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[wierd]

Could I? I'm not exactly in position to look for fungal growths in Pripyat or analyse them without proper scientific background.

Anyway, do you know of any actual supporting source, or would you say that you were slightly exaggerating when you described the area as 'radioactive as hell'?

Considering that the "red forest" is considered one of the most contaminated spots on earth... Yeah. I think it is justified to call it radioactive a hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest

Specifically, the area is home to some hastily created "waste graveyards"--
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4942828.stm

The graveyards are described as a "radiation emergency" by one of the men responsible for them, Valery Antropov, because no-one knows where they all are, or what is in them.

The unlined, leaky trenches were quickly dug and filled with low and medium-level radioactive waste in 1986.

They were intended to be temporary, but 20 years on, only half of them have even been mapped and inventorised.

An estimated 500 trenches in seven areas around the plant have yet to be studied at all.

"We know the graveyards are in these areas, but exactly where - so as not to step on them - we cannot be sure," says Mr Antropov, a senior member of a waste and decontamination unit known as "Complex".

Some of the trenches closest to the Pripyat river have been partly washed away by spring floods, others are slowly seeping radionuclides into ground water.

Mr Antropov is also worried by two repositories built hastily in 1986 for severely contaminated waste, for example graphite blocks thrown out of the reactor in the explosion.

Neither was properly built, he says, one is too close the river, and the contents of both should really be somewhere deep underground.

"Where to store highly radioactive and long-lived waste is a huge problem," he says.

"We have containers queuing up. We need to build a deep geological deposit, but Greens object. It's a problem that people don't want to see."

[Trekkin]

I am curious what relevance the radioactivity in Chernobyl (and weird's perennial inability to provide relevant citations for his claims) has to American politics.

[Madman198237]

weird's perennial inability to provide relevant citations for his claims

Ironic you should say that when you did...

Anyway, America has nuclear waste disposal problems too, so clearly it's all connected... or something.

Let's be real, when has this thread ever gone more than five days without going off-topic somehow.

[wierd]

It's just a derail others keep picking at, because they seem incapable of being satisfied.


As for not giving citations:
Considering that there are hastily buried high level wastes in that location, as outright stated by the people who manage the area in question-- which I fucking cited the source of, quoted a portion from-- AND EVEN BOLDED--

As well as genuine fears of release of large quantities of radiological materials should the new vegetation catch fire,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/chernobyl-radioactive-fires-global-danger

and a bunch of others I have pointed out, which all basically say "Hey bros, the plants are fucking radioactive as hell", I fail to see how I am NOT giving sources for it.  What, how many sources do I need to cite before you guys are satisfied here?

So far, the nitpick is that "background exposure is only just above health and safety levels", but that belies the reality that there is high level wastes in the soil, and radiologicals in the form of contaminated carbon, strontium, and cesium sequestered in the very vegetation I paid passing mention to, and that others who cannot seem to be satisfied about keep asking for more details on.

[Madman198237]

You could try all of the sources, but maybe do some field research as well?

You know, go run around in Pripyat and the surrounding areas for awhile, then come back and have somebody else report to us how long it takes you to die of acute radiation poisoning.

[Trekkin]

What, how many sources do I need to cite before you guys are satisfied here?

Just one with the Sv/hr recorded in the relevant areas of Pripyat in 2007 would suffice for Il Palazzo, I think.

Not quotes, not anecdotes, not warnings. Just data.

[wierd]

Getting hard data is proving very difficult.  Even the fucking authorities in the area dont have good data.  Which you would know, if you had not glossed the articles I posted.

[Trekkin]

I do know that. That is why I do not make unsupportable claims about the actual radioactivity in the area.

[wierd]

There is a book citation from the red forest article stating that there are locations with background radiation levels as high as one roentgen, with a footnote pointing to this book:

https://www.abebooks.com/9780309094306/Wormwood-Forest-Natural-History-Chernobyl-0309094305/plp

What I am reading suggests that it is full of original research.

So, if you want a potential source of data, you could purchase the book for 22.50$, and stop haggling me.

Whether or not her data is any good or not, I cant say. I havent read it.  Only that it is cited as one of the sources for the claim.

[Il Palazzo]

Weird, this isn't me or anyone else busting your balls. This is about keeping the general level of discussion high.
I get it that you think that something must be true - in this case dangerous radiation levels in Pripyat - but it's clear that it's just a feeling you have. All you're doing now is looking for any bit of information, no matter how tenuous, that'd confirm your preconceived notion. Instead of admitting that you just believed it to be true for no concrete reason.
The hope is that we can foster a good discussion culture on this forum by keeping tabs on each other and pointing out when somebody slips and lets their biases seep in. So that maybe when the conversation gets back to politics, people likewise won't be making baseless categorical or authoritative statements.

[wierd]

I can see that, however, demanding data  that does not exist (and then naturally not getting it), because records were not kept as to where the high level wastes buried there because of political reasoning of the soviet union on the matter, and a general lack of funding for the zone maintainers to go hunt it down, does not mean that the highly contaminated graphite blocks mentioned just mysteriously vanished into thin air.

Likewise, the cited research on the melanized soil fungi, which indicates that it actively incorporates C14, preferrentially-- along with many reports that the mosses and ground flora are obscenely radioactive (but failing to give good readings on) all paint a pretty good picture that it is not just my imagination.  The position with the least embellishment is the most likely to be true.  There is more circumstantial information to support a very radioactive forest, than there is to support an overhyped forest.

We can quibble about what constitutes 'radioactive as hell', but seeing as hell is a fictional place, it could have any arbitrary value assigned to it; the lasersword applies.  Demands for a specific threshold on radioactivity would then come from the biases of the one demanding the values, to assure that the reported values match those biases.

So, that street has lanes both ways here.

[Il Palazzo]

The point is, the burden of proof is on you. If you don't have it, as you freely admit, don't say something is true (or false - the baseline is 'don't know').

[wierd]

I know it is sufficiently radioactive to have multigenerational mutation rates far in excess of baseline for the species sampled. I posted data for that.

I know that despite this, the area has a flourishing biosphere.

Those were the only real assertions that *I* made.

[Trekkin]

There is more circumstantial information to support a very radioactive forest, than there is to support an overhyped forest.

That's not a binary choice, though; not only do different kinds of radioactivity affect tissue differently, but different dosages do too in sometimes counterintuitive ways, to say nothing of how the general mobility of the radiation source (I'm lumping several more familiar parameters into one blanket here) can affect what the actual radiation exposure of organisms at the site looks like, particularly over time. If we're going to talk about mutation rates and so forth, that matters.

It is perfectly acceptable to make broad estimates, provided they are explicitly qualified as such in a statistically rigorous way; it is even sometimes necessary to do so. The problem comes when people authoritatively claim things for which the data does not exist to support such certainty, and is compounded when they get defensive and start throwing out tangentially related citations, making spurious claims of bias and demanding other people prove them wrong. That doesn't help anyone learn anything; it's just noise, and noise doesn't reflect well on anyone. If it carries on long enough, people just learn to ignore their claims out of hand, on the assumption that they are similarly ill-founded. That's not a productive way to discuss anything either.

Not that reviewing this yet again is much better, but hope springs eternal.

[misko27]

To try and drag this back, kicking and screaming, to the topic of "America"...

So Trump's executive order made it so that children could not be separated. While this has "ended" the crisis, much is still going on.
For one, 2,300 children remain seperated from their parents. This includes some whose parents were in fact already deported, making reunion a little difficult.
For another, Trump's new policy is to detain migrant families as a whole, but this flies int he face of the so-called "Flores agreement" settlement, which set strict limits on indefinite detention of minors. The Obama Administration tried it back in 2014, but after a ruling against the Administration, they were faced with the choice to either seperate families or use what Trump has derisively called "catch-and-release". The Obama Administration opted for the latter, but Trump's executive order restores what Obama tried to do in 2014. It's... not likely for them to succeed.

Furthermore, the administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy is now effectively dead. The administration has insisted otherwise, but in fact it was never really feasible: previously the feds prosecuted about 30% of migrants crossing the border, the zero tolerance policy merely raised that to 60%, which was enough to cause a massive backlog and send the entire system to the breaking point. Court cases are now being scheduled for 2021 and beyond.

The result of all this has been a war within the West Wing. Border Patrol says that it is struggling already, and doesn't know what to do for Trump's latest executive order. Justice department officials, led by Trump's least favorite cabinent member, Jeff Sessions, have hit back, saying there is to be no change to "zero tolerance". No one really knows what will happen next, especially if the judge involved refuses to modify the Flores settlement.