Hundreds Still Live In The 'Exclusion Zone' Around Chernobyl (bbc.com)

This weekend the BBC reports on the site of the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion -- where "robotic cranes are dismantling 33-year-old, radioactive wreckage" -- investigating an area of more than 4,000 square kilometres [2,485 square miles] that's been abandoned since 1986. "That could be about to change..."

An anonymous reader summarizes their report: "Every community within a 30km radius [18.9 miles] of the plant was evacuated and abandoned; no one was allowed to return here to live." Yet the BBC visits a tiny community of 15 who reclaimed their homes in 1986 -- part of a population of 200 "self-settlers" deep in the exclusion zone, "an ageing population cut off from the rest of the country.... Almost every family forced to leave here was given an apartment in a nearby town or city. For Maria and her [88-year-old] mother, though, this cottage, with the garden wrapped around it, was home. They refused to abandon it. 'We weren't allowed to come back, but I followed my mum.'"

Parts of the exclusion zone in Ukraine and Belarus have become "a post-human nature reserve", home to prowling wolves and dozens of wild horses. Yet Professor Jim Smith from the UK's University of Portsmouth explains that "Most of the area of the exclusion zone gives rise to lower radiation dose rates than many areas of natural radioactivity worldwide." In fact, the abandoned nuclear-worker city of Pripyat was recently deemed safe to visit for short periods, "and has now become one of Ukraine's most talked about tourist attractions. An estimated 60,000 people visited the exclusion zone last year, keen to witness the dramatic decay."

And beyond the 18.9-mile line is Narodichi, a town of more than 2,500 people, where people "were quietly allowed to return home a few months after the disaster." Still considered an officially contaminated district -- and still in the "exclusion zone" -- it's a semi-abandoned area where all agriculture is banned, and the land can't be developed. 130 children attend Narodichi's kindergarten, but the kindergarten manager says half their parents are unemployed, "because there is nowhere to work." One of the least-contaminated areas in the exclusion zone, "Three decades of research have concluded that much of it is safe - for food to be grown and for the land to be developed." The BBC argues that "Fear of radiation could actually be hurting the people...far more than the radiation itself. "

Comments

Slight correction for you Americans...

[ddtmm]

4000 square km is 1544 square miles.

Re: Slight correction for you Americans...

[Mr D from 63]

Its amazing how many people are still surprised that it is perfectly safe to live in these areas. Its highly dissappointing that many of these are reporters. Years of FUD still has its power over established science.

Re:Slight correction for you Americans...

[LynnwoodRooster]

It is also the area of ~1,200,000 American football fields. Just to put it into SSUs (Standard Slashdot Units).

Re:Slight correction for you Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

But not smart enough to realize why the correction was given.

Re: Slight correction for you Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Something to keep in mind next time we build a giant power plant how will it effect everything else - not that they failed to think a lot through but not everything

Re: Slight correction for you Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

... WTC7 hasn't actually collapsed but we at the BBC are sure it will."

BBC is fake news. That's a fact. 9-11-2001 proved it.

Re: Slight correction for you Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're going to delete your post. Not because they're in on it but because Slashdead editors only believe the convenient narratives spoonfed to them. By both the MSM throughout their pothead millenial lives as well as the Arabs who own Slashdot. Actually, this isn't a msmash story, so you won't have to worry about the comment deletion. The worst that will happen is the guaranteed downmodding.
 
  On Building 7. Let's pull it!

Re:Slight correction for you Americans...

[Aighearach]

What do you expect, they can't even tell the difference between Standard American units and the "Imperial" units from their own history.

Re: Slight correction for you Americans...

[kenai_alpenglow]

Much safer than places like Chicago...

Re:Slight correction for you Americans...

[Anonymous Coward]

We know. Americans are smart enough to know more than one system of measurements. Only Europeans can't seem to grasp the concept.

Yep, but you are also too stupid to realize that imperial units isn't one system of measurements but many.
A Ukrainian mile isn't the same distance as a British mile an 1544 sqare miles is nonsensical without specifying which empire and time period the units are from. (Kings had the habit of redefining the foot to match their own and the rest of the units follows.)
While it is rare to encounter them these days there are still drawings out there with units from the various European empires.
An inch isn't always 2.54 mm so even if you think you know how convert the information needed for the conversion is often missing.

Re:Slight correction for you Americans...

[pslytely psycho]

Oh, we know.
We simply don't care.

Only a handful of craftsmen would be using old diagrams or drawings to recreate old machines, furniture or the like. (or historians etc.)

And hell, our current mixed system works just fine for us.
I can buy a gram of weed or an ounce,
I can buy a liter of soda or a 12 ounce can,
I can call the engine in my Corvette a 350 cu. in or 5.7 liter.

We use what is convenient for us and we don't care what the rest of the world does. We are slowly adding in metric, but within our lifetimes (or at least the remainder of mine) I doubt we will see a complete conversion. After all, we love 70 degree summer days, where the rest of the world would rather not have 70 degree summer days...(;

We are an eclectic culture, a language borrowed from many, measurements borrowed from many, just your average goofy Americans....( and yeah, we know the US isn't the only part of the Americas, be we are the ones that chose to name ourselves after the continent.)

The great cosmic joke is none of it matters, so fire one up and lighten up Francis!!

It will be good for your blood pressure, and even if it isn't, ain't none of us getting out alive, so party on, have fun, eat a steak and die during an orgasm.

Re: Send Moscow Donald

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure no bull Donald make radiation great again

Average dosage

[110010001000]

The average American gets 17 microsieverts per day. Most of the exclusion zone has way less than that.

Re:Average dosage

[hey!]

You say this like it proves the exclusion zone is too big. In fact the problem with the exclusion zone is that it's not uniform; it has hot spots where you would not want to live, and less hot spots that you could live in and which are are closer to the sarcophagus.

You could reduce the area of the zone by producing an extremely detailed map of go/no-go areas. That has the advantage of reclaiming more land. But it has the disadvantage that given enough people living right next to no-go areas a certain number will inevitably stray into them, pick up or disturb contamination, then spread it.

No matter how you draw the line, you could probably draw it better by some criterion.

Re:Average dosage

[drinkypoo]

There's also lots of old buildings that could fall down and conceivably raise a cloud. You don't want to live next to something like that. It could be safe today, and unsafe tomorrow.

Re: Average dosage

[Anonymous Coward]

But even the 'hot spots' are perfectly safe.

Re:Average dosage

[LynnwoodRooster]

Maybe he posted to point out the fallacy we heard when Chernobyl melted down, that it was going to be an unusable wasteland for 10,000 years. Seems it was pretty much off by a factor around 300 or so...

Re: Average dosage

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is some wisdom for you...if you see a dust cloud from a falling structure, don't walk into it and breath. The risk of breathing demolition dust anywhere far outweighs the tremendously tiny risk of anything radiation related.

Re: Average dosage

[Anonymous Coward]

Ray Bradbury wrote a story about hotspots. It was called "All Cancer in a Day"

Re: Average dosage

[PPH]

World Trade Center, 9/11/01.

Re:Average dosage

[Walter White]

> No matter how you draw the line, you could probably draw it better by some criterion.
Agreed.
I suspect the exclusion zone was much larger than required to avoid exposure until they could see where the hazards existed. It seems to me that the exclusion zone could be re-evaluated and potentially reduced without allowing habitation right up to the edge of a hot spot. However if the entire area is at risk from the dust raised from a building collapsing or similar, perhaps not much space would be regained.

Re:Average dosage

[110010001000]

No, the exclusion zone is fine. I was just making a comment. It isn't a surprise that people live in some of the areas.

Re:Average dosage

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter the division, there will always be no-go areas adjacent to safe areas, by definition. If you're worried about proximity to really bad no-go zones, the easy fix is to simply eliminate all regions in the safe zone close to such areas. If it is too complex, find the simplest subdivision of the safe areas that follows natural boundaries.

Permanently evacuating people causes life-long economic stress. This has a much higher health impact than the radiation in many areas they were evacuated from. The panicked extending of evacuation radius in Japan is another example of misguided over-reaction which causes much more harm than good.

Re: Average dosage

[drinkypoo]

Here is some wisdom for you...if you see a dust cloud from a falling structure, don't walk into it and breath. The risk of breathing demolition dust anywhere far outweighs the tremendously tiny risk of anything radiation related.

And yet, it's even worse if it's got radioactives in it.

Re: Average dosage

[MrL0G1C]

So, you've never heard of this thing called 'wind' then. FML. Just make shit up, why not.

Re:Average dosage

[cheesybagel]

This was known ever since it happened. For example do you think Hiroshima or Nagasaki are barren?
That was with bombs. A meltdown is a much less dangerous event.

You just need to look at the decay chains.
For example dangerous elements are Iodine-131 and Strontium-90.

Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days. This is why people are advised to take iodine tablets in case they are exposed to uranium/plutonium fission products. It basically reduces the chance Iodine-131 will stay for long in the thyroid gland and reduces the chance of cancer there. Strontium-90 has a half life of 28.79 years. There are also other isotopes which are produced in a meltdown but the dangerous ones typically have ~30 years half life. The rest of the decay chain is a lot less dangerous.

Simply limiting exposure in the first two weeks reduces chances to get sick and die dramatically.
After 50-60 years the radiation becomes mostly harmless.

Re:Average dosage

[cheesybagel]

Here, this page has a photo of ground zero at Nagasaki. With tourists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Average dosage

[Anonymous Coward]

Property is cheap in Pripyat at the moment. Put your money where your mouth is and go live there with your family.

*Crickets chirping.*

Re:Average dosage

[cheesybagel]

There are three reactors of the same design still in operation in St. Petersburg. You know where that is right?
The EU paid money to Ukraine to shut down the reactors in Chernobyl which were still operational. Otherwise they might even still be in use. And Ukrainians would have less dependency on Russian gas. Even though those reactors should have been retired like a decade ago at least.

Re:Average dosage

[LynnwoodRooster]

When the UN is fearmongering about Chernobyl, you know it's just politics. Unfortunately, a man-made disaster like this - and the horror story for "generations to come" - are used by anti-nuke nutters to halt progress towards truly unlimited, clean energy - nuclear.

Could it happen here?

[AlanObject]

I used to have a contract where I spent a lot of time inside the power plant at South Port, NC. I am not a mechanical engineer but I was able to see and learn enough that I was reasonably assured that the kind of incident that happened at Chernobyl wouldn't happen there. At least not by accident. And that plant is pretty old tech.

If the plant was sabotaged -- that's another matter. That's also effectively what happened at Chernobyl. Nobody had the intent to do anything wrong. They were doing standard procedures and "mistakes were made."

So yes nuclear power plants are scary. But so are a lot of other things we do and live with as if they are safe. And until a real fusion system comes along we still need fission plants.

Re: Could it happen here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chernobyl did not have a containment structure, and there were other significan design differences from Brunswick and most other PWR/BWRs that made that plant inherently much higher risk.

Re:Could it happen here?

[CrimsonAvenger]

I am not a mechanical engineer but I was able to see and learn enough that I was reasonably assured that the kind of incident that happened at Chernobyl wouldn't happen there. At least not by accident.

It didn't happen by accident at Chernobyl. It happened by abject stupidity.

If the plant was sabotaged -- that's another matter.

It wasn't. Unless you consider the mandate from Moscow to run that particular test "sabotage". The particular test in question was "is it possible to extract usable energy from a nuclear plant to deal with a meltdown in progress?" For which test, they pushed an out-of-the-way (in other words, on the back end of nowhere) nuclear plant as close to meltdown conditions as it was possible to safely go.

Unfortunately, they were wrong about how far "as it was possible to SAFELY go" was....

They were doing standard procedures and "mistakes were made."

No, they weren't. They were doing experimental work prescribed by a bureaucrat several thousand km away. Which experimental work was completely unnecessary. The only good thing about the mess was that they had (barely) enough sense to do it on a reactor on the backend of nowhere...

So yes nuclear power plants are scary.

Only to people who know little or nothing about them.

Remember, for all that Chernobyl was the worst nuclear power disaster in the history of the world, it killed fewer people than will die in traffic in the USA TODAY.

For that matter, hydroelectric power has killed three orders of magnitude (at least. the three orders of magnitude are from ONE incident) more people than nuclear power, much less coal....

Re:Could it happen here?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the plant was sabotaged -- that's another matter. That's also effectively what happened at Chernobyl. Nobody had the intent to do anything wrong. They were doing standard procedures and "mistakes were made."

And that is why Chernobyl wasn't good enough. With a damage potential like that, you can't have a plant that explodes just because people make several mistakes in a row.

Mistakes may shut a plant off - possibly in ways that means you can't turn it on again in months, years or decades. It should still not burn or explode. A good nuclear design must be foolproof, for there will be fools, in 50 years of operation. On such a timescale, the political landscape will change, and the economy will change. Can't have an explosion just because the more competent operators left for a better future elsewhere. Can't have a big bang just because some suicidal terrorists fight their way into the reactor hall.

Re:Could it happen here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its ironic that those greenies who want a carbon free future did more to block a carbon free now (or at least much less carbon now). Even now the Green Deal does not want nuclear power. This proves that they do not really think CO2 is the end of the world or else they would be calling for a short cut in the approval process for nuclear plants.

Re:Could it happen here?

[Luckyo]

And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator. Graphite that burns, but keeps moderating in event of runaway reaction, which maintains the chain reaction.

Modern reactors used heavy water as moderator for a very long time. If reaction runs away, water evaporates, and therefore ceases moderating the reaction, which means reaction no longer has slow neutrons to continue the chain reaction. So in event of Chernobyl like runaway reaction in a heavy water reactor, it would stop itself very quickly due to lack of ability to maintain chain reaction.

Re:Could it happen here?

[Solandri]

The design of the plant at Chernobyl used a positive void coefficient. Basically, when the cooling water starts to boil (creating voids in the water), that increases the rate of nuclear fission. No western nuclear plant was ever designed like this because of how stupidly dangerous it is. All western nuclear plants use a negative void coefficient - the cooling water boiling slows down the rate of fission. An accident like Chernobyl could never happen at a western plant. The Soviets were trying to get energy for as cheap as possible and cut all sorts of corners designing their plants, including using a positive void coefficient .

Chernobyl began as a test where they intentionally shut down the automatic safety systems, then didn't react in time when the rate of fissioning began to go out of control. Due to the positive void coefficient design, once the boiling water began boiling, the heat generation began to increase exponentially. The fuel vaporized and exploded, blowing the reactor and containment building apart, and throwing radioactive debris and vapor into the atmosphere and countryside.

The accident at Three Mile Island was actually pretty similar in terms of buildup. They shut down a bunch of safety systems for a test, then didn't monitor the instrument readings closely enough (or more likely, the people monitoring them weren't trained well enough to understand what the readings meant - Homer Simpson as incompetent nuclear plant operator is actually a reference to TMI). The temperature went up, the cooling water boiled, and the fissioning stopped. The increased temperature was enough to melt the fuel rods, turning the reactor into useless slag. But it was all contained within the steel pressure vessel exactly like designed (there's a second reinforced concrete containment vessel around the pressure vessel in case it fails). The concern at the time was that a reaction between the fuel rod cladding and water had created hydrogen gas at sufficient pressure to crack both containment vessels, so they evacuated around the plant out of an abundance of \caution. But it turned out not to have been a concern as the hydrogen vented. It's a tiny molecule so can permeate through things that are designed to contain water and radioactive materials. (It's the reason the buildings at Fukushima blew apart. There's supposed to be a vent or fan which exhausts hydrogen into the atmosphere, but apparently that wasn't working at Fukushima so it built up until it reacted with atmospheric oxygen in an explosion that blew apart the exterior building. It did not affect the pressure vessel or the concrete containment vessel.)

The comparison I like to draw when people point to Chernobyl as an example of problems with nuclear power is Banqio. The worst power generation-related accident in history was actually the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. During intense rain, a series of earthen dams used to hold water for generation at a hydroelectric power plant failed. The resulting flood and devastation killed about 170,000 people, destroyed nearly 6 million buildings, and left 11 million people homeless. But no western country uses earthen dams for hydroelectric power. So citing Banqio as an example of why hydroelectric power is dangerous and shouldn't be used, is like citing Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear power is dangerous and shouldn't be used. They're both irrelevant outside of the Communist bloc, since the rest of the world never did anything so stupidly dangerous.

Re:Could it happen here?

[thegarbz]

as close to meltdown conditions as it was possible to safely go.

Unfortunately, they were wrong about how far "as it was possible to SAFELY go" was....

This part here is not quite right. The minimum safe control rod scenario for the reactor design was known up front and they made a conscious decision not only to overstep the minimum safe operating number of control rods (30) but at the time of the accident only 6 rods were inserted.

Additionally during this "test" there was one unexpected problem after another. Any one of them should have been a trigger to abort the test even if the test itself wasn't an attempt at a large scale Darwin award. Yet they powered on anyway.

Re:Could it happen here?

[sjames]

Actually, at the time of the explosion, the operators were doing things FAR from standard, and in fact, the precipitating event was an operation explicitly prohibited under any circumstances in order to do something they weren't supposed to attempt.

More specifically, they were SUPPOSED to bring the reactor down to a low output and stabilize it there, then scram the reactor to see if residual steam and inertia in the system would provide sufficient power to safely shut it down. In order to do the test, several safeties were disabled.

The test was supposed to happen during the day shift, but high power demands meant they had to wait. This left the less experienced night crew to carry out the test. They probably should have postponed, but that would anger the (seriously dysfunctional) upper management.

First stem, they reduced power, but they reduced it too much. So they tried to bring power back up to the starting condition but the reactor wouldn't do it. This shouldn't have been a surprise, when reactor power is reduced by a large amount, the production of neutron absorbing poisons temporarily outstrips their "burn off" from excess neutrons. Rather than wait the prescribed 24-48 hours for the poisons to decay, they decided to attempt to burn off the poisons by withdrawing more control rods (a prohibited procedure)

Still having no success, they eventually withdrew ALL of the control rods (an absolutely forbidden procedure) leaving the reactor in a VERY unstable condition. In fact, it was primed for a runaway positive feedback. As power output started rising rapidly, they attempted to drive the conntrol rods back in, but it wasn't possible to do it fast enough, so the reactor went to many times it's maximum rating and then part of the core exploded (a flash steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion) and much of the core was ejected through the top of the reactor.

So it was an inherently dangerous reactor design, disabled safeties, and undertrained and inexperienced operators doing all the don'ts that resulted in the disaster.

The reactor's design was a big contributor as well. For one, it had a positive void coefficient. Meaning if the coolant formed a void, power output would increase. Reactor designs approved in the rest of the world tend to have a negative void coefficient. The control rods were (for some odd reason) carbon tipped, meaning that the first few feet of the rod INCREASE output by improving moderation. It had no actual containment building, just standard industrial sheet metal.

Re:Could it happen here?

[blindseer]

And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator.

That and the SCRAM rods where tipped with graphite as a lubricant. When they hit the SCRAM too late the graphite tipped rods was the last straw that broke the camel's back. It induced another "pulse" of neutrons that sent the reactor pile into an overload from which the rate of the falling SCRAM rods could not stop. The water flash boiled into steam, blew the roof off the building, and the rest is history.

Oh, and the lack of a containment dome didn't help. Most every other reactor built at the time had a heavy concrete dome built to contain a flash boil event like this. Without the dome the radiation was spread all over. Had it been built with a dome then it would have been another TMI or Fukushima, still an expensive mess but deaths would have been in the single digits instead of in the dozens.

Modern reactors used heavy water as moderator for a very long time. If reaction runs away, water evaporates, and therefore ceases moderating the reaction, which means reaction no longer has slow neutrons to continue the chain reaction.

That's how some modern reactors manage it. There's still plenty that use light water. I like heavy water reactors for this very simple safety feature but heavy water is very expensive and had not caught on in many nations. What is likely to replace light water reactors in the next generation are those that use molten fuels, as salts or metals. This means that if the reaction gets away from them then the fuel can be quickly dumped into a containment tank away from the moderator. This is kind of the reverse of the heavy water moderation where the moderator is dumped to stop the reaction.

Maybe heavy water reactors will catch on again. The price of heavy water will have to come down. Heavy water is considered a nuclear weapon proliferation risk though, because of the use of heavy hydrogen to make fusion boosted bombs.

Re:Could it happen here?

[thegarbz]

And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator.

Yes and no. Yes modern reactors are inherently safer, but no their test specifically put the reactor in a position it was never allowed to go into. They could have happily shut the reactor down if they didn't have 5x less than the minimum required number of control rods inserted (a conscious decision they made during their demonstration of stupidity supreme).

I like referencing this case during safety system reviews at refineries and chemical plants. Operations always insist that they need the ability to bypass any safety system if they actually need to. My answer to them is depending on the case a strict no, the whole point of the safety system is to take over control. You can restart your chemical plant tomorrow. Regardless of how important you think it is, it's not as important as your lives.

Re:Could it happen here?

[blindseer]

Chernobyl was also a "dual use" reactor, useful for power and plutonium production. No western country builds these any more. This creates the common complaint of nuclear power plants having to shut down for months every 2 or 3 years for refuel and inspection. The alternative to this is a more complex reactor that allows refueling while in operation, which also allows for the production of weapon grade plutonium.

So, make your choice. We either get dual use reactors that can stay online for decades at a time or we get proliferation resistant reactors that need to shutdown for refueling. If you want both then we need more research on new designs, and that means testing those designs in the real world. To test them means building them. We can't approve a design for mass production until tested. So, we are stuck in the catch-22 of not being able to build until tested while not being able to test until allowed to build.

Chernobyl was a disaster before it even went critical. It was unsafe from the start and it's quite amazing more people were not killed.

Re:Could it happen here?

[blindseer]

Can't have a big bang just because some suicidal terrorists fight their way into the reactor hall.

A safety feature I've seen proposed in some fourth generation designs is a big fat "fuck you" button for such a scenario. If there is a threat of release of anything even potentially weapons grade, or of sabotage, there is a mechanism that will dump a big load of fission poisoning isotopes to spoil the batch and render the core effectively inert. They might still be able to walk away with some radioactive material but it will be no more valuable in a weapon than natural uranium dug up from the ground. Mashing the "fuck you" button would render the power plant unable to be restarted for a very long time but it also makes it worthless to anyone that wants to use it to make weapons.

Any nation that wants to make a nuclear weapon can do so by digging up some uranium and enriching it like the USA did in the 1940s. All the anti-proliferation laws do is keep the bar at that level rather than lower it with access to some new technology.

Re:Could it happen here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could use a reactor that doesn't use enriched uranium. I remember seeing a study once where (IIRC) it would take a terrorist outfit 20 years of full plant control to retrofit the plant and extract enough material from a CANDU to make a bomb.

Re:Could it happen here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Conventional reactors use both light and heavy water, and both are much worse than using graphite in a molten salt reactor. The problem isn't graphite, but using graphite in a solid fueled reactor at low temperature, which allows energy to build up in the lattice. In a molten salt reactor, graphite will not burn, and the fuel is chemically stable to very high temperature, and will drain away from the graphite in any accident scenario.

Water moderator/coolant is the primary cause of nearly all safety and cost concerns, because it operates under extreme pressure, and can dissociate and react chemically. To manage the potential escape and dispersal of core material, multiple barriers and redundancies are required, including a very large and expensive containment structure.

Dissolve the fuel and fission products in salt, and they aren't going anywhere, ever. Molten salt reactors are completely stupid-proof, and require much less demanding construction. You could literally build an MSR in a shack, crash a plane into it, and the core material would still remain on site. Before long it would cool and solidify, and could be cleaned up with a shovel.

Re:Could it happen here?

[_merlin]

The Canadian CANDU design has a small positive void coefficient and hence is banned in the US. Las time I checked, Canada was a Western country, both geographically and politically.

You're also wrong about what the experiment was supposed to do. It was supposed to test whether a coasting turbine could deliver useful amounts of power during an unscheduled reactor shutdown, not a meltdown. The experiment had been delayed repeatedly and local management was desperate to get it done. But the day they were going to do it was unusually cold, and the controller in Kiev requested that they delay it so more power was available for heating homes. This meant that there was a shift change during the experiment. At this point they really should've postponed the experiment again, but management wanted to get it done.

There was a fuckup during the shift change handover which resulted in the reactor being put into an unstable state. At this point, they still could've shut down the reactor, waited for reactivity to die down, and rescheduled the experiment. But instead they tried to bring the power level back up without going through a time-consuming (in the order of days) shutdown and restart. Of course, trying to control a nuclear reactor in an unstable state is a very bad idea.

It really comes down to botched management and trying to not let a deadline slip further at the expense of safety.

Re:Could it happen here?

[MrL0G1C]

For every kilo of CO2 you can mitigate by building a nuclear power station you can mitigate a lot more by putting renewables in place.

Both renewables and nuclear are inflexible, if you only run nuclear 50% of the time then the power it produces costs nearly twice as much. So nuclear and renewables are in no way complimentary, it's one or the other, both need storage to take excess and supply it during higher demand periods. Storage has every reason to get cheaper as time goes on. Nuclear power clearly isn't getting any cheaper. Nuclear reprocessing is extremely expensive and that's a necessity in the future as nuclear fuel would dwindle very fast if the world took up nuclear large scale. Ocean uranium is not a viable option, it's both more expensive and also very resource hungry.

Re:Could it happen here?

[blindseer]

India apparently used a reactor very similar to CANDU to turn natural uranium into weapon grade plutonium for their first nuclear bomb test. This goes to show that there is no need to have enriched uranium for producing weapon grade nuclear material.

GET OUT...

[GameboyRMH]

GET OUT OF HERE STALKER

Re: GET OUT...

[Anonymous Coward]

Zoom zoom?

Re:GET OUT...

[allcoolnameswheretak]

GET OUT OF HERE, STALKER!

Re: Send Moscow David

[Anonymous Coward]

Propagandist EditorDavid continues to patrol a once thriving news site with soviet-like propaganda championing the mentally ill as our heroes. Hundreds of users remain and continue to read the toxic drivel to this day. Trolls like PopeRatzo and drinkypoo thrive only in such unfathomable cesspits, much like the thermoacidophile bacteria found in close proximity to volcanic vents.

Re: Send Moscow Donald

[Anonymous Coward]

sure lowered the population volume - slaps knee

Re: Counter post

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the tremendous number of lives nuclear energy has saved, I think we can deal with a few to several decades of what is now fairly low risk management projects.

Re:Send Moscow Donald

[Anonymous Coward]

Chernobyl is in the Ukraine you uneducated swine.

Nuclear accident = instant nature preserve

[Anonymous Coward]

Turns out radiation is less harmful to animals than human presence :
Parts of the exclusion zone in Ukraine and Belarus have become "a post-human nature reserve", home to prowling wolves and dozens of wild horsest

Re: Nuclear accident = instant nature preserve

[Anonymous Coward]

See Global Warming isn't a neverend crying of wolf to scare the prols and gain political power bases. It is actually science gone faith based and super real wink wink. So long as someone rises to emperor level to defeat Global Warming, all will be good© and hope will, once again return to the land©.

Or, you know .... life will find a way to adapt. Because Earth's history was so full of Global Warming episodes in the past. So full of Global Cooling episodes in the past. That gigantor Ice Sheets and massive Ocean Rises roamed the lands for hundreds of centuries. Wiping and re wiping all life off the planet while at the same time drawing Life Ending Asteroids and Meterorites into the planet's gravitational pull. Ending Life that was already Super Ended...er Again!! from Life's graves!!!!!

Swear to all that is unholy and illogical, the only thing worse than televangelists is Telescientists with even more intractibly held illogical beliefs. Arctic ice melt. Water in that ice at the north pole shifts to tbe Equator. Shifting weight causes a slow in Earth's rotation. Shifting weight also causes increased activity in Earth's crust. Days get ever so slightly long. Volcanic actvity increases. Still not the hottest the Earth has ever been, nor the most full of life at that increased level of warmth. Volcanoes erupt. Ash clouds form in the upper atmospher. Temperatures begin to fall. Ice forms once again at the North Pole. Weight shifts away from the Equator. Day length stabilizes.

And yet Life somehow, someway, never figures out it was never meant to be permanent....feck every last Telescientist who gets paid to scaremonger. And everyone else who carries water for them. You could have taken the path to educate but instead chose the path to preach. Your egos and arrogance are what kills us all.

Re:Counter post

[PPH]

The data isn't all in yet on Chernobyl. Certainly not on Fukushima. If it turns out that living next to one of these radiation release sites is or isn't harmful in the long term, we'll find out eventually. If you want a better feel for long term radiation effects, you'll have to look at how slowly life has returned to two of the largest radiation release incidents in populated areas further in the past.

How many thousands of years will we have to wait for life to return to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Re: Send Moscow Donald

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if Moscow Donald's puppet master gets his way...

Want to hear something worse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions still live in New Jersey!

Re:Want to hear something worse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions still live in New Jersey!

Doesn't that qualify as cruel or unusual punishment?

Potatoes are best

[Anonymous Coward]

with a side of radiation

The best loot

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows the deeper you go into the exclusion zone the better the loot. Sure, there might be a few more man-eating snorks, but hey, that's the price you pay.

Re:Counter post

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a joke? I have to assume it is. Hiroshima ground zero is marked with a fairly small plaque on a boring standard Japanese side-street next to apartment buildings, businesses and restaurants. The one in Nagasaki is a small park with apartment buildings and a busy street about 150' away.

Re:Send Moscow Donald

[Aighearach]

Ukraine is a country, not "the Ukrainian Slaveland" or whatever the Soviet-controlled name was. You uneducated swine.

Ukraine. Not "the" Ukraine.

Re:Counter post

[Aighearach]

For peoplewho didn't get the sarcasm:

https://www.theguardian.com/ar...

Re:Counter post

[Luckyo]

That's a serious burn. Green and glowing!

Re:Counter post

[Luckyo]

Yes. An obvious joke at that.

Re: Send Moscow Donald

[Anonymous Coward]

I am from Kiev. We really don't care. It is just old misnomer. Why are you concerned about an extra article?

Re:Counter post

[Anonymous Coward]

The date will be about five years after Japan gets its new generation of rad-hard robots developed. The Fukushima core will be dismantled and fed into a breeder reactor. Bioconcentrators will be deployed to mop up the dispersed cesium around the reactor.

Re:Counter post

[Anonymous Coward]

As I expected, no one has a clue as to how long it will take to clean up these sites. I'm shocked, not. Just oh its not so bad. Fine, then go down to the basement at Fukishima and pull out the molten fuel. Just because a few robots failed trying from radiation is no reason not to go down. After all, it is just a small dose of radiation.

Actually, seems to be a double conversion error

[Solandri]

The exclusion zone is actually 2600 km^2, or 1000 mi^2. Someone at the BBC who has no business writing anything with numbers apparently read that as miles (not mi^2), and converted to 4184 km, which he rounded down to 4000 km^2.

A 30 km evacuation radius yields a 2827 km^2 circle. So pretty close to 2600 km^2.

Re: Counter post

[Mr D from 63]

Yes, there are deadly levels of radiation inside the containment structures. That; is why people don't go in there. And since nobody needs to go in there, you don't need to worry about it. There are other deadly areas on the planet, both man-made and natural. Some of those are even related to renewable manufacturing.

Re: Counter post

[Anonymous Coward]

What lives?

I don't think so

[aepervius]

https://www.nap.edu/read/13263... average exposure from environment is half what you cite (3 mSv per year average, and if you live in city building on the coast it is probably more around 1mSv per year - thorium radon exposure is less conversly if you live in a granite ground e.g. limoge your basement will be full of radon making a higher average, then there are some other local stuff, e.g. how far you live from a coal plant - you are safer around a nuclear plant). That's at least half what you cite. The radiation exposure I can find is either identical to that background or higher http://www.chernobylgallery.co... (that was 2008 and I did not check the source, but most exposure are around 0.7 uSv per hour so around 17 uSv per day or 6 mSv per year which is at least *double* of the average of 2.4 to 3 mSv globally.

So again, citation needed on your number.

Re:I don't think so

[110010001000]

Nah, the average is 17 micro SV per day according to the EPA.

More if you count the number of fingers

[Anonymous Coward]

and divide by ten...

again cite required

[aepervius]

the environmental exposure is 2.4 to 3 mSv. A quick search on EPA for "17 micro Sv per day" reveal nothing, and all source I cited have that 3mSv. The only way I can get to 6 mSv per year is if you count *medical* exposure in addition to environmental.

Re:again cite required

[sfcat]

the environmental exposure is 2.4 to 3 mSv. A quick search on EPA for "17 micro Sv per day" reveal nothing, and all source I cited have that 3mSv. The only way I can get to 6 mSv per year is if you count *medical* exposure in addition to environmental.

While what you posting is sort of correct, it seems to lack any sort of understanding of background radiation. The first problem is that measuring radiation is really complex. Your unit of measure, the mSv is used for something called absorbed dose which takes into account things like how far you are from the radiation source and how quickly your body absorbs radiation. Its a measure of how much biological effect, but it isn't a measure of background radiation. We use Curries or Becquerels for that. The problem is that different types of ionizing radiation do different things and so have to be measured differently. Alpha radiation for instance can be blocked by clothes and sunscreen and is found in sunlight but does 20x the damage to the body per unit of energy so the amount of alpha radiation released is multiplied by 20 when calculating absorbed dose but not multiplied when calculating effective dose (a physical measure of an amount of radiation to which something was exposed)

As far as measuring the amount of radiation in an area, you can do that and everywhere around the world there is some background radiation. However, that amount varies wildly in a ratio of about 1:400. So there are natural places around the world where people have lived for >10,000 years which naturally have higher levels of background radiation than Chernobyl had just weeks after the accident (Congo, another in Iran, and in Brazil). Also, those places don't have higher than normal amounts of cancer which is weird. Also, flying will expose you to about 100x the radiation that you experience at the airport. And finally, you yourself and me and every other human ever born is slightly radioactive thanks to K40.

We just don't know the exact amounts and effects of high levels of radioactivity over time, but clearly the LNT (Linear no threshold) model we use is incorrect. But since using an overly cautious way to measure health effects is considered good, we do it. However, now that the fear of nuclear power is hurting us more than radiation ever could, perhaps that well-meaning decision (that the man who made the decision knew was overly cautious when he announced the theory) could be reevaluated. Maybe an acceptable level of radiation is a high background radiation found at naturally radioactive sites. Nah, the trial lawyers couldn't allow that...

False Dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a false dichotomy. CANDU reactors have done on-line refueling for decades now and are proliferation resistant since they do not use enriched uranium. Contact SNC-Lavalin if you want one.

https://www.brucepower.com/how-is-a-candu-reactor-refueled/

Re:False Dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, CANDU can be both refueled while online and keep risks of proliferation low. The problem is that it's too expensive, even Bruce Power gave up on the design. Enriched uranium is just too cheap to pass up. Maybe natural uranium reactors still have a future but before then we might have molten salt reactors, thorium fuel, and so on. Even CANDU is not a "CANDU" any more. Advanced CANDU gave up on natural uranium but kept the heavy water for safety, not to run on natural uranium.

Citation on Bruce Power passing over CANDU, and new CANDU reactors using enriched uranium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_CANDU_reactor

Heavy water is expensive. What is cheap is enriched uranium from spent fuel rods (which can be recycled in next generation designs), decommissioned weapons, and already existing enrichment plants. A nation that has to start from nothing, doesn't want to buy enriched fuel from foreign nations, and wants to avoid the political and/or technological hurdles of uranium enrichment, might start with a CANDU style reactor. This is a rather slow path to nuclear power when companies in the USA, UK, France, Russia, China, and perhaps others are quite willing to share technology and enriched fuel.

Re:False Dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Contact SNC-Lavalin if you want one.

You might even be able to get a nice bribe or kick back to fatten your wallet.

you call this living?

[Anonymous Coward]

or a living?

I am aware of that

[aepervius]

But due to Q factor and other effect it is much easier to use mSv, Bq is nigh useless for example as 10 Bq of gamma or 10 Bq of alpha have vastly different effect from outside the organism or inside, but aside that you are speaking of *activity* which is not what the OP is about but absorbed dose. So if you want to go Rem or Gray feel free to do it, but environmental average exposure will mostly be cited in Sv again due to the fact we are more interested in equivalent absorbed dose, than what activity there is. And As you see above *the op cited in Sv therefore it makes sense to continue in Sv*. Furthermore I cited again the average and mentioned there are vast difference between where you are (my example was limoge due to the known radon problem there - but there are other known). Again none of your explanation pertain to the op which pretended that 17 micro Sv per day is average for environmental radiation in the US without cite (this is 6 mSv per year), and this run contrary to all cite I provided (which use absorbed dose Sv too). Not too be too snarky, but none of your explanation explain the OP nor do they offer cite for the OP. As for curie... It has been an eternity I had anybody speak to me in that unit when speaking of exposure or absorbed dose. Is that an US holdover ?

Re:I am aware of that

[sfcat]

As for curie... It has been an eternity I had anybody speak to me in that unit when speaking of exposure or absorbed dose. Is that an US holdover ?

Bq or Becquerel which is the SI unit is 19 orders of magnitude less than a Curie so for activity its really weird to use the SI unit. Rem or Gray are absorbed dose which is probably the best of the choices of units of measure for physical radiation. So that's probably the best unit for a legal standard as the most damaging radiation is also the most common in the environment normally and the easiest to block. But you are right that since people really care about biological impact more than a physical unit, mSv is used in the media and for legal standards.

By either measure, the current background radiation at near Chernobyl or Fukushima is lower than some places that have high natural background radiation. Places people have lived for thousands of years. That's why talking about radiation is so frustrating. With all the complex units and measures its hard to have a sense of perspective about what is and isn't dangerous. And even when we boil it down to Effective dose (mSv unit) its misleading as to potential harm. That's because (you probably already know this but) there probably isn't any alpha radiation at say 100 yards from the site of the reactor because alpha radiation is easy to block. What's coming out at that range is probably only Gamma radiation which are high energy photons. And those are hard to block and they probably have a completely different impact than high amounts of alpha radiation which you can get from living in the tropics with no sunscreen and little shade.

To give an example, the folks in the exclusion zone might have the same equivalent dose as our hypothetical desert living person, but that hypothetical desert person would have 1/20th the absorbed dose and as you imply same the rate of cancer (equivalent dose is accurate at low levels). However, if those exposures to different types of radiation (alpha vs gamma) would be compressed to a small amount of time, say an hour of intense radiation the relationship to levels of tissue damage and rates of cancer would likely be different (Gamma radiation is a bitch which makes equivalent dose less accurate here). That's why the equations computing effective dose are so complex, they try to capture these relationships but since we don't know completely the impact of time that's not a variable used by equivalent dose so when that variable changes, the measure becomes more or less accurate. Its science so its a constantly improving but ultimately imperfect approximating of reality.

Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm. We just don't seem to admit this or allow for a reasonable level to be set for it. 1Sv will make you physically and life-threateningly sick from radiation poisoning. 1/10th of that will give you symptoms of radiation poisoning but you will survive. Less than that gives you an elevated risk of cancer. But that last line is what we just don't know. Doing such research is unethical in the extreme so we just study populations that were exposed in the past and try to extrapolate out, usually with a huge safety margin. That's why you are quibbling about an amount of radiation that certainly wouldn't cause radiation sickness and probably wouldn't increase cancer risk to any measurable degree. It would likely take 17x that much radiation to cause a measurable increase in cancer rates and even then it would be a few percentage points at first. But at about 50x more radiation than the levels you mentioned, it would probably double cancer rates. So it is something to be tracked, just not something to be worried about at the levels you reference.

Re:I am aware of that

[Uecker]

"Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm."

The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level below which there is no harm. There is a minority which claim otherwise but this but this is not the opinion of most scientists. Our best understanding of how ionizing radiation affects the body suggests that there is no safe level and large scale studies (.e.g from CT exposure) so far all agree with this even to relatively low levels.

Re:I am aware of that

[cheesybagel]

There are people in the world who live in granite houses which emit radon gas. Those are not even the worst places.

Re:I am aware of that

[sfcat]

"Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm."

The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level below which there is no harm. There is a minority which claim otherwise but this but this is not the opinion of most scientists. Our best understanding of how ionizing radiation affects the body suggests that there is no safe level and large scale studies (.e.g from CT exposure) so far all agree with this even to relatively low levels.

Yea, but that's not what the data says. The data says that there is a level that's not harmful at a constant level and that level is several times higher than the amounts discussed in the article. And that's the problem. Its always easier to go with a higher degree of caution when it doesn't cost you anything. But it does cost us something. It costs use drastically higher amounts of CO2 production and that's almost certainly a bigger health risk to the population than changes to background radiation in the amounts discussed in the article. Amounts that were likely present in the past during our evolution.

And that's the problem. Risk telescoping. Ignoring the certain risk against a rare but possible bigger risk. Its like not saving for retirement on the theory you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.

Re:I am aware of that

[Uecker]

It is absolutely what the data says. But you are right that the risk is very small, I just disagreed to the "no harm" nonsense which is clearly against scientific consensus. But cost is a different topic: Nuclear is more expensive than renewables. This why it is dead no matter what we discuss here.

I don't get it

[hackwrench]

I am from the United States. Canada doesn't get a the in front of it, nor does Mexico, or Ireland, but the United Kingdom does. Whether or not something is a country is not a rule for whether it gets a the in front of it.

Re:I don't get it

[Aighearach]

Right, so you can comprehend that it is inaccurate to refer to the US as an English colony, right?

"The Ukraine" is short for "The Ukrainian Soviet Blah Blah Blah." It is what their name was when a foreign power occupied their country. After gaining freedom as a sovereign State, their name became simple "Ukraine." Other examples not rooted in that name are from the translation of "Ukraine" as "borderland," which is just as insulting because it implies dismissively that it is part of Russia, and merely a remote area at that. For example, Canada is called "Canada," not "the northern borderland."

The only commonly-named country that has "the" in their short name is The Bahamas. Most other cases are offensive denigrations of sovereignty.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[Zehsi]

cheeki breeki