Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson.

More stories from the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week, the most notorious prison riot in American history. I've seen guys get their head shot off

and I've seen a guy get hit with the Thompson sub-machine gun

and they bounce them like a basketball.

Also, Second World War internment in Australia

and one of the heroes of resistance to apartheid in South Africa.

When you are defending a system that is so fundamentally brutal, there is no other choice in

history you will be taken down one way or the other. That's all to come later in this podcast, but first, one of the lesser known major nuclear

accidents of the last century. This happened in Soviet Russia nearly 2,000

kilometers to the east of Moscow in September 1957. It resulted in a highly

toxic radioactive cloud spreading over a wide area affecting a quarter

of a million people.

Dina Newman has been speaking to Jouraj Medvedev, the first scientist to disclose the

accident to the international community.

On Sunday, September the 29th, 1957, technicians at Mayak, a nuclear plant in the Soviet Union, started their shift

as usual. Myak was a secret facility which had produced the first Soviet nuclear bomb.

Anna Sharava, a chemical engineer, remembered the day of the accident in a documentary produced decades later.

We were one shift from 1 PM until 7. We worked in the lab and being a Sunday there was less work than usual.

And suddenly we heard a kind of thunder.

Windows were blown out, glass doors were shattered.

We looked outside and saw a huge cloud.

...