The Claim
There’s an entire town in Russia that no one is allowed to visit
Ozyorsk is a large town in southern Russia that has come to be known as city 40. Even though it may sound like some kind of top secret code name, its nothing more than the postal code of the area, but the town itself is completely closed off from the outside world.
Residents of Ozyorsk have to follow strict security procedures and require permission to enter and leave the town which has a permanent presence of armed guards. Anyone who doesn’t work at the town is not allowed to enter it, and foreigners will be turned back in the attempt.
Ozyorsk is quite large and the last conducted census in 2010 recorded 82,164 people living there, but today its population is not known though its thought to employee around 15,000 people from the town to work in the near by processing plant.
The reason for the large amount of security and “closed off” status is due to the Mayak plant on the edge of town. This was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons program after the second world war and is now used as a nuclear waste processing plant.
It produces cobalt-60, Iridium and Carbon-14, not that i have any idea what those things are, but they’re the major exports of the town. There’s various talk about how theres much more going on here than a bit of innocent radioactive waste processing due to the large presence of armed guards and secrecy, but you always get various conspiracy theories with places like this.
This is an excellent example of how NOT to dispose of nuclear waste, as the surrounding countryside is very heavily contaminated. Its thought that the amount of radioactivity in the surrounding area of the town has amounted to up to 3 times that of the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion of 1986.
( Part of the river leading to Lake Karachay – the most radioactive lake in the world)
Shortly after world war two the plant started to dump radioactive waste straight into the river, as well as burying large amounts in the surrounding countryside. In 1957 this came to a peak when a large underground storage tank containing a highly concentrated nuclear waste exploded and contaminated several thousand square kilometres of land.
After the explosion, and after they realised they had poisoned a whole town slightly down river from dumping waste in it, they ceased this practice and proper disposal methods were put in place.
Today Ozyorsk still functions as a waste disposal site, and after creating more contamination than a nuclear power plant exploding, poisoning countless people, causing the evacuation of 22 towns and some near by cities, and creating the most radioactive lake in the world, its still trotting along cleaning up all those left over nuclear by-products.
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