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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!
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.
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
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.
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
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
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."
OK, how about this?
This study examined cancer incidence (1986-2008) and mortality (1986-2011) among the Estonian Chernobyl cleanup workers in comparison with the Estonian male population.
These people generally worked at the site 1986-1991.
No clear evidence of an increased risk of thyroid cancer, leukaemia, or radiation-related cancer sites combined was apparent.
Twenty-six years of follow-up of this cohort indicates no definite health effects attributable to radiation, but the elevated suicide risk has persisted.
The WHO summary more or less states that cancer and reproductive effects have been seen in people who were resident at the time of the meltdown and in first-responding clean up teams ("liquidators"), but not in any other groups.
Some of this is surely regionalized: there are areas within the fall out zone where radiation remains quite high (hence the non-decaying trees), but this seems not to be a general feature of the whole downwind area. Therefore, it is not surprising that the nuclear alarmists can find anecdotes to support their fears, or that the nuclear apologists can find anecdotes to support their story. Anecdotes are a terrible basis for risk evaluation and policy making, but they're great for yellow journalism.
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.
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.
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I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.