The claaaaaaw!
That’s a new one to me.
I have a hard time visualizing this radioactive “dust” that you can breathe in … as we have seen for quite some weeks now, Ukr. is a rather wet area (too wet to go off-road even for 6x6 vehicles!) and it has been raining / snowing intensely on any dust for the past 35+ years
…and you get all the biomass (leaves, dead wood…) that settled on top of it for more thant 1/3 of a century…
so breathing in stuff will IMHO not be a vector that will get you so sick within a couple of days / weeks that you show significant symptoms … evident to the layperson in a war.
That’s weird. Why not simply leave it next to the already-radioactive reactor building, which was being bombarded with concrete and eventually enveloped by a couple containment structures? Or if for some reason that wasn’t possible, why not encase it in a concrete sarcophagus of its own and conspicuously signpost it?
Reports say they were digging trenches. They would have gotten right down into the radioactive stuff, and stirred everything up, and most likely breathed in particles too.
What is “ … evident to the layperson in a war” is not necessarily consistent with fact. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a large area of land contaminated with radioactive by-products and fuel residues as described above. Some of these elements are uptaken by plants and animals, the annual freeze thaw cycle actually assures upwelling of soil (which is one of the reasons that Ukraine is such a fertile agricultural region). There were also massive wildfires on 2020 (although not in the most contaminated areas) which dried the ground and released modest amounts of radiation, which was less of a concern in and of itself than the hazard posed by firefighting efforts digging firestops. Of course, the fires consume dry organic materials and leave the underlying soil exposed below, free to leech out into groundwater and migrate into the Pripyat River which feeds into the Dnipro Reservoir that supplies Kyiv and other surrounding area.
It takes only a very small amount of radioactive material to make someone ill; because ingesting it allows the path of radiation to bypass the epidermis and be taken directly into cells, the concern is not just gamma emitters such as 90Sr and 137Cs, but even weak beta emitters and alpha emitters can cause sickness and eventual death. This probably wouldn’t happen in a couple of days but for the most part the body does not quickly purge these materials and they do continuous health damage, both directly by killing tissue and suppressing the immune system which causes even common bacteria and viruses to become serious health threats.
There were people working near the building so “The Claw” was removed (as were many other items such as trucks, construction equipment, and even a German robot that was used to examine the roof of the building remotely and died because the radiation was more than an order of magnitude greater than the Soviets admitted to when they were provided the robot) and they’re all just dumped in the woods around Pripyat in unmarked locations without much care. The original response to the ‘incident’ was not well planned and was complicated by the Soviet efforts to deny and minimize the impact. The original response and construction of the concrete sarcophagus was an ad hoc effort that exposed workers to radiation levels far exceeding occupational safe levels and with little concern for long term integrity, hence the need for the New Safe Confinement and all of the active monitoring and maintenance still occurring today.
Stranger