Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4025392-20121229131609/@comment-204.184.155.187-20131110200804

Scrawland Scribblescratch wrote: Chernobyl would be an excellent example as to radiation aftermaths, and that wasn't even nuclear devastation. A plant exploded, and look what's still there. The DD world is most definitely worse than that. No. The radiation from the Chernobyl disaster is equal to the radiation of 400 Hiroshima-style nuclear bombs. The radioactive materials released by the Chernobyl reactor also have much longer half-lives than the materials released by nuclear bombs, because they are designed for different tasks.

To quote Wikipedia:  " The danger of radiation from fallout also decreases with time, as radioactivity decays exponentially with time, such that for each factor of seven increase in time, the radiation is reduced by a factor of ten.  For example, after 7 hours, the average  dose rate is reduced by a factor of ten; after 49 hours, it is reduced by a further factor of ten (to 1/100th); after two weeks the radiation from the fallout will have reduced by a factor of 1000 compared the initial level; and after 14 weeks the average dose rate will have reduced to 1/10,000th of the initial level."

However, the average halflife for the Chernobyl disaster is much longer than the average halflife of a bomb, mainly because much of the bomb's radiation comes form short lived Zirconium. Thus, even if one were to detonate 400 Hiroshima-scale bombs in a single location, 27 years down the line the site of the detonations would be less radioactive than the Chernobyl disaster site is today.