt about the strength of this structure at the time of construction, which is shown by the dialogue between Kazutov and V.A. Saprykin at the construction of spent fuel storage facilities.
The dialogue is given according to the memoirs of A. A. Kazutov, respectively, "I" - A. A. Kazutov, "he" - V. A. Saprykin:
I remember the meeting when the chief engineer Vasily Saprykin came to inspect the storage facility. It was during the day, the sun was very hot. He asked me smiling:
Will it collapse under its own weight?
I jokingly replied:
Vasily Andreevich laughed at the joke, and then thoughtfully and, it seemed to me, with slight anxiety, said
Who knows what strength it takes to destroy it?
On September 29, 1957 at 16:22, due to the failure of the cooling system, an explosion of a tank with a volume of 300 cubic meters occurred, which contained about 80 m³ of highly radioactive nuclear waste. The explosion, estimated at tens of tons of TNT, destroyed the tank, the concrete floor 1 meter thick and weighing 160 tons was thrown aside, about 20 million curies of radioactive substances were released into the atmosphere. Some of the radioactive substances were lifted by the explosion to a height of 1-2 km and formed a cloud consisting of liquid and solid aerosols. Within 10-12 hours, radioactive substances fell out over a distance of 300-350 km in the northeast direction from the explosion site (in the direction of the wind). The territory of several enterprises of the Mayak plant, a military camp, a fire department, a colony of prisoners, and further an area of 23,000 km² with a population of 270,000 people in 217 settlements of three regions turned out to be in the radiation contamination zone: Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen. Chelyabinsk-40 itself was not damaged. 90% of radiation pollution fell on the territory of the Mayak chemical plant, and the rest dissipated further.
During the liquidation of the consequences of the accident, 23 villages from the most polluted areas with a population of 10 to 12 thousand people were resettled, and buildings, property and livestock were destroyed. To prevent the spread of radiation in 1959, by a government decision, a sanitary protection zone was formed on the most contaminated part of the radioactive trace, where any economic activity was prohibited, and since 1968, the East Ural State Reserve has been formed on this territory. At the moment, the contamination zone is called the East Ural radioactive trace.
To eliminate the consequences of the accident, hundreds of thousands of military personnel and civilians were involved, who received significant doses of radiation.
Chronology of events
September 1957
- September 29, 1957 (Sunday) - 16 hours 22 minutes local time. There was an explosion of can No. 14 of the S-3 complex.
- 19 hours 20 minutes. Air masses from the area of the chemical plant moved in the direction of the village of Bagaryak and the city of Kamensk-Uralsky.
- 22 pm or 00:00 September 30. The radioactive cloud has reached the territory of Tyumen.
- Around 11 p.m., a strange glow was seen in the sky; The main colors of this glow were pink and light blue. The glow initially covered a significant part of the southwestern and northeastern surfaces of the sky, then it could be observed in the northwest direction.
- September 30 - 3 am. The process of formation of a radioactive trace is completely completed (without taking into account subsequent migration).
- 4 am. The first rough assessment of the level of radiation contamination was made at the industrial site.
- On September 30, a study of the radiation situation outside the plant and the city of Chelyabinsk-40 began. The very first measurements of contamination made in nearby settlements, which were covered by a radioactive cloud, showed that the consequences of a radiation accident are very serious.
October 1957
- October 2 - on the third day after the accident, a commission arrived from Moscow, created by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, headed by Minister E. P. Slavsky. Upon arrival in Chelyabinsk-40 (Ozersk), the commission got involved in the work, trying to find out the reasons that led to the accident. But the situation with the explosion of the container turned out to be difficult, requiring special study of many problems.
- October 6-13 - based on preliminary estimates of the radiation dose, a decision was made to evacuate 1100 people living in the villages of Berdyanish, Satlykovo, Galikaevo. The evacuation was carried out late, 7-14 days after the accident.
- October 11 - A special technical commission was created to establish the causes of the explosion. It included 11 people, mostly scientists, experts in the nuclear industry, such as N. A. Bakh, I. F. Zhezherun, Boris Petrovich Nikolsky and others. The chemist, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR VV Fomin was appointed chairman of the commission. Having become acquainted with the circumstances of the explosion of can No. 14 of the C-3 complex, the commission established the causes of the accident.
In May 1958, 12 km from Ozyorsk, an experimental research station was established on the territory of the VURS. A branch of the Leningrad Scientific Research Institute of Radiation Hygiene was organized in Chelyabinsk, as well as an integrated agricultural research radiological laboratory. In December 1962, Branch No. 4 (FIB-4) was formed on their basis. Employees of this closed scientific institution conducted a medical examination of the population in the area of the Techa River, as well as on the territory of the EURS, and carried out research work.
Results
The government commission, formed in November 1957, conducted surveys and found that the settlements of Russkaya Karabolka, Yugo-Konevo, Alabuga and the village of Konevsky tungsten mine are in an area of intense pollution. A decision was made to resettle the inhabitants of the contaminated zone (4,650 people) and to plow 25,000 hectares of arable land located in the contaminated zone.
In 1958-1959, in settlements exposed to radiation contamination, special mechanized detachments liquidated and buried buildings, food, fodder and property of residents. After the accident, a temporary ban on the economic use of the territory was introduced on the entire territory of the EURTS.
The social and environmental consequences of the accident were very serious. Thousands of people were forced to leave their places of residence, many others remained to live in the territory contaminated with radionuclides in the conditions of long-term restrictions on economic activity. The situation was greatly complicated by the fact that as a result of the accident, water bodies, pastures, forests and arable land were exposed to radioactive contamination.
Versions of the causes of the incident and its consequences
The complex, which included the exploded tank, was a buried concrete structure with cells - canyons for stainless steel tanks with a volume of 300 cubic meters each. Liquid highly radioactive waste from the Mayak chemical plant was stored in the tanks. Due to the high radioactivity, their contents emit heat (see: Residual heat release), and according to the technology, the containers are constantly cooled.
According to the official version, the cause of the explosion is described as follows:
Disruption of the cooling system due to corrosion and failure of control devices in one of the tanks of the storage of radioactive waste, with a volume of 300 cubic meters, caused self-heating of 70-80 tons of high-level waste stored there, mainly in the form of nitrate-acetate compounds. The evaporation of water, drying the residue and heating it to a temperature of 330-350 degrees led September 29, 1957 at 16:00 local time to the explosion of the contents of the tank. The power of the explosion is estimated at 70-100 tons of TNT.
Another version says that a solution of plutonium oxalate was mistakenly added to the evaporator tank with a hot solution of plutonium nitrate. During the oxidation of oxalate with nitrate, a large amount of energy was released, which led to overheating and an explosion of the container containing the radioactive mixture.
The explosion completely destroyed a stainless steel tank located in a concrete canyon at a depth of 8.2 m, ripped off and threw a concrete slab of the canyon floor by 25 m, and windows were broken in buildings within a radius of up to 1 km; no other damage was reported. No one died directly from the explosion. About 20 million curies of radioactive substances were released into the air, contained in the destroyed container in the form of aerosols, gases and mechanical suspensions (for comparison: during the Chernobyl accident, up to 380 million curies were released, that is, about 19 times more).
Measures to eliminate the consequences of the accident
During the first days after the explosion, military personnel and prisoners were withdrawn from the affected area. The evacuation of the population from the most affected villages began 7-14 days after the accident.
The territory that was exposed to radioactive contamination as a result of an explosion at a chemical plant was called the East Ural radioactive trace. The total length of the EURT was approximately 300 km long and 5-10 km wide. About 270 thousand people lived on this area of almost 20 thousand km², of which about 10 thousand people ended up in an area with a radioactive contamination density of more than 2 curies per square kilometer for strontium-90 (half-life 28.8 years) and 2100 people - from with a density of more than 100 curies per square kilometer.
On the territory with contamination of more than 2 curies per square kilometer for strontium-90, there were approximately 23 settlements, mostly small villages. They were evicted, property, livestock and houses were destroyed. The crops were destroyed in large areas. Large areas have been plowed up and withdrawn from agricultural use.
Science Reserve
In order to prevent the dangerous impact of the contaminated territory on the surrounding population, in 1959 the USSR government decided to form a sanitary protection zone with a special regime on this part of the EURTS. It included a territory bounded by an isoline of 2-4 curies per square kilometer for strontium-90, with an area of about 700 km². The lands of this zone are recognized as temporarily unsuitable for agriculture. Here it is forbidden to use land and forests, water bodies, to plow and sow, cut down forests, mow hay and graze livestock, hunt, fish, pick mushrooms and berries. No one is allowed here without special permission. In 1968, the East Ural Reserve was created on this territory.
As a result of the radioactive decay of the fallout that occurred as a result of the accident in 1957, the area of radioactive contamination of the territory of the reserve is reduced. At present, it is impossible to visit the reserve, since the level of radioactivity in it - according to existing standards for humans - is still very high. The nuclear reserve still plays an important role in scientific research related to radiation.
Currently, victims of the accident, as well as participants in the aftermath, have social benefits.
Warning of other emergencies
After the Kyshtym accident, Soviet scientists intensified the development of technology for processing high-level nuclear waste by vitrization (vitrification). In 1987, at the Mayak plant, this technology was put on an industrial basis. According to Mayak's 2013 report, and 23 years of operation of the vitrification department in four successively commissioned electric furnaces, liquid HLW with an activity of 643 million Ci was vitrified, 6’200 tons of aluminophosphate glass were obtained .
Accident information coverage
Disinformation
After the explosion on September 29, 1957, a column of smoke and dust rose up to a kilometer high, which flickered with an orange-red light. This created the illusion of northern lights. On October 6, 1957, the following article appeared in the Chelyabinsky Rabochy newspaper:
“Last Sunday evening ... many Chelyabinsk residents observed a special glow of the starry sky. This glow, quite rare in our latitudes, had all the signs of the aurora borealis. An intense red, sometimes turning into a faint pink and light blue glow, initially covered a significant part of the southwestern and northeastern surface of the sky. At about 11 o'clock it could be observed in a northwesterly direction... Comparatively large colored areas and at times quiet bands appeared against the background of the sky, which had a meridional direction at the last stage of aurora. The study of the nature of the auroras, begun by Lomonosov, continues to this day. In modern science, the main idea of Lomonosov has been confirmed, that the aurora appears in the upper layers of the atmosphere as a result of electrical discharges ... Auroras ... can be observed in the future at the latitudes of the Southern Urals "
Declassification of information about the accident
For a long time, nothing was reported about this major accident in the Soviet Union. The information was hidden by the official authorities from the population of the country and from the inhabitants of the Ural region, which found itself in the zone of radioactive contamination. However, it turned out to be practically impossible to completely hide the accident of 1957, primarily because of the large area of contamination with radioactive substances and the involvement of a significant number of people in the field of post-accident work, many of whom later dispersed throughout the country.
Abroad, the fact of the accident in 1957 in the Urals became known soon. For the first time, the accident in the USSR was reported on April 13, 1958 by the Copenhagen newspaper "Berlingske Tudende" (English) Russian. But this message turned out to be inaccurate. It claimed that there had been some kind of accident during the Soviet nuclear tests in March 1958. The nature of the accident was not known, but it was reported in this newspaper that it caused radioactive fallout in the USSR and nearby states. Somewhat later, in a report by the US National Laboratory located in Los Alamos, it was suggested that a nuclear explosion allegedly occurred in the Soviet Union during a large military exercise. 20 years later, in 1976, biologist Zhores Medvedev made the first brief report about the accident in the Urals in the English magazine New Scientist, which caused a great resonance in the West. In 1979, Medvedev published a book in the United States called "Nuclear Catastrophe in the Urals" which provided some of the true facts about the 1957 accident. A subsequent inquiry by activists from the anti-nuclear organization Critical Mass Energy Project showed that the CIA knew about the incident prior to publication, but kept silent about it, which, according to Critical Mass founder Ralph Nader, was due to a desire to prevent adverse consequences for the American nuclear industry.
In 1980, an article by American scientists from the Oak Ridge Atomic Center appeared entitled "Analysis of the nuclear accident in the USSR in 1957-1958 and its causes." Its authors, nuclear specialists D. Trabalka, L. Eisman and S. Auerbach, for the first time after Zh. Medvedev, admitted that a major radiation accident had taken place in the USSR, associated with an explosion of radioactive waste. Among the sources analyzed were geographic maps before and after the incident, showing the disappearance of the names of a number of settlements and the construction of reservoirs and canals in the lower reaches of the Techa; as well as published fishery statistics.
In the Soviet Union, the fact of an explosion at the Mayak chemical plant was first confirmed in July 1989 at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Then, hearings on this issue were held at a joint meeting of the Committee on Ecology and the Committee on Health of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with a generalized report by the First Deputy Minister of Atomic Energy and Industry of the USSR B.V. Nikipelov. In November 1989, the international scientific community was acquainted with the data on the causes, characteristics, radioecological consequences of the accident at the symposium of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). At this symposium, the main reports on the accident were made by specialists and scientists from the Mayak chemical plant.
Eyewitness comments
For a long time, the public knew practically nothing about the explosion at Mayak. Later, it is not clear why, the accident was replicated in the media as the "Kyshtym accident." An obelisk was even recently erected in Kyshtym on this occasion, although this city has nothing to do with this event. And the East Ural radioactive trace (EURS), which was formed after 1957, did not touch Kyshtym and its inhabitants.
Member of the Public Chamber of CSOs, liquidator of 1957, veteran of Mayak and Minatom V. I. Shevchenko
Discussion of the impact of the accident on the current environmental situation in the Chelyabinsk region
In July 2011, the administration of the Chelyabinsk region placed a request for quotations for the provision of services, including a requirement that the first ten links of the Google and Yandex search engines for queries related to the Kyshtym accident and environmental problems of Karabash should contain materials containing “positive or neutral assessments ecological situation in Chelyabinsk and the Chelyabinsk region". This request for quotations was brought to the attention of the media by Aleksey Navalny. Representatives of the government of the Chelyabinsk region commented on the appearance of the order by the need to "get rid of the irrelevant and untrue image imposed by radiophobes ...", and also reported that there were no plans to distort information about the environmental situation in the region. Search engine optimization specialists considered the method chosen by the authorities to be ineffective, and by the spring of 2012, the regional administration abandoned this method in favor of more traditional tools, such as publishing advertisements in magazines.
see also
Notes
- Viktor Riskin. Construction site stormed front-line soldiers // Chelyabinsk worker: newspaper. - Chelyabinsk, 2003. - Issue. October 6 .
- East Ural radioactive trace (EURS) (indefinite) .
On September 29, 1957, at 4 pm, on the territory of the Mayak chemical plant, located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozersk), the first radiation accident in the USSR occurred - a container for storing radioactive waste exploded. The catastrophe was called the Kyshtym accident - after the name of the city of Kyshtym closest to Chelyabinsk-40.
The explosion occurred in a 300 m³ tank due to a failure of the cooling system. The tank contained a total of about 80 m³ of highly radioactive nuclear waste. At the time of construction in the 1950s, the strength of the structure was not in doubt. She was in a pit, in a concrete shirt a meter thick.
The lid of the tank weighed 560 tons, a two-meter layer of earth was laid on top of it. However, even this could not contain the explosion.
According to another, unofficial version, the disaster occurred due to a mistake by the plant's employees, who mistakenly added a solution of plutonium oxalate to the evaporator tank with a hot solution of plutonium nitrate. When oxalate was oxidized with nitrate, a large amount of energy was released, which led to overheating and explosion of the container.
During the explosion, about 20 million Ci of radioactive substances entered the atmosphere, some of which rose to a height of up to two kilometers and formed an aerosol cloud.
Over the next 11-12 hours, radioactive fallout fell over an area 300-350 km long northeast of the explosion site.
23 thousand km² with a population of 270 thousand people in 217 settlements of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions fell into the zone of radiation contamination. During the liquidation of the consequences of the accident, it turned out to be necessary to resettle 23 villages with a population of 10-12 thousand people, all buildings, property and livestock were destroyed.
Hundreds of thousands of servicemen and civilians became liquidators.
In the first ten days alone, the number of those who died from radiation went into the hundreds, in total, 250 thousand liquidators suffered to one degree or another during the work.
According to the international nuclear test scale, the accident was rated at six points. For comparison, the seventh level, the maximum, was assigned to accidents at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant.
To avoid spreading radiation, a sanitary protection zone was formed by the decision of the government, in which economic activity was prohibited. In 1968, the East Ural State Reserve was formed on this territory.
His visit is prohibited - the level of radioactivity is still too dangerous for humans.
The reserve plays an important role in conducting scientific research on radiation.
Wikimedia Commons
At the site of the explosion, a column of smoke and dust was formed about a kilometer high, flickering with an orange-red light.
On October 6, 1957, a note dedicated to him appeared in which, however, not a word was said about the accident:
“Last Sunday evening ... many Chelyabinsk residents observed a special glow of the starry sky. This glow, quite rare in our latitudes, had all the signs of aurora borealis. An intense red, sometimes turning into a faint pink and light blue glow, initially covered a significant part of the southwestern and northeastern surface of the sky. At about 11 o'clock it could be observed in a northwesterly direction... Comparatively large colored areas and at times quiet bands appeared against the background of the sky, which had a meridional direction at the last stage of aurora. The study of the nature of auroras, begun by Lomonosov, continues to this day. In modern science, Lomonosov's main idea has been confirmed, that the aurora appears in the upper layers of the atmosphere as a result of electrical discharges ... Auroras ... can be observed in the future at the latitudes of the Southern Urals.
The Kyshtym accident was a state secret for a long time. For the first time, it was openly spoken about in films shot at the turn of the 1980s-1990s by the director and biologist Elena, dedicated to the fate of the Soviet biologist and geneticist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky.
The films were shown on television only after Sakanyan directly asked to be shown.
But information was leaked to the foreign press already in April 1958. For the first time, one of the Copenhagen newspapers reported about the accident. Subsequently, data on the accident appeared in the report of the US National Laboratory, biologist Zhores Medvedev devoted a book to the incident called "Nuclear catastrophe in the Urals", publishing it in the USA, and an analysis of the accident and its causes was carried out by a group of American scientists from the Oak Ridge nuclear center.
“For a long time, the public knew practically nothing about the explosion at Mayak. Later, it is not clear why, the accident was replicated in the media as the "Kyshtym accident."
An obelisk was even recently erected in Kyshtym on this occasion, although this city has nothing to do with this event.
And the East Ural radioactive trace, which formed after 1957, did not touch Kyshtym and its inhabitants, ”one of its liquidators said in an interview in 2009.
In total, more than 30 incidents were registered at Mayak, accompanied by radioactive emissions and human casualties.
The Chernobyl disaster is on everyone's lips and with good reason. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was indeed unprecedented in its scale and consequences. However, until very recently, practically no one knew that almost thirty years before the Chernobyl nightmare, the Kyshtym accident, comparable in its level and the largest at that time in the world, had already occurred on the territory of the USSR.
Kyshtym accident: chemical explosion with nuclear consequences
Fortunately, the world knows few nuclear disasters, but, unfortunately, a large number of the worst accidents at nuclear facilities occurred in our country when it was the Soviet Union. Among all these accidents, a special place is occupied by the explosion at the Mayak plant, which thundered on the evening of September 29, 1957. This explosion was chemical, but it had hardly less consequences than a nuclear one.
Object: Bank No. 14 of the C-3 radioactive waste storage complex, Mayak Production Association, Ozersk (Chelyabinsk-40), Chelyabinsk Region, Russia.
Victims: none.
Causes of the Kyshtym disaster
The main cause of the accident at the Mayak Production Association was the failure of the cooling system of the high-level nuclear waste storage tank. Due to overheating, an explosion occurred, which led to the release into the atmosphere of a large amount (about 70 - 80 tons) of radioactive substances.
However, the true causes of the disaster lie somewhat deeper - they are purely chemical. The failure of the cooling system was caused by corrosion of its components (primarily the controls), and the explosion occurred as a result of a violent chemical reaction between plutonium nitrate-acetate compounds. The reaction of these compounds is explosive only at high temperature and pressure.
Thus, the chemically aggressive environment (hot nuclear waste) caused premature corrosion of the components of the cooling system, which failed, and due to uncontrolled heating, the plutonium compounds reacted. As a result, a powerful explosion and the title of one of the largest man-made radiation disasters.
Chronicle of events
The accident occurred on the territory of the Mayak Production Association, in Bank No. 14 of the S-3 radioactive waste storage complex. The complex was created specifically for the storage of high-level nuclear waste, primarily plutonium compounds in liquid form.
As you know, nuclear materials get very hot as a result of constant fission, and therefore they need to be cooled - with such a calculation, the tanks at Mayak were also created. Each "can" was a stainless steel cylinder surrounded by more than a meter of concrete. The volume of the cylinder reached 300 cubic meters (that is, it could hold 300 tons of water), and the top was covered with a concrete cover weighing 160 tons. The whole structure was underground, and above it was just a field overgrown with green grass.
The explosion thundered on Sunday, September 29, at 16.22. As a result of the explosion, a cloud of highly active nuclear waste rose into the air, to a height of up to 2 km, literally erased into a fine powder (at the time of the accident, there were about 80 cubic meters of waste in the bank). The explosion was so powerful that the 160-ton lid was thrown 25 meters, and the can itself was completely destroyed. Subsequently, it was found that the power of the explosion could reach 80 tons of TNT.
The cloud began to spread to the northeast, and by 3 o'clock in the morning completely dissipated, covering an area of 23,000 sq. km. Only at 4 o'clock in the morning were the first measurements of the level of radiation at the enterprise, which showed the seriousness of the accident.
It is interesting that in the evening, starting from about 23.00 and until settling, the cloud glowed with pink and light blue light (the effect is caused by the decay of plutonium and its highly active fission products) - this phenomenon was similar to the aurora, and subsequently they wrote about it in newspapers.
On October 2, a specially created commission began to work to study the causes of the accident, but only on October 6 - on the seventh day after the accident - did the evacuation of people from the territory most affected by radioactive contamination begin. In the next few days, several thousand people were evacuated, and the affected villages were destroyed.
Subsequently, activities were carried out in the contaminated area to eliminate the consequences of the accident, in which mainly military personnel were employed.
Consequences of the accident
A cloud of radioactive waste thrown into the atmosphere by the explosion covered an area of about 23,000 square kilometers. On this territory there were 217 settlements (including the city of Kamensk-Uralsky) with a total population of about 272,000 people. However, in fairness, it should be noted that almost 90% of the waste fell on the territory of the Mayak Production Association.
After the accident (with a serious delay - approximately in one or two weeks), about 10 - 12 thousand people were evacuated from the most polluted areas. The villages that were empty after the eviction of people (there were 23 of them) were actually wiped off the face of the earth - under the caterpillars of bulldozers, houses, all the property of people, warehouses with food, etc. perished. Also, all livestock was slaughtered and buried, fields were plowed and everything that people could take and use was destroyed. But why were such measures taken? The reason is simple: all this prevented the spread of radiation contamination (after all, people take and drag everything that is badly lying, and if there is nothing, then there is nothing to drag), and also saved people who could secretly return to their homes from danger.
Already in 1959, a sanitary protection zone was created on the most polluted territory, which in 1968 was transformed into the East Ural State Reserve. Economic activity (cultivation of land, picking berries and mushrooms, hunting, raising livestock, etc.) was completely prohibited on this territory, and only scientists visited it.
The entire contaminated area was later called the East Ural radioactive trace (EURS). The EURT, with an insignificant width, stretched for about 300–350 km in a northeasterly direction from the explosion site. The shape of the trail is determined by the wind blowing at the time of the accident and for the next 10-11 hours.
The exact number of people who received high doses of radiation is still unknown, but a number of sources indicate that about 9-10 thousand people received dangerous doses, and 200 people died from radiation sickness.
present tense
On the territory of EURT, an increased radioactive background is still observed, which does not pose a danger to people. However, the territory of the East Ural State Reserve is still closed to the public, as radioactive contamination is still quite high there. Since the 1960s, only scientists have been working in the reserve (which was aptly named Atomic). The results of research in the Atomic Reserve are of great scientific and practical interest.
The Mayak Production Association, despite the Kyshtym accident and a number of other incidents, continues its work to this day.
Secrecy, secrecy and more secrecy
Almost all major man-made disasters in our country were shrouded in a halo of secrecy, and any materials on them were carefully hidden from the general public. The Mayak accident is no exception. It was because of the secrecy regime that the catastrophe was named Kyshtym.
The fact is that Mayak itself, as well as the city of Ozersk (or Chelyabinsk-40), were classified and not marked on the maps. The nearest unclassified settlement was the city of Kyshtym (which, being only a few kilometers from the enterprise, was not affected at all - the wind was blowing in the opposite direction), and they decided to use it for the "official" name of the disaster.
Officially, the fact of the accident was recognized only in 1989, and since then the Chelyabinsk region has been struggling with the negative background that surrounds it because of the Mayak, but so far not very successfully. The long-term regime of secrecy and numerous radiation accidents have instilled distrust and fear in people. And it is very difficult to deal with fear and distrust.
On September 29, 1957, the first radioactive accident in the USSR occurred at a chemical plant in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk). Due to an explosion in a waste storage facility, villages, forests, and farmland on an area of more than 20,000 square kilometers were contaminated with radiation, hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to significant doses. For more than 30 years, data on large-scale pollution were kept under the heading "top secret", and only after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, under the yoke of public pressure, they began to talk about them. 74.ru, together with scientists and liquidators of its consequences, restored the chronology of events that became a dark spot in the history of the country's nuclear industry.
What exploded and why
Chemical Combine No. 817, later called "Mayak", became the first enterprise in the USSR to produce an atomic explosive - plutonium-239. Radioactive waste from its production was stored in stainless steel containers - cans, which were placed in reinforced concrete canyons deep underground. They constantly circulated cold water, the level and temperature of which was controlled by special sensors.
The highly radioactive solution was poured into jar No. 14, which caused the tragedy, in April 1957. At the time of the explosion, the activity of the waste contained in it reached 20 million curies. This is two and a half times less than the emission during the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
What exactly caused the waste to detonate is still unknown. The commission, urgently assembled by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building to investigate the incident, had to reconstruct the events according to the testimony of eyewitnesses. According to workers who were in the vault 40 minutes before the explosion, there was intense heat and yellow smoke billowing.
The complex, launched four years earlier, was not properly repaired due to the high level of radiation in it. At the same time, the banks themselves were located below the groundwater level, which is why they were regularly drowned. The containers floated up and deformed, fistulas formed in them, and radioactive waste was poured into concrete pits. Repairing the power supply to the sensors was also hampered by the fact that the cables in the vault ran through the canyons themselves, where it was dangerous for humans to stay.
A photo:
As a result, on September 29, the instruments for measuring temperature and water level failed, the water supply suddenly decreased or stopped completely, which led to a sharp increase in the temperature of the solution inside the jar and its evaporation. Dry salt sediment with radionuclides overheated above 350 degrees Celsius, and at 16:22 an explosion occurred. The commission determined that it was chemical and not nuclear in nature.
The powerful explosion surprised more than frightened, - recalls the former director of the branch of the South Ural Institute of Biophysics, Eduard Lyubchansky, who at that time worked as a junior doctor in a military unit. - Explosive work near our regiment was carried out regularly, because a new factory building of the chemical plant was being built. But by evening, information began to appear from military builders returning from work at other facilities that “something had exploded there, and the clothes of those who were there were ringing.” When it got dark in the evening, through the window I saw a crimson trail in the dark blue starry sky in a northeasterly direction.
Since the city of Chelyabinsk-40 did not appear on Soviet maps, the catastrophe that happened was dubbed Kyshtym - according to the nearest settlement to it. Although neither Kyshtym nor "sorokovka" (as the locals called the city) were affected by radiation.
"The sky turned purple for three days"
The explosion was so powerful that the round concrete cover of the vault weighing 160 tons was torn off and thrown to the side by 25 meters, and the concrete ceilings that separated the jar from neighboring canyons were shifted by a meter. A crater with a diameter of 20 meters and a depth of up to 10 meters formed at the site of the explosion. A metal can containing waste was torn into small pieces and scattered 150 meters from the epicenter of the explosion.
A photo: from the archive of the newspaper "Chelyabinsk worker"
At 800 meters from the epicenter, the blast wave knocked out windows in buildings. And 200 meters from the vault, the glass flew out along with the frames and the brick walls collapsed. Stones contaminated with radiation from the epicenter of the explosion were scattered within a radius of up to 500 meters. One of the contaminated stones was found 900 meters from the vault.
I didn’t hear the explosion itself, but it seemed to illuminate me, and everything that I had on the table flew through the window into the street, ”recalls Mayak veteran Maria Zhonkina, who worked as a paramedic at the enterprise. - I went out, I look - there are no windows in front of the treatment room, there are only glasses all around, all the flower pots have flown off. Nobody understood what happened. On the street, a major ran past me with a group of soldiers and told me to call three ambulances for possible casualties. The cars arrived, but, fortunately, there were no casualties. Only one woman's hand was wounded by a shrapnel, and a window frame fell on the man's head.
A purple-orange cloud rose into the air above the resulting funnel. The height of the "mushroom" exceeded a kilometer. 90% of the radioactive substances contained in it immediately fell out on the territory of the chemical plant. The remaining 2 million curies dispersed in a northeasterly direction on the territory of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen and, in places, the Kurgan regions. In the zone of the East Ural radioactive trace (EURS) there were 23 thousand square kilometers of land with 217 settlements, in which 270 thousand people lived. Ozersk, like Chelyabinsk, was saved from radioactive contamination by the wind rose. Ten years later, a nature reserve was formed on the contaminated territory, most of which is still forbidden to be used today.
A photo:
In the head part of the VURS it was the same as in Chernobyl. It was lucky that the wind rose carried the cloud to where a relatively small number of people lived, - comments Vladimir Buikov, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of the Russian Academy of Education. - If it had scattered towards Chelyabinsk, the whole city would have suffered.
A crimson column of smoke lit up the sky for several days after the accident. It was also visible in Chelyabinsk. In its issue of October 6, 1957, the Chelyabinsk Rabochy newspaper called it an aurora, describing it as an "intense red, at times turning into a faint pink and light blue glow", which "initially covered a significant part of the southwestern and northwestern eastern surface of the sky.
The glow lasted all night, - Vladimir Buikov recalls. - The next day, the color began to decrease. But at night it still shone brightly and disappeared on the third day.
Instruments went off scale, cattle died
A couple of hours later, dosimetrists walked around the explosion, who measured the level of radiation. The received figures forced urgent decisions to be made on the evacuation of people to a safe zone.
I turned on the device for measuring the level of radiation and said that it was broken, - says veteran Maria Zhonkina. - It just didn’t reach me that the arrow could go off scale like that. Shortly before the explosion, we were trained on how to behave if the Americans dropped an atomic bomb. But we had no idea that the danger could arise even without the intervention of foreigners.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
A life-threatening dose of radiation was on the territory up to 23 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. Three military units, a prison camp and three villages were in the danger zone. It was decided to transport them on the first day.
The dose rate on the territory of our military unit reached 6 roentgens per hour (a hundred thousand times higher than the level safe for humans. - Note. ed.), and indoors - three roentgens per hour, - recalls Eduard Lyubchansky. - All military personnel were immediately taken from the street to the barracks and they began to urgently prepare for the evacuation. Guards were posted at the entrance. They were allowed to leave the barracks only when needed and strictly in removable rubber boots. Those who were supposed to be demobilized that year were allowed to take with them only things packed before the accident. Everything else was destroyed.
The soldiers went to the "clean" part on foot. They were not allowed outside the gate until they went to the bathhouse. The deactivation of all 600 military personnel was completed only by the morning.
When we were evacuated, we saw how the last prisoners were taken away from the polluted camp,” recalls the former military doctor. - At the start from the camp they were stripped naked, and they ran 150-200 meters like that. There they were met, dressed, put into a car, and when it was full, they were taken to a safe place. We didn’t have to run like that, but everyone was forced to change clothes.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
The resettlement of residents of neighboring villages was more difficult. Technician-designer Gennady Sidorov says that many people completely refused to leave their habitable places.
We communicated with residents, measured houses, kept records of buildings for property assessment, destroyed houses, - the liquidator recalls. - We started in November near Ozyorsk, and ended in the Sverdlovsk region - two villages were evicted there. Then everyone could choose money or a house in state farms specially organized for migrants. Of course, there was distrust in us, if we were not deceived. There were also threats, they came at us with a gun, with an ax, they almost killed us. All because people did not understand why they were being evicted. We were forbidden to give any explanations. I remember a strong grandfather with a long gray beard coming out of the house and saying: “Son, why do you want to evict me, my whole family lies here in the cemetery.” I explained that it is bad for health here. He did not believe it, he said that uranium had allegedly been found here.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
The development of a uranium deposit has been one of the most popular explanations for the massive resettlement. People did not see the radiation, did not feel it, so the danger seemed far away. That is why, despite the prohibitions, the inhabitants of the contaminated territories calmly continued to harvest, fish, and drink contaminated milk.
According to Gennady Sidorov, the most difficult thing was to watch how crops and livestock were taken away from people. After careful checks, if the products and animals “blew” in excess, they were destroyed.
People did not want to leave without their cattle, - says biophysicist Eduard Lyubchansky. - They agreed to move only when they saw that the cattle began to die. Those animals that grazed in the fields under the open sky died. They received a significantly higher dose of radiation, and the animals developed acute radiation sickness. Their milk was dangerous for humans. Therefore, in the villages that were resettled, cows and goats were slaughtered so that they would not be eaten and their milk would not be drunk.
Due to the long stay on the street, the peasants in part of the villages, who were resettled a week and a half after the explosion, showed signs of radiation sickness.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
They knew that it was necessary to hide, that it was not necessary to go out into the street. But you have to feed the cattle. And people received more doses of radiation, the biophysicist clarifies.
According to the stories of local residents, all the fish died in the reservoirs near the plant - after the explosion, it floated up belly up.
The Mayak lesson helped Chernobyl in some way after the accident at a nuclear power plant, says Lyubchansky. - It was then that the branch of biophysics came up with deep plowing of the earth, thanks to which its activity changed by an order of magnitude.
"Everything rang"
Along with the resettlement in settlements and at the chemical plant, the elimination of the consequences of a radioactive explosion was actively carried out. Everyone involved was involved in the work. Thousands of servicemen, prisoners and civilians helped the employees of the enterprise.
18 million curies of active substances fell out on the territory of the enterprise, - says Eduard Lyubchansky. - Naturally, it had to be cleaned. It was a dangerous job if you didn't follow the rules. Both military construction units and prisoners participated in the construction of a new plant on the contaminated territory. But up to a certain dose - 20-25 roentgens. If higher - people were taken out. This principle was later applied in Chernobyl.
Blood samples were taken from the liquidators every day to determine the degree of radiation damage.
We did not know what was going on, - says the liquidator Nina Georgievna. - At the age of 18, I got a job as a turner at a chemical plant. She was at work at the time of the explosion. We were immediately loaded into buses and taken to the city. Work resumed about a week later. And the schedule immediately changed: we worked for 30 minutes, then went down to the basement for two hours, where we were equipped with something like a gym. They forced me to change clothes several times - they constantly checked. At the exit from the workshop, at the checkpoint. Clothes constantly "rang". The bathrobe was given out in blue, but by the time you get home, it turned brown. And home dosimetrists came to measure. We have completely everything "fonilo". They changed the bed linen, but it was useless. Because dosimetrists are leaving, and everything is “ringing” with us. They checked sidewalks and houses. I remember how we washed the pavement around the school next door with rags. They did not have enough buckets, and all the neighbors took out buckets of water and helped wash.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
Workers of the chemical plant had to see irradiated people even before the 1957 accident. According to some reports, since the launch of the enterprise, more than three thousand employees have received dangerous doses.
Some of them had burns that never healed,” says Maria Zhonkina. - Patients were sent to a Moscow clinic. We even drove around the city cars that watered the roads with potassium permanganate. We are so used to protecting ourselves, and the children were taught not to pick up anything from the ground.
People infected with radiation from the checkpoint were sent to the first-aid post, where they were treated with potassium permanganate, oxalic acid and ammonia and sent to the shower. If the contamination remained, the employee was transferred to "clean" conditions for three days.
According to local residents, even children were involved in the work, who had to bury a crop contaminated with radiation in the fields.
All classes of our school were engaged in harvesting until September 29, ”recalls Raisa Nizamovna, a resident of Russkaya Karabolka. “I was in first grade at the time. On the last day, we were all called back to the fields. We saw deep trenches. We were told to bury all the harvested crops there without explanation. And in the second grade, schoolchildren were sent to forest plantations in the contaminated area. For two years, doctors came to us every month to conduct a complete examination. In the fifth grade, my goiter increased due to a lack of iodine. We learned about what happened then at Mayak only 40 years later.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
According to another resident of the village, Maria Kulikova, in 1958 she worked in the Tyubuk forestry and participated in all forest planting activities.
We learned about what we were doing only in 1993, - says Maria Kulikova. - Health problems began immediately after the accident at the Mayak plant: my legs started to hurt, my teeth fell out early.
Many who eliminated the consequences of the accident died, - another interlocutor shares with 74.ru. - Our friend entered a technical school in Ozersk and went to work at a chemical plant. He died immediately as soon as he started working at the factory.
Have you thought about leaving the city? we asked in response.
Where could we go? she only complained. “No one knew what was going on. The device is brought to the body, it rings. And what it is ringing, I did not understand. It was all kept secret. And for disclosure almost execution.
Overcame fatigue and depression
Naturally, all this could not but affect the emotional and physical condition of people. As physicians noted, people living in the territory of EURT often developed cancer of the gastrointestinal tract due to exposure to radionuclides.
Psychologically, many in our unit were afraid that they would become infertile, - says Eduard Lyubchansky. - I had to explain that during the time that we were in the contaminated area, we could get some dose, but it definitely should not affect reproductive functions.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
However, some were not afraid of the dangers of radiation in the EURT zone. So, the railway worker Alexei Bakurov specially came to eliminate the consequences of the accident immediately after graduating from the university in Novosibirsk.
As the best student with an impeccable profile, I was given a ticket from the Ministry of Mechanical Engineering, - shared Alexei Bakurov. - On what enterprise to go - did not speak. But a familiar Chelyabinsk resident said that there was some kind of dangerous explosion in the Kyshtym region. Then, on the spot, they told me quietly what had happened to them.
According to Bakurov, he did not develop radiophobia because of this.
Yes, I saw that some died, but such cases were rare, he admits. - I intuitively felt that it is necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle. And my guess was later confirmed by the doctor. After all, sometimes people died not so much from radiation as from alcohol. In our time, they said that alcohol washes out radiation, so there was as much alcohol as you like.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
Maria Zhonkina was not lucky in terms of health. Before the Mayak accident, she gave birth to a son, and after that she was no longer able to have children due to illness. To date, she has undergone irradiation more than once, getting rid of the tumor.
“Mayak today is the most environmentally friendly enterprise in the Chelyabinsk region, which meets the most stringent radiation safety standards,” emphasizes Andrey Vazhenin, head physician of the Chelyabinsk Regional Center for Oncology and Nuclear Medicine. - The accident in 1957 in a limited area affected the structure and number of oncological diseases, but now it is all leveled. And now the incidence on the territory of the East Ural radioactive trace is significantly inferior to what we have in megacities - Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk. It does not differ in structure: in Ozersk and Snezhinsk, the incidence is associated with age factors, but not with residence in this territory.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
The radiation explosion in the Chelyabinsk region left its mark on the heads of the victims. According to Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of the Russian Academy of Education Vladimir Buykov, who devoted the main scientific work of his life to the consequences of the explosion at the Mayak chemical plant, the disaster provoked neurological, psychosomatic and psychiatric disorders in the exposed population.
Having studied the medical histories of more than a thousand people who lived on the territory of the EURT and on where hazardous waste had previously been dumped, Buikov found out that many of them showed the effects of radiation years later.
People began to note reduced performance, fatigue, fatigue, dizziness and headaches, increased irritability, irascibility, conflict, - says Vladimir Buikov. These symptoms were accompanied by depression and anxiety. People recalled that they were irradiated, that there would never be a recovery. Anxiety was expressed in panic attacks. Over time, they developed a psycho-organic syndrome. Radionuclides affected the bones, making them brittle, the bone marrow and the central nervous system. People's memory began to suffer, attention was disturbed.
With the development of the disease, once exposed people could not perform elementary tasks. For example, to build a house from cubes.
A photo: Alla Slapovskaya, Alisa Nikulina
At the age of 55–65, their thinking and speech began to suffer. They did not understand the meaning of elementary proverbs or popular expressions, they took them literally, - the doctor comments. - To the detriment of abstract thinking, concrete thinking began to prevail in them. They couldn't analyze what was happening. The sense of tact was broken, some kind of disinhibition appeared. Dementia developed, and people stopped taking care of themselves.
Already at the age of 40-45, residents of the territories contaminated with radiation looked and felt 70 years and older. Both men and women lost their hair. Due to chronic fatigue, many of them were forced to leave their previous jobs.
At the same time, as Vladimir Buikov emphasizes, a once irradiated woman passes the radionuclides contained in her body to her children “by inheritance”. And if both parents were exposed to radiation, then their child will have a high probability of developing cancer. After all, it is no coincidence, as the doctor emphasizes, that in oncology centers today you can already meet a generation of children and grandchildren of those who ended up in the zone of contamination of the East Ural radiation trail in September 1957.
In August 2007, photographers Alla Slapovskaya and Alisa Nikulina toured radiation-contaminated villages in the Chelyabinsk region to report on the fate of people affected by one of the largest and least known radiation disasters in the world. They demonstrated their work at an exhibition dedicated to the consequences of the 1957 accident.
The Mayak chemical plant was built in 1948. It is located in the Southern Urals, in the ZATO Ozersk (in Soviet times - Chelyabinsk-40), located near the cities of Kasli and Kyshtym. The latter gave the name of the accident only because it was the closest open settlement to the crash site, indicated on the map.
Mayak produced plutonium-239, a radioactive substance necessary for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In the conditions of the arms race, more and more atomic raw materials were required every year, therefore, unfortunately, most of the attention in secret production was paid to increasing production, and not to the safe disposal of waste.
Mayak stored liquid radioactive waste (RAW) not far from the enterprise: a concrete “shirt” with meter-thick walls was created near Lake Karachay (the employees called it a “can”), into which RW was poured. This container was separated from the surface of the earth by two meters of soil. In 1953, the vault was arranged to avoid contact with the lake. The atoms in the waste continued to divide, raising the temperature of the liquid, so cooling units were made around the tank. Unfortunately, they were built in a hurry, and the inspection and repair of this equipment was laborious and expensive, and because of this, the enterprise put up with its condition, which is far from ideal.
This continued until September 29, 1957. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon there was an explosion. Cotton was heard in the city, but no one attached any importance to it. Rocks were blown up in the vicinity, and all disturbing sounds were attributed to these works.
Then in the "bank" there were 80 m 3 of waste, less than a third of the total volume, which was 300 m 3. The cooling units failed, so the liquid radioactive waste overheated and began to release gas. Neither the multi-ton cover of the "shirt", nor 2 meters of soil above it held back a powerful explosion. He had a thermal nature, so he did not cause a chain reaction, and this is a great success, otherwise his results could become even worse.
And the consequences were as follows: there was a release of 20 million Curies of radionuclides. 90% of them settled at the epicenter of the accident, and the rest formed a cloud. It was it that in the next half of the day carried the polluted sediments to the northeast, at a distance of 300–350 km. This is how the East Ural radioactive trace (EURT) was formed. On its area were the lands of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions, where 270 thousand people lived at that time. According to the international scale of nuclear events, the accident was assigned the sixth level out of seven possible. The maximum is given to disasters at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and at Fukushima-1.
East Ural radioactive trace. (rg.ru)
During the explosion, no one died, because it was Sunday - a day off. The victims of the disaster began to appear after the start of work to eliminate its consequences. The first liquidators of the accident were, of course, the employees themselves, then they were attracted to the aid of internal troops and prisoners who were serving their sentences not far from Mayak.
Production at the plant could not be stopped, so the liquidators were engaged in laundering the "dirt": they poured water from fire trucks on the roads, washed the walls and roofs of the enterprise's buildings. In addition to the exploded "can", there were several more in the vault, so employees drilled tunnels around them for water hoses to resume cooling. According to the memoirs of the liquidators, there were not enough protective equipment, some had to work in light respirators instead of gas masks, which instantly failed. The population was ordered to wash the floors in the houses. The evacuation started very late, after 6 days. Several villages of the Kaslinsky and Kunashaksky districts of the Chelyabinsk region decided to relocate. These were the settlements most affected by pollution. A total of 10,000 people were evacuated. Houses and everything that belonged to the inhabitants (including livestock) were destroyed. Chelyabinsk-40 did not fall into the zone of radioactive fallout, so this city was not resettled - it was believed that it had not suffered from contamination. However, people began to die from radiation sickness. The exact number of deaths from it is unknown, because for the sake of secrecy, patients were given other, unsuspicious diagnoses: cancer or second-degree vegetovascular dystonia. The affected liquidators signed non-disclosure agreements.
To prevent the spread of radiation, a sanitary protection zone was created, which was turned into the East Ural Reserve in 1968. Nature in it is gradually cured of infection, but you can’t go there - the radiation level remains very high, the radiation background can drop to natural only after a hundred years.
Aurora Borealis: how the accident was hidden
All information about the accident was immediately classified. The liquidators were ordered to remain silent. Local residents were not told about the incident. Newspapers did not write anything about what happened. The only note appeared only a week later in the Chelyabinsk Rabochiy newspaper, which said: “Many Chelyabinsk residents observed a special glow of the starry sky. This glow, quite rare in our latitudes, had all the signs of aurora borealis. An intense red, sometimes turning into a faint pink and light blue glow, initially covered a significant part of the southwestern and northeastern surface of the sky. The phenomenon, presented as the northern lights, turned out to be a cloud of radioactive dust and smoke, which really flickered in different colors. There was no more news related to the disaster near Kyshtym.
Abroad, the explosion at the plant was also silent for a long time. In April 1958, he was published in one of the newspapers in Copenhagen. The US intelligence agencies also knew about the disaster, but no one discussed it widely - distrust in the nuclear industry, caused by the accident at the British Windscale nuclear reactor, grew stronger in Western society. It happened a few days after the explosion in Chelyabinsk-40. She was assigned the fifth level on the international scale of nuclear events.
Monument to the disaster of 1957 on the territory of the Mayak plant. (rg.ru)
The explosion at Mayak was again remembered only in 1976, when the Soviet dissident biologist Zhores Medvedev published an article in the British journal New Scientist that a nuclear explosion could have occurred near Kyshtym in 1957. Three years later, Medvedev published the book "Nuclear Catastrophe in the Urals" in the United States. In the USSR, all the results of his research were denied.
A few years later, in 1986, the terrible effect of this silence and disinformation manifested itself. The fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The reason is a design test, during which the employees were inattentive and unprofessional in their work, neglected safety standards (for example, turned off the cooling units). Perhaps they would have taken into account the mistakes of colleagues thirty years ago, and a new catastrophe could have been avoided?
The fact of the explosion in Chelyabinsk-40 was recognized by the Soviet authorities only at the IAEA session in 1989. However, little official data has been declassified since then. It was recorded that more than a thousand people were injured among the liquidators, but the exact number of those killed and injured as a result of the disaster is unknown. We will never know how many ordinary inhabitants of the contaminated territories received dangerous doses of radiation and fell ill with ailments of a radiation nature.
After the liquidation of the consequences of the disaster, as far as possible, the Mayak was not closed. The enterprise is still operating, and they nevertheless learned a lesson from the 1957 accident. High-level waste is no longer stored in liquid form - instead of being poured into a concrete tank, a vitrification procedure is carried out, and the waste becomes solid and compact. In this form, they are not dangerous. Unfortunately, it cannot be said that the plant operates without incident. For 60 years, about 30 accidents with emissions and deaths have occurred on it.