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Chernobyl Becomes Tourist Hot Spot
prostoalex writes "18 years ago on April 26, the Chernobyl disaster occurred in Central Ukraine. Nowadays, as British Telegraph reports, the radioactive disaster area is becoming a tourist hot-spot with 3000 visitors paying $200 for a guided tour each year."
Look maw! 3 hands!
Is she guiding the tours?
Is motorcycle rental included?
with 3000 suckers paying $200 for a guided tour each year
Yes but apparently you have an 50 % higher chance of getting ill on such a trip. A lot of travel agents won't give you insurance.
While it is literally a Hot Spot, I would not call 8.2 visitors per day a Tourist Hot Spot. Your average Porta-Potty gets more visitors per day than that. Would you call a Porta-Potty a Hot Spot?
that man has a metal pot stuck to his head!!!
*click*
oh that will be a good one to scrap book!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
In the words of Comic Bookman "Dumbest vacation idea ever!"
...no master ninjas visit there with 4 baby turtles and one rat.
Why aren't these tourist glowing? Just curious... also... anyone have a radiation-level guide to old nukes, new nukes, "tactical" nukes?
But can they protect tourists from the mutants, stalkers, and sassy physicists daughters on Japanese rice burners?
"We're fine," she joked. "No health problems. The radiation has got used to us." Tatiana Khrushch, 66, agreed. "The air's clean, the water's lovely and the mushrooms are great," she said.
I bet they don't have health problems, or they THINK they don't have health problems. I bet they think they are Scooby-Doo too.
It's funny cuz it's true.
On the other hand, I don't get jokes, so I just mod them as Off-topic/Troll/Flamebait.
True story.
--
Just say no to karma whoring!
they said 'hot spot,' heh.
"I went to Chernobyl and all I got was this radioactive T Shirt"
Ahh, I guess slashdotters do go out for a vacation.
So we get to tour, and mutate into radioactive humans! what a great idea!
20 posts and not a single soviet russia joke.
The radiation has got used to us.
Holy crap, it's true. In Soviet Russia (or the former Soviet Russia) radiation gets used to YOU!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
glowing reports. It had to be said.
Sounds a lot like a plot by the tree-hugging left-wing whingers who'd just love to villify nuclear power in public at any cost. So there was a bad accident in the Soviet Russia. Get over it.
It won't work here in the US because the public can see through the smokescreen, but abroad - maybe. We already know that many European countries are giving up the environmentally friendly nuclear power in favour of coal- and oil-power just "because nukes are evil".
"Please do not touch the four-eyed mice"
"Please refrain from touching your complementary HazTag"
"Please do not stare directly into chernobyl zone"
"Please refrain from breathing chernobyl air"
"Please be respectful of our neighbors for we don't have many left"
To go, you follow the glow...
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Will unscrupulous tourists pick up irradiated rocks and plants just like they steal from Petrified Forest National Park?
Looks like we really blew an opportunity when they put the lid back on 3-mile Island. Could have been cool to get that healthy, green glow locally.
and you can probably find some trinitite to keep as a souvenir!
(or can you?)
So the turtles turned into ninja turtles, and human splinter + rat = rat splinter. What happened to the rat component? Did they merge? Did splinter develop an affinity for cheese? It doesn't make sense.
Well, if by 'hot' you mean radioactive. I'd hardly call 3k visitors a year (and at $200/pop that amounts to about $600k, hardly what you'd find in a place like galviston, TX)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My family visited Chernobyl and all I got was this stupid thyroid cancer!
With this as a tour guide, I'd be happy to pay.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Death and dismemberment turned into tourism and profit. I sense a distinct lack of respect for the dead. On the other hand, do they care?
have all been glowing.
I submitted a related story to this last month. Kidd of Speed" rides her Kawasaki Ninja into the dead zone through the abandoned towns, cities and villages surrounding Chernobyl.
The pictures are strikingly beautiful.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
The first appropriate Soviet Russia joke on /. Rejoice all ye nerds! An ancient artform has regained its quality!
This comment does not exist.
Looks pretty impressive!
Hell, when I was a Navy Nuke working at the GE facility in Ballston Spa, NY we were decommissioning the S3G nuclear reactor and had to work in the reactor compartment daily. Of course we wore dosimeters and watched our daily exposure.
Routinely we were lazy and didn't want to work a full day so we would stand next to the main coolant pumps (one of the hottest spots for radiation in the compartment) and crank our dosage and be over our daily limit so we wouldn't have to work the rest of the day.
Now as I write this 10 years later I wonder why we just didn't take off the damn dosimeter and place it and not us next to the damn hot spot!
I'm kind of afraid now my first kid will have an extra testical and be able to read people's minds.
The scenes filmed inside the lush nature of the Zone are in colour, this strangely adds to the eery impression, due to the contrast with the first part of the movie (the normal world) which is filmed in black and white.
And do not forget to visit Bob the Angry Flower, that's where I got the link... and this week's cartoon (Bombs of love) is hilarious too.
If people want to go to a radioactive disaster, maybe they should pick a more current one and have a look at what depleted uranium weapons are doing to the locals. Levels of background radiation are 300 times what they were before the 'shock and awe' terrorist campaign.
Heh, and the FDA thought it was bad that we had genetically engineered neon zebra fish. Heh, those suckers ain't seen nothing yet.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Don't know if anyone else has seen or posted this website.
/. her website. If so, bookmark it and return later.
Very interesting reading and great pictures of the Chernobyl area, Dead-Zone and Ghosttown.
Updated in the last few weeks.
This Russian chick has a hot motorcycle, grande huevos, and a nice radiation counter.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
I hope this doesn't
-AC
Ah, nothing like a vacation in the former Soviet Republics. Radioactive bus tours, rampaging gangsters, bathtub gin, and smallpox. Sounds like going to Gary, IN but with a longer plane ride.
What's got three legs, walks backwards, and goes 'cluck cluck'?
A chicken kiev of course!
I, 4 1 w3lc0me 0uR Radioactive Tourist 0v3Rl0RDZ
Perhaps it's simply a matter of wanting or needing the cash generated by tourists, but the area is hardly safe for those that live there. For example in nearby Minsk in Belarus most adults have had nearly 20 years to resign themselves to the consequences and their greatest concern right now is their children. There are programs that try to arrange for children to spend at least 3 months of the year outside the country to minimize the chances of cancer, infertility and birth defects of the next generation. The programs do not allow parents to travel with the children out of a concern that it is unlikely they would return. The "official" line is that everything is just fine of course.
According to the Swedish Aftonbladet Elena Filatov hasn't ridden a motorcycle in the zone (in Swedish). She hasn't got a father who's a nuclear physicist. The pictures were taken by Elena and her husband Igor under the supervision of the zone's administration.
That's Chornobyl, not Chernobyl. Yes, it matters, because it's a Ukrainian town, not Russian.
and all I got was this stupid luminescent glow!
think about it: average salary is $100 per month, or $1200 per/year. Now, assume that about 6 people probably take care of this, that's $100,000 per year, or 84 times the average salary!!
... any further questions?
Now let's transfer it in american terms:
Average salary (I assume): $30,000
84x that: over $2.5 million per year!!
Are you freakin' kidding me? If I was a kid again I would LOVE to have extra testicles and be able to read people's minds.
On the one hand, we have people such as the Kidd of Speed lady who travel there merely to take pictures, tell the story of what happened but above all leave everything alone.
On the other hand, I'm sure there's unscrupulous types who are going there simply to pick up souveniers and sell them to the highest bidder. This to me is no better than the people who where trying to sell steel from the WTC.
I hope the Russian government is controlling these tourist trips to make sure no one is profiting from the ongoing suffering of thousands of people.
What do other Slashdotters think?
1. Blow up nuclear reactor
2. Evacuate surrounding area
3. Wait 18 years
4. Re-package devastated area as tourist hot-spot
5. PROFIT!!!
Here is a woman who is a biker and rides through the "Dead Zone", she explains in detail all the security, chemical washes, and some interesting things about the dead zone such as: The asphalt doesnt carry the radiation, so the sides of the road are 2x as radioactive as the middle. She offers the truth. http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
-Alan
Yeah so the half life of plutonium is a little more than 18 years....have fun getting cancer, idiots.
at all the mutation jokes and all the stupid "in Soviet Russia" jokes (even though Chornobyl is not in Russia), take a look at the site of an organization that's actually doing something to help. Maybe even donate some money. This remains a human tragedy of massive proportions.
Ninja? Mutagens? Don't tell Shredder or Krang...
...that the price would have only been $100 but they had to shell out some cash to convert those protection "boxes" that cricketeers wear into lead shields for the male tourists...
How hot is it?
*rimshot*
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This is by far the best web tour of the area.
Or at least a bit of tin foil.
If Iraq is more radioactive than Chernobyl, it could become the next tourist "hot spot" (yeah, bad pun. so sue me, this is /.)
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
To add up to $200, each of those 3000 people would have had to fork out a whole 6 and a half cents for a tour. :)
Way to fuel the Ukraine economy. Yay!
If you are interested in what your are missing not visiting Chernobyl, check out the photographic story posted at http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html Elena rode her bike through Chernobyl and took great pictures on this absolute unreal world. Stefano
I was lucky to catch the movie "Pripyat" at my local film society a few years ago. It's a black and white documentary about the Zone and some of the people who live there. They also tour Chernobyl and talk to some of the people who work there. It's a beautiful and amazing film, and well worth trying to hunt it down. It's a shame it didn't get a wider release. I remember the engineers who currently work at Chernobyl rarely even get paid... those guys are scrounging for food while operating a nuclear power plant. I suppose they could always eat the local mushrooms... it's the gamma that makes 'em extra tasty!
Read the comment further down.
A tourist attraction with a half-life of 3.2 billion years. Now that's hot :)
My group was doing some neutron beam tests on computer components a few years ago with everyone involved wearing radiation badges. One of the guys stepped out to make a cell phone call, driving his badge to it's highest indication level in the process. Sadly he didn't discover this till he prepared to re-enter the radiation area and didn't take the indication that he had already received a dangerous (or lethal - I can't remember) dose of radiation too well.
Anonymous troublemaker
Depends on the isotope. The really dangerous stuff has less of a half life. It's more dangerous because it's decaying faster.
Please don't say something is dangerous because it has a long half life. There is an iron isotope (Fe-60) out there that has a half life of 3x10^5 years, but the only way you are going to get hurt by it is if someone smacks you on the head with it.
In fact, of the two fissile Pu isotopes (Pu-239 and Pu-241), Pu-241 has a half-life of 14.4 years, meaning that it has probably decayed into something else by now (Americium 241?)
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Girl on motorcycle crashes into tourists in dead zone -- Film at 11.
Back in the good old days of the Cold War
(before global terrorism with WMD), the US
Dept. of Energy cajouled the private sector/
public utilities into building nuclear power
plants by promising electrical energy to
consumers that would be too cheap to meter.
Above ground nuclear testing (with live troops),
and down range fallout were dismissed with the
use of the term "sunshine units", as though
excess radiation was no greater a danger than
forgetting to put on sunscreen lotion before
going outdoors.
Little mention was made of the radioactive
isotopes that would increase the risk of
skin, lung, and thyroid cancers. The same
lackidasical attitude still exists in the DoD
with the possible long term effects of the use
of depleted uranium in tank and artillery shells.
The Middle East (and Iraq especially) will not
be a very healthy place to be for centuries.
Of course, we already have a scapegoat picked
out, in the form of Saddam Hussein (who was
already an "environmental terrorist".)
Personally, I would not consider either Iraq or
Chernobyl as a tourist "mecca".
Typical that these people worry about the toxicity of something being shot to kill. Reminds me of the worry about the effect on the ozone layer of the refrigerants released from cruise missiles after they have nuked the world.
Depleted uranium (U) has very little radioctivity. That is what "depleted" means. Being in the nuclear industry I know guys who handle natural (non-depleted) U all day. It is much more radioactive, but still trivially so.
U is toxic like lead (also used for ammo) and most other heavy metals. Take my advice and refrain from picking it up and eating it if you see any while walking around the Arabian Deserts.
These people are clutching at straws trying to argue that the combination is worst than the sum of the two effects.
Extra testicles, telepathy, not having to shit and FOUR vaginas?? Still not seeing a downside...
If anyone has information about specific types of radiation and doses which would cause these effects, please respond.
In fact, of the two fissile Pu isotopes (Pu-239 and Pu-241), Pu-241 has a half-life of 14.4 years, meaning that it has probably decayed into something else by now (Americium 241?)
No, it means that HALF if it has probably decayed into something else by now.
What's there to tour in a section of Siberia desolated by a nuclear explosion?
Tourists would pass through the same checkpoints as everyone else, where you are checked for radioactivity prior to leaving. Nothing that's supposed to be in chernobyl gets out, and a lot of stuff that went in will be there until it rusts to the ground.
It's much more humane to be killed by a DU then a conventional bomb. Being sucked through a small hole is less painful then being mostly burned alive until you're dead.
The only problem 'dust' isn't like the dust that you're familure with. It's much heavier then the stuff you blow off your computer every night. The only ones who are really affected by inhalation are people who are being shot at.
I don't believe it's an environmentally sound way to murder people, but the problems with unexploded ammo and from lead, it seems to be the current best way to murder people.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
Doesn't matter if it's lead, or DU. If we used copper, then you would cry when people got copper poisoning. If we used iron or steel rounds, you'd say the same thing.
Enviromentalist bullshit. I'd be more worried about the mercury, and trace chemicals that have been found in the rivers. As for those 'pictures' they look far more remarkable and similar to chemical weapons poisoning then anything. More so when you look at what's going on with the generational breakdown of the kurds and how it's affected their DNA.
Om, nomnomnom...
You are OK. Step off and the radiation goes up exponentially. Tarmac is good for more than driving I guess.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
no, i wasn't born, i popped out of your neck
no, i have 1 testical instead of 3 ( and it just fell off)
and no, i can't read people's minds. just yours.
and grandma isn't nearly as sexy as you think she is.
if you click this and laugh, your going to hell
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
Correction: Additionally, U-235....
interesting insight Luke the Grass fed beef Man!
U-238 certainly doesn't decay into Pu-239 (atoms don't gain mass by decaying, though they can by neutron capture). Nor into Americium-241. Pu-239 was present in the core when all hell broke loose, though, as was Am-241. U-238 decays into lead (Pb-206), with long stops at U-234, Thorium-230, and Radium-222 (and many shorter stops)
When I checked /. around the time this story was posted, there was a comment from the editor who posted it to the effect of "several recent stories on Slashdot have discussed this," along with links to said semi-dupes.
Now that sentence (it was the last sentence of the article blurb) is gone.
What the dilly, yo?
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
check out this:
ghost town
Here it is:
in Russian
Apparently English version is just 3 clicks away from it.
While phrases like "Experience the peace and quiet of this and that" are just your usual PR from tour firms, they just do not look appropriate to me in this particular case. Also, one have to wonder if having picnic at the radioactive site is really such a great idea?
Created the Chernobyl problem in the first place.
Well - there are good comments also.
The issue with the 1/2 life is that it is inversely proportional to the danger. Of course this is modified by what nuclear trash is ejected when a nucleus splits. This part should be obvious to all.
A second point is that the dangers of low level radiation are drastically overstated. While there is disagreement on the casualties, the fact there is a rift in the attributed numbers is very clear. The UN reports fewer than 50 people died and a few 1000 (horrible of course - I feel so sad for these people) with thyroid cancer. These numbers are in stark contrast to the 300,000+ that some people cite.
We can learn from the accident, learn a great deal and perhaps from this will come an understanding that nuclear energy has been bad mouthed for decades and has been the target of a rather large disinformation campaign.
It is my suspicion that the disinformation campaign was fueled by large Texan oil interests who collectively realised that in a nuclear economy - their oil would not be worth much... and hense their power base would erode.
So they bought themselves a few years of prosperity at the expense of mankind in general, because now this wonderful chemical feedstock has been burned about a fast as possible. From an economic point of view, oil resources are not valuable and the value can only be achieved by burning them up ass fast as freking possible and converting them into money. Right?
I personally think the disaster is a tragedy. I really feel for these people, they have suffered a great deal. Yet, we now see the beginning of a rebirth.
Perhaps what we should be looking to do is have all nuclear nations fund actinide transmutations technology based in Chornobyl. This is the perfect place to build these facilities and conduct this research. The area is alreay poisoned and public opion says it will be uninhabitalable for 1000+ years.
The Nuclear physists and engineers may choose to differ, and they should have the opportunity to put their money where their mouths are so to speak. The area is beautiful. Actinide transmutation technology can reclaim it.
Rather than be negative about this, lets be positive. Lets build the biggest bloody actinide transmutations lab, then facility in the world and end our nuclear waste problems in the process.
Stockpiling is just bullshyte. Burning the garbage gets rid of it and no-one can build a weapon out of nuclear isotopes after they have been burnt up. Its the perfect solution and the Ukrane can export the surplus power to Europe. Right?
1. Build a nuclear power plant 2. Let it explode 3. wait a few years 4. let it become a tourist attraction 5. profit!!!
Isn't it great? Nuclear disaster means TOURIST PROFIT!
And to think those communists thought it was a disaster...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
What, no?
Why?
Victims' of Chernobyl suffering is a real fucking thing, I've seen it. This thread makes me sick.
-el
The NASA earth observatory thang has some images taken from MIR of the area. Maybe that's about as close as I'd want to get for now.
Reginald Molehusband. Edinburgh, Scotland
I though Gamma Rays were good because they gave you the ability to "Hulk Out" whenever you got pissed at somebody.
Director: Creation of Fallout Boy take one, and action.
Zap!
Millhouse: This doesn't give out real radiation does it?
Director: Good question! I'll ask when we're through this take! Now, radiation beam at Full Power! Action!
Zap! Zap! Zaaaaaaaaaap!!!!!