Outside of the HN bubble, the average 18 year old person (even in america, as opposed to russians) would not be very informed about Chernobyl. I'd say Chernobyl is a lot less famous than WWII or 9/11 or events of that sort.
And even for big historical events... if you go to a Taylor Swift concert and asked the people there about it, 50% would probably have no clue about most historical events. For example, my 24 year old younger sister doesn't know what a floppy disk is, or what the Berlin wall is. I'd bet you can take any regiment of fresh 18 year old US Marines and tell them they're doing military exercises in Pripyat and they'll mostly ask if there's going to be air conditioning or if there are hot girls around.
Amazing they even kept it going! We've over here twisting ourselves in knots in embarrassment that we let our only spaceflight system sunset and are reduced to begging rides from Putin, but his citizens don't even notice.
That's a bit dismissive for possibly the most radioactively contaminated area in the western hemisphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
https://thatoregonlife.com/2021/10/hanford-washington-nuclea...
They might literally have never heard of Chernobyl even as a place until they were deployed there.
Much could be said about things that Russia is bad at, but disinformation, propaganda and revisionism are not those things. They're really good at those. And they've been good at those things for a really long time -- multiple generations.
The even dumber are getting smuggled in for illegal tours. Meaning you get somebody who knows the area and run past the patrols and sleep in the ruins. Quite stupid but there is youtube. They are also coming after the people who stole all the scrap metal.
Chernobyl is also not the only place, people also visit abandoned cold war bunkers which can look quite amazing. But are also often heavily contaminated and off limits to the public.
Some examples are at @ExploringtheUnbeatenPath (NATO command bunker) and @shiey (Chernobyl) on youtube. Legal options are already quite nice and dont give you too much cancer. In Russia you will also go to Prison for a very long time when caught climbing a derelict antenna, let alone visiting bunkers. If i recall they got very annoyed when Russian teens climbed all the Stalin towers.
You're grossly misrepresenting the facts. The Russians who were digging trenches in Chernobyl were a part of a full blown invasion force directly organized by Russia's regime from the very top. Russia's plan to invade Ukraine and dig in and around Chernobyl was specified from the very top of the chain of command, and enforced throughout the whole chain of command way down into individual orders sent to the Russian grunts in the ground.
These were no average randos who just felt compelled to dig a hole in a camp site.
It's entirely absurd to pretend that Russia's top echelons were oblivious to Chernobyl, and it's outright stupid to misrepresent a full blown invasion force executing battle plans as random people camping somewhere who just felt like digging a hole.
My bet would be future generations in Japan will be very aware of Fukushima. Stipulating that Russians knowing about things in Ukraine is totally different than the Japanese knowing about things in their backyard.
Also, the Greenpeace statement mentions fires, which are a far far better explanation for a spike in measurements. https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762...
They also have pictures and mention the Russian camp was at "Stantzaya Yanov" which i cant find a reference to outside of the Greenpeace report. But i would suspect that wouldnt be directly in front of the very visible sarcophagus.
edit: Maps in the report https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-... Page 6 says the camp was 26km from the plant.
edit1: Estimates from https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/essd-10-339... with longitude and latitude and Greenpeace puts the camp at 51.1663, 29.9645 SSW of the reactor. Which would put it in a safe area. Meaning they were right to be not worried if the trenches were at the camp.
I knew they were outside of cairo, which means close to the river generally. and was just going to walk the nile but "sphinx cafe" showed up when I got close. You can seem the ok from sattelite view no the top right half.
I was just going to look for giza but I found them before I saw giza pop up. I didn't search I scrolled from north america.
The point is the camp site was fine from a health and safety perspective. There are more heavily contaminated areas outside and it saw little impact due to the weather back then.
Which leaves either damage to roads that might not have seen much use before (doubtful, they have police driving around to catch real life Stalkers), lost Russians or the fires Greenpeace mentioned.
Some context for the heightened readings would be nice. Especially in comparison to the fires in March and 2020. They seem to be an obvious cause.
edit: Vehicle impact sounds quite likely https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol...
Maybe dont drive tanks through the red forest.
Or a Russian soldier deployed at the Nevada test site?
I think not knowing is quite plausible.
Of course the millennial crowd interested in engineering is going to know about Chernobyl. But if you ask the average Gen Z not associated with tech or engineering, I bet they’d have no idea.
It's just not really talked about and not, as far as I know, due to fear of being imprisoned for it.
Ugly history is often "forgotten" even when there is no compulsion to "forget" it.
The date: 29 January 1863.
It gets remembered by various names and various sources give different counts for how many died. Wikipedia says 250 Natives were killed. Other sources say closer to 500.
Even ignoring tons of corruption and the fact that many teenagers are skipping school to do house/agriculture/other work, consider the fact that those schools are severely underfunded and good teachers migrated long time ago for a better life to bigger cities and even if they have internet, that doesn't meen the information they consume is educational type. I've seen some similar regions when I've visited Russia when I was in school and it looked depressing and I've only visited a bit of west part. The eastern russia is has much bigger problems in this regard, aside mybe from big cities.
And that's just abt education, other comments abt how soldiers maybe didn't know where they are or were thinking that all Chernobyl is a thing of past may be also true