Thirty years before the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, another incident occurred at a Soviet nuclear plant that was concealed by authorities for over three decades.
The accident took place at Mayak, one of Russia’s largest nuclear facilities, located near the town of Kyshtym in the Chelyabinsk region of the Southern Ural Mountains, according to Amusing Planet. This facility was constructed shortly after the end of World War II and served as the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear program. Its primary goal was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Dangerous radiation warning sign on the Techa River. (Photo: Wikimedia).
The Mayak Plant was hastily constructed in 1948. Mayak houses Russia’s largest nuclear reactor. The facility covers an area of over 90 km², surrounded by a 250 km² exclusion zone. This site is as large as a city, yet its existence was kept secret.
From the very beginning, Mayak was a hazardous facility. Authorities neglected the safety of workers and the responsibility for waste management. Radioactive waste generated from used nuclear materials was stored underground, but when the area ran out of space, instead of halting production until a new storage site could be built, high-radiation materials were dumped directly into the slow-flowing Techa River. Over 100,000 people living downstream relied on this water source. Additionally, reactors were cooled using water from Lake Kyzyltash in an open-loop cooling system. Contaminated water was discharged directly back into the lake. Within a few years, the countryside and all surrounding waters near Mayak were heavily polluted.
Inadequate safety protocols led to several deadly accidents. The first recorded accident occurred in 1953 but went unnoticed until a worker suffered severe radiation exposure, resulting in the amputation of both legs. The most notable incident, known as the “Kyshtym Disaster”, happened on September 29, 1957, when the cooling system of one of the waste storage tanks malfunctioned without timely detection. The tank exploded with a force equivalent to about 70 tons of TNT. Although there were no immediate casualties from the explosion, the impact sent a plume of radioactive dust soaring into the sky to a height of one kilometer.
That afternoon, residents in the Chelyabinsk region observed unusual colors in the sky. Local newspapers speculated it was the aurora borealis. Due to the secrecy surrounding Mayak, villagers were not informed about the accident. In the following days, the radioactive cloud drifted northeast for hundreds of kilometers, contaminating an area of 15,000 to 20,000 km² and threatening the lives of 270,000 people. Evacuations of the nearest residents began a week later. The public was not informed about what had happened; they were merely asked to pack their belongings and leave. Only about 10,000 people were evacuated over a two-year period.
News of the accident began to surface in the Western press in 1958. In 1959, the story appeared again in an Austrian newspaper. However, Soviet officials denied the occurrence of the accident. The incident only became clear in 1976 when Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet biologist who had been exiled, published a series of articles about the disaster in New Scientist. The information provided by Medvedev was corroborated by the accounts of Lev Tumerman, a Soviet scientist who passed through the contaminated area in 1960.
The actual death toll from the Kyshtym disaster is difficult to assess, partly due to the secrecy and partly because the Mayak facility had polluted the area by discharging large amounts of radioactive waste into the environment for many years. According to Medvedev, the Kyshtym disaster was worse than Chernobyl due to the release of larger amounts of long-lived radioactive strontium-90 than were released during the Chernobyl incident. Rates of cancer, congenital disabilities, and many other serious health issues remain high among residents of the region to this day.
