When it comes to a nuclear accident, Chernobyl, Fukushima or, less commonly, Three Mile Island come to mind. Few will remember the Kyshtym accident, which affected the Mayak nuclear complex. Be that as it may, she was one of the most serious of her kind. This incident of 1957 (it was reported to the general public only 20 years later) is now coming to the surface again: the place where the cloud of ruthenium-106 that reached Europe was ejected, apparently, is somewhere in the south of Russia.
Many features of this story are reminiscent of a spy novel. The nuclear complex "Mayak" (the first in the USSR) secretly emerged in the middle of Siberian forests in 1948, at the beginning of the Cold War. This strategic site was not marked on any of the maps. The same was true of the surrounding cities, for example, then known as Chelyabinsk-65 Ozersk (80,000 people). All measures were taken to preserve the secrecy of the object, the nearest designated settlement for which was Kyshtym. Its former resident recently told the newspaper Le Parisien about her parents' admonition: "If you tell someone about this, we will be jailed."
These people were employees of Mayak, where plutonium production was established. This substance is necessary for the production of nuclear weapons, and the USSR did everything to make its release as fast and massive as possible. Environmental and health issues have been pushed aside through negligence or lack of understanding of the consequences. At first, liquid radioactive waste was secretly dumped into the Techa River, on which the enterprise stood. The catastrophic sanitary and environmental consequences forced the authorities to look for another solution.
Nearly 300,000 people under a radioactive cloud
This waste was at one time contained in a storage facility at the nearby small lake Karachay, which has become one of the most polluted places in the world. The reservoirs were built in 1953 to keep the water out of contact with the lake, Sciences et Vie wrote in September. The vaults surrounded by concrete were equipped with a cooling loop to keep the heat-generating fluids from rising in temperature. Be that as it may, the maintenance of the installations is very laborious, and the necessary repairs were not carried out.
Maintenance gaps resulted in a serious accident. All the details of what happened are still unknown, but everything is clear with the general scenario: an uncorrected malfunction in the cooling system led to an increase in temperature to more than 300 degrees with liquid evaporation. The pressure in the tanks increased sharply, which caused an explosion on September 29, 1957.
“It was Sunday. About five o'clock. I went to my brother. I heard an explosion and saw a cloud,”the former head of the Mayak dosimetry laboratory told the newspaper l'Humanité in 1990. The volume of emissions was from 70 to 80 tons of waste. Most of them fell directly to the site of the accident, but some of them formed a radioactive cloud that moved northeast. It affected about 270,000 people on an area of several thousand square kilometers. Particularly heavy pollution was recorded in an area of 1,000 km2. Now this cloud path is sometimes called the "East Ural radioactive trace".
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The population began to be evacuated only six to ten days after the accident. This time was more than enough for people to receive a serious dose of radiation. Sciences et Vie writes about an area of 20 km2 around the explosion site, where all the pines died. A few months later, the population of two dozen villages, about 10,000 people, were removed. The documents record 200 deaths due to radiation over several months. However, there is no exact data, as is often the case. The impact on the environment and the population persisted in the future, which was superimposed on the effects of pollution of the river as a result of emissions.
Complete secrecy
Be that as it may, the accident was surrounded by absolute secrecy. In the 1960s, the CIA had, of course, heard of the facility and the incident. Spy plane pilot Gary Powers was shot down while flying in the region. Be that as it may, they decided to remain silent about what happened so as not to exacerbate the already growing distrust of the nuclear industry in North America and Europe after the accident in Great Britain.
In 1990, a general practitioner told L'Express that in 1967 he received an invitation to the Chelyabinsk Institute of Biophysics, a strange institution funded by a specialized nuclear department, and where the work was carried out in the strictest secrecy. Specialized medical institutions were located in the city to monitor the effects of radiation exposure over a long period. Everything was done to surround the incident with a veil of silence, despite the many cases of illnesses with radiation symptoms. Doctors were forbidden to openly make such a diagnosis in their reports. The numbers indicate that the number of cases of leukemia and malformations was much higher than normal.
Revelations 20 years later
The incident became known only in 1976. Russian biologist Zhores Medvedev, who fled to the UK, wrote an article in the New Scientist newspaper about many factors that indicated the likelihood of a nuclear explosion 20 years earlier in the Kyshtym region. The accident in the results was named after this city, which was then the only one marked on the map. The scientist supplemented the research with a book published in 1979. Official figures were released by the IAEA in 1989.
The declassified documents that have appeared since then made it possible to confirm the fact of the incident. The accident was classified as level six (out of seven) on the international scale of nuclear events, making it only one step less serious than Chernobyl and Fukushima. The relatives of the victims, including Nadezhda Kutepova, who founded her own NGO abroad, continue to fight for recognition of the accident and payment of financial assistance. A woman living in France today has won dozens of trials in Russia.
The business is still running
Despite this incident and many incidents related to the object (we are talking in particular about the discharge of waste into the water and the drying up of Lake Karachay, which leads to the release of radioactive dust), he continues to work. Today "Mayak" is engaged in the disposal of spent nuclear fuel, a large part of which comes from neighboring countries.
People still live in the surrounding towns. Ozersk, closest to the enterprise (renamed in 1994), is still closed to visitors. According to official data, people were taken out of the risk zones, where clean-up work was carried out. Nevertheless, according to the report issued by Greenpeace on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the accident, considerable amounts of waste are still dumped into Techa, and measurements indicate high levels of radiation in neighboring villages. The same applies to some cities, from which people have not been taken out. “There were five children in our family. All the others died. Cancer,”a resident of the Muslyumovo village, located 30 kilometers from the enterprise, told the L'Express newspaper in 1990.
On November 20, Russia confirmed that "extremely high" ruthenium-106 readings were recorded in the vicinity of the facility in September. Earlier, several European observational centers revealed the presence of this radioactive gas in the atmosphere (it does not occur naturally). On Tuesday, Rosatom assured everyone that there were no incidents at its facilities.
Blandine Le Cain