Mayak Production Association Facility accidents, Karachay Lake accident and Kyshtym disaster!

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Kyshtym mountain — Mount Yegoza (607 meters), one of the mountains in the lowly populated rural area surrounding Kyshtym in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia.

For the Russian documentary film about the place see: City 40.

The location[]

The Mayak Production Association (Russian: Производственное объединение «Маяк», Proizvodstvennoye ob′yedineniye "Mayak", from Маяк 'lighthouse') facility is one of the largest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing production reactors (non electricity) and a reprocessing plant. It was a 'closed location' to all outsiders. The closest settlements are Ozyorsk (AKA: City-40, Chelyabinsk-65, and even earlier, as Chelyabinsk-40) to the northwest and Novogornyi to the south. The nuclear complex is 150 km south of Ekaterinburg, between the towns of Kasli and Tatysh, and 100 km northwest of Chelyabinsk. The closest city, Ozyorsk, is the central administrative territorial district. As part of the Russian (formerly Soviet) nuclear weapons program, Mayak was formerly known as Chelyabinsk-40 and later as Chelyabinsk-65, referring to the postal codes of the site. It was built near the Techa river.

Lavrentiy Beria led the Soviet atomic bomb project and directed the construction of the Mayak plutonium plant in the Southern Urals between 1945 and 1948, using over 40,000 gulag prisoners and WW2 POWs.

Kyshtym, just outside Mayak in the Ural Mountains region. The Mayak plant was built in haste between 1945 and 1948 and Soviet scantiest then knew little about nuclear technology back then! The Kyshtym (Urals Mountains) disaster is known by several names including East-Ural Radioactive Trace, Kyshtym disaster, Urals Mountains disaster, Mayak disaster, Ozyorsk disaster and the 1957 Soviet atomic disaster.

There was also the near by Karachay Lake disaster in 1967 as well.

The incidents[]

Some atomic incidents[]

The reactor was the centre of several acts of moral turpitude, corporate misfeasance, possible corporate crime and corruption. This era was victim of a marked increase in such incidents at the plant.

Among the atomic related incidents cited by the NRC and other bodies:

13 October 1955 – Rupture of process equipment and the destruction of a process building.
21 April 1957 – Criticality accident. One operator died from receiving over 3000 rad. Five others received doses of 300 to 1,000 rem and temporarily became sick with radiation poisoning.
2 January 1958 – Criticality accident in SCR plant. Plant workers conducted experiments to determine the critical mass of enriched uranium in a cylindrical container with different concentrations of uranium in solution. Personnel received doses from 7600 to 13,000 rem, resulting in three deaths and one case of blindness caused by radiation sickness.
11 February 1976 – Unsafe actions of staff development at the radiochemical plant caused an autocatalytic reaction of concentrated nitric acid and organic liquid complex composition. The device exploded, contaminating the repair zone and areas around the plant. The incident merited an International Nuclear Event Scale rating of 3.
17 July 1993 – Accident at radioisotope plant, resulting in the destruction of the absorption column and release into the environment of a small amount of α-aerosols. Radiation emission was localised at the manufacturing facility of the shop.
27 December 1993 – Incident at radioisotope plant where the replacement of a filter resulted in the release into the atmosphere of radioactive aerosols. Emissions were on the α-activity of 0.033 Ci, and β-activity of 0.36 mCi.
31 August 1994 – Registered an increased release of radionuclides to the atmospheric pipe building reprocessing plant (238.8 mCi, with the share of Cs-137 was 4.36% of the annual emission limit of this radionuclide). The reason for the release of radionuclides was depressurisation of VVER-440 fuel elements during the operation segments idle all SFA (spent fuel assemblies) as a result of an uncontrollable arc.
24 March 1995 – Recorded excess of 19% of normal loading apparatus plutonium, which can be regarded as a dangerous nuclear incident.
15 September 1995 – High-level liquid radioactive waste (LRW) was found in flow of cooling water. Operation of a furnace into the regulatory regime has been discontinued.
20 November 1996 – A chemical-metallurgical plant in the works on the electrical exhaust fan caused aerosol release of radionuclides into the atmosphere, which made up 10% of the allowed annual emissions of the plant.
6 October 1997 – Recorded increasing radioactivity in the assembly building, the RT-1. Measurement of the exposure dose indicated up to 300 mR/s.
In 2003, the plant's operating licence was revoked temporarily due to liquid radioactive waste handling procedures resulting in waste being disposed into open water.
In June 2007, an accident involving a radioactive pulp occurred over a two-day period.
In September 2017, possible association with the airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017. Russia confirms 'extremely high' readings of radioactive pollution in Argayash, a village in the Chelyabinsk region of the southern Urals. Argayash is located 10 miles south of the Mayak plant. In January 2018, the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) reported that Mayak could be the cause of the contamination. The radioactivity was due to Ru-106 indicating release from a late stage in the reprocessing (i.e. after the Ru-106 had been separated from other isotopes).

Some non-atomic incidents[]

10 February 1984 – Explosion.
16 November 1990 – Explosion. Two people received burns and one was killed.

Other safety issues[]

It is reckoned that that the place was a death hole in the 1990s.,

The 1957 atomic accident[]

It was a major event that the military plant poisoned a large part of the local landscape for the next few years. A cooling system failed the waste reprocessing facility caused a liquid waste storage container exploded. The sudden steam explosion with a blast force equivalent to 70-100 tons of TNT. About 70 to 80 metric tons of highly radioactive material were carried into the surrounding environment and after 10 hours radioactive cloud spread over the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen Oblasts over 23,000 km².

The impact on local population is still not fully known, but at least 22 villages were reported as being affected with deadly doses. 200 people died of excessive cancers in the region and several towns and villages were abandoned for decades and in a few cases for ever. It was a Level 6 INES Scale event.

The British Windscale reactor fire happened in the same year and that plant would also be hit by 5 Sellafield incidents over time. The Chernobyl disaster was the USSR's worst atomic accident.

The 1967 atomic accident[]

Karachay Lake which lay on the territory of the Mayak facility was used for open-air storage of radioactive liquids radioactive wastes. As a result an area of approximately 1,800 km² was contaminated with radionuclides and silt were whipped in to the air as a strong wind crossed the banks of the shallow lake. The same victim area got a second radioactive contamination hit.

It has no official INES rating, but it was probably a Level 6 INES Scale event.

East/West diplomacy[]

Both the USA and USSR were scared witless by both the 1957 incident and the later 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash, so they held a diplomatic and scientific summit on atomic power station safety, atomic waste storage safety, nuclear weapons safety and post-atomic disaster co-operation later in 1961.