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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The basement of the hospital in Pripyat is where they dumped all the fire fighters clothing when they came in to treat them. To this day that basement is highly radio active. Going down there for an hour is like getting 100 years worth of atmospheric radiation.
The forest surrounding the disaster was called the red forest because the dose of radiation it received killed all the trees and turned all their leaves red.
After the disaster they ended up removing all the trees and a lot of the top soil from the surrounding area. Otherwise it would be even worse than it is.
The are currently doing the same thing in Fukushima removing a ton of top soil to reduce the amount of radiation and prevent radioactive dust becoming airborne and contaminating water supplies, food chain, and lungs of the living.
I enjoyed my trip there in 2015.
We were told our day trip would be the same radiation as a international flight on a commercial airline and that the 2000 staff work a struck shift pattern where they are only on site about 3 days at a time.
What this boils down to is understanding the difference between ionizing radiation (i.e. alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays, x-rays, neutrons, cosmic rays, etc), and radioactive materials that emit ionizing radiation. If you’re just standing somewhere in the exclusion zone in winter standing on a snow-covered parking lot, then your exposure to either of those things is going to be pretty minimal. There will likely be some radioactive materials mixed into the snow on the ground, but the snow will keep it under your feet and you’ll be receiving a very small dose of ionizing radiation. However, go there in spring, summer or fall on a decently windy day and you had better be wearing very good PPE with NBC rated filters. All of the dangerous particles of radioactive isotopes that will take those 22,000 years to decay down to safe levels are in the dirt being kicked up by that wind, and if you get those inside your body, the small amounts of ionizing radiation that they are giving off that is mostly blocked by your skin (talking about the alpha and beta rays, the gamma and others will go right through you) is suddenly stuck inside your body, tearing you apart from the inside.
It’s like the asbestos tiles that had been in my house for 60 years. They’re all nice and insulating and harmless when they’re sitting on the floor/wall/ceiling and not being disturbed. Once you start breaking them into pieces and all those little particles/fibers start getting into the air, you better have a proper filtration system and facemask in place or you’re gonna be dealing with a highly elevated cancer risk.
It’s easy to do a proper asbestos removal in one house. It’s a lot harder to clean up a city area with hundreds of square miles of buildings and outdoor spaces.
I always thought it was fairly interesting that the A-bomb over Hiroshima used approx. 60 kg of uranium. Most of the radiation dissipated within a week.
Chernobyl involved approx. 200,000 kg of uranium.
Try gardening in the exclusion zone. Just beneath the surface is still a devil’s brew of really nasty isotopes ready to enter your lungs and digestive tract and generally screw you up 8 ways to Sunday.
I haven’t read all the way down the threads and, for that, I apologize if it has already been discussed. Also l, this is way beyond ELI5 but as is often the case, curious people that ain’t 5 want to go deeper. So here goes.
I’m someone that works with radioactive materials as part of my job. I don’t claim to have authoritative knowledge on the subject but I have more than the average Joe.
This isn’t a direct answer to OP’s inquiry but I want to share a couple of concepts in the field 1) Deterministic and 2) Stochastic.
1) Deterministic outcomes are those that are radiation dose dependent. For example, if a person gets a concentrated skin dose (meaning a exposed small area, say during a long medical procedure) of, say, some several hundred centi-Gray of radiation, they are *expected* to have skin reddening (erythema, in medical parlance). These are dose dependent outcomes. The higher the dose, the more terrible the outcome. There are known doses, that when that threshold is crossed, cause expected outcomes. These are deterministic effects of radiation.
One useful way that I think about deterministic and how dose dependence works is in this way (probably getting into some upper level biology weeds here):
Think of the cells in your body that reproduce the most often. Think skin cells, lining of your gut, sex cells. The more often a cell reproduces, the more often it’s genetic material is replicating; replication is a wee bit error prone to begin with so it makes sense that some outside insult would be able to mess with the process because it has more opportunity.
Knowing this, we can see (and it roughly bears out) that skin gets damaged at lower doses followed by x and y and z. Interestingly, neurons, which conventional knowledge says replicate very little, are the most radiation resistant; however there is a known gigantic dose that causes damage to them, even. Bad way to go, too.
2) Stochastic is risk. Every time you are exposed to ionizing radiation, your risk for a biological effect (bad, in practice) increases. This includes getting walking to your vehicle on a sunny day (lowest dose, in this discussion), flying from LA to NYC, routinely laying in peak sunshine for years in order to get a nice suntan or having 10 CT scans a year. These are the levels of radiation dose that do damage, but, in terms of cancer (which incidentally is the only life threatening long term stochastic effect I can think of off the top of my head) the more you’re exposed, to the *risk* you face of developing cancer increases.
Adding here as an aside: A lot of the information we have on biologic effects of radiation come from radiation disasters, inflicted by humans purposely, and accidentally.
In a way to drive it home:
Those resulting deterministic effects were studied in the short term.
Stochastic effects took long prospective studies to determine if the risk of bad outcomes was due to what was theorized.
TL:DR
Deterministic: The level of exposure equals the biological damage done. And it happens soon.
Stochastic: It’s not a guarantee but a risk of bad outcomes years down the road.
There are two problems with the radiation measurements from Chernobyl.
First,there are two basic attitudes taking those measurements. One are people who want you to believe that nothing labeled “nuclear” in any way shape or form is safe to be around. The second group wants to promote nuclear energy and their readings are going to be biased in support of nuclear energy.
The second problem is something called fuel fleas. On average, Chernobyl is safe to be around. The average rad levels are quite low. However, the core of a nuclear reactor did blow up. It expelled particles of nuclear material around Chernobyl. These are not safe to be around. They are very hot.
There are videos on youtube of people finding them around Chernobyl. These fuel fleas are going to take thousands of years to go away. Unless someone comes up with a method of finding and safely collecting these hazards it will not be safe to occupy the area because of the risk of coming in contact with one of these.
TLDR: The fallout from the reactor explosion has dropped highly radioactive materials that are very small in size around the site. Coming in contact with these sources is very dangerous and can result in excess exposures.
If you pass your hand through a lighter’s flame quickly, it does not burn.
If you hold your hand in a lighter’s flame, it will burn.
Wait we have elevated levels of radia in CO?
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