The most radioactive lake in the world can kill you in one hour without you even entering it
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Definitely one to scrub off your list of places to visit, the most radioactive lake in the world can apparently kill you in one hour just by standing near it.
Perhaps not one of the best fishing spots, Lake Karachay is located in the Russian Federation of Chelyabinsk Oblast, in the southern Ural mountains in western Russia.
Also known as 'Reservoir 9', the small body of water - 900m in length and about 500m at its widest point - is located near to a former nuclear facility - so you probably don't want to take a dip.
And it's that radioactive, it's been labelled with the unhappy title of The Most Radioactive Lake (Ever) by the Guinness World Records since September 1951.
The site was the primary production facility for the Soviet nuclear weapons program at the time.
Reactors created weapons-grade isotopes like Plutonium-239 and Uranium-235 with safety not a consideration in the secretive crash development programme.
Like a twisted version of the intro to The Simpsons, the open-cycle reactors of the Mayak Plutonium Plant dumped reams of high-level radioactive waste alongside contaminated coolant water directly into the the Techa River between 1951 and 1953.
The river is the only source of water for 24 villages lining its banks.
Measurements were taken from some of the downriver settlements in September 1951, revealing scarily high levels of radiation.
In an attempt to put a bandaid on a bullet wound, the most radioactive sludge was diverted to a body of water to the south, Lake Karachay.
Despite specialised waste storage facilities being created later, other forms of waste were still offloaded into its murky depths.
It's argued that this stopped in 1957 or dialled back with medium-level waste being fuelled into the tainted waters until the 1990s.
It was infilled with concrete from 1978 to 1986 to keep water away from the shore and prevent sediment from shifting.
An American group of scientists claim that when they toured the facility in 1992, waste was still being dumped into the water.
The result was devastating for the water of the lake, the sludge of the lakebed and its surrounding environment with a study in 1993 revealing its waters emitted 4,440,000,000,000 megaBecquerels (120 million curies - mostly cesium-137) of radioactivity - that's a lot.
In the mid-1990s it was decided to fill the lake in with concrete again, however that project wasn't finalised until 2015.
The same group of US scientists found that the ground around the shores of the lake had a specific activity of 740,000 megaBecquerel per kilogram.
Without dipping a toe, just standing near the shore will expose a person to a dose of 5.6 Sievert per hour.
To put that into layman's terms: that's easily enough to kill you in 50 minutes.
The lake dried out in the sixties, carrying radioactive dust in the air and irradiating half a million people with 185 petabecquerels of radiation - comparable to the effect of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
In 1967, a drought reduced the water levels drastically, with gale-force winds spreading radioactive dust over twenty-five thousand square kilometres, irradiating a further 436,000 people with five million curies - again comparable to the effects of the A-bomb on Hiroshima.
Since the facility began dumping waste, about half a million people in the region have been exposed.
Russian doctors studying radiation sickness estimate those living along the Techa River have suffered four times the radiation suffered by the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in Ukraine.
Featured Image Credit: inspired_by_the_light / Alamy Stock Photo/googlemaps
Topics: News, Environment, Guinness World Record, World News, Russia
