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.
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.
Radioactive contamination is hard to clean up because the radioactive materials decay very slowly, meaning they remain dangerous for a long time. These materials emit radiation, which can cause serious health problems.
In Chernobyl’s case, the radioactive elements like cesium-137 and strontium-90 have half-lives of about 30 years, meaning it takes that long for half of the radioactive atoms to decay. Even after many half-lives, a significant amount of radiation can still remain.
Current technology can remove some contamination, but we can’t speed up the natural decay process of these materials. Cleaning up large areas thoroughly enough to make them safe for living is extremely challenging and expensive. As technology progresses, we may find better ways to manage or reduce the contamination, but completely eliminating it is a tough task due to the nature of radioactive decay.
> I was curious as to why it takes so long to clean up radioactive contamination?
It doesn’t; the Soviet and then Ukrainian governments just didn’t think it was worth spending the money to do it.
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.
It isn’t always. We clean it up on the regular. Consider it to be “dust” that we can detect insanely minute quantities of, using a magic detector. Down to single atoms.
It’s not terribly difficult to clean dust *on hard surfaces*. A waxed floor? Mop and bucket. We use windex and duct tape a lot too.
Contamination outside? Totally different story. You ever try mopping your lawn? How long until it’s “clean”? Never? Yeah, sounds about right.
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