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
It’s worth noting that despite the radiation Chernobyl has a healthy & thriving ecosystem, it’s not an irradiated death zone where your skin melts off. People are *way* harder on the environment & wildlife than radiation is, Chernobyl is more of a nature-preserve than a glowing wasteland.
Humans *could* live there too & most would be mostly fine for most (maybe all) of their lives, it’s really hard to measure, much less predict, even with 40 years of data. It’s just not worth the risk though, the world has a lot of land.
But to ELI5
It’s just not practical to clean it up. Pretend someone dumped a 10 million little pieces of broken glass at a beach, there’s just no way to separate & remove every sharp piece of glass that is dangerous from every not-sharp piece of glass we just call sand. **But** if you wait a long time all the glass with smooth over & there’s no reason to keep the beach closed.
Nuclear material is dangerous because it’s slowly turning into other stuff & that conversion process itself is dangerous to people. It’s a little bit like wood turning into ash, after the fire burns up all the wood it will cool off you & won’t get burned. (unless that wood sets something else of fire, this stuff is complicated)
Half-life is just how long it takes for half of the wood to burn. A really fast burning fire like a pile of papers will release a lot of heat quickly which is bad because you can get burned easily, but it doesn’t burn for very long which is good too.
A really slow burning fire like a looong candle doesn’t release as much heat so it’s harder to get burned, but it stays burning for a long time (say 20,000 years) which is bad.
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