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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."
For once in your Slashdot browsing days, read the article! It's really interesting and worth your time.
y4s
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.
Q) how to you feel about what happened?
A) Muhaahahahaha...
Q) no really?
A) glowy wormsss aress fun...
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
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.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Stood there and watched the blue ionized air as it poured out of the reactor?
For those of you not inclined to read it:
I began to feel sick. I knew one of the first symptoms of radiation illness was vomiting, but I was thinking, have I eaten something?
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
but is still alive today to tell about it.
... and considers no longer requiring a lamp to read by at night a bonus.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
In 1986, the Russians were our enemies. For you to call their acts "heroic" is repugnant, and you should be ashamed.
That reactor was used to power a war machine bent on converting us all into communist zombies with no freedoms.
Disgusting.
The HULK?
Meet the people shaping the future of science
This interview was first published in New Scientist print edition, subscribe here
Cheating Chernobyl
Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty at Chernobyl's reactor number 4 the night it exploded on 26 April 1986. He is one of the few working there that night to have survived. He suffered serious burns and went through many operations to save his life, and he is still ill from the radiation. He recently broke his silence for a documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel. Here he speaks to Michael Bond about what happened that night
How did you end up working at Chernobyl?
I chose it. It was one of the best stations in the Soviet Union, it was a good town to live in, and I had been there for practical work as part of my studies. And it was a good wage. Being a nuclear engineer was a prestigious career - in those days. Nowadays people in Russia prefer to be businessmen and lawyers.
What were you doing the night the reactor exploded?
I was on the night shift. When I turned up I found out that the safety test that had been planned for the day had been put off until the evening. The reactor had already been powered down and so we would just be overseeing its cooling, which is a very easy job. I was thinking that I wouldn't have much to do that night.
What were you doing when you heard the explosion?
I was in my office, talking to a colleague who had come in to ask for some paint, and reading some documents.
What happened?
The first thing I heard wasn't an explosion, it was a thud, a shaking. Then two or three seconds later came the explosion. The doors of my office were blown out. It was like when an old building is demolished, with clouds of dust, but combined with lots of steam. It was a very damp, dusty, powerful movement of air. There was a lot of shaking, a lot of things were falling. The lights went off. Our first thought was to find somewhere we could safely hide. We headed towards the transport corridor, where there was a small passage with a low ceiling. We were standing there and everything was falling around us.
What did you think it was?
When I heard the thud I thought it was something very heavy that had fallen. After that I didn't know. I thought that maybe war had begun.
Did you imagine that it might be the reactor?
I couldn't imagine it was something to do with the reactor. Before it happened there were no vibrations, no sounds, nothing to indicate there was something wrong. We were trained for various emergency situations. We were engineers, and we were trained in what the reactors could or could not do and what could go wrong. We were prepared for fire and other things, but we were not trained for this. We all thought the safety measures were reliable, that if you pressed the emergency stop button to lower the control rods into the reactor - which is what my friend Leonid Toptunov in the control room did that night - that it would stop the power as it was supposed to. But it didn't. People make mistakes, but we thought the safety measures would compensate for that. We believed what we were told in the work manual.
What did you do after the explosion?
I went back to my office and tried to ring the control room for reactor number 4 to find out what had happened, but there was no line. Suddenly the phone from control room number 3 rang. I got a command to bring stretchers. I grabbed the stretchers and ran. Outside the control room I met a friend who had been close to the centre of the explosion. I didn't recognise him. His clothes were black and his face was disfigured because he had been covered in scalding water. I only recognised him by his voice. He told me to go to the site of the explosion because there were others injured. This friend was being tended by others, so I got a torch and ran to find the other operator who had been near the huge coolant tanks.
What did you find?
I got to where I expected to find this p
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Cheating Chernobyl
Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty at Chernobyl's reactor number 4 the night it exploded on 26 April 1986. He is one of the few working there that night to have survived. He suffered serious burns and went through many operations to save his life, and he is still ill from the radiation. He recently broke his silence for a documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel. Here he speaks to Michael Bond about what happened that night
How did you end up working at Chernobyl?
I chose it. It was one of the best stations in the Soviet Union, it was a good town to live in, and I had been there for practical work as part of my studies. And it was a good wage. Being a nuclear engineer was a prestigious career - in those days. Nowadays people in Russia prefer to be businessmen and lawyers.
What were you doing the night the reactor exploded?
I was on the night shift. When I turned up I found out that the safety test that had been planned for the day had been put off until the evening. The reactor had already been powered down and so we would just be overseeing its cooling, which is a very easy job. I was thinking that I wouldn't have much to do that night.
What were you doing when you heard the explosion?
I was in my office, talking to a colleague who had come in to ask for some paint, and reading some documents.
What happened?
The first thing I heard wasn't an explosion, it was a thud, a shaking. Then two or three seconds later came the explosion. The doors of my office were blown out. It was like when an old building is demolished, with clouds of dust, but combined with lots of steam. It was a very damp, dusty, powerful movement of air. There was a lot of shaking, a lot of things were falling. The lights went off. Our first thought was to find somewhere we could safely hide. We headed towards the transport corridor, where there was a small passage with a low ceiling. We were standing there and everything was falling around us.
What did you think it was?
When I heard the thud I thought it was something very heavy that had fallen. After that I didn't know. I thought that maybe war had begun.
Did you imagine that it might be the reactor?
I couldn't imagine it was something to do with the reactor. Before it happened there were no vibrations, no sounds, nothing to indicate there was something wrong. We were trained for various emergency situations. We were engineers, and we were trained in what the reactors could or could not do and what could go wrong. We were prepared for fire and other things, but we were not trained for this. We all thought the safety measures were reliable, that if you pressed the emergency stop button to lower the control rods into the reactor - which is what my friend Leonid Toptunov in the control room did that night - that it would stop the power as it was supposed to. But it didn't. People make mistakes, but we thought the safety measures would compensate for that. We believed what we were told in the work manual.
What did you do after the explosion?
I went back to my office and tried to ring the control room for reactor number 4 to find out what had happened, but there was no line. Suddenly the phone from control room number 3 rang. I got a command to bring stretchers. I grabbed the stretchers and ran. Outside the control room I met a friend who had been close to the centre of the explosion. I didn't recognise him. His clothes were black and his face was disfigured because he had been covered in scalding water. I only recognised him by his voice. He told me to go to the site of the explosion because there were others injured. This friend was being tended by others, so I got a torch and ran to find the other operator who had been near the huge coolant tanks.
What did you find?
I got to where I expected to find this person but I couldn't find anything, there was a huge mess. I found him on the other side, he had managed to crawl away. It was the same picture: he was
The guy describes beginning to vomit about one-and-a-half hours after being exposed, but he didn't think it was the radiation as he had eaten at The Red Lobster earlier that day.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The actual interview went like this:
How did you end up working at Chernobyl?
In Soviet Russia, job choose you!
What were you doing the night the reactor exploded?
I was on the night shift
What were you doing when you heard the explosion?
Resting eyes
What happened?
Earth-shattering KABOOM!
What did you think it was?
Reactor #2, of course
Did you imagine that it might be the reactor?
What do you think, Einstein?
What did you do after the explosion?
Look out window at reactor
What did you find?
Smoldering crater
What happened then?
I tried to call my supervisor
Did you succeed?
No, he drunk
Literally?
Yes, drink much vodka...
What did you do then?
Run like hell!
Did you realise how dangerous that was?
No, kaboom happen many time, but never this big!
What happened when you got back to the reactor hall?
Green steam shooting out
One of the most interesting bits of the interview is this:
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.
There you have it. From a man who nearly died and is still sick today from Nuclear power.
It's imperative for people to realize that Nuclear Power is not devil incarnate. By stopping Nuclear development, you are slowly killing yourselves with Coal and Oil plants. The number of people killed by nuclear power rate in the dozens (most at Chernobyl). The number of people killed by coal plants rate in the hundreds of thousands. Think about it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
MOD DOWN: -5 unpatriotic.
Somehow I feel that this is a very important statement. I guess it is trying to tell me the next time I hear a loud thud, that it might not be my grandmother breaking a hip, but the war beginning.
He mentions a medal which everyone got 10 years after the event. Ironically, the design of the medal gets basic particle physics wrong - it shows alpha-particles being deflected more than beta-particles, although they have a greater mass. (If that link dies, just use the Google image search for Chernobyl medal).
thats the first word that came to my mind ;)
He may or may not in fact be a stalker, but surely he could help out making the game..
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.
No kidding, the guy glows in the dark.
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."
Sleep is futile.
He says in the interview that the control rods were dropped by his colleague, but from what I recall it was much, much too late. The core was so hot that the rods warped and jammed.
The disaster was caused partly by one engineer previously over-riding automatic safety protection in order to increase reactor power to levels needed to run a safety test.
Moreover manuals were outdated with areas simply crossed out. Human error at its worst.
Ghost Ride
I would have been interested in hearing expert commentary from one Mr. Homer Simpson after this interview.
Quote: 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.
Nuclear power will never work in the US for that very reason. Power is a private enterprise. Don't ask me why that is just the way this country thinks. Private industry will never put safty as number one priority. It's number one priority is profit. Companies will skimp on safety to maximize profit. Yes I know that we do have nuclear reactors in this country now. They are extremly regulated. They are being deregulated every day. When they are de-regulated enough for the companies, a disaster will soon follow. (5-10 years)
..they keep torches in a nuclear power plant?
What kept you going?
I was treated properly. And I was naturally strong and healthy - I was young, 24 at the time.
That, and the "continuous morphine drip".
Regardless of how you feel about nuclear power politically, the heroism demonstrated by the crew at Chernobyl was incredible-and deserves commendation.
If not for them, things could have gotten much worse. Many of these brave men knowingly gave their lives.
Poor guy - look what happened to him
When does the TV movie come out?
Where is the "Chernobyl Disaster Veterans for Truth" post? :-D
Unfortunately more stations means more opportunity for smaller incidents... Tut mir leid.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
But did Homervich Simpsonski survive ?
For those who missed it the first time, The story on the photo journal by the Ukranian woman "kidofspeed" is deeply moving. One of the most amazing stories and photos I've seen.
However where has her site gone? The pages are showing different content now...
I did a quick search but can't find any mirrors... Anyone know if the original site was mirrored anywhere?
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
thats pretty damn funny!
I submitted a story about it being revealed as a fake to Slashdot since they ran stories on it TWICE, but it was rejected.
...in British English that this guy presumably learned.
I read an article that I thought was posted here on /. a while back about a woman who rides her motorcycle around the chernobyl area. She had a website with lots of photos...wish I could find it again if anyone can track it down.
Also, were't they filming a movie there (Night of the Living Dead or something) recently? From the sounds of it, there are just now becoming areas where you can go and not be subjected to the radiation...it's hard to imagine this guy making it this long.
I still remember the brownish color and ugly taste of Lugol's solution (hope I didn't mess up the name) the nice ladies at kindergarten gave us. Of course, it was a matter of a few years until I understood the reason this "medicine-that-doesn't-taste-good-but-you-must-dri nk-it" was given to us. Weird feelings when playing Fallout ever since ;)
the sad part is, some of them are still running ...
The following is the Paper everyone will link to. And the following provides some nice diagrams to look at
And just for kicks: Some really freaky pictures. (The second one really gets to people, he is working IN the bloody thing!!)
Sunny Dubey
Nah... looks like she's been exploring some WWII battlefields...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Because I'm someone who supports nuclear fission as a means of generating power (at this point in time, anyway)...
... redundant safety precaution after redundant safety precaution. Three Mile Island proved that those precautions work, even after a series of mistakes.
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.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
...is one of my favorite chronicles of Chernobyl after the explosion. It's a little story (with pictures) about a woman that rode her motorcycle through Chernobyl and documented what she saw and how it made her feel. Very good read IMHO.
Here's the link (hopefully you people won't kill their server)
If I get a mirror put up, I'll post it.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Come now, you don't really think that the man could actually carry enough radiation in his body to actually harm anyone else do you?
That's like being afraid to shake the hand of someone who has cancer because you might catch it from them.
Sleep is futile.
For those not versed in things nuclear (and why positive temperature coefficient of reactivity reactors are a BAD IDEA), a good background on the accident and nuclear power in general.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
...as those in the UK might realise, the newspaper The Guardian also published today a much longer and more detailed article with Sasha Yuvchenko, another engineer working at Chernobyl at the time who survived the disaster. He too comments on the excellent medical care he recieved. Read it here.
...I'm way too old to worry about every loud thud that comes along, unless said thud is accompanied by a neutron emission.
# http_proxy=Proxy Server
wget -O -F temp 'slashdot story URL'
cat temp | grep \>\#[0-9999999] | awk -F '#' '{print $2}' | awk -F ' greater-than ' '{print $1}'| sort | head -1
Replace the " greater-than " with that actual symbol on your keyboard and run. The number it spits out is your First Post number. search for that post in the story and behold its glory!
Please, please, please, read this Word from God and think again.
Babcock-Wilcox engineers should be shot and the idiots approving their designs for government funding should be hung by their testicles.
This design has been available for decades before installations like Three Mile Island were built.
They went cheap, someone else paid the ultimate price.
Read below for a truly safe system.
PIUS
The Process Inherent Ultimate Safe reactor is a 640 MWe advanced pressurized water reactor designed by ABB-Atom of Sweden that utilizes natural physical phenomena to accomplish control and safety functions. The PIUS design consists of a vertical pipe, called a reactor module, which contains the reactor core and is submerged in a large pool of highly borated water. The reactor core is comprised of fuel elements that are similar to current PWR fuel elements. The borated pool water is provided to shut down the reactor and to cool the core by natural circulation. Unlike most reactors, PIUS does not use control rods for controlling the nuclear chain reaction. The reaction is controlled by the boron concentration and temperature of the primary loop reactor water. The steam generating equipment of the PIUS design is similar to that of a typical pressurized light water reactor plant. One important difference in plant design is the very large, by current standards, prestressed concrete reactor vessel. This vessel holds both the reactor module and the borated pool.
"The accident released about as much radiation as one atmospheric nuclear test," Jackson notes. "Think of Chernobyl, which exuded hundreds of thousands of square meters of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. Think of all the hundreds of atmospheric tests, and think about the next breath you inhale. How many bits of Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, and Nagasaki you are inhaling each time you breathe in."
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
It's imperative for people to realize that Nuclear Power is not devil incarnate. By stopping Nuclear development, you are slowly killing yourselves with Coal and Oil plants. The number of people killed by nuclear power rate in the dozens (most at Chernobyl). The number of people killed by coal plants rate in the hundreds of thousands. Think about it.
I am not arguing the fact that most of our current energy production is not good for us. However, Andrew Gregorovich and a entire load of people would disagree with your assessment of what the costs of Chernobyl was.
From Gregorovich's article:
THE LIQUIDATORS are those people who were recruited or forced to assist in the cleanup or the "liquidation" of the consequences of the accident. As a totalitarian government the Soviet Union forced many young soldiers to assist in the cleanup of the Chornobyl accident, apparently without sufficient protective clothing and insufficient explanation of the danger involved. Over 650,000 liquidators helped in the cleanup of the Chornobyl disaster in the first year. Many of those who worked as LIQUIDATORS became ill and according to some estimates about 8,000 to 10,000 have died from the radioactive dose they received at the Chornobyl Power Plant. This group apparently includes those who built the containment building over the destroyed reactor No. 4 which is called the SARCOPHAGUS.
Don't worry. Sometime in the next ten thousand years Chernobyl will be safe to walk near. Then everything will be just back to normal.
We should be moving to technology like this in the near future. Get familiar with it, send links to your friends... Stop the established energy complex from supressing technologies like this.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
I remember reading (I think in the book "We almost lost Detroit") that a coal plant releases a lot of Carbon-12 into the atmosphere. The measurement that I remember is that over 25 years, a coal plant releases the same amount of radioactivity in form of Carbon-12 as a reactor meltdown.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
There is a primary difference between coal/oil and nuclear. Nuclear can't be cleaned up. It can be moved from one spot to another though. How about we put it in your backyard for starters?
And even when it's done well (most U.S. plants appear to be safely constructed and maintained), how can we guanantee it's safety through administrations or government overthrows? How many people were needlessly affected (in Russia and elsewhere) because of Soviet political bullshit?
Chernobyl is fucking TERRIFYING. There's a reason why that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game is based on that location.
I say, nuclear power becomes a more viable option when you can tell me what to do with the waste it generates. And the answer has to be better than 'bury it'.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
From the article:
What happened?
The first thing I heard wasn't an explosion, it was a thud, a shaking. Then two or three seconds later came the explosion. The doors of my office were blown out. It was like when an old building is demolished, with clouds of dust, but combined with lots of steam. It was a very damp, dusty, powerful movement of air. There was a lot of shaking, a lot of things were falling. The lights went off. Our first thought was to find somewhere we could safely hide. We headed towards the transport corridor, where there was a small passage with a low ceiling. We were standing there and everything was falling around us.
Almost the same, but I was in the dorms, and my room mate had Taco Bell.
-ave
...or maybe not.
Imagine getting a job with "Engineer, Chernobyl" on your CV.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Where does the helium we put in baloons come from? Natural gas wells where it collects from decaying uranium and thorium. Those things are what keep the Earth's core hot. Vast quantities of these things are released every day by coal plants.
I'm not saying we can just replace coal power trivially, but we should be working towards that as a goal. I'm also not saying fission power is perfect either, but a well maintained nuclear plant causes less radioactivity in the environment than a coal plant of similar power output, and as the isotopes released have basically unlimited half-lives (4.5 b.y. for uranium and 14 b.y. for thorium, which are essentially forever to humans), the problem will last a lot longer.
Ultimately, neither is acceptable, and we should be doing our best to replace them both as soon as we can do it without bankrupting the world.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
In 1986AD, I heard loud thud. War was beginning.
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.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Yes, you're right, Carbon-14 is the radioactive form of Carbon that is released when coal is burned.
Sorry about that,
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Not to mention the bulkiness of coal means much more has to be mined and transported than uranium. Even at a low rate, mining and rail accidents add up.
> There may be an element of truth in this since Americans need good teeth to consume the amount
> of food they do but I haven't actually studied this correlation.
Really? I think most American food can easily be consumed without feet. Ground meat, soft bread, slimy cheese without taste (often not made from milk, too), fruits ground to pulp, everything overcooked and laced with cream, guacomole and most important extra cheese.
One serving for an American is enough for two Europeans or probably three Africans.
The teeth are only there to show your wealth. Look at all teh hollywood stars with their ceramic blended smiles... Spooky...
Moritz
...ver a year and a half more life on average! We both win!
Blar.
It was worth reading. It made me sad and rethink about life. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The motorcycle trip was a fake. The trip through the area was real
The main problem seems to be the Radon gas, which as radioactive gas can not be filtered out. Radiation levels near coal plants are higher than near atomic plants.
0 3.htmle ments/Rn -en.htm
9 7/FS-163-97.html looks good.
Some links:
http://www.stormingmedia.us/76/7636/A7636
http://www.lenntech.com/Periodic-chart-el
Especially http://greenwood.cr.usgs.gov/energy/factshts/163-
Moritz
Guys, had Cherynobl exploded, the guy wouldn't be around to talk about it now. They suffered a MELTDOWN, not an explosion. You people watch too many movies.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one.
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President." - Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I got my copy several years ago when I was researching the politics of obedience and whether engineer subordinates should be responsible to authority or the laws of physics for a course in Ethics.
The book, "The Truth about Chernobyl", by Grigori Medvedev (ISBN 0-465-08775-2) ( English translation - by the way very well done ) Copyright 1991 by Basic Books, Inc.
( Incidentally, from my research in Ethics, I just about got the feeling that if you were gonna toe the line on Ethics, you had better work for yourself.).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I was born in Kiev.. something like 250 - 300km from Chernobyl. Most of us were lucky cause the wind took frist radiation wave to another side... otherwise you could see Kiev dead (actual capital of Ukraine). I've seen lots of children in special hospitals tolly mutated.. not a good thing to see.. i imagined myself @ their's place. Nuclear power is a great this once it is controlled proprelly. Now Ukrainian government is asking for $ each year for creating new shields for old reactors... bastards!
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
That, sir, was one of the most inspiring, insightful, and patriotic statements I have heard since late '01.
I think I'm going to go fax another letter to my Congressman about the USAPATRIOT Act. I haven't gotten replies from my last one, but then all his responses take at least 2 months.
To ALL Americans: get off your asses and do something about the erosion of your civil and constitutional rights!!
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.
Russian Model: After Chernobyl, my penis is falling off.
Moe: And "penis" is Russian for?
Offtopic, but I think the more important question for us now is how many people would trade their political, civil, and economic freedom for security? I guess we're going to find out...
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.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Erf! 30 years on the core, not 6!
My bad.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Fissioning U-235 releases about 200 MeV/fission, or about (2e8 eV/fission)(1.6e-19 J/eV)(6.02e23 fissions/235 g)(0.075 g) = 6e9 Joules per tonne of the more enriched coal. That's about 1.6 megawatt-hours of heat, that can be derived from fissioning the U-235 in a tonne of coal.
Bituminous coal has an energy density of combustion of about 25e9 Joules per tonne, or about 7 megawatt-hours of heat from burning a tonne of coal.
At first glance, the combustion seems to win, especially when you consider that you can only get about 10% of the energy out of the uranium without reprocessing. But if you use the U-238 too (to make plutonium, which will then also fission in a conventional reactor), you get about 100x as much energy as from fissioning just the U-235. Of course, that takes reprocessing the fuel at least once, which is energy intensive, and there will of course be losses in the system. So maybe you only win by 30x. The fission should yield about 50 megawatt-hours of heat in a proper breeder-reactor setup. That's more than ten times the heat of combustion. Even "crappy" coal with only 1.5ppm of uranium in it could match the energy of combustion.
Wow.
I lived in Detroit at the time, and even a week later, weather men were saying the radiation cloud and dust particles were effecting weather, half a world away, in Detroit.
I still think that Nuclear power is far beter than coal, or any other method of energy creation. The purified cooling water actually comes out 30 times cleaner than when it was sucked in!
AC or not, it's a valid correction.
Obviously, this doesn't help you for chronic/long term conditions before they become an emergency, but it is hardly the draconian state you claim.
Me? I'm for more governmental control and regulation of the medical industry (and just as, if not more importantly, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Malpractice suits especially need limits.), but not abject European socialism. When industries get too big for individuals or states to handle, the federal government has an obligation to step in and keep them honest. What bothers me is that people are too apethetic to keep the Fed honest.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
They won't accept blood given by homosexuals either. Because somehow, they feel that the people who fuck without taking simple precautions are the same peoplas as those who want to waste an hour to give blood. And you know, teh gheys habe teh AIDS OMG.
Do you assert that "Soviets took care of their people well and their medicine was top" simply because of stories you read on the 'net, or do you have substantial evidence of this? Perhaps you are old enough to remember the tragedy at Chernobyl but have you ever even BEEN to Russia or any other former Soviet republics, or know people who have? Or perhaps do you live there now and your own personal circumstances have not been good since the fall of the USSR and you remember the good times?
From my perspective it looks like the Soviets were quite the opposite--they neither cared for citizens at large nor did they have an adequate public healthcare system. This fellow was highly educated and had skills and background considered important to the state. Furthermore, the more plant operators, technicians and engineers that survived, the more witnesses the state had to obtain information from in analysing the explosion. At least in the US there is SOME degree of protection and money can buy you good care--in the USSR you had to hope the Soviet government thought you were worth saving.
This isn't a case of a good system turning bad through stagnation and corruption either--the Soviet Union was rotten to the core right from the beginning in 1917. My grandmother's family was not really wealthy but did live alright on their own farm in Ukraine--until the revolution when their farm was seized and they were expelled from their property. My grandmother was a small child and the family faced great enough hardship that they fled to Canada to make a new life. A lot of attention is paid to the fact millions were killed in concentration camps during Hitler's reign of Germany, and rightly so. Unfortunately not so much attention is paid to the criminal acts of Stalin, who committed genocidal atrocities that probably even surpassed those of the monster Hitler.
Until communism fell we only had information that was either filtered by the Soviet state or came from informants or defectors, but our eyes were really opened with the breakup of the USSR. Although great effort was placed on central planning as a means to enforce equality, the reality was that there was no equality--central planners decided who was "more equal" than others. As a result, if you had connections in the politburo or were blessed with certain skills, intelligence or family ties you were taken care of.
If you were a farm worker, or coal miner or factory worker you were worthy of little more than enough sustinance to perform your duties--the system established just the kind of classes that the revolution was supposed to eliminate. So as engineers, doctors, politicians and such got top notch hospital treatment, schoolchildren in Kiev got untreated tumours and lesions, coal miners got emphesyma and citizens in general got to live in riteky state housing built with concrete largely reinforced with straw and refuse.
I suspect that you grew up believing in the communist ideal and never had to live in the reality of it, or you actually DID live in it and were fortunate enough to be part of the "more equal" strata of Soviet society--that is, you or your family were "white collar" partipants in the state machine. Admittedly, post-Soviet Russia hasn't been all that kind to that segment of society.
You are a cluless trol that should be admonished for karma whring.
Xe-135 is destroyed when it absorbs a neutron. So in an operating reactor is it "burned" rapidly as it is produced. But when you shut off the reaction, Xe-135 levels rise over the next eight hours to a peak level and then decay. This makes it very difficult to start a power reactor eight hours after you shut it down: the Xe-135 acts like an additional control rod, damping the reaction. You find that you have to pull the control rods much farther out to get the reaction started.
There's a problem with that: as soon as you get the reaction going in the core, the Xe-135 will rapidly "burn" off, restoring the usual control laws. That is dynamically unstable, as more neutrons -> less Xe-135 -> more reactive core -> even more neutrons!
The operators should have known what was happening when the found they had to pull the rods much farther than expected in order to bring the reactor stable "zero"-power operation ("zero-power" operation means that a chain reaction is being sustained but is not producing a significant amount of power. It is an important first step in operating the reactor: you start the reaction going, demonstrate positive control, calibrate your control settings, and then proceed to the power level you want. In the reactor where I worked, 5 watts of power, out of a rated maximum of 250 kilowatts, was considered "zero power".).
That unstable positive coefficient (as the Xe-135 burned off) made the reactor spike rapidly in power to a high thermal level -- where the reactor's positive void coefficient [what the Muerte23 described in the parent article] took over. That is a poor element of reactor design -- the Chernobyl reactors were "over-moderated". Fission neutrons come out fast, but uranium absorbs neutrons best when they're moving slowly. So you put the reactive material in a medium (water or graphite or Zirconium hydride or whatever) that will absorb energy from the neutrons without absorbing the neutrons themselves -- they bounce around, losing energy, until they can be absorbed by the core. Too little moderation, and the core won't start up. Too much moderation, and the neutrons will get absorbed and the core won't start up. The Chernobyl reactors were over-moderated, so that small voids in the graphite/water matrix in the core would increase the reactivity of the core. That's just stupid -- properly designed reactors are under-moderated, so that if the water boils the reaction tends to shut itself down.
Anyhow, all that would be moot except that the operators had disabled the main reactor shutdown mechanisms -- they couldn't SCRAM (or rapidly re-insert the rods into the core), but were forced to rely on the much slower drive mechanisms -- which couldn't contain the reaction. A rapid-drop SCRAM system existed (and would have saved the facility) but had been disabled for testing.
The problem (as I see it) with nuclear power is that people are such fuckin' idiots. Reactors are completely safe around people with what is called "common sense" but unfortunately, common sense isn't. Eventually, pointy haired bosses and Joe Sixpack rule the day.
(BTW, I hold a no-longer-current nuclear reactor operator's license).
FLIPing and FLOPing with the wind.
That's nothing new. U.S health care has always been centered around pharmaceutical profits. Pharmacies charge 4x the cost of Canada even though the drugs were build from the same manufacturers. Then U.S. health delegations say "Canada and oversea medicine is unsafe". That's complete bullshit.
By the end of the decade, U.S. health care will no longer be known to be top among the world. It'll go down as a service that is overpaid, too political and complicated. And Americans will be sitting on top of miracle treatments that no one can afford except the millionaires.
The conspiracy behind all this is the population control. You either send a bunch of people to war and keep a low headcount OR you provide unaffordable heathcare. Conspiracy 101.
I read the MIT report, the Xenon problem was an important issue and ment that it was very difficult to 'relight' the reactor. When the raction restarted, it was too quick.
what should have been done. There are many excellent description of what caused the event, and what was done wrong to produce the event, but I still haven't found any explanation of what the response should have been to stop the accident. Can anyone comment, or have a link. And I am talking about fixing the problem once all of those safeties were removed. Was this a recoverable condition that they hadn't trained for, or was the outcome unavoidable....
Who is the master of foxhounds, and who says the hunt has begun? -Pink Floyd
Unless you want to pay money, you are stuck reading negative gifs (sucks when you get to the photographs), but this is pretty good.
or was the outcome unavoidable....
sorry no links - but briefly from what I read in russian press -the outcome after the things they did was unavoidable. But then ALL similar reactors were equipped with new features which will make the similar situations avoidable. So now if the things at any power plant will go the same way - then there will not be tragedy.That procedure might be suitable in a dire emergency, but if the medical system is so degraded that most heart surgeries are dire emergencies what does that say about the society's capabilities and priorities? It certainly does not fit with Soviet claims of being the Worker's Paradise and the pinnacle of civilization.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Nuclear reactors don't emit beta particles at a high enough energy to create Cerenkov radiation in air. On the other hand, Cerenkov radiation in molten glass (which is now solidifed and known as Chernobylite) coming up through the air and scattering off dust is quite plausible.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Chernobyl was a wicked disaster, fueled by the necessities of politics. There was a reason why they HAD to use natural (99% U-238) uranium; why it was the sole determining factor in the design, regardless of all other considerations. Russian lives have always been cheap, just as a matter of recent (~1000 years) history, but the guys involved in this incident (and K-19) truely are heroes. Whether they knew the dangers they were being sent into, or not. Whether they had a Phd. or were just a schmoe pushing a broom.
That kind of courage is both awe-inspiring and scary...
Your statement that Iraq was planning terrorist strikes against the US is linked to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB head. That's never been corroborated. They rank down there with Bush's "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address claiming that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, *according to the British*. There was no uranium purchase, just forged documents from Italy, passed through Britain, to American intelligence and State Department analysts who dismissed it. There's even less evidence for Putin's statement than forged documents. And there's no WMD, not even according to Putin. You can be irrationally afraid of anything you like, if it helps you believe the lies pouring from Bush, then getting blamed on foreigners. Just stop spreading those lies and fears around.
BTW, if you're going to talk baseless crap, you're probably better off complaining about "socialist" universal healthcare than weapons and terrorism. Most people won't believe you, especially if you don't even toss in the "communism is dead" canard.
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make install -not war
Yes, and my understand is that the accident involved 1 of the four reactors-and wasn't quite the worse accident theoretically possible for that reactor. Personally, I think nuclear power isn't a very good idea--and building reactors without safeguards is even worse. Still, that doesn't detract from the heroism shown by the men that kept a bad situation from getting worse. You didn't loose your entire community in this disaster-some folks did.
More likely, the air was being ionized by gammas.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I was just a young lad at the time of the explosion and living in Switzerland, but I still remember it as the summer without lettuce. I guess the radiation was being absorbed in the leafy green above ground plants, and hence you couldn't eat it.
It's weird, I don't remember the drastic explosion, the incredible loss of life, the aftermath, except the fact that I couldn't eat lettuce that summer.
Odd the things you remember.
Er, "socialist/anarchist" evaluates to "1/0", which is an error. Do you balance your healthcare bills with that calculator?
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make install -not war
... apart from the waste issue. That's the thing, the main masty by-product of nuclear reaction is the waste, and what the heck do you do with it? If there was a way to safely recycle it into something safe, we would be high to not embrace nuclear power... but that's the thing, you can't. solar, water (waves, tides) and wind should be worked on. I think there is real potential there to free ourselves from sucking carbon from underground and blowing it into the air.
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As some posts below reveal, the accident resulted from a series of mistakes/stupid actions. If any of these mistakes had not occurred, the accident would not have happened. The removal of the safeties in itself did not cause the accident - it was the raising of control rods, removal of cooling water, etc. Then because of the positive void coefficient, lowering the control rods briefly increased the power of the reactor and caused the explosion. Once the explosion happened, it was all over -- putting out the fire quickly was pretty hopeless once the graphite had caught on fire.
i'm not familiar with the exact definitions, but there seems to be two kinds of nukes. those that heat the water directly and those that use a heat exchanger. neither is perfect, but the heat exchanger deally is safer. seems like a very complicated way to boil water in either case. i have worked at several com-ed (IL) nukes as an employee of a roofing contractor and observed that any problems seem to originate with the suits. the techies and security people were knowledgable and competent and for the most part polite and courteous . it was the PHBs of the operation that effed up the most.
Serenity now, insanity later.
Parent's current sig:Why? It doesn't affect karma. Set your Funny modifier negative in preferences if you don't have a sense of humor.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The main problem was that the "condition" was created artificially, as a part of a dangerous experiment that no one of the reactor's designers would approve. Without that there would be no disaster. There may be a lot of nitpicking about safety of the design, however people that were stupid/ignorant enough to run that experiment, would be likely stupid/ignorant enough to compensate for the safety of any other design, too.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Has anyone seen K-19 with Harrison Ford? The sub has a story like the Titanic where things go wrong right from the start, then things go to hell when the reactor powering the sub overheats. The submariners who have to go in and fix it come out with their skin falling off and a few die. Very moving.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
This won't be completely off topic, I hope - I was 12 and living in Romania when it happened. As you know (since you are all well-read Slashdot readers) Ukraine is not very far from Romania, and the radioactive cloud hit us pretty soon afterwards. I remember distinctly how frantic my parents were, trying to feed us vitamin C and iodine, along with bottled water. My brother was eight at the time - five years later he was diagnosed with epilepsy. Have been wondering ever since if Chernobyl had anything to do with it. More interestingly even - he is now completely healthy, due to the fact that it was discovered early and he followed a strict treatment for a long time. For those of you who have bothered to read this weepy story all the way, here's the final irony: for the past eleven years I have been living in Japan, I married the most beautiful Japanese woman (well, of course she's the most beautiful, she's mine ) and we're about to have a child in January. And we live in Hiroshima.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
What Alexander Yuvchenko and the others went through that night was incredible. They and the men who built the protective shell around the reactor are heroes for risking their lives to prevent radiation from escaping. I certainly wish that people like this would be treated well instead of being stigmatized. They risked their lives and did the right thing instead of running away.
Alexander, I salute you!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Has anyone seen K-19 with Harrison Ford?
No. No one has.
Damn, you beat me to it. It's a cool as heck site.. (The website, not the nuclear site...)
The bottom line is that this was not caused by an improper design - as it was used for some 30 years before and since the accident, albeit with some later modifications (IIRC) - but due to human error. This is obviously a tech site, so a better solution to nuclear stations would be completely eliminate the human factor. Why can't we have computers monitoring absolutely everything? From gas levels, to water levels, to the state of important components, and so forth. What do the human technicians do at this time that a computer cannot? We can certainly have a human present to monitor all the statistics, but to eliminate all control which would allow such a catastrophe to take place.
I don't consider the loss of life of Chernobyl to be significant in quantity, as compared to war, non-nuclear accidents, disease, famine, et cetera - which is not to say that life lost due to the accident is insiginificant (on the contrary, of course) - but its greatest blow was to the field of Nuclear Energy. As others have pointed out, it is potentially much more cleaner, but the stigma which was created as a result of the accident has had tremendous effect on public opinion. I would wager that more individuals have died pursuing other means of energy production than nuclear, but that hardly matters in the eyes of the uninformed public, politicians, and so forth. Sad, really.
I can't get the image of the ionized blue air out of my mind. It must have been deathly beautiful.
A blog like any other.
i don't get discovery channel, but i think it's ... maybe i'' ge to see it one
... which is what you'll find in the ...
... i still ... so what
... steam ...
a really good idea to interview someone who was
there that night
day.
this part:
"From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot because of gamma rays and neutrons and everything else that was spewing out"
got me all thinking about a doom 3 kinda gateway
to hell
middle of any fison reactor. just pile alot of
steal and concret around it and voila, nothing to
be worried about
also i've seen a diagram of the world most biggest
atomic "test" explosions and i think the russian
have had the biggest one. nobody knows what came
thru that one millimeter wormhole that was open
at the very center of that explosion...
it might be true that if you put security at first
place for the construction and operation of a
fison nuke plant, it might be safe
think that humankind should educate the masses
first. afterall the theory that was developed to
explain why this methode of "power" (more exactely
"heat" generation) can work, is less then 2
generations away. also the theory in it's simplest
form states that masse is energy and vice versa,
but the more complex part of the theory has to do
with space-time curvature, time travel
(wormwholes) and other "freaky" ideas
is really happening, when we split the heavy core
of an atom? it doesn't just get hot methinks.
so other poster suggested that splitting a heavy
atom acctually opens a "portal" to the very place
this atom was created ("supernova sun").
there are other ways to generate electricity,
hopefully without the use of inefficient "heat
machines". the fact that we are using a
relativistic theory combined with a
engine is like putting a V6 engine into a wheelchair
oh well, we remeber "that dude" for some reason.
My wife's dad worked there to contain the aftermath. Thankfully, he didn't have to do anything that dangerous, and he's still in good health.
Actually, the "liquidators" are recognized with honors, and they are entitled to benefits from the government by a special law; they undergo regular health inspections, therapy and stuff.
That engineer's position, however, is more ambivalent. People still can be found who are quick to blame everyone who worked there at the time of the accident.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
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Free Waterfall Sr: Good way to avoid frostbite folks: Put your hands between your buttocks. That's nature's pocket.
Leela: Uh...I think I'll go check on Bender.
Free Waterfall Sr: Watch that he doesn't pick your pocket.
There sure seems to be a lot of nuke engineers from russia living in the US. When I was in elementary school one of my friends dads was a nuke engineer from russia and now one of my cow orkers is a former nuke engineer from russia. They are everywhere. I spell it "nuke" because I do not know the correct way to spell it, I have depended on spell checkers for far too many years and now without one I cannot function properly. It is sad. Like not being able to do basic arithmatic because you forgot your calculator at home.
I saw K-9 with Jim Belushi, is that close enough?
Of course, we also generate lots of low level radioactive waste (contaminated tools, clothing, instruments, neutron sources, etc) but much of this stuff really isn't harmful, it's just that since we know it's more radioactive on it's way out of the plant than on the way in, we have to exercise ridiculous controls.
Those controls are there for a reason.
Otherwise, disaster could strike like what happend in Japan back in 1999 on September 30th. where 'taking shortcuts' produced deadly results.
There's a difference between being picky about disposing of a ladder that's as radioactive as a coleman lantern filament you can buy at walmart, and making fuel.
One can obviously kill you. The other might make you ill if you hugged it for five years.
Appropriate controls for the risk involved. That's all I'm saying.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.