Ghost Town

To begin our journey, we must learn a little something about radiation. It is really very simple, and the device we use for measuring radiation levels is called a geiger counter . If you flick it on in Kiev, it will measure about 12-16 microroentgen per hour. In a typical city of Russia and America, it will read 10-12 microroentgen per hour. In the center of many European cities are 20 microR per hour, the radioactivity of the stone. 1,000 microroentgens equal one milliroentgen and 1,000 milliroentgens equal 1 roentgen. So one roentgen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roentgens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach. This sort of radiation level can not be found in Chernobyl now. In the first days after explosion, some places around the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roentgens per hour. The firemen who were sent to put out the reactor fire were fried on the spot by gamma radiation. The remains of the reactor were entombed within an enormous steel and concrete sarcophagus, so it is now relatively safe to travel to the area - as long as one do not step off of the roadway and do not put nose in a wrong places.......

The map above shows all our journey through the dead zone. Radiation went in soil and now in apples and mushrooms. It is not retained by asphalt, which makes rides through this area possible. I have never had problems with the dosimeter guys, who a while age were man the checkpoints. They are experts, and if they find radiation on you vehicle, they gave it a chemical shower. I don't count those couple of times when "experts" tried to invent an excuse to give me a shower, because those had a lot more to do with physical biology than biological physics

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Lots of pictures of areas affected by Chernobyl, the nuclear accident that occurred in Russia in 1986. It has become a ghost town inhabited by wolves, wild boars, Prejevalsky Horses and wormwood it seems.

Quite the shocking array of photographs!



http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-land-of-the-wolves/author.html

as much as it is horrifying....

for two reasons,
first, the fact that you have to carry a freaking giegercounter just to go there -yikes
second, the images of nature taking over cities is very creepy, and somewhat in the collective psyche already...

I often look at infrastructure and think "how long would it take for mother nature to take it back?"
places like chernobyl are like a real-time experiment in that...gives me the creeps

That part really surprised me a lot. The waste land that is left now has wild boars, deer and the worm wood vegetation.

I stumbled across this story by accident and it was very moving and powerful - that is my reaction to it as well.

The before/after pictures of the area really make one realize how much has been lost.

There was but the one old man left tending to his life in the area affected. He would rather die than leave his home no matter what the consequences may be. :cry:

Very sad scenario in any event and they said it was a "dead zone" for 2500+ years due to this nuclear catastrophe.

Japan's future will likely be no different IMO.

How can any one support nuclear energy and nukes after Chernobyl and now Fukushima? :evilfrown:

:dem:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x43344

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