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Chernobyl Reactor Restarted, Claimed Safe for Y2K
Ydeologi writes "Usually when you hear 'Chernobyl' and 'Y2K' in the same sentence, it's because someone's using the infamous 1986 nuclear catastrophe as a metaphor to scale the predicted impact of Y2K.
But here [MSNBC story], it's no metaphor. The Ukranians say they need money and they need electricity; this was their answer. Funny thing that Y2K concerns are preceding the more obvious ones -- say, uh, the reactor with the 'spotty' history."
Hmm.. If nothing else, having a giant concrete enclosed reactor nearby would be bad for morale.
M: Hey Pyotr, what's Ivan doing?
P: Oh, he's just roasting some marshmallows on reactor 4.
The design of the reactor at Chernobyl did prevent disaster; the only reason it malfunctioned was because things went wrong while basic safety measures had been circumvented for testing purposes. The Chernobyl disaster was a result of human error and coincidence, not design. Further, nuclear power remains one of the safest and most efficient forms of power today (until we invent cold fusion, anyway)
[T]he Ukrainian government says it needs $1.2 billion from the West to finish construction of two new reactors to replace the output that will be lost by closing Chernobyl.
There's nothing quite like nuclear suicide to raise the ante in international treaty negotiations. The Ukrainian economy has taken a harsh beating since the USSR fell apart, and they do need this electricity if they hope to get their industries cranking again.
The fact that this action will precipitate an international crisis and help get the financial aid flowing again is just an added bonus.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I read a newspaper article yesterday about this. IIRC, the G7 nations had agreed to give the Ukraine about a billion dollars to build new reactors to replace Chernobyl, but haven't coughed up the dough yet. Since they need power, the government feels it neccessary to re-open the old plant.
(I was surprised too, I thought the whole area was going to be un-inhabitable for the next few hundred years)
Dana
Two of the Chernobyl reactors have been operating for many years, restarted shortly after the accident. The one that is being restarted now has been down for a normal outage since February. It's Unit 4 that is fux0red and enclosed in the "sarcophagus".
This kind of stuff is the most dangerous legacy from the cold war. Even in the west, where we at least have enough money to handle this stuff with proper security, the long term cleanup/deposit of the large amounts of highly radioactive is still an unsolved problem. We don't really know what do with it.
...
The situation in some the former eastern block, especially in the former USSR, however is much worse. These governments are cronically cash starved with some countries on the brink of insolvency. Pensions and salraies are often not being paid (or payed several weeks/months too late) and the old communist order has collapsed with (in some regions) not much of anything new to replace it. It is this abscence of government which makes the large stockpiles of nuclear fuel, weapons and waste very dangerous. Some/Much of the Russian nuclear (submarine) fleet is rotting in their harbors because there's no money/parts for repairs. Nuclear reactors (any many other vital parts of the infrastructure) don't get proper servicing/repairs. With authority breaking down to such a degree that even high caliber weapons are for sale by corrupt army officials, the question of strongly contaminated or even wapons grade materals is a serious one.
Even if we quit using nuclear power anytime soon (would be nice but don't hold your breath) we'll be stuck with large amounts of highly radioactive stuff for the next few thousand years
I was six when the Chernobyl accident happened, so my memories, and my insight, into the time are rather limited. I do remember how scared my parents were however, I do remember hardly being allowed to play outside that whole summer, and I do remember that we only got powdered milk for about six months.
Sometimes I wonder about how much time the downfall in this area took off my life, but then I come to and look at the smoke rising from the highway just a few hundred meters from my house, and wonder how much that is taking off even as we speak.
Nuclear Power as it stands is a dirty, nasty, dangerous business. We are playing with forces which we know can destroy us all, we are creating toxins and wastes that we hardly know how to deal with, and we are putting trust in that the next generations will solve our problems for us. However, it is not alone. POWER is a dirty bussiness. As much as nuclear power is a killer, so are all the other ways we have today. Anyone here going to tell me that greenhouse effect is not real? or that it isn't a bigger deal to our children than having to deal with nuclear waste? or that hydro-electric damns aren't gigantic destruction of some of our last real ecological systems?
The Ukranians need power. For them to have a chance at rebuilding their economy, they will need all the power they can get, and we cannot expect them to pay the price for the global bad conscience about what we are ruthlessly doing power our way of life. If we want that reactor shut down, we are going to have to give them an option, and we obviously aren't.
Until then, I guess we'll just have to stack up on iodine pills and hope that the wind is going the other way next time...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Nuclear Power as it stands is a dirty, nasty, dangerous business. We are playing with forces which we know can destroy us all, we are creating toxins and wastes that we hardly know how to deal with, and we are putting trust in that the next generations will solve our problems for us.
Nuclear power is considerably less dirty, nasty and dangerous than most practical alternatives today. A catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant (and Chernobyl was about as bad as it can get) might kill a few dozen people, but perfectly normal operation of a coal or oil burning power plant kills a lot more people by releasing all sorts of nasty chemicals into the atmosphere, which then cause lung cancer and similar diseases. (I recall seeing a figure of 28,000 deaths per year quoted, but I can't find a reference right not. Oh well.) Then you have coal mine accidents, general pollution, etc. "Forces that can destroy us all" is ludicrous hyperbole, even a loaf of bread is radioactive and it contains those same forces.
Anyone here going to tell me that greenhouse effect is not real?
I will tell you that it is too early to tell. Global temperatures are rising, but not in the way it should be according to the standard global warming thoery. The reason for it may well be unrelated, as the Earth's average temperature goes up and down anyway. Less than 20 years ago there was widespread fear of a new Ice Age, ie. global cooling, based on exactly the same data.
Just the same, if the global warming theory is correct, the problem is fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants produce next to no greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is not ideal, but solar and wind power just aren't going to cut it, now or quite possibly ever, for places like Finland.
And a few links:
- http://www.oneworld.org/energy/
- http://www.newscientist. com/nsplus/insight/global/faq.html
Getting back on topic, most Russian nuclear reactors are sufficiently primitive in design that they have very little software to even worry about. Russian reactors have far worse problems than Y2K, despite everything I said above I don't exactly like living near both Sosnovyi Bor and Ignalina...A neutral view of most types of energy
The New Scientist's global warming FAQ
Cheers,
-j.
This is a general response to those who are wondering what's happening.
Only the reactor 4 (the one that blew up) was shut down. Reactors 1 - 3 never stopped working.
Nobody has lived in Chernobyl since the accident because the radiation levels are too high. Nevertheless the plant was never shut down.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
This sort of stuff scares me. How far off is Homer Simpson's work environment from reality? How do people in charge of these places sleep at night?
I grew up about 20 minutes from 3 nuclear reactors in Wisconsin, and also did a research paper about nuclear power in college where I got to have a tour of two reactors. Lets just say this, if all of what I saw and learned is true for all reactors, then I'm all for nuclear power.
First of all, if you've never been inside a nuclear plant, it's truly mind boggling. The amount of engineering that goes into a plant would make any geek scream with delight. I've never seen anything more sophisticated.
With that said, there are TONS of saftey precautions these places take. They have a main control room that is operated 24/7 by many people montitoring everything. If you think that the people in there are like Homer Simpson, you're dead wrong. They don't hire bums off the street. These people go through rigorous training. In fact, training happens as long as their there. They have a second "mock" control room, identical to the real one where they go through simulations of events, and the employees are graded on thier performance. There's obviously a first test before you even get to step foot in a control room, but even after that, I beleive it's every 3 months, they have to go through training again, and must pass.
Even with that there are many fail safes built into the reactor, and you have to really be an idiot to cause a meltdown. Much of what I was told there and read about what happened at Chyrnobyl and Three Mile Island, was just that, human error, and people not reacting to simple warning signs. Those tragedies could have been avoided.
I also live an hour away from a coal burning plant, and let me tell you, that is one of the dirtiest and nastiest things I have seen. I'm not saying that Nuclear Power doesn't have it's side effects (radioactive waste), but coal plants use so much fuel for so little energy and produce so much crap. Whereas, if you filled up a nuclear reacter, you basically could just feed off that fuel for a decade before you'd have used it all up. Nobody that lives around the reactors where I live thinks twice about it. They're quiet, and clean. The only biproduct is hot water, the waste, and electricity.
And the way I see it there are many solutions for the waste. One that has been talked about extensively is the Yucca Mountains, which is in the southwest US. I believe the Trinity test was done in this area (correct me if I'm wrong). This is the main proposed site for long term disposal of all nuclear waste in the US, but it is under much debate (mainly by people who don't know about nuclear energy). If there was a good place to store the waste, Yucca Moutain is it, IMHO. Other ideas are off shore containment facilities at the bottom of the ocean, which could be a good idea, since radioactive particles don't penetrate through water very well (if at all). However, the notion of "polluting our oceans with radioactivity" wouldn't get past the public (even if it is a false claim). There are other alternatives, like space, which are less feasable, but the reality is that there are safe places for this stuff. The waste now is held in caskets. I got to see one of them with waste in it. Perfectly safe. I believe they are tested to take a 100 ft drop and not crack. Basically, to make a long story short, in the right hands Nuclear Energy is VERY safe and reliable. Don't let popular culture tell you otherwise.
Let me first make a summary of some of the facts known to me...
The Chernobyl plant (or Chornobyl as the Oekrainian people call it now), consisted out of 5 RBMK reactors..
The 1st reactor was brought back on line Oktober 1995 and the 4th this year, if I recall it right..
The Chernobyl plant is unique, because it was designed for two purposes:
1) Supplying power
2) Producing nucleair weapons.. This is also one of the main reasons, it lacks a containment structure.
During the construction of the plant, some engineers came to the believe, that the plant had structural design flaws in the cooling system and pleeded to halt the construction, these engineers where taken of the project and Russia made sure that the carrier ended as well..
The #4 reactor of the Chernobyl plant, exploded after series of human errors, when conducting a 'safety test'.
Before running the safety test, all three safety systems where disabled.
The test was performed to see, how long the reactor could hold out, when shutting it down and not generating power, without external power to the water cooling pumps & controls and without the backup power generators online.. Also, the emergency core cooling system was taken off-line..
The reactor was deliberaty put below a power output of 700MW, the strict minimum limit to garanty safe operations of all support systems and the reactor it self.. After a series of major human ignorance and errors that followed, mainly the work of Deputy chief engineer Dyatlov, who also lead the test, the reactor #4 finally exploded.
In the immidiate vicinity, there where about 135000 people, who where only evacuated days after the incident happend... It took around 8000-10000 lives of worksman, mostly soldiers (liquidators), to put out the fire and to seal of the reactor, by building 'the Sarcophagus'. (Almost) all people, who did the footage on the accident, by helicopter, died.
The radiation level in the surrounding environment, was much faster reduced, than scienctist would have expected, helped by a natural process called 'chitin'.
Envision how in the western world, these rescue workers would be dressed like and than look at the liquidators
Since 1996, a lot of modifications are done to the Chornobyl reactors, but the basic design, with it's flaws, wasn't changed, nor is the situation surrounding these reactors...
In 1997 Russia agreed to build more reactors, based on the RBMK models in Chornobyl..
In 1986, Russia could find 10.000 souls, who were send into their dead, to end the disaster..
In 1999, Ukrainian people know a lot more about radiation... Today, the area around Chernobyl is still inhabitat by Oekrainian people, who feel they are left alone by the government..
Unemployment is sky high, as you would expect, so no source of income and medical threatment is done under very bad conditions, by idealistic people who don't care about their own lives...
What if it would happend again now?
What if they decide to run Y2K 'tests'?
Check for more info these links: this and this
"The odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years. The plants have safe and reliable controls that are protected from any breakdown with three safety systems." Vitaly Sklyarov, Minister of Power for the Ukrainian SSR., February 1986
There are two real problems with nuclear power: Disposal of spent fuel (waste) and accidents. Once you analyze them, you realize there is but one problem with nuclear power: Longevity.
Accidents are the joker card in this game. Nuclear power would be fantasic -- if nothing ever went wrong. Unfortunately, one of the few constants in our existance seems to be Murphy's Law: What can go wrong, will go wrong. And when things go wrong in nuclear power, the resulting fallout (pun quite intended) can be drastic.
If a coal plant catches fire, you have a lot of smoke, some toxic chemicals, possibly explosions, the usual sort of industrial accident. But within a few days, a week or two at the outside, the fire will be out and you can start picking up the pieces.
At Chernobyl, they won't be able to pick up the pieces for hundreds of years.
Spent fuel (nuclear waste) is the second problem I mentioned. When the oil is finished burning, all your waste has gone up the stack, for better or worse. With nuclear power, the spent fuel rods must be kept until they decay to the point where they are no longer hazzardous.
Again, this process takes hundreds of years. During all that time, you keep accumulating more and more waste. You cannot handle it without special suits or robots. You need to keep it away from water, to prevent contamination of the water table. You need to do this for a long, long time.
And that is the real problem with nuclear power (or nuclear anything): Longevity. Nuclear waste remains hazardous far longer then anything else we have to deal with. Unlike a conventional industrial accident, the result of a nuclear accident may well last until your grandchildren are dead. Just creating a storage container that lasts long enough stretches our technology.
The people who design nuclear waste storage facilities spend a good deal of time trying to make the place look as dangerous as possible, using universal symbols that any human will understand. The reason why is simple: This stuff will remain deadly longer then modern civilization has been around. They have to account for anything up to and including the collapse of our society in their designs. That is the time scale we're dealing with here.
Once you realize that, you realize the problem. With almost everything else, we can afford to make mistakes. It may be bad, but we can fix the problem and move on. Not with nuclear power. Nuclear power demands perfection -- and that is one thing we cannot provide.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Micah dun said:
This canard has been going around in fundy circles for a long time--specifically, ever since Chornobyl went boom (yup, since the 80's...when the same folks were also claiming Russia was Gog and Moscow was Magog and that Gorbachev was really the Antichrist). I can also tell you that those websites probably ALL got their info from the same source (the good old fundamentalist Christian rumour mill--the same one that's been spreading the urban legends about Disney movies and Proctor & Gamble being supposedly run by Satanists for God-only-knows how long) and the claim that "Chornobyl" means "Wormwood" is patent male bovine manure. :)
A little bit of fact-finding (which is how I found it was bull, btw)--Ukrainian, Russian, Belorussian, and other "Eastern Slavic" languages are VERY closely related. So closely related in fact that often they are mutually intelligible in roughly the same manner Catalan and Castillian Spanish, or Castillian Spanish and Portugese, are.
"Chernozem" (Ukrainian "chornozem") is Russian for "black earth" and refers to a very rich, black earth that exists in Ukraine. The name "Chernobyl" (Ukrainian "Chornobyl"; the official name of the town has in fact been Chornobyl since Ukraine told Russia it was breaking away from the old USSR) means "black table" and is a direct reference to the rich chernozem earth in the area.
(Warning--massive rant about to begin on how coercive fundy groups feed their memberships stuff like this. If you don't want to hear gory details and me whinge long and pissy on it, scroll to the next message now. If you are of a fundamentalist bent, you probably will NOT want to read what I am about to say next. :)
This isn't the first time fundies have been loose with the facts, btw. Nearly all of the urban legends about Disney movies having sexual references started from one or two sources in the fundamentalist Christian community (visit here for a good reference). In Sunday school back when I was young and stupid and thoroughly brainwashed, we were told (among other things) that the CEO of NBC was a practicing Satanist, that facial creams with "placenta" contained ground-up aborted babies (yes, they actually told us this in Sunday school! And for the record, stuff with placenta contains COW PLACENTA, not ground-up aborted human babies), that the ERA would force women to be lesbians, that parents should not send their kids to Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts but instead to the fundy alternatives (Royal Rangers & Missionettes) because the Boy Scouts supposedly allowed gay Scoutmasters and promoted atheism (a patent lie--they will not even let you IN if you are gay or atheist; several lawsuits have in fact been filed AGAINST the Boy Scouts because of this), and other fun tall tales. The same church has a guy who sent out fliers to the better part of my city (large metro area of almost a million people) including grocery stores that claimed all gay men were members of NAMBLA; the church members are told this and do not question it because they are literally told to avoid ALL "non-Christian" media because the media industry outside of that run by rabid fundies is run by Satanists (!). They even give out "Christian Yellow Pages" telling them not to do business except with those of "like faith" so they won't have to deal with people who might show them they are being fed outright lies by their pastor :P (And people wonder why I say that at least some branches of fundamentalist Christianity are as bad as Scientologists. They're as coercive, in any case (as I found out being brought into the Scientology debates back when the CoS was doing major net.abuse like the Cancelbunnies instead of just suing websites into oblivion); hell, at least one Assemblies of God church (the AoG is one of your biggest fundy denominations, btw--something like two million members) was actually outed as a cult on 20/20 (the "Brownsville Movement" in Pensacola, FL) and I can testify from my experience in an AoG church and from that of others who've walked away that more often than not those churches turn dangerously coercive. Pretty much they trip EVERY one of the warning signs that have been used for Scientologists; a favourite brainwashing tool [the whole "engrams" thang] is a repackaged version of good old "deliverance ministry" [the idea that anything trying to drive you out of that church--from news reports on how it's coercive to your own inner doubts--are signs of Satanic possession and you must "pray the demons out" or "exorcise" them by force...there are verified cases where people have been driven insane or even killed in these "exorcisms", and the Scientology equivalent is widely regarded as the single most damaging aspect of it], neither Scientologists nor coercive fundy groups want their members to have any outside info at all [saying slags are being done by "subversive persons"/"agents of Satan"], both exert heavy control on members [Scientologists being encouraged to join "Sea Org", fundies being encouraged to join political groups and to homeschool their kids, send them to fundy-run colleges when possible, and using "cell groups" to basically snitch on each other to make sure members stay in control], both have lots of money...I really could go on for hours on it. I've been a walkaway for something like thirteen years now, and I'm only starting to realise just HOW coercive the group was and just HOW much bull I was fed "in the name of God". And that's from one of the biggest damn churches in the COUNTRY. :P
ObY2K: Oh, and after Russia and Iraq didn't pan out as Gog and Magog and after a succession of Gorby, Boris "Where's the Stoli?" Yeltsin, Saddam Hussein, and Bill Clinton (!) didn't pan out as the Antichrist and/or Da Source of Da Comin' Pockylipse, now they're running about saying that the WWW is going to be the source of Armageddon and Y2K is going to be the Apocalypse (they were saying earlier that the world being destroyed by fire was going to be a nuclear war between the US and Russia over Israel (!)...and they were darn near jizzing themselves over it, too...it's really sickening in a way to know that the main reason they support Israel and Jews at ALL is because they are hoping Israel will get into some kind of war which would blow the entire world to kingdom-come, and they're essentially kissing God's arse by supporting anything Israel does [up to and including human rights violations] because they want to fight on the same side as the Israelis when the last war starts because they think that no matter what Israel is "God's Team"). Myself, I'm more afraid of the fundies running about spouting that crap than I am of society falling down going thud because of Y2K, because if they don't get their Armageddon they might try to make their own (and apparently Israel is so concerned about it that they've already set up a special task force just to deal with potentially dangerous fundy Christian groups--they've already had to send three groups out of Israel so far, and it's not even December yet...and also keep in mind that most fundy groups care about Israel for only three reasons--a) because they see Israelis as "God's Chosen" and hope to be lumped in with "God's Chosen" by supporting Israel no matter what [I actually heard it preached "You support them even if they commit genocide against an entire nation"], b) they are convinced Armageddon is going to break out when Israel goes to war with another country, and c) they want to be where the action is when Jesus comes back to play General Patton to the Army of Gawd). (And yes, I think I have a valid reason for worry--as I noted above and I've noted in past, I grew up in a very coercive fundamentalist group. The group has actually argued that "good people will go to hell and bad people will go to heaven" because as long as one claims one accepts Jesus this supposedly makes things alright--and then they can have carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want to do "in the name of God". They've seriously discussed bringing back the Burning Times and expanding them to ALL non-fundamentalists [Catholics even get denounced as "idol-worshippers", and Baptists as being "lukewarm Christians who don't accept the gifts of tongues"], and in a prior "Second Coming" panic in 1988 [when some guy released a book entitled "88 Reasons Why Jesus Will Come Back In 1988"] many people lost all their money by giving it to the church. Hell, MY family has in past been in financial trouble because money was given in "tithes" and "love offerings" when it was needed for food and bills :P. The group has been known to harass and picket homes of STRAIGHT people who have come out in support of gay-rights ordinances, and for well over ten years literally made the lives of an entire neighbourhood hell when they kept trying to get in construction project after construction project so they could get in additional access roads to suck in even more people [fortunately, Mum Nature intervened by a massive flood, the Corps of Engineers declared the entire area a wetlands and 100-year flood plain where further development was prohibited, and now the church is moving out to somewhere else they hope the neighbours can be bullied easier]. Partly because they ARE being coerced and the church tries it cut off every avenue of info that it doesn't own, and partly because one of the chief tenets is essentially "If you ain't with us you're a Satanist and workin' for the devil", and they are CONVINCED they are going to go to final holy war when Armageddon does hit, I seriously worry what some members of that church might do...and that's a relatively CALM one for coercive Bible-based groups, too. I'm not even gonna go into really scary stuff like Christian Identity or the really radical groups that have set up their own "Entime Camp" communities :P)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)