Social Media approaches- Florencia Morini

Ander Ariztoy                                                                                                       21-09-18

                                                                       Lake Karachay

Built in total secrecy between 1945 and 1948, the Mayak plant was the first reactor used to create plutonium for the Soviet atomic bomb project. 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. No consideration was paid to worker safety or responsible disposal of waste materials, producing many tons of contaminated materials which directly contaminated every gallon of the thousands of gallons 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 via 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 in 1957, in which the underground vats exploded due to a failure of the cooling system. In December of 2016 with the final layer of rock and soil being added, made the former lake "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility.

According to a report by the Washington, D.C.based Worldwatch Institute on nuclear waste, Karachay is the most polluted place on Earth from a radiological point of view.The lake accumulated 3.6 EBq of caesium-137 in over less than one square mile of water. For comparison, the Chernobyl disaster released 0.085 EBq of caesium-137, a much smaller amount and over thousands of square miles. 

The radiation level of radioactive effluent is discharged into the lake was 600 röntgens per hour in 1990, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

In conclusion, you would only need to be one hour in, or near the leak to be killed because of the level of radiation. 

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