The Most Polluted Lake in the World is Made of Nuclear Waste

The "most polluted lake in the world" is making the rounds on the internet, because apparently the internet decided it wanted to talk about nuclear waste-filled bodies of water. And this is one hell of a nuclear waste-filled body of water. It's the nuclear waste filled-est.

Jess Zimmerman fills us in on Lake Karachay, where, 20 years ago, just standing on the shore for an hour would give you a radiation dose of 600 roentgen, more than enough to kill you."

She explains how it got to be so bad:

The lake is located within the Mayak Production Association, one of them largest — and leakiest — nuclear facilities in Russia. The Russian government kept Mayak entirely secret until 1990, and it spent that period of invisibility mainly having nuclear meltdowns and dumping waste into the river. By the time Mayak's existence was officially acknowledged, there had been a 21 percent increase in cancer incidence, a 25 percent increase in birth defects, and a 41 percent increase in leukemia in the surrounding region of Chelyabinsk.

The Techa river, which provided water to nearby villages, was so contaminated that up to 65 percent of locals fell ill with radiation sickness — which the doctors termed "special disease," because as long as the facility was secret, they weren't allowed to mention radiation in their diagnoses.

Nothing like a bit of Soviet-era villainy to spice up an already atrocious tale of environmental degradation.

What I'd like to take the opportunity to note how this exemplifies — very vividly — the super steep, near-incalculable toll nuclear power is capable of levying on a population. Granted, this thing was disastrously managed, disastrously contained, and disastrously kept hidden from the public. Nonetheless, the specter of incidents like this is why nobody wants to finance nuclear power projects — that and your more massive-scale Fukushima-or-Chernobyl-style disaster.

As Chris Mims pointed out in the Atlantic, the real disaster of Chernobyl wasn't just the radiation — it's the economics. Nuclear power ruined an entire swath of country across the Ukraine for the foreseeable future. Productive land is completely shot. The illnesses and health costs are expensive. A way of life is effectively ruined. Some goes for the communities surrounding the sad nuclear waste-filled Lake Kachay — it's an illustrative example of why, exactly nuclear power is not just potentially horrifying, but expensive.