Question: How do you clean up a radiation accident?

Samantha Watson answered on 14 Nov 2016:

Carefully! Otherwise you could make things worse.

Seriously, once the emergency has calmed down, it would be really important to assess the situation, work out what the contamination is (the type of radioactive material), how much of it there is, how big an area is covered, what types of area(s) is affected (farmland, housing area, schools, city centres, roads, parks, or whatever) and how many people (if any) are in the affected area.

Once you know what the situation is you can make decisions based on these factors. For example, if the radiation will decay away all by itself in a week or so, there’s not much point spending hundreds of thousands of pounds and generating tonnes of waste material to clean it up. Or if farmland is affected then the problem is dealing with lots of waste food, rather than working out how to clean the streets. There is some good guidance available in the UK to help the authorities and experts make these decisions, making sure they think about the right things, get all the right information and speak to all the right people. Because a group of scientists could say that it’s a really good plan to do a particular thing, but if all the people who live there hate that idea and have some good reasons not to do it, then it will be really difficult to get it done. So it’s important to consider all the options and work with people to pick the best strategy for the specific situation.