https://www.econologie.com/forums/accident-n ... 9-120.html
https://www.econologie.com/forums/la-france- ... 5-110.html
This subject aims to provide a little more info on these facts kept secret by the Soviet administration for almost 30 years (up to Chernobyl in fact ...).
Wiki summary:
1957 Mayak nuclear complex (in Kyshtym not far from the city of Chelyabinsk, USSR). A powerful explosion in a radioactive waste storage center projected about two million curies of radioactive products at an altitude of more than one kilometer, and almost ten times more into the environment of the installation, or about half quantities released to Chernobyl. At least 200 people perished, the application of emergency measures involved the evacuation of approximately 10 people, a prohibited area of 000 km² (level 250 on the INES scale) and signs "close the windows and drive the as quickly as possible ”installed on the edges of the surrounding roads. The Soviet regime kept the defense secret on this accident, the first information will not be revealed until 6 by the Soviet biologist Jaurès Medvedev immigrated to England. In the daily newspaper Liberation of August 1976, 24, "radioactive materials rise to the surface with the gushing of groundwater," says Igor Forofontov of Greenpeace Russia [2000].
Wiki page on the Mayak complex:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexe_n ... aire_Mayak
Disaster wiki page:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_de_Kyshtym
(a Curie is quite huge as a unit: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion ... ivit.C3.A9 )
A report concerning this catastrophe was diffused yesterday either in Arte Reportage, visible in stream during 7 days here:
http://videos.arte.tv/fr/videos/arte_re ... 91380.html
It is the second and main report which is particularly interesting (Russian "closed" nuclear cities which did not all disappear with the USSR !!)
ARTE Report
(...)
Russia: Ozersk, nuclear secret city
Twenty years after the dissolution of the USSR, two million Russians still live in secret, as in Soviet times, in 42 closed towns known as "ZATO". Cities linked to military industry or nuclear energy production.
Remainder of the Soviet era, the inhabitants, subject to special regulations for all their movements, yet see themselves as privileged, protected from the world by high gates. But others are fighting against a system that keeps secrets around defective nuclear installations, with disregard for local populations and the environment.
Ozersk and its Makak complex are a fine example. The Mayak region, which produced all of the plutonium from the Cold War, is today a nuclear waste bin. Protected by its ZATO status.
The secret is such that it allowed to conceal, for almost 30 years, the first nuclear accident in the world: the explosion in 1957 of a tank of waste, following a breakdown of the cooling circuit. The radioactive cloud had then affected nearly 300 people, covering 000 km²… 23 villages had been evacuated.
50 years later, the victims and the "liquidators", forced to clean up the region, are still waiting for help. Others are irradiated day after day by fumes from the uranium reprocessing plants in Mayak. And the population is defenseless.
Nadiejda founded Planète Espoirs there, to defend the rights to freedom and a decent environment for the people of the region. And it defends victims of traffic restrictions such as those of radioactivity.
(...)
Always after-effects on humans and the environment more than 50 years later, it is a safe bet that in Fukushima, this is also the case ... moreover the 1st report concerned nuclear in Japan and the legacy of Hiroshima and that of Fukushima to come: https://www.econologie.com/forums/accident-n ... 10579.html
Japan nuclear ill
For a few days, in a Japan once again bruised, the survivors of Hiroshima have been making their voices heard.
The "Hibakushas" were almost the only anti-nuclear in the country, but today their words resonate with the concerns of the Japanese as a whole.
This report, meeting an increasingly worried Japan, begins at the radiation treatment center of this city, which will receive the irradiated from Fukushima ... It continues, in Kaminoseki, where the population is mobilizing strongly against a nuclear power plant project, then in Kobe, martyr city of the 95 earthquake and in Hamaoka, where there is a nuclear power plant affected by the last earthquake and its aftershocks, but far from being destroyed like Fukushima. This plant is the most controversial in Japan: it was built according to specialists on the epicenter of the future "big one" ...
This journey ends as close as possible to Fukushima, still very unstable. The ARTE Reportage team is trying to understand the questions that the Japanese are asking themselves today regarding the nuclear future. Japanese people who, until now, between pragmatism and discipline, had accepted the necessity.