Few people know about the Kyshtym accident of 1957. As with the Chernobyl accident, the main cause of the disaster was poor design, namely the construction of a cooling system that was impossible to repair. When coolant started leaking from one of the tanks, workers simply turned it off and left it alone for a year. Who needs cooling systems in Siberia?

It turns out that the containers in which radioactive waste are stored need cooling. The temperature in the tank rose to 350 degrees Celsius, which ultimately led to an explosion that threw the 160-ton concrete lid into the air, which was originally 8 meters underground. Radioactive substances spread over 20,000 square kilometers.

The homes of 11,000 people were destroyed after the evacuation of nearby areas, and about 270 thousand people were exposed to radioactivity. Only in 1989, three years after the Chernobyl accident, the details of the disaster in Kyshtym became known.