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Tuesday, 18.09.2007
The Mayak nuclear disaster: 50 years on
André Ballin, Moscow. Chernobyl became a household name. But fifty years ago in the Soviet Union, there was another nuclear disaster that is rarely remembered today. The disaster of Mayak was kept secret until 1989.
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29th September, 1957. It was early autumn, but on this Sunday in Osyorsk, about 100km north of the city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals region, the weather was sunny and warm. Men and women were enjoying the weekend, children bathing in the river.
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Suddenly a huge explosion shattered the calm. “Following the explosion, a mile-high column of smoke and dust shot up, the dust glowed red-orange and settled on rooves and on people,” an eyewitness recalls. Still no one realised that one of the 20th century’s worst nuclear accidents had just taken place.
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Stalin founded the Mayak plant to build atom bombs
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The Mayak chemical plant, of which the town of Ozyorsk was an offshoot, was built in the Urals regions on Stalin’s orders to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
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It had achieved this by 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb.
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The whole time the plant was dumping nuclear waste in the river. The population knew nothing this. Most people used the river not just for their cattle, but also as drinking water. Many must have been contaminated with radioactivity long before the accident took place.
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Spark ignites 80 tonnes of nuclear waste
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The waste water with greatest radioactivity, however, was kept underground in concrete tanks that generated enormous heat and had to be constantly cooled.
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The cooling system broke down, and the catastrophe was only a matter of time. A spark triggered the explosion, which released 80 tonnes of nuclear waste at one fell swoop.
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Half as much radioactivity as at Chernobyl
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“About 20 million curie was released, about half the size of the Chernobyl disaster,” explained nuclear expert Vladimir Kuznetsov. A radioactive cloud left a swathe of contamination running hundreds of kilometres through the Urals.
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It was only ten hours after the accident that a clear-up operation was launched. The local authorities were obviously waiting for a signal from Moscow. The consequences of the delay were catastrophic. It left an area as large as the state of Maine contaminated.
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“Like the end of the world“ – Scenes from the apocalypse
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Several months after the accident, Doctor Nina Afonina was stationed in the area. “The people in the contaminated zone were failing and dying. Especially children were dying,” Doctor Afonina remembered in a recent interview with the Russian weekly AiF. Many of the young victims could no longer stand, their hair had fallen out and they were wasting away.
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“I now know what the apocalypse looks like,“ said Afonina. “It is dozens of bleeding and dying children whom you cannot help.“ The doctor is now also suffering the consequences of the months she spent back then in the Urals. She is sick with cancer and wheelchair-bound.
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Strict secrecy multiplied the number of victims
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The authorities kept the cause of the sickness secret. The locals were forbidden to use water from the river, but no one explained why. For lack of any alternative, some locals ignored the warnings and were contaminated.
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In the course of the following years, 10,000 people were evacuated, 217 settlements were abandoned. The real scale of the disaster is not known to this day.
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First information 20 years later – in the West
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20 years later, the first information about the disaster appeared in the West. Zhores Medvedev, a biologist expelled from the Soviet Union, publicised it in his book “Nuclear Disaster in the Urals” - and met with disbelief and denial. It was only in 1989 that the USSR finally admitted that the accident had indeed taken place.
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Longterm effects still take their toll
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“Even today people are dying from the long-term effects,“ says Kuznetzov. Mayak is also still used by the Russian nuclear sector. The military produces nuclear material there, and the plant also processes nuclear waste.
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Has Russia learnt from the Mayak accident? Kusnetzov does not think so. The last federal nuclear security programme, he says, expired in 2006. ”Only 12% of the programme was actually funded,” he maintains, and therefore many control mechanisms were never implemented.
(ab/epd/.rufo/Moscow)
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