The Effects of Time, Distance, And Shielding in the Chernobyl Nuclear Research Paper

The Effects of Time, Distance, And Shielding in the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident - Research Paper Example The fight to contain the effects and ward off a bigger catastrophe eventually involved more than 500,000 employees and a cost estimated to be in the region of 18 billion rubles. At the time of the disaster itself, 31 people died, and it had short and long term effects (Mara, 2011). One of the short term effect was the immediate hospitalization of 203 people and 31 of them died, 28 of those who died was because of being exposed to acute radiation. Most of them were the fire and rescue workers who were trying to contain the disaster to have it under control. They did not know the danger of being exposed to the radiation (coming from the smoke). Another short term effect was on the workers who were involved in the cleanup and recovery after the disaster (Mara, 2011). They picked up doses of radiation in high quantities. Mostly, they were not armed with personal dosimeters to ascertain the amount of radiation they received leaving experts with the only option of estimating their doses. People were also evacuated around the area of Chernobyl by the Soviet authorities after the second day of the disaster. A month later, everybody who was living inside the range of 30 km radius of the plant had been moved to a new place. Zone of alienation is the name given to the area. However, the environment over a wider scale than the enclosed 30 km radius area was affected by significant radiation (Lüsted, 2011). Some children in the affected regions were unprotected from the great amount of the doses, mainly because on taking of radioactive contaminated milk that was produced locally. Research has shown that thyroid cancer suffered by children in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine has increased greatly since the disaster. A big forest of swath of pine was killed by the radiation. Farm animals were also taken away at the time of human evacuation. Levels of radioactivity have been observed in different