Forgive the macabre question, but if a human (or other living creatue) were to venture in to the plant and collect this fuel by hand, how long would they survive?
I'm in no way suggesting that this is an option, of course -- just curious.
I'm in no way suggesting that this is an option, of course -- just curious.
>According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, "25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600,000 liquidators)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators
They had guys running in and throwing lead bricks - and some of the scientists died by giving their life to get in and take video of the meltdown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti-WdTF2Qr8
These guys knew they were doomed.
But they had freaking reportedly 700,000 men attack that problem.
These people never made it to WHO statistic as their deaths protracted over many years can not be directly attributed to the accident. As pro nuclear crowd would be happy to tell you, only couple dozen firemen died on the first day and that was it, making nuclear meltdowns almost benign incidents.
The WHO is using a statistical model to account for the fact that individual deaths might be cancer or might be something else. There is pretty concrete evidence that in terms of deaths nuclear meltdowns are benign, and the major concerns are land contamination and how big the exclusion zones need to be when things go wrong. Some of the better science-based counterarguments to nuclear I've heard go to contamination in the food chain.
[0] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...
The breakup of the Soviet Union caused much larger scale effects on life expectancy.
They were referred to bio-robots.
There are a few documentaries about them. A lot of elderly volunteered to be a bio-robot.
There was one doc that showed them throwing lead bricks into the pit - and they were only capable of being exposed up to like ~2 minutes maximum of something.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2546027/?page=1
If you served in the military for at least 6 months 1941-1945, you were higher on the priority list, which included around 17 different very detailed categories, all translated to English too.
> After just 30 seconds of exposure, dizziness and fatigue will find you a week later. Two minutes of exposure and the body cells will soon begin to hemorrhage; four minutes: vomiting, diarrhea, and fever. At 300 seconds you have two days to live.
> All of the fire fighters and people who worked in building the sarcophagus died around a year or so after the event.