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Workers Raise First Section of New Chernobyl Shelter
An anonymous reader writes with this AP report:
"Workers have raised the first section of a colossal arch-shaped structure that eventually will cover the exploded nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station. Project officials on Tuesday hailed the raising as a significant step in a complex effort to clean up the consequences of the 1986 explosion, the world's worst nuclear accident. Upon completion, the shelter will be moved on tracks over the building containing the destroyed reactor, allowing work to begin on dismantling the reactor and disposing of radioactive waste.'"
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
There are no plans to dismantel the reactor at this time, except some parts that prevent the cover from getting into place. The new cover will allow dismantelling of the current sarcophagus and protect the reactor and what remains of the building from the weather.
I think you underestimate the severity of Fukushima.. the Japanese government has been shown to be downplaying the amounts of radiation there, and there's plenty being swept across the Pacific as we speak.
which is totally what she said
It might be the worst nuclear accident but it's nowhere close to the world's worst nuclear "deliberate", of which there were at least two with much more cost.
To be honest, for the world's worst nuclear accident, it shows how scared we are of nuclear power.
There are men in the pictures, assembling a structure to trundle over the top of the reactor in the background. They no doubt have exposure limits and suitable apparatus but the fact remains that they are standing around it. There's a 19 mile exclusion zone. That's about equivalent to the zones put around nuclear testing sites anyway (and there are even tourist trips into that exclusion zone on a regular basis).
Sure, there *was* fallout and biological effects, and it's not something you want to ever repeat - that's undeniable, but in terms of taking out countries, or killing millions, it hasn't exactly worked out that way even under the shoddiest of safety regimes. It can be argued that all of the worst nuclear accidents combined are significantly "safer" than the best output from modern coal plants combined, in terms of long-term damage. Hell, it's safer than cars, which are currently being linked to everything from asthma to autism.
We just need to handle it sensibly. Put a 25 mile exclusion zone around them. Site them away from centres of population. Encase them in the equivalent of the measures being put around Chernobyl already, by default - rather than waiting for an accident before you do so. And stop being sloppy when running them (admittedly the hardest to do).
The fact is that, even with Chernobyl, the knock-on effects aren't Armageddon as predicted. Fukushima had a fecking tsunami wash over it and similar ineptness in terms of safety (the only other "Level 7" accident ever), and the deaths were almost exclusively due to the tsunami itself, not the reactor, and all the local population (again... grrr....) were not exposed to a radiation level that affected health (only a couple of workers who were on the site). And, again, outside of the ten miles exclusion zone, not much happens at all.
No-one is saying they're "safe". But because their danger is much more visible when exposed, they get a worse rap than some silent gases being spewed off into the air for decades on end and killing us and the atmosphere. They are "safer" still. Still.
Keep building them, keep decommissioning old ones, and make sure you stick them out of the way and suffer the transfer losses BY LAW before you build new ones. By modern law, you wouldn't be allowed to have a 1960's coal power plant within that distance of a population anyway (if at all) because of the same amount of hazard to health. We just need to get them AWAY from people and accept that out of over 400 power stations currently in operation (not including those that have been decommissioned) worldwide, there have only been a handful of incidents and the vast majority of those have little, if any, impact. And even the "big" accidents are no worse than a pretty minor natural disaster.
Um... in case you weren't aware Chernobyl was run by the Soviet Union and certainly not driven by profit.
On top of that it wasn't because of profits that the incident happened. They intentionally disabled multiple safety triggers to perform an experiment and that's what caused it all.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
there have only been a handful of incidents and the vast majority of those have little, if any, impact
Lies.
List of civilian nuclear accidents
List of civilian nuclear incidents
List of civilian radiation accidents
List of crimes involving radioactive substances
List of military nuclear accidents
List of nuclear and radiation accidents by death toll
Accidents involving nuclear waste
You're wrong, it was most certainly driven for its beneficial economic effects. The Soviet planning system was most certainly counting the inputs and the outputs of its nuclear power stations more or less along the lines of a Western corporation. Believe it or not, they were even using double entry accounting.
It's not the worst, but it was the one detected by Western countries so the Soviet Union couldn't keep it a secret like they dd with the Chelyabinsk accidents.
Alexei Ananenko
Valeri Bezpalov
Boris Baranov
Were it not for the efforts of these three men Europe could have quite possibly been wiped out due to fallout. We are should be forever fortunate they decided to lay down their lives.
Just because the world's worst accident didn't go a wrong as it could doesn't negate that the way we were constructing plants was horrendously stupid.
I believe Nuclear has a place, even a prominant one, in fulfilling our energy needs. But let's not think that people don't have a right to be afraid.
The Rwandan genocide was conducted with a few container loads of cheap Chinese machetes, clearly, we must ban the production of steel and any material that can be made to have a sharp edge.
Most explosives contain nitrogen compounds that can be made in fertilizer production. Explosives and fireguns are the main weapon of choice in conflicts all over the world, killing hundreds of thousands each year. Clearly, we cannot allow the pest of nitrogen fertilizer factories to spread over the planet. The naysayers who claim they are needed for food production are just lackeys of the weapon industry.
Cars kill 1.3 million people worldwide each year. Clearly, this technology must be banned.
You have no sense of proportion.
And here's another list for you:
Number of people killed due to wind power in 2008: 41
Number of blade failures from wind power in 2008: 39
Number of wind turbine fires in 2008: 110 (in which nothing can be done, since the fire is 300+ feet in the air)
Number of wind turbine structural failures in 2008: 60
Number of wind turbine "ice incidents" in 2008: 24
Number of people killed in the US by candles per annum: 126
Number of people killed in the US due to nuclear power in 40+ years of reactor operations (currently 104 generating stations): 0
More people die from candles in one year, than have died from 40 years of commercial nuclear energy. Having reliable electric generation could save those 126 people, because they could use a light bulb instead of a candle.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The fact this blew up in 1986 and it's still being sorted in 2012 tells you how dangerous it is. I don't disagree with much of what you say, but a coal power station can be dismantled in a few years without breaking too much of a sweat.
Personally, I don't think nuclear is nearly as terrible as it's perceived to be. However, we humans are pretty rubbish at anything 'abstract', and so will never run nuclear power safely in the long term. Either we'll do safety badly, or we won't have saved up enough money for the decom, or we'll push the limits of the design too far, or whatever else. I don't know why, but we just will. So with that in mind, I'd rather less nuclear than more.
The more the upper echelon saved in work and money on labor, the more they could afford on themselves.
From the era :
We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
No. Because it doesn't. Species go extinct all the time, and always have done, in spite of their "profit first" behaviour.
Bacteria do nothing but eat and make more bacteria. They can get away with this because their world is so vast and the resources so plentiful compared to their unit size - even then, they eat themselves into a corner and die from a lack of resources.
Humans are now running up against the edges of their own Petri dish, as a direct result of the intelligence that has made us so adaptable, which let us slip our environmental constraints for a while. We're starting to run into some new ones.
The one distinct survival advantage humans have is they can out-think evolution. Alas, we seem to be mostly engaged in trying to out-stupid it.
Oh, I forgot about SL1 in ID. One of the first nuclear reactors. An engineer was pinned to the ceiling by a control rod when he inserted it too fast. Some will dismiss it as suicide, but after all I've read I lean more toward carelessness as the most plausible explanation. Also, I get a report from the Department of Homeland Security everyday. It's called "Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report for U.S. Department of Homeland Security" in it there is all news related to the security of energy infrasturcture. Included in it are often minor nuclear incidents that are never reported in the mainstream news. Some might take this as an opportunity to condemn nuclear power, but to me it shows that we catch things through a very thorough set of checks and balances that ensure problems are caught before they become catastrophic. The nuclear industry has regulations for their regulations regulations. And violation often means being shut down depending on assessment of safety concern. If it's a small problem that's likely to have no impact they can continue to operate, but they still get fined. But if there's any chance it might become a large problem that reactor is offline until it's fixed. Losses in the millions result from a reactor going down. The companies don't like to do it, so they do their level best to comply with the regulations.
socialist enterprises were under tight government control, but organisationally separated from the government.
the things that were markedly different from a Western private corporation were that instead of sales and marketing you'd have a "planning" department which would coordinate production and sales goals with a ministry; instead of getting capital from a VC you'd get it from the government; a loan would not only be approved by the bank, it'd be approved by a ministry official as well and then given to you by the bank; that surplus would not be retained or distributed to shareholders, but go into the government budget at the end of the fiscal year, and, of course, that personnel decisions at high levels would involve the party.
Other than that it was much the same crap.
Not really. They wouldn't have been sent to Siberia, as they weren't even the guys who were supposed to run the test. These were the night shift guys; the day shift - who were supposed to do this task and actually prepared for it - were told to stand by because of another plant falling out of the power grid in Ukraine. By the time the plant recevied the green signal for the test, the shifts rotated and this detail never seemed to be important to anybody. It's not widely publicized because it's not a very "interesting" detail, but this very test was attempted three times before the accident by the other crew; they failed to safely shut off the reactor on every three, but they neither blew up the reactor. (They simply aborted the test and switched back to external power for cooling.)
The primary cause of the accident is two-founded. Firstly, the reactor was not safe by design, being a positive coefficient reactor. Secondarily, the crew was utterly ignorant on even the basic principles of nuclear power, let alone the operation of their own reactor. The reason why they never aborted the test was not out of fear. They never realized the reactor was in danger! Even after the fuel rods were strewn across Pripyat, these guys reported to Moscow that the reactor is intact and being fed with fresh coolant water - even though at this point the water they pumped in only flooded the electrical controls of the other units, almost causing a second catastrophe.
The final bit of irony: the reason for the test? Israel bombed a nuclear plant in Iraq prior, and some people in Russia started to get worried if the RBMK reactors could safely shut down when NATO started bombing their power grid.
"but a coal power station can be dismantled in a few years without breaking too much of a sweat."
There are lots of toxic areas left behind by coal power plants or coal mines a century after the plant has been closed. And that's with normal operation.
Radiation levels drop considerably over the first few decades as the short half life, intensely active elements decay. Why not leave it for 25 years? It hasn't been hurting anyone and waiting will probably save several lives and lessen the cost of this phase of the cleanup.
There are two additional issues that nobody has yet discussed. First, multiple RBMK plants refused to perform this test due to the danger involved, but Chernobyl had claimed that it had successfully done it years before (and the plant manager got a bonus). If they would have refused to perform a test that they faked the paperwork for, then there would be severe political consequences. Second, while a reduction in steam pressure caused a reduction in coolant flow which due to the positive void coefficient for this reactor caused it to increase in power, the real cause of the explosion was the control rod followers, ends of the control rods that were not neutron poisons but were designed to distribute the neutron flux better. When all rods were withdrawn and the scram initiated, only the control rod followers entered first. With a positive void coefficient, this was adding a void and a massive amount of reactivity was added. The reactor probably exploded before any of the neutron absorbing parts of the control rods were inserted.
That's an incredible list of assumptions that you're making.
1. In no way does anything in my post suggest anything about age. You, however, seem to think that disagreeing with your views means that someone was born after 1986.
2. In no way does my post suggest that the Chernobyl disaster wasn't a massive disaster, with lasting consequences that will far outstrip both of our lifetimes. You, however, assume that I'm in some kind of denial, where there is no actual reason to think so.
3. As a matter of fact, I remember when Chernobyl actually happened, and I actually know why it happened. It was a terribly designed reactor with an incredibly dangerous positive void coefficient, built and operated in a culture that didn't give a damn about safety or human life, and had operators doing things they should have never been doing in the first place.
Thanks for playing.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Alas, we seem to be mostly engaged in trying to out-stupid it."
Add to that large numbers of groups each saying "You must implement only our plan for the future or disaster will occur".
However the plans seem to be different for every such group.
The fact this blew up in 1986 and it's still being sorted in 2012 tells you how dangerous it is. -
Wrong - all it tells you is how incompetent the original Soviet government was. If it had been dealt with from the beginning correctly it never would have happened (multiple safety features were disabled that would have prevented it to begin with).
More to the point if they had correctly cleaned it up to begin with they wouldn't have this mess today. The Soviet Union and their vassal states had a deplorable environmental record. Leaving the environment trashed was status quo for them far more than it ever was for the West. A quick google search will find many, many examples of this that have nothing to do with nuclear. The only reason you ever heard about this instead of all of the others is because of the nuclear element.
"Coal burning also releases more radiation than nuclear power does. If the same safety rules were applied equally to both types of power, nuclear would come out way ahead."
I don't care about safety rules. Come back when you can get the same insurance for a nuke that you can get for a coal one. Then we'll talk.
I live in Luxemburg and I still can't eat as much mushrooms from the forests here as I want, still too much nasty isotopes from that old thing thousands of miles away.
No, it tells you just how fucked up the Soviet Union was after it fell apart. Hint: life expectancy dropped to levels not seen since the Stalin era, some 3 million people starved, froze to death or died for lack of access to medical care. Russia declared bankruptcy a mere 7 years later and neither Belarus nor Ukraine fared any better. Unlike Russia, they didn't have any resources to export, but instead were dependent on Russia for theirs.
The fact they are still working on the reactor is a result of the fact that Ukraine couldn't muster the $1bn to build the new shelter itself at any earlier time.
Actually, if I was planning to travel to the Ukraine the exclusion zone would certainly be on my todo list, it's a cool piece of history and the pictures that have been shot around there are fascinating. The radiation levels are pretty insignificant everywhere but directly around the sarcaughous and in the cooling pond. If you want to see how minor the radiation is see this documentary about the naturalists working in the exclusion zone.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Also one point that the anti-nukes often omit is that not all forms of cancer are linked to radiation. Many people who use the cancer argument against nuclear power forget all of the other factors that influence cancer growth and detection and seem to ignore statistics. My favorite reply to them is to note that about half of the counties around nuclear power plants have above average instances of cancer*. They get all worked up and see that as proof that the plants are dangerous without realizing that by the law of averages about half need to be above the average for there to be an average.
*This is a mostly made up statistic but it is close enough to accurate since, hey, its an average.
Because the existing structure was intended to be only temporary and is not structurally sound. A collapse of the existing structure would release large amounts of radioactive dust and other crap into the atmosphere.
If stuff inside the existing structure starts to settle or move (for example, the Upper Biological Shield is held in place only by debris), dust can be released.
This new structure encloses the existing one in a way that (a) doesn't disturb the existing stuff and (b) is designed for long-term containment.
I'm impressed. That structure was proposed over 20 years ago, but the USSR didn't build it and Ukraine couldn't afford it. Navarco, from France, is building it now, and the European Union is putting up most of the money.
It's badly needed. The containment structure the USSR quickly put up (using 500,000 people in shifts) after the disaster is in bad shape. With protective gear, people can go inside for short periods, and they can see daylight.
Only 47 people were killed directly. Maybe 4000 to 9000 had their lives shortened by radiation exposure.
"We could deal with the cancer problem after a nuclear war by failing to rebuild the tobacco industry."
Try Grigori Medvedev's "The Truth About Chernobyl". It's a pretty thick book - almost 300 pages - but he goes into very deep detail how and why things went the way they did, from the "soviet way" of handling nuclear energy and generic sentiment to the very specific events and even the aftermath. Medvedev himself was a chief engineer in Chernobyl for a while; he was also pretty acclaimed in Russia (he mentions other cases where he tried giving sensible advice to authorities regarding nuclear power plants) and he was tasked with investigating the catastrophe. It's a fairly old book so finding a new copy might be a tad difficult, but I think it's a must-read if you are really interested in Chernobyl...