Chelyabinsk-40 – Russia's other nuclear disaster | Hacker News Reader

Chelyabinsk-40 – Russia's other nuclear disaster

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47 pointschris_wot49 comments

In case you are wondering if this is real, Wikipedia page about this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

Thanks for this - something even more astounding is this document:

http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...

"About 100 kilometres from Sverdlovsk, a high-way sign warned drivers not to stop for the next 20 or 30 kilometres and to drive through at maximum speed."

Fascinating and scary.

Seems like it wasn't great even before any accident.

"Initially Mayak was dumping high-level radioactive waste into a nearby river, which flowed to the river Ob, flowing further down to the Arctic Ocean. All six reactors were on Lake Kyzyltash and used an open-cycle cooling system, discharging contaminated water directly back into the lake"

Ouch.

The whole thing is a great lesson in how “obvious” things we take for granted today, like using a sealed cooling system in nuclear reactors, or keeping waste in containers, were ideas that had to be developed through error-prone processes.

This wasn't done because the people who built these things didn't know what they were doing and what the consequences were.

Not credible. The dangers of radiation exposure were fairly well understood. I think it's more like they were under extreme pressure from governent and military interests during the cold war to just "get it done" and safety was a secondary concern.

Especially in the USSR where they were using prison labor for a lot of the nastier work.

I think your misreading of what I'm saying is what's not particularly credible.

The dangers of acute exposure were well understood. The long term consequences much less so, as well as the many ways things could go wrong to cause exposure in the first place.

That era is full of examples of terrible human damage done because people didn’t really get the consequences of pollution. These are mostly special just because the pollution was radioactive

The consequences of long-term exposure were also known, perhaps not as well as now, but I think it's inaccurate to suggest this sort of thing was done out of ignorance, rather than expedience (and general disregard for human life). This isn't something like someone eventually noticing DDT was decimating bird populations or that lead from leaded gasoline was getting into everything.

The same approach was originally used at Hanford in the US.[1]

I've been on a couple of tours at Hanford, and the guides told us that the Soviet weapons programme was a carbon-copy of the one in the US - just scaled up, with many more plutonium-production reactors - so it's not surprising that they made the same mistake about the cooling.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/buttinger1/docs... - pages 9-10

My favorite (for certain values of “favorite”) was the British Windscale reactor, which was air cooled and just vented out a big smoke stack. Predictably, it caught fire and turned into a major disaster. One guy’s insistence on installing filters in the chimney, over the objections of many others that it was pointless, prevented it from being a Chernobyl-scale event.

There are weirdly similar signs on smaller roads in southeastern New Mexico.

Really, in what sense is this an event?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak

Are there photos anywhere of the underground city mentioned in this writeup? It sounds amazing, but I've been unable to find any - just the surface-level city.

Link to the documentary referenced in the article, "The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYmGCIg9O6Y

If this is the "other" disaster, then what was the first one? You definitely don't mean Chornobyl, because it's not in Russia.

The “R” in USSR may as well have stood for Russia ;-)

But it didn't.

He’s quite correct, sorry about that - it should be the USSR.

That is also a pet peeve of mine that even respectable journalists that should know better make: saying Russia when they clearly mean USSR.

It's fairly common, although I agree they ought to do better. It seems to be partially due to the fact that Russia was such a dominant part of the USSR, and partly because the USSR was more or less the continuation of the Russian Empire, which was often referred to as just "Russia."

It's not unlike how people (not from the Netherlands) often call the Netherlands "Holland", which is only a part of it, or call the UK "Britain".

Good examples. In the US, it’s fairly common to use “England” to refer to the UK, which really weirds me out.

See 'synecdoche'.

Russia was the important part of the USSR.

Jesus fucking christ. Why is this the "other" disaster, it's much, much worse in every aspect.

Probably because it was fairly successfully covered up for decades, whereas Chernobyl had the world watching within days.

Chernobyl isn't in Russia, although the writer probably meant the USSR.

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