THE’Majak nuclear accidentalso known as Kyshtym accidentis the third more serious never recorded in history after Chernobyl and Fukushima. Despite the gravity of the event, this disaster was covered for decades by military secrecy, so much so that in the West only thirty years later. The September 29, 1957 in fact an explosion occurred in a tank storage of radioactive waste at the nuclear complex Majak Production Association in Chelyabinsk, Kyshtym area of the former Soviet Union. The event released a huge amount of radioactive material into the area, contaminating an area inhabited by 270 thousand people and being classified with the 6 level on the INES scale of nuclear accidents – the maximum value of which is 7. To date we do not know the exact number of victims, although witnesses from the time speak of hundreds of deaths per dayespecially in the first period.
The Majak nuclear complex: design and construction
The protagonist of our story is the Mayak Production Association (PA) nuclear complexone of the main reprocessing centers of spent nuclear fuel during the Cold War. The heart of this facility – built in 1945 and inaugurated in 1948 to counter the rivalry of the United States – is the deposit in which the material was stored waiting to be processed: it was a metal tank from the volume of 300 m3buried and covered with a thick layer of concrete. The tanks were water cooled and contained on average 80 m3 of radioactive material, often in the form of nitrates.

The causes of the 1957 accident
The September 29, 1957 at 4.20pm a occurred malfunction to the temperature control system of tank number 14, although it is not clear whether it was a technical failure or a operator error. The point is that all of a sudden the provision ofcooling water became insufficient and, as a result, the temperature rose uncontrollably, heating the nitrates within it up to 330-350°C and leading to a explosion. Do you think that above the tank there was a “cover” from 560 tonson which a further layer of soil two meters thick was spread: despite these measures, the explosion was so violent as to uncover the deposit and consequently disperse radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Subsequently published studies showed that most of this fell in the form of particles in an area approximately large 10km around the plant, although the plume of aerosol formed appears to have traveled to cover an area of 23 thousand km² in which they lived approximately 270 thousand people.

The Soviet Union’s response
Once the news was learned, the Government began to understand what to do to limit the damage… even if the solutions adopted were not very timely: the inhabitants of the three settlements closest to the center (Berdyanish, Satlykovo and Galikaeva) were evacuated between 7 and 14 after the accident. Everyone living in the area was given a choice: a new home or 1 million rubles – equivalent at the time to approx 30 thousand euros currently. Both alternatives were handled in a very questionable manner:
- most of the people who asked for money they only saw a small part of it;
- those who chose the new house were barely relocated 2km aheadalways within the contaminated area, in that settlement which will subsequently take the name of Noveye Muslyumovo.
To date, those who live in the area receive the equivalent of $8.50 of state subsidies, to which are added $6.80 for the purchase of medicines. For those wondering, the system Majak it is still in operation and according to various environmental associations, large quantities of contaminated material are still present in the Techa river which flows next to the plant.