Mayak
The Mayak Production Association is one of the largest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing production reactors and a reprocessing plant. The closest settlements are Ozyorsk to the northwest and Novogornyi to the south.
Lavrentiy Beria led the Soviet atomic bomb project. He directed the construction of the Mayak plutonium plant in the Southern Urals between 1945 and 1948, in a great hurry and secrecy as part of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project. The plant had a similar purpose to the Hanford Site of the Manhattan Project. Over 40,000 gulag prisoners and POWs built the factory and the closed nuclear city of Ozyorsk, called at the time by its classified postal code "Chelyabinsk-40". The first reactor, A-1, operated from 1948 and fuelled the first nuclear test RDS-1 in 1949. During the Cold War, 10 nuclear reactors were constructed, with a combined power of 7,333 MWth. Of these, four were used for plutonium production, yielding 31 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, out of the Soviet Union's all-time production of 145 tons. The other six reactors primarily produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. In 1990, weapons-grade plutonium production was ceased.
, Mayak is still active, with two reactors in operation at 1,900 MWth. Today the plant primarily produces tritium for domestic weapons maintenance, and plutonium-238, used by many space programs for radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Many other radioisotopes are commercially sold worldwide, including,,,,,,. Polonium-210 produced at Mayak was reportedly used in the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. It also reprocesses the spent nuclear fuel from civilian reactors, and manages plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons. In recent years, proposals that the plant reprocess waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise to controversy.
The site has had many radiation accidents and radioactive contamination. In 1949–1951, 76 million m3 of toxic chemicals and 3.2 million curies of radioactive waste were released into the Techa river. In 1957, the Kyshtym disaster occurred at Mayak, releasing 20 million curies in a radioactive cloud across the eastern Urals. It was the worst nuclear accident in history until the Chernobyl disaster, and is still the third most severe. Mayak is also widely suspected to be the source of the ~200 TBq airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017. Between the first two accidents, 38,000 people were evacuated. Many other communities remained exposed, suffering long-term effects of radiation poisoning.
Location
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 nuclear weapons program, Mayak was formerly known as Chelyabinsk-40 and later as Chelyabinsk-65, referring to the postal codes of the site.Design and structure
Mayak's nuclear facility plant covers about. The site borders Ozyorsk, in which a majority of the staff of Mayak live. Mayak itself was not shown on Soviet public maps. The location of the site together with the plant city was chosen to minimise the effects that harmful emissions could potentially have on populated areas. Mayak is surrounded by a ~ exclusion zone. Nearby is the site of the South Urals nuclear power plant.Reactors
| Reactor name | Design power | Upgraded power | Began operation | Shut down | Total plutonium | Design | Coolant circuit |
| A | 100 | 900 | 19 June 1948 | 16 June 1987 | 6.138 | LWGR | Single-pass |
| AV-1 | 300 | 1200 | 5 April 1950 | 12 August 1989 | 8.508 | LWGR | Single-pass |
| AV-2 | 300 | 1200 | 6 April 1951 | 14 July 1990 | 8.407 | LWGR | Single-pass |
| AV-3 | 300 | 1200 | 15 September 1952 | 1 November 1990 | 7.822 | LWGR | Single-pass |
| AI-IR | 40 | 100 | 22 December 1952 | 25 May 1987 | 0.053 | LWGR | Single-pass |
| OK-180 | 100 | 233 | 17 October 1951 | 3 March 1966 | 0 | HWR | Closed-circuit |
| OK-190 | 300 | 300 | 27 December 1955 | 8 November 1965 | 0 | HWR | Closed-circuit |
| OK-190M | 300 | 300 | 16 April 1966 | 16 April 1986 | 0 | HWR | Closed-circuit |
| LF-2 "Ludmila" | 800 | 800 | May 1988 | In operation | 0 | HWR | Closed-circuit |
| "Ruslan" | 800 | 1100 | 12 June 1979 | In operation | 0 | LWR | Closed-circuit |
History
Built in total secrecy between 1945 and 1948, the Mayak plant was the first reactor used to create plutonium for the Soviet atomic bomb project. In accordance with Stalinist procedure and supervised by NKVD Chief Lavrentiy Beria, it was the utmost priority to produce enough weapons-grade material to match the U.S. nuclear superiority following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Little to no consideration was paid to worker safety or responsible disposal of waste materials, and the reactors were all optimised for plutonium production, producing many tons of contaminated materials and utilising primitive open-cycle cooling systems which directly contaminated the thousands of gallons of cooling water the reactors used every day.Lake Kyzyltash was the largest natural lake capable of providing cooling water to the reactors; it was rapidly contaminated via the open-cycle system. The closer Lake Karachay, too small to provide sufficient cooling water, was used as a dumping ground for large quantities of high-level radioactive waste too "hot" to store in the facility's underground storage vats. The original plan was to use the lake to store highly radioactive material until it could be returned to the Mayak facility's underground concrete storage vats, but this proved impossible due to the lethal levels of radioactivity. The lake was used for this purpose until the Kyshtym Disaster in 1957, in which the underground vats exploded due to a faulty cooling system. This incident caused widespread contamination of the entire Mayak area. This led to greater caution among the administration, fearing international attention, and caused the dumping grounds to be spread out over a variety of areas.
Kyshtym disaster
Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents. 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 chemical explosion having an energy estimated at 75 tons of TNT. This released 740 PBq of fission products, of which 74 PBq drifted off the site, creating a contaminated region of called the East Urals Radioactive trace. Subsequently, an estimated 49 to 55 people died of radiation-induced cancer, 66 were diagnosed with chronic radiation syndrome, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation.The Soviet Union did not release news of the accident and denied it happened for nearly 30 years. Residents of Chelyabinsk district in the Southern Urals reported observing "polar-lights" in the sky near the plant, and American aerial spy photos had documented the destruction caused by the disaster by 1960. This nuclear accident, the Soviet Union's worst before the Chernobyl disaster, is categorised as a Level 6 "Serious Accident" on the 0–7 International Nuclear Events Scale.
When Zhores Medvedev exposed the disaster in a 1976 article in New Scientist, some exaggerated claims circulated in the absence of any verifiable information from the Soviet Union. People "grew hysterical with fear with the incidence of unknown 'mysterious' diseases breaking out. Victims were seen with skin 'sloughing off' their faces, hands and other exposed parts of their bodies." As Zhores wrote, "Hundreds of square miles were left barren and unusable for decades and maybe centuries. Hundreds of people died, thousands were injured and surrounding areas were evacuated." Professor Leo Tumerman, former head of the Biophysics Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow, disclosed what he knew of the accident around the same time. Russian documents gradually declassified from 1989 onward show the true events were less severe than rumoured.
According to Gyorgy, who invoked the Freedom of Information Act to open up the relevant Central Intelligence Agency files, the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling US 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." Only in 1992, shortly after the fall of the USSR, did the Russians officially acknowledge the accident.