User Reviews

This film would have been helped greatly by the assistance of someone who knew more about radioactivity. In one scene the director (?) scans a field with a Geiger counter. The field had been exposed to a gamma source to see the effects on different crops. Gamma Rays do not induce radioactivity! It seems the Soviets thought that irradiating seeds en-masse without selection would improve yields. Irradiation is still used today to induce mutation often because more targeted GMO techniques face consumer backlash from ignorant technophobes, much like this director? Another scene has the collection of radiation sources used in Moldova in a bunker, The director asks a loaded question. "How many years will it take to enter this place without risk" and immediately "How much time is needed until all isotopes fully disintegrate". The answer "If we talk about all the radioactive source types stored here, in some cases.it will take no less than tens of thousands of years till it would be possible to enter here without danger". The two isotopes actually mentioned caesium-137 and cobalt-60 have half lives of 30 and 5 1/4 years respectively. Which means after 600 years the Cs-137 will have decayed to a millionth of its original intensity, 105 years for the Co-60. Anything that lasts for tens of thousands must be a very weak radiation source like Americium-241 commonly used in smoke detectors. Here we see how the directors misleading double question of "how long ... without risk" and ".. time .. all isotopes fully disintegrate" apples to any house with a smoke detector! Not sure if the director is being deliberately misleading or just ignorant but I'm sure he had a narrative of BAD nuclear he wanted to say regardless of any facts he might discover.