Comment by justsomehnguy
5 months ago
> can wipe a continent
Sorry, but no.
Chernobyl exclusion zone is less than a single area of the Agent Orange usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial-herbicide-spray-mi...
Again, Chernobyl was not the worst case scenario. Everyone knows the story, some heroes sacrified their lives to prevent it.
You mean, everyone watched the TV story which has little basis in fact. Chernobyl was the worst case scenario - there's no way to build a reactor that would produce worse radiation effects when destroyed than to use a pile of graphite.
Only about 20-40% of the radioactive contaminants were spread before the fire was put out by firefighters wearing no protection. On top of that only 1 reactor burned, but it shared facilities with another reactor.
So if the fire was not put out, it could have easily been 5x worse. There were 4 reactors total, so in the absolute worst case it could've been 10x worse.