To not want my husband to visit and tour Chernobyl

[Elephant07]

Given the radiation risk.
Is it safe? Thoughts please...

Wildlife flourishing re the links then. Human habitation deterred wildlife more than nuclear disaster Says it all really.

For those claiming it's distasteful, surely the appeal is not the disaster itself (although it may be for some) but how nature has reclaimed an abounded town. Very few places like this exist where a whole town just up sticks and leaves with very short notice.

Sounds fascinating and I would go.

It's no more distasteful than visiting
Auschwitz and other concentration camps
Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorative sites and museums
Ground Zero
The Imperial War Museum
WW2 battlefield sites like Bruges, Flanders, the Somme
and a bazillion other places that preserve sites of catastrophic events and commemorate difficult bits of human history.

The disaster wrecked one reactor, the others continued producing electricity for years. People do work in the region on 2 week in the zone, 2 weeks out rotations.

In the decades since the disaster the levels of radiation have gone down, they won't be safe to live in for another century or two but visiting is different.

As for bad taste, as already mentioned concentration camps have been preserved, Pompeii is a tourist attraction, many sites of disasters are sites of pilgramidge and and tourism. Should Belfast have not built the titanic museum? What about the war rooms? What about Normandy, there are still signs of the invasion and a museum.

A friend’s company runs a tour to Chernobyl- here.

Perfectly safe. I had a friend who worked for the Chernobyl Children's fund who visited regularly and bought us back "radiocative champagne". It wasn't radioactive, but it was delicious.

A transatlantic flight is more than one chest X-ray. A flight to Spain is about 1 cxr. States is about 6

Thanks all - reassuring

I'd that true about transatlantic flights?

What about pilots and cabin crew?
Sorry for the derail

Bit late to the party but yes I'd go. Keep to paths and touch as little as you can of anything if you want to minimise the risks, but they are fairly small anyway.

Air crew are amongst the highest occupationally exposed group of workers.

More than most nuclear power workers or medical staff.

Pregnant crew are grounded due to the radiation dose they receive at work being too high for pregnant women.

@Dollymay Frequent fliers are exposed to higher levels of cosmic radiation, which means a very slight increase in their cancer risk - but it's very slight. The world's most frequent flier has increased his cancer risk by about 0.5%, having been exposed to the equivalent of about 1000 x-rays over 14 years. It depends on the height of the flight and how long you're in the air - short haul crews get less exposure than long haul.

theconversation.com/air-travel-exposes-you-to-radiation-how-much-health-risk-comes-with-it-78790

I had no idea about the flights issue!

Didn’t the Top Gear lot drive through Chernobyl and Richard Hammond duct taped his car or something?

DDs teacher went there. He said the radiation is equivalent to 4 Transatlantic flights.

Well I had no idea about the flight thing. When you have a x ray at the dentist they go outside.
Surely a long haul pilot is exposed as much as a dentist?
My Sil is a pilot, will have to ask if they are made aware of this.
Again sorry for the derail

Dentists go outside because they can.

Air crew are exposed to cosmic radiation from outer space, which is very high energy and hence can only be stopped by lots of heavy material like lead, which would make the planes too heavy to fly.

The radiation exposure to air crew in a year is probably about 10 to 100 times more than the average dentist, who should receive almost nothing.

I’d love to go to Chernobyl, it would be fascinating.

All the really nasty, properly ‘hot’ material is entombed in concrete. Background radiation will obviously be many times higher than in the UK, but it’s important to understand that 10 x a tiny amount is still a very small amount.

Tourists aren’t going to come back glowing hot.

Guy Martin was there on Ch 4 last night, Our Guy in Russia.
It was really interesting. Probably available on iPlayer.

As a person who actually lived there (Pripyat) at that time I would not find visiting at all distasteful. In fact I would like to return there one day (more out of sentimental reasons for me, I still recognise the places on photos and remember how they used to be).
Safetywise, from what I know the radiation level is low now and for a day visitor it is extremely unlikely to be harmful.

There was a field that was an agricultural school near to my house when I was growing up. I later found out that the reason it was not built on was that it had been the site of nuclear bombs testing in the 1940s/50s. Its now a very expensive housing development. I would assume that radiation disperses relatively quickly.

Nkt actual bins dropped on the site BTW. Some kind of patch testing or something. Never really understood

Guy Martin’s programme was really interesting.

I enjoyed the programme too. I'd go.

Did anyone else watch the program on TV (sometime last year) about how they built and installed the new domed covering over the power plant after they discovered that the concrete was beginning to disintegrate. It was really interesting how they built this huge structure in sections well away from the reactor and then slid the sections into place on rails. It is classed as a remarkable feat of engineering.