Bill,

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:51:20 -0700, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

> 
> On Aug 30, 2006, at 7:50 AM, Bob Axtell wrote:
> 
> > In order to render Chernobyl safe, more than 500,000 men risked
> > sterility and worse in order to pour a concrete coffin  around
> > the radioactive  plant.
> 
> Where does THAT number come from?  It seems extremely unlikely
> for any construction project to utilize that many people; consider
> that the total population of chernobyl at the time of the accident
> was about 100,000.

Errr - no!  The town of Chernobyl had a population of about 10,000, but that's a number of miles from the power station.  Pripyat was the town that 
was built close to the power station, and had a population of about 45,000.  But they weren't the people working on the problem of entombing the 
reactor - people from all over the USSR were brought in to do that - I have no idea how many, but using a lot of people for short periods of exposure 
makes sense - those who fought the fire over the first couple of days mostly died from the exposure they got.
 
Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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