Mayak
The Mayak Production Association (Russian: Производственное объединение «Маяк», Proizvodstvennoye ob′yedineniye "Mayak", from Маяк 'lighthouse') is a nuclear facility near Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, with production reactors and a reprocessing plant. Its reprocessing capacity, at 400 tonnes of heavy metal per year, is the second-largest in the world, following the La Hague site in France. It is currently used for military and civilian radioisotope production, and was historically central to the Soviet nuclear weapons program.
Lavrentiy Beria led the Soviet atomic bomb project. He directed the construction of the Mayak plutonium plant in the Southern Urals between 1945 and 1948, in a great hurry and secrecy as part of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project. The plant had a similar purpose to the Hanford Site of the Manhattan Project. Over 40,000 gulag prisoners and POWs built the factory and the closed nuclear city of Ozyorsk, called at the time by its classified postal code "Chelyabinsk-40". The first reactor, A-1, operated from 1948 and fuelled the first nuclear test RDS-1 in 1949. During the Cold War, 10 nuclear reactors were constructed, with a combined power of 7,333 MWth. Of these, four were used for plutonium production, yielding 31 tons of weapons-grade plutonium, out of the Soviet Union's all-time production of 145 tons. The other six reactors primarily produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. In 1990, weapons-grade plutonium production was ceased.
As of 2025, Mayak is still active, with two reactors in operation at 1,900 MWth. Today the plant primarily produces tritium for domestic weapons maintenance, and plutonium-238, used by many space programs for radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Many other radioisotopes are commercially sold worldwide, including 14C, 60Co, 137Cs, 147Pm, 193Ir, 237Np, 241Am. Polonium-210 produced at Mayak was reportedly used in the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. It also reprocesses the spent nuclear fuel from civilian reactors, and manages plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons. In recent years, proposals that the plant reprocess waste from foreign nuclear reactors have given rise to controversy.
The site has had many radiation accidents and radioactive contamination. In 1949–1951, 76 million m3 of toxic chemicals and 3.2 million curies 750 km2 (290 sq mi) of radioactive waste were released into the Techa river. In 1957, the Kyshtym disaster occurred at Mayak, releasing 20 million curies in a radioactive cloud across the eastern Urals. It was the worst nuclear accident in history until the Chernobyl disaster, and is still the third most severe. Mayak is also widely suspected to be the source of the ~200 TBq (~5400 curies) airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017. Between the first two accidents, 38,000 people were evacuated. Many other communities remained exposed, suffering long-term effects of radiation poisoning.
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