RichardDunneOwnGoal
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 5 Jun 2015
- Messages
- 2,016
Really don't see the appeal there.
People will say there's not an immediate risk to your health, and there likely isn't, the background radiation alone in most places isn't that great a threat to your health. It's elevated, but nowhere near what it was. The real threat to your health is posed by ingesting or inhaling particles contaminating the zone. You don't know that the air that you breathe in from a single gust of wind wouldn't contain particles that could lead to a cancer in several years time. So while it's not an immediate threat to your health, i.e you're not going to drop dead from exposure to the elevated background levels, it's still far from without risk.
If you do go ahead with it wear old clothes you don't mind binning, shoes in particular. Because make no mistake, there will be residual contamination on your clothing.
Wouldn't want to bring that home on your clothes and expose your kids to it, spread it around the house etc.
You'll probably pass through some kind of radiation detector on your way in/out of the zone, but be aware that the detector is trying to find contamination that gives off a recording above a certain threshold, there's every chance you could pass through it with alpha emitting or beta emitting particles on your clothing and still get the green light as their radioactivity is much harder to detect - albeit they pose a much greater risk to your health if they're ingested or inhaled given they decay so intensely with a much higher RBE than gamma particles (which is what the scanners detect).
I saw an utterly fucking ridiculous stunt some drunken idiot pulled on a TV show a while back, where this halfwit climbed inside an intensely radioactive crane bucket, caked in contamination as it was directly exposed to the burning core during the emergency reponse decades earlier. And this idiot was covered head to toe in this fallout, everywhere he went he was spreading it, the car you'll use to be transported to the zone etc. He gets to the detector to be buzzed out and he gets a red light and is locked out.
They didn't show how they decontaminated him, but that's an extreme example of the redistribution of the contamination. And you'll have to physically pass through the full body scanner that morons like him have, not sure if they clean it down etc.
If you go ahead with it a priority should be to bin your shoes after, at the least.
