
If I ingest a grain of sand size piece of the Chernobyl Reactor No.4 core - tomerds
https://www.quora.com/If-I-ingest-a-grain-of-sand-size-piece-of-the-Chernobyl-Reactor-No-4-core-what-would-happen-to-my-body/answer/Carl-Willis-2?share=1
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henearkr
I'm baffled at the fact that the answer is entirely about radioactivity.
Rather than that, uranium in itself is highly toxic (I mean, chemically).

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atemerev
This is purely hypothetical, as like he noticed, the fuel particle is not
soluble in gastric acid. The damage would be much less than that.

Inhaling the similar amount of finely powdered radioactive dust is another
story, though.

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zaroth
What movie was that?

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esturk
Season 2 of 24 I think.

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remarkEon
>Me, riding the whole body counter in SP1430, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant,
after being inside the Unit 4 “Sarcophagus”

What do people do who actually go _inside_ the Sarcophagus these days? I
assume there’s monitoring that needs to be done, but I also assume that you
can monitor a lot of this remotely. Also, how much longer until Chernobyl is
considered “safe”?

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guitarbill
The Chernobyl New Safe Confinement has two cranes inside, and a lot of
sensors. Incidentally, it's a great engineering project. The only downside is
that if you visit now, you can't see the sarcophagus.

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beaner
Couple naive questions:

1\. How does a piece of spent fuel end up in a "grassy bit of ground" outside
the reactor? Thought it would have all melted in one big clump in the same
spot?

2\. Why is Chernobyl still so dangerous if literally ingesting the spent fuel
isn't super bad? Or is Chernobyl no longer dangerous?

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AaronFriel
1\. There was an explosion (edit: two explosions) that began the incident
which destroyed the reactor and ejected matter a significant distance.

2\. Chernobyl, IIRC, isn't really so dangerous to visit but you should avoid
eating or drinking anything in the exclusion zone. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90
will poison you from the inside out. The latter ends up bio-accumulating in
bone.

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goatlover
Wouldn’t that also apply to all the wildlife in the area? Are there no animals
inside the exclusion zone? I get that cancer rates and birth defects would go
up, but that’s a bit different from being poisoned, the implication a lack of
survivability.

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justnoise
The exclusion zone is actually resembles a wildlife refuge these days. From
reports of the numbers of animals present it seems like human populations are
much worse for wildlife than low levels of ionizing radiation and other
contaminants from the disaster.

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blake1
The animals’ populations have rebounded, especially those, like wolves and
foxes, who’s habitats are least compatible with humans. Still, mean lifetimes,
fertility rates and mean body mass are down, while illness are up. This also
applies to some plant species. In no way was Chernobyl a strictly good event
for wildlife, just that removing humans took away a very strongly negative
factor.

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ribalda
Good to know. I was worried for this girl :) :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZyDvtX85Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZyDvtX85Y)

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userbinator
I had a feeling it was a bionerd23 video before I clicked that link... she has
some pretty scary radioactivity videos.

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roenxi
It is worth noting that there is almost literally no mention of potential
health impacts; almost all the outcomes listed in the answer are regulatory.

On the one hand, that might be good regulation - we don't want workers getting
harmed. On the other hand, it serves as ongoing evidence that getting worried
because a situation exceeds regulatory standards is foolish.

Given how little attention he gives it the "marginally higher theoretical
likelihood of later detriment such as cancer" turns out to be something
trivial like less damage than done by drinking sugar water or not exercising.

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Retric
Heath impacts are literally the first thing mentioned. “probably nothing;
certainly nothing obvious and immediate“

A grain of sand is extremely tiny and solid so it’s also got a very low
surface area. Further, if it was suck in your lung you would get significant
radiation to the same tissue, but in your digestive system food would act as a
barrier while also pushing things along.

From a regulatory framework it’s enough to detect and be concerned about which
is interesting.

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kochikame
[https://xkcd.com/radiation/](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)

This masterfully illustrates the relative risks of various sources of
radiation, something that the typical person on the street knows almost
nothing about but thinks they do

I live in Japan and read up on this topic after the Fukushima disaster

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Creationer
Which one is 3.6 roentgen, which is not great, not terrible?

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MagnumOpus
3.6R is about 37mSv. So the bottom left one, "ten minutes next to the
Chernobyl reactor core at the time of the meltdown", also the top right
"maximum yearly dose permitted for a radiation worker" is 50mSv too - I guess
the show did its research.

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zaarn
The "ten minutes next to Chernobyl reactor core at the time of meltdown" is 50
Sv, not 50mSv.

3.6R was measured by the small dosimeters on site (and also happens to be
their maximum read value). The bigger dosimeters didn't work or also maxed out
and the person in charge didn't believe it.

The show mentions a 1500R value later on but outside the reactor building.

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JadeNB
I had a really hard time with the title displayed here, which is a truncated
version of an already-confusing title on Quora. The actual title, with, I
think, desireable punctuation included, is "If I ingest[ed] a grain-of-sand-
size piece of the Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 core, _what would happen to my
body?_ "

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altmind
There are things much scarier and devastating than uranium. It took 10 micro-
grams(10^-5 g) of Pu-210 to poison(ARS) Litvinenko. You cannot see that amount
- so tiny it is. And the damage is almost 100% gamma rays - so its hard to
detect and the damage is lowered when handling and maximal when ingested.

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ianai
A discussion about the everyday occurrence of radioactive sources may be more
productive.

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godelski
Here or in the Quora post? There's plenty of people here that know quite a bit
about reactors and radiation. Ask away.

~~~
ianai
Both. This question seems like a way to emphasize extreme dangers of
radiation.

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exabrial
I left with more questions than answers...

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kahoon
As it is usual when reading Quora "answers".

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jhallenworld
I've watched this interesting (but long) talk by Brian Sheron, retired
director of Nuclear Regulatory Research:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI4TTaA7qM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI4TTaA7qM)

It gives me a better understanding of the risk of nuclear power, particularly
for current US reactors, and what our regulatory agencies actually focus on:
really it's on preventing direct radiation induced deaths, and not so much on
property damage. So: It's not so much that accidents directly kill people,
instead they kill the land. The idea is that loss of cooling incidents are
contained for a significant amount of time- at least 8 hours. I'm dubious, but
this is thought to be enough time to evacuate people from the land that will
eventually become contaminated. Only when people move back do people die, and
then only from increased cancer risk (Brian says this becomes an EPA problem).
So now the land is lost, because who would move back? [of course this focuses
only on deaths from radiation, and not for example, deaths caused by stress to
elderly people forcibly relocated].

I did not remember when people were evacuated after the Fukushima accident,
but it was pretty quick, here is a timeline:

[https://www.oecd-nea.org/news/2011/NEWS-04.html](https://www.oecd-
nea.org/news/2011/NEWS-04.html)

There is another question I'm still trying to answer. If the final heat sink
is lost (someone blows up a dam), can the reactor be shut down without
incident, assuming no blackout? This would require that the decay heat is
spread across a large enough surface area. I'm not sure if the containment
building provides such an area (a 1000 MW reactor generates ~70 MW decay heat
after shutdown). It reminds me that this is another area that NRC does not
focus on: "terrorist attacks are a military problem".

Edit: well I answered my own question from wikipedia entry on containment
building: "While the containment plays a critical role in the most severe
nuclear reactor accidents, it is only designed to contain or condense steam in
the short term (for large break accidents) and long term heat removal still
must be provided by other systems." So if the heat sink is a man-made lake
held by dam, it's a big risk (of course dam loss would cause direct loss of
life anyway). I was wondering about this because my inlaws live near Duke
Energy's Oconee Nuclear Station, on man made Lake Keowee
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Keowee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Keowee)

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lisper
Gotta love the conclusion:

"In summary, it is preferable to not eat spent nuclear fuel."

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DuskStar
It was interesting to see that it truly was only "preferable" and not
"mandatory" or "this will kill you" IMO

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lisper
That's the interesting thing: it's not really very hazardous, but it is
awfully annoying.

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CydeWeys
To be fair, it has had several decades to decay, and the most dangerous
radionuclides are the ones with short half-lives and thus high output. It's
pretty amazing that it's still that dangerous given it's had over 30 years to
decay.

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andai
Noob question, if it decays so quickly, how come there's so much of it around
this late in the Earth's history? Or was it created only decades ago, by
artificial means?

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jellicle
Some things decay quickly and some very slowly, forming a sort of chain where
the events might happen fast-slow-fast-fast-superfast-superslow-slow-fast-
medium-fast-slow, or something like that.

So these fast-decaying things disappear quickly but are also being constantly
created by things spontaneously decaying into them. The point of a nuclear
reactor is to increase the overall rates of decay, so you end up with
disproportionately large amounts of the short-lived isotopes as opposed to
what you would find in nature.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain)

If you scroll down you see thorium series, neptunium series, uranium series,
and so on. You can see the half-life at each step.

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HillaryBriss
really puts my mind at ease

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soundpuppy
If we were to make an analogy between radiocative matter entering the body,
and toxic information entering the mind, what metrics do we use to measure the
dangerous effects of the information? How long it lasts or how deeply it can
modify conscious/subconscious brain processes?

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rmdashrfstar
There's no such thing as dangerous information, only truth and not truth.

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Lowkeyloki
I disagree having read about people who work as content moderators for
websites like YouTube. They frequently suffer from acute forms of PTSD having
only passively consumed information. If information can cause PTSD, I would
consider that information dangerous to one's mental health.

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godelski
Not to mention simpler examples like the anti vax movement. Which has put not
only individuals in danger, but whole populations. There's plenty of examples
of information leading to harm.

(This comment is neither a recommendation for censorship nor a push for
freedom is speech)

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Lowkeyloki
That's true. I also thought of something like state secrets where a government
agent might show up one day and make you disappear.

But that type of information is only indirectly dangerous. The actual danger
is the government agent or your personal actions based on misinformation in
the case of antivaxx.

I was thinking more in terms of information that is objectively dangerous.
Just ingesting the information alone is enough to cause damage.

I was also reminded of an article I read recently about artists and animators
who worked on the newest Mortal Kombat game suffering from PTSD due to the
graphic nature of their art and the reference materials they had to use.

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godelski
> I was thinking more in terms of information that is objectively dangerous.
> Just ingesting the information alone is enough to cause damage.

I think there are cases for that too. But it depends on your psychology. For
example there are mathematicians who have studied infinities and gone insane.
Others haven't. Probably other factors involved, but it helped push them over
the edge.

