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Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

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Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#241

Post by DocTomoe »

CydeWeys wrote: post #229
DocTomoe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They started the war, killed millions of people in the process (including many millions of civilians in Asia), and then had the gall to try to bargain for decent surrender terms after all that horror they caused? Applying that standard, there would not be a single American left alive for the constant war they wage since the end of WW2.

The key difference is that Japan was defeated utterly; the US was never even close. The last fighting we did on our home soil was the Civil War; discounting that, 1812. In warfare more than almost anything else, might matters.

Indeed. You better pray that the US keeps being able to keep war away from their soil, because what comes around goes around. Especially when people like you gleefully claim that civilians "had it coming".

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#242

Post by xtracerx »

dweekly wrote: post #5

The pictures are lovely and the reflections profound. But much of the cited data here appears wrong. For instance, the article states (italicized): "six hundred helicopter pilots were killed" and yet it was only 600 helicopter pilots who _flew_ liquidator missions[1], two of which were killed in an piloting accident and none were registered killed from immediate radiation exposure[2], though at least one eventually d…

It also says a 5kt explosion would have "levelled" Minsk and Kiev. They are 200 and 60 miles away, so that's just made up.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#243

Post by CydeWeys »

DocTomoe wrote: post #241
CydeWeys wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key difference is that Japan was defeated utterly; the US was never even close. The last fighting we did on our home soil was the Civil War; discounting that, 1812. In warfare more than almost anything else, might matters.

Indeed. You better pray that the US keeps being able to keep war away from their soil, because what comes around goes around. Especially when people like you gleefully claim that civilians "had it coming".

The thousands of nuclear weapons we have make this an academic question. Everyone knows that we would use them if facing an invasion of our homeland, so there never will be a foreign invasion on our soil.

I know we've done some shitty things to a variety of different countries over the years, but those acts are never going to be reciprocated in kind because they're the kinds of acts that only the powerful can do to the weak, and the US is not weak. It's not a value or moral judgment, it's just the reality of how power and force work.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#244

Post by saul_goodman »

moxie wrote: post #138
saul_goodman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

If nothing else, consider this. If all it takes to cause a 3-5MT explosion is to get uranium hot and poor water on it, why would anyone go to the effort of developing a more complex weapon? The entire Manhattan project could have been easily solved if it was this simple, and even then the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs only yielded between 13-22kT. It wasn't until 7 years after WWII that the US managed to conduct a test that broke the mega-ton barrier. More complex H-bombs are required for this.

But regardless, we're picking nits here. It's a fun read and I enjoy your stories, so I wasn't intending to pick on you.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#245

Post by soperj »

CydeWeys wrote: post #238
soperj wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They started the war, killed millions of people in the process (including many millions of civilians in Asia), and then had the gall to try to bargain for decent surrender terms after all that horror they caused? Nope. Sometimes harsh punishment is necessary. Wonder what you have to say about what the US deserves after the Iraq war?

Not the same situation at all? Japan was defeated utterly in WWII. We were nowhere close. We chose to leave; we didn't need terms.

No, no terms necessary. Harsh punishment though.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#246

Post by gideon_b »

legitster wrote: post #12
gukov wrote: post #3

Highly recommend the HBO's new miniseries Chernobyl. One episode left. It's already at the top of IMDB TV show rankings. [1] https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/

A bit over-dramatized, but very, very good. Although I do not really like the decision to reduce the entire engineering team to a single character. I get that it simplifies the writing and casting, but it just perpetrates the lone scientist myth. It could have been really compelling to take the time to show the group effort.

It's worth listening to the podcast that the screenwriter put out alongside the show.

He discusses the decision to collapse the scientists into one character, and explains why he chose to do it this way. Whether or not you agree it's interesting to see the though process that goes into a decision like this.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#247

Post by gideon_b »

laacz wrote: post #206
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain why the Pripyat hospital in the first episode was so dirty and old? It had only been running for about 15 years at the time of the disaster.

I've lived my early childhood though USSR (Latvia; born in 1979), and have been to relatively recently remodeled hospitals on multiple occasions for an extended stay. Plaster and paint easily fell off, tiling was irregular and often cracked, walls were never straight or evenly plasered, bed frames already had rust, springs always squeaked. All that said, it was clean, yet because of build quality, standardized pale p…

I recently stayed at a hotel built with this quality. Everything was rusty, from the door hinges to the windows, to the front gate. There were cracks in the foundation that shot up the walls.

I asked the manager when they opened and he told me they had been open for less than a year. The building was less than 3 years old.

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#248

Post by freeflight »

vonmoltke wrote: post #216
effie wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no study that links low level ionizing radiation to any harmful effect on humans This does not mean much. The direct destruction effect of strong radiation on cells is cumulative, the longer you're exposed, the greater harm done. Given the physics and biology knowledge, our best bet so far is that effect of weak but extraordinary radiation is cumulative as well. It will increase probability of cancer and l…

> This does not mean much. It does in the context of places, like those mentioned above, with naturally elevated levels of background radiation. The absence of studies out of these areas with links to harmful health effects is evidence that such levels are likely safe.

> The absence of studies out of these areas with links to harmful health effects is evidence that such levels are likely safe.

That's such an odd wording, making it sound like there's only an absence of studies showing harmful health effects. When in actuality there's an absence of studies, period.

That's why the commentary about the German KiKK study suggests also conducting such studies in the US. If those were already a thing, then there'd be no reason to suggest conducting them?

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#249

Post by craftinator »

craftinator wrote: post #124
ekianjo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a U.S. Political History textbook (highschool level I believe) from 1949. The first page after the table of contents features a picture of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion, and a blurb about how the U.S.A. created an ultimate weapon that saved the lives of millions by forcing Japan to make peace. It was such a shock opening to that page the first time I opened the book... Understandable that the myth…

Interesting, I started off by getting 6 or so upvotes; 1 day later, I'm down to -1. I wonder what changed?

Re: Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

#250

Post by tehsauce »

arcticbull wrote: post #48
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 believe the IAEA report (which you can read yourself) put together by the United Nations and relevant affected governments in the mid-2000s. It shows that over the e…

This is the proper analysis
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