Kyshtym

Kyshtym Copper Electrolytic Plant, Chelyabimsk Region, Russia... 

Chemical Explosion at Kyshtym - Southern Urals, USSR... 

Explosion of radioactive wastes at Soviet nuclear weapons factory 12 miles from the city of Kyshtym forced the evacuation of over 10,000 people from a contaminated area no casualties were reported by Soviet officials... 

Explosion in nuclear waste storage facility at Kyshtym (Chelyabinsk), USSR, with... 

In 1957 an explosion occurred in a nuclear waste storage facility (probably due to reactions betwe organic matter and nitrate) at Kyshtym south of Sverdlovsk, USSR, leading to the contamination of approximately 1600 km of land by 8 X 10 Bq fission products, causing local contaminations exceeding 10 Bq/m (2 X 10 Sr and Cs). The area is still uninhabitable, see also 21.10. 

The Kyshtym accident (Urals, USSR) also happened in 1957 in a radiochemical plant for the recovery of plutonium. One of the three tanks of highly radioactive liquid waste was left without cooling and its instrumentation was defective. Overheating up to 380°C resulted together with... 

The production of nuclear power requires other operations, such as fuel fabrication. This has caused a few accidental releases of radioactivity, most notably when errors were made that allowed chemical nuxtures to reach nuclear criticahty. Such situations create a chain reaction for only a short time because of the small amounts of fissile material available. However, woikers and ai one else in the vicinity can be exposed to the radiation field or to the fission and activation products, such as 1 or Xe (half-life = 5 days). Most of these accidents occurred prior to 1965, but even in 1999 there was a criticality accident at Tokaimura in Japan where three woikers were severely injured. One of the most severe environmental releases of radioactivity followed a chemical explosion at the Mayak complex near Kyshtym, Russia, in 1957, where about 74 PBq of fission products were released, which contaminated about 15,000 km. ... 

Mr. Crumbly has set six goals for the Department of Energy. The first deal with truly urgent risks. Some are easy, such as the Hanford tanks which have the potential but did they really have the probability of duplicating the Kyshtym accident An objective study showed that such an explosion at Hanford was highly unlikely. The temperatures were too low and there was too much water in the system to create explosive conditions though the same chemical constiments were present. This is a case where the technical community mislead itself and the public. 

Information on the 1957 Kyshtym accident began to be declassified in about 1990. Wikipedia presents a good balanced account. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym disaster. 

First Chalk River (1952) Windscale (1957), Luccns (1969), Three Miles Island (1979) Kyshtym (1957) Chernobyl (1986) Fukushima (2011) ... 

At this stage in their development, the Soviets were most interested in nuclear research as a way to develop atomic weapons, hence the value of the plutonium produced by the F-1. For weapons production, however, much larger quantities of plutonium were needed. The F-1 reactor simply could not produce enough to support a weapons program. Therefore, the Soviets specifically built a plutonium production reactor, known as Reactor A, near Kyshtym City in the Southern Urals (Kruglov, 2002). Some confusion exists about this site, because as an attempt to... 

Fig. 4.1 Cutaway side view of the Soviet Reactor A at Kyshtym City (Kruglov, 2002)...

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