The radioactive lake that would kill you in an hour just by standing on the shore
Lake Karachay in Russia is known as the most polluted place on Earth.
Just one hour at the shore of Lake Karachay would be enough to kill. The radioactive lake, located in the southern Ural Mountains in central Russia, was a dumping ground for nuclear waste from the Mayak Nuclear Weapons facility throughout the 20th century, and is known as “the most polluted spot on Earth.”
Constructed in the 1940s, Mayak was one of Russia’s most prominent nuclear facilities and a strict government secret not known to the West until 1990. The sole objective of the plant was to compete in the nuclear arms race with the United States following the deadly end to World War 2 and it in fact became the first reactor used to create plutonium for the Soviet atomic bomb project.
The nearby lake, Karachay (which means ‘black water’), due to its small size, was unable to be used for cooling. As such, in 1951 it was chosen as the location where all the unwanted waste from the Mayak plant would be thrown.
This was not a problem until 1968, when the lake started drying up, causing radioactive dust from the 11-feet deep bed to be blown to nearby areas, irradiating half a million people.
It was decided that work needed to be done to help those at risk, and between 1978 and 1986 workers bravely laid close to 10,000 concrete blocks down into the lake in order to keep the radioactive sediment from shifting and being released.
It is said that before the lake was eventually buried beneath concrete and stone, it held over 50 times more radioactive material than was released in the Chernobyl disaster.
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