Chernobyl

[430752]

With this being around the 20th (???) anniversary of it, a lot of things are coming out that we maybe never knew. Well, maybe they came out several years after, but this is resurfacing them and workers are giving interviews, the Old Mother Russia seems to be more lax in letting info out, etc.

Its kinda wild, not just how close we came to disaster (some would say it was disaster) but also the lengths humans went to shut it down. Could you imagine american workers being told to go in a fix it, say goodbye to family and friends first since you're likely not to see them again, but it is for the good of the country?

I dunno, no real insight here, just wild.

curt j.

[SteveJ]

With this being around the 20th (???) anniversary of it, a lot of things are coming out that we maybe never knew. Well, maybe they came out several years after, but this is resurfacing them and workers are giving interviews, the Old Mother Russia seems to be more lax in letting info out, etc.

Its kinda wild, not just how close we came to disaster (some would say it was disaster) but also the lengths humans went to shut it down. Could you imagine american workers being told to go in a fix it, say goodbye to family and friends first since you're likely not to see them again, but it is for the good of the country?

I dunno, no real insight here, just wild.

curt j.

Some of those Soviets definitely were heroic, but no more so than the Americans who went into the towers or the cockpit of flt 93.

Steve

[scorrpio]

*shrug*
"Mother Russia" haven't been uptight about this for quite a while - just that most of the information has been printed in Russian - I've read detailed accounts of some people who went through it back in late 80's - early 90's. I guess it being a 20th anniversary, someone saw an opportunity to present a story.

Chernobyl is actually a well-known one. There have been earlier incidents, not as large, but still very nasty, that have been covered up. I.E. There was an incident somewhere in the Urals in the early 70's. My wife is from Chelyabinsk around there, and there are lots of people with cancers, birth defects, and other related diseases, especially from villages closer to incident site. And in the forests over there, you can find mushrooms the size of a dining table.

[LinuxRandal]

Saw a PBS show (Frontline or Nova) on it this week. There were a lot of hero's, there also were and are, scapegoats. There still are hero's working to build the NEW containment facility, and guess what, That should need to be replaced in a little over another 100 years.

I was hoping they would interview a gal who drives through the abandoned town. I first saw here sight a couple of years ago, you all might find it interesting. It is the Ghost town link: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

[jziegler]

Last month, National Geographic had a nice article about it. Yesterday, NY Times (online) had some stuff up, should still be available. They talked to a group of "Liquidators" and others involved in the early operations after the accident, as well as a series of photos of the region today with audio commentary. Some interesting stuff. The liquidators that they talked to really were the heros, along with the ones that died in the process. Without their actions, nearby towns might not have been evacuated quickly. They probably saved many thousands of lives, but to them it was just doing their jobs, their duties.

Either the National Geographic article or something else that I read recently had a timeline of what happened, and how the accident happened. Pretty scary stuff. I'm certainly glad that US reactors are of a very different design (especially considering that I live less than 10 miles from a site with 3 operating commercial reactors).

Also, I heard on the radio yesterday some talk about Chernobyl, and nuclear power in general, including some discussion with a co-founder of Greenpeace, who now supports nuclear power. Basically, we can't let disasters like this force us to rule the technology out completly.

There was an interesting comment that the severity of the accident in terms of the chain reaction and core damage is similar to that of the TMI accident. The major difference in the outcome was the design of the containment structure. How bad would the Chernobyl accident have been with a US style containment structure areound the plant? Hard to say, but I'd be willing to bet that the world would not have found out about it as quickly as we did.

Jim

[Jeffrey Schronce]

During the TMI incident, my wifes employer would not even let them leave. Business as usual. One of the really old, "Old Boys Club" type managers was acutally walking around outside the building with a radiation detector that he kept in his trunk. "Nothing to see here . . . . "