Chernobyl cover-up: Giant shield rolled over nuclear reactor remains

Regarding the wildlife

There are reports that thriving is not quite correct, it seems that biodiversity is not as great, population levels are lower and some species seem to still have problems now due to radiation.

Re: dosage, scientists regularly go inside the reactor building itself, even the most radioactive part which is all the crap that leaked out the bottom of the reactor is relatively safe to work around for a short period now.

As I pointed out elsewhere to people being stupid about this - even huge radiation doses are reasonably treatable with intensive care, it won't implicitly kill you like people imagine. It's very not nice but can be treated, one of the biggest threats is actually infection because it will destroy your immune system. In fact it's intentionally used for that when doing things like marrow transplants. Radiation cancers tend to be from things like getting particles stuck in places you don't want them like the throat or lungs.

Just don't ask Putin how much Russia paid towards the new containment building.

"Did everybody on that path die? Not even close."

Never forget that 100% of people exposed to radiation die! More seriously though:

"Radiation is scary not because it's instant death (yes, it can be, if you're quite literally in front of the reactor) but because of the cumulative effect. So long as you don't let it build too high in your body, too often, it's fine."

That's not really accurate. Radiation doesn't build up in your body in the way that things like heavy metals tend to. In fact, there's decent evidence that constant low exposure to radiation is actually beneficial, since it stimulates the protective and repair systems that fix damage to cells and DNA. The real problem with radiation is that the effects are simply too variable. A low dose might be beneficial, but what exactly counts as low? Is continuous exposure at some level more or less damaging than a single higher exposure? How exactly do short and long-term effects vary with different doses and exposure patterns? And of course, this is all before you start looking at different types and energies of the radiation involved - equivalent doses of alpha, beta and gamma radiation won't all have the same effect.

Of course people have tried to study all this, but given all the variables involved you'd need to deliberately expose tens of millions of people to all kinds of radiation and then follow them around for the next 70 years or so. Even if there weren't any ethical problems with doing that, the logistics make any comprehensive study impossible. We occasionally get lucky (maybe not the best word) and find a useful group to study, such as the well known watch painters, and there's the occasional unethical study, such as the military exposing people to nuclear tests, but this only covers a tiny portion of the question in a completely uncontrolled way. And no matter how well me manage to study the actual effects, that still does nothing for people who aren't radiation workers and so have no idea what dose they might have received anyway.

Radiation is scary to people mainly because it's unknown. You usually can't tell if you've been exposed, even if you somehow know that you usually don't know how much you've been exposed to, and even if you somehow know that it's almost impossible to know what the effects might be. It's not a particularly rational fear given how low the risk of any significant exposure actually is, but fear of the unknown is not exactly uncommon.

Its been 30 years

There's a direct correlation between radioactivity and half life - the worst stuff that's the most radioactive also has the shortest half life. So a lot of that really bad stuff is mostly gone now. There is still plenty of danger from the stuff that will stick around for hundreds of years if you tried to live there full time, but as the wildlife shows you can do that still be OK.

Some wildlife isn't doing as well because the food chain has a way of concentrating radioactivity in certain food sources. i.e. if certain plants are good at taking radioactive substances out of the soil, then anything that eats those plants will get a higher dose than those that eat other plants. And of course carnivores that eat the ones who ate the higher dose plants get a higher dose as well. So some animals are able to continue on and think it is great because there are no people around to bother them, others have a tough time because they're getting particularly concentrated amounts of radiation due to their diet.

" Hell, the wildlife are thriving since all the humans moved out."

But how many heads do the cats have!

The Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement structure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement is some work of engineering! I hope someone makes a program about it. I take my hat off to the designers and builders.

Radiation is not instant death.

"Come on in; the fallout is lovely!"

A Dustbin of Milligan by the magnificent Spike.

Goon, but not forgotten.

I have to agree, I have been to the zone 3 times now over a few years for photographic trips and it's not that bad. We have been stood on the 'safe' side of the concrete door into reactor 4 for a few minutes and no danger has come.

It is all about exposure and time, short hit is not that bad and your body will repair the DNA faster.

We observed higher radiation from the flight from the UK to Ukraine than the week spent free roaming Pripyat.

It would appear that exposure to humans is more dangerous than exposure to low-level radiation.

Re: If I had lived in Russia in that time..

Marie Curie.

She studied the stuff for years, playing with uranium ore in a shed, and carrying vials of radium in her shirt pocket, not to mention taking X-ray images unprotected, and went on to live for another 30 years before she eventually died

Sure, it wasn't healthy for her, but it's not instantaneous death.

And her lab / papers are STILL radioactive 100 years later.

Radiation, really, is much safer than most people make out. Unless you deliberately make it into a weapon, it's probably safer than TNT.

Re: Good luck to building the same for Fukushima.

"The Chernobyl reactor was destroyed to such a degree (and so radioactive) that the only option was to "bury" it and wait a few dozen years for things to cool off."

It already has done to a significant extent.

People forget that "highly radioactive" also means "won't be radioactive for very long"

Re: Good luck to building the same for Fukushima.

NSC isn't for stabilising the upper bio shield, I don't think anybody dare touch that, they are going to be stripping the roof off the old shield though because it's a mess. IMO the best thing to do would be to fill it with a mix of sand and boron and leave it for a few decades - sand would help protect it if the bio shield did fall.

"In the meantime the cleanup of the reactor will finally start, so there is a good chance the containment won't be needed anymore when this structure hits end of life."

Indoor basejumping park? Waterpark? Snowpark? There must be something fun to do with an enclosed structure of that size once it's all cleaned up :-)

It was a genuine question, although I'm quite pleased I managed to make funny out of something serious!

From what I had read, the dome is meant to last 100 years. Which is a long time, but not longer than the danger posed by what's left of the reactor. In 1988 engineers had said that the current sarcophagus would need replacing in 20/30 years time. It's taken nearly 30 years to get the dome in place so with that track record it'd be prudent to start to do something about it now at least.

That said, 100 years is 100 years and I won't be around to see what they do. And I feel a lot of the people involved are looking to their children and thinking "Meh, I'll let them sort it out". But I've grown up in Birmingham and we have the Spaghetti Junction and that, too, is meant to last 100 years. But it's not even 50 years old and that's falling apart, and it doesn't have the excuse of stupidly high levels of radiation to contend with.