Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

moxie.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 264 posts

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#131

Post by arcticbull »

rootusrootus wrote: post #67
moxie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident. One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear…

> One thing I've found interesting in talking about > Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often > willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they > confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively > "safe" even in case of disaster. I figure it balances out the people who are extremely critical of nuclear power and accept that there could actually have been a 5 megaton explosion. I'm not a…

And even still the remaining 3 reactors at the Chernobyl plant continued to operate safely, the last one closing in the year 2000. There’s a number of RBMK reactors in use today; they learned from the accident and patched up the issues. Not to say the new western reactors aren’t better, the very much are.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#132

Post by pvaldes »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #56
the_af wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I think it's important the keep the hyperbole to a minimum, if we're truly interested in safe energy and in understanding this accident and its impact. Speaking of millions of deaths, as if it were proven fact, or getting our knowledge from sensationalized miniseries, is doing a disservice to both the Chernobyl disaster and the topic of nuclear energy.

It's unfortunate that people still point to Chernobyl as why we should never go back to nuclear power ever again.

Taking in mind that the human population living in the area has sinked, and that Prypiat has been a ghost town eating money for 33 years, I can understand the general lack of enthusiasm for repeating the Chernobyl experience at home.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#133

Post by arcticbull »

freeflight wrote: post #83
ChuckMcM wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this, the numbers of casualties and description post disaster and the heroics during the disaster are not corroborated by the data. Given the secrecy of the old Soviet system about such "embarassing" events I doubt we'll ever know exactly how many people died but the massive casualty rates that get casually flicked around make for a good story but aren't supported by any external documents at all. Perhaps we'…

> Perhaps we'll find a mass grave somewhere full of radioactive bodies of dead workers but barring that, most data based consensus puts the total death toll from all radiation effects at less than 1,000 and usually less than 100. The problem is that to this day we struggle to fully understand the effects of long-term low-level radiation exposure because figuring those out usually requires long-term epidemiological st…

Not really; there’s always constant low level radiation exposure in our day to day from background radiation. It goes up tremendously when you eat a banana a day. It goes up another few orders of magnitude when you get on a plane. We’ve got a huge corpus of constantly irradiated people (flight attendants and pilots). We’ve got a pretty good idea of how this works.

[1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#134

Post by CydeWeys »

ekianjo wrote: post #113
robocat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is based on the myth that the atomic bombs ended the war. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-stone-kuznick-hi... """ The atomic bombings, terrible and inhumane as they were, played little role in Japanese leaders' calculations to quickly surrender. After all, the U.S. had firebombed more than 100 Japanese cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just two more cities destroyed; whether the attack requ…

Exactly, the soviet entry is clearly what led the leaders of Japan to surrender - the timeline also matches very closely. Not sure what we keep hearing the A-bomb propaganda such a long time after the facts.

In the end the atomic bombs weren't really any different than the other tools of total war though, like all the aforementioned fire bombings. There's a lot of reasons the Japanese capitulated, and the relentless damage being inflicted across the entire country by the US (including the atomic bombings) was a very important reason. If the US had just backed off and stopped applying pressure on Japan, the war may never have ended, at least not on the terms that we were demanding (and got). The continued bombing campaigns (including atomic bombs) was one way of continuing to apply pressure and force the war on towards its conclusion.

You can get into a more general argument about what kinds of acts are tolerated in war, but the atomic bombs don't seem to stand out either way. The real question is, is it acceptable to target a civilian population? What about even if doing so will ultimately save more lives? Look at the civilian death toll Japan had been inflicting on China, for instance; is it ethical to inflict a smaller number of Japanese civilian deaths in order to prevent a larger number of ongoing Chinese civilian deaths?

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#135

Post by zaroth »

arcticbull wrote: post #107
zaroth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 7.3 million figure is like the “12 years left” figure, that is to say it requires a little work to understand where it came from and what it means. “Ambient air pollution was responsible for 4.3 million deaths” and “3.8 million deaths every year as a result of household exposure to smoke from dirty cookstoves and fuels”. I haven’t dug into the indoor figures but a quick reading suggests that attributing the death…

> If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it should be a net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened. Respectfully I disagree. You've conflated the primary effect and the side-effect. The primary effect is energy is generated and energy is what has improved our lives. The side-effect is PM exposure whi…

I actually agree with you and edited my comment before reading your reply to soften that specific part (should be -> could be useful to consider)

I think the interesting thing which the statistic misses is that people are still choosing to light that stove with coal even though the PM it creates is damaging their health, because it’s the least worst option.

Outside PM is different because it can come from the factory down the road producing widgets for some other country, but the fact that inside PM contributes to nearly the same negative health impact, that is not a government intervention / negative externality! Starve with clean air or cook food for your family. This isn’t a fossil fuel problem, and isn’t something that can be switched out in any sense.

A makeshift stove can burn coal and cook a meal. You’ll never match that with any non-emitting technology because it will always require some investment where literally none is available.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#136

Post by zzzcpan »

Cynddl wrote: post #74

I'm confused, did they legally entered the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone? I was told that biking into the Chernobyl Zone, e.g., is forbidden due to the risk of contamination when you exit. Edit: Indeed it was not. From Instagram, “we spent the night tiptoeing around razor wire fences, coasting through sleeping security checkpoints, and riding frantically away from some surprisingly alert and vigilant guard dogs.” This val…

There are plenty of videos about this nowadays. Here's a series of videos of a Ukrainian youtuber from this winter, biking into the exclusion zone, etc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=199KDKgO1Uc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5knVD0AnTFw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DePsh2OFNVc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi9rhMn6qTU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY3jyNbbEHY

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#137

Post by xsmasher »

lqet wrote: post #103
jahewson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fatalistic I do not think it means what you think it means.

As a non-native speaker: do you care to elaborate why you think this word is incorrect here?

The word refers to a belief fate or destiny; but the usage here implied negativity or pessimism of some kind.

A "pessimistic outlook" is probably closer to what they wanted to express.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#138

Post by moxie »

saul_goodman wrote: post #91
madengr wrote: post #85

Can anyone comment on the validity of the 5 MT explosion when the core material hit water? This was also stated the the HBO show. I don’t think 5 MT fission bombs are even possible, as they tend to blow themselves apart.

Nothing against Moxie, but this stated fact is clearly nonsense. It certainly would have been terrible for a large volume of water to reach the burning core, but you're not going to get a 5MT blast from a reactor accident. It takes a LOT of things working perfectly to make a nuclear bomb explode correctly. Lots of bad things happen when reactors go critical, a nuclear blast is generally not one of them. It's the spre…

"Only 1400 kilograms of uranium and graphite mixture would have needed to hit the water to set off a new explosion. Our experts studied the possibility and concluded that the explosion would have had a force of 3 to 5 megatons. Minsk...would have been razed." - Vassili Nesterenko, director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

I am not a nuclear physicist, but at least some people who are did not find this to be "clearly nonsense."

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#139

Post by TaylorAlexander »

mikeash wrote: post #28
randylahey wrote: post #4

I found it very distracting that none of the ostensibly Russian or Ukrainian characters have an even remotely slavic accent.

I hate it when movies try to portray foreign language speakers as speaking accented English. That’s not how any of this works! If they want to go for accuracy, the actors should speak the actual language. Provide subtitles for outside audiences. Otherwise, just have the actors speak normally. It’s no less authentic than speaking with an accent, and the actors can focus on acting. Another prominent Soviet example of d…

I’ve heard some audiences (probably Americans) don’t like subtitles. So it’s a matter of money in some ways.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#140

Post by moxie »

dmix wrote: post #79

> Standing in the bleachers, listening to the Pripyat municipal overture of resounding bird song, the only thing we could do was stare out at the trees and wonder "how long until New York looks like this?" I'm curious what the author meant by this. Does he mean how long would it take NYC to look like Chernobyl after a similar nuclear/natural accident happened? Or do they have a fatalistic outlook on the future due to…

> "Also the end of the story mentions there are no obvious monuments to the people who worked to help rescue people but there is one in the very city he was reporting from dedicated to the firefighters and others involved: https://oddviser.com/ukraine/chernobyl/memorial"

I've seen it and really love it. The distinction is that it's inside the exclusion zone, a guerrilla art installation built by the liquidators themselves, not somewhere people can see it where life goes on, like Kiev or Minsk.

Post reply on HN