Yikes, Radiation

[marcust101]

Hi all,

I have aslightly scary story to relate -

A work Collegue had decided to dedicate a couple of weeks to working with orphans of the surviours of the Chernobel disaster in early August. He wanted to take some pictures to document his trip and try and raise further money on his return.

He raised $4000 or so and went to Belarus to work with the orphans for a couple of weeks. He had asked me for a camera to use will there having liked the B&W's I had taken of a company outting recently. So I gave him 6 rolls of Delta 400 and a Yashica GSN, one lesson later and he was off.

Anyway the point of all this, He returned last weekend and I developed the film for him to find it entirely opaque, every last scrap of it.

He had been careful with the use of camera and it's fine, the film appears to have been fogged by background radition from his trip. Has anyone similar experience of this outside of airport X-ray machines? I wasn't aware it could be this invasive and allow people to live there long term.

Lesson here, use digital when near raditation hotspots

Incidentally the work he did was greatly appreciated and he plans to return later in the year despite the apparent radiation risk.

Sorry for the length of this thread but I felt worth relating.

Marcus

 

[Bryce]

I'm not an authority by any means, but I'd suspect the film was either X-rayed or someone intentionally wrecked the film by exposing it ti light. As I htink I understand, enough gamma radiation to truly blacken film is also enough to be VERY harmful to people. Are there people in the area he visited suffering from radiation poisoning? How about the leukemia rate amongst locals?

 

[Bryce]

A good source of information would be Ilford's tech support- Ilford sells film for radiological use, and probably can help you deduce what sort of dose the film recieved. They are reputed to be very responsive to queries.

 

[thanatos]

I'm almost certain that it isn't the background radiation at Chernobyl that is to blame for this.

 

[varjag]

I concur, there's not *that* much background radiation there. In fact most of the 4th reactor emergency ops footage was done on film back in 1986.

 

[Pherdinand]

impossible, there's something else that happened to the film.
There are "hot spots" in the chernobyl area where the contamination is still high therefore the radiation is rather strong but i don't believe your friend was there. And maybe even that would not have been neough to fog it so badly.

 

[rxmd]

This is a piece of Forte 400 4x5 sheet film with two radioactive lenses placed on top of it in a changing bag for 48 hours. The larger, dim spot is from a 2.5/178 Kodak Aero Ektar, the smaller, darker spot is from a 4.5/113 Kodak Printing Ektar.

Philipp

 

[marcust101]

Thank you all for your wisdom, I'll try and discover more of his actions while over there.

Marcus

 

[Ronald M]

The cement mount they used to bury the reactor is now deteriorating from the the intense heat/radiation inside. The hillicopter crews used to dump the cement died within months of radiation poisoning.

Nobody really knows how to fix the problem, but they are working on it. This could turn out to be a 1000 year problem.

Yes there are a significant number of cancers appearing traced to the accident, birth defects, and other problems.