81–90 of 264 posts
> 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…
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually wrong on several levels. First of all, in the show the characters explicitly state that they are referring to a steam explosion. A steam explosion in the megaton range isn't just implausible, it's patently absurd. The upper bound on the real number is lower by 4-5 orders of magnitude. Don't get me wrong - it would still have been extremely disasterous and could have increased the total radionuclide emis…
In the context of a drama about the explosion and aftermath, I'd say it's quite reasonable to use an absurd number from one of the physicists involved. Perhaps it was indeed wrong, but it sounds like that might be actually what those involved believed at the time .
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…
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'…
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 studies, which are expensive and complex [0]
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…
You seem to have cherry picked sources that have a lower estimate for all these figures, i.e., "propaganda numbers". I think the best source for these numbers is the Wikipedia article "Deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster" [1]. From the article, Russia claims "estimates ranging from 4,000" while scientific and environmental organizations claim "no fewer than 93,000". It's clear that Russia wants to downplay the enorm…
I don’t think 5 MT fission bombs are even possible, as they tend to blow themselves apart.
I found it very distracting that none of the ostensibly Russian or Ukrainian characters have an even remotely slavic accent.
I always find it disturbing. As every native Russian speaker, I tend to feel it perceive as beautiful and melodic. Just as any other Russian, Ukranian, Greek or whoever else. Sounds like a joke and not a good one. Makes me skip the whole title.
Why are they doing it? Does it really help anybody with immersion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the feeling it's very accurate, but it is very entertaining. EDIT: the accuracy I am referring to is about the actual sequence of events of the plot, which I understand to be simplified as people replying have pointed out :)
This Twitter thread speaks to this, (supposedly) from a Russian guy. He said that as far as Soviet life goes it's extremely accurate. https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1132029943297265664
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…
As the study itself states: "These conclusions are regrettable because low statistical significance only means that chance has not been excluded as an explanation, assuming no bias and no real effect. In more detail, p values -that is, the probabilities that observed effects may be due to chance - are affected by both the magnitude of the effect and the size of the study. This means the results of statistical tests must be interpreted with caution [26]."
Meta studies based on statistical analysis is inherently challenged. This one is no better (and no worse) than the others.
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…
It's seems unfair to compare subsistence, low-tech energy (dung burning) to nuclear energy.
It makes a lot more sense to compare high-tech nuclear energy with high-tech renewables (with storage).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually wrong on several levels. First of all, in the show the characters explicitly state that they are referring to a steam explosion. A steam explosion in the megaton range isn't just implausible, it's patently absurd. The upper bound on the real number is lower by 4-5 orders of magnitude. Don't get me wrong - it would still have been extremely disasterous and could have increased the total radionuclide emis…
>That possibility was briefly considered and quickly dismissed as improbable in the extreme, which it was. A nuclear explosion would require Uranium enriched to at least 85%, whereas the fuel in RBMK reactors was only enriched to 2%. It's not just unlikely it's actually impossible.
In the case of Chernobyl, the concern was that upon contact with water (which acts as a neutron moderator in these circumstances) and given the inevitable sequence of steam explosions that would follow, some regions of superheated corium might be forced into prompt criticality events. These would technically qualify as nuclear explosions, but the sequence of events required to get from this set of increasingly improbable assumptions to anything remotely close to a megaton range explosion is, as I said, improbable to the point of being trivially dismissable.
[1] EDIT: I realized I should probably point out for clarity that I'm referencing the traditional measures for a critical mass - the mass required for a homogenous sphere of a given material to go critical. Determining the critical mass for a highly inhomogenous material of complex geometry, highly varied temperature and potentially surrounded by neutron reflecting substances is not a trivial task.