• Question: How clean it the atmosphere, after one nuclear explosion ?

    Asked by baggiano to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Well, there have been lots of nuclear explosions throughout history – the tests during and after the 2nd world war, and of course the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scientists who were opposed to nuclear weapons tried to estimate the number of people who died as a result of nuclear tests every year. I can’t remember the result I’m afraid, or whether it was very accurate.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      The atmosphere as a whole is pretty clear I would think. The local atmosphere not so much. It’s hard to classify it exactly since a lot of the units used to quantify radiation dose are different. However, in the case of chernobyl at the centre of the disaster the radiation dose was calculated to be 200 Sieverts. That doesn’t really mean much till you know that 5 Sieverts over 5 hours is a fatal does.

      The big problem is that the half life (the time it takes for radioactive material to decay into a none radioactive compound) is very slow, Ceasium 137, one of the major radioactive material released after nuclear explosions, has a half life of around 30 years so this is why the contamination is so long lived.

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