The Soviet plan to reverse Siberia's rivers with 'peaceful nuclear explosions'
In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north. The project was a grand failure – but 50 years on, the idea still won't completely go away.
To the west of Russia's Ural Mountains lies a picturesque body of water called Nuclear Lake. It's difficult to access, and visitors have to travel north by boat along the Kolva and Visherka rivers from the small town of Nyrob, where the tsars once exiled their political opponents. The lake itself, which is about 690m (2,300ft) at its widest point, is not linked directly to the dozens of nearby waterways, and the final approach is on foot along a boggy track. To get to its shores, you have to pass rusting metal signs warning you are entering a "radiation danger zone" and that drilling and construction are forbidden. Large earth mounds snake around the edge of the lake.
"The water was transparent," says Andrei Fadeev, a Russian blogger from the city of Perm, who travelled to Nuclear Lake on a sunny day in the summer of 2024. "I liked it," he says, even though his dosimeter showed spots where radiation levels were higher than usual. "There wasn't an atmosphere of a threat or something. On the contrary… I think the northern taiga [boreal forest] has just recaptured the place."
Nuclear Lake was formed on 23 February 1971 when the Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15 kilotonnes (about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet programme of carrying out peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).
