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Comment by emiliobumachar | Hacker News Reader

The key point is that radiation victims of Chernobyl did not became radioactive themselves -and harmful to others- as depicted in the series.

Fear and panic caused more harm than the accident itself - including one million unnecessary abortions.

I think the danger implied is that it could happen again.

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For someone concerned about facts he presents no actual facts to backup his claim of 1 million unnecessary abortions. What is this based upon? How did they identify which were abortions driven by bad medical advice and which were abortions which women claimed were based upon the medical advice but for which that was just a cover to avoid the social stigma often associated with abortion?

Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.

If a woman chooses to abort a pregnancy she otherwise wanted because of a perceived high risk of defects, and that risk is actually wildly inflated, that is definitely harm to her, regardless of any considerations of the fetus.

>Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.

Depending on the person and how late term the pregnancy was, it can be both psychologically and physically harmful.

edit: Pregnancy and childbirth can also be psychologically and physically harmful so net harm is more difficult to talk about.

> Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.

How is a killing of a person not considered harm?

(Unless, of course, you're some sort of extreme psycopath.)

Abortion isn't killing a person.

I remember reading that pregnancies from that area and time were routinely terminated by doctors without much further tests for that very fear.

Doesn't this depend on the exact emitters? Alpha and most neutrons will be blocked by body tissue, beta may have an effect at close proximity, and humans are almost transparent to gamma rays.

If someone is covered by fallout without knowing it, they can be dangerously radioactive.

If they inhale or ingest the fallout they'll be much less radioactive, but they could still be dangerous to others if they've ingested an extreme and lethal dose.

Some radiotherapy treatments do in fact make patients slightly radioactive. Friends and family are advised to keep their distance for a few half-lives.

The problem is that the show is historically accurate, the lady that lost her baby said in an interview by Svetlana Alexievich[0] that she was told about the danger of contamination from her husband.

The show was not meant to be a PSA for or against nuclear power, it's a historical fiction and for that it is as accurate as it can be. The story is mostly about propaganda and lies.

[0]:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/apr/25/energy.u...

The clothing they wore is still radioactive to this day. Good thing they were wearing clothing, right?

So why did the Soviet authorities bury many of them in zinc coffins under a layer of concrete?

A show of caring and playing to their own inflated fears. They didn't even try to measure the emitted dose from the bodies.

(Unlike clothing which actually retains some particles in the weave.)

Do you have a reference for that?

Question is if the series portrayed actions taken back in '86 or creating new misrepresentations and fears

The animals were really shot and realocated people from Czernobyl area were discriminated (avoided) for that very fear. Men who helped to mitigate disaster were seen as not too good partners to have kids with.

Whether they were actually readioactive or not, people often assumed they are and acted accordingly.

The question of children is more complicated than that. Exposure to radiation can cause mutations in reproductive organs that persist long after the radiation is gone, and will be passed to your children.

This is the same fallacy that many people suffer from when they discuss irradiated meat. Much of the opposition is around the fear of radioactive food.

Irradiated foods are bombarded with ionizing alpha and/or beta particles. This causes cell damage to organisms responsible to spoiling or contaminating the food (thus improving safety and shelf life), but does not cause any of the matter to become radioactive itself. In a nuclear accident, there is a chance that a victim becomes exposed to neutron or gamma radiation, both of which can induce arbitrary matter (including in a victim's body) to become radioactive. Whether or not their bodies actually became radioactive sources, it's pretty clear that the medical staff assumed that was the case, considering victims of ARS from the incident were burried in zinc coffins after their deaths.

Depends on the process. You wouldn't want to drink the cooling water of Fukushima now.

I don't know what you are talking about with irradiated meat. I guess you mean it being disinfected with ionizing light or something? That would be profoundly different besides also having something to do with electromagnetic radiation.

If you somehow ingest something radioactive, you yourself would become a source of alpha, beta or gamma-radiation. This is what happened in Chernobyl. Particles were exploded all over the place.

If that is enough to have glowing kids is another question. But the fear isn't as irrational as claimed. Even if there might have been an overreaction. Or something classified as such as there actually were quite a few cases that suffered from the incident. It just seems not as bad as repercussion became gradually visible.

The cooling water from Fukushima reactor would be no worse than "radon water" from some sanatoriums. Not too bad. Except it has fluorine contamination. Chemistry and not physics is why you shouldn't drink it.

Depends on where you swim. Water does indeed absorb radiation quite effectively withing a few meters. Radon water sounds like the modern equivalent to leeches

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