Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Ural Mountains extend about 2,500 kilometers from the Kara Sea in the north to the Kazakh Steppe in the south. They run mostly through Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the river Ural and northwestern Kazakhstan near the Caspian Sea. Vaygach Island and the islands of Novaya Zemlya continue the chain further into the Arctic Ocean.
Mount Narodnaya is the highest peak in the Ural Mountains, reaching approximately 1,895 meters in elevation. It was formally identified as the highest point of the range in 1927.
The Ural Mountains are estimated to be 250 to 300 million years old, making them among the oldest extant mountain ranges in the world. They formed during the collision of the supercontinent Laurasia with the continent of Kazakhstania, a process lasting nearly 90 million years through the late Carboniferous and early Triassic periods.
The Mayak plutonium-producing facility opened in Chelyabinsk-40 in the Southern Ural after World War II, with its plants going into operation in 1948. For its first ten years it dumped unfiltered radioactive waste into the river Techa and Lake Karachay. In 1957, a storage tank explosion expelled 20 million curies of radioactive material, contaminating over 23,000 square kilometers of land.
The Ural Mountains contain about 48 species of economically valuable ores and minerals. These include iron, copper, gold, platinum, chromite, coal, oil, natural gas, and potassium salts. The region is also known for precious and semi-precious stones such as emerald, amethyst, aquamarine, jasper, rhodonite, malachite, and diamond.
During the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941-1942, the Soviet government evacuated industrial enterprises from European Russia and Ukraine to the eastern foothills of the Ural Mountains, which were considered beyond the reach of German bombers and troops. Three giant tank factories were established at Uralmash in Sverdlovsk, Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, and the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in Chelyabinsk.