I have often blogged about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. It is one of the most radioactively contaminated places on Earth as a result of the casual disposal of waste from the manufacture of nuclear weapons for the U.S. military. The old Soviet Union was even more careless with disposing of waste from its nuclear weapons manufacture that the U.S. I have blogged about some of their sites before including the Mayak nuclear facility near the town of Ozyorsk in the southern Ural Mountains of Russia. A lake named Lake Karachay near the Mayak facility was used as a nuclear garbage dump.
The World-Watch Institute based in Washington D.C. has identified Lake Karachay as the most radioactively polluted place on Earth. The reactors at Mayak were optimized to produce plutonium with little thought given to environmental contamination and damage to human health. Lake Karachay was near the Mayak facility and was chosen for disposal of high-level nuclear waste that was too "hot" to store in the underground storage vats at the facility. Originally, the Lake was only supposed to be a temporary place to store the waste until it cooled sufficiently so that it could be moved in the vats under Mayak. However, it turned out that the waste was still too radioactive to be moved even after it been cooling in the Lake for awhile.
Lake Karachay was used as a nuclear waste dump between 1951 and 1957. In 1957, some of the underground vats exploded because their cooling system failed. A huge amount of radioactive material was dispersed over the countryside in what is referred to as the Kyshtym disaster. Following the disaster, whole villages had to be evacuated permanently. Three billion curies of high-level waste were moved from Lake Karachay to deep wells at other sites after the disaster.
It is estimated that the bottom of the lake consists of eleven feet of radioactive sludge. In the 1960s, there was a drought and the level of the lake dropped, exposing portions of the polluted lake bed. Radioactive dust from the dry lake bed was blown over a wide area. It is estimated that over half a million people were exposed to radioactive materials from the Lake bed.
Between 1978 and 1986, hollow concrete blocks were dumped into the Lake to prevent the contaminated sediment in the bottom of the lake from shifting. The Lake was originally about five hundred and forty thousand square feet. By 1991, the lake had shrunk to about one hundred and sixty thousand square feet.
In 1994, a report stated that over one billion gallons of contaminated water had leaked out of Lake Karachay and was spreading out south of the Lake at a rate of two hundred and sixty-two feet per year, threatening lakes and rivers in the area with contamination.
The Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union may have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but the terrible legacy of radioactive pollution resulting from the manufacture of nuclear weapons during the Cold War continues to damage the environment and threaten public health in many areas of U.S. and the countries that once made up the Soviet Union.
