Mayak

The Mayak Production Association (, , from 'lighthouse') is one of the biggest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing 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 1945–48, in a great hurry and in secrecy as part of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project. Over 40,000 Gulag prisoners and POWs built the factory and the closed nuclear city of Ozersk, called at the time by its classified postal code "Forty". Five (today closed) nuclear reactors were built to produce plutonium which was refined and machined for weapons. Later the plant came to specialise in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors and plutonium from decommissioned weapons.
Once production began, engineers quickly ran out of underground space for storage of high-level radioactive waste. Rather than cease production of plutonium until new underground waste storage tanks could be built, between 1949 and 1951 Soviet managers dumped 76 million cubic meters of toxic chemicals including 3.2 million curies of high-level radioactive waste into the Techa River, a slow-moving hydraulic system that bogs down in swamps and lakes. 
As many as 40 villages, with a combined population of about 28,000, lined the river at the time. For 24 of them, the Techa was a major source of water; 23 of them were eventually evacuated. In the 45 years afterwards, about half a million people in the region have been irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to up to 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl disaster victims outside of the plant itself.
Investigators in 1951 found communities along the river highly contaminated. On discovery, soldiers immediately evacuated the first downriver village of Metlino, population 1,200, where radiation levels measured 3.5–5 rads/hr (35–50 mGy/hr or 10–14 μGy/s). At that dose, people could get a lifetime external dose in less than a week. During the following decade, ten additional communities were resettled from the river, but the largest community, Muslumovo, remained. Researchers investigated residents of Muslumovo annually in what has become a four-generation living experiment of people living among chronic, low doses of radioactivity. Blood samples showed its villagers took in caesium-137, ruthenium-106, strontium-90, and iodine-131, internally and externally. These isotopes had deposited in organs, flesh and bone marrow. Villagers complained of a range of illnesses and symptoms—chronic fatigue, sleep and fertility problems, weight loss and increased hypertension. The frequency of birth defects and complications at birth were up to three times greater than normal. In 1953, doctors examined 587 of 28,000 exposed people and found that 200 had clear cases of radiation poisoning.
In 1957 Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster, which at the time was the worst nuclear accident in history. During this catastrophe, a poorly maintained storage tank exploded, releasing 20 million curies (740 PBq) in the form of 50–100 tons of high-level radioactive waste. The resulting radioactive cloud contaminated an expansive territory of more than (a nine-mile radius) in the eastern Urals, causing sickness and death from radiation poisoning.
The Soviet regime kept this accident secret for about 30 years. It is rated at 6 on the seven-level INES scale. It is third in severity, surpassed only by Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan.
Mayak is still active , and it serves as a reprocessing site for spent nuclear fuel. Today the plant makes tritium and radioisotopes, not plutonium. In recent years, proposals that the plant reprocess waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise to controversy.
An incompletely reported accident appears to have occurred in September 2017; see Airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017.
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 (formerly Soviet) 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 90 square kilometres. 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 ~250 km2 exclusion zone. Nearby is the site of the South Urals nuclear power plant.
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 Lavrenti 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 (see Pollution of Lake Karachay). 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 (as well as a large swath of territory to the northeast). 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 (including several lakes and the Techa River, along which many villages lay).
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 (non-nuclear) explosion having an energy estimated at about 75 tons of TNT (310 gigajoules). This released 740 PBq (20 MCi) of fission products, of which 74 PBq (2 MCi) drifted off the site, creating a contaminated region of 15,000–20,000 km2 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 (CIA) 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.
1968 Criticality Incident.
In December 1968, the facility was experimenting with plutonium purification techniques. Two operators were using an "unfavourable geometry vessel in an improvised and unapproved operation as a temporary vessel for storing plutonium organic solution." "Unfavourable geometry" means that the vessel was too compact, reducing the amount of plutonium needed to achieve a critical mass to less than the amount present. After most of the solution had been poured out, there was a flash of light and heat. After the complex had been evacuated, the shift supervisor and radiation control supervisor re-entered the building. The shift supervisor then entered the room of the incident, caused another, larger nuclear reaction and irradiated himself with a deadly dose of radiation. This tale has since made its way into popular culture, being found in the website DarwinAwards.com.
2017 radiation release.
Abnormally high levels of radiation were reported in the area of the facility in November 2017. Simultaneously, traces of radioactive manmade isotope Ruthenium-106 spread across Europe in September and October. Such a release had not been seen on a continental scale since the Chernobyl accident. In January 2018, the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) reported that the source of the contamination is located in the Volga – Southern Ural region between 25 and 28 September for a duration of less than 24 hours. The report excludes the possibility of an accidental release from a nuclear reactor, stating that it seems related with irradiated fuels processing or the production of sources from fission products solution. It may point to Mayak's aborted attempt to manufacture a capsule of highly radioactive component cerium-144, for the SOX project in Italy. For now both the Russian government and Rosatom have denied that another accidental leak took place at Mayak. The release of a cloud of ruthenium-106 is similar to the B205 reprocessing accident in Britain in 1973. 
Environmental impact.
In the early years of its operation, the Mayak plant directly discharged high-level nuclear waste into several small lakes near the plant, and into the Techa River, whose waters ultimately flow into the Ob River. Mayak continues to dump low-level radioactive waste directly into the Techa River today. Medium level waste is discharged into the Karachay Lake. According to the data of the Department of Natural Resources in the Ural Region, in the year 2000, more than 250 million m³ of water containing thousands of curies of tritium, strontium, and cesium-137 were discharged into the Techa River. The tritium concentration alone in the river near the village of Muslyumovo exceeds the permissible limit by 30 times.
Rosatom, a state-owned nuclear operations corporation, began to resettle residents of Muslyumovo in 2006. However, only half of the residents of the village were moved.  People continue to live in the immediate area of the plant, including Ozersk and other downstream areas. Residents report no problems with their health and the health of Mayak plant workers. However, these claims lack verification, and many who worked at the plant in 1950s and 1960s subsequently died from the effects of radiation. The administration of the Mayak plant has been repeatedly criticized in recent years by Greenpeace and other environmental advocates for environmentally unsound practices.
List of accidents.
The Mayak plant is associated with two other major nuclear accidents. The first occurred as a result of heavy rains causing Lake Karachay, a dried-up radioactively polluted lake (used as a dumping basin for Mayak's radioactive waste since 1951), to release radioactive material into surrounding waters. The second occurred in 1967 when wind spread dust from the bottom of Lake Karachay over parts of Ozersk; over 400,000 people were irradiated..
Major accidents at Mayak, 1953–1998.
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