Mayak

Mayak is the name of a Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plant between the towns of Kasli and Kyshtym (also Transliterated ''Kishtym'' or ''Kishtim'') 150 km northwest of Chelyabinsk in Russia . The plant is in the Ozersk central administrative territorial unit, formerly known as Chelyabinsk-40, later as Chelyabinsk-65, and part of the Chelyabinsk Oblast .

NUCLEAR HISTORY

The Mayak plant was built in 1945-48, in a great hurry and in total secrecy, as part of the Soviet Union 's Cold War Nuclear program. The plant's original mission was to make, refine, and machine Plutonium for weapons. Five nuclear reactors were built for this purpose. Later the plant came to specialize in reprocessing plutonium from decommissioned weapons, and waste from Nuclear Reactor s. Today the plant makes Tritium and Radioisotope s, but no plutonium. In recent years, proposals that the plant reprocess, for money, waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise to controversy.

In the early years of its operation, the Mayak plant released vast quantities of radioactively contaminated water into several small lakes near the plant, and into the Techa river, whose waters ultimately flow into the Ob River . The downstream consequences of this radiation pollution have yet to be determined. Some residents of Ozersk claim that living there now (2006) poses no risk, because of the decrease in the ambient radiation level over the past 50 years. They also report no problems with their health and the health of Mayak plant workers. These claims lack hard verification, and no one denies that many who worked at the plant in 1950s and 60s subsequently died of the effects of radiation. While the situation has since improved, the administration of the Mayak plant has been repeatedly criticized in recent years for environmentally unsound practices.

THE 1957 ACCIDENT

Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents {Link without Title} .The most notable accident occurred on 29 September 1957, when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion having a force estimated at about 75 tons of , ''The Australian'', 9.12.1976). This nuclear accident, the Soviet Union 's worst other than Chernobyl , is categorised as a level 6 "serious accident" on the 7 point International Nuclear Events Scale .

Russians driving through the area in the 1960s and later found a deserted region where road signs ordered cars to close their windows and not stop for any reason (these directives may still be in force). Russians then relayed this information to Western contacts, and thus Western intelligence agencies came to know of this region. Hence that something had gone wrong in the nuclear way, somewhere in the vicinity of Chelyabinsk, was long suspected in certain Western circles. That there had been a serious nuclear accident west of the Urals was eventually inferred from research on the effects of radioactivity on plants, animals, and ecosystems, published by Professor Leo Tumerman, former head of the Biophysics Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow, and associates.

According to Gyorgy (1979: 128), who invoked the Freedom Of Information Act to open up the relevant Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files, the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident all along, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling USA nuclear industry. "Ralph Nader surmised that the information had not been released because of the reluctance of the CIA to highlight a nuclear accident in the USSR, that could cause concern among people living near nuclear facilities in the USA" (Pollock 1978: 9). This was senseless posturing by Nader, however, since the matter had been written up in western scientific journals in the 60s, and anyone who wanted to know about it could easily have found out about it. Only in 1992, shortly after the fall of the USSR, did the Russians officially acknowledge the accident.

The Mayak plant is associated with two other major nuclear accidents. The second occurred as a result of heavy rains causing a lake polluted with radioactive wastes to overflow into the Techa River . The third occurred when wind spread dust from the bottom of a dried-up radioactively polluted lake over parts of Ozersk . {Link without Title}

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