I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health
For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware.
It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
> any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time
If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
There are satellite photos of trenches dug around the red forest where Russian soldiers had deployed?
If the Russian soldiers get problems from their trench digging endeavor, it won't be seen before many years, when a small percentage of them starts getting cancer. (needless to say, the increases mortality from the said cancers will be negligible compared to the mortality induced by being invading soldiers in Ukraine).
There is no way to know what radiation dose they got. Their activities increased the ambient radiation levels, but not extremely. But the soldiers themselves probably got quite a bit more since they came into direct contact with contaminated material. A few of them almost certainly got non-trivial doses on parts of their bodies. We don't know if any got radiation sickness, and I don't know of any source that said so. If they did, Russia would keep it quiet.
The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention. If you don't want the dirt to travel further, you have to somehow remove it and store it more safely to keep it from circulating. That's what they are doing in Fukushima because they can't afford the same size of permanent exclusion zone.
Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
We cannot know an exact figure for that, but we know they cannot by any means get radiation sickness, because the radiation level that it would have need is many orders of magnitude higher than what can be found there.
You have no idea of how tall I am, but you can be 100% certain that I'm lying if I pretend I'm two thousand kilometers tall! (that's the order of magnitude we're talking about)
> The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention.
This sentence is still wrong. Cesium 137 half-life is around 30 years. In 300 years, the amount remaining would be 1000 times lower than it currently is. In 900 years, that's 1 billion lower, which means that almost every single atom will be gone.
> Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
Obviously nobody wants to destroy a nuclear plant, and no-one said a nuclear plant accident wasn't bad, it's just far from the pop-culture depiction of it. It doesn't last for millennia and doesn't cause a mushroom cloud either.
Talking about artillery, you know what last for millennia, leaving empty exclusion zones no-one talks about? Contamination from artillery shells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
Given that both sides are using uranium-based APFSDS munitions, we'll more likely see more radiation-induced casualties from exposure to depleted uranium than from people digging in the red forest, or even maybe more than from the fallout of Chornobyl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Iraqi_populat...
Despite that, our body contains large quantities of them.
Like also for the chemical toxins, the dangers of radiation depend on the dose, and we should not worry when it is low enough.
Also platinum is a radioactive element, but those who wear platinum jewelry are seldom aware of this.
All computer displays are slightly radioactive, because the ITO transparent electrodes contain indium, which is a radioactive element too.
The ceramic kitchen knives are slightly radioactive, because their blades are made of zirconia, and both zirconium and hafnium are radioactive elements (all Zr, unless specially purified for nuclear reactors, contains Hf).
Everything written above are facts, not opinions.
They are little known facts, which is why I have mentioned them. Uranium and thorium are the most radioactive among the elements that have survived since the creation of the Solar System, but they are not the only radioactive primordial elements, there are many others.
Most people who are afraid of radiation do not realize how many of the surrounding objects are radioactive, without being dangerous because of that.
Of course, you are correct that the dangers of radioactivity depend on the dose. But your message is diminished by overly emphasizing the radioactivity in carbon and other naturally occurring elements that pose zero health risk and frankly are so very non-radioactive in a relative sense.
Whenever at least one isotope is radioactive, anything containing that element is radioactive, but with a lower activity, proportional with the natural abundance of the radioactive isotope. Because the isotopic abundance also matters, elements like carbon and potassium have very low activities even if their radioactive isotopes have high activities, because the abundance of their radioactive isotopes is very low.
The majority of the naturally occurring chemical elements, i.e. about three quarters of them, are non-radioactive.
Even if the naturally occurring chemical elements either are non-radioactive or have low radioactivity, otherwise they would have disappeared since the formation of the Solar System, their radioactivity is non-negligible due to the huge number of atoms that exist in every gram of substance.
Inside a human body, during each second, thousands of atoms disintegrate, emitting radiation.
However, almost all damage caused by the natural radiation is repaired, because all living cells have very efficient mechanisms for this. Only at higher doses those are overwhelmed.
I think you the defintion is the opposite, ie that an element is considered radioactive if NO isotopes are stable (ie ALL are radioactive).
https://www.thoughtco.com/list-of-radioactive-elements-60864...
Huh? Care to name 5 non-radioactive elements according to your definition?
> [we have it in our body], so... [we all are radioactive]
can be radioactive in some circumstances, does not mean they are always radioactive. Is a non-sequitur.
There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity, short of placing it inside a nuclear explosion or inside a high-energy particle accelerator.
Nevertheless, most naturally occurring radioactive elements have a radioactivity that is low enough to not pose any danger.
> There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity
False and false. Elements are not radioactive per se. Only some isotopes of those elements are, and some are more frequent than other. Just because you have some carbon in your body does not mean that is radioactive. (In some cases metabolism even evolved to favor some kind over the other).
Time can and will influence radioactivity, so any radioactive element is -not- always radioactive. This is false.
Location is also very important. The background radioactivity of a granite mountain is not included in the body as atoms. It does not pass the outer skin barrier, that is shedding a layer of dead cells all the time in any case.
Obvious half truths and misdirections told in a really arrogant way then re-enforce the idea that anyone telling them any amount of radiation is safe is deliberately trying to mislead them, and so they wind up trusting nobody.
They then correctly infer that the liar is malicious and trying to scam them. So all in all they get to the right place even if it is for the wrong reasons.
Its like a trenchwarfare coated nightmare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where not hydroelectric dams. And it’s not clear the existence of these dams played that significant role in the death total considering China’s history with even more devastating floods.
From the Three Gorges Dam
> China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir
Your comment really doesn't speak to the nature of the phenomenon.
Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer to live than the average Asian city center due to air pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure…
The Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb contained 64 kg of highly-refined uranium, of which less than 1 kg fissioned, the remainder being vapourised in the ensuing blast and distributed over a wide area. That dispersal in large part reduces the risk of radioactivity as it is so highly diluted. The rule of thumb for nuclear blasts is the "seven-ten rule": every sevenfold increase in hours from the blast reduces residual radiation by a factor of 10. That rule-of-thumb is an approximation, but with nearly 7^7 hours since the blast, radiation by that rule would be one ten-millionth the level 1 hour following the blast.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_seven-ten_...>
Chernobyl put 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb:
<https://www.scifacts.net/earth/chernobyl-400-times-more-radi...>
It's also worth noting that Chernobyl, and several other presently-operating nuclear power plants are in the middle of a war zone and have been the site of active fighting, bombardment, and missile strikes.
I don't find a figure for the mass of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, though it's clearly many tonnes of matter.
In the case of Fukushima, the total reactor core and fuel waste on site is measured in hundreds of tonnes, with 560 tonnes of reactor fuel, from melted-down reactors, on site.
<https://www.citizen.org/news/how-much-radioactive-material-i...>
(There's another 680 tonnes of spent waste fuel, presumably in containment, on site. I'm excluding that from this discussion as that happens to be a managed waste stream.)
The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.
Also, you're confusing radiation (rays hits you when you just stays here) with contamination (you've ingested a radioactive particle and now it's going to release it's rays inside of your body, eventually causing cancer). Radiation is really unlikely to cause trouble unless you're really close to a highly radioactive source (next to nuclear bomb detonation, inside a criticality incident, or a few very rare scenarios like that). That's a common mistake to make but that highlights your misunderstanding of the topic.
> The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.
Maybe the few square kilometers around it, but this is also the case for most heavy industrial activities (heavy metal levels are typically way off limits in these places) but the exclusion zone as a whole will not.
In fact, in Fukushima it was already safe enough back in 2016![1], and in fact it has been slowly re-opened for people to live in, Futaba[2] being the last city to reopen[3] in 2022. So much to the thousands of years! And you can even visit the Fukushima Daiishi power plant itself today[4]. Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137.
The two reasons why it stays restricted for longer than needed are:
1. nuclear inspires a deep irrational fear that other carcinogenic pollutants do not, even when they are in fact much more dangerous.
2. Neither Japan nor Ukraine really have need for these land since they've had an anemic demography for decades, unlike in 1945 where abandoning the land of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been impossible.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba,_Fukushima [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/16/futaba-last-fu... [4]: https://blog.japanwondertravel.com/fukushima-exclusion-zone-...
Of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically:
Among some there is the unfounded fear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive; in reality, this is not true. Following a nuclear explosion, there are two forms of residual radioactivity. The first is the fallout of the nuclear material and fission products. Most of this was dispersed in the atmosphere or blown away by the wind. Though some did fall onto the city as black rain, the level of radioactivity today is so low it can be barely distinguished from the trace amounts presents throughout the world as a result of atmospheric tests in the 1950s and 1960s.
<https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki>
Possibly more applicable to your assertions is the story of "Downwinders", in the US and elsewhere, who lived, and live, downwind of atmospheric testing sites. In the case of Southeastern Utah, particularly the community of St. George, this included some 330 atmospheric nuclear blasts conducted on the Nevada Test Range from 1951--1962. (Similar or larger instances of testing occurred elsewhere, notably in the former Soviet Union, were either less studied or studies are not as publicly available.) Whilst there were definitely health outcomes, those are largely attributable to the immediate and near-term exposure to radioactive fallout, largely in days and months following the blasts. I'm not aware of any significant long-term residual radioactivity in the region, and the Wikipedia article on the subject mentions none:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders>
Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.
<https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol...> Archive: <https://archive.vn/aeIix>
The WHO's assessment of present risks at Chernobyl:
Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.
<https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/rad...>
> Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.
The story about Russian soldiers getting radiation sickness was a hoax that have been debunked many times though…
> Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.
You haven't really read that paragraph have you? Because it says exactly the same thing as I did in the comment you answer to: “Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137”. There's an enormous margin between “you can farm milk in the area for a few decades” and “will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years”.
[1]: https://www.lexpress.fr/sciences-sante/sciences/nucleaire-de...