Karachay lake – The forbidden beauty
Karachay lake is a small lake in the southern Ural mountains in western Russia. Even though it is said to be one of the most beautiful and breathtaking places on earth, hardly anyone would be able to enjoy this amazing landscape. 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 hence the lake is considered to be the most polluted place on earth. In fact the sediments within the lake bed are estimated to be composed almost entirely of high radioactive waste deposits, sufficient to be fatal to any living creature within an hour.
Built in total secrecy and great haste between 1945 and 1948, the Mayak plant was the first reactor for the creation of plutonium for the Soviet atomic bomb project. In accordance with Stalinist procedure and supervised by NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria, production of enough weapons-grade material to match the U.S. nuclear superiority following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was given the utmost priority, sparing no expense.
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 primitive open-cycle cooling systems which directly contaminated every gallon of the thousands of gallons of cooling water the reactors used every day.Lake Kyzyltash was the largest natural lake capable of providing cooling water to the reactors; it was rapidly contaminated via the open-cycle system. Lake Karachay was even closer, but too small to provide cooling water, so it quickly became a highly convenient dumping ground for massive levels of high level radioactive waste that were too "hot" to store in the facility's underground storage vats.
Originally the plan was to use the lake to store the especially energetic material until it could be returned to the Mayak facility's underground concrete storage vats, but this proved impossible due to the level of radioactivity, which was extraordinarily lethal. The lake was used for this purpose until the Kyshtym Disaster in 1957, in which the underground vats exploded due to a faulty cooling system and terribly contaminated the entire Mayak area (as well as a large swath of territory to the northeast). This led to greater caution among the administration, fearing international attention, and caused the dumping grounds to be spread out over a variety of areas (including several lakes and the Techa River, along which many villages lay).Starting in the 1960s, the lake began to dry out; its area dropped from 0.5 km2 in 1951[1] to 0.15 km2 by the end of 1993.[6]
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.[3]Between 1978 and 1986, the lake was filled with almost 10,000 hollow concrete blocks to prevent sediments from shifting.
References
1. Lake Karachay
2. Jump up^ Lenssen, "Nuclear Waste: The Problem that Won't Go Away", Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C., 1991: 15.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b Chelyabinsk-65
4. Jump up^ NRDC (Nuclear Program Staff Publication) nuc_01009302a_112b.pdf
5. Jump up^ Wise Nc; Soviet Weapons Plant Pollution6. Jump up^ "Russia's Plutonium"
7. Jump up^ "To help prevent such lethal airborne contamination, Russian engineers have been gradually covering Lake Karachay with stones and concrete blocks, a controversial remediation method." ("Cold War, Hot Nukes: Legacy of an Era
