Avoiding Chelyabinsk

When our Emirates A380 was making a straight line flight from Dubai to San Francisco, I noticed that we jogged to the right of Chelyabinsk, and then back left again to continue on the same line we had before. So we took a fairly big effort to avoid this one region.

I knew the town as the location of the recent meteorite fall that shattered all of the windows. But something else must be up, and I zoomed in on Google Maps.

Turns out there is a lot going on there. I learned that it’s The Most Contaminated Place on Earth: “Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex and the site of three separate massive nuclear incidents.

Until recently this area was not included on maps and the Russian government denied its existence. No visitors had been allowed under any circumstances.

Most of the workers in the underground nuclear facility were prisoners who agreed to work in such conditions in exchange for a lesser sentence. Russian convicts were given the option to work 25 years hard labor in Siberia or 5 years underground in Chelyabinsk-40.

It really was a death sentence, however; no workers would live beyond five years with that level of radioactive exposure. Of course at the time, the convicts did not know what they’d be doing at this facility nor were they aware of the ramifications of increased exposure to radioactive material.

By 1959 every tree within a 12-mile radius of Chelyabinsk-40 was dead. Lake Karachay where the waste was being dumped, would eventually accumulate over 120 million curies of radionuclides. To put that in perspective, the Chernobyl incident released 1 million.”