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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
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.
... playing one of the Stalker series of games is more fun. Even if the scenery isn't 100% accurate.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Coral cache.
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Dude! That like totally happened to me! And then I told them how they really needed to handle the aliens, and they gave me a medal but some spies stole it when I was touring the secret warehouse.
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.
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)
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.