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Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?
An anonymous reader writes:
This article has an interesting take on how the media is presenting the current Chernobyl situation. Its author, Ron Adams, is a long time nuclear advocate, so read with that in mind. Adams critiques a recent CBS 60 Minutes broadcast that took pains to show how dangerous the area still is. He writes, "The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the audience that they should believe. ... I correspond with a number of experts in fields related to radiation, radioactive waste management, site restoration, and the health effects of low level radiation. There has been quite a bit of discussion about the misinformation propagated by this particular 60 Minutes segment."
No way!
Yes way!
They do get better...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why, I think we should build day care centers there.
If we're to believe Betteridge's law this time around... we're to believe that both Chernobyl is safe AND 60 Minutes didn't push propaganda!? NNNNOOOOO, I'M SO CONFUSED! I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!
60 minutes regularly misrepresents facts for the sake of drama or propping up political narratives. I guess even chernobyl wasn't 'scary' enough for them to resist embellishing it.
Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense!
A popular website now gone showed the readings to the exclusion zone 10 years ago.
While I got modded down for saying it is dangerous here as this is a pro nuclear site there are areas near the plant where the radiation is 100x as high as other parts of the zone. Trees to this day show genetic aberrations in areas near the plant regardless of the thriving ecosystem developing in the nearbye Ukrainian city.
Safe to visit the abandoned city of Prypiat but I would not want to live there and drink the water, get near the plant, or risk having dust on a windy day get near my face or food.
http://saveie6.com/
Fear of the unknown is a huge fear few can overcome.
The difference between fear of the unknown and fear of the known is huge.
I recently watched a much more informative video on youtube of a local hunting radioactive particles. He found some very hot grain of rice size pieces of graphite in an area with only slightly elevated background radiation.
Living there would not be an issue if you were not blind to the danger. A dosimeter won't tell you you picked up a hot particle in your shoe that is killing your foot. Vising the area with proper tools to find and identify the hot particles is essential to working and living there.
Search youtuble videos of tours of the place. Find the ones where people are looking for the hot particles.
Before I take a lunch in the park, I would want to sweep it for any hotspots before reclining on the ground.
No... that would be giving you two negatives in response to the headline, and we all know a double negative is a positive, which is exactly the opposite of what Betteridge's law demands. And of course we also can't very well answer just one in the negative, as the other would then be answered in the positive and still be violating the law. So clearly the only logical resolution is to split the difference and answer both in the imaginary!
Is Chernobyl Still Dangerous? Fairy Dust!
Was 60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda? Unicorns!
There, see? That cleared everything up nicely, no need to panic. No seriously, just relax and step away from the refreshments. The unicorns were hanging out over there earlier, and I now can't find the fairy dust - I think they may have spiked the punch. And believe me you do NOT want to get hopped up on fairy dust when you're emotionally distraught, it could be weeks before your legs will stay attached again.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I did an extensive report on Nuclear energy and it's environmental impacts when it goes sideways, as a final project in a class called "Environmental Issues" during my undergraduate degree. Despite the fact I got an A on it, and in the class, I was particularly moved by this website and included content from it where I could because my view was that a balanced perspective between Academic resources and scholarly references needed to be balanced with firsthand accounts where possible. This site was cited in numerous places in my report and my professor approached me after the class was over and told me how moved by it he was as well.
That being said, I would say without hesitating for a second that the Chernobyl area is most definitely NOT SAFE in any reasonable measure.
Check out this site and pay particular attention to the radiation readings when given.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com
and do yourselves a favor and don't believe it when anyone tries to make the logical fallacy of making an appeal to ignorance .. (IE.."What do all those scientists know? they are wrong most of the time so they are probably wrong here too.." Ad-Nauseum, when anyone can do a quick bit of critical thinking and a few google searches and find out.)
Enjoy!
I am from Germany. Over here I spoke to someone working in the field of nuclear safety (obviously also job dependent on nuclear energy, so ...). He said that he thinks we take more than enough precaution with dangerous material in connection with nuclear energy. Especially compared to other chemicals and materials in other fields, which can also be quite hazardous, but are regulated and therefore handled with a lot less care. And thus tend to harm human health and the environment much more.
Let me quote Wikipedia:
Iodine-131 has a very short half-live, so it almost all decayed by now
So, even after 25 years there is more than half of caesium-137 that was present the moment the reactor exploded. It will take 300 years for that caesium-137 to fall under 0.1% of the original level.
There are other elements present that have half-lives long enough to last until now, and short enough that they release dangerous level of alpha / beta / gamma rays. Alpha rays are not dangerous, as such, because your skin can shield you, yet alpha emitters are very dangerous because if you ingest or breath-in a small particle, there is very high probability that you get cancer later - sometimes many years later - on.
Offer Ron Adams and his family a chance to live there, for free, in a nice luxury house.
Would he accept and relocate?
I certainly wouldn't.
One weeks worth of vacation on the beachfront in that place gives a radiation dose equivalent to spending THREE YEARS in Pripyat. The background radiation inland is about equal to that of Pripyat, yet there are 116,278 people living there.
I asked my friend in Chernobyl about this... he said he and his family watched this via the internet, and they thought it was so ridiculous that he and his kids practically laughed their feelers off.
Whether 60 Minutes is wrong or Ron Adams is wrong, it won't matter - the retirees will all be dead before any potential effects of mild radiation manifest themselves.
*** Don't be dull.***
"The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the audience that they should believe.
Because you can't see radiation? Or even most of its effects?
That the trees aren't rotting, even after 30 years, is as visual as it gets, but even that needs narration or you won't realize that this tree hasn't fallen yesterday, but in 1986 or whenever.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wow. Both sides seem clueless.
So this guy things: I saw some people walking around and they weren't dead. Chernobyl must be completely safe. How could 60 minutes think this place is dangerous? That is like a high schooler saying: All my friends smoke, and look at them. Fine. Or a reporter looking at coal miners in Virgina saying: people go in the mines. They come back out. I didn't see any negative effects.
How about: "We took a sample of 100 people who had lived in the Chernobyl area for 10-12 years and studied cancer rates and health problems against the general population." or "There are X kilograms of isotope Y (alpha/beta/gamma emitter) with a half life of Z years per square mile." This isn't reporting, this is talking out your ass. If Ron Adams wants to play reporter, he should try including a verifiable fact or two.
I saw some not dead folks walking around is not an argument.
I once owned a block that had an old cattle dip on it. The ground near the dip was polluted with Arsenic. But unlike radioactive materials, As does not decay. It will be there forever. But life goes on...
From TFS: "There has been quite a bit of discussion about the misinformation propagated by this particular 60 Minutes segment."
But somehow... he never actually gets around to telling us what any of those things are. Instead, the bulk of the article is dedicated to snide ad hominem attacks on the reporter. The article headline asks "Is Chernobyl still dangerous or was 60 Minutes pushing propaganda?", but places essentially all of it's effort on the latter portion of the question.
In short, it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source.
A motorcyclist rides around Pripyat and calls the area dangerous. Well. Their own motorcycle is actually bigger heath risk to them than any of the radioactive contamination. This just like a cigarette smoker telling me that I'd better go vegan because meat and animal products will increase my chances of cardiovascular disease/stroke.
I don't know of one US news media with much of any credibility. The US news is splintered into a far left and right political propaganda machine. You have CBS, MSNBC, NBC, on the left, and FOX, Drudge, on the right. All catering to their audience. Nobody in news media can just report the news. They have to color it for their audience. Even when facts present themselves they are ignored if they counter the viewpoint of the station. Unbiased reporters get pushed aside and ignored in order to make room for agenda reporting. If you want real news you must look beyond the US at a foreign news agency that looks in at what is really happening.
Even then their coloration of news can be skewed as well. 60 Minutes lost credibility with Dan Rather and has been going down hill ever since. They now are nothing more then lefty 20/20 sensationalism news to entertain and the truth is a second thought.
An accident in southeast Ukraine in a Nuclear Power Plant.
This ends today's segment of predictive programming,
news at 11.
....am happy to see humans cultivating and eating the loca; flora and fauna.
By doing so, they are helping to collect all that radioactive material so that it can be disposed of safely and efficiently.
They are the true heros of the Soviet Union.
Thank you for proving my point for me.
The area is dangerous. The radiation is about the least of the concerns.
First is the abundant wildlife, with rabies affecting a large part of the population. Wolves, foxes, wild boars, cats, stray dogs, lots of rodents. It's a very serious problem and it will be difficult to contain.
Next, the old infrastructure, in major part stripped of metal parts. Open manholes hidden by vegetation, barbed wire fences hidden under layer of weeds, buildings that stood with missing windows without renovation for nearly three decades, about to crumble.
Chemical contamination - abandoned communal farms where pesticides were left in rusting containers. Laboratories in hospitals and institutions, assorted abandoned factories.
Huge forested areas with big risk of fire.
Unmaintained drainage/sewer systems causing risk of flood.
Radiation is not entirely non-issue either. Yes, the land is mostly fine. There are few open areas where restrictions are still important(like that concrete-covered peninsula, where the levels under the crumbling layer of concrete are still dangerous), but you could safely farm most of the land that was farmland before the disaster. There are also "pockets" of radiation in places where trash from the power plant area was dumped. Old rotten clothes in the basement of the hospital clock good 2mSv/s. Soil of the Kopachi area will produce plants actively harmful to health. Supposedly the bottom of the Pripyat lake is badly contaminated; if water levels fell, wind would carry contaminated dust.
It's a place where responsible adults could live. It's not a place where you could let kids loose though.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...when a country like Russia has deemed the area unsafe, regardless of the hype here?
Seriously? We're going to now claim that Russia is being too overprotective about safety precautions? Oh, that's rich.
It's not like they've starting rebuilding malls and daycare centers there. Might be kind of intimidating for business with all those funny "clocks" everywhere too.
Rod Adams has a hard time attacking what the 60mins guy says so he goes on a long attack against the man himself.
He then implies that being 10,000 times more radioative than normal is no big deal.
He then comes up with an absurd fallacious argument stating that the area is safe because buildings and metals are solid so this somehow makes the area safe, serious WTF here, the guy is an complete idiot if he thinks this is sound reasoning. This didn't stop the mice becoming 10,000x more radioactive did it?
If Chernobyl is so safe then why are they building a new billion dollar sarcophagus around it. If "lumps of metal cannot move or become airborne" then why are they building a new billion dollar sarcophagus around it?
In all, Rod Adams page is full of drivel, no fact is sensibly debated or shown to be wrong, he 'reads into this' new facts that never existed, he attacks 60mins and it's presenter because there is nothing in the video worth attacking.
He concludes with a quote from someone saying they would trusts 60mins facts less in the future. I conclude that Rod Adams is a nuclear zealot who is no good at science and so attacks the people who state anything he doesn't agree with, rather than having the intelligence to deconstruct the message and debate it in any meaningful way.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Eyeballs are attracted to bad news. Good news does not sell papers or attract viewers. This has been documented for a century, and modern psychology actually studies the "fear", "bad news", and "schadenfreude" centers in the brain. Perceived risks that you avoid releases dopamine. Talk radio manufactures doomsday stories every hour, on the hour.
The saddest thing is when CBS 60 Minutes gets it completely wrong - and wins a journalism Award. Ask CBS 60 Minutes anchor, Scott Pelley, about the state of journalism. http://www.mediabistro.com/tvn...
"Our house is on fire. Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.” - Scott Pelley
He should know. Pelley's won an journalism award for misreporting the "trail" of "e-waste" in 2008. But reporting that a past story was exaggerated doesn't sell many ads.
Gently reply
You can't exaggerate the risks of nuclear to much.
What? You mean like the China Syndrome? That wasn't an exaggeration? Hah.
touring the Exclusion Zone remains at the top of my dream vacation list.
Radiation in real life is not like radiation in video games. When you encounter a dangerous irradiated zone you do not start screaming "It Burns, It Burns!", your eyes do not melt, your skin does not peel. You just statistically knock years off your life. Living there probably just cuts your lifespan in half, which in no way prevents a thriving ecosystem. Which is fine for animals and Russians, because Russians are fing crazy, but does not make it safe for general human occupation.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
CBS just repeats what he tells them to.
So my post got marked troll? That's interesting.
Could there be some techno-religious blindness going on here?
How about an insightful rebuttal?
Like, "no you're wrong, there are new designs for fission reactors that are reasonably safe and leave no bad garbage and no nuclear wasteland if they blow up" or "study x,y and z show 70% of humanity is going to die of agonizing pain if we cut power usage by 40% so we're damned to use it" or something.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Misinformation is the greatest gift ever bequeathed to yellow journalism.
It sells papers and puts butts in Nielsen-rated seats.
So why WOULDN'T they pursue an agenda of misinformation?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This "article" (actually just a blog posting) contains no counter-points or arguments, beyond a quote from someone else who "had a long and distinguished career in radiation science". That's it (oh, and a conspiracy theory thrown in at the end). It just rants about how bad the 60 Minutes segment was, without really saying why.
I am not from the USA and have never considered most of your countryfolk to be aware of where the world is far less what is happening in it. I have seem the occasional clip of one of your talking heads and the BBC sometimes has them on for insights into what is happening in your country. Perhaps we just get the amateurs talking to the foreign press.
The area around Chernobyl and Pripyat is fast becoming the best collection of natural history in Europe if not the world. The videos and pictures from there vary from the sombre to the absolutely fantastic. No multinational (read US corporation) is going to try and build factories, take wood or anything else from there. Animals killed there and sold elsewhere are easy to identify. Radioactivity is higher than normal all over it but very little of it now is unsafe for the next 100,000 years.
There is plenty on the web about it - my early favourite was http://www.kiddofspeed.com/ although there are occasional questions as to whether they are real.
.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Not addressed: the core is still critical enough that any significant leakage of water *into* the sarcophagus could result in a steam explosion, opening the entire place up again.
Did the 60 Minutes segment actually cite the ambient radiation as being the primary concern for nearby human habitation? Or did we all just decide that for ourselves?
("And the radiation's HARMLESS. I READ IT ON THE INTERNET. SO NYAH!")
Friggin' high-tech Germany isn't decommissioning fission for no reason.
Indeed. However, the reason is that the politicians who made that decison wanted to get re-elected, not anything related in any way to nuclear safety.
Overall I found the coverage decent if not polite. During the segment they refer to the site around Chernobyl as "The Zone." It is also (widely) known as "the dead zone" since no one can safely live there and that it is also blocked off. Believe it or not, they were pretty kind given the mess that was caused.
News flash: the media profits from stoking controversy; the nuclear industry profits from convincing the public it's as safe as mother's milk. Neither can be truly trusted, so it is only wise to err toward the side of caution. And, please, discount the shrill, "But I know best", lamentations of the partisan.
Especially after apk spanked you again today http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
The "site" encompasses the know biosphere. Your radiation exposure was doubled and there is no safe level.
Now lets move on to Fukushima so you can deny that as well.
Recently, over on Gizmodo, et al, there was a quadcopter video flying over Pripyat and you can clearly see the reactor site in the background along with the huge dome that's being constructed. What I found interesting is that the plants seem to be doing quite well for a radiation zone.
Is it as hot as it used to be?
No.
Is it still too hot to be too dangerous to live there?
Yes.
It's a Russian reactor contaminating Ukraine. Do the Russians care?
Varratee gone komrade! Too bad for you. Bwahahahahahahaha! Long live supreme leader Komrade Putin!
Mostly agreed, but for some exceptions.... sports and finance are reported with obsessive detail, completeness and accuracy, sometimes when the story is good, sometimes when the story is bad. It's not quite limited to simple facts either, but packed with speculation and editorialization, predictions and rebuttals. Compare the coverage of sports and finance with the weather and traffic. You don't have a circle of pundits discussing the forecast, but they will discuss the sports score or the movement of AAPL.
Outside of those topics, it seems to be that people want to hear about failure and disaster. Even when reading about celebrities.
I didn't see the 60 minutes story, but Harper's ran an interesting story in June 2011 called "Life in the Zone." http://harpers.org/archive/201...
It touched on two researchers and their conflicting views on what the long term effects of the radiation has been on the surrounding ecosystem. Don't know of a convenient place to access the article however.
APK? Is that you?
You're off target again, son.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There has even been a fair amount of anti-Russian propaganda, even here on Slashdot recently.
This chump looks to have been producing more of the same, except he has been caught.
Of course, once you have spouted it, it calls into question you own credibility for good.
At the end of the day, there is only one military alliance trying to expand, and that is NATO.
In the face of NATO expansion to the east, I'd say that Putin has exercised remarkable restraint, particularly for someone with his record of undiplomatic and blunt policy actions. If the Soviet Union has been expanding the Warsaw Pact into Mexico, would the US not be upset?
1) Editorial management of the show has not been as good. (It is really, really difficult to find someone who can manage reporters.)
2) CBS, the parent organization, has not been as devoted to the enormous good will that comes from many of the 60 Minutes shows. CBS does not support the show sufficiently, in my opinion.
3) There is no one associated with 60 Minutes, apparently, who has significant understanding of technology, even though the show often tries to cover stories about technology. Here is a quote from the transcript of the show about Chernobyl, showing that Bob Simon has no understanding of the dosimeter he is wearing:
However, although Bob Simon twice shows he has no depth of understanding, there is no technical error in the transcript of that 60 Minutes show. Aside from the ooh-wow reactions of Bob Simon, it is exactly correct. (I haven't watched the video. I can imagine there is more ooh-wow in the video editing.) The main idea of the story is illustrated by this quote: "There's still so much radiation coming from the reactor that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall. When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the Sarcophagus, then sealed up."
In fact, the expense of covering the extremely dangerous parts of the area is enormous. That is a very serious issue, an issue of concern to everyone in the world. After many years, the work of reducing the danger is still not finished.
There is a nuclear disaster area in the United States, the Hanford nuclear site. I've heard about the some of the problems over many years from a manager of one of the departments of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Wikipedia article mentions some of the problems. Here is one quote: "Citing the 2014 Hanford Lifecycle Scope Schedule and Cost report, the 2014 estimated cost of the remaining Hanford clean up is $113.6 billion..." [my emphasis] Retrieved Dec. 3, 2014.
Here is another quote from the Hanford Wikipedia article: "From 1944 to 1971, pump systems drew cooling water from the river and, after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned it to the river. Before being released back into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basin for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this retention, and several terabecquerels entered the river every day. These releases were kept secret by the federal government."
What is called cleaning Hanford has now taken more than 50 years. The Wikipedia article is not, at present, completely clear about that fact, apparently because, as the quote above says, the U.S. government managed the information so that it did not get into the news, although much of the information was not actually a secret.
The problem is not in what is said in the transcript of 60 Minutes show, but in what is communicated. The average viewer has no understanding of nuclear radiation. The author of the Atomic Insights story is annoyed by the fact that the 60 Min
The first two root comments posted are both ad-hominem attacks on 60 Minutes.
Why would you not expect that when the summary questions the credibility of the person speaking against 60 minutes, while treating that organization as if they are utterly trustworthy?
People respond to lopsided arguments with corrections. Someone who agreed with the spin of the summary would not feel as compelled to post.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is a plain and simple fact: Nuclear Fission is too dangerous, especially in the hands of short-sighted, rather unwise human beings. It's a naive toy that produces wast amounts of heat, small amounts of incredibly long-term dangerous waste and a little electricity on the side.
Anything more complex than a dull rock is too dangerous for us short sighted, unwise humans. It hasn't stopped us in the past and likely won't stop us for a long time to come.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
60 minutes was pushing sensationalism, because it sells advertising, as they always do. There's no need to imagine any more insidious motives than that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
U238 and all the other radioactive isotopes lingering at the site.
The area is going to be toxic for a long, long , time. Top Gear had a show where they drove all along the coastline towards the north, all the way through Cherynobyl, on one tank of gas. It was said the longest they could be in the immediate area was 10 minutes. They were quite nervous when one of the cars ran out of fuel.
are still dangerous. the half-life of plutonium is over 400,000 years (estimated.) and the slapdash solutions of the people tasked with guarding and encapsulating all our radioactive trash are still dangerous. we don't need another news report to make up our own minds on this...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I didn't watch the 60 minutes segment, but reading the "critique" did not provide me with any useful information. If his intent is to find fault in the segment, he should address specific examples, rather than speaking in generalities as he does.
Makes the 60 Minutes segment seem tame...
Chernobyl wasn't ever dangerous, since only a few dozen people were killed.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
As opposed to a commentary by a nuclear opponent, which should always be taken non-critically.
No. a corporation can't vote
No, it can only buy votes and politicians.
But give it time, and I'm sure it will be able to vote too. Corporations already have the right to free speech, the right to own arms, and many other liberties we otherwise only give to humans.
Hell, I foresee a future where Corporations can hold office. So long have Corporate-Americans been vilified, and persecuted against. It's only been a century since they were even considered *people*. How far we've come. Soon suffrage and then one day, perhaps, one of them might even get elected.
I am so proud of what opportunities I can pass on to my two little ones - rsborgLLC and rsborg S-Corp. The future is bright and one day we'll have equality between corporeal and fictitious persons.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The Chernobyl nuclear accident couldn't have happened with a western reactor built to NRC specs be TMI.
Secondary containment would have held or at the very least contained the bulk of the radiation.
The reactor control rod design was utterly defective, the trouble really started when the reactor's control rods were inserted quickly, instead causing the reactor to runaway.
In the meantime, from Chernobyl until today Coal killed many millions of people.
I would love to read a serious (scientific) report from those that claim Chernobyl killed one million people. It's been 25 years, so please document at least 20 thousand deaths, name, date of birth and date of death, along with a diagnosis / coroners report showing death by cancer likely to be caused by nuclear radiation.
Instead the professional people that fear a real debate bomb slashdot with ad hominem attacks on why slashdot sucks.
My simple conclusion is: A nuclear accident even halfway between Chernobyl and Fukushima in severity is impossible.
Many here are just to young to understand what the USSR was all about: People are expendable.
The Chernobyl accident was exposed to breach every layer of defense in depth required to license a nuclear reactor even before TMI.
Think about it.
60 Minutes always has an agenda. Watch every segment the show does with a skeptical eye. Distortions of facts, editing of interviews, narration are all designed to push a point of view.
A PR person told me that his company tried to contact 60 Minutes before the show was aired and got no response to the calls. 60 Minutes still used the tagline in the subject heading.
CBS is the network whose lead "reporter" had to step down for fabricating a story that he broadcast.
I don't know if that happened but the Chernobyl story may surface other companies with the same experience.
Ever notice how newspaper "retractions" are buried in back pages?
I think 60 Minutes got most of their info from the video game "Stalker, shadow of Chernobyl". I guess it was a lot easier than going there.
(Oh, did they go there? Are you really sure?)
But the video game was not quite technically accurate... 8-P