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

Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

ironedcurtains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 132 posts

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#81

Post by bitL »

ageofwant wrote: post #59
bitL wrote: post #28

This really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dus…

Are you friggin kidding me? Not a single person was killed by nuclear exposure after a 8.4M earthquake killed 25000 people. The forced removal of people lead to 1000+ suicides.

This is obviously a loaded statement. There were reports of plant workers that died because of unexpected radiation exposure. Moreover, in many cases radiation causes damage after XY years of being inside human body, so we will only see in the next decades what the toll is. There is also water leaking for how many years already, nobody able to do anything about it and radiation from Fukushima detected on Hawaii in the sea water already (though minuscule amounts). And how much information is swept under the rug to maintain "face"? Your statement is either naive or intentional, the effect is the same.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#82

Post by josefx »

justicezyx wrote: post #15
tbrownaw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, that wouldn't satisfy the "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills" narrative that underlays much of the activism around climate policy and other environmentalist causes. The solution always has to be fewer humans and less human activity, with the possible exception of temporary "sorry, we were never here" cleanup efforts.

China did managed population growth, guess what happened, no one is happy. I doubt human can overcome their own nature to step ahead and regulate population effectively.

Isn't population growth close to zero for most industrialized countries?

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#83

Post by sampo »

slackingoff2017 wrote: post #26
mkesper wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer. “I know three women my age (between 30–40) who have experienced thyroid cancer. When one of them was surprised to get the diagnosis, her doctor told her they see women our age from the Soviet Union very frequently with the same. Not a coincidence.” — Z. K.

I think it should be kept in mind that the design of Soviet reactors was incredibly unsafe compared to their western counterparts. Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

> Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#84

Post by bitL »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #39
bitL wrote: post #28

This really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dus…

Well, now that the dust settled, it turned out they were perfectly right, and pretty much all the damage to lives and the region was caused by panic and evacuation.

And that's why there is a permanent exclusion zone no one is allowed to enter and the videos posted on YouTube by Japanese themselves showing significantly raised background radiations on certain spots in Tokyo were produced by irresponsible people using uncalibrated unapproved instruments, right? Or reports of metallic taste after first rains since meltdowns etc. It was just a show produced by Hollywood spread by fake news, right?

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#85

Post by andygates »

mseebach wrote: post #57
7952 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I see on HN is a stream of technological idealism that tends to ignore the practical difficulties. Blaming protestors for lack of progress is very easy as it allows you to neatly ignore those issues. There are many economic and engineering reasons why nuclear is so hard to get right.

France, a rich, functional, liberal, western democracy, is more or less uncontroversially nuclear powered to a very high degree. There are no more practical difficulties than any other large, important project. The only problem is politics.

Implementing the practical considerations sensibly is political, though - see TEPCO's out of date contingency planning for a clear case of regulatory capture.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#86

Post by bitL »

adrianN wrote: post #48
bitL wrote: post #28

This really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dus…

Fukushima is several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl. Raising panic is not without risk either, people die because of evacuations.

Fukushima: "As of 2014, a peer reviewed estimate of the total was 340–800 PBq, with 80% falling into the Pacific Ocean.[8] Radiation continues to be released into the Pacific via groundwater."

Chernobyl: "5.2 EBq (5,200 PBq)"

From:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch...

So it's a magnitude (though still in progress) and "luckily" most of the damage went to the ocean. Now how much sea life and derived food is contaminated is anyone's guess and what the long-term consequences on ocean ecosystem from continuous flow of radioactive particles will be is an interesting question.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#87

Post by Neliquat »

desdiv wrote: post #11
AnonNo15 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the lady from TV announcement said that one of the reactors is damaged, which is a really bad thing for nuclear power plant.

I think OP's point was that a 20 second blurb, no matter how truthful or accurate, is downplaying the situation. If an analogous event happened in the US, all entertainment programming would be suspended and there would be continuous news coverage on all the major channels for several days, just like after 9/11.

That kind of media did not happen back then. The 1st was really the OJ thing really. By 9/11 it was already in full tilt 24hr news mode with cnn and multiple others churning it out.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

sampo wrote: post #83
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should be kept in mind that the design of Soviet reactors was incredibly unsafe compared to their western counterparts. Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

> Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties. The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

> The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

The evacuation made necessary to avoid direct casualties from the nuclear incident killed 34.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#89

Post by jjt-yn_t » 

  Hmmm... in small a subset MORE prone to tornadoes in one of the of tornado alley states, pre-evacuate [cash for keys] 200 mile radius THEN build a test nuclear reactor UNDERGROUND,  with the missing 'two days on 4 days off, nuclear of course' less-tired operators scheduling, etc etc.
More upfront costs but seemingly no multi-century accident to mitigate, vs multi-decade, if that...

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#90

Post by boomboomsubban »

ckastner wrote: post #33
boomboomsubban wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer. Neither are you, you're speculating that they must exist in high numbers. That quote doesn't show anything, that could be a coincidence and frequently is a vague term for a very busy individual. There has been a noticeable increase in thyroid cancer incidents in the area, but treated thyroid cancer…

The apparently most extensive study lead by the WHO even puts this at around 4.000 deaths [1]. [1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

That's a writeup on the report from the Chernobyl Forum, a group created by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. The WHO was a member of the forum, and it won a Nobel Peace Prize, but there are some large issues with their projection methods.

That said, mine wasn't peer reviewed, and used the same method as the Forum report with some small tweaks. I didn't check my sources well enough, but I also can't find anything credible listing it far above that number.

Post reply on HN