Lake Karachay in the Chelyabinsk province of Russia has accumulated 120 million curies of radioactivity and absorbed nearly 100 times more strontium 90 and caesium 137 than was released at Chernobyl.  If a person stood on the shore of the lake he would receive a radiation exposure rate of 600 roentgens an hour.  This is 2,000 times greater radiation than that emitted during a normal chest X-ray and strong enough to kill a person within an hour.

The lake is near a Soviet nuclear facility called Mayak Chemical Combine.  It was here that the Soviet nuclear program was initiated in 1948 and where the first weapons grade plutonium was first produced for the Soviet Union.  The plant was shut down in 1990.  



Unfortunately currently nothing is being done about this situation.  The radiation that is being emitted either becomes airborne by a process of evaporation and is dispersed by the wind or is absorbed by sand particles and deposited at the bottom of the lake.