Ресейдегі ядролық қайта өңдеу зауыты және Теша өзенінің ластануы

Nuclear reprocessing plant in Russia

The Mayak Production Association (Производственное объединение «Маяк», Proizvodstvennoye ob′yedineniye "Mayak", from Маяк 'lighthouse') is one of the largest 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 and 1948, in a great hurry and 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 Ozyorsk, 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 to store 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 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 rate, people would get the equivalent of a lifetime exposure to radiation 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 various illnesses and symptoms—chronic fatigue, sleep and fertility problems, weight loss, and increased hypertension. The frequency of congenital disabilities and complications at birth was 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 government 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 (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). 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 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 called the East Urals Radioactive trace. 66 were diagnosed with chronic radiation syndrome, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation. 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." "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.

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. Both the Russian government and Rosatom denied at the time 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.

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 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. The administration of the Mayak plant has been repeatedly criticized in recent years by Greenpeace and other environmental advocates for environmentally unsound practices.

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 Ozyorsk; over 400,000 people were irradiated

In 2003, the plant's operating licence was revoked temporarily due to liquid radioactive waste handling procedures resulting in waste being disposed into open water. In June 2007, an accident involving a radioactive pulp occurred over a two day period. In October 2007, a valve failure during transport of a radioactive liquid resulted in spilling of a radioactive material. In September 2017, possible association with the airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017. Argayash is located 10 miles south of the Mayak plant. In January 2018, the French Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security (IRSN) reported that Mayak could be the cause of the contamination.