touring the Chernobyl area on a motorbike

I recommend the documentaries on YouTube, there are some images of the plant from a few days after, but the documentaries have detailed re-enactments. Sad, but this was how I learned about how a nuclear power plant works.

amazing story and photos, sv

yeah, thank you for sharing sv!

Brilliant reportage and pictures SV.

I am right in thinking that if this disaster had occurred in a nuclear reactor in say England or France rather than the Soviet Union it would have been more catastrophic because the firemen and soldiers would be more likely to down tools rather than embark on a suicide mission? I recall reading that they plied the first responders with vodka and told them it would protect them from the radiation. I need to read a good Chernobyl book because I never realised how potentially even more catastrophic it could have been.

that's an interesting thought

although a disaster of that severity like that is hypothethically much less likely in a western country, there would be severe difficulties in getting enough people to take those risks, by comparison in fukushima there were only fifty people who willingly exposed themselves to high levels of radiation, to get many thousands of people to do that is something else altogether

and if they needed specific skills like the miners to dig underneath the reactor....even if there are enough miners left in this country one doubts how many of them would be prepared to do that

apart from soldiers nobody else could be compelled to work in those conditions and more people were involved in the chernobyl cleanup than are currently in the uk military

so either paying huge amounts of money to people with the right skills or emergency legislation mandating people to work are the only options

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50

I meant to say Am I right? obv

have you read any good chernobyl books nakch?

no i have only read internet stuff about it but the wikipedia page is good and links to other pages where necessary

the most horrifying part is the possibility (as i understand it) that the 'corium' mixture of superheated radioactive isotopes, molten concrete, ash etc would have hit the coolant water in a confined space and created a boiling liquid explosion of such power that it could have acted like the charge in a primitive nuclear weapon and created a fission explosion with the material in the other three reactors

Alexander Akimov, the unit shift chief, and Leonid Toptunov, a technician, falsely believed the water flow to the reactor was blocked by a closed valve, and so they fought their way to where they believed they could pump water back into the reactor and spent hours, submerged to the waist in radioactive water. Both would die a torturous death from radiation poisoning.Later, in hospital, Akimov tried to stand and the skin fell off his leg like a sock.

That is so horrific, fucking hell.

some other stuff on the internet disputes the claim of the soviet physicist that it could have created a nuclear explosion and it would just have been a large conventional explosion that would have spread over a wider area than the first one, although that still would have been fairly catastrophic

Great pictures SV.

I went myself, not long after this thread was initially started. Very interesting to see how it looks lately.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32488483?ocid=socialflow_twitter

"Chernobyl fox makes five-decker sandwich"

it's just carrying them away to hoard in one load, but the bbc is clickbait trash nowadays

The smoldering graphite, fuel and other material above, at more than 1200 °C, started to burn through the reactor floor and mixed with molten concrete from the reactor lining, creating corium, a radioactive semi-liquid material comparable to lava. If this mixture had melted through the floor into the pool of water, it was feared it could have created a serious steam explosion that would have ejected more radioactive material from the reactor. It became necessary to drain the pool.

The bubbler pool could be drained by opening its sluice gates. However, the valves controlling it were underwater, located in a flooded corridor in the basement. So volunteers in wetsuits and respirators (for protection against radioactive aerosols) and equipped with dosimeters, entered the knee-deep radioactive water and managed to open the valves. These were the engineers Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov (who knew where the valves were), accompanied by the shift supervisor Boris Baranov. Upon succeeding and emerging from the water, according to many English language news articles, books and the prominent BBC docudrama Surviving Disaster – Chernobyl Nuclear, the three knew it was a suicide-mission and began suffering from radiation sickness and died soon after. Some sources also incorrectly claimed that they died there in the plant. However, research by Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of the 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, determined that the frequently recounted story is a gross exaggeration. Alexei Ananenko continues to work in the nuclear energy industry, and rebuffs the growth of the Chernobyl media sensationalism surrounding him. While Valeri Bezpalov was found to still be alive by Leatherbarrow, the 65-year-old Baranov had lived until 2005 and had died of heart failure.

hadn't congratulated SV on his report (instead calling out a link he posted as trash, lol), so here: that's brilliant, SV

have been reading about this quite a bit recently

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1111093/midnight-in-chernobyl/9780593076835.html

not sure how much of this will be actually "untold" but it seems worth a read.

thanks for the rec, tracked it down. (lemme know if you want a ysi)

cheers for the offer LBI, already got this one on the kindle on my next to read list.

np!

voices from chernobyl which won a nobel prize a few years ago is very good. extremely sad book.

well Midnight In Chernobyl is definitely no voices from chernobyl. i'm surprised at what a shit writer he is - if he just stuck to what he knew it would be interesting but all the badly written scene-setting fan-fic about the chernobyl project manager's sniffing the flowers in his garden or the courtship of one of the young scientists and how his partner's eyes seemed to change colour with her mood. I've abandoned after 60 pages for now. ffs!

:(

Photographer Robyn Von Swank has a great account @vonswankcuriosities of interesting places she’s toured -in early March she started putting up highlights of her two trips to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The photos are so, so good.

Starts here with Baba Ganya
https://www.instagram.com/vonswankcuriosities/p/Bu8GG8TgX2C/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kx4rf4r39s7f

I fell asleep watching ep 1 of the HBO series (and was having nightmares), and what I saw was pretty gritty and horrifying. The radiation horror and bit where one of the workers looks right into the burning core was something. It's got the reliably good Jared Harris and the cast speak in their normal accents rather stupid cod-ukranian accents thankfully. Going to try this one again later

I've been waiting for an evening or weekend when I'm in a really solid mood to start. I hadn't heard Jared Harris is in it, which sounds great.

all the resident Geiger counters only measure up to 360: "360... that is reasonable reading and it could be much worse!"

can't remember the units of radiation, but you get the horrific picture.

Like mh I'm waiting to be in a mood for this, but it's high up on my list. Very glad to hear they're not doing that awful Ukranian accent thing!

might need some xanax and a g'n't to face this

the incident happened very close to my birthday so the yearly remembrances seem somehow more relevant when they pop up

some of the horror in this is seeing the dickhead boss from the control room looking at glowing lumps of graphite from the exploded reactor in the grounds of the station and being too deep in the soviet denial/scapegoat game to even mention it to his minions.

I'll hold back more comment until I watch the new HBO thing, but I sometimes ponder how incredibly fucked we would have been if all those people hadn't done the work to contain what they could once the situation became clear.

the good news is in Ararat Valley, Armenia, they still have the antiquated Metsamor nuclear plant, which is a similar model to Chernobyl but somehow still operational despite being old and fucked and in a seismic zone!

2nd ep of Chernobyl builds on the good work of the first. I think that claustrophobic radiation horror at the end of the ep will give me nightmares tonight. Emily Watson/Stellan Skarsgard/Jared Harris all bringing it. There is brilliant scene with Skarsgard bluffing the lower level apparatchiks with his new-found knowledge (5mins ago in the chopper) of the make-up of RBMK reactors. Best series these useless fuckers have done in years imo.

yeah i love this show after two episodes. the horror is realised very vividly.

"a yearly stipend of 400 roubles" for whichever fool walks into the jaws of death. Nightmare day at work today!

"come on lads this is for russia"

"fuck it so, i could use a few extra roubles, where do i sign?"

"For the rest of my life, you say?..."

first episode was great, this last one was brilliant

my only problem is that i keep forgetting the names of the characters and it's difficult to refer to them by description (the apparatchik who doesn't actually know what's going on? er...
the scientist guy with glasses? er...), but that's on me

it was quite amusing when apparatchik with fey croaky voice tries to bullshit Skarsgard character that it's the concrete that is burning. But yeah, fuck knows the names of any of this lot!

I've started the Serhii Plokhii Chernobyl book, it's much better than that Higginbotham travesty and he grew up in the Soviet Union + has a better feel for how the dysfunctional + belligerent interactions between different departments (+ add idiot bosses/unrealistic quotas/budgetary pressures to the mix) conspired towards the 2nd rateness of the reactors (bad design without safety containment to start with) and absolute inevitability of a catastrophe at some point.

Yeah I only know the characters by how they look, I guess a lot has happened in two episodes, but it seems masterfully written and acted so far. The dynamic between Harris and the minister type bloke was instantly great, like the way he seems actually quite effective within the confines of what's possible in such a system.

It's interesting seeing Gorbachev portrayed at the centre of such a system, I guess I feel all I remember about him was this heroic treatment of him in western media and even when I was at primary school, which I suppose was some bizarre lionising bullshit due to the fall of communism.

Also the whole thing looks incredible.

yeah the design is so very impressive and convincing on every scale, from the reactor to the civilian scenes, everything is so real looking. I can't still can't get that image out of my head when the worker looks right into the burning core of the reactor in ep 1, incredible scene.

I'm just getting to the bit in the book that deals with the firemen attempting to extinguish the fire on the huge shared turbine hall roof. It is actually even more horrific and chaotic than the version presented in the series. Some of the firemen are kicking lumps of radioactive graphite out of the way, not realising these little glowing lumps have already condemned lots of them to a very painful death within hours/days. Molten bitumen is practically gluing some of them to the spot. One of them describing it as worse than anything the pen of Dante could have imagined. They don't even understand the implications of the reactor core blowing open and are only trained in dealing ordinary fires, and are more concerned with the broken oil pump threatening to release 200 tonnes of machine oil onto the floor turning it into a total inferno. It is a hellish clusterfuck even before you factor in the off the scale radiation bombardment and the threat of half of Europe getting sterilised.

Just started this series, and fucking hell

I mean, having read Svetlana Alexievich's book I'm not sure why I'm doing this to myself, but here we are

Now looking at the writewr/creator's IMDB credits, and having some serious cognitive dissonance.

The Huntsman: Winter's War (written by)
2013 The Hangover Part III (written by)
2013 Identity Thief (screenplay) / (story)
2011 The Hangover Part II (written by)
2008 Superhero Movie (written by)
2006 Scary Movie 4 (screenplay) / (story)
2003 Scary Movie 3 (written by)
1998 Senseless (written by)
1997 RocketMan (screenplay) / (story)

This is like finding out Threads was a Benny Hill project

That Darn Cat 2 next?

“We were doing our research, we came across this description of coal miners in the Soviet Union as being a particularly irascible, difficult group that operated outside of the normal fear bubble that everybody was in because they knew that they were necessary. In fact, they’d gone on strike a few times and Gorbachev said that he was more scared of the coal miners than anyone else,”

even though the miners were played for straight grim-faced lols, it's interesting what the writer said about them.

interesting we don't have a dedicated thread for the TV drama. Anyway, I gave my dad the DVD at Christmas and I'm not sure where this comes from but he insists on pronouncing it 'SHER-nuh-bill' despite that not being how anyone says it in the show. Who says it that way???

It's a strange phenomenon. I have friends who have been in Beijing for years but still somehow call it "Beizhing"

how are you meant to say it?

'Bay-Djing'?

You can try to match the sounds / tones if you like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUIaFSbQ5nc

But this is a better approximation than "Beizhing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlHsHe1jRQk

I'm not sure my ear can discern the difference between that and the 'wrong way' other than a harder 'j' sound?

They use a /ʒ/ sound, like in "usually" - a sound which doesn't exist in Mandarin

This doesn't look very good

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/13/ukraine-wildfires-close-chernobyl-nuclear-site

"don't worry" (as long you don't live in Greece or Russia)

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2020/04/13/2200Z/chem/surface/level/overlay=cosc/orthographic=-340.70,44.22,2274/loc=30.076,51.262

The fire seems to be under control now, thankfully.

On a side note the 5G conspiracy has reached Svetlana Alekseivich:

This is the biggest challenge since the Chernobyl era. It remains to be understood that this is - is it really influenza, or is 5G already affecting the human immune system. In my opinion, scientists do not have a final conviction. There are some complex processes of further technological development - here the influence of man on the atmosphere, new technologies, and the inability of man as a biological being to sustain it all.

I've just watched this excellent show. For some reason I'm now watching the BBC Salisbury Poisonings - with Coronavirus I'm never touching anything again.