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.'"

Comments

Soaking up the gamma

[NatlLabGeek]

I can't even imagine the dose she's soaking up. I look at the reading she's showing in pictures and she's taken up my YEARLY dose in HOURS. Is it really exciting enough to give away years of your life for a helluva ride?

Then again, I chase storms.

Go with God, girl.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[b0r0din]

Some people smoke. Others drive their motorcycle through the worst nuclear incident of all time. In my opinion, the second one sounds much cooler. For some reason Snow Crash comes to mind.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[gumbi west]

Not so sure. You probably get about 300 mR/year and you may get way more. For example, if you smoke you get an additional 1000 mR/year (1 R/year) in addition to all the other things in the tobaco.

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).

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[gumbi west]

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.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[Jeremy Erwin]

At least she's documenting her journeys. IMHO, the most interesting thing about her picture is not the radiation, but that the whole place is preserved from the Soviet era. Sort of like a depopulated Pompeii, without all the digging.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[gumbi west]

The highest reading she shows or talks about is 3 mR/hr. This is only 30 times higher than the levels in Grand Centeral Station, and is many times less than a number of natural locations.

Sorry, I'm not trying to karma whore, but my day job relates to getting people not to be affraid of radiation, so seing this post have such high mod points is really getting to me.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[Aglassis]

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.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[Aglassis]

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.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[Tackhead]

> She mentions at one point that on the "day of disaster people gothered on the roof of this builing and have been looking at a beautiful shining above Atomic Plant. This was the shinning of radiation."
>
>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.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[True Grit]

1. So much for safe, clean, and efficient nuclear power

Nuclear power has 3 problems: 1) it generates waste that is toxic for a long period of time, 2) it was over-sold and over-hyped when it was first introduced in the US, which led us to jump into this technology before we were competent with it, and 3) in the minds of average people its hopelessly linked to nuclear weapons, and the fear of mass destruction, even though the technology and goals are completely different between the 2 disciplines.

If you want to bash it on those reasons, especially the waste problem, fine, I can understand that, but I'm tired of hearing people use Chernobyl as the example of why nuclear power is "too dangerous".

There was *never* any such thing as a safe, clean, and efficient *anything* in the old Soviet Union. They routinely built nuclear reactors (and a hell of a lot of other buildings for that matter) that would never have been built in the West because of their atrocious design and lack of safety. Chernobyl isn't proof that nuclear power is too dangerous to use, its just proof that a communistic system of government is a greater threat to its own people than any outside "enemy".

NP can be safely used now, now that we've had 30+ years of experience. Look at France and Japan. Heck, did you read about the experimental mini-reactor being used by a village in Alaska? Totally self-contained and safe, its interior is sealed at the factory and isn't opened again until its decommissioned 15-20 years later when its fuel is exhausted. It can't melt-down or have a run-away reaction because there literally isn't enough fuel in the system to reach critical mass. The thing is about the size of a trailer, transportable, and thus removeable after its core is depleted. The company that makes it just comes back once its core is gone, takes it back to the factory for dismantling and salvaging/reprocessing. The irony may be that NP really is an answer to some of our problems, our mistake was spending 30 years thinking "big", when we should have been thinking *small*.

I can understand the criticism of the 1st and 2nd generation nuclear power plants (NPP), but while the US has virtually stopped development of NPPs, the rest of the world is working on the 4th and 5th generations of NPP design, just when they are starting to get *really* good.

As for NP technology *today*, as opposed to 30 years ago? When the founder of Greenpeace changes his mind and becomes pro-NP after his initial fanatical opposition to it, that should make a lot of people stop and reevaluate it, I think, at least those people still rational and open-minded enough to consider changing their minds on this subject.

Re:Soaking up the gamma

[omarin]

One thing that people are forgetting is that, like it or not, radioactivity is EVERYWHERE. Even before our nuclear age, nature has been putting out radioactivity. Unfortunately many of us don't know this fact and act like hypochondriacs when the topic is mentioned. Here is a list of natural radioactivity (from various web sources):

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:

• Salad Oil 4,900 pCi/l
• Milk 1,400 pCi/l
• Whiskey 1,200 pCi/l
• Beer 390 pCi/l
• Tap Water 20 pCi/l
• Brazil Nuts 14.00 pCi/g
• Bananas 3.00 pCi/g
• Tea 0.40 pCi/g
• Flour 0.14 pCi/g
• Peanuts and Peanut butter 0.12 pCi/g.

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...

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[magn]

Maybe if everyone stopped reload it to see the hit counter it wouldn't spin so fast :)

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[Tablizer]

How appropriate. We "nuke" her website.

Bok bok baaaAAAK!

[Tablizer]

Re Giant Egg: "big egg as we passing 86th kilometer we'll see this big egg. This is where civilisation ends and where Chernobyl ride begin. Someone brought this egg from Germany. The significance of this egg is LIFE that will break through, life that will survive through radiation."

I don't think that symbolism will work. People instead will think of Giant Mutant Chickens and run like hell.

Such an amazing and atypical slashdot article

[daddy norcal]

The pictures and story she has on her site are quite simply amazing.

Being an American kid at the time of the incident, I was fairly well removed, both politically and geographically, from the disaster, but Elena's pictures serve as a reminder of just how terrible and far reaching the effects of the meltdown were. From the initial coverup to the resulting FUD pumped out by the Russian government during the aftermath, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this event displaced tens of thousands of people, and many more are still dealing with the legacy or horrors the fallout has inflicted.

Kudos to Elena and the editors for a great human interest story.

Who are these slashdot people?

[cgenman]

"They swept over like Mongol-Tartars."

And so you post her to the front page. Again. That's just spiteful.

You can't buy this kind of publicity, but you are sure going to pay for it. Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.

Re:Who are these slashdot people?

[Almost-Retired]

Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.

Me too. Its a rather sad state of affairs when someone like Elena takes the time, fuel, and a camera along and lets the rest of the world see what its really like, and then might have to pay for the bandwidth to boot.

For the visual information that came out of her camera, I'll gladly forgive her occasionaly poor command of the english language. The pictures tell the story far better than any amount of words anyway. I followed the whole site, wondering when the server was going to melt down like it did the last time, apparently before I even got there, but this time it held up quite well.

Many thanks to a totally cool lady. And to the hosting site for putting up with the rest of the geek world that represents the average /. reader.

Cheers and many thanks Elena, Gene

More Proper.

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

'who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.'

The Nazgul.

Is she single? Looking?

[YetAnotherName]

Come on, this is slashdot ... motorcycle riding photo-snapping babe through nuclear wasteland ... show me a geek that isn't drooling by now.

Chernobyl/Springfield

[Anonymous Coward]

"in year 1986 a guy named Akimov pushed wrong button and launched the biggest nuclear catastrophe ..."

Hmm, looks like they had a Russian version of Homer Simpson working there. He was probably looking for the "donut button".

Re:Chernobyl/Springfield

[weeboo0104]

Hmm, looks like they had a Russian version of Homer Simpson working there

D'ohsky!

Re:Not yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I for one....

[Anonymous Coward]

think she'd make a great candidate for a slashdot interview.....

Re:Is she single? Looking?

[weeboo0104]

Tell me about it! I'm still looking for the picture of her in leather and a shotgun strapped to her bike, riding down the road.

Soviet calendar?

[klui]

Looks like they only show 6 days/week. Why is this?? http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/imag e21.3.JPG

Re:Soviet calendar?

[dead_penguin]

Look at the numbers. Every seventh one is missing. They were probably printed in a different colour which has now faded away -- maybe red for Sundays?

It's interesting though how the weeks run top to bottom instead of left to right like they do on "our" calendars.

She's doing fine.

[douglips]

Roentgens, the unit used in her journal, measure ionization of the air. The general conversion is that 1 Roentgen = 1 REM, the unit we use for human radiation exposure in the US.

In one transcontinental roundtrip flight, you get 6 millirem, which is equal to 6000 microroentgen. Her little counter is reading microroentgen per hour, so she can go somewhere where her counter is reading 500 and it's just like she's sitting on an airliner at 35000 feet.

Your yearly dose is about 300 millirem, so in order for her to soak that up in hours, as you claim, she'd have to sit somewhere that her counter reads 100000 or more. She's being very smart. If she were walking around without the dosimeter, she could get in trouble.

This is what she means when she says people fear what they don't understand. Once you understand the risks involved, you see her radiation exposure is much less risky than, say, smoking, or even riding motorcycles at all.

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[Falc0n]

Yup... Just in case Angelfire decides her bandwidth is too much, here is a mirror: http://www.fcdnet.org/chernobyl/

how ironic

[boomka]

In the last picture in chapter 9, there is this big slogan across the room. In Ukrainian, it reads:
"Long live communism - the bright future for the whole mankind!"

Truly, you may never know how the words you say today will be _seen_ tomorrow.

Thank you, Slashdot

[Dr. Mu]

This is the most profound and disturbing story I've ever seen here. It underscores, where words alone are hopelessly inadequate, the depraved hubris in thinking we've "tamed the atom". My kudos to the editors for choosing to post it!

Re:Question for physics people

[Kiryat Malachi]

Very different units.

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/c hp5.htm)

Wow

[Snarfvs Maximvs]

She's hot, she rides a motorcycle, and she has an accent.

I think I'm in love.

Of course, our kids will each have 9 heads. :-(

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

She's hot...

and the dosimeter confirms it.

Exposure levels

[earthforce_1]

From
http://ldml.stanford.edu/cisac/pdf/Nuc_terr_ back.p df
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.

Re:Exposure levels

[man_ls]

Her meter was microretnogen/hour.

(spelling is wrong)

REM is retnogen enhanced modifier or something to that effect -- it's the dose * an absorbtion factor.

not quite the same thing.

Re:Exposure levels

[Phanatic1a]

Her meter was showing over 800 millirem per hour

No, it wasn't. It was showing 800 microroentgen per hour.

One of the things that confuses people about radioation are the different measurements.

A roentgen is the amount of X or gamma radiation needed to deposit in dry air 2.58E-4 Coulombs per kilogram, or roughly 100 ergs per gram.

Rads are the absorbed dose, the amount of energy actually absorbed in a material. 1 rad is equal to 100 ergs per gram.

Rems are the equivalent dose, a relationship between the absorbed energy and actual biological damage. Take the rads, multiply by a quality factor which is based on the type of radiation under discussion, and you the get rems.

A Curie is the unit of radioactivity, one Curie being equal to 37,000,000,000 radioactive decays per second.

Flip over to SI, and you have Grays as the absorbed dose (1 Gy = 100 rads), Sieverts as the equivalent dose (1 Sv = 100 rem), and Becquerels as the radioactivty (3.7E10 Bq in one Ci).

Her meter was showing 800 microroentgen per hour. That's gammas and x-rays, by the way. Those have a quality factor of 1; they're very penetrating, but also chargeless, massless, and very small, so they have a weak interaction cross-section. 800 microroentgen per hour translates to 800 microrads per hour, which when you multiply by the quality factor of 1 is, surprise, 800 microrem per hour.

So to get "maximum allowable annual doseage" (allowable by whom, exactly?) of 5,000 millirem, she'd have to hang around the reactor for 260 days, which is about 2/3rds of a year to begin with. I don't think she's going to be doing herself serious harm.

And the alphas and the betas? Lousy mean free path through air.

An idea

[DigiShaman]

Has anyone thought of an idea to do P2P website hosting? I think it would be an interesting idea to have a slashdot client running on your computer. That way, ever website you visit gets cached to the client. And because it's cached, you also end up hosting the website for other slashdotters happen to have the same client program, yet arn't able to gain access to the original URL.

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[ShallowThroat]

Ahead is atomic plant.
Huge is bandwidth bill.
Sad am I.

And so it goes again

[davmoo]

Since the powers that be at Slashdot have once again shown what inconsiderate boobs they are, as have some of the readers of Slashdot (I can't believe you bastards that reload the poor girl's page just to see how fast the hit counter goes up), I have set up a mirror at:

http://www.myownlittleserver.us/chernobyl

My bandwidth may not be free, but I have a hell of a lot more of it than she does.

I have mirrored the whole site, as far as I can tell, except for the hit counter. The children among you have shown why its not good to have a public hit counter.

You whould think that a group of people who like to preach "information should be free" would try to have a little more respect. Information may be free, but unlimited bandwidth and server space is not.

Re:Is she single? Looking?

[Woy]

I believe you mean "motorcycle riding photo-snapping Russian babe through nuclear wasteland" ;)

In Capitalist America, the Russian Babe rides YOU!

Re:Not yet.

[Aglassis]

You said: " 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."

No. This is not true.

You could not do that for a small plant, and TMI-2 (anniversary is on the 28th btw), was a big plant (~3GW thermal). The Atomic Energy Act pretty much makes it impossible for me to give you any real numbers for the radiation levels outside the reactor pressure vessel shutdown or critical (though they may be published somewhere), I can tell you that it is not background. Civil nuclear plants typically start up, operate for 18 months at full power, shutdown to refuel and perform maintenance, and then repeat. Since TMI-2 was in the operating stage when its accident occured, there was a significant amount of fission products in the reactor core at the time of the accident. If you are standing next to the reactor core you do not have the full amount of radiation shielding that the general public has, so the radiation dose will be much higher. Also considering that some fission products escaped from the fuel and circulated through the coolant (of which some was released into the containment structure due to the pressure relief which set of the radiation alarms during the casuality), there will be alot of radiation in the general area not coming from the reactor vessel (which again will be significantly higher than background).

No cell phone coverage either

[motown]

The girl in the article mentioned among other things not having any cellular coverage there.

Since Chernobyl was permanently evacuated long before public cellular networks became prevalent in Easter Europe, no cellular towers were ever placed in that area.

The parent has a point: she's alone, quite a distance away from civilization in a desolate region, with no means of communication with the outside world. Comtemplating all of this, it is a bit scary indeed.

It might be a good idea to bring along a satellite phone next time, just in case.

She's a very brave young lady to undertake such an adventure! She sure has my respect.

Re:Exposure levels - negligible harm from gamma

[Faeton]

800 millirem per hour might sound like a lot, but I don't think she's going to hang around there long. What I would be worried about is the radioactive particulate that still might be around. Once it gets into your lungs, that's bad news because both beta and alpha radiation can wreck havoc on your insides. Gamma isn't as big as a deal (since it just usually goes through stuff anyways).

I work at a nuclear power plant, and there are fields in certain places that go upwards to 25 REM/h. So, what do you do? Don't stand near it and get your buddy to (unknowingly) shield you!

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[frostyboy]

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

Re:Not yet.

[afidel]

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

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[LiquidCoooled]

Bribing the guards 6000 rupels
Tank of petrol 190 rupels
Nice digital camera 2500 rupels

having glow in the dark hair - priceless

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[Pathwalker]

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...

poor command of the english language?

[cbv]

For the visual information that came out of her camera, I'll gladly forgive her occasionaly poor command of the english language.

Very nice of you. But I figure her English is better than your Russian.

It's over there.....

[rune2]

by your tinfoil hat ;-)

Thryroid Cancers in exposed residents

[WindPwr]

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.

Re:Exposure levels - negligible harm from gamma

[t14m4t]

heh. this is one of those few nuclear topics that I can actually comment on.

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

• 1 Rem

Prognossis: Excellent
Effects: none
Treatment: tell the guys he's a dumbass for thinking there's a problem

• 25 Rem

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.

• 100 Rem

Prognossis: Good
Effects: headache. 5% chance of vomitting within 4 hrs.
Treatment: seek medical attention.

• 500 Rem

Prognossis: OK
Effects: headache. 50% chance of vomitting within 2 hr. 5% chance of death within 4 months.
Treatment: seek medical attention immediately.

• 1000 Rem

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!

• 5000 Rem

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: .106 (approx 1/10) Rem. (I've been doing this job for 2.5 yrs)
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

She didn't take THIS picture.

[RayBender]

I will admit that along with every other geek on /. I'm madly in love with this hot, hot biker chick. I guess I'm glad she didn't take this picture. Yes, that's a chunk of the reactor fuel itself.

In the words of Governor Schwarznegger

[runlvl0]

"who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars."


"...what is best in life?"

"To slashdot your enemies, see their hit counters roll over before you, and to hear the lamentation of their servers!"

Elena has requested that people not duplicate site

[0x0d0a]

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.)

Re:Watch the hit counter spin

[Lumpy]

Anyone that didnt say "holy shit" and gained a new perspecitive on life is either a moron that is incapable of comprehending what they are looking at or a sick individual.

sorry, but those photos gave me the intense creeps for the past 2 hours and has reminded me that things are not bad at all here in the USA.... at least my child's school is not equipped with children's gas masks.

I feel that every american shoudl be required to view that entire website, and high school classes need to take a week to discuss what happened there.

I remember when it happened, and it's unbelieveable how this one person's website has brough back all those fears I had as a kid then returned and compounded with the realization that ... "It really was as bad as I feared it was."

Makes Our three mile island look like a simple fart.