If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
> any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time
If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
There are satellite photos of trenches dug around the red forest where Russian soldiers had deployed?
If the Russian soldiers get problems from their trench digging endeavor, it won't be seen before many years, when a small percentage of them starts getting cancer. (needless to say, the increases mortality from the said cancers will be negligible compared to the mortality induced by being invading soldiers in Ukraine).
There is no way to know what radiation dose they got. Their activities increased the ambient radiation levels, but not extremely. But the soldiers themselves probably got quite a bit more since they came into direct contact with contaminated material. A few of them almost certainly got non-trivial doses on parts of their bodies. We don't know if any got radiation sickness, and I don't know of any source that said so. If they did, Russia would keep it quiet.
The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention. If you don't want the dirt to travel further, you have to somehow remove it and store it more safely to keep it from circulating. That's what they are doing in Fukushima because they can't afford the same size of permanent exclusion zone.
Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
We cannot know an exact figure for that, but we know they cannot by any means get radiation sickness, because the radiation level that it would have need is many orders of magnitude higher than what can be found there.
You have no idea of how tall I am, but you can be 100% certain that I'm lying if I pretend I'm two thousand kilometers tall! (that's the order of magnitude we're talking about)
> The point of the story is that such a site remains a problem for millenia and people have to pay attention.
This sentence is still wrong. Cesium 137 half-life is around 30 years. In 300 years, the amount remaining would be 1000 times lower than it currently is. In 900 years, that's 1 billion lower, which means that almost every single atom will be gone.
> Another point is that the Russians put their artillery pieces near nuclear power plants. They discovered that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot back when they fire from there. Funny that.
Obviously nobody wants to destroy a nuclear plant, and no-one said a nuclear plant accident wasn't bad, it's just far from the pop-culture depiction of it. It doesn't last for millennia and doesn't cause a mushroom cloud either.
Talking about artillery, you know what last for millennia, leaving empty exclusion zones no-one talks about? Contamination from artillery shells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
Given that both sides are using uranium-based APFSDS munitions, we'll more likely see more radiation-induced casualties from exposure to depleted uranium than from people digging in the red forest, or even maybe more than from the fallout of Chornobyl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Iraqi_populat...
Despite that, our body contains large quantities of them.
Like also for the chemical toxins, the dangers of radiation depend on the dose, and we should not worry when it is low enough.
Also platinum is a radioactive element, but those who wear platinum jewelry are seldom aware of this.
Everything written above are facts, not opinions.
They are little known facts, which is why I have mentioned them. Uranium and thorium are the most radioactive among the elements that have survived since the creation of the Solar System, but they are not the only radioactive primordial elements, there are many others.
Most people who are afraid of radiation do not realize how many of the surrounding objects are radioactive, without being dangerous because of that.
Of course, you are correct that the dangers of radioactivity depend on the dose. But your message is diminished by overly emphasizing the radioactivity in carbon and other naturally occurring elements that pose zero health risk and frankly are so very non-radioactive in a relative sense.
Whenever at least one isotope is radioactive, anything containing that element is radioactive, but with a lower activity, proportional with the natural abundance of the radioactive isotope. Because the isotopic abundance also matters, elements like carbon and potassium have very low activities even if their radioactive isotopes have high activities, because the abundance of their radioactive isotopes is very low.
The majority of the naturally occurring chemical elements, i.e. about three quarters of them, are non-radioactive.
Even if the naturally occurring chemical elements either are non-radioactive or have low radioactivity, otherwise they would have disappeared since the formation of the Solar System, their radioactivity is non-negligible due to the huge number of atoms that exist in every gram of substance.
Inside a human body, during each second, thousands of atoms disintegrate, emitting radiation.
However, almost all damage caused by the natural radiation is repaired, because all living cells have very efficient mechanisms for this. Only at higher doses those are overwhelmed.
I think you the defintion is the opposite, ie that an element is considered radioactive if NO isotopes are stable (ie ALL are radioactive).
https://www.thoughtco.com/list-of-radioactive-elements-60864...
Huh? Care to name 5 non-radioactive elements according to your definition?
> [we have it in our body], so... [we all are radioactive]
can be radioactive in some circumstances, does not mean they are always radioactive. Is a non-sequitur.
There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity, short of placing it inside a nuclear explosion or inside a high-energy particle accelerator.
Nevertheless, most naturally occurring radioactive elements have a radioactivity that is low enough to not pose any danger.
> There are no circumstances that can influence its radioactivity
False and false. Elements are not radioactive per se. Only some isotopes of those elements are, and some are more frequent than other. Just because you have some carbon in your body does not mean that is radioactive. (In some cases metabolism even evolved to favor some kind over the other).
Time can and will influence radioactivity, so any radioactive element is -not- always radioactive. This is false.
Location is also very important. The background radioactivity of a granite mountain is not included in the body as atoms. It does not pass the outer skin barrier, that is shedding a layer of dead cells all the time in any case.
Obvious half truths and misdirections told in a really arrogant way then re-enforce the idea that anyone telling them any amount of radiation is safe is deliberately trying to mislead them, and so they wind up trusting nobody.
They then correctly infer that the liar is malicious and trying to scam them. So all in all they get to the right place even if it is for the wrong reasons.
Its like a trenchwarfare coated nightmare.
For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware.
It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.