• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Chernobyl's Legacy

I went to EXPO 86 in Vancouver. In the USSR pavilion they had a huge relief map of Russia. Chernobyl had been painted out. Embarrassed I suppose.
 
That website in the first post about the young lady riding her motorcycle through Chernobyl is getting kind of old as I first saw it several years ago. Wonder if she's had any health effects?
 
I thought it was interesting that there's been criticism of her, over whether she took the pics while on a bus tour or a motorcycle tour. Who cares either way, they're good eye opening pics!

Agreed!

I was just wondering about her lifetime dosage as she claims to have made that ride on several occasions. I've worked on nuclear power plants in the Navy and lifetime dosage is a pretty big deal there.
 
When you want to visit, you can book a day-trip from Kiev for just $150.

The actual dose rate you receive in this area from external radiation is actually quite low. Measured dose rates around the reactor are around 1.7 µSv per hour. Strange enough the dose rate in the Pripyat amusement park are higher and can run up to 9 µSv per hour. However these dose rates are below the legal threshold for occasional exposure in my country. The main problem is this area is to avoid contamination. Inhalation of respirable radio active dust or swallowing radio active dust is the main problem. As the distance to the source is very close this could generate a quite high dose.

In general the received dose directly after the incident was quite low for most people who were evacuated from the area (< 50 mSv), which is roughly 2.5 times the annual dose a category A radiation worker in allowed to received in my country. A full size body CT scan will vasue a dose already above 20 mSv! >5 Sv (so 100 times higher) is considered to be an immediate lethal dose.

Not very well know is the fact that "only" 31 people died as an immediate result of the accident and fighting the resulting fire (28 from radiation injuries, two from non-radiation blast injuries and one due to a coronary thrombosis), and 134 were diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Of the latter, 14 people have since died, but their deaths were not necessarily attributable to radiation exposure (in other words, it couldn't be proven). In addition, about 800 cases of thyroid cancers have been reported in children, of whom three have died. The total of 48 deaths, tragic as it is, has to be compared with the hundreds that die in other natural and man-caused disasters.

It is one of the places I would love to visit during my life. And in case you wonder, yes one of my tasks is radiation safety.

Cheers,
Huub

BTW I love the pictures by David Schindler (see Rami's post), they must have been used for the design of the computer game Fall-Out 3!
 
BTW I love the pictures by David Schindler (see Rami's post), they must have been used for the design of the computer game Fall-Out 3!

And Stalker....and Call Of Duty - Modern Warfare...and...

Actually, the design of Fallout (futuristic 1950s USA) is very different to the "style" (1970s/80s USSR) of Chernobyl.
 
Actually, the design of Fallout (futuristic 1950s USA) is very different to the "style" (1970s/80s USSR) of Chernobyl.

The pictures of the supermarket, classroom, tarmac, bathroom, staircase etc. look very similar to Fall-out 3 in my opinion.

Personally I don't think debris and burned tarmac look very different in in post-modern 1950 USA created in a computer game.

Cheers,
Huub
 
For me Chernobyl is one of those fascinating things (not necessarily in a good way, but more of a lessons learned kind of way). It is one of my life goals to go there, and to see it for myself first hand. One of the interesting statements I saw here though is that the radiation in the reactor building itself is lower than in the amusement park. The *possible* explanation from this is that the Cesium was expelled from the reactor in the explosion. One of the documentaries I have seen where they interviewed scientists who work in the building daily is that a large portion of the fuel has never been found. Either that it it turned molten when the reactor went critical, and went into the basement or it was expelled into the atmosphere when the lid blew off thereby coating the town (I have no idea how to pronounce or spell it). The way that it turned into a radioactive lava and invaded the basement of the building to me is astounding. Luckily we did not have our own Chernobyl with the 3 mile island incident, or we would have a local area to visit. It is a real shame about the first responders to that, but without them who knows how bad this could have turned out. Not to mention the team of people there now who monitor the sarcophygus (it is in extremely bad shape), and I can only pray that it does not collapse before they can build the new dome over the entire structure.
 
....Since this 'incident' occurred before the collapse of the Soviet Union,...I'd like to know who's really responsible in maintaining the upkeep on the sarcophagus at Chernobyl....the Russians or the Ukrainians?
 
Back
Top