energyskeptic | After Chernobyl, Russia had workers hired people to be “liquidators”.
They were exposed to a lot of radiation to clean up Chernobyl so
radioactive waste wouldn’t be tracked out or blown into the air and
spread further. These workers are now entitled to benefits depending on
how much radiation dosage they received.
It hadn’t occurred to me that every time there’s a forest fire, the
fallout of Chernobyl continues, because trees take up radioactive
particles, which are released by fire again.
After Chernobyl exploded, firemen rushed over and kept the fire from
spreading to an adjacent reactor — most of them died, but their bravery
kept Chernobyl from creating an 800 kilometer no man’s zone, instead of
the 30 kilometer zone that exists today.
Russia is planning to put a concrete dome over Chernobyl that will
last for 150 years. Blackwell describes this as “The reactor building,
though, will be dangerous for millennia. So maybe there will one day be a
shelter for the shelter for the Shelter Object, and then a shelter for
that, and we will continue down the generations, building–shell by
shell– a nest of giant, radioactive Russian dolls.”
There are tours of Chernobyl, here’s a description from the book:
“Dennis’s radiation meter topped out at 1300 micros, about 30 times the
background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to
face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000″. There was a hint of apology in
his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having
received less than the maximum possible exposure …, as if I had come to
Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds”.
The Chernobyl core “was the size of a small building, a thick bucket
standing several stories tall. It felt impossible to understand the
power embodied in such a machine. A quarter ounce of nuclear fuel holds
nearly as much energy as a ton of coal; the core had held more than a
hundred thousand times that much”.
