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What Chernobyl Looks Like In 2010
An anonymous reader writes "The editor of Phoronix.com has toured Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation (the 30km zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) to see what the area looks like 24 years after the world's largest nuclear disaster. Many photographs from Chernobyl in 2010 have now been published, showing off the power plant and its RBMK reactors, the town of Pripyat, the town of Chernobyl, and the Red Forest. The 24th anniversary of this deadly nuclear disaster will be on April 26."
...really? Does a disaster have to be an accident to be classed as a disaster?
No matter how bad for you radiation might be, living around humans is worse.
First post! Seriously though, just went to Chernobyl about 3 weeks ago, and seeing it is surreal. I wasn't alive when it happened, but going through the amusement park they had just built was just remarkable. I took a lot of pictures, and my favorite one is from the school we went to, found a child size gas mask, something you wouldn't expect to find in a school, but nice regardless. If you want to see more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sswezey/ . I would definitely recommend going to see it, and Kiev is a cool city to see for a day as well
.. that it's not going to look much better until it *completely* loses structural integrity.
The fact Chernobyl is so far away from anything and (for the fortunate) anyone makes it great for governments since they can forget it.
The interesting detail I picked up from this was that Chernobyl continued operation (on other reactors) for 14 years after this disaster.
The popular view of the accident would be that the area was unusable, and most probably lethal - it would seem not.
Of course, the wildlife in the area also shows this, however it is interesting how reality gets buried in popular belief.
Damn, there goes my hopes for glow in the dark marshmallows!
With the rate of nuclear decay, the plant will probably still look much the same way in 20100. It's just a day in the life of our planet, though.
... playing one of the Stalker series of games is more fun. Even if the scenery isn't 100% accurate.
Their servers have reached critical and are heading toward meltdown.
What's even more interesting, as wildlife flourishes, random private individuals introduce new animals on their own.
Someone brought and released a pair of Przewalski's Horses and now they form quite a big herd. There are some other species not native to the area and never observed there before. They were brought there by humans - unsanctioned, unregulated activity funded entirely by enthusiasts from their own money.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I like the nags and know a little about breeding. A single pair would not be enough to create a herd.
Wikipedia says a few dozen were introduced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_Horse#Preservation_efforts
Interest fact, nevertheless. Cheers.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0194278/ is quite an interesting documentary about the power plant and its surroundings. and not one of these "ohmygodit'sallsoterriblewon'tsomebodythinkofthechldren"-ones either.
Get out of here stalker
Elena Filatova has been riding her motorbike through that area since 2003 and has some interesting things to say; http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html
"Chernobyl no wildlife Haven"
--BBC News
Sorry, I can never resist blurting out my favorite BBC headline on any mention of Chernobyl! But seriously
That the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped in order to end the second world war, doesn't mean they didn't had disastrous results. In fact, that was the whole point of the operation, to force Japan into surrender by causing extreme devastation. I think it is a valid question to ask if the millions of innocent citizens spanning multiple generations who lost their lives or were severly harmed by these actions justify the ending of a war.
And of course, there is the question of necessity. It's plausible to assume the war would have stopped without nuclear attacks. It's extremely plausible the war would have stopped after the first nuclear attack on Hiroshima, so surely the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was gratuitous at best.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Drunk people do stuff like that.
Russians like to drink.
You do the math.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Getting slashdotted. Can someone throw this up on Flickr or something?
...and possibly now resembles chernobyl as well...
The story by the USSR seemed to be 'don't worry too much Europe, most radioactive material has stayed on site'. But if you visit the site and measure radioactivity it seems the opposite and you could now claim don't worry about concrete mantel repair as most material was blasted into the sky, a cheap steel roof is all that is needed to keep material remaining from raining into the groundwater. You can walk the whole site and look at the decayed mantel on the inside if you get permission as some European tv crews got. The craziest thing there is locals swimming in provably contaminated water each summer as long as they are teenagers.
Don't worry folks, I'm here all evening.
Dude, those pictures you took from the bumpercars at the amusement park and the stacked radiators and stuff tell me that you where a tad close to those kind of things, if I may put it that way. I remember pretty clearly others describing their dosimeter going wild when closing in on metal objects and walls facing the reactor.
Did you have a dosimeter or szintomat on you when walking about and taking those pictures?
I'd suggest you switch to an organic diet with lots of iodine and vitamin D for the next year or two ... Jesus, you gotta watch out, there was a frigging reactor superdisaster out there!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The interesting detail I picked up from this was that Chernobyl continued operation (on other reactors) for 14 years after this disaster.
The popular view of the accident would be that the area was unusable, and most probably lethal - it would seem not.
Of course, the wildlife in the area also shows this, however it is interesting how reality gets buried in popular belief.
My understanding is that the whole site is still operational due to the need to maintain fuels at the site. I saw a documentary on it recently and the facility is still heavily staffed.
Also other identical reactors, built at the same time from the same design, like the one at Ignalina in Lithuania continued operating until the end of 2009 (not because the plant was at the end of its useful life, but because the EU didn't want Lithuania to be operating a potentially unsafe reactor any longer).
Chernobyl type reactors, despite being absolutely obsolete and horribly dangerous by 1980s nuclear standards (even if they are far more stringent than other energy standards), have been operating right up until the end of last year. (With some updated safety features learned from Chernobyl of course)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The popular view of the accident would be that the area was unusable, and most probably lethal - it would seem not. Of course, the wildlife in the area also shows this, however it is interesting how reality gets buried in popular belief.
Depends on your definition of "lethal". It is not lethal as in "breath there and suffocate, die within 5 minutes". It is lethal as in "die of a cancer within the year if you eat food and drink water from here" or in "live there several years and lose 10 years of life expectancy". Not a barren land, but not exactly hospitable either.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
While the pictures are real, the stories of her riding around alone on her bike in the disaster zone where debunked as fake and made-up. There are pictures she took showing others standing next to her indicating that the took one of the officical bus trips into the zone, since no one was allowed in alone at the time. There may be a little yarn spun into her descriptions, so take them with a grain of salt.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I can't believe that the popular view has been that the operation stopped after the disaster. Makes me wonder what other facts of this part of history haven't made it into the domain of the popular view.
So, where's the anniversary party taking place?
We did have a dosimeter with us, at the closest point to the sarcophagus, the SV was reading a 3.57 (I have a picture of it). On average though, it was reading about 0.1. To put in in perspective, an X-ray tech during a year gets an annual dosage of 32, so I'm honestly not too worried about it, and the pictures are worth it!
When I was in Pripryat (and yes, we had the dosimeters as well) the readings were perfectly fine if you stepped on concrete, tarmac, or in some of the buildings. But if you stepped onto grass, soil, vegetation or anything which was connected to the water table, the dosimeter shot WAY up WAY fast.
Our guide made a point of showing this to us, when we were taking photos of the bumper cars in the amusement park.
I'm considering going back again this year.
Was there on a lovely day and managed to slip off from the group at Pripryat to see some unique perspectives.
http://ninjito.com/2009-09-12-PANO/qx-pano-pripyat-1.jpg
The hotel Polissia.
http://ninjito.com/2009-09-12-PANO/qx-pano-pripyat-2.jpg
Roof of said building, you can see reactor 4 in the distance to the right.
http://ninjito.com/2008-08-16/qx-pripyat-1.jpg
Rarely seen fresque honouring the cosmonauts.
Getting to Chernobyl isn't the overwhelming task of mental fortitude and endurance most of these 'reporters' want you to think it is. You go to Kiev, you spend 40 - 80USD, and you get taken there. It's very official, it's very routine, and you get an interesting experience from it. And a delicious meal at the end of it..
Longtime? Like people still dying years later?
You can get that with normal bombs, in fact you are likely to find those in almost any bombed area just waiting for something to trigger them. Just this month a WWII bomb had to be diffused in munich.
We had a couple of those here in the UK over the past year as well (though thankfully, no one died).
You get the same effect with airplanes. People are still dying (years later) from illness and other health-related problems directly attributable to the 9/11 atrocity, which involved no bombs (nuclear or otherwise), just a couple of big airplanes, a couple of big buildings, and a whole lot of jet fuel.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Remaining RBMK reactors were modified to make them safer, but I suppose you can consider them unsafe just like a car that kills its passengers if the driver accelerates to 200km/h and aims at a concrete wall or a tree.
And Ignalina power plant was shut down mainly because our politicians, fresh out of one Union, wanted to get into another so badly they signed whatever they were told to sign by said Union. Now most of the electricity comes from an old ~1.5GW oil and gas power plant which has ~25% efficiency (which I'm told is pretty low for these power plants).
...really? Does a disaster have to be an accident to be classed as a disaster?
Do as the automotive industry does. Call it a Nuclear incident.
RBMK is safe now, with a few modifications they added. There are still ~10 RBMK running inside Russia, and I don't think they have plans to shut them down early. (I think they'll gradually be taken off line between now and 2030, depending condition and how old).
From what I remember:
Added more control rods, faster application, removed graphite tips.
Added more base neutron absorber (not sure how to call it, like control rod that is always in), so that reactor is unable to run at low power level (where it was unstable).
To compensate for the above it needs to run more enriched uranium though, I think ~2.5%. I suppose this makes it less cost effective than old, but safety is worthwhile exchange...
I think most new reactors will be VVER type (PWR, with containment, safe, and exported to many places). There is also new MKER under development, it's the same theory as RBMK, with hotswap fuel rods and such, and will be used to replace old RBMK. - I think it is to be full containment, though.
Sent from my PDP-11
The news meant to say that in 2010 Chernobyl looks slashdotted.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
There are no zombies on any of them!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Getting to Chernobyl isn't the overwhelming task of mental fortitude and endurance most of these 'reporters' want you to think it is. You go to Kiev, you spend 40 - 80USD, and you get taken there. It's very official, it's very routine, and you get an interesting experience from it. And a delicious meal at the end of it..
Never been to the Ukraine, but according to what I saw in Everything Is Illuminated, hiring a driver for a sight-seeing excursion to Trochenbrod is ineed an interesting experience. ;-) I'd imagine what's portrayed in the movie is probably as informative and authentic as the photographs in the article, but a helluvalot more fun to watch.
Thank you for bringing a well thought out and reasoned comment to the discussion. http://duiattorneyorangecountyca.com/
[citation needed]
How we know is more important than what we know.
Some of the big health problem isotopes released had short half-lives, so staying there a year now is probably not much more of a dose than staying only a few days right after the incident, too.
Sent from my PDP-11
The link is slashdotted so I can't tell but I managed to find this video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j54pO9ATmeQ :)
How well did I.W. nail the feeling of the place in that iconic level?
I was there in May 2009 and I had much the same experience as you did. Unfortunately my friends and I opted to join a big tour instead of paying for a private one; the stragglers from the bus constantly kept us behind schedule, eventually to the point that we didn't get a chance to see the KGB offices or the swimming pool, both of which we'd been promised a tour of. I was fucking enraged. Anyway, we also had dosimeters and were told where we could and couldn't go. I'm not too worried about my kids being born with two legs. I'm pretty certain I'll go back, and this time pay up for a private tour.
now it's a ghost town.
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
It would seem the server had a meltdown as well.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Well, it caused a larger zone of serious radiation spread than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. Some of the tests in the pacific, Australia, and continental US contaminated very large areas but like the nuclear bombings it is mostly light isotopes that decayed very quickly. The nuclear bombings of Japan, or some other incident, might have been a more serious nuclear disaster (at least for the Japanese) but I would give Chernobyl the credit as largest.
Nagasaki+Hiroshima get a lot of press because they were intentional and we learned much of what we known of the harmful effects of radiation from it. That was not understood at the time, that's something we have in hindsight. For example, there was a lot of direct viewing of tests for many years.
Another big disaster is the collective effect of all the cores the Brits and others have dumped in the ocean just upstream from Norway. The gulf stream takes the radioisotopes, like Technium, up to Norway for it to enter the food chain and concentrate in birds which then squirt it out over the land by the metric tonne during nesting season. That latter disaster is still ongoing and growing as the cores fall apart.
It looks like the article is downplaying the extent of the Chernobyl disaster. Don't forget that it was radiation detectors at nuclear plants in Sweden, four or five countries away, that sounded the alarm. Levels there were high enough to trigger a response to a possible leak. The puzzle started when it was found that it was the workers coming into the plant on a shift change that were hot, but the ones leaving were not.
Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, Finland and Norway were some of the countries in the fallout zone. People traveling or otherwise active out of doors on those days were heavily exposed to the fallout. The isotopes and amount are known and enough time has passed that there should be indications of the effect on the population. All livestock and the fodder upon which they graze got it too, so that the meat from at least some of those regions was banned in other regions for years.
Right now the core is still smoldering hot and needs constant maintenance to prevent picking up where it left off. The core is so hot that RPV's die in a matter of minutes and the pictures they send are grainy. It's rather disturbing to see frozen waterfalls of slag and rock that where molten and flowing at the peak.
So yeah, Chernobyl is not just the largest nuclear disaster, it's still an active disaster.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Don't tell me you were really expecting to see the mutant, invisible zombies on simple photos.
I agree, I think they could have let it run its course without serious risk, but I think your politicians recognize that as tough as it is to have misinformed policies imposed on your country it's probably worthwhile in the long run.
Hopefully Lithuania will bring a replacement nuclear plant online before too long, and the EU's ~1.3bn Euro assistance to get the plant closed will soften the blow.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Now, I'm by no means an expert but do recall someone saying that the radiation levels vary so much that walking around without a Geiger counter is like walking on a minefield wearing snowshoes. Especially if you enter buildings.
The best thing about seeing the swimming pool area, is when you recognise it from Call of Duty 4. You can snap a photo of where you killed that sniper...
What they could have done is to negotiate into letting INPP continue working until a new power plant was built.
Hopefully Lithuania will bring a replacement nuclear plant online before too long, and the EU's ~1.3bn Euro assistance to get the plant closed will soften the blow.
Well, I don't know about other countries, but here, money transfer systems have serious leaks, it would probably cost 10 times as much to built the new power plant than it would for Russians or Belorussians (who are building two new power plants close to Lithuania, the Belorussian one is ~45km from Vilnius) because of the leaks.
As for the 1.3GEUR... well, nobody knows where that money went, because while some of it was destined to be used to build a spent fuel storage building 3 years ago. Now we have a concrete field where that building was supposed to be and 1GEUR less... There is an inquiry, but I don't think they will find anything. Or maybe the money from the EU is accounted for and we are missing 1GEUR of our own...
So, 1.3G in, 0.3G out, as I said, money is transferred in leaky pipes.
Much of the area around Chernobyl was evacuated immediately; see the photos here of schools, businesses, equipment and homes abandoned on short notice and never reclaimed. A succession of workers continued at the power plant, both to reinforce the rapidly deteriorating "tomb" which had been hastily assembled around Reactor #4 and to keep other reactors operating as you've noted. While animals and even some people have returned to the area, it has not become "safe" nor will it be for many years to come. The Chernobyl reactors used an inherently unsafe design chosen primarily because it was cheap; the bills eventually do come due; it can be argued that Chernobyl contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union, due both to the enormous direct cost of the disaster and a desire by the government to divest itself of the very long term responsibility. Chernobyl is now Ukraine's problem; Russia simply walked away and moved on.
Especially the ones of the rad meter.
Best Slashdot Co
All this proves is humans are more destructive than genetic disorders in animal populations. After all, if a human population wants wolves dead, they die. 100%. Mutation and degeneration may take long enough that the wolf gets to breed.
tough to bet against an organization with a user base like that.
never a better time to consult with/trust in your creators, providing more than enough of everything for everyone without any personal gain motive since/until forever.
the lights are coming up all over now. see you there?
I find it highly amusing that on Phoronix one of the "related" articles to the Chernobyl article is "KDE 4.0 Release Event".
You probably wouldn't want to eat too much of the locally grown crops or drink too much of the local water but people do live there and seem to do ok despite eating local food.
Slightly raised background radiation is not as bad as people think.
The heavy metals in the soil are a bit nasty though.
what surprises me is how little we hear about the other places that have been damaged by radioactive material.
The soviet weapons program was a disgrace.
Chernobyl pales in comparison to this:
http://www.damninteresting.com/in-soviet-russia-lake-contaminates-you
"Rather than the typical "background" gamma radiation of about 0.21 Röntgens per year, the edge of the Techa River was emanating 5 Röntgens per hour."
"Thirty-nine years of effluent had saturated the lake with nasty isotopes, including an estimated 120 megacuries of long-lived radiation. In contrast, the Chernobyl incident released roughly 100 megacuries of radiation into the environment, but only about 3 megacuries of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. A delegation who visited Lake Karachay in 1990 measured the radiation at the point where the effluent entered the water, and the needles of their Geiger counters danced at about 600 Röntgens per hour-enough to provide a lethal dose in one hour. They did not linger long."
the nuclear energy industry isn't too bad.
Its the nuclear weapons industry that people should worry about.
Of course if you listen to greanpeace types everything within a 100 miles of Chernobyl is a desolate wasteland peopled with ghosts and it will remain that way for 50,000 years.
My favorite Chernobyl quote is from Pravda: While there was no panic, there were panic stricken individuals.
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
Drunk people do stuff like that.
Russians like to drink.
You do the math.
4. Profit!!!!!11!
For 100 points, spot the zombie in http://ninjito.com/2009-09-12-PANO/qx-pano-pripyat-1.jpg :-)))
Finally, the clear proof !!!
For a detailed if fictional view of Chernobyl and Pripyat, read the novel _Wolves Eat Dogs_ by Martin Cruz Smith. Smith sends his detective character Arkady Renko on a case to the Zone of Exclusion. I am not a radiation scientist so cannot judge the veracity of the novel but he goes into considerable detail about the accident, contamination levels, people who remained, etc. Fascinating read. Disclaimer: this is my favorite author.
not to say birds are thriving, but they arent extinct in the exclusion zone (and keep in mind pripyat is very close to the reactor)
Not only are they not extinct in the zone, they are relatively thriving. Enough that there's a bunch of studies on them, at least.
I didn't find the study I was looking for, but I did find this one mentioned.
Brightly colored birds most affected by Chernobyl radiation
The study I remember reading was a simpler radiation level and nesting success. Basically, on average birds nesting in the sarcophagus had almost the same success rate as birds not, despite there being double the birth defect rate. Remember, many of these species normally lay 4-6 eggs to get ONE adult bird at the end - the chicks pushing each other out of the nest when they're growing.
Other studies show that migrant birds have more troubles, like the brightly colored ones. Big eggs are also a problem. Still, we're looking at nests in the worst of the contaminated areas.
Deer and such that live further away do fine. Not that I'd recommend humans necessarily live that close, despite me not holding to the linear harm theory(the idea that if Radiation in amount X casues Y cancers, that X/2 will cause Y/2 cancers - I'm more like X/2 is more likely to cause Y/4 cancers).
I don't read AC A human right
I visited Pripyat, the reactor, and the surrounding countryside a couple years ago. The radiation is a major presence, and as Archon-X pointed out, it's common to hear nothing from your Geiger counter in one location and then take a couple steps and suddenly be exposed to 100x background levels.
I think that must have happened to me while I first approached the reactor, but I don't actually remember it. I only remember waking up on a truck bed and being dropped off at the edge of the Zone with instructions to hunt down a man named Strelok. Long story short, eventually I remembered that my name is Strelok and the guys asking me to hunt him down hadn't realized this when they left me with my instructions. I managed to get back through Pripyat to the reactor, where I uncovered a bizarre group trying to trick visitors with a religious hoax. Not falling for it and not liking the looks of the people involved, I shut down their organization and escaped. It was the best ending I could hope for.
Highly recommended.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
We did have a dosimeter with us, at the closest point to the sarcophagus, the SV was reading a 3.57 (I have a picture of it). On average though, it was reading about 0.1. To put in in perspective, an X-ray tech during a year gets an annual dosage of 32, so I'm honestly not too worried about it, and the pictures are worth it!
I pity the schmuck who brought along his medium-format film camera.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
We did have a dosimeter with us, at the closest point to the sarcophagus, the SV was reading a 3.57 (I have a picture of it).
Err, a dose of 3.57 Sv would most likely leave you dead. What you're talking about there is a dose *rate* of 3.57 micro Sv per hour which is around 30-40 times typical background (which as you noted isn't that big a deal).
Good points again
Well I'm sure thats reassuring for the many thousands of people who died trying to stop the disaster getting any further out of control.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I know it seems wrong to nuke a city. I agree that it does seem wrong to do. But you don't understand the Japanese mindset at the time.
Dropping the bomb saved lives. Here, read this.
When we invaded Okinawa the Japanese military ordered the civilian population to kill themselves rather than submit to the Americans, because we would rape and kill them all. Of course that wasn't true - but the people believed them. Mothers strangled sons, entire families ate rat poison, families would walk up to the edge of a cliff, throw their infants off then hold hands and jump. Mass suicide. Horrific.
Now scale that up to the entire island of Honshu.
The body count was actually lower by dropping the bombs and forcing the surrender. That's why it was so vitally important to get the emperor to call the whole thing off. Instead of a few hundred thousand dead you'd have numbers in the tens of millions. It was part of the Japanese culture. Never surrender. That's why they treated our POWs so poorly. They simply didn't understand the western notions of capture and ransom - our culture handles these notions in exactly the opposite way.
It's awful to have to say that nuking an whole town full of civilians, women and children was appropriate. But really - lives were saved this way. It's horrible, I know. But war always is - that's why it's best avoided altogether.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Funny how everybody has heard of Chernobyl, the place where a nuclear meltdown directly killed around 59 people. How many people have heard of Benxihu? A coal dust explosion killed 1549 in one day. People probably don't know much about any single coal mining accident because they happen all the time. Even now, coal accidents kill thousands a year. The most recent deadly nuclear accident was about 11 years ago in a Japanese plant, where two workers died.
Now, I'm talking nuclear power, not weapons.
Now factoring the relative danger of radiation versus pollution and global warming is pretty difficult. But radiation probably killed a few thousand, whereas coal pollution probably killed millions. Both radiation and carbon will be around for a long time.
it is interesting how reality gets buried in popular belief
God exists, you insensitive clod!
Is that Sv or mSv? What you're saying there is you were in a radiation field of 357 rem (1 Sv = 100 rem), and that an x-ray tech receives an annual dose of 32 (assuming Gray in this case since you're talking about absorbed dose not a dose rate, would be 3200 rad, a lethal dose.) Assuming mSv, a dose rate of 357 mSv or mrem is still pretty hefty for a public dose rate.
I would like to propose a variant of Godwin's Law.
"Any comment thread about nuclear power will, at some point, use the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as an example in one context or another."
-SeaGROL
I just realized that the micro symbol didn't get sent, it was a reading of uSV of 3.57 (uSV = 1/10 of mSV)
There's a "Zone of Alienation" of about 6 feet around my WIFE!
If the area really was more or less "unusable," would the Soviets really have abandoned the place? Any idea what the average lifespan was of the operators at the other reactors?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The Empire of Japan was free to stop the war AT ANY TIME.
[quote]It's plausible to assume the war would have stopped without nuclear attacks. It's extremely plausible the war would have stopped after the first nuclear attack on Hiroshima, so surely the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was gratuitous at best.[/quote]
The Empire of Japan was free to stop the war AT ANY TIME.
The turning point for Japan was the loss at Midway.
The Empire of Japan was free to stop the war AT ANY TIME.
They could have stopped after Midway. They could have stopped after Guadalcanal. They could have stopped after Leyte Gulf.
The Empire of Japan was free to stop the war AT ANY TIME.
They could have sued for peace after the Hiroshima.
The Empire of Japan was free to stop the war AT ANY TIME.
That it took *two* nukings to get them to stop is itself proof that two nukings were necessary.
The Empire of Japan was free to stop the war AT ANY TIME.
...you cannot get it out. -- Peter Garret (midnight oil)
One of the people at my university has gone back to that area a few times and the photos are far better than anything I've seen sofar.
I find the inside pictures of the school especially eerie.
taken from article: "Chernobyl's plant workers were testing the viability of using the reactor's steam turbine to generate the needed electricity until the diesel generators could begin providing sufficient power. This was the fourth time over the course of several years that this experiment was carried out -- with all earlier attempts having failed -- but this time it turned deadly." translation: fail, fail, fail, EPIC FAIL!!!!
That makes a lot more sense now then...something like 3.57 mrem which is still a pretty good dose rate for just standing about in the open. Did a survey on a fluoro unit this morning and could get that thing up to 8.5 mrem for comparison operating it with my Victoreen.
It seems that photo/movie trips to Chernobyl were fashionable in recent years. .... and so on.
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven
(I know they are mostly not in English, but I think that most /. readers have IQ high enough to find consecutive subpages with pictures.)
How is an organic diet going to help somebody who could be at risk of radiation poisoning?
Learn something new.
I'm not too worried about my kids being born with two legs.
I would be.. I mean what kind of parent wants to raise a kid with only TWO legs?
Learn something new.
But it isn't many thousands.
To get many thousands, which some studies do, what you have to do is say "Radiation is deadly, anyone who is exposed and dies, died of the radiation" and then "X years later, many thousands of people are dead" and conclude "Many thousands of people died from the radiation".
To get a useful number you need to compare the population of people who were seriously exposed to a similar population who weren't exposed and compare death rates over time. And once you do that the numbers for Chernobyl itself get a LOT smaller. Because in your non-exposed population (and thus we may feel confident, the same applies to the exposed population) plenty of people got in car crashes, had heart attacks, took drug overdoses, and so on.
Of course Chernobyl did kill people, particularly those workers who entered the reactor area before they realised what had happened, and some firefighters. But the saddest thing is that many people whose exposure was limited and whose risk factor was therefore fairly ordinary (say 95% of normal life expectancy for their age) were deceived by well-meaning but stupid outsiders into believing that they were doomed, they often became very depressed and that had all the usual consequences. So you meet a guy who is 55 and was at Chernobyl, and he looks really bad, and then you find out he's an alcoholic, of course he looks really bad, but that's the alcohol, not the radiation.
The other way to get "many thousands" of dead is even more disingenuous. You pick a number out of the air (say, 0.01%) and then multiply that by all causes of death that we believe may be related to radiation exposure. Then, because these illnesses are fairly common, and the world is a big place, you say "thus, so-and-such many people around the world died because of fallout from Chernobyl". Which is completely unprovable and arbitrary.
But it's not thousands dead. It's 56.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
A good read. Learned a lot.
"Environmental Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident and their Remediation: Twenty Years of Experience"
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1239_web.pdf
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Sorry but the average German or Japanese person was so far removed from the actual war crimes (as the average American is from the recent ambulance shooting) especially seeing as neither Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany were repreistative governments.
If this was not true the de-nazification and de-imperialsisation of these nations would have been impossible. But history proved that it wasnt, so I'm sorry if I've broken your horribly inept propaganda. The simple fact is that civilians were innocent targets, as another poster pointed out WWII was the best example of Clausewitz' idea of "total war", where every target is considered a valid target. Civilians in WWII were considered valid targets by all sides this does not automatically make them guilty targets.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
...hey, as long as they have 11 fingers and 9 toes...
This picture AFAICT shows a grading page from the class book (LHS). The class book had pages for grades for each subject, for attendance, etc. It seems this format was spread across former Soviet bloc. You can notice that the class had 40 students (ugh). The grades are 2 to 5, with 2 being a failing grade. Student #37 was named Shrayer V. (in a loose transliteration), and was decent enough (only one 2, mostly 4s and 5s).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Well rather than responding to Mr AC I'll respond to you and let see if we can break this down with some reasoned discourse.
Lets start here:
The BBC interviewed a group who represent workers who cleaned up the Chernobyl accident. Whilst 30 workers died immediately, 15000 relief workers died and 50,0000 workers were left invalid. Ukraine's Health Ministry estimates that 3.5 million people, over a third of them children, have suffered illness as a result of the contamination, and the incidence of some cancers is 10 times the national average.
Except that it's the radioactive isotopes that were released into the environment that are radiation emitters. This demonstrates Mr AC has a very poor understanding of what it is that was actually *dangerous* about Chernobyl, bio-accumulation. Radioactive *isotopes* that escape into the environment analogue other elements when presented to a metabolism in the food chain. Take plutonium for example, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, as high energy alpha emitter in the body it is extremely toxic.
What is plain to see is that many *thousands* of people are displaying signs symptomatic of radiation poisoning from being exposed from the radioactive isotopes released by Chernobyl. Can you understand the consequences of the accident are still unfolding and will be doing so for many decades to come?
Followed by the most absolutely disgraceful treatment of people who actually were there to clean up the mess. Only an AC could post such a callous justification.
Ok lets examine these facts. 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body. From World Nuclear Association's website on the Chernobyl disaster ;
5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.
In reality this disaster will continue, at conservative estimates, for many decades killing more and more people. Of course you have the rather convenient position that many of these countries are too poor to measure these fatalities so the true number of how many millions Chernobyl actually killed will never really be know.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm sorry but from one shitty amateur photographer to this guy, YOUR PICTURES SUCK. They are blurry, the HDR ones are lacking in contrast, does he know whats going on?
Given, the subject matter and story he wrote is far better, but someone teach him how to use a tripod!
Died over what time period? I've seen similar numbers (20,000 out of 200,000 died over a 24-year period), but if you assume a typical workforce age distribution and look at life-expectancy numbers for eastern Europe during that time period, 10% deaths is actually below what you'd expect for such a group of people. I don't disagree that many people were left with chronic health problems from the accident, but that doesn't seem to have translated into large numbers of deaths.
You're working from an invalid assumption here. Chernobyl was a unenriched-uranium reactor -- in fact, many of the design decisions that contributed to the severity of the disaster, such as the large size of the core and the lack of containment, stem from the decision to fuel it with unenriched uranium. I wouldn't expect the core to contain more than a few grams of plutonium, as any plutonium produced during operation will fission almost immediately.
The bulk of the released material is in the form of short-lived fission products and uranium oxides. Fission products are intensely radioactive for a few hours to weeks, so it's possible to avoid exposure by evacuating the area and avoiding places (such as lakes and streams) that accumulate the materials until the radiation dies down. Uranium oxides don't bioaccumulate, and although they remain radioactive for millions to billions of years, their long half-life means they don't emit much radiation.
Plutonium is dangerous because the body incorporates it into the bone structure, and it has a half-life long enough to bioaccumulate but short enough to emit significant radiation. However, as noted above, the Chernobyl reactor didn't contain much, if any, plutonium.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Actually, as I pointed out, the reactor was due to be refueled and several tons of plutonium was present, additionally RBMK was the descendant of a reactor type designed to produce plutonium. With the core way outside of it's operating characteristics in highly unusual circumstances and it's known that the power output of the reactor jumped to some enormous thermal figure, your assumption appears to be that every thing ejected from that core was just "not a big deal".
In reality we don't actually know what radioactive isotope products were created during the runaway process prior to the reactor exploding. We know from decommissioning Chalk River that "Unidentified Deposits" amongst others like Cobalt 55 and Iron 90 are present in a reactor core so there is now way of knowing how much plutonium, amongst other elements, were created in those final few minutes. In the range of tens of grams of plutonium - very unlikely. In the range of tons of plutonium - very likely.
Yes, I stand corrected on the volume of plutonium based on the nature of the reactor. The figure was half a ton plutonium released into the environment. Thats 500,000,000,000 doses of carcinogens, if uniformly distributed around the globe it would be enough to kill everybody on the planet several times. Since my approach was to conservatively estimate the dosage released and acquired cancers, I think the point still stands.
But lets go back to your original assertion;
Ok lets examine where this figure came from. 1959 the International Atomic Energy Agency signed and agreement with the World Health Organisation preventing them WHO from researching health consequences emanating from military and civilian atomic activities. It even prevents WHO from issuing warnings to exposed populations.
Don't you find it unusual that the World Health Organisation is subordinate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in a health related matter? The IAEA seems to have no interest in WHO research into AIDs or smallpox or other non-radiation related disease like Swine or Avian flu. The *reality* is it's easier for the IAEA to control information and peoples perceptions to prevent the true nature of the disaster ever being known. The IAEA interdiction prevents WHO from publishing or researching the extent of the disaster so you can say 56 people died and close your eyes to the terrifying truth that 10's of thousands of people have died and are dying slow, mostly agonising, deaths.
Over this time period, of course. The concept you, and many others, have not yet seemed to grasp about this accident is that it is not over...
Chernobyl is still happening.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Since my approach was to conservatively estimate the dosage released and acquired cancers, I think the point still stands."
No, your approach was to make up scary nonsense. You "point" doesn't stand because you never made one. In fact you never did anything except hide your response full of lies in another thread so that the original author wouldn't be notified that you'd written it. And look how desperate you got - when someone shows you a published report documenting the 56 deaths, you respond with a grand conspiracy theory and an allegation about "slow agonising death" for which of course you have no evidence whatsoever.
Time is on the side of truth. When people like you started out you could scare everyone into believing there'd be millions of dead, lying in piles across Europe. But it's hard to sell that story now, as the curve flattens and Chernobyl fades into memory. The reality is that direct exposure killed less than a hundred, the long term effects on residents and workers were smaller even than expected, and then there's some unknown (in the sense that we're not even too sure it's negative) but small long term environment effect. And that's it. Only the nuclear mystique makes it worth talking about.
Nuclear Power just isn't as dangerous as the images of an A-bomb denotation would suggest. It's dangerous of course, and we should be careful, but all our power sources are dangerous, burning coal wasn't safer, even wind and wave power has its share of dangers.
Well it can be best summed up by this 2004 quote of Dr Michael Fernex formerly of the University of Basel who worked for the WHO;
"Six years ago we tried to have a conference. The proceedings were never published. This is because in this matter the organisations at the UN are subordinate to the IAEA. Since 1986 the WHO did nothing about studying Chernobyl. It's a pity. The interdiction to publish which fell upon the WHO conference came from the IAEA. The IAEA blocked the proceedings; the truth would have been a disaster for the nuclear industry"
So you can see the difference between theory and practice, I've provided you with the actual text of the agreement.
Oh you don't have to believe me. Even the hamstrung report from the World Health Organisation said;
"The international experts have estimated that radiation could cause up to about 4000 eventual deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations, i.e., emergency workers from 1986-1987, evacuees and residents of the most contaminated areas. This number contains both the known radiation-induced cancer and leukaemia deaths"
Imagine, based on the actual evidence I've provided you, what the WHO may have been able to uncover had they been allowed to actually reveal the actual truth of the disaster. The Guardian however points out that the IAEA is ignoring the evidence of the volume of deaths occurring as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, so it's unlikely that you will examine them fairly either, of course if no one is actually collecting the data how can it be presented?
The UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;
"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"
Maybe dying of cancer just isn't what you class as a "slow and agonising death".
The truth of the matter is that cancer takes years to incubate, thus premature deaths and birth defects will manifest over time. After this generation, the next generation and long after this disaster has passed into lore it will still be well within the toxic half-life of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137, strontium 90 and plutonium 239.
The reality is the genetic abnormalities and diseases caused by this accident are generations away and unlikely to be seen by anyone alive today. direct exposure will occur as long as there is a food chain to absorb these isotopes and people to eat that food.
Of course, it's much worse. An A bomb may release more radiation in the form of gamma radiation but much less material in terms of radioactive isotopes than a nuclear reactor - especially in these circumstances.
Perhaps you just missed it. Hopefully the information presented here will help you understand it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I was waiting for your reply. I saw your comment here in this thread and just thought I'd wind up our conversation.
Simply because they are so intrinsically linked. Nuclear power makes a lot of material available for processing into Nuclear weapons. If it wasn't then the world wouldn't have a problem with Iran or North Korea having Nuclear power.
Radioactive isotopes, through bio-accumulation inevitably make it into the Food chain. I've made some comments in this discussion that may clarify the relationship.
If you read the links I sent you you will understand why the science increasingly reveals that Nuclear power produces no Net energy gain. Accidents like Chernobyl take it from pointless to foolhardy.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.