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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.
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)
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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!
There are no zombies on any of them!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. To the present date, all the American military casualties of the sixty-five years following the end of World War II — including the Korean and Vietnam Wars — have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock. There are so many in surplus that combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan and United States are able to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to wounded soldiers on the field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_heart
Maybe this means nothing, but I'm guessing the estimated number of casualties from invading the old-fashioned way were what motivated the use of atomic bombs. The Japanese fought tooth and nail even when they were defending a speck of land in the Pacific. How much more so their homeland?
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.
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.
The Japanese fought tooth and nail even when they were defending a speck of land in the Pacific. How much more so their homeland?
Going back, there were huge numbers of reports of Japanese fanatism.
Off the top of my head:
Kamikaze bombers, Japanese civilians commiting suicide rather than face occupation, suicide attacks by ground forces AND civilians. Reports of civilians being provided arms to resist occupation. Traps and bombs being set up. It was promised to be ugly.
Remember, it was less than a decade ago that they finally convinced the last Japanese soldier to come out of the jungle.
I don't read AC A human right
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.