Weird. I wonder how those signs were supposed to be installed. So dangerous you need to blow through at 120mph, but safe enough for a worker to stand there for awhile installing a new sign.
Radioactive contamination is mostly dangerous from the alpha/beta emitting dust, not the gamma rays. The dust is only dangerous if you get it on you or stir it up and breathe it.
Trained crews with proper procedures and gear can manage a risk like that, your average citizen can't. And since there is a hazard, you're obligated to give correct advice - i.e. leave as soon as possible.
Also, how fast is "safe" when seemingly you'll regularly be encountering crashed cars from people who didn't make it?
Doing ~100 over the speed limit probably isn't considered safe, so I'd guess you don't.
It can be supervised at entry/exit points, which is what I infer from the text. A bit like the highway across East Germany to West Berlin during the Cold War.
There were many volunteers at Chernobyl, like the three engineers who went underwater to close the valves, many people fully understood the risks associated and still worked on it voluntarily. Lets not belittle their sacrifices by snide political commentary
There are currently 800+ "voluntary" prisoner who are working firefighters battling the wildfires in Southern California for less than $5-10/day risking higher injuries than professionals with limited healthcare.
Every country in times of need uses their prisoners as does Russia today for their war and they don't get treated the same as civilians in terms of rights.
Forced labor in high risk jobs is also true to every draft and conscription in every military ever, not just for soviet union or other oppressive regimes.
This is the social contract between a country and its citizens.
Nobody is dismissing the all firefighters in California as forced labor without choice in their sacrifice because some of them are prisoners who have limited choice as parent post was implying.
I think people who worked in Chernobyl deserve the same courtesy of considering all their sacrifices as voluntary independent of how they got there.
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On a side note we have the least standing to comment on forced work by prisoner in other countries, Slavery is still legal in the constitution for prisoners, we have the highest incarceration rates anywhere in the world even more than most regimes[1] in the world and for-profit prisons who charge prisoners from phone calls to soap a lot of money and also pay very little for the work they do while incarcerated .