60 years ago, the Kyshtym accident occurred, in terms of the scale of radiation contamination second only to the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the tragedy at Fukushima-1. What caused the disaster and how the authorities hid it from the population, we will tell below …
On September 29, 1957, at 4 pm, the first radiation accident in the USSR occurred on the territory of the Mayak chemical plant, located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozersk) - a container for storing radioactive waste exploded. The catastrophe was named the Kyshtym accident - after the name of the city of Kyshtym, the nearest to Chelyabinsk-40.
The explosion took place in a tank with a volume of 300 m³ due to the 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 beyond doubt. She was in a pit, in a concrete jacket a meter thick.
The lid of the container weighed 560 tons, and 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 catastrophe occurred due to an error of the plant employees, who mistakenly added a solution of plutonium oxalate to the evaporator tank with a hot solution of plutonium nitrate. Oxalate oxidation with nitrate released a large amount of energy, which led to overheating and explosion of the container.
During the explosion, about 20 million Ci of radioactive substances got into 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 on an area 300-350 km long northeast of the explosion site.
The radiation contamination zone includes 23 thousand km² with a population of 270 thousand people in 217 settlements of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions. 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.
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Hundreds of thousands of servicemen and civilians became liquidators.
In the first ten days alone, the number of deaths from radiation went to hundreds; in total, during the work, 250 thousand liquidators suffered to one degree or another.
On the international scale of nuclear tests, the accident was rated at six points. For comparison, the seventh level, the maximum, was assigned to the accidents at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant.
To avoid the spread of radiation, a sanitary protection zone was created by the government decision, in which economic activities were prohibited. In 1968, the East Ural State Reserve was established on this territory.
Its 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.
At the site of the explosion, a column of smoke and dust formed about a kilometer high, flickering with an orange-red light.
On October 6, 1957, a note dedicated to him appeared in the Chelyabinsk Rabochy newspaper, 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. Intense red, sometimes turning into a slightly pink and light blue glow, at first covered a significant part of the southwestern and northeastern surfaces of the sky. At about 11 o'clock it could be observed in the north-west direction … Against the background of the sky appeared relatively large colored areas and at times calm stripes, 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, the main idea of Lomonosov was confirmed,that the aurora appears in the upper atmosphere as a result of electrical discharges … Aurora … can be observed in the future at the latitudes of the Southern Urals."
The Kyshtym accident has long been a state secret. For the first time, it was openly spoken about in the films of director and biologist Elena Sakanyan, filmed at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, dedicated to the fate of the Soviet biologist and geneticist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky.
The films were shown on television only after Sakanyan made a direct request to Boris Yeltsin for screening.
But the information was leaked to the foreign press in April 1958. For the first time, one of the Copenhagen newspapers reported about the accident. Subsequently, the data on the accident appeared in the report of the US National Laboratory, biologist Zhores Medvedev dedicated a book to the incident entitled "Nuclear Catastrophe in the Urals", having published it in the USA, and a group of American scientists from the Oak Ridge Nuclear Center conducted an analysis of the accident and its causes.
“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 "Kyshtym accident".
In Kyshtym, an obelisk was even recently erected on this occasion, although this city has nothing to do with this event.
And the East Ural radioactive trail, which was formed after 1957, did not touch Kyshtym and its residents,”said one of its liquidators in an interview in 2009.
In total, more than 30 incidents were recorded at Mayak, accompanied by radioactive releases and human casualties.
Alla Salkova