Thursday 29 September 2022

the mayak disaster (10. 177)

Referred to as the Kyshtym incident in contemporary sources since the above site as part of Chelyabinsk-40 did not appear on maps until 1994 and the closest known village was chosen as the namesake, the catastrophic explosion of a plutonium production facility and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, occurring on this day in 1957, released twice the amount of radiation than Chernobyl but due to the subsequent coverup (the full scale of the disaster was not disclosed until 1982) and isolation of the site—around ten thousand workers and residents of twenty-two surrounding villages had to be evacuated.