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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

The story of Russians digging holes and getting radiation poisoning was propaganda, just like Ghost of Kiev. The levels of radiation in the soil are not high enough to cause radiation poisoning, except for very few hotspots that they'd have to go looking for. It's mostly alpha radiation left which is dangerous only if radioactive particles are inhaled.

I'm more inclined to believe the IAEA. Also,

>They concluded that the radiation levels where the soldiers camped were three times what the IAEA reported

Three times more is not much when talking about radiation. Flying in a plane exposes you to about that much more radiation compared with being on the ground at sea level.

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> It's mostly alpha radiation left which is dangerous only if radioactive particles are inhaled.

As someone who's dug a few ditches in my day, I'll testify that dry dirt is pretty easy to inhale.

Exactly. Dig a ditch and tell me you don't taste and smell dirt. Even in wet soil, you can't dig a ditch without ingesting some of it.

Maybe not enough to hurt you, but that depends entirely on how spicy it is.

He is right, that part of the exclusion zone is relatively harmless. Greenpeace has the coordinates in their report, if i am not too far off people still eat mushrooms from such conditions.

The story here seems to be tanks driving off the roads, not the digging at the camp site.

I recall seeing a heatmap of residual radiation levels produced in (I think?) 2015 and the reported location of the trenches was very close to the hottest part of it.

I posted the sources in the edits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182828#37183914

Do you have another position for the trenches?

Your comment says 26km distance from the plant, I can only say that this really doesn't look like 26km.

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1511709947809181698?s=20

This feels like arguing that asbestos isn't dangerous in many forms (it isn't or doesn't have to be) and then denying that people got sick at an asbestos shoveling contest.

> The story of Russians digging holes and getting radiation poisoning was propaganda

You're going to have to source that argument, because there's an awful lot of evidence of Russian-dug trenches there.

To clarify, yes I believe they dug trenches (there's pictures), no I do not believe they suffered from acute radiation syndrome.

Nobody knows if they did or not, since the Russians are not talking. There was only speculation as to how much poisoning the troops likely would have suffered (which would depend on the actual soil composition where they dug). The dosage was not zero and most certainly not safe.

That's a far cry from "OMG PROPAGANDA!"

The main point, of course, is how reckless and stupid it was.

Ehh, that’s mostly a semantic argument.

People without acute radiation syndrome / radiation poisoning can still face significant long term health effects. So yea nobody’s hair was falling out, but they still had sufficient radiation exposure to have long term impacts.

However, these are also soldiers in a war. Their risks of being shot or bombed etc drastically outweigh the risks from radiation here.

There’s no semantics about it.

Radiation exposure isn’t binary.

We’d have to know the type, intensity, and duration to make predictions about any possible expected adverse health outcomes.

It’s a semantic argument because saying nobody got Radiation poisoning doesn’t mean nobody was harmed.

People found out through researching what and where these people dug into the soil roughly what their long term heal impacts where.

Also Greenpeace investigated, so they are not a credible source after all the lobying and protests they did in Germany and which closed down nuclear power stations. The Ukrainians invited Grrenpeace likely to amplify the concerns. It was likely another propaganda attempt, as opposed to actual research.

The pictures from their report are a bit problematic. They sprinkled in pictures of the power plant among the pictures of the trenches. https://media.greenpeace.org/shoot/27MDHUHQAT5X

Looks quite professional, but I have zero trust for an organisation who's fundamentalist members scream and chain themselves to railings and raiway tracks.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/59219/tschuss...

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