Lake Karachay: World's Most Polluted

This Russian nuclear weapon production site contains 120 million curies of radioactivity, mostly cesium-137. In the past 45 years, about half a million people in the region have been irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to as much as 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl victims. From 1949 to 1956 members of the public were exposed via discharge of very large quantities of radioactive liquid wastes into the Techa River.

During the 1950's the Soviet Union started using the lake to dump waste from Mayak, a nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility built in 1945-48, in a great hurry and in total secrecy, as part of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapon program. There are literally uncounted numbers of radioactively contaminated lakes and rivers near to the plant.

During the 1960's the lake began to dry out and the wind carried radioactive dust away, irradiating half a million people with 185 petabecquerels of radiation which is comparable to the effect of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating 436,000 people with five million curies, approximately the same as at Hiroshima. Russian doctors who study radiation sickness in the area estimate that those living along the Techa River received an average of four times more radiation than the Chernobyl victims. The river is the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. he lake was filled with concrete from 1978 to 1986.

Lake Karachay in Russia is the most radioactive location on the planet

For decades, the Mayak weapons manufacturing complex used Lake Karachay as a dumping ground for radioactive waste. Residents have been exposed to toxins, and the lake has been cordoned off from humans and is considered extremely unsafe by Russian authorities.

DEADLY LAKE KARACHAY: RECOMMENDED DOSAGES
Spending only 5 minutes at the shore of lake Karachay is enough to receive a deadly radioactive dosis, spending an entire hour near the lake will probably kill you within the next few hours and in most cases you even won't make it to the next hospital.

The radiation level at the shore of the lake is 600 röntgens per hour, and it accumulates some 4.44 exabecquerels (EBq) of radioactivity, give or take...

By comparison, the Chernobyl disaster released from 5 to 12 EBq of radioactivity, but this was widely distributed while Lake Karachay concentrates the entire radioactivity in a single location.