Chernobyl's legacy 30 years on

I mean, I don't imagine people going there to be eating random stuff they find. So maybe from dust and other small particles you don't notice?

The clear cutting story is interesting. It would be interesting to get a read on the lumber they pulled from the forests in terms of how much Cesium it had in the wood.

Decades after the Chernobyl there is much higher rate of cancer of internal organs, adeno- and thyroid (ie. cancers related to ingestion of radiation sources) among people who lived or spent time in the North Ukraine, South Belarus in the months right after the catastrophe. Only official statistics points to 5000 additional thyroid cancers in Belarus in people who were children at the time.

(FWIW, I don't think the BBC has a particular agenda here, they just have the bias of having lived in a "OMG nuclear" world for the past few decades and nobody cared enough to challenge how a fairly unimportant story is angled)

There were a long series of fuckups before they even got to this point.

Such designs are illegal in the US, one of the reasons all but the latest version of the CANDU reactor can't be used here.

1. Lack of a containment vessel for the reactor core. All western reactors have these, this is a big deal. It's not a cure all but it helps a lot.

2. High positive void coefficient for the reactor. This meant that as the reactor got hotter and/or was depleted of coolant the fission reaction rate went up. This is very super extremely mega bad. Most western reactors are designed with negative void coefficients so that they are more inherently passively safe. All RBMK reactors were retrofitted after Chernobyl to lower their void coefficient and tweak some other safety features to make them less insanely dangerous.

3. Graphite tips on control rods. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. Which took an "on the edge" reactor and tipped it beyond, which then exploded (in a literal nuclear explosion, most likely) and scattered debris across the entire world due to design flaw #1.

Keep in mind that the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island events were fundamentally of a similar character, it was the difference in design between the two systems that led to one being a minor "incident" with almost negligible radiation release and one being a catastrophe with global implications.

The guide shrugged and observed something along the lines of 'This is what happens when #2 in the food chain suddenly becomes #1.'

Considering the number of people who now go on Chernobyl tours, I am just waiting for the Lonely Planet crowd to label the place 'spoiled' ;)

You can not downplay something just because it does not look as bad.

The resulting flood waters caused a wave, 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) wide and 3–7 meters (9.8–23.0 ft) high in Suiping (遂平), to rush onto the plains below at nearly 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph), almost wiping out an area 55 kilometers (34 mi) long and 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) wide, and creating temporary lakes as large as 12,000 square kilometers (4,600 sq mi).