Interview With Chernobyl Engineer

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has posted an interview with a former Chernobyl engineer, Alexander Yuvchenko, who was not only there the night of the explosion, but is still alive today to tell about it. A fascinating recollection of some pretty heroic acts."

Comments

Quite a few

[LordHatrus]

I know quite a few in the Cherynobe area who survived just fine. I even have some messed up film, somewhere :) Still sounds scary though.

Re:Quite a few

[Maestro4k]

• I know quite a few in the Cherynobe area who survived just fine. I even have some messed up film, somewhere :) Still sounds scary though.

Umm, yeah that's true but this guy was working at the plant the night it exploded and even saw the interior of what was left of the pile at one point. (Which is amazing to read about.) Most of those there that night died, in fact at one point he tells he went with 3 other guys who were ordered to manually lower the rods. He propped the door open for them to go in and see for themselves almost nothing was left. The three guys who went through the door all died very soon afterwards but he's still here. (He credits the door and wall for saving his life.)

You really should read this interview, it's both fascinating and scary as hell at the same time. I don't think I'll forget his description of the light from the ionized air above the reactor for a long time.

Treatment was prompt

[freedom_india]

How did they treat you? It was a very intensive and demanding treatment and you had to be very strong to withstand it. I had continuous blood and plasma transfusions. For a few months I lived on other people's blood. Then the ulcers from the radiation burns started to appear. I had a lot of burns. Only after a couple of months did it become clear that there was a chance I might live. For those of you who make fun of the Soviet system wen you probably wheren't even born then, this is a lesson: Soviets took care of their people well and their medicine was top.

Re:Treatment was prompt

[HardCase]

For those of you who make fun of the Soviet system wen you probably wheren't even born then, this is a lesson: Soviets took care of their people well and their medicine was top.

You're kidding, of course. Although the USSR's health care system was universal, the quality was utterly abyssmal for the average citizen.

I was unfortunate enough to see first-hand the state of Soviet-era medical facilities and the quality of care in the mid 1980's. Many third-world countries had much better medical care than that of the "typical" Soviet hospital that we toured. And, given that this was a state-sponsored tour (as was everything that we saw), I suspect that it was something better than typical.

-h-

Re:Treatment was prompt

[noewun]

Actually, beginning in the late 60s, the Soviet Union suffered from a healthcare crisis: declining care, increasing infant mortality, rampant alcoholism, poor standards of sanitation and public hygeine, etc. The life expectancy of a Soviet male in the mid 1980s was six year less than in the 1960s, and the infant mortality rate was three times that of the U.S.

Re:Treatment was prompt

[Izago909]

Their healthcare system may not have been top notch for all people, but their doctors were just as dedicated and, dare I say, more imaginative. They knew how to do something, but didn't have the tools, sot they would devise ingenious substitutes.
Have you ever seen anything about the ice surgeons performing heart surgery with no life support? They administer drugs to block adrenaline, and pour crushed ice around the body until the heart stops. From there they have about 60 minutes to get in and out. When they are done they wrap the person in heated blankets and heating pads and inject them with a large dose of adrenaline, maybe an electric shock if necessary. The lesson is that the tools are only half of the story; the doctors are the other half.

Re:Treatment was prompt

[mi]

Soviets took care of their people well and their medicine was top.

As someone, who was not only born then, but also lived there -- in Kyiv -- at the time, I authoritatively state: you are wrong.

This is a sign, that nuclear engineers were a really prized folk. Dozens of firefighters and lower-rank workers died right there -- radiation is like that, you don't feel it, until it is too late and noone bothered to warn them. Soviets most certainly did not care of their people, unless -- as in the case of these engineers -- educating them took a while.

They flew these guys to Moscow, which also means, that Kyiv -- Ukraine's capital, a city of 2.5 million people merely 100 miles away -- did not have the proper facilities. The medicine was not top -- individual scientists and labs did have notable successes, but the public health was awful.

Would Be Interesting to View in US

[ackthpt]

Alexander Yuvchenko will appear in Disaster at Chernobyl on Discovery Channel in Europe at 10pm (UK time) on 29 August

Anyone up for recording this and making it available?

Back in 1990 I caught a photo exhibit by Igor Kostin in Baltimore, MD. He was the first photographer in the area after the accident and toured it afterwords, taking many pictures which are still very disturbing to remember.

It's remarkable how optimistic he is on nuclear power, even with his concerns of safety above finanancial or even political concerns.

heroism in the face of bad design and decisions

[vg30e]

I don't dispute the heroic efforts by everyone who put their lives on the line, but the tragic fact is that the chernobyl reactor fire could have been avoided if there had been more attention paid to safer reactor design and materials.

Although the fire itself was caused by human error, the RBMK style reactors are much worse than the machines run by the US or western Europe and the powers that came up with that style of reactor are at least partly to blame for that tragedy.

The end isn't in sight yet, the "coffin" that is encasing the bad reactor is cracking, it may collapse causing another giant radioactive cloud of dust to blow all over the Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.

"My neighbors don't know who I am"

[Zen Punk]

"...there is a stigma attached to it."

I had no idea that someone who was involved in Chernobyl would feel the need to hide the very fact that he was there.

What if this man was your neighbor and Chernobyl was your hometown? Would you harbor a grudge against him because he worked there?

After all, just because someone was there doesn't mean they were responsible for the accident. Like he said, "there was nothing we could do."

Interesting, IMO.

[gfxguy]

Because I'm someone who supports nuclear fission as a means of generating power (at this point in time, anyway)...

What do you think about nuclear power?

I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and running a plant, it should be OK.

This is why this is not going to happen in the U.S. ... redundant safety precaution after redundant safety precaution. Three Mile Island proved that those precautions work, even after a series of mistakes.

Re:Safety of Nuclear Power

[AKAImBatman]

Yucca mountain is perfectly safe, but it's kind of stupid. We have the technology to reprocess most of the stuff into more fuel for reactors. Other stuff is useful in medicine and micro power sources. The remainder can be made safe via a process known as "Photoremediation".

The reason why this isn't done (save for some allowance for the second case I listed), is that the government considers it a threat to national security. Their problem with these options is that evil terrorists may intercept nuclear materials shipments, then use them for evil deeds. So their solution is to pile it all in a big cave somewhere. *sigh* Things are pretty bad when our own government doesn't understand.

Re:Why Nuclear will never work..

[ender81b]

Sadly enough you are probably right.

The best example for nuclear power safety is the fact that after 50 years of operation of hundreds of Nuke power plants only 1 serious accident occurred - and that was at a poorly designed USSR station that would never have been allowed to be built in the US.

But, nowadays, we have some relaly, really, really fail safe designs that could be used like the Pebble Bed Reactor that can never ever melt down even assuming a complete and total failure of all safety backups, coolant etc (of course, it could still cause contamination if a break in the cooling or such occurred).

Now, OTOH, you have people like the US Navy who have a *perfect* record for Nuclear safety simply because if their was ever an accident the Navy knows that would likely be the end of all their Nuke powered boats (helluva a motivator eh?)

Re:real-life Radioactive Man?

[smclean]

Yeah, my interpretation was that his shame was more the result of the fact that Chernobyl was a disgrace for the Soviet Union, and he does not want to identify himself as someone who people could blame (his being blameness in fact has nothing to do with it).

Chernobyl = 100s of nuclear tests

[abbamouse]

Actually, if you read a UN report on the matter, its scientists concluded that the lingering radiation from Chernobyl is equal to about 40% of the dose from all nuclear tests put together. Check the table at the bottom. I recall reading that the particular isotopes released by the explosion were worse than those from nuclear tests for some reason, but I haven't been able to locate the source of that information.

Interesting fact...

[burns210]

I had a class with a russian girl last year. Not russian actually, but a former satelite state whose name escapes me. Anyway, because she was born within a certain distance from Chernobyl(she was 17, or so as of this past year) the Red Cross will never except her blood for donation for her entire life.

I thought that was fairly interesting, that they have a lifelong ban on all people's blood that lived/were born within a certain perimeter of the accident.

Re:Russian R.B.M.K reactors were badly designed ..

[TheHawke]

I can't wait for that reflected moderated reactor to come online up in Alaska. Toshiba's 4S system, consists of a prefabricated core, sealed at the factory, then delivered to the site and installed into prefabricated concrete casings, then plumbed and wired. The 4S system does not use the traditional rod and core design. It design is based on a reflector that moves up and down the face of the uranium core, reflecting neutrons back into the core, causing the fission rate in increase, creating power. If more power is needed, the refector moves faster, but it also shortens the core's life, which is 6 years on the nominal decay rate.
The upshot to this design is that if something breaks, the reflector simply stops, and the core cools down back to it's normal static decay rate. For instance, you have a power surge that causes a turbine trip, which in turn causes a surge in high pressure steam feed. The operator or automation would take note of it, tripping emergency venting on the secondary coolant loop, finally ordering the reactor to SCRAM. The refector stops moving and things cool down and the community relies on the auxillary generator until a technician can come out to check things out before resetting the system back to normal power generation.

Re:Yeah? Clean it up!

[Mac Degger]

Plus, nuclear waste can be transmuted into nuclear waste that stops radiating in less than two hundred years. So all you have to do is transmutate the waste (not a trivial enterporise, but still) and house it in something for 100 to 150 years. End of problem.

Couple this with the new intrinsicaly safe nuclear reactors (these are reactors which, due to their design, have physical principles which mean they shut down themselves if anything goes wrong...no faulty electronics, we're talking simple mechanics here) and yeah, nuclear power is the only green power there is.

What bugs me most is that so-called 'action groups' like Greenpeace haven't a fucking clue. But then again, that's becuase they have hardly any PHD's working for them...and when they do, those phd's are for law, no (applied) physics, no chemistry...the only technical phd working for Greenpeace in the Netherlands came from fucking Aeronautics! A bloody plane builder! Greenpeace and it's ilk, whilst doing some good work, is ignorant becuase they're staffed like a goddamn PR firm.

Oops: sorry for the rant :)