The Kyshtym Nuclear Disaster of 1957 | Episode 59

This episode contains fart jokes about radiation victims. Viewer discretion is advised. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most dramatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll visit some of the more irradiated places in Eastern Europe. We'll watch POW's compete for food in a house Hunter's International style format, and we'll learn the difference between a burp and a fart explosion. Wise, this is not the show that you play around your kids, or while eating or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's beg in me. Pointing out the scope and variety of different places we've been on this show is nothing new. We've been places that aren't easy to get to, we've been places that are hard to find, but we have never been anywhere that didn't exist, you know, like not in any official capacity or on an actual map or anything. And I know that sounds suspicious, but think of it this way. Where is the most suspicious place we've ever been Why? Soviet era Russia. Of course, that's right. We are returning once again to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And if you're new to the show or just relatively new to the planet, the extremely abbreviated TLDR version of it is this the Soviet Union or USSR. For a long time was frighteningly important. It was this supergroup of Eastern European countries that all fell under the sway of Soviet Communist Party dictatorship. And I made a handy knemonic device to help you remember all the different countries involved. Elbam, Parkatut Elbam, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, parkatut Kurzakhstan, Armenia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. There now you never have to worry about forgetting the names of all fifteen member states of the U s s R. You are welcome. The Soviet Union was the world's largest country. This thing was eleven time zones wide. It was known for its stunning technical achievements, and it was made up of over one hundred nationalities, and it achieved the second biggest economy in the largest military in the world. And for many years, the USSR was so powerful that people across America dug up their back yards to build bomb shelters and worried about death from above Dailey for a few decades straight, all because of how people like to have their money taken away by their specific kind of government. Its goal was to repaint the world as a communist and socialist utopia where big Brother took care of everything and the people supped from a horn of plenty, except for the part where all that failed terribly and millions were left traumatized or dead. Blamed Joseph Stalin, the premier and al hefe of the Soviet org chart. His birth name was actually dugaesh Villi, but a lot of Soviet premiers like to change their name, and he changed it to Stalin because it meant the man of steel or the man with the steel fist. Yep, So let's see what else is there remembered for Well, there's the mustache, that's fun. Then there was the reign of terror that killed at least twenty million of his own citizens. That's two. And yes, most historical figures don't want to be remembered as a Hitler analogue. But here we are. And how did young Joe grow up to become such a maie. Well, it started when he caught smallpox at age seven, which left him with facial pock marks and one deform arm, which made him a beautiful target for bullies. And then his mom tried to fix him later on by sending him away to become a priest, which backfired and the experience turned him into a godless atheist. And things just got weird from there. And I don't mean simple things like mass murder. I'm talking more about stuff like the absolutely insane human z experiments. Yes, the story that was passed around was that Stalin wanted to restore Russia to its glory using an army of half men, half apes. Thankfully, he died back in nineteen fifty three, but things went on this way from nineteen twenty two all the way to nineteen ninety one. To give you a sense of just how awful things were in the Soviet Union if you never saw or read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It's a story of the poor and disadvantage trying to survive the American dust of the twenties and thirties. And it was banned in the USSR because it was too cheery and optimistic. I'll explain. Yes, these were dust eating farmers abandoning their homes with everything they own tied to their car in search for a prayer of survival. But the Soviets saw this and they were all, wait a second, these people have cars, well, Ladi da So yeah, in a nutshell, communists hated capitalists as much as capitalists hated communism. And if you're interested in the score, it's currently one hundred and ninety capitalist countries versus five communist states China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. When I was a kid, I used to wonder what the difference was. I mean, you know, the reality of living in a capitalist versus a communist country, Since if you're home perst into flames right now and you're living in a capitalist society like a truly one hundred percent capitalist country, you would find yourself having trouble paying attention to whatever it is. So I'm saying because you are panic googling firefighters near you and you're all mad thumbing for the little contact icon. As a kid, I wondered why on earth these people want to point weapons powerful enough to erase countries off the map at each other. And what I mean off the map in this context, I mean it more in the kind of ah, my eyes, my skin kind of way, more so than in the way that we will explain in this story. Of course, there was the ever present fear of waking up to the rooster crowing, watching it suddenly silhouetted against a mushroom cloud and barbecued a fraction of a second before your eyes boiled out of your head, all thanks to the same people who brought to you The lot of Automobile and Mikhail Gorbachev's album of romantic ballads. Yeah, look it up. The story goes the US and the USSR didn't really get along leading up to World War Two, then they momentarily romanced from nineteen forty one to nineteen forty five to punch out a whole whack of Nazi teeth. Then the US dropped the ball on Japan, and to the USSR it was like finding out that the US had slept with their mom and then they got, you know, just a little quiet. America just flashed its nuclear wang to the world, and Russia needed a minute. Stalin was in charge of the time, and he wasn't having it. And from that moment forward, no matter the cost, as God as their witness, well maybe not God. Atheism after all, was part of the communist kool aid, But with whoever as their witness, Russia's nuclear program was full speed ahead, as Stalin ordered a cinderblock to be placed on the accelerator, and with that, hidden cities housing top secret military and research facilities officially did not start popping up across the map. On April ninth, nineteen forty five, the Soviet government greenlit the decision to build Plant number eight seventeen in Cheliabinsk Oblast in the Ural Mountains. This plant would be dedicated to the construction of the first Soviet atomic bomb, and by nineteen forty eight, the Mayak nuclear reactor was complete, far from prying eyes and years, but creating a secret city takes a lot more than just thousands of tons of lumber and privacy, this one took forty thousand prisoners and prisoners of war turned construction workers. The Soviet Union had been well known for shipping political prisoners, dissidents, and other loose lipped undesirables to forced labor gulags, which were basically secret prison labor camps that warehouse naysayers, and again were not well marked on maps. In nineteen forty eight, the entire population of original inhabitants from the area, the gulag convicts and POW's who survived, were relocated. The laborers went back to the gulags, and the original inhabitants were well, we don't really know what became of them. Maybe they got on the wrong buses, you know, ended up in a gulag. Whatever it was, it's all covered under state secrets, and the Soviet Union loved state secrets almost as much as they loved hiding stuff. The Soviet Union was littered with hidden tunnels and secret bunkers. Lots of major cities have stories of secret underground rail systems for moving about undetected, but Moscow actually did it, so it's easy to imagine secret cities built in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by concrete walls with a bullet for anyone looking to visit or leave. They built dozens of these cities all the way back to the nineteen forties to do the quiet, dirty work of building the first ever Soviet atomic bomb. Different cities all contributed to different parts of the overall effort, but very few people understood how the Soviet nuclear program all integrated together. It was purposely designed to confuse and it all happened really fast. You tried to picture a group of Amish raising a barn in a single day, Well, it's a bit like that, but using prison and slave labor. So no straw hats, no chin beards. Mayak was one of the most secretive and heavily guarded facilities in the entire Soviet Union. But how do you build something this complex and make sure no one blabs while you pull your workers for prison? Of course, promise them twenty minutes off the sent and serve something, and when they're done, just throw them back in prison. As many as seventy thousand different inmates had been brought in from twelve different labor camps, mostly political prisoners. You know your standard criminals and your prisoners of war, all locked up for life. I mean it's perfect. These people weren't telling anyone anything. Now what they built. Mind you, you have to imagine buildings that look like sad children's drawings of towns made by the least motivated crews of ne'er dwells in Russia. But no picture clean and modern cities, you know, green spaces, churches, train line streets and restaurants, spacious parks and schools good enough to lure the families of in demand nuclear scientists. And for today's tale, we're gonna focus on just one. Kishtim. Kishtim is a town in Cheliubins, go blast way out there in Siberia, Russia. It sits on the eastern slopes of the Southern Neural Mountains, just ninety kilometers or fifty five miles northwest of Chelibins, near the town of Vosyorsk. The locals call it Ozirsk, but the government gave it the much more utilitarian code name City forty or Cheliubinsk forty. If Chelebinsk sounds familiar, it's where space through that dramatic ass rock at us. Back in February of twenty thirteen and bonus points. If you are really attentive as hell, you may remember Ozersk being referenced in the HBO series on Chernobyl. But back to Kishtim. Just outside kishtim sits the Mayak Production Association where we will be spending most of our time today. The facility was one of the several plants dedicated to producing weapons grade plutonium two thirty nine and tritium. They also processed nuclear waste, but that'll come up later. We are here during a weird, brief period in history when only the US had a nuclear bomb they could wave around, and under Stalin's orders, scientists found themselves doing the research and building their own weapons at the same time. Of course, we all know the quickest way through a test is to peak off somebody else's paper, and the Union launched a massive effort to collect as much intelligence on the American Manhattan Project as possible. The program was kind of like a cart and a donkey running side by side down a hill, and life in the oz was not easy. No contact with the outside world, let alone family or friends, no travel, no chit chat. Big Brother provided everything citizens needed, from food to information, which saves a lot of time when you're being told what to eat and think. Every resident was heavily screened, scrutinized, and controlled. The facility needed to process huge quantities of radioactive materials in very little time, and because of that, corners had to be cut to speed things up. And if you've ever booed at a nuclear power plant before, you've probably already a little sensitive to the whole nuclear waste issue, which, in fairness, we are all sensitive to nuclear waste. It's always been a problem and it always will be, like a forever problem. But mind you, it was pretty new stuff at the time and not well under stood. Mayak ran six reactors using an open cycle cooling system, and each of these created some fairly gnarly fuel waste, which it generated by the room full. But speed was key and concerns about everything else were backburner to focus on weapons production. In the beginning, high level, untreated radioactive waste was dumped directly into the nearby Teca River to be carried away to the Arctic Ocean. If I'm saying this right, the thinking was the deliete Eto problemoy soup platninume, except it wasn't all just the seal's problem. The Teca River was the main source of drinking water for dozens of villages, and three eyed fish and radiation cankers were a terribly effective way to draw attention to your ultra top secret invisible city of nuclear ambition. See also fishunwise and sometimes no fins. So for the sake of security, plant operators stopped dumping waste into rivers and just picked a lake. Lake Gazelle. Ah, beautiful Lake Gazelle, we hardly knew ye before you became an unrecognizable, unholy, toxic, bubbling soup. Understanding that the lake couldn't die anymore than it already had, they restrategized. They put up a no swimming side at Lake Gazel and started dumping into Lake Karach instead. From the air, Lake Karach looks like the bat symbol, only mutated and kind of gangerous on the right wing. Lake Karach also became less of a lake and more of a massive irradiated slurry hole, belching out six hundred renkins of radiation per hour, becoming the most polluted place on Earth. Today, it is one of the most polluted bodies of water on the planet, and visiting it not swimming across it. Just visiting it is taking your life in your hands. Swimming would guarantee you a lethal dose of radiation in thirty minutes tops, So if I were planning a visit, I'd wait until the year seventy five thousand. Now lakes that glow and pulse are thirsty attention traps. Now likes that glow and pulse are thirsty attention trap, which is bad for maintaining secrecy or privacy. So they decided to take the problem indoors. In nineteen fifty three, they built a massive, enclosed storage facility for liquid radioactive waste. It was made up of holding tanks, each big enough to store about eighty tons. At four thousand pounds apiece, each tank was big enough to hold forty Dodge caravans melted. Of course, the collection tanks themselves were made of steel and lead eighteen inches thick, which was good. Steel is super solid materially and repwise. The tanks were mounted on concrete and sunk almost thirty feet into the ground. Now, when nuclear waste decays, it isn't destroyed. It's just converted into by products like radiation and heat. For example, heaps and heaps of heat, and since the tanks were buried, the surrounding ground gave the heat nowhere to evaporate, so a cooling system was designed and installed quickly. I might add even this technology mostly involves using cold water to absorb excess heat, which is continuously cycled to carry it away, maintaining a healthier temperature. But two things about working as fast as you can. You can have quick results, and you can have good results, but you can't have both. Mistakes get made, and because of the urgency and pace of the work, if something needed repair or maintenance, it had to go right to the bottom of the list. Working fast means everything is a priority, and when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. The cooling system for one of the waste collection tanks had been malfunctioning for a while, and turning it on and off again wasn't working. The repairs just kept getting back burned. The problem, of course, with trying to cool things poorly is they don't stay cool. The coolant used to maintain the temperature wasn't circulating properly, meaning that heat wasn't being removed from the storage facility, and the coolant didn't just warm it evaporated. You know how hot cool it has to be to evaporate Waterless coolants have a boiling point around three hundred and seventy degrees fahrenheit. And because of secrecy, I have no idea what kind they were using here. Whatever it was, it was a trade secret. But let's assume it was something affordable and straight off the shelf. And now with it all depleted, all the liquid in the tank evaporated. When all that was left was a highly radioactive mix of ammonium nitrate mixed with acetate salts. It sounds complicated, let me uncomplicated. What was left were the base components for an ammonium nitrate fuel oil bomb. Sometimes they call this a fertilizer bomb. On April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, at nine O two a M, forty eight hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil exploded in a rider truck parked outside the Alfred P. Burrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing one hundred and sixty eight and injuring another eight hundred and fifty. That blast took out half of building. And in this case, in this situation, take the same ingredients but irradiate them first, and you get the potential for more of a dirty bomb. As the temperature of the waste continued to rise, so did the stress on the tank walls. Nothing like heat for making things want to expand, and in this case really expand. The tensile strength of carbon steel is around forty thousand psi, and nuclear fuels are generally stored, like I said, in steel and lead casks, designed to keep radiation from escaping and strong enough to hold together even through a natural disaster, but they are not necessarily built to contain an explosion. That's right, pressure inside the effective tank rose until the vessel couldn't contain it. On the twenty ninth of September nineteen fifty seven, it exploded, and I mean exploded with the force of about one hundred tons of TNT. When the Manhattan Project officials needed to run a test at the Trinity site, they used one hundred tons of TNT. It was the perfect amount for testing their instruments, which were calibrated to be used on actual nuclear explosions, and the test plast was visible sixty miles away. Thankfully for all involved, the explosion this day was a chemical explosion, not a nuclear explosion. I mean, yes, they were all nuclear chemicals, but you get my meaning. Unthankfully, most of these chemicals were highly radioactive, so what's the difference. The blast was powerful enough to not just lift but throw the lid off the tank. All one hundred and sixty tons of concrete just casually tossed, well, not casual in the sense of the tremendous sound and jolt and the pants sing shock of it all. No one was crushed or flung to Mongolia by it, but maybe they wished that they had. Much like the Arc of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones. Once this was opened, twenty million curies or twenty megacuris of radioactivity were blasted forth, up and out across the region. A plume of radioactive fallout scattered in the wind across an area of twenty thousand square kilometers or seventy seven hundred square miles. A mega curie is a unit of radiological measurement. They named it after Mary Currie, the groundbreaking scientist who discovered all sorts of poisonous crap like polonium and radium and pioneered the use of radiation in medicine. Of course, She did this in her lab, surrounded by the stuff, and died from aplastic, pernicious anemia brought on after years of work. Her notebooks and lab equipment are still on display behind radiological shielding, and you probably won't be comfortable rubbing her lab notes all over your body for the next fifty thousand years or so. Twenty million curries is equivalent to seven hundred and forty paida becherels. That's a seventy four followed by sixteen zeros, and on a good day your body would never face more than point zero zero zero seven becherels. Just rule thumb, and I know it's super confusing, don't feel bad. There are so many ways to measure radiation and it's annoying. Really. You've got rams and seaverts too, and as always, there is no test at the end. So let us simplify things by saying that the amount of radiation that hemorrhaged out of the hole was more than ninety trillion times the amount needed to say, make next year's birthday plans seem irrelevant. Of course, I should point out that because radiation isn't something that you can see or smell, or taste or even feel nearby villagers and residents had no idea anything had even happened. The majority of radioactive particles quietly falling on them were serrium and zirconium, which are just short lived isotopes that really don't turn a lot of heads. But three percent of what flew out of there was strontium ninety and caesium one thirty seven. And you might think, whoo, three percent, that doesn't sound so bad. We'll give your heads a shake. Comrades, even a tiny amount creates a radiological hazard. Strontium ninety, once inside your body, bonds to your bones and your teeth, where it quickly cancers up all your bone marrow and your soft tissues and prevents your blood from clotting properly. And you probably don't realize it, but because you live on Earth after the nineteen fifties, you have some of it in you right now, just a little. So much of this stuff had been thrown around during the endless atmosphere testing of nuclear weapons in the fifties and sixties that it just became part of the environment and the food chain globally. Caesium one thirty seven, on the other hand, is an isotope found in medical equipment and is considered the most dangerous of all radioactive isotopes. Strontium puts out beta particles, which will burn you, but only with direct contact. Caesium, on the other hand, bars out beta and gamma particles. Gamma will happily pass through everything you're wearing and cook you from the inside out. Hundreds of people living ninety kilometers or thirty five miles away were admitted to hospital with radiation sickness. Now imagine living closer. Residents living in the closest nearby villages received a radiation dose of five hundred and seventy milliseiverts. For context, the people of Gernobyl and Pripiat were evacuated after receiving three hundred and fifty milliseiverts, and the normal cutoff or exposure is too or three millisiverts in a year, and you can't just leave the stuff lying wherever it fell. A few hundred thousand soldiers and civilians were voluntold to help with the cleanup, but they were not told to bring any kind of special gear or protection, and they weren't offered any either. When evacuations did begin, it was kind of weird. First it was the non essential military units, then the prison inmates, then followed by the Mayak staff, followed one week later by the civilian population who had spent their time looking at strange but spectacular displays of deep blue and violet colors across the sky. It was probably radiation ionizing hydrogen in the air, but they were told it was simply the northern lights or Aurora borealis with a tone that said enjoy. But the people were not dumb. The northern lights, the Aurora bori alice at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within Cheliabinsk. Yeah, the locals were pretty The government was using them to study the long term effects of radiation on humans. There were about two hundred seventy thousand people living in two hundred and seventeen towns, villages and settlements across the impacted area. Mayak opened for business back in nineteen forty six and had produced the first Soviet atomic bomb by nineteen forty nine. And after that Moscow saw that they did good and demanded more and more bombs in less and less time. And like we said, you can do it fast, or you can do it safe, but you can't do both. And in the decade between nineteen forty eight and nineteen fifty eight, seventeen thousand, two hundred and forty five plant workers came home with loose teeth or loose hair, and now roughly five hundred thousand more had been exposed. On a much grander scale, farmers and locals had to slaughter their cattle, bury their crops, and plow their farm land. Eleven thousand people had been evacuated from twenty three local villages and then were destroyed, the villages, not the people. Huge swaths of forests and bodies of water, plus more than fifty percent of agricultural land was made useless and unusable. One Soviet exile wrote that a highway signed warrant drivers not to stop for the next twenty or thirty kilometers and to drive through at maximum speed. On both sides of the road, as far as anyone could see, was dead. No villages, no towns, only the chimneys of destroyed houses, No cultivated fields or pastures, no herds, no people. Nothing. Now I hope you're sitting when I say this, but the Soviet authorities understanding what had happened, decided to keep the incident a secret. On the International Nuclear Event Scale ors measured on a scale from zero to seven, Kishtim had been ranked a level six as serious accidents, described as a significant release of radioactive material. So you're mining your own business quad watching when one of them turns into a weird mushroom shape, but instead of vaporizing and really sticking it to your creditors, you get sprayed with hot, glowing goo. Would you know what to do? We'll keep this short and sweet, because you are now on a clock. Coming into direct contact with radioactive materials can be extremely dangerous. Surprise, if you've found yourself in a situation where you've come into contact with radioactive materials, Step one, you want to take immediate actions to minimize your exposure. You know, no different than if you were being chased by a cloud of bees. All radiation fades with distance, and the further the distance you are from the radioactive material, the lower your exposure will be. First step, run, Second step, if available, use shielding. Obviously a full body lead snuggie would be ideal, but assuming that you don't have one, put as many walls or objects between yourself and the source of radiation as you can. You've already been exposed, you don't need further exposure. And if you are contaminated, your clothing is going to be two. So here's a safety trick that you can practice at home. You're going to want to strip, You're gonna want to strip down without touching your clothes. Then yeah, maybe next time I'll do a quick safety segment on what to do when you've dislocated both of your shoulders practicing how to become a stripper, But for now, carefully remove all of your outer wear with gloves or tongs or whatever's handy, except for your hands. Ironically, those are your last option. If your clothes are in fact doused with radiation, depending on the kind, it's not doing anyone any favors, so you need to get rid of it all. Dump contaminated clothing in a sealed plastic bag or a container, and do not actually kiss them goodbye. Radioactivity can stick to clothing and skin, so it's crucial to wash yourself thoroughly with soap and water, and that includes your hair. But fun fact, conditioner will actually bond it to your hair, so don't get fancy soap and water will do nicely. And don't forget under your nails and around your puticles. And as much as you're a tempted to silk wood scrub yourself raw, if you damage or cut your skin, you're going to create paths for radioactive residue to enter the bloodstream. So the rule of thumb is be gentle but thorough unless you are experiencing nausea, vomiting, dizziness, or obviously burning of the flesh. In that case, move quicker. You're going to want to seek immediate medical attention. Radiation exposure can have severe health effects, and there's only so much you can do at home. These tips are meant to reduce harm and buy you time to get to a hospital. And don't just sit there in their lobby filling out their clipboard, ruining their waiting room with your nuclear ass. You've got to tell them you've been exposed. Most hospitals will call out a code orange, that's shorthand for anything involving the chemical or biological or radioactive or nuclear agent. In fact, if you're pretty sure you've been exposed, do not take public transit. In that case, call nine to one one you live in a largely democrat at it but mostly socialist country where these kinds of services exist for you. So just let the professionals figure out a plan. And no matter where you live, every area will have its own regulatory agency of one kind or another, and the hospital will have them on speed dial. So don't worry more than you already are. So what happened. The Soviet Union hid the details of the accident for nearly three decades, but Western sources suspected it much earlier based on unusual radiation levels detected in the atmosphere. They only reluctantly acknowledged the disaster only after biologist Zora's Meditativ published his suspicions that the government was not telling the whole truth. And I read his report and the first line said, I hope you are setting down. Of course, nobody believed him at the time. Nobody could accept that there had been a major nuclear disaster and that this had stayed a secret. Here we are anyway. Medvedev got kicked out of the country, became a political dissident, and wrote a book called Nuclear Disaster in the urals found wherever books are sold, just not in the Soviet Union. So many things went wrong here. The use of pow labor was not ideal. I mean, what did they think might happen when you hire free, unskilled labor. Many of these people would be pretty excited if they could just make you a berthouse or an ashtray. They didn't know nothing about no coolant systems, and because these people were not used to getting up for work with a hop II attitude, a lot of the security and safety precautions and procedures for construction of this kind of thing were pretty much either overlooked or just ignored. The other major problem lay in the lack of in depth knowledge regarding nuclear science and paired with the use of unskilled pow labor. I mean, to be fair, nuclear science was a brand new feel of research and there were many unknowns. But that combination of unknowns with urgency and speed and unskilled pow labor created a recipe for disaster. Speaking of a disaster, after the Kristim disaster, American spyplanes criss crossed the skies over Europe, gathering intelligence on Soviet activities until one was shot down. A CIA Lockheed U two spyplane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet Service to Air missile over Sperlogical Blast in the Ural Mountains on May Day, nineteen sixty. This would have been like shooting down a Russian spyplane on the fourth of July. And it was a good shot too. Dcins fly at eighty thousand feet that's more than twice what a commercial airliner does. Yeah, good shot, bad timing, the timing, It just couldn't have been worse. See. This was also the very first day of the nineteen sixty Paris Summit for world leaders, and when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was told about the U two, he was all, are you find kidding me? And stormed out of the summit. Now do you think this escalated or de escalated tensions between the US and USSR? Exactly? And two years later, a second U two was shot down over Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis. Yeah, this is all happening all the same time, and was literally the closest that we have ever come to being engaged in a full world ending nuclear war. And what was so important that Gary Powers had to risk his life and the lives of everyone on earth over Russia that day. Well, it's believed he was gathering intel on the area around Mayak. The radio chemical plant involved in separating the weapons grade plutonium was finally shut down in nineteen eighty seven, and it took until nineteen eighty nine for the Soviet Union to acknowledge in any way that the Kishtim disaster was real. Fast forward two more years and the reactors were shut down for good. The Russia State Nuclear Authorities claimed aimed that the plant stopped dumping waste, but move a little further and the Russian State Nuclear Authorities claimed that the plant had stopped dumping waste, leaving out the part where it had its operating license revoked in two thousand and three for dumping waste into open water. So at least no lessons were learned, and of course not everyone left, leaving their homes that their families had lived in for generations to start over with very little money in a cramped little apartment in some town they know nothing about was considered a pretty bad deal, and as far as getting any resettlement money, while evacuees were promised the world, but as they tried to collect on those promises, oof imagine trying to collect a check and being branded as an enemy of the state. In twenty fifteen, the Ministry of Justice went so far as to declare one legal aid group an enemy foreign agent, and they declared its leader a spy. She even had to flee the country moved to Paris, so a lot of people continued to live in the area, and if you trace the Techa River backwards, you can actually map birth defects and cancer rates with every new village. Those who lived along the river had a cancer rate three and a half times higher than the national average and a rate of birth effects twenty five times higher. Many of the Armani adults developed lymph nodes so swollen that their words were completely unintelligible to visiting doctors, and between that and clerical errors on their papers and medical records, many were denied the ability to leave. Miscarriage rates continued to rise, as well as preterm babies born with limb and organ malformations. Mayak continued to process material and, in a bold pr move, accumulated nuclear fuel from the Soviet fleet that had been left to rot for decades in Andrea of Abbay was packaged up and shipped to Mayak for reprocessing. They thought this could be the way Mayak atoned for its sins, but others thought it was better to have Mayak potentially blow up twice than to risk a separate disaster at andrea of A Bay. No matter what you think, just think about what we're applauding here. The only reason the explosion at Kishtim was not as well known as Chernobyl. And I'm going to break this down here for all of those people who listened regularly with their kids. Hey, kids, The difference between Kishtim and Chernobyl is Kishtim popped like a zip and Chernobyl blue like a fart. A cloudy plume that blasted from Kishtim remained thick and kind of densely concentrated, which prevented it from reaching the higher atmosphere. Chernobyl, on the other hand, just blue and it just kept blowing because the overheated and exposed reactor acted like a blast furnace, funneling radiation high into the sky, where it casually spread to neighboring countries. Also, the reactors that Chernobyl burped up as much as one hundred and eighty five million carries of radio nucleides compared to Kishtim's twenty million. This accident would have silver metaled against chernobyl. But whether it's less radiation but contained to a smaller area, or lie of radiation but much more spread out, it's really hard to ignore. And they would have gotten away with it two if it weren't for those pesky swedes and their atmospheric radiation detectors. In an episode where we talk about hidden and secret cities, it's about time we got to the disappearing cities. Thirty villages and towns vanished from the maps, burned, bulldozed, buried, nothing but tumbleweeds and chimneys from the highway. The final resettlements finished up in twenty thirteen. That's more than sixty years after the disaster, and the affected area, known today as the East Eurals Radioactive Trace or YORT, remains contaminated to this day. They claim that about eighty percent of the contaminated area is safe and the rest was turned into a preserve for three eyed squirrels. There's one more thing that I remember about Mayak, you know, trying to keep its name out of the press and failing terribly. In two thousand and six, There was a very famous critic of Vladimir Putin named al Lexander Litvinenko. He was minding his own business one day when a man poked him with an umbrella. What he didn't know. What he didn't know until his skin began to visibly slough off, was that the pope came with a millionth of a gram of polonium to ten. Well, what's that, Well, just one of the most toxic substances known. An entire gram of polonium to ten is enough to kill fifty million people and sicken another fifty million. Litvinenko ingested less than one millionth of a gram, but that was still enough to quite happily kill fifty people. The radioactive poison inside his body was so strong he had to be buried in a lead lined coffin, and the polonium that killed him came from Mayak. The Krishtim disaster didn't just do ass alt, dirty and chill. We're all aware of the dangers of nuclear weapons, but this served as a reminder of the dangers of nuclear production. It also contributed to international efforts to improve nuclear safety and communication around nuclear incidents. In the future. Soviet nuclear cities remain a testament to how farig nations will go to protect their scientific and military secrets. And speaking of covering things up, both the US and Russia independently decided not to say a word about Kishtim. The Soviets were obviously afraid of the humiliation and backlash, but the US kept it quiet because even though they would have loved to have given the Soviet Union a nice public black eye over this, then they knew they would have been setting themselves up for a Pierre nightmare if anything ever went wrong with one of their own nuclear programs. And America did have problem with their own nuclear programs, just not as bad as Russia, at least as far as we know. It's hard to keep score when things are quietly hushed away. It's hard to learn from them too. And less than thirty years after our tale, another major nuclear incident occurred inside the Soviet Union at a little place called Chernobyl in Soviet era Ukraine. Only this one became way more public, way more well known, and came with history changing social and economic upheaval. Most people would come to see it as the last nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse shortly after. Imagine a disaster in America so bad that within a few years it just wasn't America anymore. Let that sink in. The nineteen fifty seven Chrishtian disaster is recognized as the world's first truly major nuclear incident. It ranks third and severity only behind Chernobyl and Fukushima Daichi. I've said it's hard to form lessons around these things, but the disaster of Kushtim did go on to shape international safety protocols for years to come, and yet, despite its incredible pedigree and importance, knowledge of it has faded or slipped purposefully into histories, thus been largely unknown and unheard of for the rest of the world. I get a lot of requests for radiological disasters and incidents of any kind. You people are Geiger happy, Well, I hope you're happy with this one. Most people don't know that the Soviet Union did a dry run before Chernobyl in Chelli events, and most people in the Soviet Union don't know much. My guess is, if you live in a country as secretive as Russia during the Soviet era, you were probably made to forget more than we learn In a full episode of this show. For example, even just sitting here, I suddenly realized Siberia was home to even more explosions than previously mentioned. I completely forgot all about the nineteen oh eight Tunguska media explosion. It was the largest asteroid impact in recorded history, even though it actually airburst instead of hitting the earth. On the Patreon version, we talked about other meteors like the Chelli Events explosion of twenty thirteen, which caused a lot of damage and was only sixty feet across. And I say only sixty feet because the Tunguska Mediator was estimated to be closer to a twenty five story buildings worth of death from above. This thing flattened eight hundred and thirty square miles or two thousand, one hundred and fifty kilometers of forest. June thirtieth was the day it arrived, and today we observed June thirtieth as asteroid day each year on the day in Tungu Guska's memory. I'm not going to tangent into a whole side episode here, but on topic I will point out that if you had been listening to this on Patreon, not only would you have heard it sooner and ad free, but this episode would have been about ten minutes longer. Let's see, we looked into dead coal war spies, the instagrammers of the Siberian Maldives, the British sci fi show that lifted directly from this disaster, only placing it on the moon space nineteen ninety nine. Let's see we visited the single most nuked place on Earth. We learned by meteors pretty much have no choice but to kill us. And I gave you a chance to get in on the ground floor of my bullet ant stinging business. If you are a regular listener, why not consider becoming a supporter. It really helped me fulfill my dream of doing this time and if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really help keep that dream alive. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with ridiculously interesting material is guide worth it. If you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com. Slash funeral kazoo. I got a quick but heartfelt shoutout to djag JP, Jennifer Coe, Jennifer Holme, Katherine White, bad Patoos, which I'm thinking it's like patoo Allison, Tom Elizabeth, and Susan Harshfield for joining the Patreon. In fact, if you can hear this, Junia Solid, email me or DM me, even if just to let me know where you're listening from. I really want to make a world map with listeners to make me feel more connected to you. Guys. You're always welcome to reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire me an email to doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always want to thank my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. However, if you could spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at GLOBALMTIC dot ca on on the next episode, I can't tell who's worse. All of you listeners who love shipwrecks serve all of you who yell women and children last. Well, either way, we've got you covered as hell. In our next episode, it's the Arctic shipwreck disaster of eighteen fifty four. We'll talk soon. Save to gogglesov, and thanks for listening.