Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

And there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the sudden death of 10.000 herbivorous mammals that nobody seems to see: Chernobyl fire forests in 30-april-2015 releasing clouds of radioactive dust only 10 days before this event. Dust travelling by air normally settle down after a raining episode.

Animals died in few hours with synthoms totally compatible with radioactive poisoning in the chain food. Strange inmunosupresion, diarrhoea, pain in the mouths and guts and problems with breathing. Saigas are animals with a interesting nose that filters dust and those tissues are connect with a net of blood capillaires so poisoning by dust could be quicker in this species.

If someone here have friends or know some scientists working in Kazakhstan, please warn them that have extra care with saiga corpses and also with goats and cattle and try to protect native people. Somebody should start looking for radioactivity as soon as possible to discard or confirm this hypothese. I think is the most logical solution to this mystery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a96nEk-f6Y

Looking at the radiation patterns from the Chernobyl accident itself:

http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/glbrad.html

I doubt that radiation from a fire in the area around Chernobyl would be significant, especially in Kazakhstan.

The animals and people who died from the Chernobyl accident were exposed to thousands of times as much radiation as had landed anywhere outside of the Ukraine and Belarus.

The spread of radioactivity depends on wind and weather patterns, which aren't constant.

The article even mentions recent heavy rainfall in the steppe which could have washed radioactive particles out of the upper atmosphere.

It's not that hard to disprove this theory with a Geiger counter, so it seems worth checking.

Chernobyl melted down on April 26, 1986. So, most of the worst radioactive elements are long gone with large numbers of large mammals living in the area with minimal issue. That said, it may have indirectly contributed to a large die-off in combination with something else.

PS: A good example of a disease + enviermental issue is trench warfare. WWI trench warfare created a breeding ground for disease by both compromizing immune systems and packing large numbers of people together. The resulting pandemic is estimated to have caused significantly more death than the actual fighting.

>> So, most of the worst radioactive elements are long gone

You're wrong. Just facts:

Cesium-137 half-life 30 years

Strontium-90 half-life 28 years

1986 + 28 = 2014, 1986 + 30 = 2016

Less than half of strontium 90 is left, and vary close to half of Cesium-137 is gone, but together they make up a small fraction of overall radiation released.

Iodine 131 for example is one of the most dangrious isotopes after an event, but it's half life is 8 days.

Mmh... half of a bullet in the heart can kill you also...

But we need also to take in mind that when some of those compounds vanish in fact they aren't gone, they convert in other subproducts. Uranium creates Cesium (and Iodine I think, i'm not expert on this) when decays, so the real cesium should be now 50% plus X (where X is the cesium constantly created since the accident). And Thorium, Polonium, Radium...

What happens whith uranium in the subsoil when is burned in a fire?. Is its decay increased?

The half-life of uranium-238 is about 4.47 billion years and that of uranium-235 is 704 million years. So, they add meaningless amounts of Cesium.

Anyway, the dust is something like 95% less radioactive now than it was right after the event and you get far less dust from a contaminated forest fire than you would from the initial fire.

PS: Inside the reactor there is new stuff being generated from fission, but that's contained right now.

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