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Chernobyl's Sarcophagus, Redux
Lasrick (2629253) writes "With the news that a multinational consortium is to the halfway point in constructing a huge stainless steel hangar that will sit over the ruined site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, Dan Drollette looks in the archives of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and compares notes on the sarcophagus that was built 25 years ago, and the one that is being built now. 'No one really knows what went into the "concrete cube;" even the amount of concrete claimed to have been used is suspect, as it would form a volume larger than the sarcophagus, wrote nuclear engineer and author Alexander R. Sich in his 11-page article, "Truth was an early casualty."' Let's hope this new sarcophagus lasts longer."
I believe the structure should appear from space as a giant band-aid.
"Truth was an early casualty."
That's a great line.
Thanks Obama!
Chernobyl was arguably the worst design of anything in history. But the Soviets moved, 500,000 plus people. Gorbachev says it is what broke the USSR. Mistakes were made, but they are taking responsibility for the mess. This is what is needed for Nuke Inc. USA and Japan. Get it done. This would turn the tide of popular opinion.
On a positive note, deeds such as this involving international assistance reinforce my retarded optimism that humanity might rise above tribalism into something astonishing.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So what is the purpose of this submission? Chernobyl cleanup and management is an interesting topic, but little useful info is put forth here. An update on construction and a rehash of what we already know. Just a vehicle to put forth an accusation of lying about concrete volumes that doesn't appear to have a basis.
Chernobyl is a huge mess that fortunately can't and won't be replicated due to design differences in existing plants.
If you like your concrete shelter, you can keep it.
I'm sure there are dozens of alternatives other than burying it like a turd in the back yard. Unfortunately it looks like burying it and hoping it solves the problem is the best alternative at this time.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
If you do a cost-benefit analysis of risk, nuclear energy is less problematic than fossil fuels, believe it or not, even with occasional accidents. Fossil fuels harm and kill a good many due to air pollution, and perhaps general climate disruption due to the green-house effect.
There is something psychologically more fearful about dying from radiation than dying from lung cancer even though the second is significantly more prevalent.
Perhaps because in our movie-shaped imaginations, too much radiation creates 3-eyed mutants with lumpy heads or giant city-eating monsters; while lung cancer merely produces dead people with screwed-up lungs.
It's hard to produce a scary movie based on lung cancer. Dawn of the Coughers just doesn't have the same freak-out punch as zombie mutants or Godzilla. Hollywood needs to get more inventive.
Table-ized A.I.
No one really knows what went into the "concrete cube;" even the amount of concrete claimed to have been used is suspect, as it would form a volume larger than the sarcophagus
The core melted a hole through the ground deep enough to hit the water table where it exploded on contact with water, then caused a steam explosion that was so powerful some of the material hit the jet stream. The heat continued causing hydrogen build up and further hydrogen explosions.
They tried to pour molten lead into the cavity but that just boiled and caused the radioactive steam to also carry lead vapor as well, making it even more toxic. So they gave up and filled it in with concrete. No one has any idea how large the whole was, if there was a chamber at the bottom from the water reservoir or multiple explosions. I don't find it the least bit suspicious that the amount of concrete poured into a random unexplored hole in the midst of the greatest man made disaster in history might be a bit off.
"Truth was an early casualty."' Let's hope this new sarcophagus lasts longer."
Apparently sensationalism is still alive and well.
If you do a cost-benefit analysis of risk, nuclear energy is less problematic than fossil fuels, believe it or not, even with occasional accidents.
I read somewhere that the most deaths of any power source have been .. solar. Because people fall off the roof while putting up the panels.
Yeah I know... citation needed. But hey, this is slashdot, right?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Yeah, but it's up in the north right on the border with Belarus; not the nice waterfront property Russia's interested around the Sea of Azov.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You miss my point.
There have been a revolution in Ukraine. The constitution does not apply anymore (otherwise the former president would still be there). Since there is no constitution, nothing legally prevent a region to leave the country. The emergency is therefore to restore a constitutional order, and foreign powers should not support a government that works on anything other than that.
Without a constitution, Ukraine will fall in civil war. It will not need help from Russia to go that way, and the mess will spread to most parts of the country. Including Chernobyl.
Ugh. Utterly embarrassing uninformed comments like this are why I really don't want to read /. any more. Everything you've said is just sophistry and doesn't pass the whiff test if you've got even a basic foundation in nuclear physics, and you got upvoted +5 for it!
I'm sure there are dozens of alternatives other than burying it like a turd in the back yard. Unfortunately it looks like burying it and hoping it solves the problem is the best alternative at this time.
AFAIK the long term plan isn't "bury it" - the new containment is designed to contain dust while work is going on to desconstruct the reactor. There are cranes and things built into the new structure for this purpose.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Actually, coal is the worst by far. Nuclear is the best. Solar is more dangerous than Nuclear, but not even by an OOM. .44 .15 .10(not including Banqiao, including it raises it to 1.4 because the once incident killed 171k. And we thought rare accidents were dangerous with Nuclear? They have nothing on Dams). .04
Forbes article, deaths per Trillion kWh
Coal, Global: 170k, Coal, China: 280k, Coal, US: 15k
Solar: 440
Nuclear, Global average: 90
Deaths per TWh by energy source(note:1k times less electricity than above)
Coal, electricity, world average: 60. 100 if it's for everything.
Oil 36
Solar
Wind
Hydro
Nuclear:
I don't read AC A human right
Three full core melt-throughs are sitting in sandstone, leaching to the pacific/atmosphere without any control or sarcophagus at all, since march 2011.
I saw a documentary, there are deers, birds, a lot of large fish in the station's artificial lake, foxes, etc. And also a lot of trees in the Chernobyl area.
Is wild life and plants immune to radiation?
> The existing RBMKs have undergone significant changes [to prevent another Chernobyl disaster].
> A re-creation of such an event would take a long list of intentional actions taken by a team of people for that purpose.
The Stuxnet military computer worm required a long list of intentional actions taken by a team of people for that purpose (and cost about 100 million dollars to achieve success, after some 3 years). Stuxnet wrecked the iranian's uranium isotope refinement plants. It contains a simplified MIDI copy of Hatikva in its binary code and played it along over the frequency controllers as the hexa-fluoride gas ultra-centrifuges were wrecked.
Let there be absolutely no doubt, that CIA + NSA + Unit 8200 can use yet another Stuxnet variant, based on the flexible "Tilded" cyberattack framework, to make another one or two RBMK reactors explode spectacularly or on russian soil proper (should Putin and his ex-KGB cronies remain hell-bent on re-holodomorizing Ukraine and making toilet paper out of the Budapest Memorandum of Understanding of Security Guarantees for the Ukraine.)
Putin strolling across the isotopically depopulated steppes of Mother Russia will be much like Adolf Hitler, wandering around the ruined streets of Berlin on his last birthday of 20 April 1945.
BTW, did you know the Chernobyl disaster happened directly because of Israel? The soviet russians were experimenting with super-quick emergency shutdown scenarios, after witnessing the devastating efficency of "Opera campaign". It was a suprise-based air attack, in which a handful of jewish fighter-bombers easily demolished Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor (despite the supposedly strong, soviet and french equipped iraqi air defence system of radars, missiles and jetfighters).
The efficiency of those newest, digital computerized american F-15 and F-16 warplanes, as used by the zionists in the Opera / Osirak attack, scared the soviets witless, as they were still stuck with vacuum tubes and hand-soldered discrete transistors at the time. Fearing a similar aerial attack on reactors on soviet soil, likely resulting in widespread radioactive fallout, they experimented with swift nuclear reactor shutdowns with just 5 minutes of forewarn. This resulted in an accident, with the soviets themselves spreading radioactive fallout over the USSR.
That hobby seems much better than a civil war.
Whether the new design is adequate or not is moot: when Putin takes over the country, he will completely shut down any real news and everything will be fine.
*** Don't be dull.***
You could say the same about coal, and be more correct. In fact, WAY more correct.
Coal kills 170,000 people per year; nuclear after Chernobyl and Fukushima only kills 90. Source
440 people die per year from rooftop solar, which is almost 5x as many as nuclear.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Because I'm sure they're lying about how much concrete they used rather than they just did it so hurriedly nobody kept accurate records.
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Well you're half right but there's no money other than building the containment hut now. The hope is that they'll get some money and do something else with it later.
So, for now and the near future they're just burying the shit. Maybe in 100 or 200 years they'll have the tech to actually remediate the site.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
and the mess will spread to most parts of the country. Including Chernobyl.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here...it sounds like they decommissioned the last reactor back in 2000. And trying to extract useful nuclear material from the destroyed reactor would be hellaciously complicated and expensive, even assuming you don't care whether every person who does the work dies. Portions of the inside of the reactor basically melted into a big glob--nuclear material, moderators, control mechanisms, concrete from the vessel walls...
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trying to extract useful nuclear material from the destroyed reactor would be hellaciously complicated
I was not thinking about people making a dirty bomb, but rather about fights around a fragile sarcophagus filled with radioactive material.
You apparently have never looked at the number of coal-related deaths vs. the number of nuclear-related deaths. If you add in the nuclear deaths from atomic weapons (including cancer) in addition to power plants, the numbers are still separated by several orders of magnitude.