Qualla: Yunkom Coal Mine https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/e/4/yunkom-coal-mine-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Yunkom Coal Mine https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine Yunkom Coal Mine: Introduction https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine/ Photo credit анонімний, Public domain. In 1912, miners first went down into the coal beneath the town of Bunhe, in the heart of the Donbas coalfield, and the Yunkom mine - short for Yuny Kommunar, the Young Communard - began its long working life. Two years later, in 1914, a jackhammer chattered against the coal face here for the first time. For over a century this mine gave a Donbas town its livelihood, its rhythm, and its name. But Yunkom would become famous for something no other coal mine could claim: a nuclear explosion set off deep within it, and the slow-rising water that now threatens to turn that buried blast into a poison.

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]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/e/4/yunkom-coal-mine-wp/ube4-yunkom-coal-mine-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Yunkom Coal Mine: A Century Underground https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine/ Photo credit анонімний, Public domain. Coal is the story of the Donbas, and Yunkom was one small chapter of it - a working mine like hundreds of others, sending men down into the dark to cut the fuel that powered an empire. Through the Soviet decades it employed the people of Bunhe, its shafts descending hundreds of m...

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]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/e/4/yunkom-coal-mine-wp/ube4-yunkom-coal-mine-a-century-underground.mp3 0:06 2 full Yunkom Coal Mine: The Blast in the Depths https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine/ Photo credit анонімний, Public domain. In 1979, at a point 903 meters below the surface, Soviet authorities detonated a nuclear device inside the Yunkom mine - the operation code-named Klivazh, part of a state program that used atomic explosions for industrial ends. The purpose was practical: to shatter the stressed r...

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]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/e/4/yunkom-coal-mine-wp/ube4-yunkom-coal-mine-the-blast-in-the-depths.mp3 0:06 3 full Yunkom Coal Mine: The Long Decline https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine/ Photo credit анонімний, Public domain. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Yunkom collapsed with it. The numbers tell a stark story of a community's unraveling: daily production fell from around 1,446 tons in 1990 to roughly 330 by 1999, the length of working tunnels shrank from 84 kilometers to under 29, and the workfor...

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]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/e/4/yunkom-coal-mine-wp/ube4-yunkom-coal-mine-the-long-decline.mp3 0:06 4 full Yunkom Coal Mine: The Water That Remembers https://qualla.com/yunkom-coal-mine/ Photo credit анонімний, Public domain. Draining a deep mine takes constant pumping, and when the pumps were removed, water began climbing through the workings toward the old blast cavity. Scientists had warned of exactly this. The hydrogeologist Yevgeny Yakovlev estimated that the radioactivity of the site, dominated ...

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]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/b/e/4/yunkom-coal-mine-wp/ube4-yunkom-coal-mine-the-water-that-remembers.mp3 0:06 5 full