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Chernobyl...18 Years Later
abysmilliard writes "A young Ukrainian woman has posted a photo journal of her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl and the area surrounding it. Included are pictures of the now-emptied city, maps of current radiation levels, and a discussion of how the area has changed. While the english is quite broken, it's often rather surreal, as well, with quotes like, 'I don't know how sound the silence to those tourists that they can not stand it, but to me after hitting a red line on my bike tacho it sound like all those ghosts cursing 1100cc kawasaki engin.'"
Guess how long that will take to /. the bandwidth out of?
I'm saving a mirror now, if necessary, I can mirror.
http://unbolted.llarian.net/chern/
Mirror is the site gets overloaded or bandwidth exceeds limit (which can happen with angelfire).
(She - apparently by mistake - skipped page 16, which you can access by modifying the URL manually.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
She mentions that the radiation exposure in Kiev during the first few days was equivalent to about a year's worth of radiation at Chernobyl now. The bastards did not inform the populace until the wind blew into Europe and radiation alarms started going off, igniting international alarm. My wife, a child at the time, was belatedly rushed out of town along with all the children in Kiev a week later. I can't prove a link, but the fact is my wife had cancer surgery just last week. I'm sure that coal and gas are worse for the environment, and I support nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative, but a freak accident combined with a stupid reaction of a government made matters much worse than they should have been. People will be suffering due to Chernobyl for decades and centuries to come.
There is another page of pictures that you won't see clicking on the links, she has page 15 going directly to 17 by accident. This page shows the swimming pool.
When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb.
How exactly does this work? When have human eyes been capable of seeing the x-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Or, is there some grain of truth in this, in terms of the visible light being so intense that it's possible to see vague impression of bones within your hand? I suspect the latter.
When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb. True, but not for the Reason you stated. I dont care how bright the light is, you cant see X-Rays with your eyes. however, with a sufficiently bright light your hand becomes translucent and you can see the outline of your bones. Try this: With a very powerful flashlight (like a Maglite) go into a dark room and let your eyes adjust for a minute or two. Then hold your hand so the palm completely covers the flashlight part, dont let any light escape. Turn the flashlight on and you should be able to make out the outline of your bones, if the light is powerful enough. But you still cant see X-rays.
It's a Bradbury story from _The Martian Chronicles_
Here it is, although it's geocities, and will be /.ed real quick.
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http://www.geocities.com/pripyatcity/argazkiak.ht
In page 12 she shows a radiation display at the city 4km from reactor, it says 81.6 but the scale is in russian characters, the text says "microroengen per hour"
Dunno if that's accurate...
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
There Will Come Soft Rains.
The story in question is Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," which is part of the _Martian Chronicles_. And yes, both it and Chernobyl are extremely, extremely spooky.
Insightful, but wrong...as with most nuclear anything-related posts on /.
The RBMK reactors have a positive void coefficient. The rod control mechanisms had been manually disabled for the turbine coast-down experiment (because they kept ramming in the rods, something which should have served as a Big Clue to the operators that what they were doing was a bad idea). When the cooling water began to boil, the reactivity jumped due to that positive void coefficient and the power level spiked 3-4 orders of magnitude in some milliseconds. That flashed the cooling water into steam, which exploded and blew the top off the roof. The 3,000+ degree graphite moderator was now exposed to open air and burst into flame and it was good night, Gracie.
Read Medvedev's book. Hell, read _any_ book.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Someone posted the story and an analysis, too.
Yeah, right.
Dartmouth researcher poisoned by 2 droplets.
Odd that this happened (semi-recently) at my school, and nobody's ever mentioned it in ANY of the chem classes I've taken...
There is another of that design under construction in Cuba.
The graphite moderator reactor has a positive temperature coefficient, so it is inherently unstable. The fact that the graphite burns isn't too neat either.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The cyrillic characters read "mk R / ch" which I assume to stand for "mikro Rengen v chas" or "micro-Roengen per hour". So yeah, it's accurate.
No shit. I just recently was informed of a student around this area who, for whatever reason apparently "ate a lot of tuna" with her dog one week, and get this, they are BOTH suffering from mercury POISONING. Now I don't know what the fuck "a lot of tuna" is, maybe they got a whole tuna as a gift or something, but that you can possibly get mercury poisoning from just an amount that you can stuff in your face in a week (and let's assume that's not 24/7 eating tuna, in that case you'd die of your stomach rupturing first), is seriously screwed up.
Now let's say she ate tuna EVERY meal for a whole week...that adds up to what, 21 meals of tuna? How many tuna sandwiches have you had recently? In 21 weeks will you have consumed enough to otherwise qualify you as "mercury poisoned"?
I'm glad the general public has such a say in how our food is raised because, yes sir, I loves me that good old American heavy metal poisonin'! I'll fry it up in my recycled radioactive-waste frying pan!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
TMI was nothing like Chernobyl. Going to the dentist for an x-ray gives you more dangerous radiation than just about anybody got from TMI. Nobody died because of TMI.
Chances are, because it is on an Angelfire page, it will go down within the next 45 seconds. In anycase I have mirrored it at
http://ryans.northernwatercolour.com/chernobyl
I also included page 16 which she mistakenly skipped in the linking, it shows a swimming pool.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
The observed shining was caused by white-hot burning graphite.
Cherenkov radiation is not observed in air (you need particles with mass traveling with speed higher than the speed of light in given medium , and the optical density of air is low (close to vacuum), the particles would have to travel at speeds near to c - which are difficult to obtain because of relativistic effects. (You can get that from accelerators, but not from fission)
You can see Cherenkov typicaly in water - the blue shine around immersed fuel rods or intense radioisotope source.
There is similar-looking bluish shine/flash around extremely strong sources, like criticality accident with Pu, U, or in nuclear explosion (the mushroom has bluish envelope). This shine is caused by intense ionisation of air molecules by radiation, mostly X-ray. The recombination of ions produces excited states whis give away the surpluss of energy by emission in UV/vis , which also appears bluis white.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Another photographer has put together a whole book that looks very much like her site... I've flipped through it.. hundreds of ghostly images..
Here's a link to it from Amazon:
Robert Polidori: Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
The situation at TMI was pretty serious. Although no one died, the fuel rods in the core of the reactor did melt. That's how hot it was. There was a lot of contamination inside of the containment building (it served its designed purpose) and it took a long time to clean it up.
That's probably due to the time of year the pictures were taken.
All of her pictures were from Feb. 21, which is before there are leaves on most of the trees and bushes. The old picture with the two young girls in it looks like it was at least April when it was taken because they're dressed for warm weather and the hybrid tea roses are blooming.
The definition of a liberal: I may disagree with what you have to say, but I'll fight for your right to say it
While not wanting to diminish the size of this catastrophie, it is nevertheless very important to actually look at the numbers and to put things into perspective.
Please refer to the papers from the United Nations studies on this. They can be found here: UN website on the Chernobyl Disaster
Starting with paragraph 1.26 we find a discussion. In paragraph 1.28 we find that there were some 2000 cases of thyroid cancer attributed to the radiation (iodine). However, thyroid cancer can be treated and there is no real death rate associated with the thyroid cancers.
Next we find that the anticipated development of leukimias has not occured. In paragraph 1.36 we find this quote: unexpected appearance of early childhood thyroid cancer, the unexpected absence of leukaemia stemming from the accident.
In paragraph 1.38 we see that there is a iodine deficiency problem in the population and that addressing this problem in a timely fashion would no doubt have made a considerable difference.
Starting with paragraph 2.01 on page 30, we have a history of the event itself. In paragraph 2.03 I131 is discussed. This isotope has a half life of 8.05 days and were the population given an ample supply of non-radioactive iodine - through the use of simple iodized table salt - then the radioactive version would not have been picked up.
It is really unfortunate that iodine pills could not have been distributed faster!
On page 56 we find more telling information. 28 highly exposed individuals died within 4 months of the accident (see box 4.2). In addition to the end of 1998, 11 others died.
in paragraph 4.18 we have more discussion of the thyroid cancers, and the esitmation is made that the total number could be as high as 8,000.
In the end, while this certainly was a major disaster with an impact on innocent people that should not be underestimated, we are still left with the facts that the media overestimated the impact and the death rate by many orders of magnitude.
In fact some of the pictures clearly demonstrate this. If one looks at the flora and the fauna in the pictures we see groups of wild animals happily running along totally oblivious to the radiation.
These animals have a faster metabolic rate than humans and thus are not as radiation hardy as we are. Yet they are clearly thriving and the world they are living in, and rearing their offspring can only be described as very beautiful.
Yes the radiation is there and yes it should not be scoffed at. But the pictures clearly show that animal life is not impacted all that much. Those horses look pretty healthy and pretty happy to me!
Here is zipped copy of the entire thing, including a fix of page 16 (+ links) mentioned by another /.'er below. I wanted a personal copy, figured I would offer it to anyone else who wanted to keep this excellent site...
I lived not that far from Cernobyl. I was 8 at the time. When it happened it was so downplayed that nobody outside that small area realized the impact, until much later. It was on the evening news and it was a 5 minute thing, my dad was a little worried but said it's probably something minor. They showed a cloud of smoke comming from the place and that's all, then other daily news followed. I also remember later, my mom saying how that year many of her plants outside had died, don't know if it is related or not. The worst is when the government had asked for volunteers to help clean-up the mess and promised appartments for those who sign up. They didn't say that when they come home to those new appartments, they won't have that time much to enjoy them. There were rumours how people with heavy doses where "cooked" that the skin and meat was comming of their bones and they couldn't even feel that.
being in odessa when a bunch of "survivers" where sent to live out the last of their days. odessa, ukraine is kind of a resort town for vacationing buerocrats and a tuirist attraction for foreigners. there were mostly little kids around were our dacha was, but there were the unlucky soldiers there as well that were sent in to clean up that mess without any protection what so ever. It was really creepy seeing a bunch of hairless kids play on the beach, i was just a kid then and didnt quite understand what was going on but the images stuck, but it could explain why i harbor so much resentment towards anyone associated with that regime.
me fail english? thats unpossible
Yeah.. Lesson One is don't use an RBMK reactor with no secondary containment. Current (and future) designs have Fail-Safe systems where, should the control system fail, the whole shebang fails into a "safe" mode (control rods are dropped which effectively stops the reaction and free-flowing coolant is delivered to alleviate residual core heat). TMI would have failed safe, except for incorrect operator intervention.
Chernobyl was also utilized to produce weapons-grade plutonium as well as civilian electricity, which is why the graphite moderator was used (instead of water, as in US civilian designs). When the graphite burned, the temperature shot up very quickly and the reactor exploded through the pressure-seal which was the only line of defense (not the reinforced concrete secondary containment vessel in Western designs). TMI showed how well that design could withstand both an incident and poor handling of that incident.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Inside the Chernobyl Plant, you'd need a lead block encased around you to be safe. The radiaction in the vicinity of the pile is still so intense that most electronics malfunction within minutes, if not less.
The differences between TMI and Chernobyl are essentially those of design and the ways in which they affected the disaster.
Unlike TMI, Chernobyl almost seemed to be "how dumb can we be and get away with it". (See the quote: "like airplane pilots experimenting with the engines in flight".)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Nuclear safety always should be more than just a guy with a rubber stamp - hopefully three mile island and the subsequent court case changed all of that.
Those who think nuclear accidents can never happen in the good old USA should consider superior or more expensive technology is worthless if the lowest bidding contactors don't even do the job, and no-one is there to see that they haven't done the job.
Different situation, different outcome, but we can learn from both, so long as we stick to the technical instead of the emotional, and keep nationalism out of it. The lesson I get from Three Mile Island is to watch your contractors - they may not care if what they do can result in a major catastrophe. The lesson I get from Chernobyl is that a steam explosion is far more catastropic when nuclear material can get scattered around - so the design has to avoid that and try to bring it down to a less major incident.The main problem with nuclear power today is we keep having to subsidise the plants we have - shutting them down is usually a bigger problem than keeping them going. We just have to pour cash in to keep this 1950's white elephant going - at least in the UK where they are not supported by the same weird financial misdirection that makes the US plants appear to make a profit. Maybe when defence in the USA gets pissed off and wants a bit more of their own budget it will also become clear to people in the USA nuclear plants are made up of a lot of expensive parts and require expensive maintainance - it's not a cheap way to boil water.
The link between radiation and cancer has much to do with the increased mutation rate of DNA caused by radiation, which is natural since most cancers are caused by changes in the DNA of a cell. I find it difficult to see why you try to deny this?
It is too bad, but I guess because of the Soviet Union and the turmul in the years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, there has not been done real studies on the wildlife of Chernobyl. (There has been done many studies on the radiaton effects on humans in Chernobyl.) But since all life is related to DNA, there is no doubt that the animals and plants in the area has been seriously affected. Can you show any scientific study that has shown no impact on nuclear radiation on wildlife, we would like to hear about it. And remember, radiation is one thing, but plutonium is one of the mosth leathal chemical poisons in its own right, so if the radiations doesn't get you, the radioactiv chemicals is there for you to worry about the. Again, it is quite natural that plutonium and other radioactive isotops made in a nuclear plant are poisonous, since because they don't excist naturally in nature, organisms have not evolved protections against them.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Instead of just karma whore with a wget, I made a listing for the Distributed Mirror Project of the site. I added the mirrors listed here (that I could connect to), and they are listed on the DMP page for this site
/. will get something after it uses her bandwidth up (unless someone had graciously upgraded her account, in which case mod me to oblivion - I've got karma to burn.)
This way I'm Karma whoring for doing some real work for this wonderful site she made, and oh yeah.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
From what I read about the Chernobyl disaster it wasn't really the reactor design that was at fault but the dangerous experiments that were being carried out at the time.
e nce/Helicon .asp?SID=2&iPin=ffests0172
"The disaster began with a routine operation for maintenance and fuel change that commenced a day before the accident. In addition to these procedures, the technical crew wanted to perform a test of the plant's steam turbines. Their goal was to determine if the turbines would continue to provide power for the plant's safety systems after their steam supply was cut off. While attempting to perform this test, they committed a series of errors that culminated in catastrophe. More than simple blunders, the errors stemmed from a reckless disregard for safety procedures. The errors compounded, and the disaster would likely not have occurred if any one error had been avoided.
The crew began by reducing the reactor's power so they could start their experiment. They also switched off the reactor's emergency core cooling system. This meant that in the event of a malfunction the reactor would become dangerously hot, which is exactly what subsequently happened. At 12:28 A.M. the crew made another serious error by putting the reactor's regulator at much too low a setting for the planned experiment. At this point, the reactor should have been shut down and the experiment abandoned, but the crew feared a reprimand for the incorrect regulator setting, so they decided to bring the reactor back up to power. To do this, they removed most of the graphite rods that moderated the fissioning of nuclear materials in the reactor core. By 1:00 A.M., the power output had reached 200 MW, still too low for the experiment. At this point, they switched on two extra pumps for the circulation of more cooling water in the core. This action made the reactor highly unstable, and water and steam levels began to oscillate uncontrollably. The crew then made another major mistake by blocking the automatic shut-down system. At 1:23, they started their experiment, and a few seconds later they switched off the safety apparatus that would have come into operation as soon as the turbines stopped.
In less than a minute, the crew chief realized that he had a serious problem, and he ordered the graphite rods to be reinserted in the core. The rods did not fall home, probably because the rods or the nuclear fuel had been distorted by the heat. The rods were then disconnected so that they could fall into the core, but by this time the situation was hopeless. The reactor's power surged from 7 percent to several hundred times its normal level. An explosion rocked the core, followed by another one 4 seconds later. These explosions blew the roof off of the reactor and caused the collapse of a refueling crane into the core, destroying what was left of the cooling system. A reaction of the steam with the fuel rods' zirconium cladding caused the formation of hydrogen, which then ignited, setting off 30 separate fires through the plant. The graphite in the core also ignited."
http://www.fofweb.com/Subscription/Sci
Actually, it *was* partly the reactor design that was to blame, as well as operator error.
The Chernobyl design had control rods entering the core from top and bottom. This particular design causes the reactor to have, in certain operating regions, a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity (like positive feedback for you non-nukes.) This has the effect of the reactor power level rising in response to a rise in temperature - and in response to the bottom control rods rising into the core.
Western designs are almost all designed to have a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity in operating regions.
What happened was, as the reactor temperature rose, power followed, such that when they finally tried to shutdown the reactor, reactor power level shot way up (basically, the reactor went prompt critical - some experts have said that the reactor went prompt supercritical - I'm not sure myself since I'd have to go back and research the values for beta and beta-bar that Chernobyl was designed to.) As a result, the power level exceeded design values by a couple hundred times, and the resulting step rise in temperature and pressure caused a massive steam void to form in the reactor, which promptly escaped by rupturing the top of the reactor.
Had Chernobyl been built to western designs the disaster wouldn't have happened.
1. Cooling and fuel channels containing thousands of welded joints through which the coolant continually passes vs. a western design consisting of a single pressure vessel that holds the majority of the coolant covering the core with a few loops to circulate water to the steam generators. This makes the design much more prone to a leak in an inaccessible location.
2. Using graphite instead of water. Graphite has its uses - a power reactor is not one of them.
3. A positive temperature coefficient of reactivity. If you do *nothing* else, make sure your design has a negative coefficient in all operating regions.
4. A flimsy steel shed vs. a proper containment. Even when the reactor suffered a steam explosion, a proper containment structure would have caused Chernobyl to be a localized accident resulting in the contamination of the inside of the containment structure, instead of a disaster affecting the entire world.
Cancer is a really common disease anyway. It's the biggest cause of death, bar heart disease, in other countries. Around Chernobyl, most people will naturally blame Chernobyl for all of the cancers, when the vast majority of cancers were/are naturally induced.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The best guide to the studies on animals and humans, as of a couple of years ago, was a survey article in Science Magazine, one of the leading professional science publications in the world. Rather than relying on the sorts of news reports you reference (which are not scientific and report information from governments which have a major financial stake in blaming all problems on Chernobyl), I'll take Science Magazine any time
:The chemical toxicity of plutonium (a heavy metal) is inconsequential alongside the radiation effects.
Your evolution based argument is pure supposition, and is unlikely given that there are natural compounds with similar chemical toxicity (other heavy metals) and plenty of natural alpha-emitting natural compounds (e.g. polonium).
As far as the chemical toxicity, this says:
In other words, the chemical toxicity is irrelevant.
Overall, ricin, of Al Qaeda fame, is 10-20 times more toxic than plutonium. Botulinum toxins (the reference bacteria strain for which was found in a refrigerator in Iraq by David Kay's team) is 10,000 times more toxic than plutonium.
Furthermore, I do not deny that high levels of radiation cause cancer, not to mention radiation sickness. What is not well known is that people live and prosper in areas of very high natural radiation.
When one looks at low levels of radiation, the sensitivity is undetectable. Low dose radiation level rules are based on an unproven and somewhat implausible theory called Linear, No-threshold Theory (LNT). This theory is used to derive radiation hazard predictions and exposure standards as one of the first uses of the Precautionary Principle. The theory assumes that one can estimate risk at a low level by applying the ratio of that level to a high level where the risk as been established. The risks for low level radiation dosages are hypothetical, having been derived by this ratioing from populations exposed to much higher dosages (uranium miners, Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors).
Furthermore, the risk is presumed to be based on total lifetime dosage independent of the rate of exposure. Again, this has not been established scientifically.
You mention Hiroshima. Because Hiroshima had no local fallout, all excess radiation exposure occurred in an extremely short period of time - most of it in a few seconds. Furthermore, the levels of dosage received by Hiroshima victims had to be estimated, which could not be done accurately.
There are several problems with LNT. First, it is based on a very old, discredited model of carcinogenesis which assumes that a single point mutation in DNA is the cause of cancer. In fact, the process is far more complex, with cells having the ability to repair mutations.
This means that the odds of acquiring non-repairable damage are higher if the radiation is delivered more quickly, because a single cell may sustain multiple hits. There may also be secondary effects, due to the death of an excessive number of cells at the same time.
great radiobiologist, the late Harald Rossi summarized the situation as follows: "It would appear...that radiation carcinogenesis is an intricate intercellular process and that the notion that it is caused by simple mutations in a unicellular response is erroneous. Thus, there is no scientific basis for the "linearity hypothesis" according to which cancer risk is proportional to absorbed dose and independent of dose rate at low doses" .
However, lets just assume that LNT is correct, since it is widely used.
Consider this (April 2000):
The Chernobyl catastrophe resulted in vast quantities of radionuclides being released into the global atmosphere, which were easy to measure even high in the stratosphere, and far away at the South Pole . It was a godsend for anti-nuclear activists. Yet according to estimates of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR),
The only good weather is bad weather.
One other place with high levels of radiation is Uranium City
m l
http://www.interlog.com/~grlaird/uraniumcity.ht
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.