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Chernobyl 25th Anniversary
ZwedishPzycho writes "Twenty-five years later, and yet again we are worried about a nuclear disaster. There will be plenty of stories out there discussing the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident; here is just one."
After the Chernobyl disaster, a Russian organization of Chiropractors volunteered their time and set up shop in a nearby Ukraine school gymnasium.
Over 3,500 people visited and had spinal adjustments which helped improve nerve function to the thyroid gland, which is so important with radiation poisoning. NOT A SINGLE PERSON WHO VISITED GOT CANCER!!!
Think about that next time you visit an "MD". Chiropractic is where it's at.
...looking for a Gravi artifact near these old buildings, see. And the detector keeps pointing me inside, so I go. The roof is gone and the moon is out but I'm staring at the detector instead of looking around.
All of a sudden I bump into this bloodsucker, and he's taking a leak. I look at him and go "hey, buddy, why are you pissing in the middle of the building?" And he looks back at me and goes "what the hell are you doing in my house?"
So I look around and realize we're in the middle of a converter room for a substation of the nuclear power plant. There's got to be 10 million volts on the wires in there.
About then I realize that only in the Zone can you walk right past a bunch of giant warning signs, into a room full of enough electricity to kill you faster than the speed of light, and the only thing out of the ordinary enough to make you notice is a blood sucking mutant taking a whiz."
It's nice you can already visit it though. I visited there two years ago and the place really gives you weird feeling.
I had also just played the map in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and it was funny seeing the same places.
Who wants some cake?
When you said yellow cake, I was picturing, you know, lemon or maybe butter flavored. This is definitely not lemon or butter flavored. It tastes like burning.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Who wants some cake?
I'll have some yellow cake.
This is a great example of a troll of the "I'm an idiot, please call me such and angrily correct me" type.
Because we all chiropractic is not where it is at. High colonics are where it is at. Remember, the key to life is to have a healthy colon.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
you can see it in postings on this website: technological overconfidence. the inflated sense of mastery over a technology due to technophilia and deriving much personal worth from one's mastery of technology
which is fine when you are talking about space exploration or computers. but nuclear power?
the problem is, accidents happen. they always do. no long winded speech on safety will alter the inevitable. corners are cut, economic considerations bypass longterm challenges, things break and fall apart over time. eventually, you have a nuclear accident. well now, it's a matter of the consequences of the accident. well: you blow up an oil supply depot, collpase a coal mine, undermine a dam, etc: these are awful cataclysmic events. and 5 minutes after it happens, its over. but nuclear power, when you have an accident, it stays with you for centuries. that's the big problem with nuclear power
mankind being too confident in his technological mastery, combined with longterm effects outside of the realm of mankind's normal psychological considerations, and you can see the problem with nuclear power. mankind, in a way, isn't built to handle nuclear power safely, and so we just shouldn't use it
i'm not saying we have better alternatives. and nuclear is great, when it works. and it works 99% of the time. but the problem with nuclear, when it doesn't work that 1% of the time? unlike every other power source, really terrible consequences stay with you for centuries. and so that 1% changes everything about nuclear power in ways that any conscientious person finds very troubling and sobering
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...and still no superheroes :(
I recently heard that studies show exposure to LOW level radiation makes the body's immune system more resistant. i.e. Someone downwind of Chernobyl would be less likely to develop cancer. I wonder if there's any truth to this idea? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17867496
There was a time when people refused smallpox vaccinations, believing it to be stupid to inject a disease into the bloodstream, but it later proved to be beneficial.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Turns out, at least in Iraq's case, the yellow cake was a lie.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Who wants some cake?
When you said yellow cake, I was picturing, you know, lemon or maybe butter flavored. This is definitely not lemon or butter flavored. It tastes like burning.
There's an exhibit in the window of the Wellcome Museum on Euston Rd. in London with pictures of some artist making actual cake from yellow cake and eating it. While you may not actually die from the amounts used, I still wouldn't intentionally EAT some. I guess it's no worse than living in a radon-rich area, but still...
Just wait until the next major forest fire, when all the radiation the trees and ground have absorbed will be lofted into the air again, to land who knows where, depending on the wind at the time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A saw a link earlier today to an interesting portfolio of pictures of the modern site. It's actually surprising that there are people still living there. Most of them are nuclear workers and associates. But a few eccentrics have apparently moved back to their villages too (the article talks about an encounter with one old lady who lives there, completely cut off and on her own). I also didn't realize that the other reactors of the plant were kept online long after the #4 reactor was entombed (the last reactor wasn't shut down until 2000). It's also amazing to see how much work has really been done to clean the place up (it's now safe to walk around most of the area, with a guide who knows the really nasty "hot spots" anyway).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The Daily Show reported a few years ago that the UN Security Council confirmed that Iran was preparing to produce yellow cake. "See the Bush administration wasn't wrong about Iraq--they were just really bad at spelling."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That is my favorite level from the game.
Though all the "sniper" levels in Call of Duty games tend to be some of the best.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
...and we still haven't been able to top it? What's wrong with the youth today?
As of right now yes, it is the world's worst because there are so many deaths linked to it and so many more still expected as a result.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
"Nuclear blast"?
Whoever wrote the article had no clue. Chernobyl consisted of a steam explosion followed by a graphite fire of the exposed reactor core. There may have also been a subsequent brief prompt criticality incident that released less energy than the steam explosion, however the article implies that Chernobyl's radiation release was entirely by a bomb-like nuclear explosion.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I "visited" Cherynobyl via scifi.com's video site. The show was called Destination Truth, and they were filming the area around the nuclear plant and nearby town.
That's as close as I plan to get to a meltdown site, although I did recently receive a job offer to go to Tokyo for a few months (is $65/hour enough money to move within 60 miles of Fukushima? Hmmm).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
That's not how it works, but I doubt you care.
I wonder if the net result of these nuclear accidents that seem to continuously do orders-of-magnitude less damage than the hysterical anti-nuclear advocates claim will actually help the nuclear industry after a while?
I was a child in Germany when this event occurred and it did manage some interesting changes. I was six at the time and the school I went to had several tents set up outside the school where men in interesting orange, white or yellow suits would give you a once over with a geiger counter before you were allowed in. I know there was another tent set up a distance away for kids who came in 'hot', but I don't honestly remember what went on in the tent as I was always 'clean'. No recess outside for a whole year (a bunch of pent up 6 year olds is a scary thing) and if you were outside, under no circumstances were you to touch anything or put any of the plants (like blades of grass) in your mouth to make whistles. I know there were probably more rules, but I was six at the time and didn't care much outside the "some Russians made it so we can't play outside" angle. Was a military brat. I say this because since then I have read up as much as I can on the incident and am extremely interested in the history behind the disaster. I have even looked into getting one of the CHERNOBYL LIQUIDATOR medals to add to my small collections of all things Chernobyl. The lead up to the actual disaster itself is very fascinating and I encourage people to read into it. It wasn't so much a sudden 'oops!' as it was a lapse in several security and communications measures that lead up to the eventual steam explosion. The descriptions from some of the poor unfortunate first responders is enough to send chills up anyone's spine. Particularly the one I read (looking for link now actually) from a firefighter that died shortly there after describing the sensation as 'millions of hot pins and needles all over ones body'. Other interesting aspects from this were talks of the plant design itself, as well as photos of the nearby towns and abandoned villages. If anything this disaster was a wake up call for a more standardized plant design and communications methodology. My mind doesn't serve me well but the Russians had a habit of making each plant unique (someone correct me if I'm wrong?) and thus how to contain this particular disaster was by the seat of the pants moment. Oh, and if you get a chance, find the remains of the plant via google maps. I am not sure if it is still up but a year ago you could see the concrete tomb from the skies. Also look for some of the 'on site' photography done. The picture of a pipe 'oozing concrete lava' was morbidly fascinating.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
You don't know how it works, and you guessed wrong.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/26/chernobyl-radioactive-fires-global-danger
I actually want safe, clean nuclear power, but I think people like you are out to destroy any trust normal people might have in the nuclear industry. By continually downplaying any dangers, you make yourself sound like a shrill shill.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's really quite interesting. I know most heavy metals are usually boneseekers and poisonous in their own right, but yellowcake contains not uranium metal, but various Uranium sulfides, hydroxides, etc. I have no idea of the relative toxicity of these compounds. The radiation dosage from the unrefined, unenriched, and unirradiated Uranium would be so minute as to be inconsequential unless you ate a few tons of the stuff in one sitting.
I have to say I'm very much on the fence on this one. In my youth I was definitely against nuclear power, then later I was a strong supporter. Now I'm back to being not sure.
There's a big problem if, for example, you had perfected the containment process, then out of the blue, a Tunguska sized event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event) happened nearby (or on top of) your nuclear sites.
The fallout from that would be impressive.
A Tunguska sized event is a "lesser risk" that we all live with every day, yet it did happen, and very probably will happen again within a few generations.
I think the quote you are looking for goes something like this:
"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
I think Katrina; and the World Trade Center; and the Coal fires in Centralia, Pennsylvania (burning since '62); and the 1969 oil Spill in Santa Barbara; and the 89 Valdiez spill; and the Heyope tire fire (burned for 15 years;) and the Deepwater oil spill; the Bhopal disaster, etc. etc. etc. all disagree with your statement that nuclear desasters are the only energy/transportation disasters that have a long lasting impact.
Regarding the Centralia coal fires:
"This was a world where no human could live, hotter than the planet Mercury, its atmosphere as poisonous as Saturn's. At the heart of the fire, temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees [Fahrenheit]. Lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases swirled through the rock chambers." - David DeKok (1986)
"5 minutes after it happens, its over" Is a very myopic statement, that could easily be rectified by walking the beaches of Santa Barbara.
I "visited" Cherynobyl via scifi.com's video site. The show was called Destination Truth, and they were filming the area around the nuclear plant and nearby town.
That's as close as I plan to get to a meltdown site, although I did recently receive a job offer to go to Tokyo for a few months (is $65/hour enough money to move within 60 miles of Fukushima? Hmmm).
1) chernobyl didnt melt down, so it isnt a meltdown site, Three mile island is a meltdown site, and now off course fukushima dai ichi
2) the official exclusion zone is 30 km, 60 miles is over three times as far away as the japanase government deems safe, take into account that direct radiation drops off on an inverse cube, and you would be subject to 1/9th of the direct radiation that the japanese government deems acceptable, not counting extra decrease by objects blocking the line of sight. Exposure to fallout and activation products would not drop off as sharply, but still will be significantly below acceptable limits..
Now i cant look into your wallet, so i dont know how much of an improvement $65 an hour would be, but being 60 miles from fukushima wouldnt be very high on my considerations list
People, what a bunch of bastards
The cake is a lie.
What? The reactor blew it's lid, the graphic and fuel inside caught fire and burned for days. The fuel and fuel rod casings, and the sand packed around the reactor vessel that acted as a bio-shield, all melted and flowed out of the bottom of the reactor, finally solidifying into a large mass of highly radioactive glass like substance now called Chernobylite.
Chernobyl wasn't just a meltdown, it was a complete meltdown.
Much less bad than living in a Radon-rich area.
Yellowcake isn't enriched, so it'll be better than 99% U-238 (half life in the billions of years) and less than 1% U-235 (half life in the hundreds of millions of years).
As far as I know, none of the compounds present are digestable, so it'll go through your digestive tract like, well, shit through a goose.
In two days tops it's on its way to the sewage treatment plant, and you don't have all that many alpha emissions from something with a 700+ million year half-life in two days....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
good pic جات عراقي thanx alot its seems so refliction
good pic <a href="http://www.iraq3.com/">صبايا العراق</a> thanx alot its seems so r
Wow, times flying. Seems like this was just happening. Don't get old, kids!
According to this, I have died of cancer, twice.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
gb2Poland
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Other 2 responses were AC, so I'll pitch in -
As stated, Chernobyl sure as heck DID melt down, the core now existing as a sort of glass slurry in something like the 3rd sub-basement.
I don't read AC A human right
As far as I know, none of the compounds present are digestable, so it'll go through your digestive tract like, well, shit through a goose.
Pretty much; as far as the radiation itself goes, you're more at risk from the fact that Uranium is a heavy metal, and exposure has many of the same negatives as metals like lead.
I don't read AC A human right
check out the uranium hexafluoride plants / storage areas sometime. They're in casks, thousands of them out in the weather, and corroding. Upon exposure to water in the air, all kinds of fun happens.
Personally, I'd have phrased it more as 'the anti-nuclear crowd blocks further research, much less implimenting the new developments'.
I guess we don't need wars as long as there are apologists like you around.
Apologist? It's pretty much a fact. Imagine if anti-gasoline nuts had blocked the implimentation of fuel injection, unleaded gas, and catalytic converters because their goal was the complete elimination of gasoline as a fuel.
I don't read AC A human right
If a Tunguska sized event happened over the middle of london or washington DC we'd be wishing it had happened over some remote nuclear plant instead.
hell if one had happened during the cold war over a city it probably would have started world war 3.
some things are unlikely enough and catastrophic enough that we'd all be fucked no matter what energy source we use.
The Chernobyl disaster was part of the plot inspiration for the sixth star trek movie. Just substitute 'Klingon' for 'Russian' and 'Praxis' for 'Chemobyl'.
Only the Klingons managed to blow up 3/4's of their moon and knock out the power plant for an entire planet.
Tokyo is nowhere near fukushima. You can thank me for this tidbit of info with your first week's paycheck
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Asteroid and comet monitoring got slightly better since 1908.
So, although nothing makes another similar event impossible, at least we should be able to see the celestial body in advance and predict the possibility of impact, with increasing accuracy as the date of incident approaches.
If another Tunguska-like comet is going to impact near a nuclear plant, we will probably see it coming in advance and have enough time to shut down the plant and remove the radioactive fuels.
There are plenty of other natural catastrophes which are harder to predict. Hence, we need to use technologies which are "designed for failure".
There are lots of possible designs for nuclear plants. Some of them are able to shutdown passively by themselves alone in case of problem.
Sadly lots of the designs which where the most developed at first were designs which gave the fastest and cheapest possibility to obtain interesting by-products like enriched uranium and plutonium. Not necessarily those which don't need to be attended in case of problems.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
unlike every other power source, really terrible consequences stay with you for centuries.
How long does CO2 emitted from burning fossil fuels stay in the atmosphere? How long does the greenhouse effect keep warming the planet even after CO2 emissions are stabiliized? Are there any long-term consequences of global warming that some people would consider "terrible"?
Blowing up a frog with a stick of dynamite is a lot more dramatic than putting it in a pot of water and gradually increasing the temperature to a boil, but the consequences for the frog in both cases are that its life ends.
Or the vast artificial lake built near the main plant (used to provide water coolant for the reactors) dries out.
After the reactor explosion, the lake was showered with radioactive debris which sank to the bottom. Today water has to be pumped constantly from the nearby river Pripyat to stop the lake evaporating in summer and exposing its toxic sediments, which would dry out and be spread by the wind.
I wonder what was actually used? The artist's description is phrased very carefully:
http://zoeworks.co.uk/projects/nuclear-dialogues
'Participation is encouraged through a tasting of 'yellowcake' - a colloquialism for uranium oxide U3O8, an essential ingredient in the preparation of uranium fuel for nuclear reactors. The designer, along with scientists from Nuclear FiRST, devised a recipe for an edible yellowcake, using ingredients that contain radioactive isotopes, to challenge entrenched viewpoints and misunderstandings of risk.'
My random guess would be that the 'ingredients that contain radioactive isotopes' in the 'edible yellowcake' are probably just something rich in, e.g., Potassium-40 - you can get an above background reading from 'LoSalt' salt substitute, and that's a regular food ingredient.
...and now that I actually look more carefully, aren't those brazil nuts (which contain K-40 and Ra-226) in the kitchen photo? Can't make out the packet they're pouring from, but I'm guessing it's something potassium-rich.
Are you sure you haven't?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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I am not, but you should be sure -- I am responding to you.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The earth is 200 million square miles. If there are 1000 nuclear plants uniformly distributed, that's 200,000 square miles per plant, or squares 450 miles on a side. The mean distance of random strikes and a plant would thus be (roughly) 180 miles. To figure 99.9999%, you'd need 1 million strikes. The even-odds distance for at least one strike being within that distance from the center of the strike is 0.18 miles, or 1000 feet. Plants aren't point size, so almost a direct hit. So your guess is wrong. However, your evaluation of the Tunguska-type event itself being more significant seems correct.
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In 2004 Slashdot had a story on an interview published in New Scientist. The interview was with Alexander Yuvchenko, a Chernobyl nuclear engineer on duty that night. The article is behind a paywall but you can find a free version of it here. Absolutely fascinating read.
We're not going to put nuclear power plants where they aren't needed, and we aren't going to put them underwater. Sorry for nit-picking.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Fallout from a meteor strike, and fallout from an entire reactor core after being vaporized are two completely different things.
Yes, while a Tunguska sized event would be catastrophic for New York, or Washington, it's effects are mainly localized except for some atmospheric dust. This is the exact example of what happened at Tunguska. Now imagine if all four Fukushima reactors were at ground zero of the Tunguska strike. All those radioactive isotopes could have been vaporized into the atmosphere. Possibly making a much larger area uninhabitable for thousands of years. Tunguska has already recovered, in well under a hundred, and with no lasting radiation.
If that Tunguska event had hit Chernobyl in 1986 instead of the simple explosion that happened, we may very well be seeing things much differently today.
Also remember, Plutonium is not natural.
Had the chance to trapse through Chenobly / Pripryat a few years back - thought some of you guys might appreciate seeing what's what there.
http://ninjito.com/2008-08-16 [Selection of about 20 photos]
http://ninjito.com/2008-08-12-PANO/qx-pano-pripyat-1.jpg [ the famous hotel ] ..
http://ninjito.com/2008-08-12-PANO/qx-pano-pripyat-2.jpg [ roof of said hotel with the reactor in the background
simon
That's not how it works, but I doubt you care.
Yes, it pretty much is.
I wonder if the net result of these nuclear accidents that seem to continuously do orders-of-magnitude less damage than the hysterical anti-nuclear advocates claim will actually help the nuclear industry after a while?
If you think Chernobyl helped the nuclear power industry, you must be deluded.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
the asteroids though are just as likely to hit the atmosphere over water.
No, those estimates are not worldwide.
Yes it is ChErnobyl, because the accident happened in the Soviet Union, not in the Ukraine. And the accident doesn't know any borders or nations: Ukraine had most of the trouble, but both Belarus and Russia also still suffer.