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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Who would be crazy enough to go into soviet tunnels full of questionable radioactive stuff? I'm sure there is fun glowy stuff down there but surely that is a rough risk ratio for even desperate people

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>In the post-Soviet vacuum of the early 1990s, the conditions at Semipalatinsk-21 resembled the apocalypse that nuclear weapons have long portended. A city of 40,000 that was once serviced by two daily direct flights from Moscow had been transformed into a dystopia of a few thousand stragglers and feral dogs whose main challenge was finding food and warmth…In the winter of 1995, Kairat Kadyrzhanov, a metallurgist living in Semipalatinsk-21, confronted the scavengers at Degelen to alert them that radiation might be present in the tunnels. “My wife and children are starving,” one of the scavengers told Kadyrzhanov, as he recalled it. “What am I supposed to do?”

Anyone desperate to make a buck on scrap with no other jobs around. Especially in 90s things were pretty bleak in post Soviet states.

Now imagine the appeal of selling any of this radioactive stuff to a shady buyer. Now it's even more appealing.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident . It's not implausible.

Weird how we ended up making real-life objects that "curse" everything and everyone they touch with "invisible evil death magic". It's right out of a fairy tale.

Germs are already a bit like that. A lot of these superstitions were not bad for infection control, even if the underlying mechanism was not understood (much like the Standard Model, incidentally).

Lead and abestos have been in use since antiquity.

Unless you work with lead or eat off of leads plates all day, the risk of exposure is low. Even lead pipes are not as scary once they have been mineralized. Same with asbestos, it's the workers that handle it that are at the most risk. An asbestos tile or insulation just sitting there is not a huge risk.

I think as well as the obvious connection to nuclear warfare, part of the public fear of nuclear technology comes directly from how highly radioactive objects mimic the idea of a "curse".

In reality there's many forms of industrial pollution that are arguably scarier than nuclear waste, but none are quite so eerie in how their harm is caused. Even though it represented the very worst practices for these materials, the idea of a place like Lake Karachay where even half an hour on its shore would have killed you without you even knowing you were doomed is really unsettling. I don't think nuclear technology should be avoided, but there's definitely a formidable image problem here I think.

Chemical pollution is a lot scarier in a way, since it's much harder to detect. Even absolutely tiny amounts of radioactive contamination its existence to cheap widely available detectors. But I think chemical pollution is easier to ignore since it's harder to detect.

A lot of chemical pollution lasts literally forever, too. It's kind of funny the way the mind works. "This will remain dangerous for ten thousand years" somehow sounds scarier than "this is always dangerous."

> Lake Karachay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

There are many people who die every year going into tunnels without knowing if the air is safe to breathe where they're exploring.

Do you think they'd be worried about radiation?

Because it almost certainly isn't actually glowy, they just look like tunnels, maybe with some scrap inside that can be sold off, and not everyone knows that it has radioactive waste inside or what it can actually do to you. The average person knows a lot less about radiation than you do

https://xkcd.com/2501/

People looking for bomb grade plutonium, of course. But also scavengers who have no idea, there's been plenty of incidents with abandoned nuclear material.

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