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."

Comments

60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[fustakrakich]

No way!

Yes way!

They do get better...

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[fustakrakich]

I wouldn't know. All of mass media has been pushing propaganda since it became mass media... The rest is just gossip...

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[some old guy]

Precisely. As we used to say in the Navy, "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see."

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[AmiMoJo]

The first two root comments posted are both ad-hominem attacks on 60 Minutes. I've noticed this is pretty common on Slashdot these last few years - every comment section begins with some ad-homs against TFA, become the real debate begins further down. It's as if those early commentators hadn't even RTFA.

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Walter Cronkite, "The most trusted man in America", is one of the greatest journalists to ever live.
To say he had no credibility is only to prove how ignorant you are.

in fact it so colors you that we can safely assume you believe that the "mainstream media" has a liberal bias (which also indicates you have no idea what "liberal" even means), instead of a corporate one, and that you further believe that Fox isnt part of the mainstream media, even though its rating and audience and influence are larger than all the other news channels.

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Walter Cronkite, "The most trusted man in America", is one of the greatest journalists to ever live.
To say he had no credibility is only to prove how ignorant you are.

in fact it so colors you that we can safely assume you believe that the "mainstream media" has a liberal bias (which also indicates you have no idea what "liberal" even means), instead of a corporate one, and that you further believe that Fox isnt part of the mainstream media, even though its rating and audience and influence are larger than all the other news channels.

Wow, in response to a post about CBS pushing propaganda. you demonstrate that you swallowed it all - hook, line, and sinker.

Walter Cronkite Biography Reveals His Dark Side

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[msauve]

"And in the US of A, a corporation is legally a person. No, I'm not kidding."

No. a corporation can't vote, and does not have all of the rights of a natural person. It is true that for many laws, corporations are included in the definition of "person," but that's not the same as saying they are persons legally - there are limits and exceptions.

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[Applehu Akbar]

Liberal arts educated journalists vs. science is an old story. And on 60 Minutes in particular, the journalists themselves probably support evolution only because of their personal experience in having pet dinosaurs as kids.

Re:60 Minutes Pushing Propaganda?

[taustin]

Walter Cronkite, "The most trusted man in America", is one of the greatest journalists to ever live.
To say he had no credibility is only to prove how ignorant you are.

Cronkite's hero was Edward R. Murrow, who was the giant whose shoulders Cronkite stood on.

in fact it so colors you that we can safely assume you believe that the "mainstream media" has a liberal bias (which also indicates you have no idea what "liberal" even means), instead of a corporate one, and that you further believe that Fox isnt part of the mainstream media, even though its rating and audience and influence are larger than all the other news channels.

Indeed. News is a business, and it is, by and large, an advertising business. In other words, the viewer isn't the customer, the advertiser is. And the predominate marketing strategy for the news business for the last several decades has been to scream at us "WATCH OUR PROGRAM OR YOU WILL DIE!!! AND YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE EATEN BY DINGOS AND SOMEONE WILL KICK YOUR DOG!!!!"

Because that's what the audience will tune in for. Retarded hysteria. Says more about the audience than the news programs, but it says a lot about the news programs. And all of it is bad.

What a shock

[epyT-R]

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.

Re:What a shock

[Luckyo]

Problem with it is that it's not actually scary. People have been living in Exclusion Zone itself and right outside it for a long time. Mainly cleanup crews and their families.

So long as you don't go rolling in the hay of Red Forest, it appears you're going to be pretty much fine living there. Locals are even living off the land and eating local produce like fruit and mushrooms. Which apparently scared the pants off the BBC cuisine reporter who went into the region until they thawed him off with some good old moonshine. Which they told him afterwards, was made from the local produce.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/feat...

Re:What a shock

[AmiMoJo]

Just because people are doing it doesn't make it safe, it just makes them ignorant.

It's true that the risk from consuming small amounts of produce from the area is low. If you are a reporter visiting for a while the risk is low, but if you live there it's a different story. Children are at particular risk, but even adults who allow long lived radioactive particles to accumulate in their bodies are facing an increased risk of health problems.

Those people are poor and desperate, and the danger isn't visible to them. It's sad that they are even allowed to live and farm there, instead of being helped to build a life somewhere safer. Stunts like feeding journalists unsafe food just encourage more people to do it.

Re:What a shock

[epyT-R]

I know, but it was quite the hellzone radiation wise in 1986. People in pripyat and surrounding areas were exposed quite severely.

Today, the exposure at the plant itself where people are working, is still quite toxic. It's not just about the strength of the exposure, it's the length of time and how it propagated through your body (alpha/beta/gamma). Eating food grown there every day puts you at greater risk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:What a shock

[Trepidity]

The I-131 is mostly gone by now, but high concentrations of Cs-137 are still there, which is s significant carcinogen.

Re:What a shock

[vivian]

There are plenty of smokers who don't die of cancer, so that must also be safe, right?

Re:What a shock

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:What a shock

[Golden_Rider]

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.

Re:What a shock

[tburkhol]

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.

Re:What a shock

[cheesybagel]

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?

Yes

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:Yes

[rioki]

The effects of radiation is interesting. The SciShow episode Inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite interesting on the subject. Sure it's short 4min format, but it introduces the interesting fact that, although some species have suffered gravely, some plants and animals flourish. If you read further into the subject, it gets even more weirder. As for example species that tend to suffer under human civilization, such as the deers and the lynx, suddenly are quite successful; it appears that humans are worse drain than the radiation.

Re:Yes

[zmooc]

"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.

Re:Yes

[zmooc]

Maybe it's just you that doesn't have Google.

Here's a properly readable source with proper links to somewhat less readable scientifically sound sources:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Of headline's and double negatives

[Immerman]

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.

Interesting how quickly people forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Interesting how quickly people forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at me! I ride a motorcyle, rented a geiger counter and went around Priyat with a geiger counter, wrote down some readings and took photos of abandoned buildings just like the hundreds of other tourists per year.

The area is well studied by actual scientists who conducted actual research. I'll trust their assessments. I don't need any ignorant opinions by tourists pretending to be scientists. By your standards taking a few photos of the Tower of London and Big Ben while on vacation in England would make you a knowledgeable scholar of English history.

Re:Interesting how quickly people forget...

[catmistake]

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

Yes, still dangerous

[stasike]

There are still places in Chernobyl that are way too radioactive. Some radioactive elements have relatively long half-live, so some places in the exclusion zone will not be suitable for long-term occupation for hundreds of years.

Let me quote Wikipedia:

Particularly dangerous are the highly radioactive fission products, those with high nuclear decay rates that accumulate in the food chain, such as some of the isotopes of iodine, caesium and strontium. Iodine-131 and caesium-137 are responsible for most of the radiation exposure received by the general population.

Iodine-131 has a very short half-live, so it almost all decayed by now

20 to 40% of all core caesium-137 was released, 85 PBq in all.[109][115] Caesium was released in aerosol form; caesium-137, along with isotopes of strontium, are the two primary elements preventing the Chernobyl exclusion zone being re-inhabited.[116] The caesium-137 activity represented by 8.5 Ã-- 1016 Bq would be produced by 24 kilograms of caesium-137.[116] Cs-137 has a half life of 30 years.

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...

[tlambert]

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.

yes...

[Tom]

"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.

Re:YEs, its safe

[TsuruchiBrian]

Yes I'm sure he would not mind moving his whole family to a remote area in a foreign country, sacrificing his career, relationships with friends and family, just to prove a point. Of course if he doesn't do this, we should definitely assume it's because he is a liar and secretly agrees that Chernobyl is very dangerous.

TFA is missing a few things...

[DerekLyons]

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.

Attack the messenger

[MrL0G1C]

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 also seems to have avoided noticing that lumps of metal cannot move or become airborne without some kind of driving force or that materials inside buildings â" even poorly maintained buildings â" do not harm people who are outside of the buildings.

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.

Journalism Mantra: "If it bleeds, it leads"

[retroworks]

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.

The Poster is an Idiot

[wisnoskij]

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.