Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
Good straw man you built there, but you missed the point entirely.
The debate over DU is about the dust form it takes after a shell has hit it's target and explodes. That makes it inhalable which is far more problematic than just having chunks of it on the ground that no dumbass would eat anyways.
Hammer of Truth