Oddbean new post about login | logout radiation from plutonium bombs is way overhyped... it took 30 years for a whole nuclear reactor of shitloads of uranium that got covered in concrete to recover to the point that all the animals and plants are fully recovered in the region of Pripyat around Chernobyl the amount of material involved that leaked before they put the sarcophagus around it was maybe a few hundred kilos of very hot uranium... a typical nuclear bomb has like ounces to pounds of plutonium in it and that simply is not going to be comparable, even if it was all iodine 131 (which it isn't)
Very interesting. And now I recall reading that actually very few people died from radiation from chernobyl - as long as they had iodine to dilute the radioactive isotope (I131 I assume from your note). By the way have you seen the Chernobyl tv series? Brilliant. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7366338/
i tried to start watching it but stopped and yeah, the immediate toxicity is primarily from iodine 131, and to a lesser extent from caesium 137 but both of those are all decayed to much less toxic things within weeks that is not to say that the fine dusty uranium that boils out and recondenses and blows around is not toxic, just that its effects are slow, it doesn't absorb easily except into the lungs and doesn't pass from there easily into the blood, but the cancer rates are way above what they would have been since 1986 for decades afterwards but yeah, plutonium reaction is not a meltdown, it's so hot it explodes with more force than any chemical, hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen based explosives, and mostly the atoms are shattered into subatomic high energy particles and electrons, so there is not a lot of this splitting into other elements like the iodine and cesium
I have in mind that it's true the "cancer rates were way above.." (although from covid I am very sceptical as to what any such data means or if it can be collected honestly etc) but that the cancer was all thyroid cancer, and very very treatable - so it didn't translate to mortality. Dunno, obviously, what you're into and not into, but 100% recommend the chernobyl tv series - not really for the historical / technical stuff (though there's a brilliant exposition of what went wrong and the stages of meltdown) but it was beautifully made, and has really stayed with me.
regarding the cancer, all kinds of things have led to the increased frequency of the disease... chemicals in the food supply and building materials and plastics, halides, plastic hardeners that disrupt the endocrine system, all the stuff in the bodies and interiors of cars, computers, phones, circuitry, genetically modified foods, nanomaterials in all kinds of things, these vaccines, the high carb diets of the upside down food pyramid, it's just a factor as you know, the mistakes that happened at chernobyl would be far less likely to occur with modern reactor technology, we are nearing the point where they can make them small enough to carry on the back of a truck and power a whole large town, and almost zero risk of a meltdown as for tv, i just generally don't enjoy watching theatre of any kind most of the time, the poisoning of it all with cultural marxism has just given me an allergy to the entire class of artform, haven't read very much fiction in a long time either, last few things i read were the william gibson sprawl trilogy (only the first two tho) and before that, years before, was Crime and Punishment mostly i get my fix of drama from computer games, metro and tomb raider mostly