Thursday Throughput: Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Edition
[ThTh1] With Russian troops withdrawing from the area around Kyiv, we are learning more and more about what was done there. One of the stranger things to emerge are reports that Russian soldiers literally dug in within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and some are now possibly being treated for radiation sickness. So what this story here?
When Chernobyl exploded and burned, it sent massive plumes of radioactive ash and debris all over Europe. The area immediately surrounding the reactor was the most thoroughly contaminated. The Soviet Union — eventually — evacuated the town of Pripyat as well as the surrounding areas and established an Exclusion Zone to keep humans out of the most contaminated areas. Today, the exclusion zone is roughly a thousand square mile region of Ukraine (there is another 800 square mile exclusion zone in bordering Belarus).
You can actually visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone since there is — oddly enough — a burgeoning tourist interest in Chernobyl. While the radiation levels are elevated, they are not dangerous over short periods of time. The areas frequented by visitors have been decontaminated and guides will keep you away from the most lethal remaining areas, such as the basement of the hospital (although, if you really want to, you can visit the irradiated control room of reactor 4 for a few minutes). In fact, as long as you stick to known safe areas, a day-long visit will expose you to less radiation than the airplane flight there.
But there are significant dangers to having a bunch of troops stomping around the area indiscriminately. First of all, while the radiation levels are not very dangerous in general, there are areas that are extremely dangerous. For example, irradiated equipment was buried in various places, not all of which are known. Even a short exposure to such things could make one very very sick. According to some reports, the Russian army drove vehicles through the Red Forest — one of the most badly contaminated regions in the exclusion zone. Second, heavy vehicles plowing through an area — or men digging trenches — can disturb the radioactive dust and ash that is settled on the ground, causing it to contaminate clothing and food and even get into people’s lungs. Getting radioactive material inside your body is especially dangerous. Alpha radiation is very dangerous but can’t penetrate the skin. Ingested or inhaling it, however, can be deadly. Finally, it appears that the Russians blocked firefighters from going into the region, which means that wildfires can disperse radioactive material into the air.
Right now, we’re just hearing rumors. The Russian military and media are being somewhat coy about this. If I had to guess, it would be that reality is somewhere in between the “Russian soldiers dying” narrative and the “nothing to see here move along” narrative. I would guess that Russian soldiers were not warned about where they were and some of them have received mild but not lethal exposure to radiation.
Still, the lesson to be learned here is pretty clear. I am a big supporter of nuclear power, as you know. I have said that nuclear’s chief competitor — coal — is like having a Chernobyl every week, only more spread out. But, summoning all the authority of the letters after my name and my 30 years in science and the thousands of words I have written on this blog, I would like to say: please do not fight wars in the most radioactive place on Earth.
[ThTh2] A year ago, I wrote about a new particle physics experiment that had the potential to break the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model explains almost everything we see in particle physics. But tiny little discrepancies have been appearing that may hint at something beyond the Standard Model.
Well, another big crack appeared last week when it was found that the W-boson — a particle that conveys the weak nuclear force inside atoms — may be a tiny bit heavier than expected. If this result is born out, the Standard Model has some explaining to do.
I should caution, however, that this result is early and is in conflict with other recent measurements, which may indicate a systematic error, either in the new result or the old ones. But we’re getting more and more hints that particle physics is even crazier than we think.
[ThTh3] It’s raining rock! Hallelujah, it’s raining rock. Amen. I’m gonna go out to run and let myself get … uh, scorched by the 3000 degree heat?
[ThTh4] The last time I hard about talking mushrooms was when my college roommate was doing mushrooms.
[ThTh5] Does porn “rewire your brain”? Nope.
[ThTh6] It seems like our fertility crisis may be closely related to our mental health crisis.
[ThTh7] Planets … find a way.
I wondered when Chernobyl was going to be habitable again and, as it turns out, it looks like it will be in about 20,000 years.
I kinda want to know if there’s any way to speed that up… I mean, are there even any science-fiction books that have ways to speed that up?Report
I mean, yes, sure.
You could bring in hordes of people in radiation gear. Robots. Machines. You’d take the vegetation down, chip it, load it all into sealed casks and remove it to a storage area. Then you’d take the ground down by a couple yards in the entire zone. Load it all into sealed casks and remove it to a storage area. In that process you’d remove everything the Soviets buried, seal it in casks and send them to storage. You’d take the buildings all down, all the radioactive stuff you’d seal and remove to storage.
Then bring in a couple yards of fill for the entire zone and fill it back in. Except for the plant site itself your radiation levels would be pretty normal across the rest of the region. It’d cost an almost inconceivable amount of economic toil but it could be done. Would it be worth it to do? Certainly not. You’d never recoup your investment.Report
Ukraine/Belarus would go bankrupt trying it. When the Rocky Flats nuclear reservation NW of Denver was closed, it wasn’t nearly the mess Chernobyl is. Removing and treating or sealing soil on that scale would have blown away the DOE budget for decades, so they took the same approach as Chernobyl. Worst areas are off-limits behind razor wire, the rest of it is a nature preserve with rules that humans stay on the paved trails, absolutely no pets allowed. My bicycling friends are split about 50/50 on whether they would cycle across it.
Most recent unplanned-for problem is that some of the native plants mistake plutonium for other metals, absorb it, and fix it in their stems and leaves. It’s prime territory for a repeat of the Marshall Fire. If that happens, the plutonium that’s been brought up goes up in the smoke plume. I have a cousin who works for a company that designs toxic waste site cleanups. They were invited to bid on Rocky Flats. Their plan was a couple square miles of meter-thick reinforced concrete cap and 24 hour per day military guard. Needless to say, they didn’t win.
DOE is several decades behind on the promised clean-up of the Hanford Reservation and the INL.Report
Agreed. It would require an international commitment and, bluntly, the affected region just isn’t worth the effort to remediate.
Rocky Flats ia hair raising and that’s just a couple of square miles. The Chernobyl Exclusion zone is 1004 square miles!! Holy agnostic Jebus!Report
I guess I was hoping for a “you know those chemical fire extinguishers? Add some baking powder.” kind of answer.
But, you know, on a molecular level.Report
I sympathize but the problem is right in your statement. This isn’t a molecular problem- it’s atomic.Report
There are fungi / bacteria / etc. that absorb radiation from decaying radiative isotopes just as readily as they do from the sun, and don’t have the same issue as plants that fix heavy metals in leaves and stems. But those act more as a shield, rather than a clean up method.Report
Alpha radiation is very dangerous but can’t penetrate the skin. Ingested or inhaling it, however, can be deadly.
This is, somewhat ironically, one of the ways Putin murders people.Report
The Space Launch System wet dress rehearsal of fueling failed again today (third try). Core stage tanks were filled to about the 5% level before a hydrogen link, apparently in the ground infrastructure, forced then to stop. Tanks are being drained. No word yet on what they’ll do next.
I don’t know how the engineers manage to sleep at night at this point. Drugs? Myself, I’d be having nightmares of the whole thing going up in flames before the first flight.Report
I’m going to write something about SLS at some point. What a mess.Report
I blame Congress more than anyone. They have authorized, canceled, re-authorized, canceled, and messed with this so many times it’s insane.
Each time they cancel it they throw away at least two years of work, and by the time they re-authorize it (always with just enough differences that any precious work is useless), everyone involved has long since left and they have to rehire from scratch.
NASA started gaming the system more the second time or third time it was cancelled, trying to do more generic work rather than tailored exactly to Congressional requests (SLS mostly exist because NASA just broadly interpreted the “Mars-no Moon no Mars no Moon no Robots no Moon” swapping around of goals as ‘we definitely need a heavy lift rocket to do that’ and trying to keep as much initial work as possible to push forward.
But in the end, it’s been the same issue as with ISS. If Congress keeps randomly changing how big it is, what’s its for, who is involved, how long it should last — well, you spend a truly ridiculous amount of money simply designing, prototyping, then throwing it all away because the mid-terms mean that now it needs to hold 4 people not 7 and also Russia is out but Japan is in, and that module you just finished the design work for is now gonna be done by Europe to their own designs…
Not that nasa doesn’t have serious problems especially I’m upper management, but frankly when your budget and goals randomly get changed every two to four years, it’s frankly amazing they even have a rocket to fail to manage to fuel.
(True story: I once worked on a NASA project that, five years in, they canceled,. Why? Because their latest milestone delivery had come in 10 months late and double the budget. It came in 10 months late and double the budget because 8 months into a year-long milestone NASA radically changed the design because a very prominent Senator on he right committee made…comments. NASA adhered to his comments, and gosh darn it it turns out that linear time is a thing and when you throw away eight months of work in favor of something significantly different, your engineers can’t go back in time and work on your new design goals from the beginning)Report
If you’re a Lois Bujold fan, you might recall that the Vorkosigan’s original capital was nuked by the Cetagandans. Afterward, it became the Vashnoi exclusion zoneReport
Is Chernobyl literally the most radioactive place on Earth? Are any other places even close? Are there other “exclusion zones”?
I reckon the tourist interest was motivated by the dramatic series based on the events there from a few years back.Report
Are there other “exclusion zones”?
Yes, somewhere between “several” and “many”. Also places that should be exclusion zones but aren’t.
Is Chernobyl literally the most radioactive place on Earth? Are any other places even close?
Almost all of the Top 10 lists for the category put Fukushima #1 and Chernobyl #2 measured inside the buildings. The site of the former Lake Karachay in Russia is the most radioactive open-air site in the world (lethal radiation dose in less than an hour). The Soviets dumped about 60,000 tons of uncontained high-level waste in the lake on purpose, so it’s not classified as an accident.
Does how they measure matter?
Yes. Top 10 lists put the Hanford Reservation in Washington State anywhere from #4 to #10, depending on methodology.Report