Mayak Plutonium plant Soviet atomic bomb project
Once a secretive city Chelyabinsk-65 situates near the Mayak plutonium factory. Russian authorities want to find out how many people aged over 65 survived—the surrounding area was damaged by radioactivity. According to the last official statement, 1000 people dead. But Russian experts estimate the number to be much higher. The clarification takes a long time.
Rare footage inside the Mayak Nuclear Plant facility in Russia, former USSR.
The East Ural Reserve is the only reserve in Russia that was created not to protect natural objects from human activities, but to protect people themselves from nature. More precisely, not from nature itself, but from the radiation that the plants and animals of this territory have absorbed. There are only two such reserves in the world – East Ural and Polessky in Belarus. Both of them were created after the largest radiation disasters: one, well-known to everyone, occurred in Chernobyl, the second – at the Mayak chemical plant in the Chelyabinsk region.
The Security Service of Ukraine has declassified part of the KGB documents on the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP). It follows that accidents at the facility occurred before 1986.
Mayak Plutonium plant, Soviet atomic bomb project
In 1957, at the Mayak chemical plant in the city of Chelyabinsk-40, modern Ozersk, a container with radioactive waste with a volume of 300 cubic meters exploded. As a result of the explosion, not only the Chelyabinsk, but also the Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions were under the radiation cloud. The total area of infection was 23 thousand square kilometres. It is interesting that Chelyabinsk-40 itself was not affected – most of the radiation (90%) settled on the Mayak territory, and the rest went further in the region.
Approximately a week after the radioactive cloud, the soviet government ordered to abandon 23 villages and relocate 12 thousand people. Moreover, the liquidators demolished all buildings and destroyed all livestock.
