A lake in Russia is so radioactive, you can die in less than an hour of being near it!

Starting in 1951, the Soviets began dumping their radioactive waste into Lake Karachay from their testing site in Mayak, the nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility. In the 1960s the lake started to dry up. Then in 1963, a wind storm picked up 185 PBq of radioactive dust from the dried up part of the lake and blew over half a million people making them sick.

Between 1978 and 1986 the lake was filled with almost 10,000 hollow concrete blocks to prevent sediments from shifting. The lake is the most polluted and radioactive place on Earth. The lake accumulated some 4.44 exabecquerels (EBq) of radioactivity including caesium-137 and strontium-90.
To compare it to something, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster released 5 to 12 EBq of radioactivity. The difference is that the Chernobyl disaster wasn't concentrated to just one location as in the case of the lake. The lake is so saturated with the radioactive waste that it could kill someone within an hour of being near it.

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