The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples | Hacker News Reader

The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

atlasobscura.com

284 pointsjonbaer118 comments

I live in a city in Brazil where there was a very grave cesium leak, and two people involved in the incident ended up eating a cesium sandwich, including a little girl.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident#Ivo_and_his_da...

I understood that the two people ate a sandwich and a little girl. I'm glad that wasn't the case.

This part seemed quite crazy, though: "She was buried in a common cemetery in Goiânia, in a special fiberglass coffin lined with lead to prevent the spread of radiation. Despite these measures, there was still a riot in the cemetery where over 2,000 people, fearing that her corpse would poison the surrounding area, tried to prevent her burial by using stones and bricks to block the cemetery roadway."

It seems hard to understand in our eyes, but you have to appreciate the lack of education and superstition in Brazil. If you ever read the famous feedback from Feynman about the standard of teaching in Brazil (shit) then you would know why.

I think it's fairly patronising to blame poor education for mistrust of government safety assurances with respect to radiation?

I'm not saying that the coffin was insufficient protection, but I know I don't know enough to be sure. So the question is not "am I well informed enough to judge the risk" (and in a country with good education standards and having studied physics to 18 I probably have a relatively decent education) but rather "do i believe that the person who made that judgement was".

A logical process that no doubt is a result of being well educated

If I recall correctly Feynman thought his students had been taught to memorize facts and formulae, not to actually have a practical understanding of principles. This doesn't make the entire education system shit – it's a second order problem compared to graduating kids from high school who are functionally illiterate.

I should have clarified I meant from a US perspective.

Also, as an adult, I've spent several years living all over Brazil so I'm familiar with their education system and religious beliefs. I don't find the riot so strange when considering the experiences I had in Brazil.

I find it very understandable for people to be wary of radiating materials being brought into a sacred place, not trusting the promises of safety, if the reason was a radiation accident in the first place.

Well, it's not as crazy as it sounds, in a certain perspective.

If you guarantee that "hey! nuclear stuff is absolutely safe, there will never be problems whatsoever!", but then incidents happen, it's reasonable that people is skeptical when you say "hey! that coffin is absolutely safe, there will never be problems whatsoever!".

This could be extended as a reasonable doubt of nuclear energy in general (I don't claim to support it; just accept it as reasonable).

I completely agree.

I understand that radiation isn't magic and things don't become permanently tainted by mere exposure.

Still, this girl ingested cesium and died as a result.

I would be highly uncomfortable with with an unknown quantify of a beta+gamma emitter with a 30 year half life being buried anywhere near where I get my family's drinking water.

You also have to take into account the fact that (and I'm trying to be charitable here) the principles involved's first reaction to a glow being emitted from inside a difficult to open metal cylinder was "Let's see if we can open this so we can make glowing jewelry!"

People are scared of nuclear technology in no small part because they simply don't understand it.

This lady reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)

There was a very interesting documentary on PBS a month or two back about the 'Radioactive Wolves' of Chernobyl. Bottom line: they don't seem any more or less healthy than other wolf populations in the region, but do well because nobody hunts them.

or the game s.t.a.l.k.e.r

Parent meant the famous PC game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Chern...

The background and some terminology of the game ("The Zone", "Stalker") are borrowed from the popular science fiction novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker that was loosely based on it, as well as Stalker, the film's subsequent novelization by the original authors.

Very, very loosely based on.

Or better yet, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers which the film was based on.

But this doesn't have anything to do with radiation

Not directly, and neither does the film, but the entire 'Zone' trope was popularised in Roadside Picnic almost 15 years before the Chernobyl disaster.

It does and does not have to do with radiation with the same relationship that post-WWII Japanese media features.

Sometimes it's more interesting to write a story about the effects and meaning of a thing, rather than the thing itself.

I remember seeing a documentary like that on Finnish TV a couple of years back, but it wasn't just about the wolves - it included other animals too. They seem to be doing very well.

Do you happen to remember the name of the documentary? It sounds very interesting.

I saw a French one called 'The Zone', it was very interesting too

Perhaps they do well, because the radiation kills off the weak ones relatively quickly (compared to other habitats), and thus the remaining population is actually stronger over time. For humans, that doesn't happen because we try to cure those afflicted which would've otherwise have been "naturally selected out", and so weakens the gene pool over time.

That does not make sense. If the radiation culled the weakest, then it would also affect the stronger individuals. Essentially, radiation would make the stronger weak and make the weak too unhealthy to survive.

More importantly, 'strong' and 'weak' only have meaning relative to a particular evolutionary niche. Adding massive radiation changes the niche so that strong means 'able to survive massive doses of radiation' and 'weak' means 'not'. There is no reason to assume this definition of 'strong' correlates with 'strong' outside a highly irradiated zone.

The wildlife situation in Chernobyl is complex.

Here are some BBC reports. The BBC sometimes mangles science reporting. I'd be interested to read more modern articles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6946210.stm

> Recent studies said rare species had thrived despite raised radiation levels as a result of no human activity.

> But scientists who assessed the 1986 disaster's impact on birds said the ecological effects were "considerably greater than previously assumed".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14250489

> "But what we're finding is that there is a significant impact on both the population and the biodiversity - the number of species - in the zone. And it's directly proportional to the level of contamination."

> But this is one side of a polarised scientific debate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9387000/938...

> Birds living around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident have 5% smaller brains, an effect directly linked to lingering background radiation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7949314.stm

> According to researchers working in the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl, there is a "strong signal of decline [of insects] associated with the contamination".

> The team found that bumblebees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies and spiders were affected.

There seems to be this public perception that wildlife around Chernobyl is just doing fine. Research indicates otherwise

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24963711

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22514722

The second article goes as far as to propose that [bird] populations are only maintained through immigration from nearby uncontaminated areas.

> Do you happen to remember the name of the documentary? It sounds very interesting.

Radioactive wolves of Chernobyl and yes, is great; you can see it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTHBfo_A6No

My problem with nuclear disasters or really any kind of bigger scale environmental damage is, that you have no control over other people's actions and failures. You therefore can not argue, that the technology is fine as long as we all use it securely, because you simply can not ensure that for countries you have no control over.

And it is not only the small countries. We trust developed nations with nuclear technology, when we really should not [0]. Fukushima happened, many smaller scale incidents in the US happened [1] and in Germany the nuclear waste is a constant issue [2].

Unfortunately when using a shared resource like "world security", the free rider problem occurs, so everybody keeps using it. When you enlarge the time period in which we use nuclear power/weapons long enough the probability, that we mess things up on an even larger scale than Chernobyl or Fukushima ultimately approaches 1.

While I hate, that people forget that nuclear power does run on fuel and we have to handle the waste for generations to come, I am very thankful, that they also forget to think of peak uranium [3], which in my mind as a layman might solve the problem.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_th...

[2]: http://www.dw.de/what-to-do-with-nuclear-waste/a-16755844

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Peak_uranium_for_i...

Administrative maturity does not reliably advance over time but technology does and technology can compensate for a lack of administrative maturity. The social challenges may be intractable but the compensating technological challenges are not and reactor technology has come a long way in this regard. If Fukushima had been built in 1971 instead of 1967, it would not have had the flaw that caused the 2011 meltdown. The industry has learned even more in the following 44 years.

Unfortunately, reactor designs are "frozen in" when built so we are in the awkward position of simultaneously knowing how to build safe, robust reactors and knowing that many of the reactors in service are not safe and not robust to administrative incompetence. A timeline:

    date  age
    1956  00: Calder Hall, first commercial nuclear power
    1967  11: Fukushima built
    1971  15: Fukushima flaw discovered
    1990  34: U.S. NRC ranks Fukushima flaw most likely risk
    2004  48: Japanese NISA cites 1990 report
    2011  55: Fukushima meltdown
    2015  59: Today

Nuclear advocates propose closing down the old, dangerous reactors and building new, safe reactors. Nuclear opponents propose shutting down old reactors and not building new reactors -- but they haven't been able to find viable economic alternatives to the old reactors so effectively what happens is they lobby to keep the old, dangerous reactors running while stopping the construction of new, safe reactors that could otherwise have replaced them. This is the worst possible policy outcome and thanks to their efforts it is what has come to pass in the US. Ugh.

> Nuclear opponents propose shutting down old reactors and not building new reactors -- but they haven't been able to find viable economic alternatives to the old reactors

To the extent this is true, neither have nuclear proponents or the nuclear industry; the reason new nuclear reactors aren't built isn't because of nuclear opponents, its because the nuclear industry won't build them without special liability protections. So, clearly, even new reactors aren't economically viable alternatives, from the perspective of those who would pay for and profit from them, to old reactors without socializing the risk while privatizing the profits.

> so effectively what happens is they lobby to keep the old, dangerous reactors running while stopping the construction of new, safe reactors that could otherwise have replaced them.

Old reactors in the US continue to be decommissioned even though new ones aren't being built. Objectively, the market has found economically viable alternatives to nuclear power.

Those cheaper power sources are coal and oil, right? Doesn't every discussion of nuclear being with the assumption that controlling carbon emissions are the real goal?

Germanies currently installed photo voltaic systems have the power output of 21 nuclear reactors on sunny days.

And still rely on france to provide nuclear power when it isn't.

Germany relying on France is not a bad thing at all. It is called European integration. We do it in other areas, too, because the benefits way outweigh the costs. They could for example crash our currency or stop to sell us food. We could not feed us on our own. Remember, Germany is tiny by US standards.

Somebody has to be the first mover. Once France follows, we will provide them with renewable energy of the finest quality.

No one is complaining about one country cooperating with another, they're simply pointing out that Germany isn't as nuclear free as some claim as it uses nuclear energy from France on days when it's not "sunny".

No one claims that Germany is nuclear free, because they still have their own nuclear power plants.

> its because the nuclear industry won't build them without special liability protections.

You say "liability protections" as if the dispute were over indemnification in case of a meltdown or accident. That's not what has made nuclear reactors too "risky" to be built in the US. The "risk" in question is that anti-nuclear factions will be able to indefinitely stall construction by repeatedly coming up with new "safety studies" to perform (e.g. environmental impact on squirrel population). This strategy worked for them in the past and the nuclear industry reckons it will work in the future unless they have legal protection against it.

> Old reactors in the US continue to be decommissioned even though new ones aren't being built.

A few old reactors, yes. But we've been holding steady at ~750GW of nuclear power for 15 years. "We have been keeping the old reactors running" is far, far closer to the truth than "we have been shutting them down."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/US_Electr...

> Objectively, the market has found economically viable alternatives to nuclear power.

Yeah, coal, which is probably even worse on average than running old, dangerous nuclear plants:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

Clean sources other than nuclear will eventually make this point moot but it'll take decades and in the meantime we have been / will be running on an unholy mix of unclean, nonrenewable power and power derived from old, dangerous nuclear reactors when we could have switched to clean, safe nuclear sources decades ago.

Yuck.

Not to mention that arguing about the degree of liability the owners face is effectively the same as arguing about the cost of their liability insurance. If the insurance is expensive enough to make it impossible to turn a profit, that is just as effective as a regulator causing endless delays by fiat.

I see the free rider argument for nuclear safety. But it also seems to apply to nuclear prohibition. Whether your approach is to make nuclear power safer or simply to eliminate it, you face the same problem when it comes to ensuring that everyone follows along. So while I see it as a problem, I don't see how it's an argument in favor of elimination over safety as you seem to be making.

The waste problem is greatly overstated. For one, newer technology allows reusing much of the waste. For another, the amounts involved are tiny. Finally, we put up with processes that produce far nastier stuff that lasts forever, not merely centuries or millennia. The "generations to come" bit is always brought up when it comes to nuclear waste, but that's still way faster than, say, environmental arsenic goes away.

My argument is not, that we should not enhance security. We definitely should, the fact, that even the most developed industrial powers can not handle it in a manner that satisfies me personally is my argument for eliminating it. I am personally just not comfortable with even a tiny chance of a massive and unfixable catastrophe. This is just my subjective feeling.

To your second point: I always forget how this rhetoric figure is called and I would be grateful for a link, but it is easily dismissed: Something even worse does not justify not acting on something bad. We have quite a few people on this earth and can tackle multiple issues at once.

Does that mean the free rider problem does not apply? If the argument is that it can't be handled with sufficient safety regardless, that's a reasonable one (albeit one I disagree with), but separate from the shared resource/free rider thing.

For the waste, I apologize, I didn't mean it as the usual "X is worse, so Y can be ignored." What I meant to say by that was that the dangers of waste are exaggerated, and it can be dealt with without a great deal of difficulty. The "generations to come" stuff is generally stated to make nuclear waste sound really bad, much worse than other things, but in fact that makes it a lot better than more mundane sorts of waste. The fact that we can deal with waste that is much more poisonous, generated in much greater quantity, and lasts much longer than nuclear waste tells me that nuclear waste isn't a difficult problem to solve (except for the political aspects). I don't mean to argue for not acting on it, merely that acting on it isn't a showstopper.

I thought of the free rider in this way: If we stop, everybody else is still doing it (free riding on our reduced risk) and we would be still affected by the risk they produce, but without the benefits of the energy, so lets just keep doing it.

Right. My point is just that it applies both to stopping (other people might just keep using it) and to improving safety (other people might not spend the money on safety like we do). So while it's a problem, it doesn't seem to be an argument for one choice over the other.

By this logic it doesn't matter which way you argue, or whether you argue at all, right? Those actors who you have no control over will do what they want. I don't see what I'm supposed to take away from it.

You have economical influence over prices and I would argue, that ensuring that something is not there is much easier than ensuring that something is built securely.

But you are right, it is difficult.

> Fukushima happened

Yes it did, and it finally pushed me over the edge into full support for a nuclear renaissance (I was leaning before). Let's recap what happened:

1. A Tsunami of unexpected size hit Japan, overwhelming sea walls and other technical infrastructure, and as a result killing somewhere between 15000 and 19000 people. Most drowned, but 165 died of fire.

2. One of the many pieces of technical infrastructure that was hit and wasn't able to cope was an old nuclear power plant with severe safety deficits.

3. Yet there have been zero casualties of the resulting meltdown (and future predicted casualties are somewhere between low and non-existent). That's despite the fact that Tepco and the authorities appeared to be woefully unprepared.

165 people died of fires resulting from the Tsunami, a number much, much larger then the casualties from the meltdown. Banning fire and flammable substances would be a saner response to the Tsunami than banning nuclear power.

Your source [1], the Wikipedia article on nuclear accidents is the most ringing endorsement of nuclear power I can think of. Did you have a look at the "fatalities" column? It reads 0 or 1 for all of the accidents except the one in Idaho falls, where the number is 3. Do you know what the death toll of other energy sources is? Forbes put together the statistics[2], and the results are staggering: even in the relatively safe USA, the death-rate per Trillion kWh for Coal is 15000. Worldwide it is 150000 and in China 280000. Nuclear is 90.

Again, the gap is so staggeringly huge as to beggar belief, but it tallies with other sources. Now I'd obviously prefer that number to be zero, but that option is not available on the menu, so I'd like the least bad option, and nothing else comes close (even solar and wind are higher).

In terms of waste, I just want to reiterate what others have stated: technically, it is a solved problem, the problems are purely political, because of an unreasonably scared populace and spineless populist politicians. Heck, ash from coal plants is more radioactive than nuclear waste[3][4].

Now there are problems, for example being stuck with a military reactor design that whose express purpose was to make bombs, whereas other designs are much, much safer and would burn waste[5], but those can be overcome and even with those problems it is a damn good option, so good that many thinking environmentalists have come around[6][7]. Alas in Germany everybody "knows" that nuclear is bad, so our Dear Leader decided to cave in to popular demand, no matter how brain-dead.

If you haven't seen it "Pandora's Promise"[8] is also really worthwhile.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_th...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

[3] http://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_is_coal_ash_more_radioa...

[4] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

[6] http://e360.yale.edu/feature/stewart_brands_strange_trip_who...

[7] http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/mo...

[8] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1992193/plotsummary

Reminds me so much of the "kid of speed"'s quests through Chernobyl on her motorcycle. She takes lots of pictures and explains the historical relevance of different landmarks in that land stuck in time.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

Ah, unfortunately Elena was discredited as a fraud more than a decade ago.

In reality she was on an escorted tour through Chernobyl and brought along her motorcycle helmet to use in photos.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/05/fraud-exposed-and-true...

Top Gear (UK) was driving to Chernobyl in one of their recent specials. Some of the camera crew waited outside the zone, for personal reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf6ON6pbDDA

My grandmother was 1957 Mayak disaster liquidator (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster). She said that some people in Dokuchaev Soil Science Institute ate and ever brought home for their families fruits cultivated on contaminated soil just because they were in deficit.

Don't think I'd be quoting Madame Curie, if I were her.

Why not? I'm assuming you're implying that Marie Curie's research shortened her life. Marie Curie lived until age 66 in 1934. Life expectancy according to this (http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-stati...) random google search for 1935 in France was 58.09. This means that Marie Curie's life was 113% longer then usual for her time. The current life expectancy in the USA is 78.74 according to the top google result, so if it helps you can think of her as living to about 89 in our terms. In other words despite her research she had a long fruitful life. I wish I had the chance to make as great an impact on the world as she did.

Life expectancy is a tricky statistic to use correctly, because it is significantly dragged lower due to the high rate of death in birth / infancy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy ). Once that hurdle is gotten over, your life expectancy increases dramatically, so it's not sure as to whether or not Curie actually lived a long life compared to contemporary adults.

Considering that we know that Curie's death was caused by longterm exposure to radiation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#Death ), you could reasonably expect her to have lived a much longer life without such exposure.

This pdf has life tables for England (should not be ridiculously different than France, good enough to illustrate the point either way):

http://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/Docs/DEIP_Gallop.pdf

In the 1930s, a 65 year old woman would expect to live an additional 12 or so years.

These are both excellent points about life expectancy, thank for for sharing this information, looks like I got to learn something today. The overall point however that Marie Curie did live a long fruitful life despite her research and could be considered an excellent role model. There is often a misconception that she died young due to her research, and often the subtext of disapproval because of it. I think it's sad that it's common to belittle someone for quoting her.

13% longer, not 113% longer. I know, nitpicky.

Not so nitpicky! I had the same feeling and wondered for a moment, "was life expectancy then just 33 years? Did I misread?"

The question isn't how long someone lives relative to their peers, it is how long they would have lived if they had not been exposed to whatever harmful thing. Considering it was aplastic anemia most likely due to radiation exposure which killed Madam Curie, she would have certainly lived longer than 66 years if she had not been exposed to the ionizing radiation. Not that she could have known any better.

Here's another interesting "radiation enthusiast", who visits nuclear sites and collects radioactive memorabilia. He actually works as a nuclear engineer.

http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/

Highlights include Chernobyl trips, a trip to "Soviet Ground Zero", and a how-to for DIY uranium chemistry.

While we're onto nuclear enthusiasts, this is a great slightly-tongue-in-cheek (or possibly entirely serious) blog about nuclear science and fashion and stuff: http://rose-blogg.blogspot.com/

I like the recipe posts the best: http://rose-blogg.blogspot.de/2013/05/oppskrift-pa-naturlig-... ( https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... )

Awesome! I've been following bionerd23's youtube channel for a while and really enjoy the videos she's done. Glad to see more folks being introduced to her too!

Genuine question from someone that doesn't understand.

Is she exposing herself to more radiation than is safe?

Is there a very high likelihood she's going to make herself sick? I watched this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kg4vVYKc90 and she seems to be pretty callous with that hot particle.

One her comments:

well, if its over 100 mSv/h, then acute radiation sickness begins after ~2 hours (noticable reduced blood cell count from 200 mSv acute dose onward, though you'd only FEEL sick after another 3 or 4 hours). but yeah, as the inverse square law applies, there's nothing to fear with this particle. and yep, the spectrum was done by a HPGe, as usual. :)

...and it was maxing out her meeter, which I think was showing 100 mSv/h, wasn't it?

Yes, but radiation sickness is caused by prolonged exposure - that is, 100mSv/h for two hours (dimensions are important here, dosage is in Sv). Additionally that's for a full body dose and she was mostly irradiating her fingers.

ahhh, Thankyou.

I thought it meant that if you're exposed to 100mSv/h, you'll get sick around 2 hours later... but what it means is a full body dose for 2 hours is enough to make you sick.

Therefore 5 minutes to the fingers is probably OK.

I think the key was if that was the dose to the total body area not just from a single grain in her hand. Imagine being covered in those grains for 1 hour that would be the equivalent.

And what happens if you "only" irradiate your hand? Presumably some of the alpha/beta particles can go into your blood and then to the rest of your body?

what damage is being done by holding that grain?

The gigacounter predicts the sieverts/h based on the local amount of radiation and by assuming that is the dosage all parts of your body are exposed to. If significantly less of your body is actually exposed to that level of radiation the actual dosage you receive will be less than predicted.

You're right but it's not about the dose only. If I blast a millimeter-sized piece of your finger with neutrons the body dose might be extremely small, but that piece of finger tissue might itself become radioactive and the newly-made-radioactive atoms in it will keep irradiating the cells around. Then some of them will get cancer mutations. Then some of them will go long enough along the path to cancer. Then some of them will metastasize...

The girl seems to have a good understanding of dose safety. But a poor understanding of biological effects, just like everyone else. Beta vs alpha vs gamma radiation have very different biological effects and sieverts, the measuring units that take some of these differences into account, are a gross over simplification. You can kill someone with a radiation dose well below the lethal one in Sv and you can survive a dose above the lethal one...

Biological systems have very complicated relationships with radiation in general, that's why even the health impact of non-ionizing radiation needs to be investigated (yeah, your cellphone is most likely safe ;) ...but you know that you have at least some cells in you body that respond even to non-ionizing EM radiation - they are in your eyes and thanks to them you can read this :) )

High Radiation doses to small areas are a really complicated issue. One example of a greater than lethal dose in 1978 to a person’s head where mostly it was just a question of direct tissue damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski Note: You may want to avoid doing an image search though.

More generally in the short term it's fast growing tissue that's most at risk. So, exposure that is quickly lethal may not do a lot of damage to slow growing tissues. Long term you can often remove severely affected tissues so a person can often survive much higher doses to their arms and legs vs torso.

PS: Another issue relates to population sizes. A 0.1% risk to everyone in the US kills more than 300 thousand people and is a major issue. A 0.1% risk to one person may not seem that bad as that's around the default risk every month for a 55 year old male.

Alpha particles (high energy bare Helium nuclei actually) and beta particles (high energy electrons actually) don't "go into your blood", they are just absorbed by atoms in your skin and they break a few molecules those atoms were part of along the way. If they go deep enough they make break up some DNA in you skin cells. If they would get to the blood they would just be absorbed by the blood itself and break some molecules that float in the blood - which would be pretty harmless. If the dose is really big they may even turn some atoms in your skin's cell radioactive and yeah, these could then go around your body, but at such a dose you'd have burns on your skin already.

Her biggest problem from holding something like that radioactive grain in hand would be the gamma rays causing mutations in the cells in her hand that would then lead to cancer in the log term. Like I'd imagine she will be sick with some bone cancer or leukemia or a random sarcoma in like 10 - 15 years from now. Maybe even longer if she has inherited some good DNA-repair genes and anti-cancer-immunity genes. Or sooner if she wasn't so lucky at the genetic lottery and if she has other risk factors too...

And then there's the radioactive dust... I'd imagine she has inhaled quite a lot of it along her trips, and this is probably her biggest short term (think "less than 10 years") concern.

It's really only neutrons that can transmute other elements into radioactive ones. Charged particle or EM radiation might damage your body's chemicals but they won't harm your atoms.

Generally a whole body dose of 1 sievert will increase your odds of getting cancer by 10% over your life. I don't know how much she's been exposed to but while my guess is that while future cancer is a concern it really isn't a sure thing.

> Charged particle or EM radiation might damage your body's chemicals

Which is probably the biggest problem for biological systems - alterations in the DNA caused by radioactivity.

no, alpha particles cannot pass through skin. beta might

Then of course, if some speck of radioactive material gets lodged in your body the inverse square law works against you.

Seems like everyone and their dog has a radiation detector in Russia esp. around Chernobyl, not something ones sees in the west.

Don't know about radiation detectors in Russia but Chernobyl is located in Ukraine, not Russia.

currently (just saying)

My bad. Sadly or luckily it's close to being exactly on other side of the world from me and while I do use maps to help me place things, this time I didn't or if I have in the past, I've forgotten (it happens).

No, from all the videos I've seen in the last few years she takes safety seriously. In the really serious urban exploration videos of Chernobyl, Pripyat, etc. you can see everyone in suits and masks to keep out radioactive dust, and many different detectors for gamma, alpha, etc. radiation in use. The areas being explored have radiation levels that are hundred and thousands of times higher than normal background levels, but they're still safe enough to be around for a few hours without lasting harm.

edit: Here's a good video that shows some of the gear and safety equipment for more serious explorations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdhdCbDch6A

Watch the video with her eating the apple. She goes on to show the actual measurements, and explains the reason she could be so cavalier about it. She brings up a very interesting point, that the people who have a knee-jerk reaction to the apples wouldn't have the same reaction to her eating a bavarian mushroom, even though the mushroom has more cesium 137 in it.

It certainly seems that she knows what she is doing, and isn't just jumping in for giggles when the meters start beeping. She even mentions the inverse square law in the video you linked.

seriously, 6 foot long catfish is a radioactive freak now?

I lived in Uzbekistan from the time I was born (1976) till about 1990 and six foot catfish was really big but not uncommon. I have a photo of my dad holding 5 feet one by the gills somewhere in my albums (dated before 1976 for sure).

I remember my dad buying smoked catfish slices about 5-7 inches across, those definitely came from pretty damn big specimens. At the time there were no nuclear power stations near Syr Darya or Amu Darya rivers.

If you watch the video, she says the size of the catfish is most likely due to them having no predators.

You don't even have to watch the video, it's right there in the article.

The parent commenter was probably commenting on the attitudes that warranted that disclaimer (in both the video and the article).

You get ones as big as that in the River Ebro in Spain. The ones she saw are not record breaking, I agree.

If you're a non-angler who lives somewhere like the UK where freshwater fish are pretty small, you would think it's gigantic.

I agree. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfish#Size

>The largest specimens on record measure more than 2.5 metres (8.2 ft) in length and sometimes exceeded 100 kilograms (220 lb).

As long we're talking about atomic fruits again, I'll leave this here in case anyone missed it...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9408350

Atomic Gardens: Breeding Plants with Gamma Radiation (pruned.blogspot.com) 51 points by thret 1 day ago | 6 comments

Someone should combine that with the upcoming marijuana legalization and make their fortune selling irradiated seeds that might create a completely new high.

This is actually extremely similar to the plot of an 80s movie called "Class of Nuke 'Em High" - it features two students buying irradiated cannabis (sourced from the nuclear plant next to their high school) from a group of thugs.

I stumbled upon it randomly on Netflix, thought it was terrible yet ended up watching the entire thing anyway. Turns out it was an intentionally bad movie - a parody of a 50s horror film - but I had difficulty separating the intentional 50s cheese from the unintentionally-cheesy 80s context. A very strange experience.

It's funny how you watched a Troma film without actually knowing what it was. Trust me, they were very aware of their "cheesy 80s context". Nuke 'Em High is one of their classics along with Toxic Avenger, which even spawned toys and a children television show. But I understand you reaction. Even I, as a cult-film guy, find their stuff hard to watch at times.

Their output is astounding though, and once in a while they launch great careers (South Park, J.J. Abrams).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troma_Entertainment

One of the higher-end base malts often used in British/Scottish style beers (and Scotch Whisky), Golden Promise, was bred in this way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

I wonder, maybe someone can answer: why is Chernobyl still remembered while nobody talks about Fukushima anymore?

Chernobyl was a lot more serious? Fukishima hasn't killed anyone [1] where as Chernobyl killed at least 40 people directly [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disas...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_dis...

One was in 1986 and the other in 2011, so I would expect the safety to be better in the second one. Both were INES Level 7. And Fukushima hasn't killed anyone... yet.

There was no "yet" with Chernobyl. People died within weeks.

There is a "not yet" with Fukushima.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disas...

As usual with long-term exposure, cause of death becomes a statistical and actuarial question.

Incidentally, Chernobyl almost sterilised large areas of Europe and Russia. One of the official documentaries explains what would have happened if the initial suicide squad efforts had failed - it would have been far worse than anything in history.

People died within minutes.

I am pretty sure Fukishima and Chernobyl will be considered equal especially since Fukishima is ongoing and will be for years. The water contamination will be very significant.

I think we still remember Fukushima just fine at the moment. Chernobyl happened 20 years before, and had also some extra component of "media interest", being in the USSR at a particular point in time. And also a lot of initial secrecy, which made everyone extremely nervous.

In terms of "nuclear disaster", Chernobyl was also several orders of magnitude bigger.

Fukushima was the product of a HUGE natural disaster (an earthquake and tsunami) that killed 15K people, and the effect of nuclear power plant problem has been pretty limited compared with that. Chernobyl was solely a problem on the power plant that produced everything, including actual deaths by radiation, the permanent evacuation of a whole town, involvement of a lot of workers that received quite high radiation levels, and a measurable lasting effect on the surroundings. It also was pretty close to be a much bigger problem.

They are both very very important nuclear incidents which should be taken seriously. And they are remembered because of that. Chernobyl, though, was much more dangerous and uncontrolled.

In the big scheme of things, they are dwarfed in impact for huge natural disasters like Haiti's earthquake in 2010 or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Nuclear power and radiation has this especial meaning for us that makes us fear it more than other things.

WDR (a german public television channel) made (in my eyes) a very good reportage about it. Maybe if enough people bug them there is a chance of getting at least english subtitles. http://reportage.wdr.de/fukushima

Or its lifetime Fukushima produced 100 Gigawatt-years of electricity and the disaster is expected to end up killing 180 people assuming a linear no-threshold radiation model. A typical coal plant will kill between 280 and 40 people generating that much electricity.

By contrast, Chernobyl killed somewhere around 20,000 people (also assuming linear no-threshold).

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...

That's a good question. I used to live in Japan around the area of the disaster, so I still have a vested personal interest in the event. It's something I try to keep at the back of my mind thinking about the people living there.

I worry about people who live in Koriyama which is a great city but there is obviously a heightened risk now. For those who can't move their families, the radioactive isotopes of cesium and what was iodine in the initial exposure obviously could cause cancer or other diseases. Especially in children, which makes me sad.

It's not something I talk about because there is little benefit to prevention at this point and really more negativity surrounding those who try to use it in journalism to shock people or create unnecessary panic. In some ways I might not have a scientific view of the disaster, but studying at a university in the region in May of that year, I did have access to regular reports of the radiation level and I did do some amateur investigating.

I don't believe anyone who says California is or was at risk from the radiation has any right saying that.

I also believe that, in the long term, many of the areas surrounding the disaster in northeastern Japan are safe and that tourism in the region has been impacted disproportionately to the risk.

I know that it's a complicated issue and that mistakes have been made, labeling food that's been grown in Fukushima, or failing to set up a proper evacuation zone initially, but all in all it's a real place where people are still living, and most of the attention Fukushima has gotten in the US has been really misplaced, in that there hasn't been sympathy and there's been a fearful response.

Sort of related to this post; I recently read Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima [0]. I was not expecting much from the book, but it turned out to be FANTASTIC, would highly recommend if you have any interest in nuclear accidents or nuclear energy in general; I learned a lot from reading it.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605986801/

edit: formatting

Is Chernobyl the site of the worlds worst nuclear disaster or some "novel" tourist attraction?

Both.

Hah, I knew it was about Bionerd when I saw the title :)

I remember subscribing to her YT channel around 2010 after https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIEO0lQV7rU

I thought exactly the same, though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj0HDN82Pfo is the video that got me to subscribe.

I love her channel.

Isn't she increasing her long term risk of cancer?

Fascinating!

However, the name of the publication (“Atlas obscura”) seems grammatically nonsensical. “Atlas obscurus” would look more credible.

Why not "Atlas kryptos"?

You could also interpret it as "Atlas, hide!"

You could, but it doesn't make abundant sense.

Funny how critical remarks get punished with downvotes. This one was actually quite predictable.

If the 23 in her username is her age, she is going to get cancer before 50.

BTW did that radiation from Japan make it to California?

Because we all might be eating a little of that radiation if so.

Unless rain somehow filters radiation but I doubt that.

Why do you say she will have cancer before 50?

exposure to ionizing radiation.

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