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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if "Europe survived" is what we should be striving for.

The exclusion zone which can't be inhabited for more than 3000 years to come is still 1,000 sq mi large. You can also still measure higher rates of radioactivity in mushrooms and game.

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the exclusion zone is open to tourism and has accidentally become one of the most successful wildlife sanctuaries. most parts of the zone will expose you to around 1 uSv/hr or less, or about 1/500 the exposure from an hour in an airplane. people go there without PPE

You know we can have successful wildlife sanctuaries and big tourism zones without a nuclear power plant disaster right? It's called a national park.

you're moving the goalposts

So did you by retorting to a comment about the long term habitability of a region with an argument about short term visits.

i would be ok living somewhere with constant exposure at 1 uSv. that's half of the 20 mSv/year occupational limit for radiation workers which is way lower than it needs to be

If you have ever watched any urban exploring or tourist guide videos from the Chernobyl area you will notice that they always check for radiation and don't go into certain buildings or areas because radioation is not uniform.

There's places where there's almost no radiation, then you walk into a random building and the exposure is too high to stay for a longer time.

Not sure that's a place you really want to live in, easy to say from a comfortable chair behind a screen somewhere far away.

the built environment is obviously a big radiation sink that needs to be demolished and disposed of. no one's saying we should reinhabit pripyat stalinkas. more like reduce the exclusion zone to the area that's actually dangerous, which is the minority of it

We don't have more of them because they conflict with something else: human usace and occupation

People are still living in Chernobyl.

He'll, they're growing food there that gets sold to Europe, cos it has below the standard level of contamination.

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