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.
