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Putting A Lid On Chernobyl
slicer622 writes "Chernobyl is finally getting a containment structure (Washington Post). Billed as the largest moveable structure ever built, its designed to help take apart the wreckage and keep most of the radioactive material from spreading. It will be 800 feet across, and 300 feet high and will cost $800 mil."
It will be 800 feet across, and 300 feet high and will cost $800 mil.
The dome itself will not cost $800 million, the whole project, including cleaning up inside the dome once it's there, will cost $768 million.
- Peter
About 7 years ago they built a huge concrete wall that goes underground and is meant to stop the flow of groundwater(to some extent) from the contaminated areas. The last I read of this said that the wall had begun to fail. The Pripyat River, which was Chernobyl's water supply, was severely contaminated.
This map shows the "hot zone." It actually covers quite a large area.
A lot of stories about the Chernobyl accident can be found here.
Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster On April 25th -26th, 1986 the World's worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). The Chernobyl nuclear power plant located 80 miles north of Kiev had 4 reactors and whilst testing reactor number 4 numerous safety procedures were disregarded. At 1:23am the chain reaction in the reactor became out of control creating explosions and a fireball which blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid.
The Chernobyl accident killed more than 30 people immediately, and as a result of the high radiation levels in the surrounding 20-mile radius, 135,00 people had to be evacuated.
according to this article The impact on wildlife and even humans is not as worse as people thought it would be.
For example: Years ago, some researchers theorized that a severe nuclear accident like the one at Chernobyl would cause such severe genetic damage that animals would be born showing drastic changes in appearance. So far, the Chernobyl accident has not borne that out, the researchers note.
and
"For instance, there are probably two million people in the contaminated areas, and only a few thousand are actually sick from diseases than can be reasonably linked to the high levels of radioactive contaminants. We really don't know why this is yet," said Dallas.
Uh, no.
First of all, neutrons are stopped fairly easily by minimal shielding. Most of the irradiated debris would not get bombarded by a single neutron from that neutron bomb.
Secondly, adding a neutron to an atom will have wildly differing effects depending on many factors such as the speed of the neutron, the geometry of the collision, and the nuclear structure of the atom. Some atoms, such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other light elements tend to form stable or long-lived isotopes that give off fairly low levels of radiation. Others, such as uranium, can form highly radioactive elements and can start limited chain reactions - not a good idea in a closed environment. Take a look at this site for more information on nuclear chemistry.
One last thing you should know is that a neutron bomb is not a totally "clean" bomb. It still has a pretty decent amount of radioactive fallout, it just tends to produce quicker forms of radiation which will dissipate more easily. There will still be a fairly "hot" zone which will only add to the bad situation in Chernobyl.
Still, this is probably just a troll judging from your comment about the whole mess being cleaned up in a week. I thought you trolls were attending some sort of training sessions on how to be subtle? If you are then you had better take a refresher course on troll techniques, the first one didn't take.
Sapere aude!