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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."
ooopps....a link would have helped...sorry.
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Just say no to karma whoring!
Travel in ex-USSR can't be covered with insurance - regardless of ecological issues.
Seriously though, no she won't be giving tours. As she wrote on her site; she rides alone to avoid breathing in the dust kicked up by another vehicle. Also the reason she goes on bike, she can stick to the center of the road. The radiation increases quite a bit just moving toward the shoulder.
Radiation levels are currently lower than the background radiation in Norway. The real problem is the insides of buildings which still contain trapped radioisotopes. Also, the nearby groundwater has a higher level of radioisotope contamination than normal. You get some radioisotopes in your food and drink all the time. The issue is that a higher dose of these isotopes you get, the higher your risk of cancer.
And comparing the stuff from a power plant to the stuff from a nuke is kind of stupid. Nukes are meant to make the biggest BOOM possible. They try to use the least materials to do it, and the force required tends to break the materials down into fairly non-dangerous stuff.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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!!
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?
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.
This is by far the best web tour of the area.
There you go. The result of decades of sensitivity brainwashing. I hate 2004. Repeat after me:
off-color jokes are not offensive.
off-color jokes are not sexual harassment.
off-color jokes are not an attack on me or "my kind".
your opinion sucks. please kill yourself.
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.
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.
Quickly paraphrasing this from Walker's Physics, Volume II:
The RAD (radiation absorbed dose) is the amount of energy that is absorbed by an irradiated, regardless of the type of radiation. One rad equals .01 joule per kilogram.
More information is needed to have an indication of the biological effect a certain dosage will produce. This is called the relative biological effectiveness (RBE). Some values:
Heavy ions: 20
Alpha rays: 10-20
Protons: 10
Fast neutrons: 10
Slow neutrons: 4-5
Beta rays: 1.0-1.7
Gamma rays: 1
200-keV X-rays: 1
The biologically equivalent dose for humans, the REM (radiation equivalent in man), is just the dose of radiation times the RBE. So alpha rays have at least ten times the relative biological effectiveness than X-rays.
30 characters are fine for a s
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.
The biologically equivalent dose for humans, the REM (radiation equivalent in man), is just the dose of radiation times the RBE. So alpha rays have at least ten times the relative biological effectiveness than X-rays.
You are both right.
Alpha particles do more damage, but only if produced by ingested substances. From external sources, they won't penetrate the layer of dead skin on the surface of your body.
Heavy ions behave similarly (at least when in the same energy range).
Betas have a penetration distance of at least several millimetres, so they're definitely an external hazard (first poster was hazy on that).
The real danger at sites of nuclear accidents (or bomb tests, etc) is inhaling radioactive dust. That can get close enough to live tissue to give you lung cancer, and anything soluble can pass into the bloodstream and do more damage.
The danger from nuclear reactors and from long-term waste storage is from soluble radioactives getting into the local water supply and being ingested that way. This is why power plants have multi-stage heat exchange systems and why proposed waste storage sites are at the bottom of mines in non-porus rock, or under a few hundred feet of clay at the bottom of the ocean.
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.
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)