No; that photo is from 1996 (a decade after the incident) where the vast majority of short lived fission products are well into their decay chains.
It’s not safe to be around it for a long period now (and it still wasn’t then), but it’d take at least a few minutes of getting up close and personal with it to see any short term effects.
FWIW NYT interviewed him in 2014. He may have since passed (I didn’t look it up) but certainly not as a result of acute radiation exposure.
Fun fact: the film had to be exposed for several seconds for each of the images in this series due to the low light levels, which contributes to the amount of radiation ‘fuzz’ in the images. Think 1800s camera levels of staying still for a photo, just in front of a giant radioactive chunk of corium.
No; that photo is from 1996 (a decade after the incident) where the vast majority of short lived fission products are well into their decay chains.
It’s not safe to be around it for a long period now (and it still wasn’t then), but it’d take at least a few minutes of getting up close and personal with it to see any short term effects.
FWIW NYT interviewed him in 2014. He may have since passed (I didn’t look it up) but certainly not as a result of acute radiation exposure.
Fun fact: the film had to be exposed for several seconds for each of the images in this series due to the low light levels, which contributes to the amount of radiation ‘fuzz’ in the images. Think 1800s camera levels of staying still for a photo, just in front of a giant radioactive chunk of corium.
Why didn’t they just bring bigger lights I wonder? Space constraints? Is this sitting inside a collapsed basement?