Slashdot Mirror
Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos
wrx writes "Elena has taken another motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area, and has updated her site with a whole lot of new photos and text. The pictures now show several surrounding towns, the radiation level of the magic wood, and many more details inside buildings. After the dust had settled from the
original slashdot story,
Elena wrote 'who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.'"
I'm counting around 100 or so hits every few seconds...
We'll show her who "those slashdot people" are.
I can't even imagine the dose she's soaking up. I look at the reading she's showing in pictures and she's taken up my YEARLY dose in HOURS. Is it really exciting enough to give away years of your life for a helluva ride?
Then again, I chase storms.
Go with God, girl.
It's disturbing to think that the town is going to be like that for 100 years.
Regardless of how many breakthroughs there have been in fission technology, I'd like to see twice as many breakthroughs in radiation cleanup before I embrace the technology.
Some of us still remember Three Mile Island.
Hi. You must be new here. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Re Giant Egg: "big egg as we passing 86th kilometer we'll see this big egg. This is where civilisation ends and where Chernobyl ride begin. Someone brought this egg from Germany. The significance of this egg is LIFE that will break through, life that will survive through radiation."
I don't think that symbolism will work. People instead will think of Giant Mutant Chickens and run like hell.
Table-ized A.I.
While the evacuated scenes of London in the film don't have the wear and tear of a few decades of desertion like Chernobyl does, it kind of gives you a representation of what it might be like to be there.
Scary stuff...What's our world coming to?
_________________________________________
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Actually, it reminded me more of "Day of the Dead," the Romero flick from the 80's.
So just to drive in the finer points of the answer to her question, we do it to her again. I'm sure she's likes it even better the second time around...
When in doubt, act determined. Business 101
The pictures and story she has on her site are quite simply amazing.
Being an American kid at the time of the incident, I was fairly well removed, both politically and geographically, from the disaster, but Elena's pictures serve as a reminder of just how terrible and far reaching the effects of the meltdown were. From the initial coverup to the resulting FUD pumped out by the Russian government during the aftermath, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this event displaced tens of thousands of people, and many more are still dealing with the legacy or horrors the fallout has inflicted.
Kudos to Elena and the editors for a great human interest story.
This is very fitting timing, and a reminder, to the Three Mile Island accident which happened 25 years ago on March 28. We were extremely close to experiencing a total catsrophe, but avoided it narrowly mostly due to luck.
"They swept over like Mongol-Tartars."
And so you post her to the front page. Again. That's just spiteful.
You can't buy this kind of publicity, but you are sure going to pay for it. Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.
The ______ Agenda
'who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.'
The Nazgul.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Come on, this is slashdot ... motorcycle riding photo-snapping babe through nuclear wasteland ... show me a geek that isn't drooling by now.
check out www.infiltration.org for more urban exploration.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Come to think about it, it would be a great location for a disaster flick. Getting people over their fear of going there might be a problem. You'd have to pay a little more than scale.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
There are many things people do everyday that shorten your or reduce your health, mainly: Using Gasoline!
>I too agree that the USSR should be ashamed and we should be Proud Americans.
It's not like accidents don't happen in the United States, and I don't quite see where your statement is founded.... simply because another country has a disaster, does not give Americans, nor any other country in the world bragging rights. I think what should be truly done, is that we all learn from examples, so this won't happen to humanity again.
"in year 1986 a guy named Akimov pushed wrong button and launched the biggest nuclear catastrophe ..."
Hmm, looks like they had a Russian version of Homer Simpson working there. He was probably looking for the "donut button".
think she'd make a great candidate for a slashdot interview.....
Tell me about it! I'm still looking for the picture of her in leather and a shotgun strapped to her bike, riding down the road.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
they are mixed in with the old. so you have to go throught it all.
wow, very poignant. It reminds us of the fragility of life.
/cry
The last few pages were difficult to view,of the preschool...
Looks like they only show 6 days/week. Why is this?? http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/imag e21.3.JPG
Roentgens, the unit used in her journal, measure ionization of the air. The general conversion is that 1 Roentgen = 1 REM, the unit we use for human radiation exposure in the US.
In one transcontinental roundtrip flight, you get 6 millirem, which is equal to 6000 microroentgen. Her little counter is reading microroentgen per hour, so she can go somewhere where her counter is reading 500 and it's just like she's sitting on an airliner at 35000 feet.
Your yearly dose is about 300 millirem, so in order for her to soak that up in hours, as you claim, she'd have to sit somewhere that her counter reads 100000 or more. She's being very smart. If she were walking around without the dosimeter, she could get in trouble.
This is what she means when she says people fear what they don't understand. Once you understand the risks involved, you see her radiation exposure is much less risky than, say, smoking, or even riding motorcycles at all.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
She's riding a fast motorcycle on unswept roads in a place where nobody's going to come along to find you for a long, long time.
A few rem won't add materially to her risk.
I shouldn't do this first gear hard launch in front of leading personal and some committee.. that's fine with me... after all, what did I lose, except for those several hundreds microroengen
;)
Thats my kind of radiation-researcher
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
In the last picture in chapter 9, there is this big slogan across the room. In Ukrainian, it reads:
"Long live communism - the bright future for the whole mankind!"
Truly, you may never know how the words you say today will be _seen_ tomorrow.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
Roentgen is a measurement of ionization energy in air. rem is a measurement of human-risk/exposure. for the high-energy forms of ionizing radiation (gamma/X), roentgen=rem, but for other forms (beta/neutrons, notably, alpha and sf would only be an issue if internalized), rem >> roentgen
Unless she set the camera on a, uh, really high fence post. Or maybe she has a tripod, I guess...
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
Those pictures are just great at showing the sense of "creepiness" of those places. I can definitely understand why folks are afraid of venturing into the dead zone, even though these aren't terribly large doses of radiation.
Everyone should definitely take the time to look through ALL of the pages. Thanks to the author/photographer for a great photo-essay.
Visit the oldest running human webcam on the internet:
http://www.mitwebcam.com
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
This is the most profound and disturbing story I've ever seen here. It underscores, where words alone are hopelessly inadequate, the depraved hubris in thinking we've "tamed the atom". My kudos to the editors for choosing to post it!
grammatical skills completely dwarfed by "dramatical" skills
Very different units.
c hp5.htm)
Roentgens measure ionizing radiation in air/free field. Rems (actually REM, an acronym for Roentgen-Equivalent Man) are a measure of how much biological damage a given amount of radiation does. Basically, one roentgen of gamma radiation is appx. equivalent to one rad absorbed is appx. equivalent to one rem. However, other types of radiation have different conversions - for instance, one rad of alpha radiation is appx. equivalent to 20 rems of exposure.
The short version - "In summary, the roentgen is a unit of exposure, the rad is a unit of absorbed dose, and the rem is a unit of biological dose."
(data from http://www.radford.edu/~fac-man/Safety/Radiation/
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Roentgen: radiation intensity required to produce and ionization charge of 0.000258 coulombs per kilogram of air.
Rem: absorbed dose of 0.01 joules of energy per kilogram of tissue
One roentgen of gamma radiation exposure results in about one rad of absorbed dose.
Why don't we, as a community, set her up with some real hosting for her pics.. maybe something with moveable type and plenty of room for pictures.
She's hot, she rides a motorcycle, and she has an accent.
:-(
I think I'm in love.
Of course, our kids will each have 9 heads.
-----------------------
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
From_ back.p df
http://ldml.stanford.edu/cisac/pdf/Nuc_terr
20,000 millirem will mutate DNA enough to produce noticeable health effects. Above 100,000 millirem, diseases manifest.
10,000 millirem is enough to increase your cancer risk.
5,000 millirem per year is the maximum allowable annual dosage.
25,000-100.000 mrem - Temporary blood changes
35,000 - Loss of appetite, nausea
50,000 - Temporary sterility in males
100,000 - 2x normal incidence of genetic defects
100,000 - 300,000 - Vomiting, diarrhea
300,000 - 500,000 - 50% chance of death if not treated
300,000+ - Permanent sterility for females
400,000-1,000,000 - Acute illnes, death within days if not treated.
Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour, when she was standing a few hundred metres from the reactor.
I am facinated by these pictures, I would love to (briefly) visit these places, but I fear she will do herself serious harm over time. The area is an incredible time capsule.
My rights don't need management.
Has anyone thought of an idea to do P2P website hosting? I think it would be an interesting idea to have a slashdot client running on your computer. That way, ever website you visit gets cached to the client. And because it's cached, you also end up hosting the website for other slashdotters happen to have the same client program, yet arn't able to gain access to the original URL.
Life is not for the lazy.
The licence plate on her bike is KIA.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Hey, as a potter, you're probably getting a few handfuls more radiation than the general populace just by virtue of your glaze materials.
But then, if you do exclusively anagama, that's not a problem.
I had a high school physics prof bring in some happy yellow Fiestaware bowls that she bought in New Mexico when she was working on the bomb. That yellow was from the Uranium Oxide in the glaze. Those things got the Geiger counter screaming, I can tell you. "How'd you like to eat your Wheaties from that?" she'd ask.
I often wonder what isotopes my cobalt carbonate or manganese have in 'em...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
This is a very interesting article but the figure of 300,000 to 400,000 deaths is ludicrous. So far as I can tell, Chernobyl accident is responsible for less than 10,000 fatalities (there will be more as time goes on).
Of course, that's a horrible number of deaths from an industrial accident. Comparable or perhaps not as bad as Bhopal.
See this rather old reference
Maybe a place of historical heritage... Fact is, it's not really suitable for people to use it for living, and won't be, for the foreseable future. But even if it was, living there would almost be like desacrating a graveyard.
Quite interesting that the author (the biker girl) confirmed what I thought all along: the place has become a heaven for wildlife. Animals don't care about shorter life expectancy, as long as they are freed from the intimidating human presence.
Sigged!
Since the powers that be at Slashdot have once again shown what inconsiderate boobs they are, as have some of the readers of Slashdot (I can't believe you bastards that reload the poor girl's page just to see how fast the hit counter goes up), I have set up a mirror at:
http://www.myownlittleserver.us/chernobyl
My bandwidth may not be free, but I have a hell of a lot more of it than she does.
I have mirrored the whole site, as far as I can tell, except for the hit counter. The children among you have shown why its not good to have a public hit counter.
You whould think that a group of people who like to preach "information should be free" would try to have a little more respect. Information may be free, but unlimited bandwidth and server space is not.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Don't forget, she is cleared for nuclear wastelands. Because she didn't post personal information to the site I won't blow her cover, but with a little due dilligence you can find out that she didn't just buy one.
And that probably is enough to keep the average people from doing what she is doing. In fact, the checkpoint is probably there exactly to stop average people from doing what she is doing. I won't want anyone going in there that didn't have a professional appreciation of the idea that where you are may be safe but four feet to your right may be death. Plus that keeps the ghost town a ghost town, and not one of those terrible run-down tourist traps.
Besides, the concept of ecological armageddon tourism is just a little... Creepy.
The ______ Agenda
Isn't that what you put on fish?
In Capitalist America, the Russian Babe rides YOU!
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
This haunting bit of unintentional free verse is directly from her site:
She is native here and literate in issues of atom.
There are bad places where no one goes.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
This was the best Slashdot article I've read to date. It's got a pretty young Russian girl riding around on a Ninja motorcycle through uninhabitable nuclear disaster areas taking pictures of everything, including herself. That pretty much does it for me.
Where's my lead suit?!?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
just wanted to say 'thanks elena -- for being our eyes into this fascinating wasteland'.
your photo-journal is one of the most haunting things i've ever seen.
safe speed be with you.
john penner
(toronto)
I wonder how old they were on average when they went back. After 18 years I wouldn't be too surprised that many had died if they were generally seniors in the first place so how much effect does the pollution actually have? Someone must be keeping track of them if she can say how many are still alive and how many went back in. I think this is a good thing because we can study the effects of radiation exposure over long periods on willing subjects. I hope someone is checking on each resident and recording radiation levels where they live and at different times of the year.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I'm not so sure she's safer.
The obvious potential hazard of the radiation aside, she has mentioned riding at high speeds as well as animals on the road slowing her down.
One of the mostest important aspects of driving or riding safely is expectations. A bike racer can expect that if he follows the leader at 180mph, and is only separated from his rivals back tire by an inch or two, he is in most regards, safe. You cannot do that while riding in public.
Elena's biggest safety risk may very well be "the unexpected".
The girl in the article mentioned among other things not having any cellular coverage there.
Since Chernobyl was permanently evacuated long before public cellular networks became prevalent in Easter Europe, no cellular towers were ever placed in that area.
The parent has a point: she's alone, quite a distance away from civilization in a desolate region, with no means of communication with the outside world. Comtemplating all of this, it is a bit scary indeed.
It might be a good idea to bring along a satellite phone next time, just in case.
She's a very brave young lady to undertake such an adventure! She sure has my respect.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
I work at a nuclear power plant, and there are fields in certain places that go upwards to 25 REM/h. So, what do you do? Don't stand near it and get your buddy to (unknowingly) shield you!
I mean, I dig chicks, I did bikes, especially Kaw's (H2 my persona fav), I dig russia , I mean hey a russian broad whos not afraid of a little roadrash OR radiation, sounds like a date to ME !
this is amazing, and a perfect example of what the net is really about.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Elena's biggest safety risk may very well be "the unexpected".
On a bike (hell, anywhere in life, really) that is nearly always the demon factor that gets you... damned near got me once, twelve years ago, going into a series of S-turns that I'd been thru many times, and some dickhead had spilled pea gravel all over the low side of the bank - apparently spillover from shoulder maintenance.
Trashed the bike, but I more or less walked away. I was goddamned fucking lucky, tho.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
It in fact blew the roof some 2,000 feet into the air spreading the worst of the worst particles far and wide.
White-hot graphite rods were exposed to cold water - these exploded and that was what caused the explosion. The outside world first learned of it when some Norwegian folks at a nuclear plant picked up some off the scale readings.
The majority of the reactor was buried under tons of concrete and steel (which is now in danger of cracking open). Many firefighters died attempting to contain nuclear fire and most of those had no idea what they were dealing with at the time.
More info here:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip22.htm
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I found myself worrying about surface contamination as she walked through the buildings and on the tires of her motorcycle. She wasn't wearing gloves as she walked through the buildings nor booties.
She was very concerned about monitoring the direct radiation but what she might have stirred up is another issue. I hope she checked.
It's an apt description of us anyways, no matter what the "most correct" word is. We have rampaged across the 'net leaving destruction in our wake. No where is safe: we shall decend upon you unexpectedly, pillage your music and movies, delight in your women, and rampage off to new conquests faster than the attention span of a child.... Our hordes shall be feared throughout the net!! Or at least by servers everywhere.....
For the visual information that came out of her camera, I'll gladly forgive her occasionaly poor command of the english language.
Very nice of you. But I figure her English is better than your Russian.
This is fascinating, but admit it, folks, half the reason you enjoy this website is that the girl's cute and has just a touch of geekiness.
...of the Elephant's Foot below reactor number four.
[ home ]
The USSR had their government to cover things up and we've our share of businesses that let profit get ahead of the well being of their neighbors and the environment. A simple and easily approached example might be to watch the movie Erin Brockovich. Not all wide spread disasters were (and will be) of a nuclear nature.
Favorite Sentence from Elena's Chernobyl Journalbyl?
1. "Beginning of a story about town where one can ride with no stoplights, no police, no danger to hit some cage or some dog."
2. "This motorbike has matured 147 horse powers, some serious bark, it is that fast like a bullet and comfortable for a long trips."
3. "Time do not ruin roads."
4. "Radiation sit on earth, on the grass, in apples and mushrooms."
5. "They are on check points and if they will find radiation on you vehicle, they give a chemical shower and this eat ya bike"
6. "This word [Chernobyl] scares holly bejesus out of people here."
7. "As we passing 86th kilometer we'll see this big egg."
8. "They eat food from own gardens, drink milk of their caws and claim that they are healthy, but we can't get away from facts, only 400 of them left out of 3.500."
9. "Evil wind brought here 70% of Chernobyl radiation."
10. "We don't need to run out of fuel on the middle of some nuclear desert."
That's one of the coolest, neatest, most awe inpsiring things I've ever seen on Slashdot. I'm not sure why exactly, but it is :-)
-psy
by your tinfoil hat ;-)
More importantly, we should come together as a species and help one another, ofcourse it would only happen on a show like Star Trek, but it's wishful thinking for the better.
I too agree that the USSR should be ashamed and we should be Proud Americans.
Yes, when the world comes to an end, I too want everyone to remember the numerous toxic waste sites, polluted rivers, and massive deforestation of United States of America. I too want to stand proud of all the positive things my country has done for our enviroment.
Come on, you can't blame the entire USSR for that accident, though their government did downplay the damage of the event in the typical Russian way. If anyone should be ashamed it's probably the idiots inside the plant that cause the disaster to take place. I'm sure they new full well what could happen if they did what they did, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Now all that's left is an area frozen in time.
Pictures of the Red Forest - trees vs. 60 Grays. Holy shit.
The world is full of small risks. Deal with it. You can't escape radiation -- you need it to live! (Unless you're an abyssal sea-dweller, of course.) But you probably run less risk from every-day radiation then you do from driving 10 MPH over the speed limit on your way home from work!
I recently worked on a project with a group of radiologists at the research university I'm employed by to develop an expert system to more quickly train operators of portable ultrasound imaging equipment. This group is part of a world wide organization of physicians dealing with the long term irradiation effects of hundreds of thousands of people exposed to Chernobyl's fallout. Specifically, detecting thyroid cancer with ultrasound requires much experience and there is great urgency to speed training to detect these cancers early before they become too advanced for successful treatment. This group began monitoring residents in the fallout area shortly after the accident was made public. Children exposed then are now beginning to show higher rates of thyroid cancers.
That would be Tatars rather than Tartars. A Mongol tartar is what you'd get at a russian tavern at the end of 15th century.
I lose an hour of my life everytime I visit Slashdot, so I don't see what the hoopla is about.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
those numbers that are being quoted are for a burst dose -- ie you get it all at once. the effects change if you get a continuous, lower dose to the same levels.
I'm currently in the Navy's Nuclear Engineer school (2 more weeks and hopefully I'll be a certified nuclear engineer! hooray!). I don't have the numbers memorized, but this is along the lines of what they tell us (and yes, it's unclassified):
1 Rem = 1 mRem (milliRem)
The following are effects from burst doses
Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: tell the guys he's a dumbass for thinking there's a problem
Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: have him see a doctor just to make sure, but there's still really no problem. possible rise in chance to get cancer.
Prognossis: Good
Effects: headache. 5% chance of vomitting within 4 hrs.
Treatment: seek medical attention.
Prognossis: OK
Effects: headache. 50% chance of vomitting within 2 hr. 5% chance of death within 4 months.
Treatment: seek medical attention immediately.
Prognossis: Guarded
Effects: headache. 100% chance of vomiting within 1 hr. 50% chance of death within a short period (can't rememebr the time).
Treatment: better get him to a doctor NOW!
Prognossis: hopeless
Effects: headache. 100% chance vomitting within 30 min. 100% chance of death within 48 hrs.
Treatment: Give him sedatives. Call the morgue.
For those that are curious, the guys on K-19 probably got more than 5000 Rem.
And what do these mean? here are some numbers to compare against:
I work daily 15 feet from an operational reactor (I work on US submarines).
my exposure last month: 4 mrem.
my lifetime exposure:
The radiation levels in the Reactor Compartment 15 minutes after shutting down the reactor: ~50 mRem/hr (avg)
a day at the beach: 10 mRem per day
smoking for a year: 1 Rem
standing next to a bag of fertilizer: 2 mRem / day
eating a banana: 4 mRem each
those numbers are mostly from betas and gammas. alphas only affect you if you get them inside you, which is why smokers get so much radiation, and neutron mostly is (a) really low-level and (b) passes right through you.
so what's my point?
1. I get less radiation from work that I do from living.
2. those numbers that they got from Chyrnobl are HUGE, but they can't happen on US Naval Reactors. Even if we were to completely melt down and spray our stuff all over the place, we would still be relatively clean (we use tiny reactors; we only need to power a 300' boat to 25+ knots, we don;t need to power an entire metropolis). besides, the most likely time that would occur is if we get hit with a depth charge, at which point's we'll sit on the bottom of the ocean and get covered with a whole hell of a lot of water!
weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
oops. sorry. 1 Rem = 1000 mRem.
sorry. my bad
weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
...it makes her hot in more ways than one.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
So you're suggesting trying to bluff your way past a Russian military checkpoint into a restricted area, using a fake ID you've assembled from scans on the net?
You first.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
I do not want to discount the bombs, but those people probably die from old age far more than from radiation. The nuclear attack occurred almost 60 years ago.
As a long-time rider, I can assure you that any bike rider's biggest safety risk is _ALWAYS_ the unexpected. This is just as true in racing (what happens when the lead bike blows a gasket?) as it is in street riding.
;)
Although Elena's site focuses more on the result than the process, I get the impression that she is an experienced rider, and thus cannot fail to be aware of that.
There ARE only two kinds of motorcycle riders, after all -- those that have had accidents, and those that will. (And the two are NOT mutually exclusive, what's worse.
But one doesn't ride a motorcycle because one is concerned about one's safety among all else, either....
(I echo an earlier poster's sentiments about the appeal of women who ride!)
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Back in the early 80's a small town - Times Beach, Missouri was found to have dioxin sprayed on the dirt streets and caused the government to buy out the whole town and relocate everybody.
It is eery to drive down I-44 just outside of St. Louis and see this town that is totally deserted. just sitting there...
I've moved from the area since so have not seen it in a few years so don't know what it looks like today, but it was said that the streets contained 2,000,000 times the amount of dioxin considered to be a dangerous level.
People living there would rake up dead birds and animals died at an alarming rate. over 50 horses died at a single stable from the spraying.
Now it is just a ghost town frozen in time from the early 80's.
A massive cleanup was to be put in place collecting the dirt, processing it and later putting back the cleaned dirt... but it may be a never ending project.
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
In Capitalist America, the Russian Babe rides YOU!
For a fee... of course...
Or possibly for a green card?
http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm
Not too many people know about it but there was a mis-hap in idaho. The operators were trying to do some type of rod drop test. The man was physically pulling on the control rod. It was stuck. When it finally gave, he pulled it too far. The Rx went promptcritical, shot the rod out, impaling him, and supposedly pinning him to the roof.
Best shielding for:
Gammas: DU or lead
Betas: Plastic, water (avoid metal at all costs, especially heavy metals)
Alpha: Basically anything
Neutron: Parafin to slow them down and lithium to absorb them
An x-ray is made by slamming an electron into a heavy, dense metal, usually tungsten in machines. A beta is a very fast electron so shield them with metal and you have an x-ray source.
Quoting chapter 6:
Some tell that 400.000 dead, soyuzchernobyl report of 300.000 people that died since 1986 and this is not over, in 30 years people will still die
These numbers are WILDLY inflated! The number of deaths from radiation are probably rather in the dozens. Check here, or here
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Let's just hope no-one does anything stupid and evil that makes us abandon another city in this way...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
"who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars."
"...what is best in life?"
"To slashdot your enemies, see their hit counters roll over before you, and to hear the lamentation of their servers!"
Carthago delenda est!
Subject says it all, really. She would make a great subject for a short documentary movie, taking a ride through the dead zone and talking about it. I would pay to watch it. I might even invest in it. It wouldn't cost very much to make.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Interesting map and info at Radon Map.
I lived for a year in a brick house in Wyoming, which is chock full of granite and uranium.
Wyoming: if the weather, the animals, or the locals won't kill ya', the radiation will!
(Assuming, of course, that you're smart enough to not go skinny dipping in a random hotspring....)
~UP
Eat the Path.
Elena has started posting on sport-touring.net.
When someone put up a mirror, worried about bandwidth, Elena asked him to take it down because she was concerned that her updates wouldn't get propagated, and that people would only see an old version.
elena
I asked to remove copied site, because need to update and need to make some corrections.
Original Elena post here.
While I realize that folks just want to help out, I think that, given that this is Elena's work (and one that she had to venture into hazardous environments to produce and is giving away freely), her wishes should be respected WRT mirrors. (That doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a personal wget -rk --no-parent'ed copy just in case the site ever goes away permanently, though.)
May we never see th
This deed that you have done is invaluable. As a human being and as a historian-in-training, I am humbled by what you have presented. The impact, emotionally and otherwise, that this gives... I don't think I have any words suitable to describe it.
All I can say is that you are a beautiful person, both inside and out.
Pax Vobiscum,
Ted
Eat the Path.
If you read a bit further in the thread I linked to in my parent post, you'll also notice that Elena removed her facial portrait and email address (leaving only the postal address) from her original pages -- the body of her documentary work is still present, without some of the personal information. She originally deliberately took her site down for a short period after it first "hit the Web awareness". As folks have noticed, there has been a lot of online commenting on her sex appeal, etc, and a good guess is that she's been uncomfortable with the email that she's been getting since her original site was put up.
Seriously -- appreciate the work for what it is -- a unique, honest set of images and insights into the most horrific nuclear disaster the world has ever seen. However, please try and avoid creeping the author out. I'd like to continue to see more of this material.
Thanks.
May we never see th
One thing that strikes me - this area is a sort of Soviet-era time-capsule - some things are left as they were on the day of evacuation. When the radiation dies down, someone will buy it up and turn it into a theme park..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Would be nice to see this published in a book.
Maybe Oreilly would want to publish their first
coffee table book.
Pardon the horrid number slang, but the subject line is too damn short. Has anyone actually sent her $ to upgrade her bandwidth? There was talk of it with the last article, but I didn't I hear anything more. Maybe start a fund (pity PayPal isn't trustable). I mean, her page is a public service, I would give her money. If there was an easy way how. She posted a mailing address but I don't trust Russian post.
In western Europe we were told that most of the core material was trapped underneath the concrete sarcophagus that engineers died for when created. Imagine our shock as we heard that the sarcophagus was starting to break down recently. What would come from underneath? Do we need to send money and robots to seal the sarcophagus?
Finding the truth was hard, but researchers found that the radiation was low, expeditions were set up right down into the sarcophagus, what we found was that the disaster was bigger then reported by international organizations. Almost all core material had escaped during the disaster. Even today we were told that most had been contained. The environmental damage had been way bigger then even recently calculated.
This conclusion also had a strange side effect. The breaking down of the sarcophagus is no new disaster, we don't have to costly fix it. All that we could do is build a simple roof so that rain water is kept out and that groundwater is not polluted anymore then it already is, so that wildlife has more chance. Then just wait for radiation to slowly reduce by itself.
Dennis SCP (source: Public TV noorderlicht.vpro.nl)
In Worlds most dangerous places, Robert Young Pelton said that in Chechnya you could get thru any Soviet roadblock with a loaf of bread. Vodka and tobacco would get you an armed escort where ever you wanted to go.
I though it was funny when he said that these weren't the "robust shovel jawed blondes (the russian soilders) from stallone and van damme movies".
Hooo Son! This'uns a Hawg!
Even without ozone depletion, sun exposure is something you have to be careful about. People get the chills at the thought of visiting Chernobyl, but think a nice "healthy" tan is no problem. Wrong!
Call me crazy, but I bet she didn't put her email and full name on the website because she didn't want a million emails.
So why post it here? To show you can lookup?
Seriously, we should respect her wishes and NOT contact her except via snail mail.
Repsect is not that difficult a concept.
Elena,
We Slashdotters are a curious crowd. We come from many walks of life, from many different counties, and political persuasions. When one of us reads a story that we think others may like we submit a short synopsis of it to the editors. If the editors agree, the synopsis and a link to the story are posted on Slashdot. Slashdotters share some common interests, mostly in technology.
You are only one person, but what you have done, what you have said has affected thousands of people. Your story has made us take a good hard look at life, technology, and our own contribution to society. There is a real sadness to your story, a sadness caused by something intended to be good. There is a lesson for all of us in that. Your story shows us what can happen when technology goes wrong.
Your Ghost Ride is more important than you may have imagined. You have reached not only the minds but the hearts of thousands of Slashdot readers. It is a well presented first-person story that reminds that terrible things can and do happen.
It is not uncommon for people familiar with dangers and risks to minimize them. To some degree everyone thinks; "It can't happen here." I'm sure the people of Chernobyl felt that way before the accident. Many of us work in industries where we can apply what you have taught us to our work. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. It doesn't take much of a mistake to cause a chain-reaction that ends in disaster and it doesn't need to be in a nuclear reactor for that to happen.
On Monday, when I go back to work, I pledge to you that I will remain mindful of your story. It will make a difference in my work and in my life.
I urge to take this further. You have told a powerful story. This can be the end of it or, it can be just the beginning. It is up to you. In the days and weeks ahead, you can change lives. You are an exceptional storyteller. What you have done transcends differences in language and in societies. You can be an agent of change. Please use it. I would like to hear more from you!
The operative word was "random." There are still a few people who die by falling or jumping into a hotspring in or near Yellowstone National Park. The problem isn't in the purity of the water, it's in the temperature. There are still quite a few hotsprings which are "unlabled"; that is, they don't have signs posted as to whether or not they are safe.
A greater majority of people who run into these hotsprings are smart enough to know to steer clear of them, but there are a few who want to get a closer look, and then fall in, or stupidly assume that every hotspring is safe or that the random, deep pool of water isn't a hotspring, and then jump into one. Even worse is when someone decides to "take a closer look" or take a swim in one despite warning signs and metal handrails constructed to prevent them from doing so. Unfortunately, the usual result is a gruesome death (I'll spare you the details).
So that line about the hotsprings was a bit of black humor.
Google can probably help you find more information on this and the other dangers of being a tourist in the Yellowstone/Wyoming area. If you'd like to get more out of me, I'd request it be done through email, as we're rather off-topic as it is.
Thanks,
UP
Eat the Path.
What's tough is that Chernobyl-induced cancer cases amount to an increase of between 0.004% and 0.01% above the baseline rate of cancers (the exact number is subject to dispute, but is commonly agreed to lie in this range). Thyroid cancer rates are the only ones observed to have increased after Chernobyl, with an increase of 0.9% for the adult population as a whole and 5% for children under 14. Thyroid cancer is very treatable and has a mortality rate of 0.7%, so 100,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer would cause only about 700 deaths.
Some anti-nuclear activists assert that these numbers dramatically underestimate the number of deaths due to Chernobyl because they want to count as Chernobyl deaths the number of abortions (frequently estimated at 50,000-100,000) performed on frightened mothers throughout Europe in the wake Chernobyl. I hadn't seen the anti-nuke crowd join the pro-life movement before this.
According to the UNSCEAR, the only long-term effect that's been seen is an increase in thyroid cancer. They were surprised to see no increase in leukemia, whose connection to exposure to radiation is well documented and well understood.
The exact toll of the Chernobyl accident may never be known. Determining which cancers are caused by fallout and which by other causes is not possible and the numbers are so small as to be statistically uncertain. Perhaps the WHO number of 3500 deaths that I cited was low by a factor of two or three (another estimate, published in the anti-nuke Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, puts the toll at 6000 and rising as of 1996), but there's no credible estimate that puts Chernobyl't toll within a factor of five of Hiroshima.