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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."
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.
...no master ninjas visit there with 4 baby turtles and one rat.
"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.
ooopps....a link would have helped...sorry.
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!
Yeah, those sell a hell of lot better than the "I went to Chernobyl and all I got was thyroid cancer" t-shirts.
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?
have all been glowing.
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!
Coming this fall: Holiday to Chernobyl starring Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes and Rusty Goffe
Carpets by Bono
Tagline: 8 went in, 8.2 came back.
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.
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