How many people live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone? Svetlana Alexievich interviewed some of “The Zone’s” residents in her excellent book Voices From Chernobyl. It’s not a fun place to live, unless having all your teeth fall out is fun.

Nowhere in Europe is a fun place to live any more thanks to what we are still using in place of nuclear power. Summers are brutal, winters are brutally expensive, oh, and we funded a genocide in our own borders, and probably a few more in the Middle East. Because, as it turns out, winter is fucking defined as "that point in time when there's not much solar going around at these latitudes, and sometimes it's not windy either".

So yes, I'm fucking bitter about that, and about people like you.

Do you mean that Chornobyl resident don't get enough vitamin C? Because I can't think of a link between exposure to radio-elements and losing your teeth…

Ironic as it sounds, nuclear weapons in many ways have far shorter-term impacts than nuclear reactors.

The Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb contained 64 kg of highly-refined uranium, of which less than 1 kg fissioned, the remainder being vapourised in the ensuing blast and distributed over a wide area. That dispersal in large part reduces the risk of radioactivity as it is so highly diluted. The rule of thumb for nuclear blasts is the "seven-ten rule": every sevenfold increase in hours from the blast reduces residual radiation by a factor of 10. That rule-of-thumb is an approximation, but with nearly 7^7 hours since the blast, radiation by that rule would be one ten-millionth the level 1 hour following the blast.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_seven-ten_...>

Chernobyl put 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb:

<https://www.scifacts.net/earth/chernobyl-400-times-more-radi...>

It's also worth noting that Chernobyl, and several other presently-operating nuclear power plants are in the middle of a war zone and have been the site of active fighting, bombardment, and missile strikes.

I don't find a figure for the mass of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, though it's clearly many tonnes of matter.

In the case of Fukushima, the total reactor core and fuel waste on site is measured in hundreds of tonnes, with 560 tonnes of reactor fuel, from melted-down reactors, on site.

<https://www.citizen.org/news/how-much-radioactive-material-i...>

(There's another 680 tonnes of spent waste fuel, presumably in containment, on site. I'm excluding that from this discussion as that happens to be a managed waste stream.)

The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.

Your elephant foot argument is a good summary of what you get wrong: in a nuclear plant there are tons of radioactive material, but even in the scenario of an accident, most of it stays inside the plant, and only the elements that are light enough to get vaporized by the accident's temperature are actually going to the atmosphere. In a nuclear bomb detonation, even the uranium or plutonium itself is vaporized and spread over the area. And the heavy material falls out much more quickly than the light one, so the dispersal is actually lower than the small fraction that leave the site in a nuclear accident. That doesn't mean nuclear accident are harmless, quite the contrary, because iodine for instance is being spread very far away from the plant and it has the nasty effect of being at the same time very radioactive, and very easily metabolizable.

Also, you're confusing radiation (rays hits you when you just stays here) with contamination (you've ingested a radioactive particle and now it's going to release it's rays inside of your body, eventually causing cancer), that's a common mistake to make but that highlights your misunderstanding of the topic.

> The immediate vicinity of both Chernobyl and Fukushima will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years.

Maybe the few square kilometers around it, but this is also the case for most heavy industrial activities (heavy metal levels are typically way off limits in these places) but the exclusion zone as a whole will not.

In fact, in Fukushima it was already safe enough back in 2016![1], and in fact it has been slowly re-opened for people to live in, Futaba[2] being the last city to reopen[3] in 2022. So much to the thousands of years! And you can even visit the Fukushima Daiishi power plant itself today[4]. Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137.

The two reasons why it stays restricted for longer than needed are:

1. nuclear inspires a deep irrational fear that other carcinogenic pollutants do not, even when they are in fact much more dangerous.

2. Neither Japan nor Ukraine really have need for these land since they've had an anemic demography for decades, unlike in 1945 where abandoning the land of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been impossible.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba,_Fukushima [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/16/futaba-last-fu... [4]: https://blog.japanwondertravel.com/fukushima-exclusion-zone-...

"Most" measured in hundreds of tonnes leaves a lot of "some" that does not in fact remain in or near the plant, including daughter-elements which are themselves highly bioactive, notably iodine, cesium, and carbon. Uptake of these results in embedded radioactivity within an individual.

Of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically:

Among some there is the unfounded fear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive; in reality, this is not true. Following a nuclear explosion, there are two forms of residual radioactivity. The first is the fallout of the nuclear material and fission products. Most of this was dispersed in the atmosphere or blown away by the wind. Though some did fall onto the city as black rain, the level of radioactivity today is so low it can be barely distinguished from the trace amounts presents throughout the world as a result of atmospheric tests in the 1950s and 1960s.

<https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki>

Possibly more applicable to your assertions is the story of "Downwinders", in the US and elsewhere, who lived, and live, downwind of atmospheric testing sites. In the case of Southeastern Utah, particularly the community of St. George, this included some 330 atmospheric nuclear blasts conducted on the Nevada Test Range from 1951--1962. (Similar or larger instances of testing occurred elsewhere, notably in the former Soviet Union, were either less studied or studies are not as publicly available.) Whilst there were definitely health outcomes, those are largely attributable to the immediate and near-term exposure to radioactive fallout, largely in days and months following the blasts. I'm not aware of any significant long-term residual radioactivity in the region, and the Wikipedia article on the subject mentions none:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders>

Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.

<https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol...> Archive: <https://archive.vn/aeIix>

The WHO's assessment of present risks at Chernobyl:

Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.

<https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/rad...>

About nuclear testings, from time to time Western Europe still receive radioactive materials from the French nuclear test in the Sahara 60 years ago[1]. That being said, I don't really understand why you seem to be very aware of the effect of radioactive decay and dilution when it comes from atomic bomb fallout, but seems to be absolutely oblivious to the exact same effects for nuclear accidents, even though the nature of the materials involved makes the same effects much stronger in the case of a nuclear accident (because you mostly have light elements leaving, and not the heavy actinides).

> Contrast the previously mentioned Chernobyl war zone in which Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation consequent to operations in the area, well above acceptable levels, some 35+ years after the incident at the nuclear plant there.

The story about Russian soldiers getting radiation sickness was a hoax that have been debunked many times though…

> Currently, concentrations of radioactive caesium (Cs-137) in agricultural food products produced in areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout are generally below national and international standards for actions. In some limited areas with high radionuclide contamination (e.g. in parts of the Gomel and Mogilev regions in Belarus and the Bryansk region in the Russian Federation) or areas with organic poor soils (the Zhytomir and Rovno regions in Ukraine), milk may still be produced with activity concentrations of Cs-137 that exceed national standards for action (100 Becquerel per kilogram). In these areas, countermeasures and environmental remediation may still be warranted.

You haven't really read that paragraph have you? Because it says exactly the same thing as I did in the comment you answer to: “Growing crop or raising cattle there will stay ill-advised for a few more decades though, because the only real risk at this point comes from ingestion of Cesium 137”. There's an enormous margin between “you can farm milk in the area for a few decades” and “will in fact be uninhabitable and restricted for at least many centuries, if not thousands of years”.

[1]: https://www.lexpress.fr/sciences-sante/sciences/nucleaire-de...