Editing 3.6 Roentgen (section)

==An explanation for the confused==
It's a [[meme]] from a TV miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster. There are plenty of explanations available from Google, but if you insist: the short version is that the dosimeters at the Chernobyl plant were only rated for measuring 3.6 roentgen (an obsolete unit of measuring radioactivity); the good dosimeters were kept under lock and key<sup>[1]</sup> (or burnt out the second they were turned on), and were thus unavailable in the initial hours of the disaster. 3.6 roentgen would be plenty bad, but not horrible--roughly speaking, depending on the radiation, it would equate a less then a 5% increased probability of dying of cancer. Later, more accurate measurements suggested 15,000 roentgen of radiation, meaning the initial estimates were off by a factor of 4000<sup>[2]</sup>. Mixed with Dyatlov's otherwise insane behavior in the hours after the explosion, the entire internet made the man a meme in the aftermath of the 2019 miniseries, with the "3.6 Roentgen" line particularly being widely memed on.

<sup>[1]</sup> Why yes, the Soviet system ''was'' horribly dysfunctional, thanks for asking. To be clear, though, it wasn't really the limitation on the regular dosimeters (3.6 Roentgen is okay for day-to-day operation) or keeping the heavy-duty (and thus expensive) ones under lock. The truly stupendous part is not having the guy with the key on site when running a reactor test, nor breaking those out the very instant something weird happened and by something weird we mean '''the entire reactor room blowing up and igniting a fire'''.<br><sup>[2]</sup> For scale, that's a bit like a claim that something is a foot long, when it's actually 3/4 of a mile long; or a claim that something lasted a second when it actually lasted over an hour, or a claim that something lasted an hour when it actually lasted ''5 months''.

[[Category:Meme]]