Weird. I wonder how those signs were supposed to be installed. So dangerous you need to blow through at 120mph, but safe enough for a worker to stand there for awhile installing a new sign.
It's worth considering that a lot of places aren't safe for the general public while being perfectly safe for trained workers.
Radioactive contamination is mostly dangerous from the alpha/beta emitting dust, not the gamma rays. The dust is only dangerous if you get it on you or stir it up and breathe it.
Trained crews with proper procedures and gear can manage a risk like that, your average citizen can't. And since there is a hazard, you're obligated to give correct advice - i.e. leave as soon as possible.
Military. Acceptable working conditions are significantly lower than for civilian workers. Particularly in the scenario where these signs would be installed.
What do you mean crashed cars from people who didn't make it? The sign is basically a "minimum speed 40 mph" sign routinely seen on the interstates but with a bit more teeth. The sides of highways aren't usually lined with crashed cars (except occasionally when winter gets feisty).
If I have permission to do 150, you bet I'm going to do 150. Even though I don't exactly have a ton of experience doing it. A fair number of people are going to misjudge, overcontrol, suffer equipment failures, etc.
I understood it as "this level of radiation could kill you in hours, but this is the only way to a fallout shelter." Reading other posts made after mine I appear to be mistaken.
Those signs are all over Georgia and it absolutely wigged out my Toyota’s sensor that scans speed limit signs. For 3 hours the car thought the speed limit was 40mph while I was going 85.
[...] they mention supervised traffic, so presumably at some point people standing outside next to speeding traffic and radiation.
It can be supervised at entry/exit points, which is what I infer from the text. A bit like the highway across East Germany to West Berlin during the Cold War.
There were many volunteers at Chernobyl, like the three engineers who went underwater to close the valves, many people fully understood the risks associated and still worked on it voluntarily. Lets not belittle their sacrifices by snide political commentary
That is the normal state of things in most countries. Yes their efforts should be remembered too.
There are currently 800+ "voluntary" prisoner who are working firefighters battling the wildfires in Southern California for less than $5-10/day risking higher injuries than professionals with limited healthcare.
Every country in times of need uses their prisoners as does Russia today for their war and they don't get treated the same as civilians in terms of rights.
Forced labor in high risk jobs is also true to every draft and conscription in every military ever, not just for soviet union or other oppressive regimes.
This is the social contract between a country and its citizens.
Nobody is dismissing the all firefighters in California as forced labor without choice in their sacrifice because some of them are prisoners who have limited choice as parent post was implying.
I think people who worked in Chernobyl deserve the same courtesy of considering all their sacrifices as voluntary independent of how they got there.
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On a side note we have the least standing to comment on forced work by prisoner in other countries, Slavery is still legal in the constitution for prisoners, we have the highest incarceration rates anywhere in the world even more than most regimes[1] in the world and for-profit prisons who charge prisoners from phone calls to soap a lot of money and also pay very little for the work they do while incarcerated .
