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kingdragonfly: Why did Russians take Chornobyl?

What makes Chernobyl really nasty is that the radiation is very unevenly distributed, it's not that the soil is uniformly moderately radioactive, it's that most of it barely shows any activity and then scattered all over it are small, incredibly hot fragments of ejected reactor core (alongside areas where irradiated equipment was dumped, which is different). So instead of getting an overall moderate dose, you get extreme doses concentrated in very small areas, which is far more damaging. The other danger about moving the soil around is that it's going to create dust, some of which you'll breathe in, which means you now have alpha particle emitters inside your lungs. So the threat isn't so much generic "radioactive soil" but in the short term effects of exposure to concentrated high-activity sources and in the long term lung cancer.

Something that really surprised me about the Fukushima meltdown was the extremely localised pockets of radiation.

In Fukushima City, around 50 km from the power plant, the radiation readings outside my front door were barely above background levels, and one upstairs balcony had very high levels, whereas another didn't. It all seemed to be related to eddies of dust or how the wind blew, and was totally unpredictable.

The insidious, invisible nature of radiation made for a stressful time. Sales of Geiger counters (mainly Russian-made!) went through the roof.