Chernobyl

I spent a week at Hanford doing some database work back in the 90s. Then I ended up at Rocky Flats.
 
gkainz said:
I spent a week at Hanford doing some database work back in the 90s. Then I ended up at Rocky Flats.
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I got a tour of Rocky Flats once because we were going to do some mapping of it and they wanted to show me which buildings to avoid if I was going to crash. Seriously.

I thought it was a cool boondoggle and a way to get out of the office for the day. So did the people who gave me the tour, I think.

This was way before 9/11. I'm thinking it was around 1990.
 
There were a LOT of buildings there one would want to avoid. A number of them had crime scene tape on walls, halls and stairwells with warnings about "do not touch" the walls. One of them had metal detectors, retina scanners and multiple layers of armed security guards to pass thru to gain access to the building. Scary place. Fortunately, only the last few months of my contract required me to be on-site.
 
ScottM said:
I have many friends in the south of France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy that are still worried about the radiation from Chernobyl that spilled onto their lands, got into their food and water supplies and who knows what else. The effects of this were far more than local.
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The radiation cloud blew north into Scandinavia too. I've been to Sweden a few times, and sometime around 2002 or 2003, I ordered reindeer roast beef in a restaurant. It was delicious! But only after dinner was I told that they only recently started eating reindeer again; they had stopped eating reindeer because of the radiation fallout into the forests, and some of the reindeer were deemed unfit.

I hadn't realized the radiation spread so far. But I also lived in Germany in the 1990s, and it was a concern then. I've also met some people from Ukraine; I asked them about it, and they said that everyone they know had some thyroid problem, attributed to the radiation.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
That reminds me when I was 15, I chose to do a project or essay on nuclear power for science class. Went into great detail and did a pretty fair job, I was an A student.
Well turns out teach was a tree-hugger and hated nuclear!
Talk about a shock when I got that grade back!
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And it is truly unfortunate that a teacher (a SCIENCE teacher above all) let a personal bias get in the way of objectively grading a paper.
 
I was still living in Northern Germany when Chernobyl blew up. We all got a crash course in nuclear exposure, and fission byproducts. IIRC the biggest issues were Iodine 131 and Cesium 137. At least those were the isotopes I remember making it to Western Europe.
 
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