Lake Karachay
| Lake Karachay | |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 55°40′42″N 60°47′59″E / 55.67833°N 60.79972°E |
| Type | Reservoir |
Lake Karachay (Russian: Карача́й), sometimes spelled Karachai or Karachaj, is 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).
According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute on nuclear waste, Karachay is the most polluted place on Earth. The lake accumulated some 4.44 exabecquerels (EBq) of radioactivity over less than 1 square mile of water, including 3.6 EBq of caesium-137 and 0.74 EBq of strontium-90. For comparison, the Chernobyl disaster released from 5 to 12 EBq of radioactivity over thousands of square miles. 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 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, sufficient to give a lethal dose to a human within an hour.
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