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
Think of being in an airplane, a super large airplane that’s full of 50 tons of ultra fine powdery beach sand flying at 50,000 feet.
A door opens and dumps all of that sand out over a 9000 square mile area.
Now you’re tasked with cleaning up every grain of that 50 tons of sand. They hand you a sand detector and when you use it on the ground it goes off and basically just tells you “yep, there’s a tiny bit of sand spread all around you in every direction”.
You chop down the trees that have any trace of sand absorbed into their wood and leaves, you dig up the soil until there’s no more traces of sand beneath, you gather up and kill all the animals in the area that have eaten the sand contaminated plants and now have sand inside their bodies and on their fur and end up cleaning up a small area until a rain storm, a gust of wind or an animal migration moves more sand from adjacent areas into your clean area contaminating it again.
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