Why is Chernobyl deemed to not be habitable for 22,000 years despite reports and articles everywhere saying that the radiation exposure of being within the exclusion zone is less you’d get than flying in a plane or living in elevated areas like Colorado or Cornwall?
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Much of the radioactive material was contained in dust and particles that slowly blanketed the area and has since been moved and buried until the constant fall of “stuff” that occurs everyday.
So just walking around is maybe not the worst choice you could make, though there are still pockets of increased radiation.
A worse choice would be to disturb environment, something like building a home or tilling the soil would turn up all that dust and be a super bad time for you.
Remember those Russian troops who camped out around the reactor and dug trenches into the Earth for a few days of shelter in the early days of the Ukrainian War? And then suddenly they were all shipped away and never heard from again?
They’re… not doing well.
There’s a big difference in exposure between a temporary event and long-term living. Part of that has to do with the activities you’d undertake as a permanent resident.
Don’t know the full story, but I’m aware that a lot of pieces of the exploded reactor are buried under not very much soil. Certain spots of ground are thousands of times worse than nearby parts of ground, and If you start digging holes (say for foundations of buildings) you can dig up parts of the reactor that will not be safe to be near for thousands of years.
Here’s some reporting on the russian army’s recent misadventure (and subsequent sudden withdrawl from) the exclusion zone: [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/world/europe/ukraine-chernobyl.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/world/europe/ukraine-chernobyl.html)
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-troops-radiation-chernobyl-ukraine-b2048563.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-troops-radiation-chernobyl-ukraine-b2048563.html)
It is of course hard to tell to what extent russian soldiers were injured by the radiation, both because the russian government isn’t keen to talk about specifics, and also because with the exception of severe radiation poisoining, often the damage is not apparent for many months/years after the exposure.
exposure is low if you come on a brief tour, stay on carefully selected path, and do not touch anything.
“habitable” means people can go anywhere and do all sorts of things including renovations and digging to replace pipes, all of which will kick up radioactive dust.
Habitation implies consumption of the environment as well.
Breathing, drinking, eating, farming, gardening, having the family dog out playing and digging all day, then come home and sleep next to the kids’ bed…
u/Spiritual_Jaguar4685 basically answered the question but I’ll present it a different way:
The damage that radiation causes is extremely dose dependent. The more radiation the worse for you it is. Dose is, in turn, heavily distance and time dependent. The closer you are to the source, the higher the dose. The longer you spend close to the source, the higher the dose.
Just imagine a source of radiation as being a man with a rifle who stands in one place but randomly points the rifle in different directions and fires off bullets. The closer you are to the man with the rifle, the more likely one of his random bullets will hit you. The longer you stand there, the more likely a bullet or multiple bullets will hit you.
Now, what would be the worse case scenario? The worst case scenario would be that you swallow the man with the rifle and he’s standing ~~instead~~ inside of you, shooting bullets. Now, every bullet he fires is going to hit you. And, he’s hard to get out of you, so he’s going to be spending a lot of time inside of you shooting, which means you are going to be hit with many, many bullets.
That’s the worst case scenario at Chernobyl or other nuclear accident cites: That you swallow or otherwise get radioactive dust or dirt inside your body: say, through your mouth or into your lungs or even through your eyes. That dust will keep firing energy and particles into you from point blank range for as long as the dust stays in you. If you live in Chernobyl and eat food or drink water or breathe (you know, things that are required for humans to live) the likelihood of being contaminated with a radioactive particles is very high, which leads to chance of radioactivity poisoning or cancers.
But let’s look at some good news: ~~Radioactive particles~~ ~~Irradiated~~ radioactive dust from most nuclear bombs don’t tend to be as bad as a nuclear accident’s radiation. Nuclear bombs tend to make things around it radioactive, but much of the radioactive material that’s created as a short half life, meaning it becomes less radioactive very rapidly. The radioactive dust is still a problem but generally not on the scale of a nuclear accident like Chernobyl. This is why, during a nuclear attack, if you aren’t killed by the other effects of the nuke, simply staying inside for 48-72 hours to allow radioactivity to dissipate, you have a decent chance of escaping a lot of radioactive effects from fallout. Of course luck, proximity, and wind as well as medical treatment will all effect your chances of surviving. For example, the crew of Lucky Dragon 5 were accidentally absolutely covered in radioactive ash from a nuclear test and only 1 died of acute radiation poisoning (though they received pretty good medical care, including multiple blood transfusions.)
Wait, what’s going on in cornwall?
ELI5: In the Chernobyl zone, there’s particles (dirt) that can enter your body and remain forever emitting radiation, the big (alpha) particles, the medium (beta) and the very small (gamma). Natural radioactivity, are only “invisible waves” coming from minerals or space, and are not being emitted from inside your body. The big (alpha) particles usually are stopped by a thin layer of paper, the medium (beta) stopped after 1cm of skin, and the very small (gamma), the most dangerous, is more scarce than the other bigger “particles”, in a natural radioactivity environment.
**Radiation is more than just the number on a Geiger counter.**
First, there are several types of radiation emitted from literally anything.
**Alpha radiation** won’t even penetrate your skin but consists of fairly heavy & large particles that can deal a lot of damage even at low ‘radiation count’, but if you inhale dust particles those particles get lodged in your lung & stay there with the effect of fireing of millions of nanoscopic shotguns in your lung, slowly destroying the cells causing pain and due to the increased cellular replacement near guaranteeing lung cancer. At high intensity it’ll burn/melt your skin off like a heat ray.
**Gamma radiation** needs meter thick concrete steel lined with lead to contain, but needs very high reading for it to meaningfully interact with your body’s cells (cook you like a microwave essentially), that’s what you’ll likely receive when on a plane. It takes needs a lot of it to noticeably damage you.
**Beta radiation** is kind of the intermediate of the two, less physically damaging per unit, but also harder to shield. It’s pure electrons being shot at you. This mostly damages the DNA inside of your cells, so the damage is not as immediate as with alpha, but more likely to cause new cells to be malformed & cancerous if they don’t self-terminate or get removed by your body. Getting hit by a lot of it will cause your body to kinda melt after exposure, cuz loads of your cells trigger their self destruct.
Second, any radioactive element might decay into increasingly lighter elements that are radioactive themselves. Each element & isotope (an isotope is when an element has a non-standard ~~electron to proton+neutron ratio~~ *number of neutrons*) emits a different mix and intensity of alpha, beta & gamma radiation.
Also some of those decay products can be *highly toxic,* way more radioactive or corrosive and be a gas, so in a zone with radiation, with time you’ll also have to worry about random *stuff* just popping up. Now imagine inhaling some of that *stuff*. No fun.
It’s likely not a lot of *stuff* popping up at a time, but still generally you don’t want your people to settle in regions with ‘*invisible death*’ if you can avoid it.
Third, a lot of the *highly irradiated* material a Chernobyl was buried, any people messing around there might accidentally disrupt buried material & kick up dust… you’d see it on the Geiger counter, but at that time a whole lot of people will have taken healthy deep breaths of air supposedly “no more radioactive than a transcontinental flight” except that dust is >10.000x more radioactive & now their lungs will rad blasted for months if not years.
With everything, children will be more affected. Toxins are more dangerous with lower body weight & genetic damage is more risky the earlier in life it occurs, since those cells will have decades more time of copying and accumulating defective information. That’s part of why in Fukushima elderly volunteered to do emergency work in the plant. Getting cancer in ~10 years is less tragic of a life change if you are 65 rather than 25.
With people inhabiting an area this also means they’ll spread small amounts of material around, making it near impossible to contain. You know with how at the end of winter the little stones & sand they use to reduce the slipperiness of sidewalks & streets end up everywhere in your house, even if you frequently clean? Now imagine this stuff was radioactive, mostly invisible (dust) and all of the things mentioned above
Because the moment you start to plow the soil or dig up foundations for new buildings/infrastructure, you get all kinds of fun stuff back into play that has been trapped in the deeper layers of the soil.
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