Kyshtym () is a town in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, located on the eastern slopes of the Southern Ural Mountains northwest of Chelyabinsk, near the town of Ozyorsk. Population: 36,000 (1970). History Kyshtym was established by the Demidovs in 1757 around two factories for production of cast iron and steel. The city emblem shows the Kyshtym Manor House, a Palladian residence of Nikita Demidov Jr. According to Herbert Hoover, a small iron industry had existed there "for one hundred and fifty years", which produced a secret process for generating sheet iron "unusually resistant to rust." The process "consisted of alternately heating the sheets and sweeping them when hot with a wet pine-bough. The effect was to create a coating of iron oxide which was rust-resistant." Baron Meller-Zakomelsky's Kyshtym estate became of interest to foreign capital, after the 1905 Russian Revolution and subsequent depression. A British consortium around Charles Leslie brought in the mining entrepreneur Leslie Urquhart, investing in Russian oil and minerals. In 1908 Leslie became Chairman of the Kyshtym Corporation, for mining. In 1910, Hoover's American company became involved. The copper, iron and steel industry associated with mining in the area was modernized. Copper production, using pyritic smelting, eventually reached 25,000,000 pounds a year. The corporate situation was already complex, when the American interests became involved, because of tensions between the British interests, which were related by cross-holdings. In 1911 Alfred Chester Beatty visited Kyshtym, on behalf of the American interests. By 1912 the future direction was set for investment in the Urals, with Beatty and Urquhart allied, and the British group around Leslie excluded. Kyshtym was granted town status in 1934. Administrative and municipal status Within the framework of administrative divisions, it is, together with twelve rural localities, incorporated as the Town of Kyshtym—an administrative unit with the status equal to that of the districts. As a municipal division, the Town of Kyshtym is incorporated as Kyshtymsky Urban Okrug. Nuclear disaster Kyshtym is near the Ozyorsk nuclear complex, also known as "Mayak" ("lighthouse" in Russian), where on September 29, 1957, a violent explosion involving dry nitrate and acetate salts in a waste tank containing highly radioactive waste, contaminated an area of more than 15,000 square kilometers (Ozyorsk was the town built around the Mayak combine, but it was a closed city, which was not marked on maps, thus making Kyshtym the nearest town to the location of the disaster).