AFTER Fukushima and Chernobyl, what was the world’s third-biggest peacetime nuclear disaster?
Three Mile Island? Windscale/Sellafield? Neither of them — it was the Kyshtym disaster that happened in the USSR exactly 60 years ago today. What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?
On the international nuclear event scale, which measures such accidents and incidents, Kyshtym measures 6, on its own behind 7-rated Chernobyl and Fukishima, and ahead of Three Mile Island and Windscale/Sellafield.
WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENED?
ON September 29, 1957, a massive explosion took place at the Mayak (Russian for lighthouse) plutonium production site at Ozyorsk — its original name was Chelyabinsk-65 — near Kyshtym in Chelyabinsk Oblast on the east side of the Ural mountains. Mayak made the material for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons programme.
The plant had only been operational for a decade, and the Soviet scientists who designed it were basically making things up as they went along in terms of safety. There had been several accidents before the big one, and workers — who included forced labour — were convinced the plant was a death trap.
The radioactive waste from plutonium processing was stored in tanks which were supposed to be kept cool. One waste tank’s coolant system failed and it went undetected until the heat caused the 70 tons of waste, along with dry nitrate and acetate salts in the tank, to explode. The force of the explosion was later measured as the equivalent of 70 to 100 tons of TNT, about 10 times the size of the largest non-nuclear bomb in the Second World War.
Suffice to say it blew the lid off the waste tank, which itself weighed 160 tons, allowing the highly radioactive waste to spread high into the atmosphere.
An area of more than 20,000sq miles (50,000sq km) around the site was contaminated to a greater or lesser extent, though miraculously no-one was directly killed in the plant as a result of the explosion.
HOW SERIOUS WAS THE RADIATION LEAK?
THE contaminated zone was known as the East Urals Radioactive Trace, and some 250,000 people lived there, but only as few as 12,000 were evacuated from the area. They were never officially told why.
Local rivers and farmland were heavily contaminated and crops from the fields for many miles around were destroyed by local workers who had no protective clothing. The radioactive particles were carried on a north-east wind for about 10 hours, reaching some 200 miles from the scene of the explosion.
Everything below that plume was classed as contaminated, with the most common contamination being by deadly Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 — the former a radioactive isotope with a half life of 28 years and the latter with a half life of 30 years. Caesium-137, it should be noted, was the chief contaminant following both the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. Some 800sq km were officially classed as unusable for the next 30 years. A total of 22 villages were affected by serious contamination.
HOW MANY HAVE DIED?
ESTIMATES vary, but in the immediate aftermath, some 300 people died of radioactive poisoning.
Deaths from subsequent cancers number in the thousands.
The Soviet authorities made many people stay in their contaminated homes where they drank water from contaminated rivers. Some scientists think it was part of a giant experiment to see how a population would be affected. Cancer rates in the area are still five times greater than elsewhere in Russia, and genetic abnormalities at one point reached a 90 per cent level in live births near the site.
WHY HAVE WE NEVER HEARD OF IT?
THE Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev was a secret society, able to suppress all knowledge of the event, not least because Ozyorsk was a “closed city” that didn’t officially exist – it’s why the disaster has been named Kyshtym after the nearest town that did actually exist on maps.
Only when biologist and Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev published his account of the disaster in 1976 did anyone outside of the USSR learn what had happened. Only after the end of the Soviet Union was the disaster officially confirmed.
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