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Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

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Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#91
post #9

Remember watching the evening news with my dad when they finally announced it publicly. They completely downplayed it. In came in as "Oh by the way, an accident at ChAES happened, next up - sports...". Here I found the 20 seconds blurb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouJjaV_NbY (sorry in Russian, obviously). My dad, a mechanical engineer, also specializing in workplace safety was really concerned and told me. "This…

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.

"One of the reactors is damaged" was a huge understatement that ignored, by omission, the real issue, which was, of course, the massive release of radioactive material.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#92
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

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Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#93
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#94
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice how reprocessing or fast breeders solve problems 1 and 4. As for 3 the US has never had an release of radioactivity to the environment from a nuclear reactor aboard a ship or submarine in several thousand years of operation time.

That's not correct, there have been several releases of radioactivity from US military vessels. This is all prior to the late 1980s, since the mid 1970s many controls and monitors were added to prevent releases. Personally I'd attribute this to lack of awareness rather than lack of budget. The Soviet program looks quite different. December 12, 1971, The USS Dace spilled 1,900 litres of radioactive coolant water in to…

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Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#95
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying that building a road is no more difficult than launching a rocket into orbit. It turns out that nuclear physics is really quite hard. That is not a reason to not do something. But we shouldn't take these issues so lightly.

Of course it's hard. But it's not like we've never done it before and that operating nuclear power plants is this weird theoretical endeavour. Or, put in another way: the hardness isn't why we're not doing it.

I don't agree. A lot of countries have been open to new nuclear developments. In the UK for example there is a supportive government, and schemes are even quite popular locally due to jobs. Yet the commercial and political risk is still huge. Despite the legacy of nuclear schemes it is still difficult to get schemes of the ground. And those kind of issues are in a large part due to the unqiue challenges that nuclear presents that are not relevant in other large infrastructure projects.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#96
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true in this form. There were unsafe soviet designs, but also there were unsafe western designs. Soviet designs were not all categorically unsafe. The design used at Chernobyl was a problematic design, but still many layers of human error had to be involved to create the accident. Military reactor designs are generally less safe. Civilian designs were usually OK in the USSR.

It's not just the design(s), it is the implementation too. At Chernobyl the powers at be (accountants?) got involved and decided to use flammable bitumen coverings on the roof of reactor 3, one would assume to save money. Unsurprisingly, the roof of reactor 3 caught fire.

This is a good example of one of the failings at Chernobyl, but it took many of them coinciding to make the disaster as bad as it was.

They were required to use another material to build the roof, but they were also required to be finished with construction by a certain time. Soviet central planning led to a shortage of the proper roofing material. I'm sure the decision to use bitumen was either made in ignorance or with the assumption that it wouldn't matter for other reasons. Lots of mistakes were made with the assumption that the rest of the system was safe so it wouldn't matter.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#97
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting. I'm in the nuclear industry and would like to try to address some of these issues if you don't mind. 1. Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. It is effectively totally sustainable and even renewable on a 4+ billion year time frame, even without breeder reactors. But really, breeder reactors will become a thing when uranium gets e…

Hi, interesting answers. 1) Could you tell me more about replenishment of Uranium in seawater, or point me towards your source? Wouldn't it mean that we would reach a maximum saturation of Uranium in the ocean after some time (with precipitation of excess Uranium in the form of salts)? Have you seen / access to estimates of Uranium electrode deposition cost from water? Are they cost competitive in any way in comparis…

Thanks, and sure. You're right to be skeptical. The renewability of uranium isn't a widely accepted idea and unfortunately is hard to definitively prove experimentally due to the hilariously long time scales. So we're left with less rigorous claims of this to treat rationally more than scientifically. Also, haha: 'fishy'!

Here's a good source: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/3088/htm And it points to an older one: http://tmtfree.hd.free.fr/albums/files/TMTisFree/Documents/E...

From the first:

"One additional aspect of nuclear sustainability—noted long-since by Bernard Cohen—is that a significant fraction of the nuclear fission energy resource is in fact completely “renewable” in the same sense as wind and solar energy [32]. Wind and rain constantly erode the Earth’s crust, which contains an average uranium concentration of 3 parts per million. Rivers then carry this dissolved uranium into the oceans, at a rate of approximately 10,000 MT per year [33]. In a breeder reactor energy system, this is a sufficient rate to supply the world’s entire electricity demand at the present time more than five times over—or is roughly one quarter of what’s needed to supply a continual 100 TW to a hypothetical global civilization of 10 billion persons which is energy supply-replete by any contemporary measure.

As the crust is being eroded by rivers, it is constantly replaced by new layers of rock being pushed upward by plate tectonic processes. The supply of uranium in the Earth’s crust is effectively inexhaustible, on the order of 40 trillion metric tonnes, a factor of 10,000 more than is present in the oceans. At present erosion rates, this source of uranium would last on the order of 4 billion years, similar to the timespan over which the Sun will become a red giant.

Therefore, this assured source of “continually mined-by-Nature and oceanically presented” uranium will last as long as life on Earth does—even if burned at rates sufficient to supply a large fraction of a fully-developed human civilization—and represents an astronomical amount of nuclear energy, one that is in fact truly renewable and inexhaustible by any human measures."

EDIT: As for increasing concentrations of uranium in the sea, it's already in equilibrium so the incoming stuff that leaches in through rivers is leaching back into the rocks, giving us the equilibrium concentration we observe today. The point here is that if we start extracting it that concentration is not expected to drop because we can't offset the balance very much.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#98
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a dam burst it kill a lot of people in short time. And 36 hours later rebuilding the infrastructure and towns begins. If a reactor bursts it might not kill lots of people but it will devastate a large area for a very long time. We still do not know internal details about the Fukushima reactors because not even robots can go there. A dam burst is a nightmare but it is a nightmare which is easy to clean up afterward…

Not quite. The majority of deaths from the Banqiao Dam burst was from subsequent epidemics and famine. The 11 million displaced also weren't exactly spending three nights in a hotel, then going home. The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on…

Water is less scary than uranium. I agree with you, but it seems to be futile to convince people because there's just more movies about the harm of radiation than deaths by flooding. They keep rebuilding New Orleans and living in coastal Florida too.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#99
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.

I wouldn't say uncontroversially. There are political issues around what to do with aging nuclear power plants (see Fessenheim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant) and whether to invest more. I don't know much about it, but nuclear energy was a talking point during the latests elections.

Personally, I think it would be an enormous mistake not to invest enough to at least assess the feasibility/practicality of cleaner nuclear sources. I really hope France keeps on investing in nuclear energy & research.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#100
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wouldn't say they were direct. That number is based on a comparison with a 1916 tsunami and earthquake death toll, and with around one of those thirty-four being under sixty that seems hard to calculate exactly.
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