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Lake Karachay (russian: Карача́й), sometimes spelled Karachai or Karachaj, was a small lake in the southern
Ural mountains The Ural Mountains ( ; rus, Ура́льские го́ры, r=Uralskiye gory, p=ʊˈralʲskʲɪjə ˈɡorɨ; ba, Урал тауҙары) or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western ...
in central Russia. Starting in 1951, the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
used Karachay as a dumping site for
radioactive waste Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons ...
from
Mayak The Mayak Production Association (russian: Производственное объединение «Маяк», , from 'lighthouse') is one of the biggest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing a reprocessing plant. The closest ...
, 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." The radioactivity of the lake is comparable to the
Chernobyl disaster The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. It is one of only two nuc ...
, the worst nuclear accident of all time.


Background

The name ''
karachay The Karachays ( krc, Къарачайлыла, Qaraçaylıla or таулула, , 'Mountaineers') are an indigenous Caucasian Turkic ethnic group in the North Caucasus. They speak Karachay-Balkar, a Turkic language. They are mostly situa ...
'' means "black water" or "black creek" in several Northwestern Turkic languages, including
Tatar The Tatars ()Tatar
in the Collins English Dictionary
is an umbrella term for different
. Built in total secrecy between 1946 and 1948, the Mayak plant was the first reactor used to create
plutonium Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhib ...
for the
Soviet atomic bomb project The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II. Although the Soviet scientific community dis ...
. In accordance with
Stalinist Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory o ...
procedure and supervised by
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. ...
Chief
Lavrenti Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (; rus, Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия, Lavréntiy Pávlovich Bériya, p=ˈbʲerʲiə; ka, ლავრენტი ბერია, tr, ;  – 23 December 1953) was a Georgian Bolshevik ...
, 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 The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the onl ...
. 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. Lake Kyzyltash was the largest natural lake capable of providing cooling water to the reactors; it was rapidly contaminated because of their use of the open-cycle system. Lake Karachay was even closer; however the lake was too small to provide sufficient cooling water. Lake Karachay was then designated a close-by and convenient dumping ground for large quantities of high-level radioactive waste too "hot" to store in the facility's underground storage vats. The original plan was to use the lake to store highly radioactive material until it could be returned to the Mayak facility's underground concrete storage vats, but this proved impossible due to the lethal levels of radioactivity. The lake was used for this purpose until the
Kyshtym Disaster The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and ...
in 1957, in which the underground vats exploded due to a faulty cooling system. This incident caused widespread contamination of 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 The Techa is an eastward river on the eastern flank of the southern Ural Mountains noted for its nuclear contamination. It is long, and its basin covers . It begins by the once-secret nuclear processing town of Ozyorsk about northwest of Chely ...
, along which many villages lay). In the 1960s, the lake began to dry out; its area dropped from 0.5 km2 in 1951 to 0.15 km2 by the end of 1993. In 1968, following a drought in the region, the wind carried 185  PBq (5 M Ci) of radioactive dust away from the dried area of the lake, irradiating half a million people. Between 1978 and 1986, the lake was filled with almost 10,000 hollow concrete blocks to prevent sediments from shifting. Conservation of the affected area continued into the 2000s via the federal target program "Nuclear and Radiation Safety in 2008 and for the period up to 2015", with the rest of the lake finally being backfilled in November 2015. Conservation work was completed in December 2016 with the final layer of rock and soil being added, effectively making the former lake "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."


Current status

According to a report by the
Worldwatch Institute The Worldwatch Institute was a globally focused environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C., founded by Lester R. Brown. Worldwatch was named as one of the top ten sustainable development research organizations by Globescan Sur ...
on
nuclear waste Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons ...
, Karachay is the most
polluted Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. Pollution can take the form of any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) or energy (such as radioactivity, heat, sound, or light). Pollutants, the ...
(open-air) place on Earth from a radiological point of view.Lenssen, "Nuclear Waste: The Problem that Won't Go Away", Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C., 1991: 15. The lake accumulated some 4.44  exabecquerels (EBq) of radioactivity over less than one square mile of water, including 3.6 EBq of
caesium-137 Caesium-137 (), cesium-137 (US), or radiocaesium, is a radioactive isotope of caesium that is formed as one of the more common fission products by the nuclear fission of uranium-235 and other fissionable isotopes in nuclear reactors and nu ...
and 0.74 EBq of
strontium-90 Strontium-90 () is a radioactive isotope of strontium produced by nuclear fission, with a half-life of 28.8 years. It undergoes β− decay into yttrium-90, with a decay energy of 0.546 MeV. Strontium-90 has applications in medicine and ...
. For comparison, the
Chernobyl disaster The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. It is one of only two nuc ...
released 0.085 EBq of caesium-137, a much smaller amount and over thousands of square miles. (The total Chernobyl release is estimated between 5 and 12 EBq of radioactivity, however essentially only caesium-134/137 nd to a lesser extent, strontium-90contribute to land contamination because the rest is too short-lived). The sediment of the lake bed is estimated to be composed almost entirely of
high level radioactive waste High-level waste (HLW) is a type of nuclear waste created by the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. It exists in two main forms: * First and second cycle raffinate and other waste streams created by nuclear reprocessing. * Waste formed by vitr ...
deposits to a depth of roughly . In 1990, the radiation level in the region near where radioactive effluent was discharged into the lake was 600  röntgens per hour (approximately 6  Sv/h) according to the
Natural Resources Defense Council The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a United States-based 501(c)(3) non-profit international environmental advocacy group, with its headquarters in New York City and offices in Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, B ...
, sufficient to give a lethal dose to a human within less than an hour. , the lake's status is completely infilled, using special concrete blocks, rock, and dirt. It had been completely backfilled in November 2015, then monitored before placing the final layer of rock and dirt. Monitoring data showed "clear reduction of the deposition of radionuclides on the surface" after 10 months. A decades-long monitoring program for underground water was expected to be implemented shortly after.


Cultural references

* The lake and its vicinity are featured in
James Rollins James Paul Czajkowski (born August 20, 1961), better known by his pen name of James Rollins, is an American veterinarian and writer of action-adventure/ thriller, mystery, and techno-thriller novels who gave up his veterinary practice in Sacrame ...
' Sigma Force novel ''The Last Oracle''. * The lake and its vicinity are featured in Brent Ghelfi's novel ''The Burning Lake: A Volk Thriller''. * The album ''
One Hour by the Concrete Lake ''One Hour by the Concrete Lake'' is Pain of Salvation's second studio album. It is a concept album focusing on the issues of nuclear power and waste, displacement of indigenous peoples, the firearm industry, and human discovery. Release history ...
'' by Swedish progressive metal band
Pain of Salvation Pain of Salvation is a Swedish progressive metal band led by Daniel Gildenlöw, who is the band's main songwriter, lyricist, guitarist, and vocalist. Pain of Salvation's sound is characterised by riff-oriented guitar work, a broad vocal range, o ...
is a concept album based on the contamination of Lake Karachay.


See also

*
Hanford Site The Hanford Site is a decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in Benton County in the U.S. state of Washington. The site has been known by many names, including SiteW ...
, The United States’ worst nuclear industry polluted site. *
Norilsk Norilsk ( rus, Нори́льск, p=nɐˈrʲilʲsk, ''Norílʹsk'') is a closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around 90 km east of the Yenisey River and 1,500 km north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk ...
, The
Blacksmith Institute Pure Earth is a New York City-based international not-for-profit organization founded in 1999 that works to identify, clean up, and solve pollution problems in low- and middle-income countries, where high concentrations of toxic pollution have dev ...
included Norilsk in its 2007 list of the ten most polluted places on Earth.


References

{{reflist, 30em


External links


Lake Karachay - Open-Air Depository for Radioactive Waste
(in Russian)

(in Russian)
Radioactive Lake Has Been Practically Annihilated
(in Russian)
Google Maps Image of the lakeDeadlier Than Chernobyl"Damn Interesting" article on the lakeLake Karachay become the most polluted spot on earth
Karachal Karachal Radioactively contaminated areas