Just thinking its been 20 years since it happened

The area around will be contaminated ofr 1000s of years

Children still being born with unfair and terrible disability

Kids and adults dying of cancer

What a waste absolute waste of life

Just sat here thinking how much we take safe/cheap power for granted in the western world etc

What a waste of so many lifes greenpeaec say 100,000 children will die of cancer because of it

Nige

 

Do you know how much radioactive coal get emmited into atmosphere by traditional coal plants?

Also what ment waste of life was not production of energy in Chernobyl, but rather scientific/military experiments that took place there and ended up cathastrophically.

And we are closer and were affeected a little bit so I know something about it.

 

Azrael

Aye i do understand the shit that coal fired plants pump out , However when nukes go wrong they go badly wrong

Funny enough we have farms over here in uk still under restriction because of the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl too

Nige

 

When plane crashes a lot of people die still it's one of the safest means of transport on the planet.


Modern reactors can be designed far safer then ever imagined and still other means of producing electricity kill more people and wildlife everyyear then all nucelar accidents ever.

In Poland only 7 000 people die on the roads every year, should we stop using cars? There are certain costs of the standards of living we have and we have to accept that. Witin those nuclerar energy seeams least costly solution so far.

 

Wasn't this a lot more to do with the peolpe in charge rather than actual nuclear power?

Done properly, I think it's the only way to go - coal/gas is running out. We can have wind farms etc. but people still bitch and moan about that. It's all still bloody expensive too

 

Azrael

I agree with you on teh cost and value for money element of Nuclear power as it is regarded as the "cheapest"

My point is we take for granted the cheap power we are provided with and need to be aware of the potential dangers

On your comment about planes cars etc , People that travel on them make a concious decision to do so

Living 20 miles away from Chernobyl and watching your 2mth old baby die of radiation sickness as i have just read in a book about the disaster is shocking and they were told initially by the authorities

Its ok dont worry

Shocking

 

They were experimenting with core temperatures, wated to check how hiugh they could go or something like that, and they overdid it.

 

Yes I know. If someone would have asked me if they could do that experiment....




Um, NO!

 

Correct

Wanted to see how far they could squeeeze the reactors senior people where VERY aware of this and denied it later

 

I trust nuclear power, just not the thousands of nutters and extremists who see it as a potential way of attacking us and causing maximum damage to "the evil West"!!

 

I don't mean costs as financial costs.

We are unaware about great many things unfortunatly. Much to often.

Shame people don't realise that with their lifestyles they make decision to produce as uch cheap power as possible.

This kind of thng was common practis in soviet block. I wouldn't say it was one of bigger crimes commited by communists. They starved milions of people to death in Ukraine, so not telling truth about disaster wasn't a big issue. They also sent couple of fireman units there to die from radiation but it's small things compared to other stuff they did. They did that to their own people, to countries they managed to control (us) and also to others e.g. by contamination of natural resources or radiation cloads from Chernoby or nuclear experiments in Siberia/Kazachstan.

 

I guess most of the planet has seen Elana's story by now, but just in case:

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

 

St3V3_C problem is I read some articles about some of the stuff she writes beeing bullshit. I wonder what the true stroy is, which we probably will never know. Some things haven't changed in the east so far...."democracy" (what a joke there) or not...

 

Aye

One day the truth may be heard about the former USSR which i visited in 1987 when i was 17

i went to Moscow , St Petersburg and spent 10days with a family in Minsk

the biggest shock i ever see is

We call ourselves as humans the most intelligent and CIVILISCED animal


Mmmmm Mmmm Not sure myself

Killing Fields
Wars
Experiments on innocent people
Nazis

But to name a few of our own self made attrocities

Nige in a very sombre mood today

 

Thats what i have heard aswell. It was a lack of maintenance and an experiment gone wrong.

There are hundreds of nuclear reactors around the world, yet no other big accidents have happend. Also, the technology has improved over the years, so i say nuclear energy is the way forward (it's not like we acually have any alternatives)

 

Nige

Lunch - PM me

That is all

 

It could be, but I think people agree the pictures are real, and just the pictures tell a very sorry story

 

They tell but you know... I could probably show you some ex-Soviet military bases over here in Poland that look like that. Whole cities completly deserted, contaminated soil, coroding structures and so on. They wouldn't even keep fuel in tanks they just ahd holes dug in the ground for jet/tank fuel and it was contaminating soil around...

And then they left in early 90s leaving everything like that....

Nothing really unusuall with soviets.. every monument of the past, old castle, palace, some historic building they destroyed or used as shooting range for artilelry or whatever they fancied at the moment.

 

The type of reactor (RBMK was a flawed design from the outset, suffered from instability at low power, excess steam pockets in the cooling core, known as positive void coefficients, leads to increased rapid power production which is very hard to control, as if not stopped soon enough supplies itself with more fuel thus amplifying the problem. The tests were being carried out at low power levels leading to the above situation, not helped by the emergency cooling system being shut down at the time.

Modern designs are inherently safer, if these tests had been carried out within a test reactor design (designed to implode) we would not have seen such a horrific situation and fallout levels.

 

Another thing is that Chernobyl could be much worse. It didn't actually explode after all and it could.

 

We complain about our government, but really I think we are quite lucky.

 

I watched somethong on the History channel about the Chernobyl disaster a few weeks back. it fascinates me, nuclear stuff. I don't like the idea of having the power stations but we may have no choice.....

You can't compare plane crashes etc because when a plane crashes the damage can be cleared away. When a Nuclear reactor explodes, the contamination lasts hundreads of years and affects far more people.

I've forgotten now the exact nature of the "experiment" at Chernobyl. Can't remember if it was to see if they could still provide enough power with one of the cores shut down or if it was a safety test to see if they could bring a reactor back from a certain state or temperature. I have a feeling it was the latter but my memory sucks!

They overrode the safety system which would have shut the reactor down allowed the core to become so unstable it couldn't be stopped. Bloody idiots.

I cannot believe how evil people can be at times, either. Sending firemen etc to put out the fire with no protective gear, telling the public that everything's ok, then days later when it's too late for many, teliing them oh it's not OK after all, time to evacuate.



Nuclear power worries me immensely because I worry about accidents happening and terrorist nutcases either obtaining radioactive material or flying planes into the power stations.

They should be built out at sea.

 

Its amazing isnt it how in the 80s our biggest fear was Nuclear war from USA and USSR with Uncle Sam dragging us along for the ride

Now

WE fear Nuclear issues from fundamentalist terrorists etc

Scares the living shit out of me , Not for me

For my kids that scares me a LOT

 

Dogsmoke:
Prior to a routine shut-down, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4 began preparing for a test to determine how long turbines would spin and supply power following a loss of main electrical power supply. Similar tests had already been carried out at Chernobyl and other plants, despite the fact that these reactors were known to be very unstable at low power settings. As flow of coolant water diminished, power output increased. When the operator moved to shut down the reactor from its unstable condition arising from previous errors, a peculiarity of the design (as I explained in previous post) caused a dramatic uncontrollable power surge.

It’s not as dangerous, France has 58 stations in operation or nearing completion and it supplies ž of their power needs.

 

Isn't that even more like 80-90%?






I'm ust reading article byproper scientist on the Chernobyl effects in POland - will tell you what I found out.

 

Azrael

It probably is by now, they are really ramping up thier nuclear contribution ot power over there.

EDF have offered to provide the uk's plants for a set power supply rate.

 

I read through couple of publications following this thread. All seem to me very optimistic - not much damage to healf of humans really . Even the most contaminated regions have less radiation then natually most radioactive regions n France, Spain and Scandinavia. I wonder if that is true. One of experts from Poland wrote that in his opinion all the evacutaions apart form direct area of the reactor were mistakes and world-wide hysteria was pointless.

Sure thing is that Belorussia and Ukraine won't give up milions of pounds international help they get for fighting effects of the castatrophe.

 

It's very easy to sit there smuggly and scoff at the engineers who pushed the reactor harder but nuclear experiments have always been like this. You have to bare in mind during the first atomic bomb tests the leading scientists couldn't be certain if nothing would happen or if the chain reaction would consume every atom on the planet

We are dealing with a technology that's always beem so relatively far ahead of our understanding and if it hadn't been for WW2 even the basics would probably still be a mystery.

 

Dont know if this has been said but it will take 244,000 years for th area around it to be safe.

gaz

 

War is definitely a catalyst for invention.

I understand experiments have to be done, but you can do a lot to reduce the risks. I get the impression that these things were not done this time.

 

Good topic.

Who remembers that link of some bird gonig through there on a motorcycle? I thought it was fookin brilliant and sad

Trying to look for it but not having any luck

 

LOL, you could try my post just up ^^^ there

 

 

Top show Steve, fookin missed it though didn't i

 

 

It certainly looks like it but sadly I guess the truth will be buried and the plant owners will continue to argue with the reactor designers.

Something that is worrying is this issue of no containment building being part of the power plants design.

 

The RBMK plant was a flawed design but the safety systems were more than capable of coping with the flaws.

Unfortunately human error caused the accident by switching them totally off.

They didn't stand a chance of shutting it down. All reactors are unstable at low power and specifically low temperature and pressure, this is due to simple rules of reactivity within a reactor and the potential for a exponential growth in reactivity and hence a catastrophic accident.

Most reactor safety systems have special modes to limit reactivity on start up/low power and low temperature limits known as Cold Water Accident Protection. It acts in less than a second as the exponential growth in reactivity is too fast for a human to react and once beyond a certain level even inserting the control rods will make no difference as the production of neutrons is too high for the control rods to absord enough to prevent the exponential growth of the nuclear chain reaction.

Contary to popular belief the reactor did NOT have a "nuclear" explosion. The explosion was because the extreme reaction meant that hydrogen was produced from the water in the reactor and the hydrogen exploded. It is true that the reactor started to melt down although it never got hot enough to fully melt down into the ground although it did begin to melt through the reactor floor into the space below which was flooded with water to cool it down.


Running the reactor above 100% power is not as destructive as people believe either. Initially the reactor will just run outside limits and trip the safety systems. If these are overidded then initially not much will happen but eventually the fuel rods will be damaged leading to radioactive particles being released into the primary coolant. The primary coolant is a sealed system from the atmosphere. What happens next depends on the reactor design, but as the pressure and temperatures increase you will eventually cause structural failure of a pipe leading to a primary coolant leak within the reactor compartment. Again this compartment can be sealed from the atmosphere preventing particulate release. Beyond this eventually the fuel rods will completely melt and as temperature a continues to rise the risk of a meltdown would eventually occur. Also pressures and temperatures will increase within the reactor compartment and will eventually cause a structural failure. All this is before radioactive particles are released to the atmosphere where until then the only radiation risk is due to elevated levels of direct gamma radiation in the vicinity of the reactor itself.

All of this assumes all safety sytems are overided. Most reactors have additional mechanically activated safety systems as part of the design that even in a total failure of all electronic safety sytems will activate long before a meltdown occurs. Most modern late generation reactors even have a "core catcher" designed in case of a total meltdown to catch the molten core.

The nuclear justification to get an opperating license is so strict that events that have a 1 in 10000 year calculated occurance will have physical safety systems considered and built in. They will even get scientists to calculate the worst case realistic accident and the pressures and temperatures of such an event and design the reactor compartment to withstand those conditions where physically possible.

Everything in the design is orientated to prevent release of contaminated particles to the atmosphere as that is the worst thing that can happen.

The background radiation within a few hundred meters of the plant will be high for a while due to direct gamma radiation but this causes no long term problems to health as long as you leave the immediate area before you get too high a dose. Breathing and eating contaminated particles is the worst thing that can happen because the particles will give out radiation for centuarys causing continous damage until they are flushed out of the body.


Not strictly accurate.


80% of the land will be permantly habitable within 200 years. The background dose even in the city of Chernobyl is low enough to spend several days at a time in the city a month with no significant health effects.

Its safe enough to hold a remembrance service within 1/4 mile of the plant for the public and press with no protective clothing.


The main problem is the radioactive particles that have found thier way into the water supplies and food chains. Its a biological fact that such contaminants build up in certain tissues and as you go up a level in the food chain the levels are concentrated even moreand with us being at the top of the food chain means we can get a very high dose mainly concentrated on the thyroid gland which is unfortunately very effective at soaking up radio active particles.

Most of the cancers and illnesses are thyroid related due to the lack of action immediately after chernobyl meaning every one within 50 miles will have consumed lots of contaminated water and food.

The direct gamma radiation for those in the city was relatively low compared to the long lasting effects of the radiactive contaminants now inside people.

The russian authorities didn't even give the people of chernobyl iodine tablets for several months after the incident my which time the cancerus mutations would have long occured.

The iodine tablets are designed to flush out the thyroid gland removing the radioactive particles which while in the body continuously give out radiation.

 

The reactor hall is an emergency containment boundary.

Shame the roof was blown off in the explosion.



The scale of the accident could have been hugely reduced and the casualties cut if the authorities did not display such sheer incompetance as they did.

The huge dose to the population could have been cut to vitually zero if they had realised the scale of the accident and evacuated and issued iodine tablets.

 

Mate i just read that on monday in a report so for you to say its bollocks away and wipe your chin.