The Kyshtym Disaster: The Controversial History of the Nuclear Meltdown Hidden by the Soviet Union

For decades, it was believed that the first major accident at a nuclear power plant took place at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, which took nearly 15 years and $1 billion to fully clean up after that disaster. However, Three Mile Island paled in comparison to Chernobyl, which to this day remains the most notorious nuclear accident in history. Located in the Ukraine, the Chernobyl power plant was undergoing experiments in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 when it suffered a series of explosions in one of its nuclear reactors, killing over 30 people at the plant and spread radioactive fallout across a wide swath of the Soviet Union. Although the Soviets would try to cover up just how disastrous the accident at Chernobyl was, it was impossible to hide the full extent of the damage given that radioactive material was affecting Western Europe as well. All told, the accident caused an estimated $18 billion in damages, forced the evacuation of everybody nearby, and continues to produce adverse health effects that are still being felt in the region.

The disasters emphatically demonstrated the dangers of nuclear power plants, and it brought about new regulations across the world in an effort to make the use of nuclear energy safer. Meanwhile, scientists and scholars are still studying the effects of the radiation on people exposed to the disasters and continue to come up with estimates of just how deadly they were.

As it turned out, however, Chernobyl was not the first major nuclear disaster that the Soviets tried to hide. In 1957, a nuclear disaster occurred in an area near the Ural Mountains, far to the east of Moscow and to the north of the border with Kazakhstan, and to this day, it is a disaster few have heard of, even though it was the world’s worst nuclear disaster until Chernobyl. For those aware of it, it is now known as the Kyshtym disaster.