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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."
I always wondered what a Quake 3 map would look like in real life... :)
:)
For those of you who map, you'll know what I'm talking about.
"The shelter is designed to keep water out and dust in for 100 years"
Great, in 2108 we are screwed again.
what happens if the existing "sarcophagus" fails after the bigger one is built over top of it? Couldn't this still be a disasterous problem? After all, I've heard before that if it were to cave in, it'd be like having the accident all over again.
Because Chernobyl Fallout.
Ties in nicely with the story today about radioactive Christmas trees being sold by russian businessmen.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I'm curious about how much the surrounding areas have been irradiated...as far as how much the 'hot zone' has grown. Has anyone given any concern to the groundwater contamination? The dome is a great plan to prevent atmospheric contaminants, but I've not seen any below-ground plans. This seems like a half-baked (no pun intended) plan to me...at least they're doing SOMETHING.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
They want to reopen Chernobyl. This article states "Officials from the European Bank for Reconstruction have criticised plans by the Ukrainian authorities to reopen a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. They say they are concerned about the safety of reactor number three, which sits next to the remains of the world's worst nuclear disaster, because of a failure to put in place extra safety measures that had been agreed. " Here is a link about the facilities.
I'm pretty sure that Reactor 3 is shut down now, but that only happened recently.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Chernobyl is named for a small, bitter herb, "chernoblis", that grows in the region. Of course, that's the Ukranian word. In English, the herb is called "wormwood."
...
No joke.
Of course, to quote my father when he heard that, "That's nonsense. Chernobyl wasn't a star. A star is a
!!!
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Leave it to the Russians to come up with a solution that is, in essence, one big matrioshka doll.
Now I want to see the heir of the peasant who invented these things sue for IP infringement.
My
Limekiller
This reminds me of a "new" Twighlight Zone episode circa 1987, where a guy has a fallout shelter in his basement.
His wife and kid go to the grandmothers for the weekend. Meanwhile, he's chilling with his friend drinking a beer, and a nuclear bomb touches down. They both go into the fallout shelter. They guy thinks he's lost his wife and kid forever.
Months go by in the fallout shelter, and external radiation levels aren't going down. They can't tell if the detector is broken, or what. Eventually some "scavengers" come pounding on the door, and the father has to stop his friend from making any noise.
More months go by, there's an argument and the friend finally says fuck it and leaves. Now the father is by himself, and even more months go by... finally he decides it's hopeless, puts on his sunglasses and heads out of the fallout shelter.
Next scene, the wife and son are looking at the father's grave. Talking about him, etc. Then the camera pans up, and there's the city about 10 miles away with a huge glass dome over it.
I found this summary of the episode as well:
Shelter Skelter
Teleplay by : Ron Cobb & Robin Love
Based on a story by : Ron Cobb
Directed by : Martha Coolidge
Starring : Joe Mantegna; Joan Allen
Summary : A survivalist believes he has lived through a nuclear war in his shelter. In reality, it was an accident which destroyed his town and contributed to bringing peace to Earth, and he has been entombed for ever.
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
I stumbled (ok Googled) across some interesting and moving photos from Pripyat, the town where the Chernobyl workers were housed.
Shocking and worth a read / look.
Great, Bechtel. If the budget is $800M, Bechtel will blow $4B for evaluation and planning, never build the thing, then punt the project off to the next biggest bribery outfit. Bechtel's main accomplishments have been building a massively overpriced and non-standard rail system in the Bay Area, screwing up the water distribution systems of several nations, ripping off Malta, and repeatedly gassing the residents around the Carquinez Strait.
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.
I've seen more than enough movies to realize that this is a mere cover story to hide the real purpose of this "container" -- sheilding a priveleged few thousand against a rogue earthbound asteroid.
I'll bet you ten bucks that nobody knows where Bruce Willis is right now, either.
Can't fool ME.
My
Limekiller
Hmm ' will keep MOST of the material from spreading '.
:)
Glad i dont live around there..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It will be 800 feet across, and 300 feet high and will cost $800 mil."
How cheaply could we hurl the whole thing out of orbit?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
...The City of Cincinnati has offered the Bengals another new stadium 'out in the suburbs.' Mayor Charlie Luken Deemed the new stadium a 'multi-use facility' and plans are in place to have the team moved within the next 90 days.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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.
I have been thinking about this for a very long time: since we have this exclusion area around the reactor since 1986, animals were exposed to the radioactivity and no doubt, many died. But did any survive? Did the radioactivity produce some major genetical changes (some believe that the increase of cranial capacity in the Homo Sapiens was due to mutations from increased gamma rays)?
Sigged!
$20,000 American/pound.
Do you have a "plan B"?
KFG
Psssst - I know where you might be able to pick up a suitable enclosure really cheaply, if you don't mind using second hand equipment. As an added benefit - it seems to do a good job of discouraging tourists! ;-)
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Read the article......
These photos are absolutely astounding. Looks like a fairly modern city, just abandoned for nearly 20 years. Anyone who has an interest in 'end of the world' type sci-fi, we've all seen 12 Monkeys and the like - THIS is what it really looks like when our modern structures are left completely to nature.
I've never seen anything like it. Awe-inspiring and incredibly sad.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
After this tragedy occured soldiers were volunteered
to go there and die fighting with fire and radiation. Many lost their homes and were evacuted to the town i lived in. We got lucky - the wind was in the other direction. Nevertheless streets had to be washed literally - trucks were spraying water everywhere trying to wash off the radioactive dust.
Many thousands of people died in Chernobyl. Many more are STILL dying from this disaster. It was a tragedy. Please don't joke about it. It's beyond "dark humor" IMHO.
the site has 18,497 visits (at this time today) since 1997. Watch that # double.
"In 1997, the Group of 7, plus Russia, the European Union and Ukraine, set up the Chernobyl Shelter Fund with the European reconstruction bank in charge. The bank established a shelter implementation plan, estimated the project cost at $768 million, and funded it with donations from 28 nations, ranging from $170 million from the United States to Iceland's $10,000."
Interesting: far too expensive for the Ukraine, but the consequences are global, therefore countries around the world share the expense. This gives me a modicum of hope that people will put aside their national differences for the sake of planetary survival.
-kgj
Chernobyl: The results of a Russian Homer Simpson working at a nuclear power plant :P
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Wasn't there something like this in Clive Barker's Imajica? A building, owned by the Autarch, so large it contained weater systems? How cool is that? Sure, not as big as Slartibartfast's shop, but still....
*Weather Systems, that is
"If it weren't for the radioactivity, I could almost call the job 'a piece of cake,' but the radiation makes it hugely complex and extremely difficult."
Yea... and if it weren't for the radiation you wouldn't even be building the 'piece of cake'.
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
come on, i live mere away 70km from the 'object' and i'm fine, actually i'm doing better than most people are. it has nothing to do with the incident - it was not SUCH a disaster after all. talking about some 'danger' from Chernobil is not even funny, it's like speculating about tv radiation effects on health while puffing a cigar.
incident was local, incident didn't spawn no monster populations (some mutants - yes, but those don't replicate, you know), that's it.
if anything is worth discussing in the story it's a technical side, so please reduce your speculations about 'Chernobyl danger' to a minimum - those make my bald head itch.
Practical Semantic Web Log
Quick question: Why do Russians always hang area rugs above their beds? Off topic, I know, but I'm really curious...
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
You can't build a reactor cover before a plant blows and hope it to be of any use. Unless you really want to ignore the nasty effects of a nuclear blast. Any structure built over a reactor would be blow sky high, and throw the structure materials off at hundreds of miles per hour, turning the entire plant into one giant nuclear claymore mine. You build them so they don't blow up, and use common sense, which the soviet government did not have, the test they demanded are what caused the accident.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The project design consortium is headed by Bechtel. We should perhaps be concerned:
/ 10/mm1089_08.html
"Although Bechtel did not build the ill-fated Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant, as co-manager of the cleanup operation at TMI it did help make a bad situation worse. The NRC's Office of Investigations found that Bechtel schemed to avoid making the necessary repairs and that the company "improperly classified" modifications to the plant as "not important to safety" in order to avoid safety controls. When workers such as Senior Safety Start-up Engineer Richard Parks complained that Bechtel and TMI's owner were deliberately circumventing safety procedures, they were harassed and intimidated. In 1985, the NRC fined the two companies for this abuse. Bechtel also disregarded the health and safety of the cleanup crew at TMI. A 1985 series in the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed the details of the neglect: workers were sent into radioactive sections of the plant without adequate protective clothing or respirators; workers were routinely given clothing that was already contaminated; and equipment intended to detect radiation hazards often malfunctioned. Contamination incidents have been routine since the accident, averaging two a week.
Source: http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1989
-kgj
It will be 800 feet across, and 300 feet high and will cost $800 mil.
And after being used to move the Chernobyl remains, Cowboy Neal will be using it as a car.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
From the article; The new shelter will not "contain" the core's radioactivity but will be weatherproof.
So the idea is to make it "weatherproof"
The article is very vague as to how much of the sarcophagus they are going to deconstuct, or how they are going to "stabalize" the core for the long term.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Any chance we could put one of these over Hilary Rosen?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The Twilight Zone is some of the most enjoyable entertainment I've ever had the pleasure of watching. Brilliantly done, didn't require a huge budget, and looks gorgeous.
Of course, I've only seen "old" ones, but it's one of the very few TV shows that I really enjoy.
May we never see th
I've seen sheets of plasterboard (sheetrock, for the USians) with the height printed in imperial and the width in metric... 8'6" x 1200mm or some such.
Umm no, reactor containment facilities are in fact supposed to be able to contain anything short of a supercritical event (which should not be possible in a properly designed system). The Chernobel plant did not explode in a supercritical event, rather it's cooling system exploded due to the reactor becoming extremely hot and superboiling the coolant to pressures much higher then the system could handle. If the reactor containment facility had been about twice as thick it would have contained the explosion and nearly no radiation would have leaked to the environment.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Thus mutations which propagate are quite rare.
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Hm, I thought you called it sheetrock. I have heard it referred to as drywall too though, just not as often.
That's a good link but not very many photos, unfortunately. Not considering the tragedy itself, there is something eerily beautiful about abandoned, overgrown cities. I found it rather interesting how bad the condition of part of the city is (for example the stairs of the cultural ministry or whatever it was, totally falling apart). I mean, it hasn't even been fifteen years now and yet parts of this place really look like wilderness.
I feel old now.
That's a study primarily about fish.
Try reading up on what Chernobyl did to Ukraine's neighbor Belarus (where most of the radiation came down, partly thanks to the Russians seeding rain clouds so it didn't make it as far as them).
About 1/3 of Belarus is contaminated. In an already poor country people can't pick wild mushrooms, berries etc in contaminated areas because of it.
The biggest suffers from this are young children - there are much increased rates of blood diseases like Leukemia in Belarus as a result of it.
This is yet another patch on a dike that will one day burst.
Unfortunately the burst will not be visable as it would be with a water dam.
The only fix today, is the one that should have been put in place at the time of the original disaster. Time will not be a friend in fixing this problem, it will only make the fix impossible if the wait is too long.
The entire site needs to be encased in high lead glass.
Yes the lead provides a hazard, but one much lower than radioactive contamination of the water table, and bio-spread by insects and birds.
IANAU (I Am Not A Ukranian), nor do I play one on TV, but from what I understand, The Ukranians call it "Chornobyl". "Chernoblis" is wormwood. "Chornobyl" means "black water". The plant is built along the Prypiat River, which was once called "Black Water River".
Couldn't they make that blob on the map even larger, or make it of even more unnatural shape?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I was seven at that time, lived about one hundred miles from Chernobyl. On that April morning (around 5 o'clock) we woke up. The air was too thick, hot... The skies were rather strange reddish color...
And Communists were flying on giant dragons across those skies, spreading purple glow from their mouths...
I have lived about 95km from there at the time, and nothing of the kind happened. If it did, I (and you if you actually was there) would be dead.
The rest of the message id even more bullshit, so I won't even touch that.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.