So, can someone explain what happens when the fireman touches the graphite piece? Is it the atoms breaking like crazy? Why does it happen only by touching? Also, similar thing seems to happen to the guy holding the door from the core room (chernobyl hodor).
Any form of radiation (light, microwave, alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays, etc etc) follows an inverse square law.
Double the distance from a ray source, it is twice as "weak". And vice versa.
So because the firefighter picked it up with his hand, and it would have been at a distance of only a few millimeters away, the radiation exposure on that area was much more intense.
More closer you get to the source of the radiation, the more radiation you get. In this case, graphite rock is super duper strong source of the radiation. If you just walk near it, you get super strong dose. If you pick it up and hold it in your hand, you will get super duper strong dose and the most damaged part will be, as shown in the episode, your hand.
To clarify: it isn't the graphite in and of itself that's irradiating (if it was, we wouldn't use it in our pencils), but rather that this graphite had been in the core and had been exposed to and coated with other radioactive elements before it exploded.
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u/mikelowski May 08 '19
So, can someone explain what happens when the fireman touches the graphite piece? Is it the atoms breaking like crazy? Why does it happen only by touching? Also, similar thing seems to happen to the guy holding the door from the core room (chernobyl hodor).