Comment by watwut

> I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.

If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade.

> The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion

The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint).

And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe.

Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.

Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable.

As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering.

Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants.

Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.