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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."
Is she guiding the tours?
Is motorcycle rental included?
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?
...no master ninjas visit there with 4 baby turtles and one rat.
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.
"I went to Chernobyl and all I got was this radioactive T Shirt"
Ahh, I guess slashdotters do go out for a vacation.
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.
"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"
My family visited Chernobyl and all I got was this stupid thyroid cancer!
nothing like disabled children for a laugh....
....not a cheap joke in a b movie....
these are real people
Cruise TT
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?
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
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.
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.
John, Are you from Ireland - bet you are. In Ireland there is a huge understanding of the awful event in 1986. Today a huge amount of Irish people are working to help the victims. From organising Aid convoys to having Children from the area come to Ireland for the summer to get clean air. A documentary on this won an Oscar this year!! J
What's got three legs, walks backwards, and goes 'cluck cluck'?
A chicken kiev of course!
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