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Don't eat any mushroom omelet though.

http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php?navID=578

My hat goes off to you for a decent try, sir. It's more than I can say for the NeverVotedBush's failure to back up his statements.

Cesium-137 does not pose a significant airborne hazard. While it can spread by airborne dispersion, the hazard of Cs-137 is that it is water soluble and is treated by the body as if it were potassium. Cs-137 has a half-life of ~30 years and is one of the key isotopes still posing a potential danger in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

FWIW, much of the dispersion of Cs-137 and Su-90 materials into the food supply were caused by nuclear weapons tests and thus are commonly found around the world. Levels have been dropping since testing ceased.

It's not authorative but apparently Elena's story is a hoax. According to the linked posting she was 30, not 26 at the time of writing and cannot ride a motorbike. According to the thread she is actually a tourguide with Chernobylinterinform. Sorry for ruining the fantasy.

Chernobyl

btw I am pro nuclear and think it's our only way forward, but your comments are specious.

Instead it spread across several miles of nearby area and found its way into the water table. Some of it was carried by winds, but this really wasn't anything different than the hundreds of nuclear bomb tests that had been done in decades past.

Actually, people living in Bavaria (West Germany) and Czech Republic are supposed to have any mushrooms they pick in the forest tested for radioactivity. There are offices in most small towns that will do this service for free (or a small cost).

Here is my supporting research:
http://www.racerocks.com/fungi/fungrad.htm
http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php?userhash=11557 590&navID=33&lID=2

> I believe in the ingenuity of people and am confident that in the next
> 100 years we will have solced the nuclear waste issue.

I believe in the stupidity of people. Get real. The last ice age lasted 10.000 years. Plutonioum takes 500.000 years to become harmless. What kind of storage facility do you think will outlast that? Who will warrant a 500.000 year commitment?

The increase in cancer after Tchernobyl lingers on. That was one single incident.
"Professor Edmund Lengfelder of the Otto Hug Strahleninstitut in Munich, which has been running a thyroid centre in Belarus since 1991, warns of up to 100 000 additional cases of thyroid cancer in all age groups."

Nuclear power should ideally be globally banned. And if politically impossible, it should in the very least be banned in areas we know were covered under the icecap during the previous ice age. Anything else is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

Plans and plants are barely theoretically safe. Think about it:
With targets like that - who needs the Bomb?

Although it is safe in normal operation, things can always go wrong, and they do. Even if the risks are small, a largescale accident could wipe out populations and make huge areas uninhanitable for decades.

While I agree with the latter part of your argument, the former part is incorrect. The worst nuclear accident in history (Chernobyl) failed to "wipe out" even the population of the local city. A total of 56 people have died to date, with an expected final death rate of 4,000 due to Chernobyl-related illnesses. There were about 1,800 documented cases of Thyroid cancer from the event. FAQ/Findings

Current radiation levels are actually lower than the natural background levels for areas like Norway. However, the higher content of radioisotopes in the soil makes it unwise to live there. Despite this, many residents have moved back into the area.

The Chernobyl event is quite comparable to the 5-day, 1952 London incident where 3,000 people died from coal pollution.

The radiation released by coal is not that significant, and blends into background levels.

It's not the radiation you should be concerned about. It's breathing the radioisotopes into your lungs and blood stream. Once there, the radioisotopes have a chance to do the MOST damage by hitting the soft tissues with direct doses of radiation. Normally your skin provides a great deal of protection, but large internal doses tend to circumvent that protection.

But the way it's handled is what makes nuclear power so dangerous, and that's the reason so many people oppose it.

The way it's handled is what makes coal so dangerous. That's the reason why so many people should be opposed to it.

From the University of Michigan: "Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning."

I think the results are clear. Coal is FAR more dangerous than nuclear.

And "radioacive [sic] fallout" is another big myth about nuclear weapons. The amount of radioactive material left is comparatively small and on top of that, are alpha emitters anyway are only dangerous if ingested/inhaled and only then if in comparatively large doses.

Graphite is a) not a liquid and b) not a metal.

Graphite was present in Chernobyl, but it was used as a moderator. The coolant was our good friend h2o.

http://www.chernobyl.info/ has great info (The .info domain used for a legit site? Who knew?)

Try... Health: Long-term effects - Overview

Basically lots and lots of money is involved so everyone is lying fit to bust while the poor sods in between die.

Ahh but reactor four of Chernobyl contained Uranium-235, which has a half-life of 713 million years. Additionally, U-238 decays into a number of isotopes including Pu-239 (not 241), who's half-life is 24,000 years and Americium-241, who's half life is 433 years.

Americium-241 isn't particularly dangerous, however (it's what's primarily used in smoke detectors). It emits alpha particles (He) and low-energy gamma rays.

Oh and by the way, half-life is "The time required for half the nuclei in a sample of a specific isotopic species to undergo radioactive decay." [Stanford's SLAC page]. In other words, half of the nuclei doen't decay in that time, and is still just as potent as before.

Source 1
Source 2

Well, I wouldn't say that it is "as usual", but life is still going on.

-h-

I gather from your Web site that you are from the U.S.

Do you think that the September 11 attacks are a joking matter? Those attacks killed thousands; the effects of Chernobyl may have killed 300,000 if one accepts an estimate from a U.K. charity. The radiation of Chernobyl spread across multiple countries. -- I remember news reports reporting radiation tracked all the way to northern Finland ; radiation was tracked to Central Europe and the Mediterranean .

I entered college 90 minutes' drive east of Three Mile Island in the Fall of 1979. The campus was still on edge because of the accident and uncertainty about its long-term effects -- because weather can go from west to east there....

Zeal.com search on Chernobyl

www.chernobyl.info English-language pages

Chernobyl Charities U.K. page on book Voices from Chernobyl

Ignorance may be a bliss, but it can be unhealthy as well.

Check out two international studies. Unscear report and UN report. UN also has pretty clueful page on chernobyl in general. We're talking about moderate increase in occurrence of cancer with some 10000-20000 cases attributed to the accident. Fatality is pretty low, thought, so casualties are some 100s.

You're just looking at things and seeing what you want to see...

Do you know WHY the background radiation levels are higher in Norway than Chernobyl? It's actually very simple, really...

Because the prevailing winds dissipated the deadly cloud out into the direction of Norway and beyond...

Here's a few links for you to digest...

http://www.chernobyl.info/en/Facts/Contamination/A mountRadiation

This one's from an official Chernobyl information site. Click on figure 10 to get a feel for the radiation distribution. The first part of the time after the accident was where most of the radiation release occured. Note that it's blowing in the general direction of Norway...

http://www.grida.no/db/maps/prod/level3/id_1219.ht m

This one is a chart indicating the levels of Cesium-137 on the ground as a result of Chernobyl. To put this in perspective, Cesium is a VERY nasty element and all of it's isotopes are very unfriendly to all life on this planet. It's a beta emitter (meaning it's radiation is very damaging inside your body, but clothing, etc. will generally protect you from it's effects.)- however, having said this, it's decay product, Barium-137, which is a gamma ray emitter with a half-life of about 2.6 minutes. Cesium-137 produces the most energetic decay product with the longest half-life of approximately 30 years. Cesium-137 is a particularly NASTY substance for living organisims as it tends to replace the Potassium in your electrolyte balance. Think of all the rather unpleasant things that this stuff will do to you when it does that- it's a ticking timebomb, waiting to go off.

http://www.stoller-eser.com/FactSheet/Cesium.pdf

This is JUST touching on Cesium contamination, which will still be about for a little while yet- many years after the accident. It doesn't go into any of the other contaminants from the accident. Iodine-131 and other Iodine isotopes were also massively dumped into the environment. While short-lived, they won't kill you outright unless you're exposed to quite a bit all at once. However, they get into your system in minute quantities and dramatically increase your risk for Thyroid Cancer. Enough exposure and it's almost a certainty- and it won't show for years to come.

Then there's the one we all know about. The one that people worry about (and they should...). Plutonium. This one's rather tame compared to the others, really. It's an Alpha emitter. It's fairly radiotoxic, but only if you ingest or inhale it. Now, having said this, it was sprayed all over the place and covered everything with a dusting of this element wherever the radioactive cloud blew. If you stir it up, you can inhale or ingest it without knowing you did so. Inhalation of it will expose you to hightened risks of lung cancer. Ingestion at the levels in question is held to be relatively "okay"- only a slight increase in the risks at worst. It's going to be lingering around for some time- the half-life for the isotopes in question is some 87+ years.

Anyone that says that Chernobyl was just an industrial accident just doesn't understand what exactly happened and what all was contaminated by it. You obviously do not have a full grasp of the situation with the way you're going on about it.