I’m obviously asking for opinions. If this has been mentioned elsewhere, please point me toward it.
About those soldiers who were irradiated near the Chernobyl grounds — considering how badly they were exposed (digging trenches) and how quickly at least some of them became sick — are they treatable, curable, hopeless??
Well, it does sound like the radiation poisoning was acute, rather than an accumulation over a longer time.
Just walking around the area they were in (red forest) is bad enough… but digging holes and breathing in dust makes it quite a bit worse. Even vehicles driving through would have kicked up a lot of radioactive dust, and it sounds like nobody was wearing protective gear or breathing apparatus.
So they breathed in radioactive dust. Exposing their internal organs to direct radiation.
Basically, it boils down to what kind of dose the soldiers were exposed to. At relatively low doses, (2 grays of ionizing radiation), they’ll have nausea, weakness, loss of white blood cells (more prone to infection) and a small percentage may die within 8 weeks, with more dying in later years from cancer, particularly lung cancers.
At medium doses, 6 grays, they’d be looking at fairly quick nausea, diarrhea, headaches, dizzyness and 50% of them dead within 2 weeks.
High doses, you’re looking at severe symptoms, sickness and death within 2 days.
My wild-ass guess is we’re looking at the first case, with soldiers exposed to 1-2 grays of radiation. I think they were left there for a while, and then a bunch of them began to get symptoms of nausea and then maybe some headache and diarrhea. The penny dropped for someone somewhere and the pulled them out.
They’ll all be out of commission for weeks/months, a few will die, and the rest will be at a huge risk of cancer in the next decade.
It’s not confirmed that they were digging trenches. There are news stories of Russian army trucks driving through the forest, kicking up dust, but all the stories of trenches and soldiers being taken to Belarus seem to be linked to one Facebook post, by one unknown individual.
I can believe the stories that the Russian soldiers there had no clue about the radiation risk, and had no idea of what facility they were even at.
The Russian military seems to really keep the front line troops in the dark about what is going on. No wonder they’re screwing up so badly.
Energoatom, the Ukrainian state enterprise that runs all nuclear power stations in the country, says they were, according to the the article I posted earlier in the ‘Russia invades Ukraine’ thread:
According to Energoatom, it has been also confirmed that the Russian military were building fortifications, trenches in the “Red Forest” - the most toxic zone in the entire exclusion zone.
This story says the account of digging trenches is unconfirmed.
Unknown without more information. There is considerable variation in physiological response to radiation depending on age, gender, underlying health, et cetera. Unless they actually entered the New Safe Confinement they probably weren’t exposed to gammas, although there were some reports of nuclear materials stolen from a calibration lab. If they were actually digging or disturbing dust containing alpha emitters (235U, 235Po, most isotopes of plutonium) they are probably walking dead; even if they recover from the acute exposure, unprotected internal organs and endothelium will accumulate genetic damage and essentially fail from within.
Stranger
A YouTuber known as Bionerd23 used to visit the Chernobyl plant area and apparently made it a bit of a hobby to find and dig up highly radioactive fragments (possibly actual bits of the reactor core) within a couple kilometers of the power plant. These were bits just lying around on or slightly under the surface.
So while not proven it is plausible that soldiers driving around or digging in the area could have come across some dangerous stuff. Anyone foolish enough to put a “pretty” rock in a pocket (or just have stuff lodge in the creases of their clothing) could get some significant exposure. Breathing in the dust in the area is not healthy.
People living/working in the plant itself don’t get acutely sick but then those people generally know what they’re doing, as opposed to uninformed soldiers and reckless people on YouTube.
One or two guys getting sick in the Red Forest could lead to fear/panic and symptoms arising from that among more soldiers. Or maybe a number of them are sick. Hard to tell and I doubt Belarus will be giving us a report any time soon.
Long term, radiation damage is cumulative. Plenty of radioactive cesium from the reactor debris, and that stuff is a bone-seeker. Your body mistakes it for calcium and incorporates it into your bones where it continues its radioactive decay, damaging everything around it, which your body then tries to repair and if there’s more cesium hanging around it uses that, which then damages everything around it…
But we don’t actually know anything other than some reports from the media.
I can believe it just if not more likely that many did know and did ask, and were told, “No, no danger. Everything is absolutely fine. Carry on.”
Did this careless person have to scale a very high fence or fences to get inside this area?
Disturbing are the descriptions here on radiation poisoning. If this did happen to the Russian soldiers in that area, by whatever means (digging fortifications, kicking-up dust, collecting souvenirs, etc.), I am quite confident any broad impacts to the Russian military will never see the light of day.
Nope.
There is a small tourism industry in the area, in one video she shows the train ride into the exclusion zone. There are formal tours given of some of the area, from day trips to multi-day excursions - portions that are checked for radiation and are relatively safe, I might add. Once you’re inside the zone you could potentially slip away and do what you want. It’s a large area and I suspect most of it is not regularly patrolled. I get a sense that folks are allowed to do what they want as long as they’re not posing a risk to others. There are even some old people who still live in the zone, too stubborn to leave.
Potentially collecting bits of a blown up nuclear reactor and/or encouraging people to treat radiation as a minor hazard or no problem at all probably constitutes “harm to others” in the eyes of the controlling authorities, so she’s banned from the area now.
Darwinism in action.
Daylight may be unnecessary. These soldiers may be glowing in the dark for years to come.
How can you tell a Russian nuclear submarine crew?
They glow in the dark.
That exclusion area is bigger than the entire nation of Luxemburg. Unlikely that there’s a fence around the whole area. (How many workers would have died of radiation poisoning while building it?)
Probably none, as construction of the New Confinement Structure to go over the top of the old sarcophagus and wrecked reactor didn’t kill anyone. It’s possible to build things in the exclusion zone without killing the workers, and a perimeter fence even more so as it wouldn’t be near any of the really hot zones.
you can get russians out of Chernobyl - but you can’t get Chernobyl out of russians
Reports on UK media that one of the irradiated soldiers has died, however, the sources were not the most reliable of UK media and I’d want to see it confirmed by others before saying it’s fact.
If it is fact I’m left wondering just what the hell those boys got into. There hasn’t been that long a time interval from the start of the invasion until now, death by ARS in that time frame requires a substantial dose.
Or maybe some of them found “The Claw” and sat on it to pose for pictures. Which in theory would be enough to do you in.
Ir they were breathing in radiated dust, would that be sufficient to cause death?