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Comment on The Helicopter with Radioactive Bladesparent

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Exposure to a nuclear blast doesn't necessarily make things radioactive. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not radioactive wastelands. Even in Chernobyl, the other reactors continued to operate for a time after the accident, and nature is thriving.

But, the radiation detector is on the upper surface of the rear fuselage. Hypothetical Beta particles from the ground will strike the underside of the aircraft and not the detector.

Strontium-90 is a major component of fallout and strongly in the ‘really not good for you’ category.

Nothing I wrote refutes that

fallout is present in dust in the air. it’s radiation would not be coming only from below the helicopter.

I guess in this extremely contrived hypothetical where a Navy helicopter flies through heavily-irradiated dust cloud from a nuclear detonation, yes, the blade alarms might go off spuriously. Well done.

what helicopter do you expect EXCEPT a navy helicopter to be flying through the fallout from a nuclear explosion?

especially with all the nuclear tests they were doing for decades?

Ambulance and rescue helicopters, if there are any left, and the crew didn't just take the helicopter and run as far as possible...

Which will almost certainly be military, because civilian helicopters and staff aren’t equipped or trained for that kind of environment except for perhaps a every couple of years hazmat/mass casualty training.

Exposure to a nuclear blast doesn't necessarily make things radioactive

Isn’t this neutron activation?

Generally they are going to airburst to cause maximum damage over an area which means what free neutrons hit are gasses which dispurse pretty quickly. Ground detonation does cause more fallout though.

It is, but a) it's a probabilistic process and b) most of the products decay rapidly, down to the background level in a matter of days.

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