Thinking back to Chernobyl

April 1986, Ukraine, near Belarus

As the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine slogs on, I think back 36 years. A quick post of mine from 11 years ago:

In the spring of 1986 I was managing a Radiological Environmental Monitoring Program database and reporting system (REMP) I’d developed for the environmental radiation lab in Oak Ridge where I worked. One of our clients was Perry Nuclear of Ohio (they intended to build a nuke plant there). The REMP stuff comprised an ongoing environmental baseline study via which to establish natural radionuclide levels across the breadth of matrices within a 5 mile radius of the proposed plant site — soils, vegetation, water, milk from local cows, all manner of biota, and the air.

The air filter analyses always came back “below LLD” (Lower Limit of Determination, i.e., in this case “LT 0.04 pCi/cu.m." (less than 4-100ths of a trillionth of a Curie). I had a macro code snippet that simply populated that field with that update ongoing.

One week after Chernobyl we had elevated positive lab readings across all air filter locations. I-131. Given its 8.05 day half-life, it descended back down to below LLD after about 5 weeks.

Nonetheless, it was a bit creepy.

Other, heavier radionuclides like Cs-137 were blown all over the arctic regions. Scientists are probably STILL studying biota uptake and rad migration on a lot of this stuff.

Putin may well soon cause another nuclear disaster during his chaotic invasion of Ukraine, either by escalating to using nuke weapons, or by hitting a Ukraine nuclear power plant (he's already damaged one).

 

 

Ukrainians fleeing Kharkiv. Covid-19 petri dish?

UPDATE:

"The situation at Chernobyl is deteriorating."

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