From the above cited Wikepedia link
The Kyshtym disaster was a radiation contamination incident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production reactor for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the Soviet Union.
NickB79,
The "worker's paradise" Soviet Union was ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE to the environment.
In haste to produce material for nuclear weapons at Mayak; the Soviet Union didn't take even the most mundane attempts at mitigating the effect on the environment.
The USA spent a great deal of money on its nuclear weapons program, and when Plutonium production operations at Hanford produced lots of radioactive waste, the USA built in-ground tank farms to contain this radioactive waste awaiting a more permanent disposition. Unfortunately, political wrangling and a desire not to spend any more money on nuclear weapons programs delayed that more permanent disposition, and the acidic waste remained in the tanks longer than what was originally planned. Eventually, the tanks leaked, and no doubt you've heard about that.
However, the Soviets attempted to do a nuclear weapons program on the cheap and totally dispensed with the "niceties" of building tanks. They just poured their radioactive waste directly into a lake. They now have a lake that is so radioactive that you can get a lethal dose of radiation just standing near it for a length of time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
Lake Karachay sometimes spelled Karachai, is a small lake in the southern Ural mountains in western Russia. Starting in 1951[1] the Soviet Union used Karachay as a dumping site for radioactive waste from Mayak, the nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility, located near the town of Ozyorsk (then called Chelyabinsk-40).
According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute on nuclear waste, Karachay is the most polluted spot on Earth.[2] The lake accumulated some 4.44 exabecquerels (EBq) of radioactivity over less than 1 square mile of water,[3] including 3.6 EBq of caesium-137 and 0.74 EBq of strontium-90.[1] For comparison, the Chernobyl disaster released from 5 to 12 EBq of radioactivity over thousands of square miles. The sediment of the lake bed is estimated to be composed almost entirely of high level radioactive waste deposits to a depth of roughly 11 feet.
The radiation level in the region near where radioactive effluent is discharged into the lake was 600 röntgens per hour (approximately 6 Sv/h) in 1990, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defense Council,[4][5] sufficient to give a lethal dose to a human within an hour.
You get a lethal dose of radiation by standing next to Lake Karachay for one hour.
Mayak is the Soviet Union's version of Hanford; and as above; they just dumped radioactive material directly into the lake without any tanks, leaking or not. At least with Hanford, the VAST MAJORITY of the radioactive material is still in the tanks, even if they leak. Most of the material has a consistency somewhere between peanut butter and concrete.
So even with the leaks at Hanford, the US nuclear weapons program was NO WHERE NEAR as insulting to environment as the Soviet Union nuclear weapons program.
The good thing about science is that it is true, whether or not you believe in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson
PamW
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