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Posted on 10/10/2026 7:06:19 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Four decades after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, scientists have uncovered a chilling reminder that Chernobyl's radioactive legacy is far from over.
Researchers studying microscopic fragments of nuclear fuel blasted out of the reactor during the 1986 explosion found that some have remained remarkably unchanged.
This defies the expectation that they would have gradually broken down over time.
And the team says it could have significant implications for understanding the long-term health risks posed by the radioactive contamination.
‘Our findings demonstrate that Chernobyl fuel particles act as remarkably persistent reservoirs of fission products and actinides in the environment,’ the team wrote in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
‘Preserved… structures in Chernobyl particles after nearly four decades indicate these particles will continue acting as persistent radioactive reservoirs for the foreseeable future.’
When Chernobyl's Reactor 4 overheated and blew, it released a column containing over 100 different highly radioactive ‘hot particles.’
Measuring just 8 to 50 micrometres across, the tiny fragments still remain radioactive today and continue to contaminate soils in and around the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine.
A team from Leibniz University Hannover and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf examined six of the particles to find out how they had changed over the past 40 years.
To their surprise, some were found to be far more stable than scientists had previously assumed.
‘There are three classes of these particles,’ author Tobias Weissenborn explained.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.com ...
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No surprises, just poor journalism. Look at the half-life of these isotopes.
What were the isotopes?
Someone needs to have basic half life physics explained.
Just when you thought Daily Mail couldn’t be more moronic.
Not good, but not terrible.
C’mon, man. What is a half-life? I don’t do exponential scales but I love me some logarithmic.
Wow! After nearly 50 years in the nuclear power industry and now I can’t find my effing “Socked Face”🙄
You should look up “half-life”. The medicines you take have half-lives in your body. The concept is pretty straightforward. Be it days, seconds, month, years, centuries etc.
Shocked not socked. Spell check and spelling suck.
Over 100 radioactive elements and isotopes were ejected during the Chernobyl disaster, with the most significant and dangerous releases including:Generally speaking, the longer the half-life, the less dangerous a given isotope is. Unless the element is poisonous in itself, which plutonium is, supposedly.• Iodine-131 (half-life of ~8 days): A short-lived isotope that heavily contaminated the food chain (via milk) and caused a surge in thyroid cancers.
• Cesium-137 (half-life of ~30 years): A long-term hazard that traveled the furthest distances and remains a primary source of environmental and biological contamination today.
• Strontium-90 (half-life of ~29 years): A dangerous isotope that accumulates in bone tissue and can lead to leukemia.
• Plutonium isotopes (such as Plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,100 years, and Plutonium-241) and Americium-241: Long-lived transuranic elements that present multi-century hazards within the exclusion zone.
• Noble gases (such as Xenon-135 and Krypton): Short-lived radioactive gases released immediately during the initial explosions and thermal release.
I say "supposedly" because at least one person lived to a fairly ripe age with a measurable amount of it in his body.
I was being facetious.
My wife often wonders what the half-life of my air biscuits are.
Comrade Dyatlov, izzat you?
CC
Not poor journalism. This was all hype and doom journalism. That land will be radioactive for a long time. A first-year physics student could have told you with precision for how long, what intensity year by year for each hot isotope. This was journalistic malfeasance. He would need to look it up in a book or online, which that idiot journalist could also do.
More hype and doom bull s--t. The half-life of hot isotopes does not change. This journalist should be fired.
The article states there are a 100 of them. I am noy going to list them
The article states there are a 100 of them. I am noy going to list them
It is pretty much a cocktail of a wide variety of isotopes, but Cesium-137 and Plutonium are two of the worst ones.
I just watched a video last night of an MIT professor who lectured his class on Chernobyl, probably a nuclear physics class from the sound of it and the homework assignments he was discussing with them.
I have enough of a background that I could follow along, and it was interesting to hear the discussion from a nuclear perspective rather than the usual Chernobyl Communist Policy and Procedure perspective.
The article states there are a 100 of them. I am noy going to list them
Thought so. I never thought of medication half-life until recently. I’ve known cobalt 60’s since the Navy taught me in 1972.
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