Nuclear physicists will never show you this. What is radiation really?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Have you ever been to Japan? For example, in this large, intensively developing city, where skyscrapers grow like mushrooms after rain? Welcome to Hiroshima. “What is Hiroshima?” You ask, “After all, Hiroshima is…” Well, okay. Here is another Japanese city - Nagasaki. How do you like it? Yes, and Nagasaki too … … Perhaps the modern inhabitants of these cities were deliberately misled, and they do not know anything about the danger?

Maybe you need to urgently inform the Japanese that they live in a zone of lethal radiation? But before calling the Emergencies Ministry, let's remember what we generally know about Radiation? This is a fairly common property of matter. The sun is something like a giant hydrogen bomb that emits photons in a wide range, ions, as well as gamma radiation, that is, radiation. The force that warms up the Earth from the inside, from the so-called core of the Earth, is also related to the nuclear decay of heavy transuranium elements. Radiation is emitted by soil, living bodies, and some medical devices.

It turns out that radiation surrounds us everywhere and penetrates into our body. Sometimes you can hear such a phrase: "natural radioactive background" - somewhere it is only 15 thousandths of a milliRoentgen per hour, and somewhere ten times more, and it is also considered "natural". However, it is more likely that high levels of radioactive radiation in nature are just as natural as the “natural” content of heavy metals in water bodies into which waste products of factories drain.

Imagine what would happen if 209 nuclear weapons with a total capacity of about 250 Mt (megatons) were detonated in Russia? Pip your tongue, you say, this is the end of the world.

However, how do you feel about the official data, according to which, in the period from 1949 to 1963, exactly this number of nuclear shells bombarded the territory of the Soviet Union? Here is the American bomb, nicknamed "Kid", which was dropped on August 9, 1945 on Hiroshima. Now multiply this bomb 16,600 times. This is the total power of the strike against the USSR from the 49th to the 63rd years of the last century. It is as if the British had fired their entire nuclear arsenal of 160 warheads towards the uninhabited regions of the Soviet Union.

How is this possible? Soviet nuclear tests took place at the two largest test sites in Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya. For example, the Semipalatinsk test site, which was and is still in a fairly populated area. Although, logically, it should be located almost at the North Pole or somewhere in Siberia. By the time the first test nuclear bomb exploded, the brand new city of Kuratov was located at a distance of some 60 km. In 1954, 80 km from the landfill, another appeared - the city of Chagan.

So, imagine that you live in one of these cities. Step out onto the balcony for some fresh morning air. And suddenly - a flash. “What is there, a thunderstorm?” - your spouse will ask. "No, they are testing nuclear bombs again." Indeed, what's wrong with that? And no panic! About a hundred atmospheric (that is, not underground) nuclear and thermonuclear charges of different power, from 1 kiloton to several megatons, with a frequency of once a month on average. Even an ultra-small charge of 1 kt gives rise to a characteristic nuclear mushroom with a height of about 3 km. And 1 megaton of capacity is a mushroom 19 km high. Ground nuclear explosions at the Semipalatinsk test site had a total yield of about 100 Mt. If all these shells were detonated at the same time, then a square of territory measuring 240 by 240 km would receive a radiation hit with a lethal power of 30 Sv (Sievert).

For comparison, a person with a dose of only 0.05 Sv is already considered irradiated. It is the fact that atomic bombs exploded not all at the same time, but in a strictly metered manner, with a time difference, that makes these explosions much less dangerous - including from the point of view of radioactive radiation.

Everyone knows from school age that the earth after a nuclear explosion is unsuitable for life and even deadly. Drinking water from the affected area will also, at a minimum, lead to a terrible radiation exposure to the body and genetic rearrangements, and, as a maximum, to a painful death. There is even one well-known fairy tale about this … But this is all in theory. And what about in practice?