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Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos
wrx writes "Elena has taken another motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area, and has updated her site with a whole lot of new photos and text. The pictures now show several surrounding towns, the radiation level of the magic wood, and many more details inside buildings. After the dust had settled from the
original slashdot story,
Elena wrote 'who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.'"
Also, 300 mR is only enough to increase your risk of cancer by 0.01 %, i.e. it's not going to take any time off your life (unless you happen to be the one in 10,000 who gets cancer as a result of that additional exposure, and even then, your chances of dieing are only 1 in 2).
Oh please.
TMI was a non-incident. The only reason anyone thinks it was a big deal was because of press coverage, and because of TV personalities arguing about it live on nightly news. The most exposure anyone got was around 100millirems, which is about the same as an x-ray at a doctor's office.
You do realize that Three Mile Island was the single lamest nuclear "disaster" in history, right? Standing with my hand on the reactor, I would get the same amount of radiation from said reactor in one second as I get from the rest of the environment in one second. Compare to smoking, which (on average) quadrouples your radiation dose.
Yup... Just in case Angelfire decides her bandwidth is too much, here is a mirror: http://www.fcdnet.org/chernobyl/
Living in a home made of brick (as I do) will increase your dose by about 30 mR/year. On the other hand, living in a poorly ventilated house over a soil rich in Uranium can increase your dose by about 1000 mR/year. This is all in the United States NRC's (not online) NuReg 1401.
You said: " Wait a second! she is showing readings of less than 1 mR/hour. Power plant workers can work in 1 mR/hour for the entire year and not exceed NRC's strict 2 R/year limit. In otherwords, this is nothing. Parent poster doesn't know what he is talking about."
The NRC limit (see 10 C.F.R.) is 3 rem per quarter, and 5 rem per year. A rem is a weighted roetgen (R). The weighting factors are used because while a roetgen measures the energy deposited, a rem measures the physical damage (exposure versus dose). An example of a weighting factor is a gamma will have a factor of 1, while a fast neutron may have a factor of 20. So a 1 mR/hr exposure rate will give you 1 mrem/hr for gammas, and 20 mrem/hr for fast neutrons.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Those pictures are just great at showing the sense of "creepiness" of those places. I can definitely understand why folks are afraid of venturing into the dead zone, even though these aren't terribly large doses of radiation.
Everyone should definitely take the time to look through ALL of the pages. Thanks to the author/photographer for a great photo-essay.
Visit the oldest running human webcam on the internet:
http://www.mitwebcam.com
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
Very different units.
c hp5.htm)
Roentgens measure ionizing radiation in air/free field. Rems (actually REM, an acronym for Roentgen-Equivalent Man) are a measure of how much biological damage a given amount of radiation does. Basically, one roentgen of gamma radiation is appx. equivalent to one rad absorbed is appx. equivalent to one rem. However, other types of radiation have different conversions - for instance, one rad of alpha radiation is appx. equivalent to 20 rems of exposure.
The short version - "In summary, the roentgen is a unit of exposure, the rad is a unit of absorbed dose, and the rem is a unit of biological dose."
(data from http://www.radford.edu/~fac-man/Safety/Radiation/
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Roentgen: radiation intensity required to produce and ionization charge of 0.000258 coulombs per kilogram of air.
Rem: absorbed dose of 0.01 joules of energy per kilogram of tissue
One roentgen of gamma radiation exposure results in about one rad of absorbed dose.
On the left there are abbreviated weekdays written, and they go from Monday to Saturday. Traditionally in Soviet Union everyone worked 6 day per week, and this calendar only shows the working days.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
From_ back.p df
http://ldml.stanford.edu/cisac/pdf/Nuc_terr
20,000 millirem will mutate DNA enough to produce noticeable health effects. Above 100,000 millirem, diseases manifest.
10,000 millirem is enough to increase your cancer risk.
5,000 millirem per year is the maximum allowable annual dosage.
25,000-100.000 mrem - Temporary blood changes
35,000 - Loss of appetite, nausea
50,000 - Temporary sterility in males
100,000 - 2x normal incidence of genetic defects
100,000 - 300,000 - Vomiting, diarrhea
300,000 - 500,000 - 50% chance of death if not treated
300,000+ - Permanent sterility for females
400,000-1,000,000 - Acute illnes, death within days if not treated.
Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour, when she was standing a few hundred metres from the reactor.
I am facinated by these pictures, I would love to (briefly) visit these places, but I fear she will do herself serious harm over time. The area is an incredible time capsule.
My rights don't need management.
Most of that increase is from Radon, which is an inert gas that is produced by the breakdown of Thorium or Uranium. It's much heavier than mormal air and so tends to linger in basements, and as a gas, of course it goes right into a person's lungs.
Then there's Granite. Some granites produce 500 to 800 mr/year or so exposure. 'The' UN building in NY, NY is sheathed with a moderately hot granite cladding, resulting in, if I recall correctly, employee exposures of 200-250 mR/year at full time, and some buildings are much worse.
Who is John Cabal?
You said: " Yeah, potasium iodide, they are saying it keeps radiation out of your system for X amount of dollars, like this: http://www.nukepills.com/"
Potasium iodide doesn't 'get the radiation out of your system'. Please understand that radiation is the transmittal of energy through EM-wave or various particles (betas, alphas, neutrons). Radiation may pass through your body (perhaps doing harm) but it won't stay. Contamination is some radioactive substance that emits radiation governed by its half-life. If you drive by the a site that has alot of contamination you will get some radiation dose. As long as you don't ingest any of the contamination you will not get a dose when you leave.
The purpose of potassium iodide is to minimize the dose to your thyroid. One characteristic radionuclide from nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons is radioactive iodine (typically I-129 and I-131). Your thyroid can absorb a certain amount of iodine before it become saturated. If you use iodine pills, your thyroid will absorb a non-radioactive nuclide. This means that when you ingest radioactive iodine following a casuality, little of it will be absorbed into the thyroid, reducing the dose to the thyroid. Please note though, that the thyroid isn't the only organ that can kill you if it gets exposed to a significant amount of radiation. Its just the only one that there is an effective preventive measure for. If you are in the area of radioactive fallout, it will increase your chances of survival slightly, but it won't make you a radiation-resistant superman.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
If you read through it she mentions that she brings one of the local die-hards who refuses to leave with her for exploring buildings because of the safety issues involved. Presumably said girl took the photo.
One of the units at Chernobyl had gotten a license to operate, even though they hadn't run all of the required tests. One of the tests they hadn't run was to verify that the spin down of the turbine after a turbine trip could power the unit until the standby generators could be activated. The unit was coming up to a planned shutdown, so they decided (or were told) to run the test and get it out of the way.
However, rather than simply tripping the turbine and reactor, which would only give them one shot to get the test right, they decided to keep the reactor running at low power level and simply trip the turbine. That would let them repeat the test as many times as they needed to in order to make sure they passed it.
Sure enough, the operators flubbed the test on the first run through, but they also allowed the reactor to sink to an extremely low power level. So low, in fact, that they got into an unstable operating range that they didn't know about. So, when they goosed the reactor to repeat the test, they got a runaway instead.
The resulting pressure excursion and/or steam explosion blew the head off of the reactor and the roof off the building. The reactor, like all Soviet reactors, had no containment structure. This allowed air to enter, which allowed the graphite blocks that served as a moderator to catch fire, creating a radioactive smoke plume blowing downwind. The rest of the world (ie., us) found out about the accident when Swedish scientists reported a radioactive cloud passing overhead.
The graphite in the reactor all burned away eventually, in spite of many days worth of truly heroic (and fatal) efforts to put it out. The fuel all coalesced into a magma and the proceeded to sink down through the building structure where it (fortunately) dispersed into the different basements and sub-structures until it had been dispersed and cooled enough that it stopped. It's all still there and will be continue to be deadly dangerous for thousands of years to come.
So much for safe, clean, and efficient nuclear power.
All this is from memory, so please forgive any errors, which are entirely mine.
Heh, looks like you made the same mistake that I almost did. The link on that first page just goes right back to angelfire. The -k option in wget is most useful for these situations
True mirror at: http://netfiles.uiuc.edui/benoc/mirrors/www.angelf ire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/
Visit the oldest running human webcam on the internet:
http://www.mitwebcam.com
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
Yeah, sure. It's a non-event only if you realize how close they were to core meltdown which would have poisoned the water table across a large swatch of the east coast (lookup china syndrome), and ignore the fact that the reactor containment facility STILL (a quarter centyry later) has places too radioactivly hot to enter. And several years after the incident considerably more radiation was released:
For 11 days, in June-July, 1980, Met Ed illegally vented 43,000 curies of radioactive Krypton-85 (beta and gamma; 10 year half life) and other radioactive gasses into the environment without having scrubbers in place. In November 1980, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the krypton venting was illegal.
link
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If you want to grab it via bittorrent, and contribute bandwidth back to other people who are downloading, I've got a torrent of a mirror set up here.
Bittorrent is probably overkill for a 5 meg site, but who cares; it helps spread the bandwidth load around...
It in fact blew the roof some 2,000 feet into the air spreading the worst of the worst particles far and wide.
White-hot graphite rods were exposed to cold water - these exploded and that was what caused the explosion. The outside world first learned of it when some Norwegian folks at a nuclear plant picked up some off the scale readings.
The majority of the reactor was buried under tons of concrete and steel (which is now in danger of cracking open). Many firefighters died attempting to contain nuclear fire and most of those had no idea what they were dealing with at the time.
More info here:
http://www.uic.com.au/nip22.htm
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
>
>I have never heard of radiation producing visible evidence (immediately, that is), but then again, there was a lot of it. What is this "shinning" all about?
Chernobyl was a graphite fire - the fire is probably what is being described.
There is a visible phenomenon - Cerenkov radiation - a beautiful blue glow produced when fast moving particles strike water (speed of light in a transparent medium is a function of refractive index -- if particles have to "slow down", that energy has to go somewhere - it gets shot out in a cone of radiation).
If you're seeing Cerenkov radiation at the bottom of a reactor pool, it's beautiful. If you're seeing it because the neutron flux through your eyeballs is enough that your vitreous humor is glowing blue, it's probably less than beautiful, given that if you know what you're seeing, you realize that your lifespan is probably best measured in hours/weeks, rather than years.
Given that the only probable reports of seeing Cerenkov radiation from within the eyeball have been criticality incidents at very close range (1946, Tickling the dragon's tail"> and 1999 Japan, Tokaimura), I'm skeptical that the people on top of the building were seeing Cerenkov radiation from within their eyeballs.
Chernobyl wasn't just a graphite fire, however, it was also a steam explosion. It's plausible (I don't have the numbers) that the neutron flux being spewed from the building was high enough to make condensing steam in the nearby air glow blue.
From the account provided, there's insufficient data to sway me one way or the other -- were witnesses seeing light from the burning graphite and related fire, or were they seeing Cerenkov light released when you dump a massive neutron flux into a tower of condensing steam. The simpler hypothesis is that it was merely light from the intense fire.
If I had to choose, I'd go with fire, but a single picture from the rooftop, or an eyewitness reporting blue in the fire would be enough to convince me that the shining was the blue light of Cerenkov radiation brought on by the dumping of insane numbers of neutrons into condensing droplets of water as the steam condensed.
Aside to Elena: Thank you again for documenting this.
That picture does not do it justice. While I was somewhat disappointed that the whole nuclear reaction was fairly anticlimatic -- no rumbling, no vibration, no nothing discernable except the blue light -- that blue light at the bottom of the pool was probably the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There's just no way to describe the color. It's so vivid and so intense.
-------------------------------------------------
I recently worked on a project with a group of radiologists at the research university I'm employed by to develop an expert system to more quickly train operators of portable ultrasound imaging equipment. This group is part of a world wide organization of physicians dealing with the long term irradiation effects of hundreds of thousands of people exposed to Chernobyl's fallout. Specifically, detecting thyroid cancer with ultrasound requires much experience and there is great urgency to speed training to detect these cancers early before they become too advanced for successful treatment. This group began monitoring residents in the fallout area shortly after the accident was made public. Children exposed then are now beginning to show higher rates of thyroid cancers.
And her Ukrainian may be even better than her Russian.
They are separate languages. Russian was forced on the Ukrainians by the Soviets, just like in the rest of the USSR. I'm sure she does speak Russian, but you cannot assume which is her "native" language.
those numbers that are being quoted are for a burst dose -- ie you get it all at once. the effects change if you get a continuous, lower dose to the same levels.
I'm currently in the Navy's Nuclear Engineer school (2 more weeks and hopefully I'll be a certified nuclear engineer! hooray!). I don't have the numbers memorized, but this is along the lines of what they tell us (and yes, it's unclassified):
1 Rem = 1 mRem (milliRem)
The following are effects from burst doses
Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: tell the guys he's a dumbass for thinking there's a problem
Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: have him see a doctor just to make sure, but there's still really no problem. possible rise in chance to get cancer.
Prognossis: Good
Effects: headache. 5% chance of vomitting within 4 hrs.
Treatment: seek medical attention.
Prognossis: OK
Effects: headache. 50% chance of vomitting within 2 hr. 5% chance of death within 4 months.
Treatment: seek medical attention immediately.
Prognossis: Guarded
Effects: headache. 100% chance of vomiting within 1 hr. 50% chance of death within a short period (can't rememebr the time).
Treatment: better get him to a doctor NOW!
Prognossis: hopeless
Effects: headache. 100% chance vomitting within 30 min. 100% chance of death within 48 hrs.
Treatment: Give him sedatives. Call the morgue.
For those that are curious, the guys on K-19 probably got more than 5000 Rem.
And what do these mean? here are some numbers to compare against:
I work daily 15 feet from an operational reactor (I work on US submarines).
my exposure last month: 4 mrem.
my lifetime exposure:
The radiation levels in the Reactor Compartment 15 minutes after shutting down the reactor: ~50 mRem/hr (avg)
a day at the beach: 10 mRem per day
smoking for a year: 1 Rem
standing next to a bag of fertilizer: 2 mRem / day
eating a banana: 4 mRem each
those numbers are mostly from betas and gammas. alphas only affect you if you get them inside you, which is why smokers get so much radiation, and neutron mostly is (a) really low-level and (b) passes right through you.
so what's my point?
1. I get less radiation from work that I do from living.
2. those numbers that they got from Chyrnobl are HUGE, but they can't happen on US Naval Reactors. Even if we were to completely melt down and spray our stuff all over the place, we would still be relatively clean (we use tiny reactors; we only need to power a 300' boat to 25+ knots, we don;t need to power an entire metropolis). besides, the most likely time that would occur is if we get hit with a depth charge, at which point's we'll sit on the bottom of the ocean and get covered with a whole hell of a lot of water!
weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
Back in the early 80's a small town - Times Beach, Missouri was found to have dioxin sprayed on the dirt streets and caused the government to buy out the whole town and relocate everybody.
It is eery to drive down I-44 just outside of St. Louis and see this town that is totally deserted. just sitting there...
I've moved from the area since so have not seen it in a few years so don't know what it looks like today, but it was said that the streets contained 2,000,000 times the amount of dioxin considered to be a dangerous level.
People living there would rake up dead birds and animals died at an alarming rate. over 50 horses died at a single stable from the spraying.
Now it is just a ghost town frozen in time from the early 80's.
A massive cleanup was to be put in place collecting the dirt, processing it and later putting back the cleaned dirt... but it may be a never ending project.
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Best shielding for:
Gammas: DU or lead
Betas: Plastic, water (avoid metal at all costs, especially heavy metals)
Alpha: Basically anything
Neutron: Parafin to slow them down and lithium to absorb them
An x-ray is made by slamming an electron into a heavy, dense metal, usually tungsten in machines. A beta is a very fast electron so shield them with metal and you have an x-ray source.
Quoting chapter 6:
Some tell that 400.000 dead, soyuzchernobyl report of 300.000 people that died since 1986 and this is not over, in 30 years people will still die
These numbers are WILDLY inflated! The number of deaths from radiation are probably rather in the dozens. Check here, or here
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
1. Our bodies: about half of the radioactivity in our bodies comes from Potassium-40 (naturally-occurring radioactive form of potassium.) Potassium is important for the brain and muscles. Most of the rest of our bodies' radioactivity is from Carbon-14 and tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. These naturally-occurring radioactive substances expose our bodies to about 25 "millirem" per year, abbreviated as "mrem/yr".)
2. Radioactivity in food and water: for example, the radio- (and non-radio) active forms of iodine and sodium. The food we eat contains radium-226, thorium-232, potassium-40, carbon-14, and hydrogen-3, also known as tritium.
To quote a web page: The U. S. Department of Energy gives the following concentrations as examples:
3. Flying: Flying in an airplane increases our exposure to cosmic radiation. A coast-to-coast round trip gives us a dose of about four millirem.
4. Living at higher altitudes: Generally, for each 100-foot increase in altitude, there is an increased dose of one millirem per year. (So, San Francisco vs. Boulder, for example)...
5. The rocks, soils and beaches around us are radioactive: In Ohio, radiation in soil and rocks contributes about 60 millirem in one year to our exposure. In Colorado, it is about 105 millirem per year. In Kerala, India, this radioactivity from soil and rocks can be 3,000 millirem per year, and at a beach in Guarapari, Brazil, it is over 5 millirem in a single hour -- but only a few residents who use that beach receive doses in excess of 500 millirem per year.
6. Radioactivity in our homes:
A: If you live in a wood house, the natural radioactivity in the building materials gives you a dose of 30 to 50 millirem per year.
B: In a brick house, it is 50 to 100 millirem per year.
C: In a tightly sealed house with little ventilation, natural radioactive gases (radon) can be trapped for a longer period of time and increase your dose.
7. People/coworkers: Each person with whom we spend eight hours a day gives us a dose of about 0.1 millirem in a year.
8. Cooking: Using a gas stove can increase the dose by about two millirem per year because of radioactive materials in the natural gas.
9. Smoking: A person who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day receives a radiation dose of about 1,300 millrem per year. This is because polonium (a radioactive element) is part of the smoke and when inhaled, it gets trapped in the lungs.
10. Misc: There's also the sun, and medical X-rays...
Basically, on the whole we need not fear natural radioactivity, as our bodies evolved to cope with it (cellular repair). What we need to fear/respect is man-made radioactivity and its waste products, because when human error/greed/fallibility get involved, that is when man-made radioactivity bites us in the ass...
More pictures here
Then again, I'm sure these pictures still don't do it justice.
Elena has started posting on sport-touring.net.
When someone put up a mirror, worried about bandwidth, Elena asked him to take it down because she was concerned that her updates wouldn't get propagated, and that people would only see an old version.
elena
I asked to remove copied site, because need to update and need to make some corrections.
Original Elena post here.
While I realize that folks just want to help out, I think that, given that this is Elena's work (and one that she had to venture into hazardous environments to produce and is giving away freely), her wishes should be respected WRT mirrors. (That doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a personal wget -rk --no-parent'ed copy just in case the site ever goes away permanently, though.)
May we never see th
Ummmm, Chernobyl was tiny compared to other nuclear accidents that happened in the Soviet Union. The only reason it is so well, known is its location. It is very close to other European borders. When it went off, other national communities saw a huge spike in radiation levels coming from that region. The Soviet Union denied anything happened, but after repeated requests to know what happened they finally caved in and said what happened.
I've lived in areas in the former Soviet Union that had worse nuclear accidents. With Chernobyl, they had a crack that formed over the waste plant, and from that it started to spew waste from it. They flew a chopper over it and dropped some cement over it to stop the process.
Chelyabinsk Sorok (40 kilometers from the city) had much worse problems. In the '50's and the '60's it had a couple accidents. It blew the top off the waste plant completely. There was no stopping the waste from coming out. They had to bring people from outside the region to clean it up, because the residents in the area knew what it was and would not clean it up. (Normally the Soviet Union would have only those who were in the area clean it up, so rumors wouldn't spread.) This happened again in the '60's. And another time they decided that because there are so many lakes in the area, why not take and dump some of the nuclear waste and dump it in one of those?
Another city that a huge nuclear accident happened at was Novosibirsk. Although I am less familiar with the details. I just know that some days were "warmer" than others depending on how the wind blew.
(Please note that I actually lived there and conversed with many people in Chelyabinsk -- who openly scoffed at Chernobyl. I've even conversed with a person who cleaned it up. He was so cancer-ridden that he could barely move.)