Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
You don't need to run any lights at night.
She mentions that if the guys at the checkpoint find you have too much radioactive dust they give you a shower and eat your bike. I was always under the impression that in Soviet Russia, your bike ate YOU!
Also, I'm on the page now where you can see a city, but it's so QUIET that people wat to get out ASAP after being there a few minutes. I totally want to go see this!
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
"The word CHERNOBYL scares holly bijesus out of people here."
Holly Bijesus? Is it just me, or would that make a *great* bisexual porn star name?
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
linking to a 10+ page site full of photos on angelfire? yeah, that'll last long...
Guess how long that will take to /. the bandwidth out of?
I'm saving a mirror now, if necessary, I can mirror.
The disaster was a damn good example of bad mix of technology, science and politics. Boy, don't we have plenty of that in the U.S.
The essay was absolutely amazing. The surreal description is perfect, reminding me of apocalyptic movies of the 80's and describing what I imagined the world looking like in the RPG Gamma World. Abandoned buildings as people left them, houses falling apart, yet seeing scenes of prezwalski looking horses crossing a stream.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... but not all that is invisible and harms is radioactive. Heavy metals such as mercury, PCBs etc, can be seriously nasty. The sheer calous lack of regulation of these pollutants by governments world-wide is unbelievable. Even your fabric-softener can have mercury put in it.
So while there is this collective phobia and aura surrounding radiation, there isn't around other many other toxic threats. Note the security surrounding nuclear materials, but how easy it was to obtain unbelievably toxic dimethylmercury (until someone killed herself when a droplette momentarily touched her protective glove) until recently.
I read this, and I look at the pictures, and all I can think, numbly, is "...holy shit..."
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
There's another site out there with pictures of the abandoned buildings. Something about it is incredibly compelling and sad; almost like looking at a modern-day Pompeii. People who were children back when this happened go back there and spray-paint messages to former classmates on the walls of their elementary schools, trying to contact them or just to say they're still still around.
:60 Minutes segment a few years ago that the gov't pipes music into various parts of the city, where apparently there are still some people working--this is to keep them from going insane from the silence.
I also saw on a
She shows a nice map of the radiation levels, but without showing the scale it doesn't mean jack. She has the norm listed as 12-18.
I am guessing that she means millirem per hour, but I honestly have no idea. Anyone know?
Yep. Especially when you're wearing jeans, which will be ripped through in a half-second if you were to fall off the bike. I don't ride a motorcycle, but I do know only the truly stupid ride without motorcycle pants+jacket/suit, especially if the roads aren't in great shape and you'd be lucky if days went by before someone happened to pass you by. Same goes for riding without a helmet- dumb, dumb, dumb.
Please help metamoderate.
This comment in the essay: This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP. They didn't know this was shining of radiation. they learned it on next day when evacuation began reminded me of talks I had with some of my patients some years ago that either lived in southern Utah and Nevada, or were in the military. Whole families would gather on high mountains to watch the pretty lights from the atomic bombs being tested in the open air and I had one old army guy tell me that soldiers who were gathered at the exercises, if they were not issued goggles, were told to look away and cover your eyes with your hands. 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.
Amazingly scary.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The MOST interesting thing in the article to me though was the "deafening silence" that is mentioned. The author said that many companies have investigaed doing things like 2 hour tours but the tourists complain and want to go home after 15 minutes because it's so quite it's like being deaf. I wouldn't think that it would be so bad (go to wheat feild in the middle of the US and it's silent too), but I guess it's the combination of all the buildings and normal city sights (with the exception of the fact that there are no people) and the silence that makes it so eerie and spooky.
I bet it's spooky as hell there.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
http://unbolted.llarian.net/chern/
Mirror is the site gets overloaded or bandwidth exceeds limit (which can happen with angelfire).
Now, i am happy that i was one of the few who got to see it (like others said, angelfire and slashdot? yeah, right) and I found it very very interesting.
But i'd like someone to do some sort of anthropological study of how these little stories get noticed and submitted to slashdot and other blogs (is slashdot a blog? hmmm).
I'm curious who found this story.. was it the author of the page? a friend, or a really interesting "other"...
Very troubling to know that there is a city where silence alone can scare one away...Kind of funny how one can find total peace in the shadows of death, destruction, and the flaws of man. I, for one, would love to visit it..Apocalyptic visions are filling my head already..
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Q: Why do we celebrate the October Revolution on November 7?
A: Because that is when TASS (Soviet news agency) saw fit to report it.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
"marauders in radiation poluted area are not just a regular marauders, they don't steal stuff for themselves. There were cases of radiactive tv sets and other stuff being sold on city second hand markets and then police shot 7 or 8 of them and it helped"
Now, does that sound like the Soviet Russia from a bad movie, or what?
(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.
It was science.. It still is. It shows what happens when you don't respect what power these things truly have -- or to reword it, shows you that you should always respect something that you barely have under control.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
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.
Your wish is the LiveJournal's command.
The pictures are just sooo eerie. The housing in the pictures is a perfect visual example of the kind of large apartment complexes built in the Soviet Union at that time. Large sprawling 16-24 story houses with balconies and nearby schools, playgrounds, stores and hospitals. She mentions how they were brand new, just waiting for families to move into them.(In the Soviet Union your housing was assigned to you btw). Just seeing pictures of those apartment complexes was the most horrifying part of this entire photo journal. Interestingly enough it also reminded me of a Russian book, "Picnic by the Roadside" by Strugatski Brothers and the it's movie adaptation by Tarkovski(same guy who made the original Solaris) called "Stalker." Same idea of traveling through a modern ghostown after a catastrophe. Incredibly eerie.
I've been to Ukraine 3 times in the past 2 years: my gf is of Ukrainian extraction. Chernobyl is a name to conjure demons with there. Even more so than in the West. What's even scarier is that the Ukrainian government's denial over the state that it is in. They still are running at least a couple of the reactors and they are not being terribly maintained. The Russians came out stating that the buildings that the reactors are in are about to collapse...yet the Ukrainian government is unwilling to shut the place down.
Expect a sequel there, folks, and it's gonna be just as ugly if not worse. To make matters even more horrifying, based on the behavior of the Ukrainian government, the people are going to be informed through western sources long before, but far too late even so, that anything wrong is happening there when it does.
Note I say when, not if. I really mean it too.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I realize this might be slightly off-topic, since I don't think this article really discusses the any of the dangers/merits (or lack thereof) of nuclear power in the first place. However, I know that all the same, some people are going to try to bring it up, so before anyone starts trolling about how dangerous nuclear power is, I just thought I'd point out:
1) Chernobyl was based on very old technology. Nuclear power is much safer today.
2) France gets >80% of its power from nuclear sources. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest sources of energy in the world. (I have nothing against fossil fuels, either--at the moment NOTHING has proven as economical. But I do think ultimately, we will have to find alternatives, and nuclear power is certainly a viable option.)
3) It is my opinion that the worst part of Chernobyl was the way the communist regime tried to keep it a secret, until they found out that it was just so big they simply couldn't keep it a secret anymore. Sure, many other governments in the world (and I am NOT naming any ones in particular) have also been forced to fess up to things later, but that is NOT an excuse. The Russian government was truly evil, and I will not retract that statement, as long as I live.
Many people think the Chernobyl area is just like a desert. It's true, there are no people, but there ARE animals. Researches have found rats living there. When they tested those rats, which are living healthily, the scientists found that DNA of rats changed as fast as it had in last 20 million years. That's right, the radiation caused mutations (or evolution) in 20 years, at rate equal to 20 million years.
The rats aren't mutilated or anything, they just happen to adapt.
-------
FM Clan
...and accumulates in the dirt near the roads, because the roads are smoother and higher than the surrounding ground.
Now, there's been a group in every generation since Jesus that has managed to find evidence that it is the generation of the apocolypse. So far, they have all been wrong, but that doesn't seem to bother contemporary apoclyptics.
But they do have a clear idea of where we are in the sequence of events. As you can imagine most of the fitting of events is somewhat vague, or takes some generosity of interpertation. (Please bear with me, this is going somewhere). But there is something that is very late in the sequence (and lots of very dramatic things need to happen before it). This event is
And what is the Ukranian word for "wormwood"? Chernobyl.Somehow this news of the meaning of "Chernobyl" tends to disturb people who believe we are in the end times.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Because, one day, we are going to run out of fossil fuels, and one day, our energy needs will be greater than that possible by covering the available areas of the Earth with solar energy collectors.
Nuclear power is dirty, but... unless we use and research it NOW, it'll always stay dirty. Coal plants, while still emitting pollution, are MUCH more efficient and much LESS polluting than they were 50 years ago.
That this was the most eye opening thing I have seen linked on /. in a long time. Really makes all the SCO and Ipod stuff seem kinda small. I mean that was one of the most surreal things I have experienced in a long time.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
This site is amazing; the town looks just like any other town anywhere else in the world, but nothing is there.
The abandoned ferris wheel and barges gave me a serious case of the willies.
Ok, so we know about 30 firefighters died within a few weeks of thea accident. Do people who died 88 years after the accident still count in the death toll?
I have never heard figures above a few thousand before this. Maybe she is being accurate to 3 decimal places? Does anyone have a real source?
But what do we do with the waste produced by nuclear fission plants?
Block off a few square miles and store it. That's all it takes. The amount of nuclear waste generated is miniscule compared to the amount of other types of waste that we don't think about twice. The whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" thing is way overblown.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Hey. Let's not forget close-call that was "3 Mile Island" and another snafu here in the US: The SL-1 Accident in Idaho.
Is what's left behind there - a big crumbling concrete tomb no one seems to want to take responsibility for. Someone had better goddamn well do it or else EVERYONE will suffer again.
There isn't a hole deep enough to bury this demon in. Chernobyl is the kind of thing that gives me real nightmares. Part of me wishes I never read that book. What a horrible, HORRIBLE disaster.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
My guess would be that asphalt absorbs less radiation than dirt/dust/mud/plants do.... whenever it rains, more radioactivity is washed off of the road and onto the areas around the road.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I believe there's a major difference between silver nitrate film (a chemical light reactive process) and digital cameras (CCD or CMOS being an electronic reactive process). That may be the reason why there was no fogging (recall too that a lot of cameras used to videotape Chernobyl were either tube or CCD based).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Sounds like Euless, Texas on the days after 9/11 when air traffic (DFW) was shut down. With no airtraffic and next to no vehicles on the roads it was very quite and very disturbing.
Wow, welcome to the 1940's. Where have you been in this last half century? I'd say the furious over-regulation by governments world-wide is unbelievable. For instance, I now have to recycle the few micro-grams of mercury contained in fluorescent lamps and batteries. Do you know what's the biggest cause of cancer in humans due to chemicals? Salt. Sodium chloride, that is. Do you know what's the biggest cause of cancer due to radiation? Sunshine. Do you know what's the second biggest cause of cancer after tobacco? Obesity. Don't believe my words, ask any oncologist. No, the biggest environmental threat to humans isn't either radiation or chemicals, it's ignorance, stupidity, and paranoia.
Ukranaian women are fucking hot That is all. Thank you.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Naaa, this is Slashdot. The story has nothing to do with games, SCO, the latest video card benchmark, or esoteric science. Therefor, it should last fairly well.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
http://home.etria.com/files/kiddofspeed/page2.html
Wow, that's the most powerful thing I've seen on the internet in a long time.
Here is a site with many more pictures of the military vehicle graveyard there.
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.
As I recall, we have the Swedes to thank for 1st informing the world of the excessive radioactive fallout their detectors measured. It's a pity that even the reindeer in Lapland (northern Norway, Sweden & Finland) were affected as they ate grass which contained radioactive fallout. And the Lapps survive by eating reindeer.
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
...is here.
"The whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" thing is way overblown."
No, it's not overblown at all. I can deal with a lot of things but this is one that I don't want in MY backyard!
It doesn't take much of this radioactive shit to cause a serious disaster. I agree with using something like Yuca Mt. to store it all in but even this has problems.
1) Transportation. Getting it there will be more than half the fun. What if there's an accident on the way in? Which town along the way will become the next Chernobyl?
2) Possible environmental consequences. Things like water table contamination are a real concern.
3) Natural disasters. A sudden earthquake or volcanic activity could certainly ruin your day.
Can you predict the future for 10,000+ years? That's how long a site would need to remain stable.
Of course, where it's all stored now is a bigger nightmare because it can hardly be protected - particularly from terrorists. Then there's the waste of the plants themselves. I haven't heard any real info on what to do with a decomissioned plant yet other than just 'leave it lay'. Not good at all.
I'm not nuke-phobic, but I am realistic about man - an imperfect being handling something that you simply CANNOT make a mistake about.
The sad thing is, this is hardly the first time this sort of thing has happened. I don't usually support Greenpeace, but check this info out about the city of Mayak since a nuclear disaster. These people still LIVE THERE! Some of the pictures in their image gallery are quite disturbing:
http://archive.greenpeace.org/mayak/index.html
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Does anyone else find the irony in posting a story about a nuclear meltdown...
By linking Slashdot to an Angelfire web page?
Angelfire tech: "The core, its heating up! Quick, more Nitrogen on the servers! Too late, Run for your lives!"
I only joke because I wasn't there.
There were cases of radiactive tv sets and other stuff being sold on city second hand markets and then police shot 7 or 8 of them and it helped.
:P
Yeah, I suppose that oughta send a clear message
it might just've been the light of the fire on the smoke or cloud bottoms.
A couple of months ago a magnesium recycling plant in ohio (i think) burned up. A town webcam was pointed in its direction, and despite being miles away, the sky looked as bright as day from the white light reflecting off the bottom of the clouds at 2 am. You could definiately say it was glowing.
or, it could actually have been the radiation ionizing the air (is this possible, nuclear physicists?). I seem to remember some descriptions of nuclear blasts causing purple glows in the air from radiation ionizing it.
-
Seems you were programmed well during the duck and cover days. I own a Russian motorcycle here in the US (named same as the river on the rad map) and find it very tough and reliable.
Don't believe all that you were fed, go there and hang out (not necessarily this place) and you will find some of our propaganda was true but a lot was/is not.
Riding through there does seem tempting!!
If you want to watch a good movie on the threat of vast radiation poisoning, watch the BBC movie Threads. I got this tip from another Slashdot post a while ago, and am passing it no. I had to go to my library to find it.
It is about how the "threads" of society essentially unravel within a generation after a nuclear attack, in the face of massive homelessness, starvation and of course widespread and incurable radiation sickness.
Lovely stuff.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a990430a.html
Little FAQ on Cerenkov radiation. Radiation itself doesn't glow, it energizes other particles which do the glowing.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I was wondering when I'd see the first anti-Bush post.
There is something sad and beautiful about being to look into a land that has been poisoned and shut down from the other side of the world.
It is eerie that a beautiful young woman would be our guide. Eerie that she would chronicle this deadened scene for us to view while enjoying the freedom it gives her, well aware of the danger and of those who died and still suffer the effects of the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever known.
As I slouch back in my chair, well aware of the life around me in this chilly San Francisco evening, it becomes clear that sometimes the internet offers us too much.
Safe passage Lena.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Where a snapshot of life in the Roman Empire was captured in a momemt of disaster for posterity. With Pompeii, we wonder how foolish they were to see the obvious signs of the volcano ready to go, yet did not try to escape. With Chernobyl, we see...the same thing!
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Here you go. No bandwidth limit, and I took a couple of minutes to strip out the ad-insertion JavaScript.
I think the most poignant part was the abandoned amusement rides, and how she said that was the part of that town where the radiation doses were strongest. That Ferris wheel standing still and silent, still painted red and yellow, was just... wow. I have no words.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
One can only acertain the feeling of nostalgia that dominates that site. We almost forget what the advances of modern civilization will inevitably become.
It reminds us that we will be consumed by our own creation, entropic in nature.
And also disturbing.
austintsmith.com
This double true.
She is, I am very certain, very fast moving on that ZX-11.
More so moving, I have perhaps never been so humbled as a human being as viewing her site. It should be praised. Insight into one of human kind's saddest tragedies that I rarely think one person has, and she can convey it to others so completely.
Thanks. I learned a lot more from her site than I expected to by following that link.
~8^]
If you're interested in that sort of thing, you shouldn't be looking at Chernobyl as an example, you should be fact-finding Nagasaki and Hiroshima. _Those_ are examples of nuclear devastation during wartime; Chernobyl was the result of an nuclear accident involving a power plant reactor meltdown. Quite a different situation.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
They just ended up as super human mutants that now wear spandex.
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.
[Shudders]
Shit... I watched that film in science at school... everyone spent the week beforehand getting all excited, because another class had seen it, and told us about how crazy it was.
For the second half, we had no teacher, because she'd gone to do anything but watch it... I don't think anybody ate that lunch time.
It's some scary, scary shit, but if you can handle that, well worth watching.
There was also one recently by the BBC about smallpox, which was disturbing, but not in quite such an extreme way.
Magnum photographer Paul Fusco has some very moving photographs of Chernobyl, and it's victims. They can be found here. Magnum appears to be offline at the moment, but please, take the time to view the photographs. Very powerful stuff.
I recently attended a presentation by Paul, and some people were reduced to tears by the photographs he showed of Chernoybl.
It's a very sad situation.
I know the reason for some, since I've talked to older people living in Eastern Europe and asked. Basically it boils down to working hard your whole life (some with nice professional jobs) and then watching your nice pension be destroyed by inflation in the transition to capitalism and your lifestyle plummet. Things really were materially better for them under the old system, although all of them are happy to see the political repression gone. The problem is that the same people in many cases that ran the country under communism and now doing so under capitalism. The more things change, the more they stay the same....
Oh Christ, "Threads".
Don't remind me.
At around the same time one of the U.S. networks had a similar made-for-T.V. movie that was supposedly very controversial: "The Day After". However, it came off like an Irwin Allen disaster flick compared to Threads.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Sorry to say this, but the fact that on such a story -- which is highly interesting and moving at the same time --, the first five comments are (+5, Funny) ones, makes me feel rather sad.
Anyway, these are great pictures. Most people have forgotten about Tchernobyl now -- I bet practically everyone thinks that life is just going on there normally by now. The pictures show us the dangers of working with nuclear energy -- one small mistake, and the whole region is doomed for a long time, far beyond the lifetime of a single human. If this doesn't teach us a lesson about safety and security, I don't know what will.
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone."
--Sara Teasdale
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
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!
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.
...the upcoming PC game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The developers of the game made a trip to Chernobyl and also took some photos of "The Zone" that are quite amazing as well. Supposedly they recreated about 60% of the real world for this game. How creepy...
Here is the link to the photos, and here is the game.
Both photos collections are unsettling. Just to think of what it must be like to experience Chernobyl, past or present, gives me chills. But is it not somehow fascinating to see our own technological marvels destroyed and decayed, as a sort of humbling reminder? Or am I the only one?
-K
Reminds me of another ghost town I've seen (personally)... It's Centralia in Pennsylvania. You get near it where I80 meets Knobles or Route 61. (IIRC) - The story is that there was a giant waste fire burned in a open pit near a mine that ended up burning down hot enough/low enough to hit an exposed vein of coal under the mountains. The town has been burning ever since. It's not like a giant wildfire that you may first imagine, but a slowly moving, ever constantly burning coalfire underground.
This fire started in 1961 and still burns today. Centralia no longer exists on some maps because it has been deserted (by most). Due to the underground fire, some portions of land is too hot to walk on or has simply been dried out/burned to a crisp from the heat below. I wish I still had pictures of what I was able to take (lost the pics in a HD crash.) - From a slightly higher viewpoint, you can literally see a band stretching across... sort of like a slow moving creature devouring everything in its path and turning it all charred black or seared white.
One of the most interesting things I came across was scorched wood near an open vent: The steam coming up from the ground carried copper and baked it into the wood/bark. Lots of rocks were simply bleached white from the heat. I tried to be a dumbass and stood near an open vent to piss on the rocks... the heat was pretty damn intense. My shoes started melting (though I was standing a bit away from the vent) before I could finish urinating.
A link. (I used some info to correct my faulty memory.)
The Chernobyl Photo Journal is _stunning_.. I have considered going back to Centralia in the summer to do a more extensive photo documentation along the lines this young woman has. Beautiful work. First thought in my mind when I saw some of the pics was how desolate Centralia was as well... very erie and hard to describe if not for pictures.
Iraq had weapons of mass distruction, the USSR was an empire of evil ready to conquer the world.
Houston, we have a pattern.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
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
I am an American who got a bike license in the Netherlands. I wrecked my 95 Honda VFR750 two years ago, nearly to the day, on the north side of Hilversum, NL.
I was going about 45 mph, which isn't terribly quick, and things went awry. I was wearing a Clover textile jacket (hard armour, not unlike what the Ukraine girl was wearing with Kawa green). Triple stitched Carhartt jeans were covering my posterior.
The hard armour and the jacket saved me from a broken arm. My leather gloves kept my hands clean, and the jeans split at the center seam.
The results we a broken tailbone and a tiny bit of rash on my ace. I skidded over 25 ft and it's amazing what jeans will protect you from.
I walked away. The bike was totaled, despite me riding it home. You'd be amazed at what it really takes to cause serious damage.
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...
for those who know what it is (like me), heres from wikipedia :
A dosimeter is a pen-like device that measures the cumulative dose of radiation received by the device. It is usually clipped to one's clothing to measure one's actual exposure to radiation. Magnifying lenses (a low-power microscope) and an illumination lens allow one to directly read the dose by aiming the illumination lens at a light source and looking into the device.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosimeter
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.
Yeah, me too. Stupid piss-taking jokes about an event that goes beyond the realm of experience of any one of the lives of a small group of people currently sitting on their ass in a comfy place, reading a website called
Prosperity does not give one the right to degrade another persons experience
And before anyone pulls out the ol' "get over it, its only a joke" excuse, let me just say that jokes have their time and place.
The Chernobyl incident was a completely different time, in a completely different place. If this site was hosted in Russia, and the jokes were about American disasters, how many of you would consider them to be flame-bait, or make a noise about how 'inappropriate' it is?
Ridicule aint no compliment, and it aint no reflection.
That said, I hope that the generations yet to come understand that the generation currently alive are sorry for what they did to the future, with Chernobyl.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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?
Is it so? Tell me than, why my friends, relatives, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends have died or are dying because of cancer?
These were taken on a visit to the Chernobyl area by staff of the upcoming game "STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl" (based on the Chernobyl area)...
I could not find the original hosted site, but I had it backed up so I uploaded it for everyone here. It is very haunting. Anyway, check it out:
http://ii.net/~eenhoorn/s/Chernobyl/chern.html
It's a Bagel.
I have a friend living in Dnepropetrovsk and she says that most children in the vicinity have a weaker immune system and suffer allergies and all sorts of ailments.
Greenpeace released a similar site a while back about the Mayak plant. The Mayak plant released the same amount of radiation over 50 years than Chernobyl released at once, and it's totally fucked up the area. Minatom don't want to shut it down and they're still reprocessing fuel.
Half Life: The Dangerous Effects Of Nuclear Waste
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
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.
Whenever Chernobyl is mentioned, there are always those people eager to explain why it doesn't matter, because the same thing couldn't happen with more advanced reactors. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure....
Of course the SAME thing couldn't happen. But other things could/will/do. Anyone who is an engineer knows that, as there simply are no perfect fail-safe systems.
Here in germany people were also priding themselves about their fail-safe reactors, especiually compared to Chernobyl. But then along came 9/11, and they wondered what would happen if a Jumbo Jet would crash on the nuclear power plant. No, the shielding wouldn't hold - the best idea they come up with now is to use fog bombs to make the plant invisible. Like that's going to make a difference with GPRS available.
You know, the nature of such catstrophies is that they come in a way nobody has thought of before. Of course Chernobyl has been analyzed over and over, and people won't make the SAME mistakes. But you bet they'll make OTHER mistakes. To deny that is just being in denial.
I had the chance to visit the national museum in Kiev two years ago.
It was truly amazing, I hope that they make a good movie about it becouse it seems that most people only learn about the world from movies.
In the museum they had two newspapers, one a Soviet and an American the day after. On the American the disaster was on the main page as the headline. On the soviet it was on the 6th page in a little box in the cornner.
Once the Soviets figured out the shit they were in - on the third day - they started to evacuate people. There was one film they showed of little kids playing, you could see bright flashes in the film. It was from radiation on the film. (Think airport xrays)
Another film showed the clean up crew. Each soldier was given a gas mask and a iorn vest. Before the door the took a shot of vodkia and walked out - Each man would shovel for 30 seconds and then go home. Most died a few days later.
On a side note my parents and brother meet some local people and they went out to a beach on the river (look at the map on that website). My father was just reciently diagnosses with tyroid cancer (in germany) a was not too happy so none of them swap just watched. Later my dad finds out that they were in the red-zone. Mind you there were a lot of kids playing in the water.
For those who may not know - the nuclear plan was just recienty shut down ('98 i think). It had been in operation for quite some time (using the remaning reactors)
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Here is a look at just how extensive the damage was.
I know you're trying to make a political point, but it has been estimated that, although different radionuclides were released, the total radioactivity of the material from Chernobyl was 200 times that of the combined releases from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I think what matters most is that more people died from it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if the radioactivity was 200x less, it still was much more than enough to wipe out entire cities.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Pretty amazing stuff. The desertion so nearly complete. The suffering and loss of life. The fact that the evacuation was so late.
I found it strange that the tourists who went to the ghost town were disappointed that it was so quiet! I would have thought that was the point.
Great stuff! To be commended.
She did admit that radio-activity on the roads she travelled is still many times normal background. I hope her dad knows his safe doses well...
Posters recognized by their sig,
Exactly. Which is why our next reactors will have only infallible humans operating them.
Oh, wait.... our next reactors will have only infallible computers operating them.
Dang! Wait... our next computers will have only infallible humans programming them.
Wait...
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
There's something really cyberpunk about this, and not in the glitz-and-glamor Mondo2000 sort of way.
/. article ever.
I think it's the duality between the rusted-out poisonous landscape, the hot motorcycle, and the logo jacket.
Very cool. Best
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
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
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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
Urban archaeology doesn't have the following of some hobbies, like stamp-collecting or professional sports, but I can see its appeal.
All constructions, like all people, have life cycles. They're built/conceived, people move in, they're lived-in, they have make-overs/get remodeled, they have mid-life crises/get remodeled tastelessly to hide the structure's growing problems, the spirit leaves/people move out, and get torn down.
If the area is busy enough, there's no gap between moving out and tearing down. And if the area is really busy, there's no gap between the tearing down and the building up, the quest eternal for the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes places die, and this interests people. Pripyat has the dubious distinction of actually being killed, and of course there's some interest in its slowly decaying municipal corpse. And there are other ways for a place to die suddenly too.
Obligatory links:
Come to think of it, there's a place not far from me, pretty much right in the middle of Annapolis, which I need to snap pictures of for posterity's sake. Sure, I'll be using a digital camera, but...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Hmmm, how much do I want to play that game now. Are we sure this isn't a plant by Nvidia? :)
I gather from your Web site that you are from the U.S.
Do you think that the September 11 attacks are a joking matter? Those attacks killed thousands; the effects of Chernobyl may have killed 300,000 if one accepts an estimate from a U.K. charity. The radiation of Chernobyl spread across multiple countries. -- I remember news reports reporting radiation tracked all the way to northern Finland ; radiation was tracked to Central Europe and the Mediterranean .
I entered college 90 minutes' drive east of Three Mile Island in the Fall of 1979. The campus was still on edge because of the accident and uncertainty about its long-term effects -- because weather can go from west to east there....
Links that may be useful rather than callously "funny:"Zeal.com search on Chernobyl
www.chernobyl.info English-language pages
Chernobyl Charities U.K. page on book Voices from Chernobyl
Don't forget to keep an eye out for this years Oscar winning short documentary Chernobyl Heart. Imagine if a tragedy like this hit some built up part of the western world - in the states or the u.k. etc...
The documentary was made in collaboration with Adi Roche and the Chernobyl childrens project, which is worth special mention...
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.
i live a few miles from national airport (and the pentagon), and our airport was closed for WEEKS, nearly closed forever had some in the white house had their druthers. some things you don't realize are there until they're gone, and you'd find yourself kind of waiting for the next jet. all we did hear was the flights of military jets, which normally pass over here at less than a thousand as they cut through over national from andrews, but now of course they sounded ten times as loud.
just after the jet hit, i just remember hearing all the sirens, headed in the same direction. our fire department (arlington) was the first there, reportedly the engine was out on another call and saw what happened. (yeah, i wondered what happened to the other call,, too.)
strange time here. then came the anthrax. then the snipers. yes, it did occur to me to wonder whether we should be here, but this is our home.
i notice that most of the biker's pictures (including the one of her in a kawasaki jacket, the brand she mentions repeatedly? did they pay her for promo?) of how the chernobyl area has gone to hell focus on decrepit buildings. well, of course manmade stuff would fall apart; how's nature doing? and to be honest i find it humbling and a tad reassuring that man's creations will go away once man has left, let the earth move on.
My uncle was a member of one of the first rescue teams that were sent to Chernobyl after the disaster. This might be slightly off topic, but if you think that the pictures of the empty city are disturbing, take a look at people who were there after the tragic event.
I hate a lot of things about my former country, the Soviet Union, and its leaders. One of the things that I hated the most was the fact that people were never told the truth. In May of 1986 my uncle was told that he had to go to Chernobyl to help patch things up. Since he was a memeber of an elite task team that was a part of chemical forces, a special unit within the Soviet Army, he had no other options. He went there in May and he spent some quality time there. His major task was to drive tons of cement to a helicopter that would drop it off on the damaged reactor.
The not-so-funny thing was that nobody who was in my uncle's shoes knew what was going on there. The superior officers, had to tweak radiation meters down so nobody could find out the real level of radiation. People did not have proper protection, tools to work with; moreover, the Soviet leaders did try to play things down a notch. Afterall, how could a superpower have a major disaster?
Out of all of my uncle's rescue team, only a dozen or so people are alive now. All of them are disabled. My uncle has problems with his eyes and due to this fact he had to quit his job: he was a professional photographer. The Ukranian government pays him a small pension, not enough to buy food for a week. His immune system got reduced down to 60% of what he used to have. Still, he's better than his son. My cousin's system is 40% of the normal level. I remember reading a newspaper about a woman who had to buy a bottle of vodka every day. She did it because her husband could not surive through pain without it. Just as my uncle, he was in Chernobyl trying to fix the Soviet problem without exposing it to the rest of the world. That guy was lucky. His kids had been born before he went to Chernobyl. You won't believe how many stories I've heard when people just wanted to die without pain and suffering.
Finally, here is a surprise for you. Chernobyl is not the only empty city. In fact, if you want to see more of them, you should travel to southern Belarus. See, due to the winds and the rain that happened right after the disaster, most of the radiation that escaped in Chernobyl ended up miles away in the neighboring state. In fact, Belarus recieved more damage than the Ukraine due to the wind pattern for that day. Most of the winds blew from the Ukraine straight into my motherland and the damage was done. I was lucky. Although I was in the rain that day, most of the radiation passed around my town. However, many towns received a solid amount of radiated water but the government did not do anything until it was late. As I said above, the government did everything it could to cover up the problem.
We were told to burn our clothing and take a shower. That is it. That was the f*cking Soviet solution to the problem. Months later dozens of small towns were evacuated. People left leaving everything behind in hopes that they would return. Return my ass. The only people who returned were either looters or bums who scored nice houses where they could live. Years later, after the Soviet regime had collapsed, some reporters were providing us with information places that were emptied out. Most of these places are still there. They are a real time machine. If you go there, you'll see pretty much everything as it was in late 80's. Pictures of those places are distrubing, but not as bad as pictures of kids with cancer or disabilities due to the Chernobyl disaster. As for me, I am afraid of having a child myself. Who knows what got inside of me during that f*cking rain... All I know is that some of my friends started to develop problems already.
Have a nice day.
There is a game in the production -STALKER about Chernobil zone. Designers of the game took a special trip into Chernobil zone, to take pictures and get a feeling of the zone. Pictures form their trip (don't mistake them for screenshots)used to be buried somethere on their site.
Here are some of my bookmarks with photos of abandoned places . . . don't know how well any of them work:n /index. htmm lt tp://www.forgottendetroit.com/t en-ny.com/o logy.htmlw w.starfury.demon.co.uk/uground/m erica.com/lostframe.html. com/
http://detroityes.com/toc.htm#Gildedb ring.com/hub?ring=draining&list&page=1
http://members.tripod.com/airfields_freema
http://home2.planetinternet.be/henk/index.ht
http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/
h
http://www.forgot
http://www.acme.com/jef/photos/archae
http://www.infiltration.org/
http://w
http://www.losta
http://www.modern-ruins
http://www.losthighways.org/radebaugh.html
http://e.we
Regarding nuclear power, it is important to remember that uranium can run out just like fossil fuels, and in fact if we had started out using nuclear power instead of oil for energy, we would certainly have run out of nuclear fuel by now. In other words, nuclear power is not a solution except as a pollution free way to power a few dozen densely populated areas.
This past Sunday, the Oscar for Documentary Short went to a film about Chernobyl:
One simple rule for its versus it's
To look at the pictures she has taken of the aftermath, the lives that were lost. I'm deeply disturbed, and saddened.
My hat is off to her and others that document this as a monument to those who lost their lives, their loved ones, and their homes. These people died needlessly at the hands of those that considered human life to be secondary to political goals.
In a time where we all worry about the possibility of a rogue nation, or a terrorist triggering a nuclear or "dirty" bomb, we need to look at this and be aware of the outcome.
May this tragedy never be repeated.
-dh
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.
Pripyat (1999)
We've closed down most of the pits and are using North Sea gas to power the stations. How long is that going to last?
Wind and solar would be great, but what I've heard about yields from both, the investment to replace our power requirements would be immense and completely blight the landscape of the country.
A Ukrainian chick who no doubt has one of those sexy eastern-European/Russian style accents who rides a big bike and likes to go to dangerous places on it.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
The WTC was designed to survive the impact of a 707. It probably would have, although they missed the effect that a massive paper fire would have on the denuded steel support columns, which is what brought the building down in the real world attack. However, it's a completely different type of survivability. WTC was not designed to have the airplane splatter against the walls, it was designed to absorb it and still have enough structure remaining to hold. The people on the affected floors get an express ticket to heaven. Despite the fact that the airplanes which hit the WTC were much larger than what the WTC was designed to withstand, the towers still managed to stay standing long enough for nearly everybody to evacuate.
Nuclear reactor containment domes, on the other hand, are designed to actually shield from an airplane impact. They don't just absorb it and survive, the airplane will not penetrate. This is a totally different degree of survivability. Not to mention that this has actually been tested, and the dome is barely even scratched. A bunker buster could crack it. A nuke going off right next to it could, but a nuke a little distance away probably wouldn't do much. These things are seriously strong.
About your completely nutty tin-foil hat theory about the causes of WTC, get real. People have been flying airplanes into things to destroy them since the 40s. An Algerian terrorist group tried to fly an airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, and was only unsuccessful because French security forces learned of their plans beforehand and decided to raid the airplane during negotiations on the runway. An operation involving 20 people on four different flights timed to go off within minutes of each other requires years of planning to pull off. There's no way your show could have been the inspiration for the attack.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
TMI did fail safe. You had a partial meltdown with only very limited release of short-lived radiactivity (Iodine-131, half-life 8 days). No deaths or injuries.
It woudn't have failed at all if it hadn't been for incorrect operator intervention.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Hey, I just wanted to reply to express my simpathy towards you and your family. I think I can relate - my family had to survive the Holocaust, another great cover-up attempt.
No matter how long you live after that, or where you move, the images and memories will haunt you. And the older you get, the more you learn about how stupid and egotistic the political decisions can be. And the governments excuse themselves with "we didn't know..." and you feel how lucky you are to be alive today.
Live and tell the story. I think this is our purpose, the next-generation survivors. And if you truly do so, you'll see how people just don't want to hear, don't care, and excuse themselves with having more important things to do...
I truly hope you have a healthy child one day.
It's curious whether there is any scientific/industrial research going on in this direction. Let's note, Chernobyl is not the only technological disaster area in the world. The world is full of leaking, diffusing, lying in the open and pretty deadly chemical and radioactive stuff.
Practically every large city in North America and Europe has highly contaminted patches of land next to them due to the past or present industrial activities. Things can get very expensive when people finally figure out the reasons for soaring rates of cancer and other sicknesses.
Is there a technological solution to the problem? Nanotechnology? Genetic engineering? You can imagine cesium gathering ants and mercury hungry bees. There was a report somewhere about generically modified bacteria successfully neutralizing toxic chemical substances. Perhaps some ideas could be sparked by the Ukrainian biker chronicles.