Chernobyl wildfires and radiation risk
valentin.vincendon.com
valentin.vincendon.com
Iodine 131 has an eight day half life. The accident was 12,409 days ago. There is <2^{-1500} of the iodine remaining.
For scale, if the Earth were made entirely, by mass, from I-131 on the day of the accident, there would have been ~10^50 nuclei. All of those nuclei would have decayed into daughters within the first four years.
There is certainly plenty of residual radioactivity from Chernobyl, with which one might be concerned regarding forest fires. The specific hazard against which potassium iodide provides protection, however, is no longer present.
Radiation levels are within safe ranges [2].
The wildfires started from the nearby villages where residents were careless with burning their waste. As a response Ukrainian parliament increased fines for such actions by 18 times [3].
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/ukraine-wildfires-close...
Regarding the essay, I wouldn't mind seeing what the risk is like for the nearby regions. I've seen reports that the rains might smooth some of the danger but it's still a chilling prospect. Wouldn't contamination of land in the Kiev region and parts of Belarus mean a disruption of some supply chains? I've read that Ukraine delivers vast amounts of salt to the EU, that would likely be hit. (Not to mention the impact on people but that's a different matter altogether.)
It shows the raise of thyroid cancer in Belarus.
Radiation accidents are quite convenient as those who suffer from them spread over a very long time while you read always that only one person died from Fukushima for example.
Levels are so low, that you can't make predictions that are bases on real data. You can only extrapolate the cancer risk from higher doses.
Every coal and gas plant does around the same harm as a Fukushima accident every year if you look at the deaths they cause.
Also consider that the worst ever accident in the history of nuclear power, Chernobyl of course, is expected to in the full course of time, kill 4,000 people (including those who killed themselves because they thought they were "contaminated"). On the other hand, the worst hydro accident, the Bangqiao dam failure, killed 171,000 people in the span of likely about 10 whole minutes. [3, 4]
It bears calling out separately for emphasis since you mentioned it, if you're going to get any cancer, just pray it's thyroid cancer -- it has a 98% survival rate [5]. The thyroid is removed and you take thyroxin for the rest of your life, but otherwise, you're good to go. If you're in an affected area adding it to your routine screening should be more than sufficient.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
[5] https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/thyroid-cancer/statistic...
The data you sourced doesn't consistently support that in link [1]; it suggests more like 1 in 2 so isn't really fair to call that an order of magnitude. It is just much better.
But don't mind me, I remain as confused as ever about why people don't feel these statistics end the argument over nuclear.
[1] notably excludes the Bangqiao dam as that would raise the hydro number probably an order of magnitude by itself. Their biomass number also likely excludes air pollution.
Either way, to your point, the results are pretty darn clear no matter how you slice and dice the numbers.
If we're looking at the peer reviewed stuff, nuclear isn't an order of magnitude safer than renewables, it's broadly similar to modern renewables after taking into account the evacuation of entire cities to mitigate the nuclear casualty figures...
That doesn't mean it's at all bad, just it's not perfect either.
If they hadn’t obliterated those places the death toll would be a lot higher.
I haven’t heard of entire cities being shutdown due to solar accidents despite the far greater prevalence of solar farms than nuclear facilities in existence.
Edit: Also, heroic efforts by ordinary Russians, who almost certainly compromised their own lives so that people much further away wouldn’t be affected.
Similarly, the fact that we've largely contained it by shutting entire countries down is not an argument for COVID-19 actually being one of the least harmful pathogens humanity has encountered.
Yes and no, in a way it's worse because Pripyat was evacuated, so people were moved to low radiation areas. Coal plants, people don't realize just how much radiation is generated by them. Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. [1]
"Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas."
Honestly it sounds much risker to live anywhere near a coal plant than anywhere near a nuclear plant (which for the record have had 30 years of safety upgrades since Chernobyl). Not to mention, the last RBMK reactor at the Chernobyl power plant was left operating until the year 2000.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Imagine trying to power Seattle or Vancouver with solar. It might work until 3 or 4 pm in the summer, but at all other times you'd need to bring power across the Rockies, taking massive transmission losses all the way due to resistivity of wire, and then of course when it's the rainy season in the Pacific North West, it's snowing in the Prairies so now you need to have a means of scraping snow and ice from your Spain-sized solar farm.
Then scale that difficulty up by an order of magnitude, adding in the cost of maintaining multi-terawatt transoceanic power cables to import energy from another continent if you want to run your electrical applicances after the sun goes down.
It's just not feasible.
And this new thing called internet could never work because half the time people is sleeping so trying to access a webpage in Australia would work only 12 hours a da... oh, wait...
We have batteries.
> you'd need a solar farm about the size of Spain
https://mapfight.appspot.com/sahara-vs-es/sahara-desert-spai...
But sure, you could put that Spain-sized solar farm in the Sahara. Then it's just a simple matter of pacifying the Islamic militants and whoever else while building a global-scale power distribution network, and convincing opposing powers such as NATO, Russia, and China, to give up their domestic power infrastructure and put national security at risk by relying on one giant point of failure all while coordinating construction projects (with their increased electrical demands) on a global scale.
I won't even get into the size of the battery farm required to store a continent's energy needs. The United States used 1.068E20 joules of electricity in 2018: Divide by the number of seconds in a year and there's your wattage, I'll leave it to you to figure out the rest.
edit: and we're still ignoring transmission losses at transcontinental scale
Waterford Nuclear Generating Station for example occupies 3,000 acre of land to produce 8402 GWh (2017). That’s 8402 GWh / 12 million square meters / 365.24d / 24h = 0.08kW per meter or 80w/meter compared to ~67w/meter over 24 hours for a 23% efficient solar panel in a Arizona. You are spacing those panels, so in practice solar needs about twice the land for the same average power.
That’s just one example there are better and worse examples. Notably you can get higher nuclear power density when multiple GW reactors are on the same peace of land, but that’s got it’s own issues.
This branch of the comment thread started because arcticbull claimed, with two separate sources, that nuclear is safer than solar.
The major examples of nuclear being less safe than solar involve invoking nuclear plants designed in 1967 (Fukushima) and 1972 (Chernobyl). At the dawn of the nuclear industry [0].
People are claiming that nuclear is safer than solar and they are accompanied by statistical evidence that nuclear is absurdly safe. The evidence is also considerable that by 1975 they'd figured out how to design a safe reactor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg
Those are different metrics.
I don't think anyone would care about that fact in practice. Deaths per unit power is much more important unless you have a thesis that it changes with the amount of power produced.
PS: Hydro power is actually negative deaths per kWh if you include the lives saved from reduced flooding. But that gets into tricky definitions.
It's very positive if you count the Bangqiao Dam ;)
And war with Russia, yes.
The Tchernobyl accident released a lot of radioactivity in the air.
The soil contamination is twofold :
- spotty : some rocks that blew thru the explosion highly contaminated some spots.
- distributed : the plume contaminated the soil with material of different half-lifes.
The problem here is that trees are recycling organic matter that was tainted by radioactivity and so, if they burn they release it in floating materials.
We cannot infer something meaningful from the plume's direction as the atmosphere has high-flowing air currents in upper atmosphere that redistribute the pollution.
Only a raise of radioactivity in realtime measurements will tell. I'm sure the effect can be seen in Europe currently, yet no one wants to scare people so information is hidden.
https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Advanced.aspx
"We believe in building something that matters. Something that has a positive impact on the lives of many. This is why we have created uRADMonitor, because our bodies are fragile and because pollution is harmful both to us and to the environment. So we have designed a worldwide network of automated monitors, as a first line detection and warning system against the harmful chemical and physical factors around us."
I know there exists and official network of radiation detection in Europe yet data is not accessible (except maybe here [0])
and we would need historical data to see fluctuations over natural threshold (more than 24H)
[0] https://era.org.mt/en/Pages/Ionising-Radiation-Monitoring-St...
https://snipboard.io/FkpN0c.jpg
regarding the first website, I couldn't find a way to have a range bigger than 24h.
https://snipboard.io/fOmbWe.jpg
Maybe I'm missing something...
This right comes from the "European Code of Good Administrative Behaviour" Article 22.
If none is still being generated, there should not be any significant quantity left considering it has a half-life of only 8 days.
Same goes for Kiev\Kyev.
These days ukrainians are often pissed if you use the 'wrong' one.
She'll be waiting in Istanbul.
If the author confused West and East, I'm not holding out much hope that any of the rest of the article is accurate.