I would think that this would be one of the more
straight-forward cleanup operations. The Canadians knew shortly
after it hit and started cleaning up the radiation rather soon
so natural processes wouldn't have had much time to spread it
around. It would be like prospecting for Uranium only this stuff
is highly radioactive so it would lead the searchers right to it
and the airplane would be able to survey a larger area so it's
like searching for fires. You shouldn't see any so if
you do, you need to get it out.
Cleaning it up would involved digging up the ground that
was contaminated. It would probably have melted its way in a
little and the impact would have made holes where the pieces
hit, but it isn't like it is going to bore down through the
Earth.
I don't know how many pieces they were having to deal
with, but it would be a case of dig and dig until there is no
further radiation and then move to the next spot and dig all
that out, probably not terribly deep, but you, of course must be
thorough and the ground is frozen.
The real problem is what do you do with all that awful
stuff after you cleaned up the ground? It was probably put in to
containers of some kind and shipped as highly dangerous atomic
waste to a special site where spent fuel rods and other
high-level radioactive waste is stored. That kind of stuff is
capable of killing people after only a few hours of exposure so
all the hazzmat workers and people who trucked away all the
debris had to exercise the highest level of radiation safety in
every thing they did.
They probably got the ground cleaned up pretty well, but
that junk is still sitting in a waste containment facility
somewhere just as nasty as it was the day it was scooped off the
ground.
I don't know if you know this or not, but every single
piece of nuclear waste produced since 1945 is still sitting
around, waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with it.
Mostly, they put it in places where there is little
earthquake activity and where it is not likely to get in to
water supplies, but it just doesn't go away.
Mary Stores writes:
> I wonder if the tundra in Northern Canada would really be safe after such
> an event? I am skeptical. And how do people go around cleaning stuff up
> like that?
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