Everybody knows that Chernobyl was the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history. But how many have ever heard of the second biggest? The Mayak Enterprise nuclear plant in the Southern Urals, Russia was the second compared to Chernobyl and was one of the dark secrets of the cold war. It was one Soviet Union’s primary nuclear complex, a massive set of plutonium production reactors, fuel production facilities, and reprocessing and waste storage buildings set on the Mayak Facility. In 1957 a storage tank with highly radioactive liquid waste exploded. More than half the amount of radioactive waste released by the accident in Chernobyl was blasted into the atmosphere. A few villagers were evacuated, but most were not. 217 towns and at least 272,000
