The Japanese in China was GRISLY. And they didn’t hide it either, the printed horrible pictures in their news papers 
It has been largely swept under the rug since the US occupation and their sort of make over after the war.
Most animals live much shorter lives than humans anyway. So they have less time to get radiation induced cancers. And if they do, it is usually after they passed on their genes.
I was going to say Switzerland too.
My understanding is most of the Exclusion Zone has relatively low radiation, but that there are random hot spots sprinkled around, which is why visitors are required to carry geiger counters around. Digging into the soil though, is probably the worst thing you could do.
If memory serves you’re also limited on time in the more irradiated areas. It’s not just carrying Geiger counters, you’re supposed to wear a dosimeter badge.
Though there’s a difference between the full exclusion zone, and the 10km inner zone near the plant.
Apparently there’s even a hotel in the outer zone these days, and it’s currently safe to be there for a few days.
That seems to be part of the confusion here. Russian troops were in the broader exclusion area.
But they also took the plant itself. And the Red Forest that’s connected to this report is the part that even the plant workers aren’t supposed to go because it’s so irradiated.
At a minimum they seem to have passed through some of the worst parts without gear. And some of these troops spent weeks in the inner zone without protective gear.
That’s bad. But it doesn’t seem to be radiation sickness bad.
If they didn’t use filters and follow decontamination procedures, and it sure doesn’t sound like it, then they’ve inhaled or otherwise ingested a lot of particle-emitting dust. And that’s … bad. Even relatively harmless emitters are bad news inside the body.
If there is any kind of treatment for that, I’m guessing that it needs top-notch extensive / intensive / expensive care, and that they’re not going to get it.
I’m pretty sure they just get all the cancer.
Like all the cancer all the cancer.
Apparently the soil in the Red Forest is pretty much the most irradiated thing you can come into contact with there. Short of entering the containment structure around reactor 4.
If they ingested much of that at all, I don’t think there’s anything to be done. You can’t undo gene damage.
Nuclear authorities were tracking radioactive dust clouds raised by movement through the area a few weeks back. So that seems pretty certain.
It just sounds like nothing short of reactor 4 is hot enough to cause radiation sickness. The time and exposure limits have to do with longer term risks.
I used to do a bit of this sort of thing. In a ‘Red Area’ you wore oversuits and overshoes. You washed your hands and had them checked for radiation. If you worked there, you gave regular pee samples to make sure you hadn’t picked up anything nasty. The actual radiation level never got above the background in Cornwall or Edinburgh. The restricted areas do not mean ‘here be radiation’ but ‘here might’ be radiation.
What radiation might there be? The real nasties that give out lots of radiation have short half-lives. Thirty years later, you may get a trickle of radiation daughters, but the real nasties have gone. Inhaling alpha-emitting dust is dangerous, but alphas are easily absorbed so it is only in the lungs can it get close enough to living cells - it will not get through your skin.
If you have a radiation detector you detect individual radioactive particles. You can detect concentrations of radioactive particles in parts per billion. I am not saying radiation is good for you, but if we know to look for it, we can detect it in tiny concentrations. Digging trenches in Chernobyl is a chump act, but the animals are okay, and provided they don’t lick the Elephant’s Foot for a dare, they will probably be okay too.
That’s ‘okay’ for someone in the Russian Army currently in the Ukraine, of course.
And any that they swallowed when flushing the dust from their mouths.
Oh God, that’s going to be a TikTok challenge or something like that in a couple of years.
Not necessarily. Alpha particles usually have a small range when passing through matter. This makes them harmful because they do all their ionising in a small neighbourhood, so there is a lot of dose to the neighbouring few cells, but your hands get significant protection from alphas just by being wet - that’s how small the range can be. So, if you swallow alpha-emitting dust, it will probably not harm you because your gut is wet.
Plutonium, Polonium, Radium, and their friends are infamous for their radioactivity, but in low concentrations rather than warheads, the real danger is from poisoning. These can poison you in such small amounts that only the radioactive day can show the stuff was ever there. The polonium kills you, but the radiation says ‘Vlad sends his regards’.
Yup. That band is the Heavy Metal of Elements.
(Cue the jokes about technicians handling the nasty stuff getting lead poisoning from the containers.)
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