Forests around Chernobyl aren’t decaying properly (2014)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
During the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago trees just fell over and lay there because nothing had evolved to decay them yet.
"""The delayed fungal evolution hypothesis is controversial, however, and has been challenged by other researchers, who conclude that a combination of vast depositional systems present on the continents during the formation of Pangaea and widespread humid, tropical conditions were responsible for the high rate of coal formation."""
It's interesting to think just how much went on before trees with lignin showed up. Flowers are also relatively recent - 150mya.
Will we have to develop antibacterial plastics to combat this for stuff we don’t want eaten, yet?
https://text.npr.org/2023/06/01/1178876648/tupperware-busine...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/14/bugs-acr...
So maybe extinctions after extinctions for animals that are visible to us, and then bunch of new superbugs.
* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then
* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.
* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.
(copying my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34654837 )
"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."
Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief.
And climate scientists are very smart and have worked out how much the added co2 amplified the original warming, and have been able to work out how much warming you would get by doubling co2 levels, which appears to be around 3 degrees C.
Basically the amount of co2 that the ocean can have dissolved in it is a function of temperature and the relative co2 concentration of the air. When the temperature of the water increases it can hold less co2. Just like when soda gets warm and isn’t pressurized, it gets flat.
What is your point exactly?
Strictly speaking that's not true. Listen man I don't really want to hold your hand and walk you through this.
Maybe you should actually read some of those studies?
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2013.009...]
Some of the recent ones (< 1 million years), co2 seems likely to be a feedback, not a forcing method - but there have been many times in the past where that is not a plausible explanation at all, with levels in the 2000 ppm range.
This really needs to stop. I remember doing the calculation a few years back due to another HN post (and the German obsession around boar) and you'd need to eat roughly 0.55lbs (0.25kg) of the most radioactive boar you could find every day or 3lbs (1.4kg) of the median. That is to just hit EU radiation limits, not to hit a level where you're at risk. This also doesn't include that you'll heal over that period. The problem here is that if you're eating this much pork every day you're going to be at far higher health risks for heart disease than radiation sickness. Recommended is not more than 50g/day or 0.05kg/0.11lbs. For reference, Germans eat about 55kg of meat a year, so you'd be eating 220x the average German if you had a craving for the most radioactive boar and ate it exclusively. Germans used to eat more meat, and especially pork, and these stories have just done wild damage to the population. Especially because farm pigs aren't affected. But a side benefit is that less Germans are dying of heart disease, so I guess that's nice.
As for the forest, you may notice if you google it you'll see this story limited to 2014 and maybe a BBC article from 2019 as a result of the HBO series. [0] You may be interested to know that wildlife flourishes in Chernobyl and this is almost an accidental nature preserve. Life is shorter, yes, but life is flourishing and wildlife populations are far higher now than they were prior to the disaster. Population levels are similar to uncontaminated regions. It is really a fascinating area to understand from a biological perspective (same with Fukushima, which has similar results). When you dig into these they really challenge your preconceived notions of radiation damage. There is danger, don't get me wrong, and I don't think people should go inhabit these places just yet. But neither are these places dying. They're more like the post-apocalyptic movie scenes where animals and plants take over. There's far more nuance and interesting things happening in these regions and I wish we'd discuss these from a more holistic perspective.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190701-why-plants-survi...
Fwiw, I did mention that the animal lives are possibly lower quality and definitely shorter lived. So I'm not quite sure what you're rebutting from my comment. It appears that you're just rephrasing part of it but without any source and clear suppositions from a misunderstanding of the data in the first paragraph I wrote.
Mostly what I take issue to is that you're saying people need to stop being concerned about something, but the reasons you gave didn't really support that conclusion. I dunno if there's a problem here or not really, but I don't think we should dismiss it in this manner. It's sort of like the inverse of fear mongering, though fear mongering is probably more dangerous, so I only mean that directionally and not proportionally (eg I don't take issue nearly as strongly as I would a fear mongering comment, I think your comment is largely fine, but that's what I find objectionable).
The dose rate near Chernobyl has fallen 2 orders of magnitude. Further, now the vast majority of the activity is Cs-137, which is excreted pretty quickly. Further, the waste is getting buried and further removed from the food chain (though Russia recently stirred up soil there, which isn't ideal).
We have decades of living with the results (event was 1986), decades of scientific research (not just reactors, but medicine and space), and high political motivation to demonstrate harm (as it shows the failure of the USSR and communism). That in all this time and with all this money and motivation, we have not gathered data that conclusively says that the bioaccumulation is a problem. That is the basis of my claim: almost 40 years of analysis of the exact event and 80 years of health physics (the study of radiation on humans).
Mostly what I take issue to is that you're saying science doesn't matter. At least this is how it comes off. I actually agree that point a and b are orthogonal. The second paragraph is written to address a second point. I have a complaint about a common false fear mongering claim by the article and I also add some information that is about the article's main topic. They don't become a singular argument due to proximity. Paragraph 2's only mention of humans is that they probably shouldn't live there, which is difficult to confuse with "it is safe to live in Chernobyl because bavarian boar, hunted a thousand kilometers away, is safe to eat despite their radiation levels." Forgive me, but it is difficult to not feel frustrated and interpret you as not actually reading what I wrote. Definitely not in good faith.
The only party that did push against Nuclear were the Greens. And it took them over 20 years to finally get a nuclear exit through in Germany.
And as far as thresholds are concerned: we have those for everything, from lead to small dust. Being above it doesn't outright kill people, but it defenitely doesn't improve longterm health. And yes, Bavarian boar has a tendency, in some regions, to be above radiation thresholds. That can be dorectly traced back to Chernobyl. You are trying to deny that by attacking the validity of those thresholds, thresholds that are coming from a ruling party in Bavaria that is in power sonce the 50s, is as pro-nuclear power as they come. I call that a straw man argument if there ever was one.
What that means for the safety of the exclusive zone is a different stroy, isn't it?
And no, as pointed out above, the health impact of Chernobyl, on everyone from Minsk and Pripyat to the liquidators and half of Western Europe was never really studied.
We can dig up hundreds of articles from the late 80's and early 90's of Germany being concerned with the radiation of Chernobyl. The articles are still being written to this day.
> And yes, Bavarian boar has a tendency, in some regions, to be above radiation thresholds
And you'll find that my calculation is based on the most radioactive boar found, which was about 4x higher than the median. Don't change my argument. We were dealing with the worst case scenario, not the average, not the best, but the worst. Nor am I denying that boar surpass thresholds. Who made such a claim? I sure didn't. I only wrote about the dosage you'd get and how much you'd have to eat to achieve the EU public dosage limit (20mSv/yr), which itself is well below the measurable threshold for developing cancer within your lifetime. That is purposefully set with margins of safety. Just like my argument is that no reasonable person is going to consume that much radioactive boar meat and if somehow they did, radiation is far from their biggest concern.
Your heart will explode before you can eat the most radioactive bavarian boar money can buy. That's all I said, don't put words in my mouth. I find it incredibly offensive that you so blatantly misconstrue my argument and with absolutely no shame.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/east-west-germany-dealt-differently-wi...
Long term, everybody silently agreed to just not look too closely anymore. And blame it all on bad Soviet tech. Until Fukushima happened, that was when things really changed across the political spectrum in Germany, other countries either stucknwith nuclear anyway (France), never got into it (Austria) or had a far easier time getting out of it.
I have nothing but sympathy for that, it's bullshit. And if I had any role in causing it to happen by being the first person to reply to you, I apologize. All I have to say on it, and this is from a place of being a hypocrite who struggles with this myself, is that he who fights monsters must take care he does not become one - don't let the internet poison your ideas about how conversation works, and put you on the defensive in every interaction. It's so difficult to find common ground and explore disagreement from that position.
---
Sorry it's taken me a while to respond, I got busy.
I think you should recalibrate your sense of what it means for something to be in good or bad faith. You deemed both of the subthreads[1] here to be bad faith, but in my reading, neither of them are. The other subthread was snarky, which is different from being in bad faith.
If you don't feel I read you as closely as I should have it wasn't sufficiently respectful, I can understand that being frustrating, but that isn't actually what bad faith is - I didn't misrepresent your views or the facts, I didn't employ manipulative language or sophistry to try and trap you in a rhetorical cage, et cetera.
If you don't feel sufficiently respected, well, you don't owe us anything, you don't have to engage, but throwing around accusations of bad faith because you don't feel like people are reading you closely enough is - well, not great faith.
What I took issue with is you closing the book on something and telling people the debate was over, not even because you had new evidence but because you didn't personally feel moved by the evidence. It's kinda rich for you to then lecture me about being unscientific.
My contributions to science have thus far been negligible (the company I was going to continue my lab tech career with froze hiring during the pandemic, so I had to change lanes to software engineering, c'est la vie), but when I was a lab technician, I actively practiced being comfortable with ambiguity, acknowledging what I do and don't know, and separating observation from interpretation. If I had told my PI that we didn't need to look into boars for the reasons you gave, I would have gotten clowned on.
That's not to say every discussion needs to be scientifically rigorous (I consider myself an empiricist but not a scientist because I don't regular use the scientific method, I operate with a fairly loose level of rigor as software engineer), but I rolled my eyes pretty hard when you tried to come at me for being unscientific.
[1] Oh boy, this thread got a lot bigger. I meant this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36205287
This is definitely something I picked up on and did apologize in one case where I realized there was a clear disconnect. I find that this is extremely common on the internet and it often just pushes me to stop talking (but some days I'm pulled back into the old addiction).
I'll also say that this comment has made me gain a lot of respect to you. And I must also apologize to you for being antagonistic and escalating it. You're not alone in that struggle. I do think it has become the norm of internet discussions and that at times we need to take a step back and "reset". I really do appreciate that you have taken the initiative to do so.
Maybe I can suggest a strategy I try (but clearly am not consistent in implementing). If I'm adding something to someone's comment (additional information instead of rebutting) I try to make the first line of the comment indicate this or have a positive response like "Good point! In addition..." Sometimes I find agreeing comments turn to fights. Easier to see as a third party. I also try to internalize that the way language works is: there's what one intends to say (what's in their head), what is said (how that thought is lossy encoded into speech), and what is heard (what is lossy decoded into listener's head). We all need to try to do a better job at trying to hear what the other person is trying to say, rather than what is said. But emotions get the best of us and our lazy/lossy decoders fill in a lot of info that may not be intended.
The best strategy I found is to just log off. But considering your comment, I'm going to respond and I'll do so in detail. And if you got other strategies I'm also open. It is a learning process
--
> Bad faith
I think this has to do with our decoders. It also seems that we have different definitions for bad faith. Snarky would be included in mine as the setting is about discussion accurate information rather than the joking that may happen when sitting around with friends having beers or whatever. Additionally, self-deception is included in my definition, and one does not need to intentionally misrepresent an argument or do an active form of deception. An example of this is actually all too common on the internet (and especially around discussions of nuclear technologies) is to argue strongly about an area one has little to no domain expertise in. This is common on the internet as many do watch educational videos that give a high level overview of a subject (often with bad information) and the viewer convinces themselves (self-deception) that they are qualified to expertly educate others on this subject matter (fwiw, I should mention that I have a degree in physics and have directly worked on nuclear shielding technologies and have extensive experience with radiation simulating, Both physical and computational). Another common one is the "just asking questions" version, which is just sealioning. It is hard to tell if this is used intentionally to cause disruption/confusion (e.g. Koch brothers on Global Warming) or innocent. Regardless, it does have the same result. I want to point this out because considering our above dash discussion, we should recognize that a lot of internet speech looks like we've just normalized behavior out of the CIA's disruption manual [0,1]. I do think a lot of bad faith conversations have been normalized and we do it unintentionally (myself included).
> ... closing the book ... didn't personally feel moved by the evidence
It is not that, it is that bio-accumulation was already considered. The boar are accumulating Cesium-137, typically through the ingestion of mushrooms, which grab it from the soil. Biological half-life (how long for half to be expelled from the body) is 70 days[2]. The reason this was not directly discussed is that there was already a large margin of safety in place and that this does not disrupt the thesis of my argument: You have to eat so much red meat that you'd be at a high risk of adverse health effects (heart attack, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer) before you reach a level where you should be concerned with the effects of radiation. The radiation target used was the EU guidelines for yearly protracted dosages (20mSv/yr) which already has a built in margin of safety as we typically don't see measurable increases of lifetime cancer risk until at least double that (and a low risk at that level). The frustration with many of those that responded to me is that one side of this argument was clearly ignored: the meat consumption. We are talking about health risks after all. If I said that the drinking water is poisonous, but did not note that you had to consume 100 liters in a single sitting, you would have every right to call me out and mock me as water toxicity kicks in at 6 liters. You would die from the water consumption long before you'd die of the poison. Your PI should clown on you if you did this. This is what I am doing with the boar narrative, it is the same scenario. You'll notice that every story that reports these boars state that they are over the legal limit and not a safe limit. The legal limit varies drastically by region. The EU has 600Bq/kg, Japan with 1kBq/kg, and Australia with 100Bq/kg. All three of these regions have radioactive boar btw. A 200Bq/kg boar in Australia is not more dangerous than a 200Bq/kg boar in Germany.
Similarly, bio-accumulation can happen with that poisonous water but we need to consider that the water is both difficult to obtain (it would be difficult to have an exclusive diet of wild board; radioactive or not) and that your body rids itself of poison (meaning that differential matters). I purposefully placed exceptionally large safety margins on the calculation (normal for radiation safety btw) as a means to simplify the argument (like you said, not everything has to be rigorous science) and even account for a wide variety of factors that would happen in real life (such as variance between boar, intravariance between cuts, and even factors like differing background radiation. The eater might be a Concord pilot). I would not expect someone with expertise in radiation safety (which there are plenty of HN users that are) to take issue with my claim.
I'm not sure what science you do, what is it? I'm assuming it doesn't have to do with particle physics?
[0] https://www.authenticcomms.co.uk/blog/the-1944-cia-guide-to-...
[1] https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=750070
[2] https://dec.alaska.gov/eh/radiation/half-lives-explained/
I don't want to take the time to respond in depth now (I will try to later), but just to answer your direct question, I studied and worked with algae, and in particular it's use in the remediation of water contaminated by uranium mining via bioaccumulation. I didn't bring this up to establish my credentials because I don't feel I'm any more qualified on this subject than a stranger on the internet with an interest in it (remember, I was a technician, I didn't get a bachelor's in biochemistry or anything like that), and I wasn't interested in anything bigger than a pillbug (let alone a boar), but there you go.
(I'm worried this will come off like a "gotcha": I don't mean it or see it that way, like I said, my experience is not definitive, I just want to answer since it's a direct question and think it's ha-ha funny not point-and-laugh funny.)
ETA: And if I'm perfectly honest, I too have become defensive and anticipate a high rate of discussions going poorly, and contribute to this self fulfilling prophecy. My language also raised the temperature needlessly, but more to the point, I didn't present this as a credential because I didn't have the emotional energy to defend it. It wasn't so long ago but feels like a lifetime, and it's taxing to reexamine the plans and passions that hit the cutting room floor one faithful day in March of 2020.
And that's why it stuck in my craw when you said I acted as of science didn't matter, because it cast a stone towards a place of nostalgia. And I overreacted and was pretty snarky in response, which is my bad.
I tend to not bring up my credentials because I feel like that shouldn't matter to the discussion. Plus, a lot of people have experience without credentials and I don't want to rub that in their face and argue from a place of authority. Just leads to credential bashing. One thing I would like to add about science, though, is that it is important to challenge the status quo. This is part of why I don't want credentials being at the forefront. Challenging should be encouraged. Of course, there's a right way and wrong way to do this. You have to do science and come up with a hypothesis/answer that has better explainability than the current consensus answer (if one exists). It is honestly one of the best learning tools you have. Every grad student spends a significant amount of time trying to reproduce works, as this is a way to learn. Either you verify the result (which is an unappreciated science win that we need more of) or you got a great new research direction (I'm no longer in physics). Many spend far too much time spinning their wheels as they fail to reproduce the results but are too self-critical to think that they might be right and the original work is wrong. It is an extremely important process and does teach you how to differentiate good works from bad works.
I figure you may be interested in some studies. I'd also encourage you to search some too. But you may find that there is far more work on tracing the radioactivity in the boar and other wildlife and far less on the actual health effects to the animals or populations. Again, we're pinned to government defined safety levels rather than risk of cancer[note]:
- Radiocesium accumulation and germline mutations in chronically exposed wild boar from Fukushima, with radiation doses to human consumers of contaminated meat[0]
> Hypothetical consumption of contaminated wild boar meat from radioactively contaminated areas in Fukushima, at the per capita pork consumption rate (12.9 kg y^−1), would result in an average effective annual dose of 0.9 mSv y^−1, which is below the annual ingestion limit of 1 mSv y^−1. Additionally, a consumption rate of about 1.4 kg y^−1 of the most contaminated meat in this study would not exceed annual ingestion limits.
This paper makes very similar conclusions as I do, just through a different point of view. They calculated dosage by predicting the consumption whereas I sought to find the amount you'd need to eat to reach the limit. But two things to note: first, the Japanese public dosage limit is much lower than that in the EU (1mSv/yr vs 20mSv/yr), and second, the dosage limit decreased post Fukushima[1]
- Evaluation of DNA damage and stress in wildlife chronically exposed to low-dose, low-dose rate radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident[2]
Paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34120002/
> Our results suggest that wild boar and snakes chronically exposed to LD-LDR radiation sufficient to prohibit human occupancy were not experiencing significant adverse health effects as assessed by biomarkers of DNA damage and stress.
- Exemplifying the “wild boar paradox”: dynamics of cesium-137 contaminations in wild boars in Germany and Japan[3]
Linking this one because there is a weird phenomena to be aware of (I just learned this too! I knew of a difference but not that it was almost 3x)
> The effective half-life of 137Cs in wild boar meat was much longer in Germany (7.3 y) than in Japan (2.6 y), respectively.
[note] A big reason for excessive safety factors is that you want to account for vulnerable people. This can be pregnant women, children, babies being breast fed, or even people with disabilities. My analysis and [0] account for this in one way, but not in a different. Nuance matters and shit is complicated. But here's some background.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
[1] https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/pdf/basic-...
[2] https://cvmbs.source.colostate.edu/researchers-find-few-adve...
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10967-022-08528-2
It doesn't matter how we perceive as nature coping with this disaster. The fact that it shouldn't have happened, the fact that there are still other reactors in operation of the same type, the fact that billions of tax payer dollars went into preventing more severe consequences should be a warning sign that this madness we call nuclear power needs to stop.
What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.
This is definitely a traumatic event. I'm not going to downplay this or the harm done at Fukushima. But I also don't think it is helpful to exaggerate the damage. The context of the discussion here was about nature and wildlife, so that's what I talked about. If you want to bring people into the conversation then I think that's a different matter. The cost of disruption to people's lives is large, both economic, mentally, and physically. But we also need to be clear that these costs are not because of radiation. It is important because we have these same costs when it comes to matters like oil spills, ground water contamination, and other such events that are far more common but do not receive yearly articles on (despite these events happening yearly).
> What's one thing the engineers of Fukushima and Chernobyl had in common: They all thought the reactor would be safe.
This is not a good faith argument here and not actually accurate. If you would like to engage in good faith I'm more than happy to. But if you want to just vocalize your non-expertise opinions and berate anyone who doesn't agree, then that's not a conversation, that's a hostage situation and violates HN rules.
1) RBMK reactors (like Chernobyl) have a positive void coefficient, which leads to an increase in radiation as steam pressure increases. At the time of the of the disaster, this was generally considered "not a good idea" due to the ability for these reactors to explode and release high amounts of radiation. This was even known by Soviet Scientists and was even a plotline in the HBO miniseries (people seemed to miss this, but maybe a priori knowledge made it more significant to me).
2) Concerning Fukushima, the region was hit with the largest tsunami ever seen in recorded history for the area and one of the largest ever recorded anywhere. Meaning the largest to hit Japan in at least 1000 year. With the reactor being built in a time where scientific knowledge did not know that this magnitude of an earthquake was possible in such a fault. The comment implies that such lack of knowledge, and thus potential for danger, will always exist. But the knowledge even advanced before the quake happened, but was still relatively new at the time (btw, this also applies to the Cascadia subduction zone off of Washington and Oregon).
These were due to two completely different causes, with 25 years of experience between them, and with the latter being caused by an extremely rare natural disaster. It is improper to characterize risk by black swan events (or gray swan events, which may be more accurate concerning Fukushima). Additionally, the results and causes are not even remotely similar. The connections are simply that both involve nuclear power. It is literally comparing apples to oranges, which both happen to be round fruit that grow on trees. The argument is setting an impossible standard and using a false narrative. It is posting with high confidence but low expertise. In the end, it only confuses and makes it more difficult for anyone reading to acquire accurate knowledge about the events and actual risks of nuclear energy.
Concerning Fukushima the problem would have been averted, if managers actually did what they were told by engineers:
>> All three of the generators added in the late 1990s were fully operational after the tsunami. If the switching stations had been moved to the interior of the reactor buildings or to other flood-proof locations, power would have been provided by these generators to the reactors' cooling systems and thus the catastrophe would have been averted.[59]
At Fukushima, the flood barrier was too low. Saying it was the highest tsunami in recoded history would be an argument, if that was something nobody considered (that would indicate defficiencies in the regulatory aspects), but regulations actually had provisions for such Tsunami. Meaning, the managerial system of nuclear power screwed up.
And finally, there is the risk assessment aspect. People usually get that wrong. Risk is calculated by evaluating the detectability of an issue, the propability of an issue, the effectiveness of counter-measures and the impact of an issue. And as history has shown twice, the likelyhood of a nuclear disaster is rather low, the one for smaller accidents is significantly higher so. We also had to learn the hard way, that there is only so much we can do to mitigate those risks on the technical side (physical and cost limits, managerial and regulatory defficiencies and so on). And we also saw that the impact of a nuclear disaster can, and has been, huge. Not doing a proper risk analysis allows you to pretend everything is fine, an attitude explicitly called out by the Soviet investigation, the second report is much better than first one and both are available im English online, into the Chernobyl disaster. No idea why people interested in nuclear energy don't read those, or the IAEA report. Those reports, and Chernobyl itself, should be mandatory reading, and teaching, for every engineering program, there is so much to learn here!
This is an often cited claim with no realistic value. TEPCO did run simulations in 2008 that showed that the current safety measures were not sufficient were an 8.4 magnitude earthquake to happen that management ignored. But we have to be careful here and ask the appropriate followup question. Why did they ignore it? Easy to say money, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of it. After all, we can always build bigger and better, there's no end to this. The reason management felt comfortable ignoring this simulation is because there was no evidence that such an earthquake could actually happen. I can simulate a magnitude 15 earthquakes all day, but that doesn't mean you should prepare for them, since there's no mechanism to explain how this could happen and no historical data to suggest it. This was the situation. You have to remember that the Tohoku earthquake was the 4th largest ever recorded. EVER. The simulation was based on an 8.4M 1933 earthquake (the 20th largest ever recorded) and in a different region of Japan. There was good reason to not act quickly on this simulation. Now, there were scientific advancements during that time and it was learned that the potential for such an earthquake that large could happen, before it did, but I'm also not sure how quick you expect people to react. Even when it was learned it was clearly known to be an unlikely event.
For your fun, here's the list of the strongest earthquakes since 1500s[0], which still puts Fukushima as #6. There's <20 that are >9M and you'll notice that Japan only shows up on that list twice.
There's a danger to this kind of thinking that is concerning to me and appears like it should be concerning to you as your concerns are safety. This narrative encourages companies to not run such hypothetical scenarios because if they do and the situation turns from imagination to reality blame arises and we create a narrative of how we should have acted. But this isn't a Shell/Exon situation where they were measuring and modeling realistic data. Do not conflate the two. I understand the frustration, we want to know things could have been different. But this is also why we want entities to run hypothetical scenarios, because if knowledge updates then some of the work to improve systems already exist. It is a hedge. But we need to be careful to not put unrealistic expectations on others or to move the bar based on post hoc understanding. Don't be captain hindsight. It'll just discourage performing such hypothetical scenarios in the future. Post hoc blaming is counter to your actual goals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_e...
You'd need to eat that much for what to happen? Radiation sickness (since you mention that afterwards)? I'm pretty sure people are more concerned with increased cancer risk than that. Not saying that this is a valid concern here either, just that radiation sickness is on the far end of a spectrum of dangers.
No, to hit EU dosage limits (20mSv). Which still is below actual risk of cancer. This is a small risk if taken all at once (acute exposure) but not found when protracted. For example, UK workers who consistently got 30-40mSv/yr had no statistical increase of cancer. So the number is 0% increase in cancer risk due to radiation exposure.
But again, we're talking about eating an __absurd__ amount of HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE boar you can find (well above thresholds), DAILY, and for an entire year. Do you know what 3lbs of pork looks like? The volume is 9 x 5 x 4 inches and is 24 servings. You're eating that daily, and it is the most radioactive boar you can find. It is not only an absurd amount of food, but also unrealistic to even source with high levels of effort (*most* radioactive, not average).
But here's the thing, consuming that meat DOES result in a multiple percent increase in risk of getting cancer. The problem is that this is due to eating red meat and the risk would be the same if you were sourcing non-radioactive boar. You're focusing on the wrong thing if you're concerned about your health and safety.
What part of "eating 3lbs of pork a day is going to cause your heart to explode" is not being understood here? You're clearly not the only one that is missing this. I'm not sure how I'm being unclear.
Yes and no. Acute exposure is not the same as protracted exposure. 10mSv in a microsecond is a vastly different risk than 10mSv over a year.
Before you make such bold and obtuse claims, you may consider that this 20mSv safety limit includes radiation workers, who we haven't measured as having increased risk of cancer (even when the limits were higher). The relative risk starts around 50mSv but is still exceptionally low.
Stop assuming things that you can't be bothered to verify. If you're going to chase me around comments you should at least make a reasonable attempt to be somewhat accurate. Just stop pulling stuff out of your ass.
Your argument was, I summarize, that is not bad, the thresholds are way to low anyway and don't hurt. In short, we should increase safe thresholds and move on, right? That's how stuff works so, and it is a repetition of the arguments all the VW apologists used to downplay the scandal. That line of argument is dishonest, IMHO.
We can continue to discuss all those other points I raised, or the official investigation reports. Otherwise we turn im circles, and I don't have time for that.
Yes
> we should increase safe thresholds and move on, right?
Words you put in my mouth
Acute radiation sickness is pretty difficult to acquire through protracted exposure, as by definition acute radiation sickness is acute: short term. 10mSv in a millisecond (acute) is dangerous, 10mSv over a year is perfectly safe.
Here's a study you may be interested in[0]
> The minimum and maximum radiocesium concentrations were 87.1 Bq/kg FM and 8,120 Bq/kg FM, respectively, with a median concentration of 450 Bq/kg
> If the residents consume the wild boar meat as a meat source once, the median committed effective dose was in the range of 0.062 to 0.30 μSv/day, with a maximum value of 5.4 μSv/day. In Japan, the natural effective dose from food ingestion was estimated to be 99 µSv/y, which was 0.27 µSv/day
> The committed effective dose for one-time ingestion of wild boar meat could be considered extremely low for residents in Tomioka.
You can use this information to calculate risk. Let's combine based on these numbers instead of mine. EU dosage limit = 20mSv/yr. We'll subtract 2.1mSv for average German dosage[1], leaving us 17.9. Taking the higher dosage from this study (13.5x German thresholds) giving us 3314.8 "meat sources" to reach the limit (defined at the bottom by median pork consumption, maximum ~50g/day). Let's then say they eat 3 servings per meal, eat 3 meals a day, and do so for an entire year. Their dosage will be 19.84mSv/yr (17.739 from the 8,120 Bq/kg boar). Your relative increase in lifetime chance of cancer at 20mSv protracted radiation exposure is approximately 0%. It is approximately 0% even at 40mSv protracted. Your risk of getting cancer due to eating that much meat is well above 0, since a single source here is roughly 50g (the recommended limit for daily consumption of red meat) and you're eating 9x that (450g/day). Your risk of cardiovascular issues are even higher.
Were I to live in Germany, I'd appreciate the cheap pork.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7283223/
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/natural-radiati...
https://www.fda.gov/food/irradiation-food-packaging/overview....
At the low level, it boils down to the amount of energy an organism has at its disposal: prokaryotes have no mitochondria and thus cannot usually form multicellular organisms. If radiation hits an prokaryotic organism (i.e. a single cell) - it's alone by itself and probably well gone after the hit.
If radiation hits an eukaryotic (multicellular) organism, it still is able to compensate for that (to some degree) and still remains in the breeding pool for some time after the event.
The key difference between the two is the ability to reproduce itself after the damage.
So: thoroughly sterilised, if the FDA isn't totally off.
Now I'm sure if you go digging in the Red Forest like the Russians did at the start of the war you're going to have a bad time, but the exclusion zone has settled down significantly. Most of the highly radioactive isotopes have by definition a very short half-life.
Are you confident there are fewer microbes?
[1] http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation...
Extensively.
Environmental extremists come to the conclusion that irradiating large patches of Earth to make it unlivable for humans but is a net benefit to the non human ecosystem because the damage from human habitation far exceeds the damage from radiation. And of course, life evolves and adapts to the radiation. Then they start seeding dirty bombs to intentionally create more and more of these no go zones that become nature sanctuaries.
I suppose "The 100" is partially playing into this concept.
If you want to make a difference make sure that you start a forest and grassland fire every single year - the regular fires ensure the resulting fires are small and leave a lot of carbon behind some of which will get incorporated into the forest floor and forever stored away. Plus forests depend on those fires to clean up all the under brush.
Note, the above applies to most forests in North America, but you need to check with a local expert in forests to understand the details and where it doesn't apply. Every location/climate has different forests with different needs. There is no blanket statement that is right for everything.
All you need to know from the article.
Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404345 - March 2014 (121 comments)
Of course we want this litter to remain just where it is as many decades as we can, but under each rock there is always an idiot, so the healing process is never guaranteed.
Not exactly true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone_...
> "At least one suspect was arrested for alleged arson".
> "the local young man has confessed to starting fires for fun"
Ok. Lets change "soldiers" by a more generic "human pieces of s*t".
I wonder if any fossil were radioactive before to became a fossil. That would made the process much easier.
I love that hypothesis.
There have been others - it's a very dry place in summer.
No humans messing around plays a big role, but everything being wet most of the time certainly helps.
"There are huge wildfires because no water in the area".
This is a lie that we tell ourselves. There is not water in the area because wildfires. Many of this fires were deliberated crimes and would have burn with or without water. The lack of water is a scar of a previous attack.
Somebody should build a forest Matrioska with a tiny cow cranium in the inner figure. Maybe this way the people would finally understand the obvious rule. After a few thousand years untouched, all forests became "rainforests".
Yea… I’m pretty sure this isn’t true.
There are many remote forests in Canada for example that haven’t been logged maybe ever and those areas still experience occasional large scale wildfires.
In short a little stress is good, for both ecosystems and humans, (it develops a better immune system). But too much stress is catastrofic, and this is the current situation with the "clean forest" mantra.
There are other tests that could have been done, such as measuring the ability of soil suspensions taken from the Red Forest to breakdown cellulose in a test tube (studies that would probably require a lot of care in a radiation-safe lab), but the kind of study described in the article (leaving bags of leaves around to see what happens to them) seems to be enough to prove the point; fungal/insect breakdown of plant matter is inhibited in the most severely contaminated areas of the exclusion zone.
Looking around, here's a study on the contamination of fish in surrounding lakes (still an issue). Some fish are more genetically sensitive to it than others, but you probably wouldn't want to eat any of them:
"Impact of Environmental Radiation on the Health and Reproductive Status of Fish from Chernobyl" (2018)
They just blew a major dam in Kakhovka, Ukraine, with tens of thousands being evacuated.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-no-threat-f...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/live-updates-ukraine-accuses-russia-of...
They should experiment with bringing in decay promoters to try to prevent a devastating fire from making things worse. (Assuming they haven't done so already, which may be wrong given the age of the article.)
i hope they can decay so their spirits can finally be laid to rest. the last thing ukraine needs right now is to be flanked by some restless undead radioactive ents