Chernobyl tourism visit caused contamination?

[eas1234]

TL;DR Summary

Potential contamination from Chernobyl tourism visit

Hello, this is my first post but I don't know who else to ask. I realise my fears may be irrational but I can't get the thoughts out of my head and I am feeling very overwhelmed with anxiety.

Last year I went on an organised tour in Europe. There were a couple there who had recently been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone shortly before the war started. During that tour, some of my items came into contact with theirs. Notably my passport when crossing borders and checking into hotels. Also my shoes may have touched theirs.

My question is- what is the risk of contamination if say they dropped their passport on the ground at Chernobyl. Could radioactive duct particles be present on my passport as a result. I have the same concerns with shoes. I know they go through dose checks as they leave the zone, but those soviet era gates look ancient and I don't even know if they work. If there was the potential for contamination, what sort of detector would I need to check? Alpha particles as well? Any advice is appreciated as I'm in a bit of a state over it. Thanks.

 

[russ_watters]

Welcome to PF!

You can buy a Geiger counter if you want, but second-hand exposure to something that was a minimal threat to the primary is going to be basically nonexistent. I worry though that armed with a Geiger counter you might fall down a rabbit hole of unwarranted worry, testing everything around you and misinterpreting non-zero results. You will not get cancer from eating a bananna.

 

[gmax137]

I agree with @russ_watters , you really do not need to worry. But if you do worry anyway, take a damp (moist but not soaking wet) sponge or paper towel and wipe down your shoes and passport. That's all it takes.

 

[artis]

My question is- what is the risk of contamination if say they dropped their passport on the ground at Chernobyl. Could radioactive duct particles be present on my passport as a result. I have the same concerns with shoes. I know they go through dose checks as they leave the zone, but those soviet era gates look ancient and I don't even know if they work. If there was the potential for contamination, what sort of detector would I need to check? Alpha particles as well? Any advice is appreciated as I'm in a bit of a state over it. Thanks.

Base rule is this, radiation needs a source. That source can be a radioactive substance or fine particles of that substance/gas.
Another rule is this, radiation only really becomes dangerous "in numbers".
Inhaling a single radioactive atom won't do anything to anyone. You need quite a bit of those atoms which produce quite a bit of particle disintegrations (Becquerels) or photons of high energy in order to be at risk.
This is why even the "ancient" as you said, detectors that are still used probably at some gates of the exclusion zone are good enough to know whether you have taken a whole bag of reactor fuel out with you VS whether you have few atoms of a weakly radioactive substance somewhere on your jacket surface.

Also radiation (apart from really high energy one or huge doses) can only really harm you if it gets inside your body, of which the easiest way is to eat it or inhale it.
So unless you took those shoes right after the trip to zone and cleaned them with a napkin that you then ate for dinner, I'd say you are just fine.

Given the time that has passed and atmospheric phenomenon and rain and sediment buildup, after all these years the only way to get radiation damage from visiting Chernobyl is if you went to live there in the most contaminated areas with digging a hole for a bed and then drinking water from ground with dirty hands etc. Essentially what the Russian troops stationed there recently did.So no worries, and definitely no need for a dosimeter , their quite expensive and the cheap ones are imprecise unless your dealing with strong fields.
+Even if you had the best instrument money can buy, a year has passed and since then the shoes and passport even if they had any particles on them have probably been lost , so you won't find anything at all.
And whatever you would find would be from a totally different source and place and without proper knowledge or gamma spectroscopy you wouldn't know the source anyway, because remember a basic dosimeter can only count dose rate not distinguish the energy of the radiation to know it;'s source.

So even if you were to Chernobyl yesterday and today your dosimeter started beeping close to your shoes , ideally you'd still need a scintillator at a minimum attached to a laptop with the proper software and then you could do energy determination of the radiation to determine the source of it which would then either be a source typical for a nuclear fallout like Chernobyl or maybe some other source.

I live in a country where many rocks have rather high amounts of radioactive trace elements from ground and they would beep with a dosimeter. Yet they have never been to Chernobyl

 

[eas1234]

Thanks to everyone that replied to my question. I do have severe OCD so that has obviously made this experience more anxiety provoking than for the average person.