
Chelyabinsk-40 – Russia's other nuclear disaster - chris_wot
https://www.thescreamonline.com/strange/strange08-01/chelyabinsk40.html
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gus_massa
In case you are wondering if this is real, Wikipedia page about this event:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster)

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

[http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...](http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/14/724/14724059.pdf)

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mikeash
"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.

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tyingq
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.

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blincoln
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...](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/buttinger1/docs/LA9217MS.pdf)
\- pages 9-10

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mikeash
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.

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blincoln
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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYmGCIg9O6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYmGCIg9O6Y)

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

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

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mikeash
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."

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jhbadger
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".

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

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

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

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

