I think there's some bad information here.
- Some pilots flew up to 33 sorties into the steam cloud, and six hundred helicopter pilots were killed by the radiation.
According to wikipedia, 600 pilots were involved.
- Historians estimate that about 600 Soviet pilots risked dangerous levels of radiation to fly the thousands of flights needed to cover reactor No. 4 in this attempt to seal off radiation.
Doesn't really diminish their heroism, however.
Nice write up! I was researching how to sneak in there during my time in Ukraine, but I didn’t find anything good enough to give me confidence I could do it. So we just settled on going with a guided tour for a day. It was a really interesting experience. I was impressed by Duga - it’s a massive radar that to didn’t even know was there. The most impressive man made structure I’ve ever seen. I tried to take pictures, but nothing really captures the scale. Made a video of my day :)
Perhaps to clarify/expand on remarks you made about radiation dose received on a plane, it can be as high as 3-3.5 µSv/hr (30 to 35 background level radiation) and increases with altitude. Still, it's important to notice the 'per hour' bit before jumping to conclusions. Thirty hours spent at 3.0 µSv/hr is a rough equivalent of a single chest x-ray (absorbed dose of 100 µSv or 0.1 mSv) or around ten days of simply living in your normal background radiation. As far as ground and life being radioactive within the exclusion zone, it's because of bioaccumulation. During the Chernobyl disaster, three main radioisotopes were released. Iodine 131 (halflife of 8 days), Caesium 137 (halflife of 30 years) and Strontium 90 (halflife of 29 years). Iodine decayed so fast that today we might as well assume it's no longer present (there's only about one ten-millionth of the initial amount left after six months). Caesium and Strontium, however, are alkali metals. They eagerly react with water and other common compounds to create products which are both bioavailable and easily soluble in water. The more dangerous of the two is Strontium, which shares many chemical properties with Calcium, meaning it can easily bind to bones and subtly influence metabolic patterns (which I'm unqualified to discuss, simply mention them for someone else to pick up, should they wish to) decaying from within your body. And since nobody can function without alkali metals, they tend to accumulate with time, as you said in your amazing video.
Wow thanks for this reply! I remember doing a little research before doing this video (mostly to reassure my mom t wasn’t dangerous ) and had trouble finding information that was easy to digest. So I might have gotten some details wrong. But I do remember that the heavy particules that have the longer half life could not travel too far with the wind - which is why the 10km zone is the most dangerous one. And that living organisms absorb those particules so you should not eat fish, berries, mushrooms - even if thy are abundant. It’s actually a bit of a paranoia thing in Ukraine when you buy stuff from the farmers markets. They have been reports of people selling stuff from Chernobyl because it’s so easy to fish/scavenge there. Or maybe it’s all hearsay, who knows...
So, this is (surprise!) a bit more complex. Yes, heavier chunks landed nearby. Those were the ones with the surface to mass ratio low enough to make air drag almost negligible and were governed by basic kinematics and advection. (Taken from Partial Differential Equations with Fourier Series and Boundary Value Problems by Nakhlé H. Asmar, 2nd edition) The rest travelled much farther, and it didn't matter which isotope they contained. It depends on moisture, wind strength and direction, initial height those 'dust' particles achieved etc etc etc. Notice that on maps like this one: you get concentrated spots. That's where it was accumulating due to large-scale air currents, rainfall and, basically, weather.But I do remember that the heavy particules that have the longer half life could not travel too far with the wind - which is why the 10km zone is the most dangerous one. And that living organisms absorb those particules so you should not eat fish, berries, mushrooms - even if thy are abundant.
Is anyone watching Chernobyl? It's been a grim, grisly and fascinating show incredibly highlighting humanity at its best during one of its worst crises.
I watched the first one and enjoyed it. I am old enough to remember when it happened, and I've always meant to read a book on it. I wonder how many 'almost Chernobyls" there have been, and how many plants are in a dangerous state of neglect or at risk due to a natural disaster.
The Soviet Union was the kind of place that hundreds could die because a maintenance worker could take the clogged filters out of the exhaust system of a bioweapons plant, write "replace the filters!" on a post-it and have his supervisor release anthrax into a city because he wasn't looking for post-its. I remember Chernobyl, too. Every kid in town had parents who could explain at length why Chernobyl happened there and couldn't happen here. My dad was the only one on standby to hop on a cargo jet if the Soviets accepted our help. They didn't, because they were Soviets. There's a lot of duty and honor and stoicism in HBO's Chernobyl. There isn't a lot of hubris. Chernobyl happened because the Soviets were poor and didn’t want the world to know they were punching above their weight. Keep bargain-basement nuclear reactors out of the control of command economies run by nepotism and the odds of a meltdown go way down.
As it stands with Russia today, too. As a country, Russia is basically Moscow and the 100 mile oblast around it, St Petersburg (for foreign tourism), and the Black Sea coast (for vacationing Russians). Their economy is tiny. Their infrastructure is almost non-existent (on a per-capita basis). And yet we are continually told to consider them our single largest threat on the planet. I've never understood the US's utter fascination with making Russia the boogeyman... it's completely out of scope with their ability to project power more than walking distance from their border. Chernobyl happened because the Soviets were poor and didn’t want the world to know they were punching above their weight.
At the end of WWII there were two countries left standing - the US and the USSR. There were two ideologies left standing - capitalism and Marxism-Leninism. They battled until they were eyeball to eyeball and then partitioned the world. Who can you make the bogeyman if not the one nation you aren't dealing with? Make a spectrum. Put your direst enemy on one end, yourself on the other. You can deal with everyone on the spectrum except your direst enemy because everyone else is a matter of degree. And as soon as the Soviets tested nukes it was gonna be proxies all over the world forever and ever amen.I've never understood the US's utter fascination with making Russia the boogeyman...
Sure sure sure. I get/know all that. I lived through most of it. What I don't get is the continued fascination with Russia and fetishization of them as Dr Evil-type nogoodniks. I guess there are just too many John Bolton's still clinging to power. Old scared white men are our fucking cross to bear, aren't they? TOMORROW leaders could flip the script on Russia, expose their sad economic numbers, their lack of ability to mobilize, their cartoonish Cold War-style efforts in the various -istans, and their flaccid attempts at projecting power in the middle east, and quickly turn the Russia narrative from Evil Empire to the KGB's Clown-like Grandchildren. Seems like a much more powerful narrative, and one that we could control easily. Also puts us in a solid position to do better business with China, and become a real collaborative trading partner, rather than a begging dog at the foot of whichever loony is currently running China. (Deng?)
Seriously? 'cuz as soon as Yeltsin was out, our Free Market Makeover of Russia was over and the KGB was running things same as they ever were. How the fuck do you expect to sell $350m F-35s with that kind of attitude, young man?What I don't get is the continued fascination with Russia and fetishization of them as Dr Evil-type nogoodniks.
TOMORROW leaders could flip the script on Russia, expose their sad economic numbers, their lack of ability to mobilize, their cartoonish Cold War-style efforts in the various -istans, and their flaccid attempts at projecting power in the middle east, and quickly turn the Russia narrative from Evil Empire to the KGB's Clown-like Grandchildren.