Written by: Sauharda Bajracharya - 26010, Grade VIII
Posted on: 01 October, 2021
It was 1957 in Central Russia, villagers near the Ural mountains were scared. Government men had came to the village from nowhere. They were ordered to leave their home and their home was burnt down. Their crops were destroyed, animals were slaughtered. They were confused, but it was not just their village. It was everyone’s village in the area. Some of the people there looked ill, but they were just told that there was an outbreak of a disease. They were confused about the disease and what caused it? Was it the river, was it the lake or was it the strange lights in the sky that people had seen not a long time ago. This happened in 1957, but this had started 12 years ago.
In Hiroshima August 6th 1945, the United States had dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II. 3 days later in Nagasaki, the United States dropped another nuclear bomb. Hearing this on the news, Joseph Stalin(Leader of the Soviet Union) felt threatened. Stalin learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and launchned the Soviet Nuclear program. This program was done near the Ural mountains where they made the first ever plutonium plant named Mayak. 70,000 gulag inmates were forced to build the nuclear facility. And eventually, they made 7 nuclear reactors near the lake Kyzyltash. They made their first bomb named First Lightning and detonated it in 1949. After this, a city named Chelyabinsk-40 was built where all the scientists with their family could live. This was a hidden project and the city with over 100,000 people was never shown on the map. The residents there were not allowed to leave the place. But, the idea of the hidden city was stolen from the United States similar to the Hanford project. But, the Soviet scientist had a lack of knowledge in developing plutonium. They were handling plutonium with their bare hands and they were taking the water to cool the reactors from Lake Kyzyltash and the Techa river. But, the water was directly supplied into the open reactor core and was sent back to the lake. The same lake where children used to swim, where people got their drinking water from. But there was an even bigger problem, and it was the Mayak’s storage system. They had nowhere to store the nuclear waste. So, what did they do? They dumped all the nuclear waste into the nearby water sources. The surrounding lakes and rivers became highly toxic, and Lake Irtyash in particular had so much radioactive waste that it was called the Plutonium Lake or the Lake of Death. But this isn’t even the most toxic lake, Lake Karachay or Lake Karachay is an even deadlier lake. This lake was highly used for dumping all the nuclear waste and large amounts of radioactive materials were released into the lake. With all this dumping, the people at Mayak started neglecting the underground storage tank. Due to all the radioactivity, the waste started heating itself and the cooling system couldn’t handle this. On September 29th, 1957 a tank containing 80 tons of radioactive materials exploded. 90% of the radiation got deposited in the city and the surrounding area of Mayak. Meanwhile the 10% of the radioactive materials formed a cloud which drifted for 10 hours across north east russia. This caused contamination and this was called the Kyshtym disaster, one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. This was a level 6 accident whilst Chernobyl was a level 7 accident.
The Kyshtym disaster was ranked at number 3 in the worst nuclear accidents in history, behind Fukushima and Chernobyl. But, the number of radiation sickness caused by this accident was 3 times more than of Chernobyl. Due to the project and the city being a secret, the villages around the area were only informed a week later and the soldiers had used the term disease for an excuse, it was actually radiation poisoning. More than half a million people were affected by the radiation. But, what happened after? By the 1960s the lake started drying and the Soviet’s thought it was a good sign but it was just another disaster. The toxic water was in contact with direct sunlight which made the liquid into a radioactive gas. And all that was left was wind to take the gas to contaminate even more people. And a windstorm occurred which irradiated another half a million people. But then the Soviets had enough and buried the lake in 10,000 concrete blocks. But it was only until 1989 that the world found out about the Mayak Project, Techa river, Lake Karachay and the secret city.
