Mayak

For other uses, see Mayak (disambiguation).
Satellite image/map of the Mayak nuclear facility.

The Mayak Production Association (Russian: Производственное объединение «Маяк», from Маяк 'lighthouse') is one of the biggest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing plutonium production reactors and a reprocessing plant. The nuclear complex is located 150 km south-east of Ekaterinburg, between the towns of Kasli and Tatysh, and 72 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.[1]

In 1957 Mayak was the site of the Kyshtym disaster, one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. During this catastrophe, a poorly maintained storage tank exploded, releasing 50-100 tons of high-level radioactive waste. The resulting radioactive cloud contaminated more than 750 km2 (290 sq mi), contaminating an expansive territory in the eastern Urals and causing sickness and death from radiation poisoning.[2] The Soviet regime kept this accident secret for about 30 years. The event was eventually rated at 6 on the seven-level INES scale, third in severity only to the disasters at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan.[2]

Fissile Material Storage Facility (FMSF). Looking at administration building of the storage facility to include all the support facilities. Excavator is one of the pieces of construction equipment procured by the USACE.

Design and structure

Mayak's nuclear facility plant covers about 90 square kilometers. 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 minimize 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.[3]

The Mayak plant was built between 1945–48, in a great hurry and in total secrecy as part of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project. Five nuclear reactors were built to make, refine, and machine plutonium for weapons. Later the plant came to specialize in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. 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.

Nuclear history

In the early years of its operation, the Mayak plant released 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. 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 Techa River near the village Muslyumovo exceeds the permissible limit by 30 times.[2]

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. [2] 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 hard verification, and many who worked at the plant in 1950s and 1960s subsequently died from the effects of radiation.[4][5] While the situation has since improved, the administration of the Mayak plant has been repeatedly criticized in recent years by Greenpeace and other environmental advocates for environmentally unsound practices.

Kyshtym disaster

Main article: Kyshtym disaster
Fissile Material Storage Facility (FMSF). Looking at the south side of the main Administration Building and security building of the storage facility.

Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents.[6] 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.[7][8] Subsequently, an estimated 49 to 55 people died of radiation-induced cancer,[8] 66 were diagnosed with chronic radiation syndrome,[9] 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation.[2]

The Soviet Union did not release news of the accident and denied it happened for close to thirty years. However, 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 of the disaster by 1960.[10] This nuclear accident, the Soviet Union's worst before the Chernobyl disaster, is categorized 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 the 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."[11] "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."[12] 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 rumored.

According to Gyorgy,[13] 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."[11] Only in 1992, shortly after the fall of the USSR, did the Russians officially acknowledge the accident.

Other accidents

Fissile Material Storage Facility (FMSF). The building is the ventilation center of the storage facility. The ventilation tunnel showing in the north of the ventilation center.

In December 1968, the facility was experimenting with plutonium purification techniques. Two operators were using an "unfavorable geometry vessel in an improvised and unapproved operation as a temporary vessel for storing plutonium organic solution."[14] "Unfavorable 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.[15]

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.[7]

Major accidents at Mayak, 1953-2008:[16]

More recent major accidents:

See also

Looking at storage facility processing materials, controls, accountability, and fissile material container storage from south-west angle.

References

  1. ↑ Will Standring (2006). "Review of the current status and operations at Mayak Production Association" (PDF). Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Kyshtym Disaster". Nuclear-Heritage.net. 6 January 2014. Retrieved 25 October 2014.
  3. ↑ This section copied and translated from the German Wikipedia entry for "Mayak", with some grammatical errors corrected
  4. ↑ Koshurnikova, N.A.; Shilnikova, N.S.; Sokolnikov, M.E.; Bolotnikova, M.G.; Okatenko, P.V.; Kuznetsova, I.S.; Vasilenko, E.K.; Khokhryakov, V.F.; Kreslov, V.V. (2006). "Medical-dosimetry registry of workers at the 'Mayak' production association". International Journal of Low Radiation. Inderscience Publishers. 2 (3/4): 236–242. doi:10.1504/IJLR.2006.009516 (inactive 2015-02-01). Retrieved 6/01/2012. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
  5. ↑ Azizova, Tamara V.; Muirhead, Colin R.; Moseeva, Maria B.; Grigoryeva, Evgenia S.; Sumina, Margarita V.; O’Hagan, Jacqueline; Zhang, Wei; Haylock, Richard J. G. E.; Hunter, Nezahat (2011). "Cerebrovascular diseases in nuclear workers first employed at the Mayak PA in 1948–1972". Radiation and Environmental Biophysics. Springerlink. 50 (4): 539–552. doi:10.1007/s00411-011-0377-6. PMID 21874558. Retrieved 6/01/2012. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
  6. ↑ Larin, Vladislav (September–October 1999). "Mayak's walking wounded". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 55 (5): 20–27. doi:10.2968/055005008.
  7. 1 2 A report on the 1957 accident and on endemic radioactive pollution at Mayak
  8. 1 2 Standring, William J.F.; Dowdall, Mark and Strand, Per (2009). "Overview of Dose Assessment Developments and the Health of Riverside Residents Close to the "Mayak" PA Facilities, Russia". International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 6 (1): 174–199. doi:10.3390/ijerph6010174. ISSN 1660-4601. PMC 2672329Freely accessible. PMID 19440276. Retrieved 11 June 2012.
  9. ↑ Gusev, Igor A.; Gusʹkova, Angelina Konstantinovna; Mettler, Fred Albert (2001-03-28). Medical Management of Radiation Accidents. CRC Press. pp. 15–29. ISBN 978-0-8493-7004-5. Retrieved 2012-06-11.
  10. ↑ "The nuclear disaster of Kyshtym 1957 and the politics of the Cold War". Arcadia. Environment and Society. 2012. Retrieved 25 October 2014.
  11. 1 2 Pollock, Richard, 1978. "Soviets Experience Nuclear Accident," Critical Mass Journal 3 pp.7–8
  12. ↑ Zhores Medvedev, The Australian, 9.12.1976
  13. ↑ Gyorgy, A. et al., 1980. No Nukes: Everyone's Guide to Nuclear Power. South End Press ISBN 0-89608-006-4. pp. 13, 128
  14. ↑ McLaughlin et al. "A Review of Criticality Accidents" by Los Alamos National Laboratory (Report LA-13638), May 2000
  15. ↑ Glowing Georji: A 1994 Darwin Award nominee
  16. ↑ "Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation – 2008 Report to the General Assembly" (pdf). United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. 2011. |chapter= ignored (help)
  17. ↑ All of the above list transferred directly from the Russian Wikipedia entry for "Mayak". Translated and some grammatical errors corrected
  18. ↑ http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/nuke_industry/siberia/mayak/27922
  19. 1 2 http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2007/Mayak_leak
  20. ↑ http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2008/another_mayak_incident
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Coordinates: 55°42′45″N 60°50′53″E / 55.71250°N 60.84806°E / 55.71250; 60.84806

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