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Chernobyl (Finally) Shuts Down
wpanderson writes "The Ukrainian nuclear power station at Chernobyl has finally been closed down by President Leonid Kuchma, according to the BBC News.
The plant has been plagued with problems - the most public and visible was the failure of Reactor 4 on 26th April 1986, although there have been more problems since. The most recent was a "malfunction" in Reactor 3 which caused a shutdown, just 9 days before the closure date.
Although the plant is now closed, and the Ukrainian government has pledged not to use the site for electricity generation again, it will "be 2008 before the fuel rods can be safely removed from the plant".
There are quite a few pictures taken inside the ill-fated Reactor 4 (cyrillic link) for the morbid!"
Go to the "Power" button, drop menu down to "Power Plants", and plop down a coal plant for $6,000 in some cleared space.
Or better yet, raise some terrain, and add a water space for $40, and then a hydrodam for $400, and viola, more power!.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
American reactors do not require weapons-grade uranium to function; they typically have new fuel enriched to around 4.some-odd percent in U-235. Weapons-grade is, shall we say, higher than that.
Many university research reactors used highly enriched fuel because they were significantly smaller and would not be going through repeated fuel cycles. The perceived terrorist threat has since caused many to change their configurations in such a way as to use lower-enrichment fuels. As an example, at the time I attended my alma mater the reactor was fueled with 90% U-235 and shortly after my graduation they moved to a 20% enrichment design. The 90% fuel elements are still in the pool, however, so I'm not entirely sure how the "terrorist threat" has been reduced...but I digress.
The advantage of the CANDU is that by using a heavy water moderator instead of light water, they can use natural uranium and not enrich at all. Of course, you can also refule on the fly, which makes the CANDU a risk for proliferants -- and when you have to shut down your LWR every 18 months for refueling it gives you a built-in opportunity to perform inspection and maintenance of the entire facility. Don't knock the value of that.
Lest this degenerate into a cross-border "Our reactors are better than yours", let me hasten to state the obvious, that each design has features which can be considered good or bad depending on your priorities.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
My neighbor was a soldier when he got his dose. In a military experiment. Soemthing went wrong and only he survived the Hell. He lived in a town like anyone else. Truly it was a damn picture to see him.
I met a few "Chernobyl liquidators", yes they have a lot of damn stories about the accident and what happened later. But no one has ever told such BS that KGB forced them down. What they told was that the government jerks didn't told all about at the beginning, but that anyway many realized that things were deadly and there is a job to be done no matter the risks.
Not all plants are breeder plants. Go to FAS (www.fas.org) if you trust only american sources.
Chelyabinsk? Aren't your doctor messing something. Yes there is a "living graveyard" and guarded by military. But not to hold people but to hold a deadly nature. There is a dump that broke and radiation entered sorrounding waters and a lake. Everyone knows about that place, TV, newspapers talk about it, and it is known as the "living graveyard".
Your damn doctor should be more careful getting sources. He talks a whole BS about things we know. Chernobyl liquidators live in towns and die in them. Yes the were underpaid and the government is a bastard. The same way US gorvernment is a bastard for shutting down stories about soldiers getting high doses in Nevada, during the 50's, or hidding the whole picture of Agent Orange, or the consequences of Desert Storm. Here both governments don't make a great difference.
And today the Russian government is not KGB in suits. That ended. We are living in a bad but real democracy. Even the ultra-secret Novaya Zemlya and Semipalatinsk are relatively known. There are even photos in journals and newspapers of the greatest "OOOPS" of all History of Mankind. Lake Death - something several orders bigger than Chernobyl, Bikini or TMI.
You're a damn STUPID troll. That's what you are. I managed to be in Kiev for some time a year after the accident. And my accounts don't give any picture near your stupid xenophobic babbling. People were evacuated from nearby regions and from Pripyat city in promptu. However radiation seem to have caught some. There were abortions and mutations among some of these people after the accident. Some caught cancer.
However the government decided to not create panic over Kiev, a city nearby Chernobyl. And Hell there are a lot of places in Kiev that caught radioactivity. Once I got caught in one near Kiev. For nearly 6 months I had a good time, together with a few colleagues.
That's what I saw. HUGE irresponsability. Hiding of facts. A damn confusion. People suffering and not being cared at propper level. Suspected KGB officers saying the HELL of their bosses and burrocritters for being cowards and lazy on dealing with this critical stuff. And I saw Russians and Ukranians saying "we passed October, we passed civil war and we passed the World Wars. We pass this one".
If you don't get the point let me tell you one thing. There is nothing tougher than Russians. Their society is based in a sometimes ingenuous but strong collectivism and voluntarism. And they are a Hell when things get hot. I saw people running 100km/h on trucks under blizzard conditions at -45 to hope to get a near airfield. I saw people carrying by hand 18 tons of products through an airfield at running speed. Hands freezing like hell, wind blowing through your face, the airplane cargo door completely stuck and 10 guys carrying the whole damn shit through the small side door. And why this? Because the jerks in Moscow didn't do their FUCKING job and did everything up-side-down. Now no one gets sit and waits that the Sun comes shiny in Moscow and the boss gets a fresh morning. there is a job to do, and damn we do it! And besides, the supplies were not for us but for another site. We had enough food to hold a month more...
Btw -I got several burns and knocked my spine in this stuff. However I did what I should do.
There are still 14 other reactors of the same design in operation at other powerplants around the former Soviet Union. I have not heard of any plans to shut these down. With Chernobyl being the most visible of these, it's closure will very likely take the heat off the others, and they will continue operating with almost no one giving it a second thought, until the next major failure.
.^
^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
A lot of the pictures (and other neat stuff) were taken from the inside Chernobyl by Pioneer, a robot devoloped by students at Carnegie Mellon University.
- Among the longest-lived of the strong fission products is strontium-90. Its half-life is 28 years. If you stored it for 30 half-lives (840 years), there would be about one-billionth of the original amount left. We can consider that "gone". 840 years is about 1/6 the age of the oldest pyramid in Egypt.
- The long-lived products are mostly transuranics, which are valuable as nuclear fuel. Throwing them away as waste is technically stupid, but the Greenies who demand an end to nuclear power favor it because they don't want to see the neptunium, plutonium etc. go away both physically and as a political issue.
- The earth is full of toxic materials which will never disappear, like lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic. Coal plants may emit more toxins as mercury than are produced by a nuclear plant, and the nuclear plant's stuff will eventually disappear even if you do nothing.
- The toxicity of most trans-uranics is over-rated. A number of people contaminated with plutonium have lived long, healthy lives.
(What's this obsession people have with shooting things into the sun? Don't they know any orbital mechanics? This is many times as difficult as shooting it off to infinity, and we won't even get into the hazards of launch-vehicle failures. But I digress.) Given that the stuff can be reprocessed into something that becomes nearly harmless within a millenium, and that we can feed the rest back into the cycle and get rid of it, does that change your evaluation? Personally I would not want a sodium-moderated plant near me for two reasons:- Hot alkali metals are corrosive, not to mention explosion hazards if water is involved.
- You could use lead or a lead-bismuth alloy as a coolant instead, and get a nice inert liquid which gives you a gamma-ray shield in the bargain.
If the roads won't work, there are always helicopters. Three days is enough to get a cargo-lifter to California from anywhere in the USA. This is far less of a problem, even in the worst of circumstances, than you seem to think. The reactor containment buildings can survive a direct hit by an airliner, and inland US areas haven't been hit by enemy action during a war in the last century. I can't imagine the kind of disaster which would produce the kind of problem you're postulating, buta.) Most of us would have much bigger problems than the core cooling systems, and
b.) a nuclear plant's toughness might make it one of the safest places to be!
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Coca-cola has just decided to cease production of Coke with traces of cocaine...
Tylenol is sealing their pill bottles to prevent tampering...
People are encrypting their messages using public-key systems and not simple substitution ciphers...
There's been a knife in my eye for ten days and I just pulled it out...
Oh, wait, these things were done years ago or would be done immediately. Why wasn't Chernobyl shut down after it turned parts of Russia into a comic book fantasy?
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
So when do the big trucks move in and start covering this mess up so that the land can eventually be used again? Until the entire site is under a large amount of SOMETHING (sand, concrete or marshmellow puff) the site will continue to be a hazzard even if it isn't producing power.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I must agree... The potential of nuclear power is grossly underestimated by the uninformed public, and the dangers generally overplayed. When was the last time you heard mention of radiation on the evening news without the word 'deadly' in front of it? And yet, radiation is a fact of the universe, whether you're sunning on the beach or working in a coal mine. Its 'deadliness' is in how its treated... and in the past 20 years, the nuclear power industry as a whole has made significant progress in safety practices.
;-) )
Not that they've had any choice. As one author wrote, all utilities with nuclear plants are 'hostages of each other'. Everyone knows that one more heavily-publicized Major Disaster will spell the end of an otherwise worthy industry, no matter how unsafe and environmentally unsound the alternatives may be. If one company messes up, everyone suffers. Therefore, for most utilities, constant vigilance and high standards of safety are the rule.
I wouldn't say it's absolutely pointless to argue the merits. There are good companies out there that haven't given up on nuclear. As energy in the US is deregulated, the more efficient energies will have a significant competitive advantage. The future is as yet to be written. But of course, there always have been and always will always be the less-than-perfectly-informed masses. Ever wonder if there was a Prehistoric Greenpeace dedicated to ending the use of fire or the wheel?
And who knows? Maybe after global society collapses and we've been through another Dark Ages lasting a couple hundred years, someone in the Second Renaissance find some plans left behind by the Ancients of Candu... (kidding, of course.
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Yes nuclear does produce waste, but it can be contained with less environ impact than that of coal. What represents a pinprick on the map of the US can store a lot of nuclear waste. Coal devastates far more space (eg. a lot of the state of WV).
Yup. Now, not that nuclear waste isn't without its risks. Certainly, it is. But it's small and containable, though highly dangerous stuff.
This being said, if there were a nuclear waste handling facility near my home, it wouldn't bother me. The real estate would be cheap, and it would be a lot safer (and quieter!) than living under a big airport's flight path. It's just a question of risk assessment.
Yeah, I'd have to put a new tube into my geiger counter and keep it on, but that's just part of my way of dealing with the risk of being in that location. Same thing if I were living on the Pacific rim: there'd be a seismograph bolted to my basement floor. It's a risk. Still less than driving my truck on the freeway to work every day.
Lastly, nuclear waste does not spontaneously explode like a nuclear bomb unlike a depiction in a crummy made for tv movie that people probably take for fact. Nor do plants themselves.No. Nuclear waste gets hot and changes chemically as elements are transmuted from one to another. But this process is well understood and managed.
As for the exploding plants, Chernobyl, being graphite-moderated enriched uranium, is an extremely dangerous design. (Can we think all the stereotypes of the Ford Pinto and the Chevrolet Corvair built into one car, only a thousand times worse? That's how dangerous an RBMK is.) And, even so, it took a *lot* of safety violations and operator stupidity to cause that thing to run away. A staggering number of things that you just don't do, were done there.
You know, things that you just don't do. Like in a car, doing 100 miles an hour, you just don't turn the wheel as hard in either direction as you can. Basic sense of having been around a car and knowing how hard to turn the wheel around a corner at 10 miles an hour give you some measure of understanding of what would happen at 100 miles an hour.
And yet at Chernobyl, they kept trying and trying and trying, doing one stupid ill-advised thing after another, in flagrant violation of all common sense when running a nuclear reactor, until it finally blew up.
This is like driving a 1971 Pinto with a full tank of premium gas down the Santa Monica freeway, and slamming on the brakes as hard as you can when you see an 18-wheeler behind you.
You just don't.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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-Ando[EViLMEDiC]
- Ando
Let me address these one at a time.
Yes, Zoller said that they were working on Nuclear Hand grenades.
As for the special security clearance: No. His security clearance was due to the fact that he worked with nuclear weapons for the military. As for the permission to talk to his class and individuals, but not the press- this has something to do with what he saw through the military, vs. what he saw through the UN. I really don't know much about the protocol; Apparently he saw things working as a UN inspector that doubled what he saw through his military service. When he wrote to DC, they told him he couldn't make statements in front of press, and had to ask press members to leave. Look, I really don't know much about press and the military and what not.
Next: The MP's. He told something in a [previous] class that one of his students later told his father, who was in the military. The students father happened to know something about the matter, and reported it. Days later, MP's showed up in Zoller's office and required him to show his papers granting permission. I don't know what the subject matter was; it had something to do with a river. I really don't know.
His work in discovering the source of the fallout: The 1st people to tell that something was wrong were some people who were working in a nuclear lab somewhere NW of Cherynooble; I forget what the country was. (It wasn't Russia). Nuclear plant workers test themselves for radioactivity after they enter some sort of dangerous area, but just by chance, a worker decided to investigate himself before entering. He had been in the rain before coming to work. When he tested himself, he found that he was radioactive. The people in the plant worked to figure out what was wrong, and they figured out that the rain outside was radioactive. They reported it.
A short while after, Professor Zoller got a phone call from the military. He wasn't an active serviceman then, I think. I think he'd already left the military at this time, and was at the University of Washington (I forget.) They had arranged for airplane tickets for him to fly down to the bay area (I think). He took the flight (on a commercial airplane), and when it landed, before they unboarded everyone, he was specifically unboarded by the military. They took him to a lab where they had some substance. They told him (and other nuclear chemists with him) to analyze it and tell them what it was. They analyzed it for many days, and reported, "This is rainwater that has been contaminated; a nuclear reactor has exploded somewhere." They said, "That's right." (They wanted to verify that it was true- this is before we all knew about it.) He then helped with the determination of which plant blew up. The Russians were denying that anything had happened at all! Zoller has worked in environmental scientists and was a part of figuring out where the accident happened. He showed us maps that they had, of where the various reactors were, and showed us how the figured that it must have been the Chrenobyl plant. That was his role in determining that it had happened. The world didn't know about it till afterwards..!
As for the "Radioactive Seattle Fish": I can assure you, the fish in Seattle are quite tasty, and I imagine uncontaminated as well. Professor Zoller's predictions were that in 10 years, however, the situation will be different. As for this stuff, I refer you to the arctic environmental reports that I linked to above. Zoller claims that the EPA knows about the dangers in our Arctic sea. Right now, he says though, it's not their problem. I don't know what their permissions are like; Zoller seemed to imply that they were not supposed to talk about it.
My personal view of Russians is not xenophobic; I personally tutor a 16 year old Russian in computer science. He doesn't pay me anything; I just noticed talent in him, and decided to help him learn Computer Science. (It was painful just watching him play a MUD when he could be developing his skills and having more fun then typing the "n" "s" "e" and "w" keys.) He's very nice. I'm kinda trying to convince him that communism isn't the way to go, but he's really adament about it. I think he's just a little young and naive. He's leaning more towards socialism now, which I guess is better.
I suspect as long as there is Love in everyone's hearts, it doesn't matter WHAT type of government you have. Hell, you could probably have a fascist state if everyone was warm and caring.
Zoller's another story. He doesn't have the greatest things to say about the Russian culture. <shrug> I don't think that makes him a liar or an exaggerator though. He believes that the Russians have had troubles with corruption before Stalin even. He said that their history has been really bad, and that they've been suffering a lot, throughout history.
I'm really not a Russian historian. I don't know a thing about Russia.
There's a guy posting here (ekeen, or something like that). He might be a better person to ask about the Russian spirit.
At no point have I said that Russians have no respect for human life.
As for Remembering that my prof is a human: Yes, that's true. I can't really tell what parts of what Zoller has said are precise and which are not. Hell, I'm operating off of memory, and that's even worse..! But the essence of what Zoller has said is very clear in my mind. Anyways, I can't discriminate on something in Zoller's mind, so tell you what: I'll just recount as much I can.
It was quite a different story than I had ever heard before...
Hopefully this doesn't dissuade the people from adopting future nuclear ventures as I still think this is a viable energy source.
As for the final resolution of Chernobyl: remove as much of the fuel as possible, and begin to bury it as a permament reminder of the risks of experimenting outside of laboratory/controlled conditions.
And as for the people, they worked hard and bravely, and managed to turn a Significant Disaster(tm) to a major disaster. They should be proud of the work required to even recover from it.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I think you mean to say that the future is fusion power. Fusion involves the joining of two atoms into one, and the energy is released due to the decrease in total mass. Fission is the splitting of large atoms, and the energy is released due to (??? I forget)
Rebuttal time: There is no perfectly clean power source. You may claim that fossil fuels are safer than nuclear fuels, but have you ever seen smog in a city, or listened to the chronic coughs of someone who lives in that every day? And that's just from cars. The coal generating stations of the USian middle-north (whatever you call that area) alone dump thousands of tons of pollutants into the sky, most of which drift over into Canada. This isn't an anti-american post, but I'm just pointing out that the effects of these plants are far-reaching indeed. In fact, it has been determined that it is acid rain from these coal power plants that are destroying the maple tree forests in Quebec, and putting many of their owners out of (syrup making) business.
This is one easily recognizable area where nuclear fission has a distinct advantage. The byproducts of the reactions are relatively small, and completely contained. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't a bunch of them sitting in a (modified) swimming pool somewhere? Fossil fuel plants dump thousands of tons (or maybe millions) into the ecosystems, and there is no way to contain them. I'd personally rather have one pound of solid waste that I knew was hazardous than breathe contaminated air and be slowly poisoned over my entire lifetime.
I feel it is my open mind which has allowed me to avoid the fear-mongering surrounding nuclear power. As such, I will read all replies with the same open mind. If there is anyone who wants to debate the safety of a properly designed and properly run nuclear power plant, state your arguments.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Here is a nice map: http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran/
The disaster at Chernobyl was the final nail in the coffin of nuclear fission generators, and when the last one is shut down, I suspect that I'll be one of the only people not cheering.
Nuclear power should have (and in almost all cases has) lived up to much of it's "great promise." Properly done, it is cheap, efficient, and safe.
Safe? That's right--it's hard to come up with a safer form of electricity than a good reactor. Coal? Not a chance! Hydropower? Maybe, but it's not very 'environmentally clean.'
But popular opinion matters more than facts, and one disaster like Chernobyl (which still hasn't killed a fraction as many people as coal) will push popular opinion over the edge.
Here's the problem: Chernobyl-class reactors are badly designed, lacking in a lot of safety features, and fairly scary. It STILL took years of substandard maintenance, lack of care, bad luck, and gross negligence on the part of several operators to kick off the meltdown. In a well maintained and properly designed reactor (CANDU!!!), an operator _couldn't_ cause that kind of disaster, no matter how they tried.
But it's pointless to argue the merits. Nuclear power is on its way out. Ah well. Hopefully we'll get serious about wind before long.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
That there are still several aging Chernobyl class reactors still in use.
In Lithuania, for example, the Ignalina plant provides something like 80% of the countries electricity, and is rapidly approaching the end of it's life. The problem is that they can't afford to shut it down, and they can barely afford to keep it running.
We're not out of the woods yet; the Chernobyl legacy will play out for many years to come.
One (slightly used) glow-in-the-dark water heater, near-mint condition. Still operates with the efficiency and safety it did when it was new.
Currently listed as item number #102934613 on ebay.
Buyer assumes all liability for maintenence, disposal and heating costs. Buy now and I'll throw in free shipping!
As is usually the case in any accident, a number of things combined to cause this one at Chernobyl. Unlike power
reactors operating in the U.S. and other nations, the Chernobyl RBMK reactor (which is a graphite rather than a
light water system) has a built-in instability that occurs at low power, which is how the reactor was operating at
the time of the accident. If some of the cooling water in this reactor converts to steam, the RBMK increases in
power. This in turn causes more steam to form, which causes _another_ increase in power. (In Western light
water reactors, the power decreases.)
The power increase feature of the RBMK caused a rupture in the cooling system and a large steam explosion
occurred. This caused the cooling system to fail and the outer covering (or cladding) of the fuel elements to
increase in temperature. The cladding was hot enough to react with the steam, causing hydrogen to form. The
hydrogen then caused a second explosion. The release of this energy set the graphite core on fire.
In spite of its dangerous features, the RBMK -- unlike other reactors -- had no actual containment structure to
prevent release of contamination. Such a design could not be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in
this country, nor in most countries of the world. Studies done since the Chernobyl accident have shown that its
releases would have been successfully contained by a U.S. type reactor. As a matter of fact, a test of a 37-foot
tall scale model of a nuclear plant containment building was made at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico
in 1987. The test showed that the type of light water containment used at U.S. nuclear plants could withstand
more than three times the pressure it was designed for without rupturing or fragmenting.
A second factor in the Chernobyl accident involved a safety experiment being conducted. It required that the
reactor be run in a very unusual manner. Because of a series of operational problems, the operators found
themselves running the reactor far outside its safety limits. In their efforts to finish the experiment anyway, the
operators --in spite of running the reactor under unfamiliar conditions-- turned off seven of the safety systems in
the reactor and its control systems. Any one of these seven automatic controls could have prevented the accident
had it been on.
All this reflects important differences between Western and Soviet operators and their training. Unlike the Soviets,
U.S. reactor operators take continued training in classroom situations and on reactor simulators. Further, operators
in Western countries are strictly bound by what are called "technical specifications" which forbid operation of the
reactor outside of preset safety limits. All of which could be debaitable anyway.
Trust the source!
The accident at Chernobyl came about from the decision to conduct a specific low-power test; namely, if the plant scrammed and lost its connection to outside sources of power, would the residual power from decay products be enough to run the coolant pumps and so forth?
To drop the plant to a power level that would simulate that scenario, they had to move through several instability regions where the nuclear properties of the moderator and coolant caused positive feedback loops and the reactor's safety mechanisms kept "getting in the way". Xenon buildup made it difficult to work around these problems, and since the test was being conducted in the middle of the night and the reactor physicists were all snug in their beds, on-site personnel decided to disable the safety control mechanisms. They had the reactor down at (if memory serves) 30 kW or some trivial number when they hit another feedback loop. In the course of the next few seconds, the temperature of the coolant rose with the power level (power spiked to something like 30,000MW in a tenth of a second), the coolant then flashed into steam, the steam pressure blew the roof off the building, and the 3,000 degree graphite moderator was exposed to the air, at which time it burst into flame, cracked, and generaly became a Problem.
The RMBK design of reactor has positive reactivity coefficients. It's a "bad" design in that it requires intervention when the laws of physics want to put it on a runaway. However, unless things go horribly awry, human operators are more than capable of operating such a reactor safely.
The problem at Chernobyl was not the reactor, but the people operating it. Many people around the world want to see nuclear power eliminated because even with the safer designs of the Western world, a ragingly inept (or malicious) employee with access to the wrong places can make Bad Things happen. To me, that's the wrong reaction; a spiteful mechanic at United Airlines could cause the deaths of hundreds of people but we don't see a call for the elimination of air travel.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
One of the interesting things about Chernobylite is that it appears to be made from fuel melting into the sand which surrounded the reactor itself. We are working on converting radwaste into a glass form for final disposal, and this got there quite by accident. It also did a remarkable job of flowing without melting through things; it's all over the floors, but doesn't appear to have gone any significant distance though them. If someone wanted to budget the money for the robots and such, it shouldn't be terribly hard to break the stuff into chunks using hammers and shovel it up into canisters to cart away. In any event, it's not an immediate problem because it's quite well immobilized as-is. The bigger problem is the stuff on the ground floor of the building that's in small particles or dust form, because it can be leached or blown into the air by a building collapse or just the wind.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
From the page: (credit, copyrights go to Chernobyl Charity Online, please visit their site)
-Erik
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-Erik
Good, it was an unsafe design anyhow
Heheh... Positive control coefficient, and a moderator that doesn't boil away.
It was an *insane* design, bordering almost on the criminal.
And yeah, there are still more than a dozen of the damned things running.
<sigh> I know that the RBMK reactor was designed for three goals: price, efficiency, and plutonium production (for weapons). And since that didn't include safety, I guess the engineers got what they wanted.
I'm all for nuclear power. You can't burn fossil fuels because of price per MWh and emissions. You can't build damns everywhere, because there are great environmental consequences to those - and they're only practical where there's a large river. (ie. Hoover Damn powers a lot of L.A., but how far from L.A. is it, with resulting efficiency losses in the lines?) You can't build tidal, wind or solar plants yet, because the technology still isn't practical even in the parts of the world that energy is abundant enough to effectively harness.
Western Europe has been shutting down its nuclear plants and increasing its reliance on natural gas. Fine, gas is easy to manage and it's clean as far as fossil fuels go. It's also abundant in neighboring Russia.
Ironically, as Western Europe shuts down its reactors, Russia keeps on commissioning and retrofitting their pressurized water and dangerous RBMK reactors so that they don't have to divert any natural gas that would otherwise be sold to Europe.
As is usual with the policies enforced by environmental lobby groups, it backfired. Fine, the reactors in Western Europe are being shut down. And replaced with far more dangerous Russian reactors. Good work, you stupid long-haired hippie tree-huggers. (Ooops. I have long hair and I like Five Man Electrical Band, I guess I can't insult hippies.)
Before you moderate me down for saying that environmentalists are idiots, check out this link, which has to do very specifically with the Russian reactors vs. Western Europe natural gas fiasco. While environmentalists are full of great intentions, they're generally ignorant of science or the basic fundamentals of how a marketplace economy works.
Like it or not, nuclear power is going to be here for a while.
Let's encourage safe and responsible use of nuclear power, at least until something more practical comes along. Let's try to not ban nuclear power, but to ban RBMK reactors.
Let's see a day when all the running nuclear reactors in the world have *negative* control coefficients (ie. won't run without a moderator) and use a moderator that will boil off and shut down the reactor in the case of an overheat.
Back when I was in high school, I got a summer internship down the road from Ottawa at a place called Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories. This was the home of Canada's nuclear program, and is one of those rare things that makes me proud to be a Canadian. Canada still leads the world in civilian nuclear technology.
At the time, they had three big research reactors there - the decommissionned "ZEEP" (Zero Energy Experimental Pile, put out *one watt* of heat, built in 1944 for the war effort and has a colorful history), the vertical-loading National Research eXperimental "NRX" (since decommissionned) and the horizontal-loading NRU. All three were of the CANDU design, though the ZEEP and NRX were very primitive.
I was assigned to the NRX. Every day, I'd travel from Deep River to Chalf River, don my dosimeter, walk through the checkpoints and head to the reactor. It was great fun, helping out with experiments. And irradiating golf balls for increased driving distance.
There was a Commodore PET on top of the reactor, and it used to record and monitor the temperature throughout different parts of the reactor vessel. Then, there were the tube computers (no kidding!) with ferrite core memories which were used to provide more critical functions. (Semiconductors don't like ionizing radiation if the reactor leaked, tubes are a lot more forgiving.)
And, let me tell you, there's no feeling in the world quite like standing there, on top of the reactor, looking down 30 feet or so to the people below you, feeling the slight vibration of the pumps running all around, and the sheer sense of power in the room as the reactor below you runs.
Food was forbidden in the reactor buildings, because ingestion of bits of radioactive dust was an (unlikely) possibility. Even so, people did eat there occasionally, and I was no exception, though you become very careful with the geiger counters before you put it in your mouth. Because there was (officially) no food allowed in the building, there was no kitchen, so hot snacks were a rarity. Canned stew was a special favorite: the cans fit right into the (sealed) sample tubes. Drop them in at the top, lower them slowly through the reactor, and then retrieve them at the bottom. If you timed it just right, the can was nice and warm. If you got distracted, the can burst and you'd have to clean out the sample tube. (And no, this was not a good idea, but it didn't put anyone at risk besides those of us who ate the food, and we all knew perfectly well how the food had been cooked.)
I'd have gone into nuclear physics as a career if I could have handled the math. <grin>
My favorite reactor design is the CANDU (CANadian Deuterium-Uranium). It's an elegant design. Uranium 238 ("natural uranium") is used instead of the U-235 used in most other reactors. U-235 requires the added steps of processing and is also vulnerable for use in weapons.
The moderator in a CANDU reactor is heavy water; deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen. Deuterium is a rare but naturally-occurring isotope of hydrogen. It's ordinary hydrogen in every respect, except for the fact that there's a neutron in the nucleus. It's not radiactive (unlike hydrogen with two neutrons, called "tritium", which *is* radioactive). Deuterium water is heavier than regular water, simply because of that neutron in the hydrogen.
The heavy water serves as the moderator. It slows down the fast-moving neutrons coming off the U-238 so that they can sustain the fission chain reaction. Light (ordinary) water will not sustain this reaction - nor will no water.
Let's say everything fails. The computers go down, the control rods are all jammed out of the core, and the operators are idiots. A Chernobyl accident still cannot occur. It's physically impossible.
If a CANDU reactor gets out of control and overheats, the moderator (heavy water) can be drained away, shutting down the reactor. You can't do that with blocks of graphite like an RBMK reactor. With a CANDU, if there's a problem and the operator doesn't drain the moderator away, eventually a pressurized pipe will burst and the moderator will boil away. With no moderator, the reactor will cease to work. Since the fuel is uranium in non-water-soluble ceramic pellets, there will be minimal decay daughters in the resulting steam cloud. Which will be contained anyway in the concrete reactor house, which is held under a vacuum to prevent release.
Unlike Chernobyl, which drastically overheated. The solid graphite moderator began to burn. And still the chain reaction continued to produce heat, because the graphite moderator was still there... it burned for 9 days.
Let's take all those unemployed Chernobyl workers to see a CANDU or similar reactor in operation, train them extensively on it, and then help them build them to replace their aging and rickety designs.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The Chernobyl accident is far from over. I attended a special lecture by Professor William Zoller at the University of Washington, in which he described what happened, and is continuing to happen, at Chernobyl. It is not an entertaining lecture to attend. He told us a lot of things.
Professor Zoller showed us images of the radioactive goo at the bottom of the reacter. He told us that 3 people died to get the picture. The government just kept sending people down with cameras until someone went down, took a picture, and survived the trip back up, and then died. (Prof. Zoller was functioning as a UN inspector, or something. I have forgotten just what he was doing over there.)
If there are pictures of the interior of the building where the accident occured, you can pretty much assume people died to take them.
No, they didn't send robots to take those pictures.
All Russian nuclear plants were breeder plants. Apparently, they wanted plutonium for their weapons. Nuclear submarines, and, yes, NUCLEAR HANDGRENADES are the stupidest ideas in history, but, hey... There wasn't/isn't exactly a concern for human life over there.
Arctic dumping was the primary means of evacuating radioactive waste. Rivers were also a way of getting the waste out of there. As far as I can tell, people panicked, and thought, "Well, if we just dump this in the sea, it'll all just go away." In 10 years time, here in Seattle, we'll be told not to eat our fish. (This is according to Professor Zoller.) He also claims that the EPA knows about this, but is required to keep quiet. But, they continue to monitor the radioactivity of boats coming in on the ports here in Seattle.
The so-called "Brave Firefighters" who put out the fire were not brave. They were forced to put it out by the KGB.
There is a place called Chelyabink-Tomask (unfortunately, I don't have my notes with me and cannot spell the name correctly.) that is a living graveyard, guarded by the military; They are essentially, waiting to die. Nobody goes out, nobody goes in.
You can verify this yourself by contacting him. He will ask you if you are a member of the press. If you are, he is not allowed to talk about it with you. So ask him personally.
I wonder if posting an email to Slashdot is equivelent to being a member of the press.?
These notes are from my memory, not my written notes; I'm afraid there will probably be imprecise. But they are accurate. That is, what is described is true, though I may have numbers and names wrong. His lecture scared me immensly. The room had only about 10% of the people in it by the time he finished...
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