After 600 hours 64 workers at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant finally relieved
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Best info on this whole situation comes from the UN's "nuclear watchdog" (the IAEA), who now has 27 individual updates from this overall event.
https://www.iaea.org/nuclear-safety-and-security-in-ukraine
Not to say people shouldn't be allowed to rotate shifts, of course. But don't let the word Chernobyl freak you out too much is all.
After the TV show with its absolutely cartoonish depiction of the risks of nuclear energy I have no hope that's happening any time soon. It was genuinely baffling to me how a show, that was about as accurate on the threats of nuclear energy as Jaws was for sharks, got so much praise heaped on it.
The risk of an explosion was very real, but the show claimed it would be measured in megatons, which is completely ludicrous.
Much of the point of the manhattan project was devising mechanisms to bring fissile materials together fast enough and precisely enough that they could reach criticality for long enough to produce an effective weapon. To propose that you could get comparable effects via nuclear materials burning through their containment vessel melted in a pool is absurd and just extraordinarily unlikely.
That quote is about “testimony” of a Soviet physicist… who knows what political or other motivations were at work to justify that statement. I can’t imagine any modern physicist saying that was reasonable and it seems the writer couldn’t make that happen… it just seems like a fishing expedition for the most impressive quote that found someone saying something ridiculous and used that as a source of truth ignoring everything else which wasn’t as “fun”.
The contemporary quote was either misattributed, missing context, or a straight up lie.
It’s not hard for an ordinary person to imagine what 4 million tons of explosive equivalent might be, or a hundred thousand, both are ridiculous. The actual risk was an explosion on the scale of a few buildings or a minor criticality incident which splattered melted nuclear material in a very small local area.
You’re not going to find a nuclear physicist who could back anything else up with calculations, the author tried and couldn’t.
The problem with your “viewers are ignorant so it doesn’t matter point” is that viewers aren’t totally ignorant and are then fed with very false information which makes any understanding that they did have considerably worse.
> portrayal of radiation sickness as weirdly contagious
Thanks for pointing this out. That part threw me off completely when watching it. Like how would that even work.
it was not perfect but it was a good show... aren't all movies cartoonish in some way?
Too bad they can't make something that scary about air pollution.
* the “bridge of death” scene that never happened
* irradiated firefighters portrayed as themselves being radioactive
* military dude threatening to throw a member of the academy of the sciences out of a helicopter for trivial/arbitrary reasons
I remember there being other notable ones when briefly looking into it after watching it a couple years back.
It's worth noting that show was not a work of nonfiction. In fiction, when the needs of drama and factual accuracy collide, drama usually wins, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Most people who watch something like that without foreknowledge of the truth of the situation are going to believe the drama is real.
While I appreciate the devotion to facts, I feel the portrayal still rings true. These risks are catastrophic and are to this day being handled with scandalous incompetence.
Please note that, despite your apparently reasonable handwaving, in fact fission reactions are still occurring in uranium fuel masses buried deep inside what's left of at least one of Chernobyl's reactors. Not saying there is any need to panic. But try not to let a false sense of security lull you into a coma.
Wired also had an old article about the long-term situation with radioactive contamination, which the surrounding environment has to absorb including wildlife that continues to mutate rapidly last I checked. So, I would say secure containment is paramount.
Nuclear energy can be safe, but we keep failing to recognize how short of foolproof the many fail-safes involved really are even in a high-tech society. Things going bad when you lose power or a single (water) pump are the prime examples.
See, a complete destruction of ZNPP Unit by an external force (bomb) is going to contaminate the immediate area but not much further. It won't be nowhere near at the scale of Chernobyl accident.
On the other hand, The Shelter in Chernobyl NPP contains 50,000+ tons of highly radioactive and highly volatile (light) dust particles of graphite and concrete. If they destroy Novarka and The Shelter in the worst case scenario half of Europe becomes the exclusion zone. Source: I am closely working with Chernobyl guys.
Based on what we see so far in this invasion, we have no reason to rule out intentional destruction of The Shelter.
For instance, you wouldn't expect sane combatant to repeatedly fire ordnance directly into the nuclear power plant units.
In Chernobyl they have already disrupted the top soil level and dug back radioactive particles back in the air and thus in the lungs and GI tracts of their soldiers and civilians unlucky enough to live where the wind blows.
Given the Putin's rhetoric of "why do we need the world without Russia" and similar we cannot rule out destruction of The Shelter.
The so called strikes against nuclear power plants were made far too big of a deal. Ukraine is trying to blow everything out of proportion - and I say this being a total supporter of Ukraine - so that US/EU will help them.
There has been no real danger of incidents around nuclear power plants that I’ve seen, just Ukrainian propaganda efforts to try and frame the Russians for attempting one.
Top soil level disrupted in the Chernobyl zone. This is a big deal. Not chernobyl-accident-big, not fire-on-the-unit big, but still not a nuisance.
I can kind of agree with you and I agree that our propaganda over exaggerates.
So if Putin/military make decisions based on rational thought process then yes we don't have to worry. I'm just not sure they really do. I have seen things in this war which I do not understand from the strategic and tactical standpoint. It's not that they aren't reasons, it's just that I have not been able to figure them out so far.
It turns out that a lot of stuff that Putin was saying was TRUE, not just Trump-style bluster. He does believe that Russia should own a sphere of influence, and that a sort of USSR 2.0 project is both viable and desirable. This is shocking to us (I myself was shocked when he decided to go for a full invasion instead of just expanding the Donetsk and Luhansk republics), but not so much to Ukrainians.
Basically we projected our values onto Putin and believed that he wanted to make his nation rich like the West. Turns out money for him is less important, relatively speaking, than direct power for Russia.
See this video from a Ukrainian analyst where he accurately predicts and explains the war in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8
Meanwhile as we speak we have reports of russian soldiers with radiation poisoning arriving in hospitals in Belarus. While the reports are not yet confirmed, we fully expect that to happen: some of the russian troops are stationed right in the middle of the the Red Forest. Radiation levels in these woods were quite high by themselves even after all these years, but digging that specific soil with tanks and boots - that's a whole lot different story.
Now I have read quite a few books on nuclear disasters before and was aware of the fact that the megaton explosion was not true. So I may not be a representative example of how people reacted to the show.
What was scary to me was the relatively accurate representation of the behavior of the soviet brass. I even found their representation quite mild. And as we see in Ukraine these days, nothing has changed, russians have zero regard for civilians, nuclear power plants are being endangered with shelling, maternity wards are being bombed, bread lines are bombed. Post-soviet mafia does not care about anything but their own kleptocracy and looting.
Every time I think about this I get reminded the Fork Yeah! talk by bcantrill.
https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1986
"An open mind is completely wasted on russians"
"The lawnmower does not care"
[0] - https://mashagessen.com/
Besides being the original reporting, it won’t hijack your back button or come with bonus hate content just below the fold.
With the energy usage of non-western countries exploding quickly this could be a major hinderance to stopping climate change if all prosperous nations go all-in on nuclear and discourage other countries from doing so because of the risk.
A non realistic scenario tbh, it's very unlikely that e.g. germany will construct new nuclear power plants and a lot of not-very-stable countries already use nuclear power as we're seeing right now.
Russia has used its reactors to produce materials to conduct political assassinations on foreign soil, which have ended up injuring and contaminating many innocent people.
In Japan, TEPCO demonstrated a long-running, stunning disregard for safety that led to the Fukashima disaster (and it was not Japan's first nuclear power plant disaster, either): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...
And as a reminder, Chernobyl happened because a bunch of engineers were basically engaged in a dick-measuring contest, likely to satisfy some apparatchik.
I'd say the world's nuclear power programs have demonstrated extensively that humans as a whole can't handle the responsibilities, and now we have numerous, much safer alternatives.
It's an absolute miracle we haven't had an accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon near a population center given bombs have even been released from planes, in some cases with multiple safety systems satisfied - and that the permissive action link system was almost completely bypassed by petulant air force commanders who had weapons set to (I wish I were making this up) codes of all zeros.
And of course you can wait until the wind is blowing in the right direction.
Yes, there would be consequences. But there are also consequences for going on a random shooter spree, and they don't stop random shooters.
Anyway I don't think the concern is that they would target or otherwise intentionally sabotage the reactors -- but that nonetheless they would allow something bad (potentially seriously bad) to happen by pure neglect. Kind of like the way they managed to blow up Reactor 4 in the first place back in 1986.
If you attack that infrastructure, the core will melt down without suffering a direct attack.
IIRC, that's what happened at Fukushima: a tsunami took out the backup generators, which shut down the core cooling system, which then led to the core overheating and melting down.
And as for loss of habitability, the dose rates around Chernobyl are elevated but not incompatible with life. Around Fukushima, I'd join Elon Musk in eating any locally grown food. Better to avoid airplanes if you're concerned about those levels of radiation, below the threshold known to cause the smallest measurable increase in cancer (100 mSv acute, 300 mSv annual). Good read here: [2]
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
[2] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
World population is likely to steeply decline, and globalization plus high living standards will most probably go away. We just won't consume as much energy or make and trade as much stuff in the future.
So, rewording that: a bunch of people will die, enough to reduce the global population, the ones who are left are going to be miserable.
And all of that makes you _less_ worried?
For example, CA uses about 25 GW-day of electricity per day. To make that much on a perfectly calm CA winter day, you need to have about 100 GW of solar capacity standing by. Then, you need to also build energy storage/shifting systems that can shift the energy from the noontime peak to the night, where baseload demand never falls below 20 GWe.
Now consider that there are often 15-day wind lulls in huge regional areas, and sometimes these coincide with big cloudy areas.
The oft quoted "low" costs of wind and solar in levelized $/kWh completely ignore and hide the fact that you have to overbuild at this magnitude and include the storage. The overbuild also implies a massive over-taxing of earth's land and mineral resources to build and rebuild the collectors and storage system.
Saying solar is the cheapest form of energy is like saying kids tents in the yard are the cheapest form of housing, and just pretending the indoor plumbing and heating and pantry of the parent's house cost nothing.
Systems costs are what matter. LCOE must stop driving policy.
Building 30 GW of load-following nuclear would be cheaper and have far lower impact on the environment.
The alternate less cooperative answer is no. 'Renewables' as a concept are not the answer. Biofuel is renewable but causes climate change and air pollution while nuclear is low carbon and low pollution but not considered renewable.
Furthermore, nuclear fuel on earth can power 100% of our primary energy for 4 billion years using the known and demonstrated technology of breeder reactors. This is just as long as the nuclear fusion fuel that powers solar, wind, hydro, bio will last, and so nuclear is just as renewable as those.
LCOE is pertinent because the very low total cost of electricity generated by renewables spares money, enabling investments needed to compensate intermittency (over-provisionning, storage...).
Not a single industrial breeder reactor works satisfactorily (after many decades of R&D backed by huge investments in nations).
If you're going to try to annex Ukraine, you're going to take Chernobyl. Of course there are very good strategic reasons (including the location issue, as mentioned by another comment) to take over all nuclear facilities and electricity production in the nation you're trying to annex.
What kind of annexation is it if you don't take the electricity production facilities and all the nuclear plants? If you do, what, leave all the nuclear power plants under the control of the Ukrainian Government and its proxies? It would be wildly irrational in terms of strategy.
One of the first things you'd want to accomplish, if you can, is to seize utilities and be able to control their function (for all manner of reasons), as well as controlling anything nuclear related.
And, they can't be attacked in that area with anything other than small-arms fire - anything explosive will be too great a risk to send radioactive dust into the air.
that speaks good of you :) For Russia that allowed for one of the pillars of the current Russian propaganda - (the link below in Russian) "It has been discovered that Ukraine was making nuclear weapons in Chernobyl"
https://news.ru/world/ukraina-rabotala-v-chernobyle-nad-sozd...
"Existing high radiations levels allowed to hide that work"
Granted that stupidity doesn't work outside of Russia. Unfortunately inside Russia it is a hit (together with "Ukraine making biological and chemical weapons to attack Russia")
I know a few right wingers in the US who believe this too. They think Putin is a good guy who is cleaning up Ukraine.
Mariupol is going to be another one. They’re destroying it so they can show on their propaganda tv “look Russians, this is what we found in Ukraine, this is why we had to liberate it”.
The plant is secured to prevent possible provocations like the one Ukrainians did in Zaporozhye.