The small village of Muslyumovo lies near the Mayak Production Association, one of the world’s largest nuclear complexes. The state nuclear operator and regulator Rosatom now reprocesses spent nuclear fuel there, but Mayak once provided around 40% of the world’s supply of weapons-grade plutonium.^[1] In 1957, a major explosion in the plant’s underground waste storage tanks blew 2.1 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the air, affecting approximately 270,000 people. Known as the Kyshtym disaster, it was second only to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in scale. Over the following decade, the government relocated about 10,500 people from the Khyshtym incident’s most contaminated areas,^[2] excepting the small ethnic Tartar community at Muslyumovo. According to the Bellona Foundation, Muslyumovo is ‘the only place in the world where people are sick with chronic radiation sickness.’^[3]

[1] Stratford, C. (2012) ‘Living in a nuclear hell,’ Al Jazeera, 6 April.
Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/4/6/living-in-a-nuclear-hell
Accessed: 31 August 2019.

[2] Now This World (2016) ‘The Soviet Union’s Secret Nuclear Disaster,’ 26 April 2016.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GNSer8T6TA&ab_channel=NowThisWorld
Accessed: 14 September 2020.

[3] Yefremova, Y. (2008) ‘Muslyumovo: a look inside,’ Bellona, 15 January.
Available at: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/radwaste-storage-at-nuclear-fuel-cycle-plants-in-russia/2008-01-muslyumovo-a-look-inside
Accessed: 18 February 2021.