To be fair to the naysayers, the story was unbelievable. If a ground-level nuclear device had accidentally detonated, its signature of high-thrown radioactive dust would have been picked up by Western governments within hours of the blast, and the same was true if a bomber-dropped weapon had been used to test a simulated city on the ground. It was hard to hide such tests or accidents.[188] It was true that the Soviets had six graphite reactors at Mayak, which was then known as Chelyabinsk-40, but it would be hard for a graphite reactor fire or even a graphite steam explosion to kill hundreds of people unless they were standing on top of it, and how were thousands injured, needing immediate hospitalization? Not even Soviet engineering would place production reactors so close together that an explosion in one could set off the others. A single plutonium production reactor, for all its buildup of radioactivity, is limited in the damage it can do. While it would be possible to contaminate thousands of square kilometers with plutonium and fission products, this would be a low-level contamination. It would be a long-term danger and not producing immediate injuries. A seismic event that would swallow Chelyabinsk-40 would have showed up on seismographs around the world, and a destructive landslide in the heavily wooded Urals seemed unlikely.
Medvedev reasoned that it must have been an underground storage tank filled with waste products from the plutonium processing, heating up in the confined space and causing a sudden, massive steam explosion from the water content of the solutions. It seemed almost plausible, but fresh, concentrated fission waste, straight out of a reactor that had been running at full power, only generates about 60 kilowatts of heat per ton. After a year of sitting quietly, the same waste is putting out 16 kilowatts of heat, and after ten years the rate has fallen to 2 kilowatts per ton. This is certainly enough heat to melt through a steel tank or even to blow the thing wide open, but it lacks the power concentration to cause the reported level of mayhem. Even if left-over plutonium were to make a supercritical mass in a waste tank, it would simply boil the water furiously until it modified its own configuration into subcriticality. As we have seen in all the criticality accidents, to be killed you must have been embracing the reactor. The reported power of the blast did not correspond to what would be contained in a steel storage tank.
Shortly after Medvedev’s article appeared in the New Scientist, articles appeared in three British newspapers seeming to confirm his incredible story. The newspaper articles, all appearing on December 7, 1976, linked back to a letter to the editor in the Jerusalem Post, sent in by another ex-Soviet, Professor Leo Tumerman, former head of the Biophysics Laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Molecular Biology. Tumerman had written to strongly disagree with Medvedev’s assertion that the supposed accident could have been the result of a reactor explosion. It was common knowledge in Russia, he claimed, that the catastrophe was the result of gross negligence on an industrial scale. He was not sure how, but the careless storage of radioactive wastes at Chelyabinsk-40 had resulted in massive destruction.
Tumerman had not been there at the time, but in an automobile trip in 1960 he had seen evidence of a disaster with his own eyes. He had been visiting his brother, an engineer, at the construction site of the Byeloyarsk power reactor, about 300 kilometers from Sverdlovsk in the Southern Ural Mountains. From there he had to drive about 180 kilometers to Miassovo, near Chelyabinsk-40, for a summer seminar on genetics. He reached the main highway heading south at about 5 a.m., and soon he passed a large declarative road sign. It was a warning to all drivers: DO NOT STOP FOR THE NEXT 30 KILOMETERS! DRIVE THROUGH AT MAXIMUM SPEED!
The next 30 kilometers of highway were quite strange. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing there. No cultivated fields or pastures. No herds of cows. No people. No birds. No insects splatting against the windshield. No towns or villages. No trees. There were only chimneys sticking up all over the place, with no houses connected to them.
Curious about what he had seen on the drive to Miassovo, he got an earful from some seminar participants. The whole countryside was hot from radiation contamination. It was caused by an explosion at either the plutonium production plant or a waste tank. Details were fuzzy, but thousands had been evacuated permanently, and their houses were burned down to prevent looters from hauling away contaminated objects and spreading the radiation farther than it was. Everyone called it the “Kyshtym Disaster.” It actually occurred at Chelyabinsk-40, but Chelyabinsk-40 officially did not exist, and Kyshtym was the nearest town on the map. No further details were forthcoming, and experts were puzzled. Finally, in 1989, formerly secret files concerning the Kyshtym Disaster started finding their way out of the crumbling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the unexpected truth began to crystallize. Nobody had speculated correctly.
Under the Stalin and later the Khrushchev governments in the Soviet Union, the safety of the environment and even workers was not exactly a primary concern. The six graphite plutonium-production reactors at Chelyabinsk-40 used open-loop water cooling, pumping water out of Lake Kyzyltash and dumping it back in. At first, liquid waste from the plutonium extraction plant was simply dumped into the River Ob and allowed to empty into the Arctic Ocean. In 1948, plutonium production was at a fever pitch, and there was no time to work out the details of making the process efficient. It was extremely important that a nuclear weapon be successfully tested before the official celebration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, which would be on December 18, 1948. They did not quite make it, but the RDS-1 plutonium-fueled bomb was successfully tested on August 29, 1949. The rest of the world was stunned by this development, thinking that the Soviet Union was farther behind than that.
In the crash program to produce fissile bomb material, a great deal of plutonium was wasted in the crude separation process. Production officials decided that instead of being dumped irretrievably into the river, the plutonium that had failed to precipitate out, remaining in the extraction solution, should be saved for future processing. A big underground tank farm was built in 1953 to hold processed fission waste. Round steel tanks were installed in banks of 20, sitting on one large concrete slab poured at the bottom of an excavation, 27 feet deep. Each bank was equipped with a heat exchanger, removing the heat buildup from fission-product decay using water pipes wrapped around the tanks. The tanks were then buried under a backfill of dirt. The tanks began immediately to fill with various waste solutions from the extraction plant, with no particular distinction among the vessels. The tanks contained all the undesirable fission products, including cobalt-60, strontium-90, and cesium-167, along with unseparated plutonium and uranium, with both acetate and nitrate solutions pumped into the same volume. One tank could hold probably 100 tons of waste product.
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On the other hand, in 1958 there were more than 100 above-ground nuclear weapon tests in the world, with 71 detonations carried out by the United States alone. The suspended fission-product dust in the atmosphere was getting so dense, it was hard to tell that another bomb had been set off. The U-2 high-altitude photographs would have clearly shown effects of ground-level destruction, but if such evidence existed, would it have been released by the CIA?