Lake Karachay
Sign in to saveformer lake in the southern Ural mountains in Russia, used as a disposal site for high-radioactive waste
Key facts
- Type
- Reservoir
- Basin countries
- Russia
- Settlements
- Ozyorsk
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- lake
- Country
- Soviet Union
- Located in
- Ozyorsk
- Area
- 0.5
- Elevation
- 251
- Image
- Majak Satellitenkarte.jpg
Show 1 more fact
- native label
- Карача́й
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Lake Karachay (Russian: Карача́й), sometimes spelled Karachai or Karachaj, was a small lake in the southern Ural Mountains in central Russia. Starting in 1951, the Soviet Union used Karachay as a dumping site for radioactive waste from Mayak, the nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility, located near the town of Ozyorsk (then called Chelyabinsk-40). Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility." Its radioactivity is comparable to the Chernobyl disaster.
Satellite image/map of Lake Karachay
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Lake Karachay” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.