rafriedman@gmail.com said:
I just got a New Mockba 5 and I'm afraid to use it. Nearly all Russian cameras entered this country post Chernobyl. I know the glass on some of these cameras is naturally radioactive (negligible) but what about any particulate contamination (Cesium 137 etc) that might have occurred? An awful lot of radioactive dust fell on Belarus and the Ukraine.
A couple of notes:
- Even if radioactive dust falls somewhere, it doesn't usually get inside boxes, technical apparatuses etc., let alone glass.
- Even assuming that your camera was standing somewhere on a table in a courtyard in western Belarus on 26 April 1986, things don't really get radioactive if dust falls on them. A camera is not a growing organism where the concentration gradually rises through continuous intake.
- The cloud went west. The portion of the Soviet Union that was contaminated is actually quite small; most went down over northern and central Europe - i.e. here, which is why we stopped collecting mushrooms in Bavaria in 1986. The probability that your camera got contaminated of all things is actually quite small. Kiev, which is right next to Chernobyl in the south-east, took relatively little radiation at all. My wife is from Ukraine, and it gets on her nerves quite a bit that whenever she goes to the doctor because of any ailment the first question is always "how far from Chernobyl did you live". Said doctor here in Germany probably took more radiation than she did.
- There is currently some debate about the dangers of radiation, whether it is actually as dangerous as we have come to think it is, and what about it is actually dangerous. This started from a study of lung cancer rates among workers who had been working at the Mayak reprocessing plant in the Urals between 1948 and 1972, including victims of the 1957 disaster there which is commonly called one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. From 6293 workers 301 had died of cancer, but with all of these except 100 the cancer stemmed from smoking cigarettes. (
Here's an article about the study.) This is not to say that radiation isn't dangerous, only that it isn't
that dangerous and that it's worth keeping a clear head. There's a lot of hysteria about radiation and not all of it is justified.
So your Moskva should be safe to use. If you wear a mechanical wristwatch you're probably taking more radiation from glow-in-the-dark markings on its hands.
Philipp