Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Just because people are doing it doesn't make it safe, it just makes them ignorant.
There is no evidence that what they are doing is dangerous. There have been thousands of cases of thyroid cancer caused by radiation from Chernobyl. But all of those surplus cancers occurred in people that were exposed to I-131 in the first few weeks after the accident. I-131 is not a significant ongoing risk. There are no other known surplus cancers. So if the people are "ignorant", please cite the information they should be aware of.
The I-131 is mostly gone by now, but high concentrations of Cs-137 are still there, which is s significant carcinogen.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"it appears that humans are worse drain than the radiation"
Only if you look at photogenic large mammals like we always do. But nature is much more than that. Fungi, microbes, spiders and insects are doing very bad, so bad in fact that dead trees are hardly decaying. Birds have very small brains compared to birds from more healthy regions. And trees are not growing as fast as they should.
Bottomline: large parts of the natural cycle are not working and we don't know very well what the long term effects will be. What we DO know, is that abnormal amounts of flammable biomass is accumulating in the area. A forest-fire could cause huge redistribution of radioactive materials.
0x or or snor perron?!
There is plenty of evidence that what they are doing is dangerous. There have been extensive studies into the effect on humans, and on wildlife in the area. Bio-accumulation is a serious long-term problem that is known to cause cancer and birth defects.
That is why governments test for it, and why farmers and fishermen in the Fukushima region have been going to such lengths to test their produce. As well as meeting their own safety standards, they need to be able to show other countries that their goods are safe. The EU did reject some goods in the years after the disaster, but more recently they have managed to replace the affected soil and introduced improved cleaning methods. Obviously the people living near Chernobyl don't have access to any of that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In Germany, even this year, 40% of the wild boars which were tested in Saxony (hunters are required to check animals they killed for radioactivity) showed radioactivity higher than the limit of 600 becquerel/kg, which made them officially unsuitable for human consumption. Some animals even showed radioactivity as high as 9800 becquerel/kg. Articles (in German) here: http://www.neues-deutschland.d... and here: http://www.n-tv.de/wissen/Wild...
This radioactivity in the meat is caused by the boars eating mushrooms and other plants in the forest. If plants and animals in eastern Germany are still contaminated after all this time, I'd rather not eat anything from directly next to the chernobyl plant, or live there.
There are plenty of smokers who don't die of cancer, so that must also be safe, right?
See, this is why we try not to use anecdotes to test hypotheses. There are smokers who die of cirrhosis without ever getting cancer. There are even people who jump of buildings and survive (please do not try that at home). You can't determine whether smoking causes cancer, or whether drunk driving causes accidents by watching one individual.
If you survey the people who lived near Chernobyl, and who actually worked on the clean-up project, you find that they get 'radiation' cancers at the same rate as everyone else. That is, there is no additional cancer risk for having been a Chernobyl clean-up worker. (now, those folks do have a somewhat higher incidence of 'alcohol-related' cancers, but I don't think you can attribute them to high background radiation or Cs ingestion.
The only people who have documented cancer associated with the accident are people who were resident at the time of the meltdown and the immediate "liquidators." Among them, WHO estimates
the additional cancer deaths from radiation exposure correspond to 3-4% above the normal incidence of cancers from all causes.
Saxony used to have Uranium mines (see the Wismut page in Wikipedia). So are you sure it is Chernobyl radiation or just runoff from underground rivers that cross the uranium deposits that occur naturally over there?
sort of takes the romance out of it
more on that
alright, if you're not trolling you deserve a letter grade off that project
The Admin and the Engineer
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.
Yeah, only on slashdot will nuclear apologists be on standby to declare that uranium mines cause Cs-137 (which is the cause of the radioactivity in boars and mushrooms in bavaria/saxony) to spontaneously appear.
And get a Score 5, Informative, WTF?
>There's a body of research now that demonstrates that low level doses are not as dangerous as earlier predicted.
Let's be careful about bruiting this about unless you point to the data AND the conclusions. It only takes one hit from a photon of ionizing radiation to cause a mutation, and it only takes a few mutations to cause serious disease. This is a big controversy, and has been for a LONG time.
Look up what happened to the cast and crew of the movie "The Conqueror", which was filmed downwind of nuclear testing sites that had been active two years earlier. It doesn't take much radiation to cause trouble...