[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by IamIan

If you or anyone was to try and 'live' in the event area today long term .. even decades after the 'clean up' .. because they were under the false idea that the risk was less than smoking .. It is very likely to kill you in just a few years.

Except that there are people who've lived there ever since it happened. A link to one article, the first of many that can be found: Opinion: After Chernobyl, they refused to leave - CNN.com

an unlikely community of some 130 people, called "self-settlers" who, today, live inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Almost all of them are women, the men having died off due to overuse of alcohol and cigarettes, if not the effects of elevated radiation. About 116,000 people were evacuated from the Zone at the time of the accident. Some 1,200 of them did not accept that fate. Of that group, the remaining women, now in their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of a group that defied authorities -- and it would seem, common sense -- and illegally returned to their ancestral homes shortly after the accident.
...
They lived through Stalin's Holodomor -- the genocide-by famine of the 1930s that wiped out millions of Ukrainians -- and then the Nazis in the1940s. Some of the women were shipped to Germany as forced labor. When the Chernobyl accident happened a few decades into Soviet rule, they were simply unwilling to flee an enemy that was invisible.
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Five happy years, the settlers logic went, is better than 15 condemned to a high-rise on the outskirts of Kyiv.
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Of the old people who relocated, one Chernobyl medical technician, whose job is to give annual radiation exposure tests to zone workers said: "Quite simply, they die of anguish."
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There aren't studies to refer to (after all, semi-legal marginalized old women living on radioactive land are hardly a civic or research priority) but surprisingly these women who returned home have, according to local officials and journalists who have kept track of them, seem to have outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation -- by some estimates, up to 10 years.