Find the most terrible place on Earth

Lake Karachay is located south of the Ural Mountains in Chelyabinsk region, eastern Russia, now considered the most serious and dangerous pollution on Earth.

Lake Karachay - the most polluted place in the world

In less than 1 hour in Karachay Lake , you could be infected with enough lethal radiation, up to 600 jealousy. Excessive radiation is emitting from Karachay because the lake is located inside the Mayak production complex, one of Russia's largest and most leaking nuclear facilities.

Mayak was built in the 1940s, when the former Soviet Union shifted the production of weapons to the east to avoid the Nazi aggression. The facility was once one of Russia's most important atomic weapons factories and was kept secret from the foreigner's gaze for 45 years.

Only after Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree to open the area in 1992, Western scientists were able to access the site and immediately declared it the most polluted place on the planet.

Lake Karachay is the most polluted place in the world

For decades of security, engineers at Mayak mainly performed nuclear melting operations and dumped radioactive waste into nearby rivers and lakes. The waste that flows into the lake is a mixture of radioactive elements, including long-lived fission products like Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 , whose elements last up to approximately 60 years.

When the public finally became aware of the existence of this nuclear facility, the Chelyabinsk region saw a 21% increase in cancer cases, a 25% increase in birth defects and an increase of 41% in people with leukemia. bridge.

The nearby Techa River, which supplies many villages in the region, is so polluted that up to 65% of local residents are sick from radiation contamination.

It was not until the mid-1950s that the operation of dumping nuclear waste into nearby rivers and lakes stopped and instead pumped them into a series of tanks. By September 1957, these tanks had exploded with destructive power equivalent to about 85 tons of TNT, spraying nearly 70 tons of radioactive waste up to 1.6km high.

Radioactive dust cloud spreads cesium isotopes and strontium across an area of ​​over 23,309 km ² , affecting about 270,000 people and their food supplies.

Karachay Lake gradually began to dry up, revealing radioactive residues in the lake, the wind blew away radioactive dust everywhere.

In the face of the destruction of the nuclear waste storage system, authorities decided to direct the flow of radioactive waste from Malak directly into Karachay Lake, where there is no outlet on the surface, causing the Optimistic engineers are what poured out that will be buried indefinitely.

Everything went smoothly for about 10 years, until a serious drought struck the whole Chelyabinsk region.Karachay Lake gradually began to dry up , revealing radioactive deposits in the lake . Hazardous dust, including radioactive substances Strontium-90, Caesium-137 and other harmful elements, began to be blown everywhere.

Currently, the vast expanses of Chelyabinsk region are still uninhabited as a result of radioactive contamination of rivers and lakes as well as the 1957 explosion and the 1967 drought. cardboard than water, but its pollution has not been controlled.

Estimates suggest that nearly 1 billion gallons of groundwater in the region has been contaminated with 5 radioactive nuclide megacurie. Even today, local people still do not know the true amount of radioisotopes exists in their farming products.