Mayak

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The Mayak Production Association (Russian: Производственное объединение «Маяк», Proizvodstvennoye ob′yedineniye "Mayak", from Маяк 'lighthouse') is a nuclear facility near Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, with production reactors and a reprocessing plant. Its reprocessing capacity, at 400 tonnes of heavy metal per year, is the second-largest in the world, following the La Hague site in France. It is currently used for military and civilian radioisotope production, and was historically central to the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Lavrentiy Beria led the Soviet atomic bomb project. He directed the construction of the Mayak plutonium plant in the Southern Urals between 1945 and 1948, in a great hurry and secrecy as part of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project. The plant had a similar purpose to the Hanford Site of the Manhattan Project. Over 40,000 gulag prisoners and POWs built the factory and the closed nuclear city of Ozyorsk, called at the time by its classified postal code "Chelyabinsk...

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