Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos 951
wrx writes "Elena has taken another motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area, and has updated her site with a whole lot of new photos and text. The pictures now show several surrounding towns, the radiation level of the magic wood, and many more details inside buildings. After the dust had settled from the
original slashdot story,
Elena wrote 'who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.'"
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
Also, 300 mR is only enough to increase your risk of cancer by 0.01 %, i.e. it's not going to take any time off your life (unless you happen to be the one in 10,000 who gets cancer as a result of that additional exposure, and even then, your chances of dieing are only 1 in 2).
Fitting Reminder (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dawn of the Dead (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think radiation works that way. Once you leave the area, the radiation doesn't follow you (if you didn't roll around in the material). Its not a chemical like mercury. You don't soak it up until you meet some magical tumor line. If you don't develop tissue damage while irradiated you won't mysteriously develop it later just because you were irradiated.
Re:Not yet. (Score:5, Informative)
TMI was a non-incident. The only reason anyone thinks it was a big deal was because of press coverage, and because of TV personalities arguing about it live on nightly news. The most exposure anyone got was around 100millirems, which is about the same as an x-ray at a doctor's office.
Re:where do the new images start? (Score:2, Informative)
they are mixed in with the old. so you have to go throught it all.
Re:Not yet. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not yet. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Watch the hit counter spin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Question for physics people (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
The NRC limit (see 10 C.F.R. [nrc.gov]) is 3 rem per quarter, and 5 rem per year. A rem is a weighted [triumf.ca] roetgen (R). The weighting factors are used because while a roetgen measures the energy deposited, a rem measures the physical damage (exposure versus dose). An example of a weighting factor is a gamma will have a factor of 1, while a fast neutron may have a factor of 20. So a 1 mR/hr exposure rate will give you 1 mrem/hr for gammas, and 20 mrem/hr for fast neutrons.
Temporary mirror for when angelfire quota runs out (Score:3, Informative)
Those pictures are just great at showing the sense of "creepiness" of those places. I can definitely understand why folks are afraid of venturing into the dead zone, even though these aren't terribly large doses of radiation.
Everyone should definitely take the time to look through ALL of the pages. Thanks to the author/photographer for a great photo-essay.
Visit the oldest running human webcam on the internet:
http://www.mitwebcam.com [mitwebcam.com]
Re:Question for physics people (Score:5, Informative)
Roentgens measure ionizing radiation in air/free field. Rems (actually REM, an acronym for Roentgen-Equivalent Man) are a measure of how much biological damage a given amount of radiation does. Basically, one roentgen of gamma radiation is appx. equivalent to one rad absorbed is appx. equivalent to one rem. However, other types of radiation have different conversions - for instance, one rad of alpha radiation is appx. equivalent to 20 rems of exposure.
The short version - "In summary, the roentgen is a unit of exposure, the rad is a unit of absorbed dose, and the rem is a unit of biological dose."
(data from http://www.radford.edu/~fac-man/Safety/Radiation/
Re:Question for physics people (Score:5, Informative)
Rem: absorbed dose of 0.01 joules of energy per kilogram of tissue
One roentgen of gamma radiation exposure results in about one rad of absorbed dose.
Re:Soviet calendar? (Score:4, Informative)
Exposure levels (Score:5, Informative)
http://ldml.stanford.edu/cisac/pdf/Nuc_terr
20,000 millirem will mutate DNA enough to produce noticeable health effects. Above 100,000 millirem, diseases manifest.
10,000 millirem is enough to increase your cancer risk.
5,000 millirem per year is the maximum allowable annual dosage.
25,000-100.000 mrem - Temporary blood changes
35,000 - Loss of appetite, nausea
50,000 - Temporary sterility in males
100,000 - 2x normal incidence of genetic defects
100,000 - 300,000 - Vomiting, diarrhea
300,000 - 500,000 - 50% chance of death if not treated
300,000+ - Permanent sterility for females
400,000-1,000,000 - Acute illnes, death within days if not treated.
Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour, when she was standing a few hundred metres from the reactor.
I am facinated by these pictures, I would love to (briefly) visit these places, but I fear she will do herself serious harm over time. The area is an incredible time capsule.
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
Then there's Granite. Some granites produce 500 to 800 mr/year or so exposure. 'The' UN building in NY, NY is sheathed with a moderately hot granite cladding, resulting in, if I recall correctly, employee exposures of 200-250 mR/year at full time, and some buildings are much worse.
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
Potasium iodide doesn't 'get the radiation out of your system'. Please understand that radiation is the transmittal of energy through EM-wave or various particles (betas, alphas, neutrons). Radiation may pass through your body (perhaps doing harm) but it won't stay. Contamination is some radioactive substance that emits radiation governed by its half-life. If you drive by the a site that has alot of contamination you will get some radiation dose. As long as you don't ingest any of the contamination you will not get a dose when you leave.
The purpose of potassium iodide is to minimize the dose to your thyroid. One characteristic radionuclide from nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons is radioactive iodine (typically I-129 and I-131). Your thyroid can absorb a certain amount of iodine before it become saturated. If you use iodine pills, your thyroid will absorb a non-radioactive nuclide. This means that when you ingest radioactive iodine following a casuality, little of it will be absorbed into the thyroid, reducing the dose to the thyroid. Please note though, that the thyroid isn't the only organ that can kill you if it gets exposed to a significant amount of radiation. Its just the only one that there is an effective preventive measure for. If you are in the area of radioactive fallout, it will increase your chances of survival slightly, but it won't make you a radiation-resistant superman.
wow (Score:1, Informative)
horrible, horrible thing what happened there
Re:Such an amazing and atypical slashdot article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Watch the hit counter spin (Score:1, Informative)
wildly inflated death count (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, that's a horrible number of deaths from an industrial accident. Comparable or perhaps not as bad as Bhopal.
See this rather old reference
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
However, rather than simply tripping the turbine and reactor, which would only give them one shot to get the test right, they decided to keep the reactor running at low power level and simply trip the turbine. That would let them repeat the test as many times as they needed to in order to make sure they passed it.
Sure enough, the operators flubbed the test on the first run through, but they also allowed the reactor to sink to an extremely low power level. So low, in fact, that they got into an unstable operating range that they didn't know about. So, when they goosed the reactor to repeat the test, they got a runaway instead.
The resulting pressure excursion and/or steam explosion blew the head off of the reactor and the roof off the building. The reactor, like all Soviet reactors, had no containment structure. This allowed air to enter, which allowed the graphite blocks that served as a moderator to catch fire, creating a radioactive smoke plume blowing downwind. The rest of the world (ie., us) found out about the accident when Swedish scientists reported a radioactive cloud passing overhead.
The graphite in the reactor all burned away eventually, in spite of many days worth of truly heroic (and fatal) efforts to put it out. The fuel all coalesced into a magma and the proceeded to sink down through the building structure where it (fortunately) dispersed into the different basements and sub-structures until it had been dispersed and cooled enough that it stopped. It's all still there and will be continue to be deadly dangerous for thousands of years to come.
So much for safe, clean, and efficient nuclear power.
All this is from memory, so please forgive any errors, which are entirely mine.
Re:Exposure levels (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Watch the hit counter spin (Score:5, Informative)
Heh, looks like you made the same mistake that I almost did. The link on that first page just goes right back to angelfire. The -k option in wget is most useful for these situations
True mirror at: http://netfiles.uiuc.edui/benoc/mirrors/www.angelf ire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/ [uiuc.edu]
Visit the oldest running human webcam on the internet:
http://www.mitwebcam.com [mitwebcam.com]
Re:Exposure levels (Score:5, Informative)
(spelling is wrong)
REM is retnogen enhanced modifier or something to that effect -- it's the dose * an absorbtion factor.
not quite the same thing.
Re:Not yet. (Score:5, Informative)
For 11 days, in June-July, 1980, Met Ed illegally vented 43,000 curies of radioactive Krypton-85 (beta and gamma; 10 year half life) and other radioactive gasses into the environment without having scrubbers in place. In November 1980, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the krypton venting was illegal.
link [tmia.com]
Re:Watch the hit counter spin (Score:5, Informative)
Bittorrent is probably overkill for a 5 meg site, but who cares; it helps spread the bandwidth load around...
It blew the roof off man! (Score:5, Informative)
White-hot graphite rods were exposed to cold water - these exploded and that was what caused the explosion. The outside world first learned of it when some Norwegian folks at a nuclear plant picked up some off the scale readings.
The majority of the reactor was buried under tons of concrete and steel (which is now in danger of cracking open). Many firefighters died attempting to contain nuclear fire and most of those had no idea what they were dealing with at the time.
More info here:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip22.htm
Re:still impresive (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Exposure levels (Score:2, Informative)
Re:She's doing fine. (Score:2, Informative)
That's usually true for beta radiation and gamma, too, if I'm not mistaken. Alpha radiation has a factor of something like 20 (ie, 20 rem for 1 rad of alpha radiation). For those not versed in things nuclear, that's because alpha radiation is massively ionizing compared to others. Neutron radiation has different factors depending on whether it's thermal or fast neutrons.
For a quick explanation on all these units and radiation dosage in general, check here. [drexel.edu]
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
>
>I have never heard of radiation producing visible evidence (immediately, that is), but then again, there was a lot of it. What is this "shinning" all about?
Chernobyl was a graphite fire - the fire is probably what is being described.
There is a visible phenomenon - Cerenkov radiation - a beautiful blue glow produced when fast moving particles strike water (speed of light in a transparent medium is a function of refractive index -- if particles have to "slow down", that energy has to go somewhere - it gets shot out in a cone of radiation).
If you're seeing Cerenkov radiation at the bottom of a reactor pool [umr.edu], it's beautiful. If you're seeing it because the neutron flux through your eyeballs is enough that your vitreous humor is glowing blue, it's probably less than beautiful, given that if you know what you're seeing, you realize that your lifespan is probably best measured in hours/weeks, rather than years.
Given that the only probable reports of seeing Cerenkov radiation from within the eyeball have been criticality incidents at very close range (1946, Tickling the dragon's tail"> and 1999 [cns-snc.ca] Japan, Tokaimura [japantimes.com]), I'm skeptical that the people on top of the building were seeing Cerenkov radiation from within their eyeballs.
Chernobyl wasn't just a graphite fire, however, it was also a steam explosion. It's plausible (I don't have the numbers) that the neutron flux being spewed from the building was high enough to make condensing steam in the nearby air glow blue.
From the account provided, there's insufficient data to sway me one way or the other -- were witnesses seeing light from the burning graphite and related fire, or were they seeing Cerenkov light released when you dump a massive neutron flux into a tower of condensing steam. The simpler hypothesis is that it was merely light from the intense fire.
If I had to choose, I'd go with fire, but a single picture from the rooftop, or an eyewitness reporting blue in the fire would be enough to convince me that the shining was the blue light of Cerenkov radiation brought on by the dumping of insane numbers of neutrons into condensing droplets of water as the steam condensed.
Aside to Elena: Thank you again for documenting this.
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exposure levels (Score:5, Informative)
No, it wasn't. It was showing 800 microroentgen per hour.
One of the things that confuses people about radioation are the different measurements.
A roentgen is the amount of X or gamma radiation needed to deposit in dry air 2.58E-4 Coulombs per kilogram, or roughly 100 ergs per gram.
Rads are the absorbed dose, the amount of energy actually absorbed in a material. 1 rad is equal to 100 ergs per gram.
Rems are the equivalent dose, a relationship between the absorbed energy and actual biological damage. Take the rads, multiply by a quality factor which is based on the type of radiation under discussion, and you the get rems.
A Curie is the unit of radioactivity, one Curie being equal to 37,000,000,000 radioactive decays per second.
Flip over to SI, and you have Grays as the absorbed dose (1 Gy = 100 rads), Sieverts as the equivalent dose (1 Sv = 100 rem), and Becquerels as the radioactivty (3.7E10 Bq in one Ci).
Her meter was showing 800 microroentgen per hour. That's gammas and x-rays, by the way. Those have a quality factor of 1; they're very penetrating, but also chargeless, massless, and very small, so they have a weak interaction cross-section. 800 microroentgen per hour translates to 800 microrads per hour, which when you multiply by the quality factor of 1 is, surprise, 800 microrem per hour.
So to get "maximum allowable annual doseage" (allowable by whom, exactly?) of 5,000 millirem, she'd have to hang around the reactor for 260 days, which is about 2/3rds of a year to begin with. I don't think she's going to be doing herself serious harm.
And the alphas and the betas? Lousy mean free path through air.
Re:Soviet calendar? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
That picture does not do it justice. While I was somewhat disappointed that the whole nuclear reaction was fairly anticlimatic -- no rumbling, no vibration, no nothing discernable except the blue light -- that blue light at the bottom of the pool was probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There's just no way to describe the color. It's so vivid and so intense.
Thryroid Cancers in exposed residents (Score:5, Informative)
Re: they swept over like Mongol-Tartars (Score:2, Informative)
Re:poor command of the english language? (Score:4, Informative)
And her Ukrainian may be even better than her Russian.
They are separate languages. Russian was forced on the Ukrainians by the Soviets, just like in the rest of the USSR. I'm sure she does speak Russian, but you cannot assume which is her "native" language.
Re:Exposure levels - negligible harm from gamma (Score:5, Informative)
those numbers that are being quoted are for a burst dose -- ie you get it all at once. the effects change if you get a continuous, lower dose to the same levels.
I'm currently in the Navy's Nuclear Engineer school (2 more weeks and hopefully I'll be a certified nuclear engineer! hooray!). I don't have the numbers memorized, but this is along the lines of what they tell us (and yes, it's unclassified):
1 Rem = 1 mRem (milliRem)
The following are effects from burst doses
Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: tell the guys he's a dumbass for thinking there's a problem
Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: have him see a doctor just to make sure, but there's still really no problem. possible rise in chance to get cancer.
Prognossis: Good
Effects: headache. 5% chance of vomitting within 4 hrs.
Treatment: seek medical attention.
Prognossis: OK
Effects: headache. 50% chance of vomitting within 2 hr. 5% chance of death within 4 months.
Treatment: seek medical attention immediately.
Prognossis: Guarded
Effects: headache. 100% chance of vomiting within 1 hr. 50% chance of death within a short period (can't rememebr the time).
Treatment: better get him to a doctor NOW!
Prognossis: hopeless
Effects: headache. 100% chance vomitting within 30 min. 100% chance of death within 48 hrs.
Treatment: Give him sedatives. Call the morgue.
For those that are curious, the guys on K-19 probably got more than 5000 Rem.
And what do these mean? here are some numbers to compare against:
I work daily 15 feet from an operational reactor (I work on US submarines).
my exposure last month: 4 mrem.
my lifetime exposure:
The radiation levels in the Reactor Compartment 15 minutes after shutting down the reactor: ~50 mRem/hr (avg)
a day at the beach: 10 mRem per day
smoking for a year: 1 Rem
standing next to a bag of fertilizer: 2 mRem / day
eating a banana: 4 mRem each
those numbers are mostly from betas and gammas. alphas only affect you if you get them inside you, which is why smokers get so much radiation, and neutron mostly is (a) really low-level and (b) passes right through you.
so what's my point?
1. I get less radiation from work that I do from living.
2. those numbers that they got from Chyrnobl are HUGE, but they can't happen on US Naval Reactors. Even if we were to completely melt down and spray our stuff all over the place, we would still be relatively clean (we use tiny reactors; we only need to power a 300' boat to 25+ knots, we don;t need to power an entire metropolis). besides, the most likely time that would occur is if we get hit with a depth charge, at which point's we'll sit on the bottom of the ocean and get covered with a whole hell of a lot of water!
weylin
Deserted town in the USA (Score:5, Informative)
It is eery to drive down I-44 just outside of St. Louis and see this town that is totally deserted. just sitting there...
I've moved from the area since so have not seen it in a few years so don't know what it looks like today, but it was said that the streets contained 2,000,000 times the amount of dioxin considered to be a dangerous level.
People living there would rake up dead birds and animals died at an alarming rate. over 50 horses died at a single stable from the spraying.
Now it is just a ghost town frozen in time from the early 80's.
A massive cleanup was to be put in place collecting the dirt, processing it and later putting back the cleaned dirt... but it may be a never ending project.
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
SL-1 (Score:2, Informative)
Not too many people know about it but there was a mis-hap in idaho. The operators were trying to do some type of rod drop test. The man was physically pulling on the control rod. It was stuck. When it finally gave, he pulled it too far. The Rx went promptcritical, shot the rod out, impaling him, and supposedly pinning him to the roof.
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:3, Informative)
Shielding (Score:3, Informative)
Gammas: DU or lead
Betas: Plastic, water (avoid metal at all costs, especially heavy metals)
Alpha: Basically anything
Neutron: Parafin to slow them down and lithium to absorb them
An x-ray is made by slamming an electron into a heavy, dense metal, usually tungsten in machines. A beta is a very fast electron so shield them with metal and you have an x-ray source.
Re:Deserted town in the USA (Score:5, Informative)
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
Contaminated soil and other debris from Times Beach was completely incinerated by 1997. The buildings and houses were leveled years before that. Know what you mean, though--when I was a kid, I used to hold my breath when we drove by on 44.
Googling for "times beach cleanup" turns up this PDF summary [epa.gov]. A quote:
The Times Beach cleanup has been completed. All residents and businesses were permanently relocated, the purchase of the remaining parcels by FEMA has been completed, and the ownership of the parcels of land has been conveyed to the State of Missouri. The demolition and disposal of the structures at Times Beach has been completed. Excavation of dioxin-contaminated soils, interim placement in temporary on-site storage, and final destruction of site contaminants by incineration has been completed. Thermal treatment of dioxin-contaminated soils from Times Beach and other sites was completed in June 1997, and the site has been restored to a state park.
--Tom
Chernobyl body count (Score:4, Informative)
Some tell that 400.000 dead, soyuzchernobyl report of 300.000 people that died since 1986 and this is not over, in 30 years people will still die
These numbers are WILDLY inflated! The number of deaths from radiation are probably rather in the dozens. Check here [wisc.edu], or here [vanderbilt.edu]
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:1, Informative)
It's not really a question of striking water or of particles suddenly slowing down.
Cerenkov radiation is emitted when a charged particle travels faster than the speed of light in a medium. (such as water).
As you say, this is a question of refractive index. The angle of the cone of light depends on the ratio of the speed of the charged particle and the speed of light in the medium. I *guess* that it looks mainly blue in water because blue (or maybe near-UV) is the highest frequency of light that will propagate in water, but I could easily be wrong about that.
Anyway, you won't see Cerenkov radiation in air because the index of refraction for air is so close to 1. An ultrarelativistic charged particle will lose energy very quickly by showering, so you just aren't going to have anything fast enough.
Also, neutrons do not directly cause Cerenkov radiation. I imagine that the glow that is seen from fuel rods in containment pools is due to beta emitters in the fuel rods. This is because alpha particles move too slowly (rest mass of 4 Gev, KE of a few MeV), and neutrons and gammas are obviously not charged particles. It is conceivable that a gamma could produce some "knock-on" electrons (delta rays) of sufficient energy, but for typical isotopes this is surely a comparatively tiny contribution compared to that due to beta emission.
Re:steekin badgers (Score:2, Informative)
Silly American
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:5, Informative)
1. Our bodies: about half of the radioactivity in our bodies comes from Potassium-40 (naturally-occurring radioactive form of potassium.) Potassium is important for the brain and muscles. Most of the rest of our bodies' radioactivity is from Carbon-14 and tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. These naturally-occurring radioactive substances expose our bodies to about 25 "millirem" per year, abbreviated as "mrem/yr".)
2. Radioactivity in food and water: for example, the radio- (and non-radio) active forms of iodine and sodium. The food we eat contains radium-226, thorium-232, potassium-40, carbon-14, and hydrogen-3, also known as tritium.
To quote a web page: The U. S. Department of Energy gives the following concentrations as examples:
3. Flying: Flying in an airplane increases our exposure to cosmic radiation. A coast-to-coast round trip gives us a dose of about four millirem.
4. Living at higher altitudes: Generally, for each 100-foot increase in altitude, there is an increased dose of one millirem per year. (So, San Francisco vs. Boulder, for example)...
5. The rocks, soils and beaches around us are radioactive: In Ohio, radiation in soil and rocks contributes about 60 millirem in one year to our exposure. In Colorado, it is about 105 millirem per year. In Kerala, India, this radioactivity from soil and rocks can be 3,000 millirem per year, and at a beach in Guarapari, Brazil, it is over 5 millirem in a single hour -- but only a few residents who use that beach receive doses in excess of 500 millirem per year.
6. Radioactivity in our homes:
A: If you live in a wood house, the natural radioactivity in the building materials gives you a dose of 30 to 50 millirem per year.
B: In a brick house, it is 50 to 100 millirem per year.
C: In a tightly sealed house with little ventilation, natural radioactive gases (radon) can be trapped for a longer period of time and increase your dose.
7. People/coworkers: Each person with whom we spend eight hours a day gives us a dose of about 0.1 millirem in a year.
8. Cooking: Using a gas stove can increase the dose by about two millirem per year because of radioactive materials in the natural gas.
9. Smoking: A person who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day receives a radiation dose of about 1,300 millrem per year. This is because polonium (a radioactive element) is part of the smoke and when inhaled, it gets trapped in the lungs.
10. Misc: There's also the sun, and medical X-rays...
Basically, on the whole we need not fear natural radioactivity, as our bodies evolved to cope with it (cellular repair). What we need to fear/respect is man-made radioactivity and its waste products, because when human error/greed/fallibility get involved, that is when man-made radioactivity bites us in the ass...
Re:Worried about surface contamination (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, alright then maybe a shower just in case
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:4, Informative)
More pictures here [google.com]
Then again, I'm sure these pictures still don't do it justice.
Radon levels in the UK (Score:2, Informative)
Elena has requested that people not duplicate site (Score:5, Informative)
When someone put up a mirror, worried about bandwidth, Elena asked him to take it down because she was concerned that her updates wouldn't get propagated, and that people would only see an old version.
elena
I asked to remove copied site, because need to update and need to make some corrections.
Original Elena post here [sport-touring.net].
While I realize that folks just want to help out, I think that, given that this is Elena's work (and one that she had to venture into hazardous environments to produce and is giving away freely), her wishes should be respected WRT mirrors. (That doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a personal wget -rk --no-parent'ed copy just in case the site ever goes away permanently, though.)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:3, Informative)
Assuming that she's not mistranslating the prefix, she is expressing radiation doses in microroentgen per hour. Now, from the food you eat, you aer exposed to about 40millirem (rem=roentgen equivalent man). http://www.oversight.state.id.us/radiation/radiat
Now, at the rate of 500 microroentgens/hour (or
Some other interesting facts about radiation:
Your average overall dose is 360millirem per year (http://www.oversight.state.id.us/radiation/yourr
Radiation workers (of which I used to be one) are allowed a full 5 REM per year. That is 10,000 hours of
Obviously, for hotter areas radiation-wise, the story is different.
It's been years since I did this kind of thinking, so if I made a mistake, somebody chime in.
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:3, Informative)
I saw this at the experimental reactor they got right in the middle of Athens, and that blue light is quite possibly the most beautiful light I've ever seen.
Re:She didn't take THIS picture. (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. It depends on the activity level, particularly in highly penetrating types (neutrons and gammas). It would appear that after a few years (this was taken in the late 80s) the fuel had cooled enough (activity-wise) that it could be approached briefly. They talk of dose rates of 30 rem for the guy who took this picture. He also approached it close enough to get a sample. I kid you not.
It almost happened here... (Score:1, Informative)
The 'empty' sarcophagus of Chernobyl (Score:2, Informative)
Finding the truth was hard, but researchers found that the radiation was low, expeditions were set up right down into the sarcophagus, what we found was that the disaster was bigger then reported by international organizations. Almost all core material had escaped during the disaster. Even today we were told that most had been contained. The environmental damage had been way bigger then even recently calculated.
This conclusion also had a strange side effect. The breaking down of the sarcophagus is no new disaster, we don't have to costly fix it. All that we could do is build a simple roof so that rain water is kept out and that groundwater is not polluted anymore then it already is, so that wildlife has more chance. Then just wait for radiation to slowly reduce by itself.
Dennis SCP (source: Public TV noorderlicht.vpro.nl)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:4, Informative)
I've lived in areas in the former Soviet Union that had worse nuclear accidents. With Chernobyl, they had a crack that formed over the waste plant, and from that it started to spew waste from it. They flew a chopper over it and dropped some cement over it to stop the process.
Chelyabinsk Sorok (40 kilometers from the city) had much worse problems. In the '50's and the '60's it had a couple accidents. It blew the top off the waste plant completely. There was no stopping the waste from coming out. They had to bring people from outside the region to clean it up, because the residents in the area knew what it was and would not clean it up. (Normally the Soviet Union would have only those who were in the area clean it up, so rumors wouldn't spread.) This happened again in the '60's. And another time they decided that because there are so many lakes in the area, why not take and dump some of the nuclear waste and dump it in one of those?
Another city that a huge nuclear accident happened at was Novosibirsk. Although I am less familiar with the details. I just know that some days were "warmer" than others depending on how the wind blew.
(Please note that I actually lived there and conversed with many people in Chelyabinsk -- who openly scoffed at Chernobyl. I've even conversed with a person who cleaned it up. He was so cancer-ridden that he could barely move.)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:1, Informative)
Of course that's conjecture. None of it can change the fact that two fission bombs were droped on Japan. Was it a tragedy? I don't know. It was certainly war.
Re:Soaking up the gamma (Score:2, Informative)
Administrative limits are different from legal limits. For example, I have an administrative limit a fraction of the legal limit and a local control limit that is a fraction of that (though extensions that allow up to my administrative limit are allowed). If certain work permits and waivers are signed, I can go up to the full 3 rem/qtr or 5 rem/yr (but they are difficult to get). In casualities I can go up even higher depending upon whether equipment or lives are at stake.
The purpose of these limits is to follow the ALARA (as low as reasonably attainable) campaign. If I was to work in a radiation area of 5 mrem/hr and had a local limit remaining of perhaps 10 mrem (hypothetically--obviously this is very low to be considering doing any high radiation work), I should probably leave the area to check my dose at about an hour (having used up about 5 mrem) or when my self-indicating dosimeter reads 5 mrem. If the job is so complex that it requires more hours, additional shielding and cycling other personnel through would prevent any one person from exceeding their local control limit. If I had exceeded my 10 mrem of local control limit left, I would be blocked from additional radiation work until I could get an extension to my local limit.
Re:OT: hotsprings? (Score:3, Informative)
A greater majority of people who run into these hotsprings are smart enough to know to steer clear of them, but there are a few who want to get a closer look, and then fall in, or stupidly assume that every hotspring is safe or that the random, deep pool of water isn't a hotspring, and then jump into one. Even worse is when someone decides to "take a closer look" or take a swim in one despite warning signs and metal handrails constructed to prevent them from doing so. Unfortunately, the usual result is a gruesome death (I'll spare you the details).
So that line about the hotsprings was a bit of black humor.
Google can probably help you find more information on this and the other dangers of being a tourist in the Yellowstone/Wyoming area. If you'd like to get more out of me, I'd request it be done through email, as we're rather off-topic as it is.
Thanks,
UP