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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."
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
From the article
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the Chernobyl nuclear accident led to more than one hundred times the nuclear fallout of what was experienced during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
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Fucking retards
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
She's a fraud. The whole thing never happened. It was just wishful thinking on her part because she wanted to write poetry. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong. "Apparently she didn't go around alone on a motorcycle. She went in a car with her husband and a friend. Elena defends herself, admitting that much of her story was 'more poetry' than reality." It just baffles me how someone can take some cool photos and then ruin the entire thing by lying about it. It's like going to the White House to meet the President, and then you make up a tale about how you went to the bathroom, opened the wrong door, and stumbled into the Situation Room. Your story is already way cool, why the F lie about it? The REALLY sad part is all the people who rushed forward to defend this fraud.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The bombing of Dresden has never been legally classified as a war crime. There are plenty of people who believe it is, plenty of people who believe it isn't and even more people who have no opinion either way. Whether it would be classified as a war crime if it were "on trial" is a matter for discussion :)
It wasn't classified as a war crime simply because the perpetrators of said attack were on the winning side.
A prime example of that is some of the charges that Admiral Donitz faced regarding the sinking of neutral and unarmed shipping even though both the British and the Americans waged a similar campaign tactic against both Germany and Japan.
This fresque honours the USSR Post Service and says "The post service for all time and all peoples".
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.
I can confirm this, visited there last summer. Truly a place worth visiting. There are several hundred people working on shifts there all the time, two weeks at a time. There's even a mobile phone network there nowadays. Ukraine government also plans to open large part of the exclusion zone during the next 5 to 10 years, so some of the stories are kind of exaggerated.
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.
It's also a complete hoax
Pity - it was / is well written.
Meh, I went there last summer. It is indeed exaggerated. Here are a couple of things to note:
--The town is not completely closed. Lots of people still work there to decommission the other reactors.
--The plant continued to run until 2000.
--They only take you around certain places because they have been tested to be relatively safe. There are still parts in buildings where highly radioactive dust has settled, so even with a good G-M meter, you might stumble upon way too much radiation. A G-M meter will tell when you have found it, but it's not going to tell you where it is.
--The "kidofspeed" site about her Chornobyl/Pripyat tour is probably a hoax