Why is radiactive contamination so hard to clean up?

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I saw a video that said that Chernobyl will not be habitable for another 20,000 years. I was curious as to why it takes so long to clean up radioactive contamination? Also for Chernobyl specifically as technology progresses couldn’t we find new methods that significantly reduce the amount it takes for Chernobyl to be habitable again?

Sorry for bad Grammer.

In: Chemistry

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think the real answer here is that op is looking at radiation like an oil spill, where you can literally just go clean off the rocks and ducks.

Radiation contamination is more akin to a burn. You can’t just go “clean” the burn out of something that has been burned, the entire object is now “burned”. The only way to remove the burn is to remove the entire item that has been burned.

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