arcadiaego reblogged your photo and added:
I mean to be fair the Wikipedia page, which is extremely short (presumably because once you’ve gone, yup, very radioactive there’s not a lot more to say) doesn’t say how the colour photo was taken or how fast/likely the radiation is to kill you and has only one source that isn’t a physical publication. So I’m not sure how to confirm those two facts in 10 mintues as a non-science person. The closest I can find is a site about Corium saying it’s likely to kill you after an hour of exposure.
Having said that they can only know this from taking samples, and less than 10 minutes did tell me that the “Medusa” quote seems to come from 1987, sooo it’s probably not that bad any more.
The 10 minutes I referenced were just from googling “Elephant’s Foot from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster” and clicking on two of three websites and reading through a couple of popular science articles, not any special legwork I was able to do from having a little bit more of a science background.
And this isn’t a criticism of you or any one person in particular, it’s fielded entirely at the societal construction of “science” as something only certain people can be good at understanding, but the attitude of “I’m not a science/math person, so I can’t know/learn things about science/math” is one that really bothers me and I think has done a massive amount of harm to the world. It’s true that a lot of people are bad at presenting science to the public, but that’s a an example of our society having taught bad scientific literacy (which is something that can and should be learned by even non-scientists), not people being incapable of learning about things for themselves. I would really, really encourage anyone with the mindset “I’m a humanities/etc person so I can’t verify scientific information for myself” to shed it as soon as they can because we have a lot of issues with that as a society and it’s incredibly dangerous.
