Lake Karachay (Russian: Карача́й), sometimes spelled Karachai or Karachaj, was a small lake in the southern Ural mountains in central Russia. Starting in 1951, the Soviet Union used Karachay as a dumping site for radioactive waste from Mayak, the nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility, located near the town of Ozyorsk (then called Chelyabinsk-40). Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."[1]
According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute on nuclear waste, Karachay is the most polluted (open-air) place on Earth from a radiological point of view.
The radiation level in the region near where radioactive effluent is discharged into the lake was 600 röntgens per hour (approximately 6 Sv/h) in 1990, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defense Council,[5][6] sufficient to give a lethal dose to a human within an hour.
Built in total secrecy between 1946 and 1948, the Mayak plant was the first reactor used to create plutonium for the Soviet atomic bomb project. In accordance with Stalinist procedure and supervised by NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria, it was the utmost priority to produce enough weapons-grade material to match the U.S. nuclear superiority following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Little to no consideration was paid to worker safety or responsible disposal of waste materials, and the reactors all were optimized for plutonium production, producing many tons of contaminated materials and utilizing open-cycle cooling systems which directly contaminated every liter of the thousands of liters of cooling water the reactors used every day.
In the 1960s, the lake began to dry out; its area dropped from 0.5 km2 in 1951[4] to 0.15 km2 by the end of 1993.[9] In 1968, following a drought in the region, the wind carried 185 PBq (5 MCi) of radioactive dust away from the dried area of the lake, irradiating half a million people.[
The sediment of the lake bed is estimated to be composed almost entirely of high level radioactive waste deposits to a depth of roughly 11 feet (3.4 m)
The pollution of Lake Karachay is connected to the disposal of nuclear materials from Mayak. Among workers, cancer mortality remains an issue.[6] By the time Mayak's existence was officially recognized, there had been a 21% rise in cancer cases, a 25% rise in birth defects, and a 41% rise in leukemia in the surrounding region of Chelyabinsk.[7] By one estimate, the river contains 120 million curies of radioactive waste.[8] Prevalence of pollution
Nuclear waste, either from civilian or military nuclear projects, remains a serious threat to the environment of Russia.[9] Reports suggest that there are few or no road signs warning about the polluted areas surrounding Lake Karachay.[10]
Some parts of the lake are extremely radioactive (600 röntgens/hour) and one could receive a lethal dose of radiation in 30 minutes (300 röntgens).[
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