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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.'"
You don't need to run any lights at night.
"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
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
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.
For the record, a free Angelfire site presently gets 1 GB of monthly bandwidth on which to serve up to 20 MB of content. Which means, when /. finishes off this site's bandwidth allowance, this site's gone for the month.
If somebody were to give this unfortunate person Angelfire's highest "element plan", it would cost $15 for the setup and $14.95 for the first month, and give her 30 GB of monthly traffic. That might be enough to survive a slashdotting.
(She - apparently by mistake - skipped page 16, which you can access by modifying the URL manually.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
She mentions that the radiation exposure in Kiev during the first few days was equivalent to about a year's worth of radiation at Chernobyl now. The bastards did not inform the populace until the wind blew into Europe and radiation alarms started going off, igniting international alarm. My wife, a child at the time, was belatedly rushed out of town along with all the children in Kiev a week later. I can't prove a link, but the fact is my wife had cancer surgery just last week. I'm sure that coal and gas are worse for the environment, and I support nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative, but a freak accident combined with a stupid reaction of a government made matters much worse than they should have been. People will be suffering due to Chernobyl for decades and centuries to come.
There is another page of pictures that you won't see clicking on the links, she has page 15 going directly to 17 by accident. This page shows the swimming pool.
I can't believe some girl's photo album was the single greatest link I have ever read off slashdot. And it wasn't even M$ or SCO related. Incredible.
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.
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FM Clan
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.
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
Chernobyl Reactor 2 was shut down in 1991 after a fire, Reactor 1 was shut down in '96 to scam money out of the EU, and reactor 3 (the last one standing) was shut down permanantly in December of 2000.
However, the cement structure encasing reactor 4 (the one that went boom) is starting to show signs of wear and about 10% of it is cracked.
Scientific types are warning about structural failure happening sooner rather than later. The real issue here is repairing that, because when it comes tumbling down we're going to be in a world of trouble again... and what with the no-soviet union anymore, good luck convincing anyone to go to ground 0 and clean it up (rather than forcing them to do it at gunpoint.)
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..."
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.
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
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.
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!!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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. --
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"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.
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.