Nuking a hurricane

[kandrathe]

I'm also interested, just because I haven't heard this before so it's something new.
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There was a report given to the IAEA by the former Soviet Union from August 25-29, 1986 in Vienna, where they detailed an accident that happened in the late 1950's at their MAYAK plant at Kyshtym, in the Ural mountains, near the city of Chelyabinsk. Scientist Frank Parker lead research on the scale of the accident in the 1970's by analyzing water samples from Siberian source rivers.

http://encarta.msn.com/map_701514385/Magnitogorsk.html

This was the time and area that Gary Powers was trying to photograph when his U-2 spy plane was shot down.

5. The estimated 3000 early workers at the plutonium production reactor and chemical facility at the MAYAK plant: Some of them received up to 400 rem for 1 yr.
6. About 30000 villagers who used water contaminated with 90Sr from the Techa River and received an average dose of 50 rem. It appears that the cancer rate is increased about 15% (in this group).
7. About 11000 residents exposed at the time of the explosion of the holding tank with nuclear waste at Kyshtym in September 1957; 1150 of them received an average of 52 rem (Ref. 3).
8. The population in the Altai krai exposed to the radioactive fallout from the Semipalatinsk test site.
NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS IN THE USSR

Sites with plutonium production reactors and reprocessing plants have the largest potential for impacts to the environment. This hypothesis has been validated by Bradley (1997, p. 11), who synthesized a number of reports and estimated that, as of themid-1990s, Tomsk,Mayak, and Krasnoyarsk had released 6.3x10^19 becquerels (Bq), equivalent to 1.7 billion curies (Ci), to the environment (including deep-well injection). In comparison, all other Russian releases, including those from Chernobyl, were only 1.1x10^17 Bq (3 million Ci). 
The releases from Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Mayak were 4.2x10^19, 1.7x10^19, and 4.4x10^18 Bq (1.13, 0.45, and 0.12 billion Ci), respectively. While releases of radioactivity cannot be directly translated into health effects, they are the best surrogates for impacts in the absence of much more extensive information and risk assessment.
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Publications/Docu...99-003.pdf

Important industrial areas are located in the Middle and Southern Urals. Intensive industrialization in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) began during World War II (1939-1945), when many industries were established to develop armaments production centers far from the military zone. The region has been a major center of nuclear weapons production since 1948, when the Mayak complex began operations near the city of Kyshtym. Mayak produced the material for the first Soviet atomic bomb, detonated in August 1949. Mayak caused three major incidents of nuclear waste contamination in 1949, 1957, and 1967, which combined released more than ten times the radiation of the world's worst known reactor disaster near Chernobyl’, Ukraine. In the 1950s nuclear wastes from Mayak were diverted into nearby Lake Karachai, and the lake soon became highly radioactive. In the late 1960s workers began filling in the lake with rock and soil and planned to seal it over with concrete by the mid-1990s, but a government commission concluded in 1991 that this might force radioactive isotopes into the groundwater. Containment of radioactive wastes and cleanup efforts continue in the Urals amid public controversy over how best to proceed.
http://www.sfu.ca/~akocheto/urals.htm

http://www.logtv.com/films/chelyabinsk/cheldis.html
http://www.logtv.com/films/chelyabinsk/kyshtym.html

http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/publicati...7/techa_cor.htm