Her husband had become radioactive because of his high exposure. So he was emitting (re-emitting?) radiation from his body since he absorbed so much in the first place.
It’s possible for a person to actually become radioactive, but that would be exceedingly difficult to do without just killing the person on the spot. It’s also possible for a person to be contaminated by radioactive material on or in their body, but as you say, he should have been cleansed of most of that by that point. More likely, the nurse was just being abundantly cautious, which if others had done before her would have saves a lot of trouble.
I’ve been reading up on radiotherapy, including an accident with i-131, and it can be absorbed through skin I guess and then ends up in saliva and sweat.
Edit: didn’t see Chronos’s post before posting this.
Radiation victims are isolated to prevent microbial infection, ie for their own safety while there is a chance to save them, not to protect others.
Note also that acute radiation syndrome is mostly caused by external exposure to radiation, not by people swallowing a big chunk of cobalt-60 or something.
He was already cleaned of any fallout (stripped of clothing from fighting the fire, which is still highly radioactive today) by the time she got to him, but her baby did die shortly after birth. Now if he had inhaled radioactive dust that would keep emitting even after being decontaminated. Plus it doesn’t take a lot of radiation to cause problems with a gestating baby.
I can’t seem to find an estimate of the amount of I-131 released into air at Chernobyl by weight. I can find it in petabequerels per day, but not kgs. Anyone know how to make some sort of conversion?
Datasheet says, max 4600 terabecquerels per gram
That was (mostly) plutonium, not U-235. Plutonium required an implosion-type bomb (which design they actually bothered testing) rather than simply smashing two halves together inside a gun barrel.
A couple of people still managed to kill themselves by manually fucking with it (e.g., keeping the two halves separated using a screwdriver).
Ah…right. I forgot. Thanks.
It still illustrates the point though asked in OP question #4. Uranium and plutonium will have differences in some respects but for this the point is getting a critical mass in the same place.
Indeed your mentioning the two types of bomb (gun type and implosion type) illustrates this. Both were a means of bring two separate pieces of material together to form a critical mass.
The different approaches were because bringing them together causes criticality to happen fast! So fast that in the uranium bomb you needed to bring them together at over 900 m/s (so speed of a bullet) or else it would fizzle as it started the reaction too soon and would only partly blow-up.
Plutonium was even worse. They tried to engineer a gun-type bomb for plutonium but the pieces needed to be brought together so fast they needed a longer gun barrel. Turned out a bomb sufficiently long to accelerate the plutonium was longer than could be carried by any plane the US had.
So they went with an implosion bomb (which worked but had all sorts of challenges of its own, its engineering is really ingenious for its time).
In the end though having too much of either of these things in the same place at once is bad for anyone nearby.
Re: I-131.
Here’s a link listing all the precautions one should take after radio-iodine therapy.
Yeah, that’s pretty cautious.
Looking around I find that a lot of post-treatment instructions aren’t that thorough. But this is similar to what I’ve seen given to a family member who did this.
On the one hand, the precautions extend for a week. OTOH, I don’t see a Chernobyl worker getting that high of a dose (enough to destroy their thyroid) without other issues taking precedence.
So if the World Nuclear Association estimates roughly 1.85 Ebq of I-131 was released (though considerably more C-137 was released), then (buy my admittedly questionable calculations), only 402 grams was released? Less than half a kilo spread over a 30km is that dangerous? I know there was considerably more total bq’s released, but it seems most were concerned with the i-131.
If it gets in your body it’s certainly dangerous, especially to the thyroid gland. Just to get a feel for it, the public limit is supposed to be 1 mSv per year, and an acute dose of 4-5 Sv is pretty lethal. According to that same datasheet, ingesting radioactive I-131 commits you to 4.76 x 10[sup]-7[/sup] Sv/Bq, so if you took that much and evenly spread it over a 30 km radius (NB not what happened; the stuff was detected far and away) then each square metre of soil would be loaded with enough I-131 to kill 60 people. Are you sure you want to drink radioactive Chernobyl milk?
When you note the Sv/Bq of ingesting I-131 you didn’t mention the amount. Did your source happen to mention what amount would result in that exposure? Thanks for your help!
My source is this Nuclear Safety Data Sheet. It says, “Critical Organ: Thyroid Gland”. The activity is what I quoted above, 4600 TBq/g. A lot of other relevant info is there, like what happens if you breathe it in instead of swallow it, and what happens if you just stand next to some of it.