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Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Radioactive Material Was a Selfie
- exabrial 10y agoWhen they selfie, was the camera on timer? What is the source of the lightning looking stuff?
- cauterize 10y agoYep. "so it’s likely this photo was an old-school timed selfie. The shutter speed was probably a little slower than for the other photos in order for him to get into position, which explains why he seems to be moving and why the glow from his flashlight looks like a lightning flash"
- sitharus 10y agoYes, it was a timer. It's a flashlight. from the article: [...] so it’s likely this photo was an old-school timed selfie. The shutter speed was probably a little slower than for the other photos in order for him to get into position, which explains why he seems to be moving and why the glow from his flashlight looks like a lightning flash. The graininess of the photo, though, is likely due to the radiation.
- jordache 10y ago"The shutter speed was probably a little slower than for the other photos in order for him to get into position, which explains why he seems to be moving and why the glow from his flashlight looks like a lightning flash." WHAT? the timer of the shutter has nothing to do with the the actual shutter speed. Using a timer for an old skool selfie has no relationship to blurriness in the exposure caused by too slow of a shutter speed.
- criley2 10y agoUnless he does not have a timer and instead reduced aperature dramatically (high f/stop) to reduce light, then increased exposure time dramatically. The result would be a "properly exposed" shot for anything except what was moving during the shot, which would presumably be him running so he could stand still and be exposed during the already running exposure.
- Alupis 10y agoIf the shutter was open long enough for him to walk around the camera, it would be one giant blur, not spots of blurriness, with two distinct humanoids in the frame. This article is filled with inaccuracies and/or guesses (as other HN'ers are pointing out in other comments). For example, it's increadibly unlikely the photographer of this image is still alive. Standing that close to that much radiation for long enough to setup a camera, walk around it and putz around for a while... I don't buy it. Majority of the workers involved in the containment died shortly afterwards, or developed terrible ailments due to extreme radiation exposure, leading to early death.
- photoGrant 10y agoTo play devil's advocate, this can actually be easily achieved with a timer delay, a shutter drag AND a flash.
- Alupis 10y agoI don't believe that would explain the two distinct humanoid figures, with little motion blur between them. The person would have had to move extremely quickly from bent-over to up-right (almost instantly as the shutter opened) and held that position. Seems unlikely. In addition, maybe it's just the lighting effects, but the figure standing almost upright is wearing what appears to be a yellow jumpsuit, while the figure bending over is wearing white. The red box on their hip is probably some sort of geiger counter, and most folks getting this close probably had one.
- foobarrio 10y agoThe photo was taken 10 years after the initial meltdown and photographer is alive. When the meltdown first happened, anyone that close would be dead under 2 minutes. The radiation figures are in the article. If were to take a 10 second photo, 4 seconds in one spot, 1 second moving and another 5 seconds in another spot I wouldn't be a full blur. The part of me moving only accounts for 1/10 of the entire exposure and the places where I stood still would be much brighter. I can exaggerate this by turning off my flash light when I was moving.
- lvs 10y agoNot sure why you're so breathless. Of course you could time a photo by using a long exposure, and you'd get precisely this kind of effect for a moving subject in a very dark room.
- roywiggins 10y agoIf you don't have a timer, the easiest way to take a self portrait is pop the camera on a tripod and open the shutter for the longest exposure your camera can handle. Then, you move really fast as you get into position and then stand still for the remainder of the exposure. You'll look a little bit transparent and be surrounded by fainter motion blur from when you were getting into position. I've done exactly this on moonlit nights, and the result looks completely consistent with the photo in the article. You also get ghostly duplicates if you hesitate as you get into position. Could the shutter speed was an accident and the subject happened to pause enough to show up visibly on the image- much like the first photographed human, who was getting his shoe shined: http://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/ http://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/ If it's not a selfie, it's an extraordinarily lucky accident that there's a recognizable human in the photo. ed: it's possible it was just really dark, and all the photos were exposed for that long. Someone wanted a picture of Korneyev, and he moved during the exposure. But the combination of "blurry person" and "crisp person" makes me lean towards the selfie hypothesis. Someone trying and failing to stand still won't wave a flashlight around. Someone rushing to get into a selfie shot might.
- pcl 10y agothe first photographed human, who was getting his shoe shined Of course, it actually contains two humans -- the man getting his shoes shined, and the one doing the shining. Somehow it's always bothered me that the shoe-shiner hasn't gotten equal credit. Arguably, he was actually first, since it looks like he's a bit closer to the camera.
- jordache 10y agoOk so if it's such a archaic camera that lacks a timer feature, you think it would feature configuration 2nd curtain flash setting? A dumb camera would fire the flash immediately upon shutter click. The guy would not be able to to stand in front of the camera to allow the flash to bounce off his body
- return0 10y agoI have an old soviet camera that has both timer and shutter speed adjustment that lasts many seconds (both mechanical). The photo looks like it combines the initial camera-flash photo (blue helmet pose) with the blurriness (and flashlight movement) of a long exposure.
- Dateki 10y agoI would have expected the film to be completely blackened, once brought to proximity of a strong source of gamma radiation. (i.e. the "Most Dangerous Radioactive Material") Even if the camera was put into lead encasing, the shielding shutter was opened for quite a long time and pointed directly at the source of the gamma rays.
- Jabbles 10y ago> Research on the substance has found, for example, that dumping water on it after it forms actually does stop some fission products from decaying and producing more dangerous isotopes. What? I bet it doesn't. There's no way cooling will interfere with the half-life of the elements. They probably mean that solidifying the extremities reduces toxic/radiation exposure.
- schwarrrtz 10y agoMaybe the water absorbs neutrons and slows down the chain reaction?
- caf 10y agoBy absorbing neutrons it reduces neutron-activation of elements in the surrounding environment. The downside is that elements like Cesium are water-soluble so you'll be spreading stuff around a lot more.
- criley2 10y agoCould it have something to do with preventing neutrons from rapidly increasing the rate of decay? Because we already use water based neutron moderators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_moderator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_moderator
- Jabbles 10y agoI don't think the Corium is likely to be critical - and if it is, pouring water on it will probably cause an explosion...
- mysterypie 10y ago> There's no way cooling will interfere with the half-life of the elements. Wow, so even at absolute zero, decay happens at the same rate? It kind of makes sense, but it's surprising if you've never thought about it. Wikipedia seems to confirm it: "A number of experiments have found that decay rates of other modes of artificial and naturally occurring radioisotopes are, to a high degree of precision, unaffected by external conditions such as temperature, pressure, the chemical environment, and electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay )
- fvrghl 10y agoAm I the only one who thinks it looks like he is headbanging while holding an electric guitar?
- Crito 10y agoMore complete quote of the photographer's joke: > "Don't worry, Soviet radiation is the best in the world. It makes hair thicker and men more potent." http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/alive-in-the-dead-zone http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/alive-in-the-dead-z...
- mirimir 10y agoLove this! There are some great stories from the Mir station. Brewing mash from random carbs, and distilling "vodka". The haze of tobacco smoke. From black Russian tobacco. And remember, Chernobyl was caused by a team of (probably drunk) operators just fucking around. Juggling a big knife, basically ;) Showing off, for kicks. 58 points by hberg 1 hour ago | flag | 21 comments
- exar0815 10y agoAbsolute, complete bullshit, sorry. The experiment massively went wrong, but the people, of whom many died trying to stop the disaster caused by the typical soviet problem of bad planning, slavish obedience to higher-ups and generally worse education and training, should still be seen as what they were. Victims of their system, and calling them "drunk" adds insult to injury. Edit: typos
- mirimir 10y agoI agree with your points about crazy management, bad planning, chaos, poor training, etc. For the rest, I'm just going from what I've read, and from my experience of the culture. Did you live in the Soviet Union? If so, for very long?
- exar0815 10y agoLuckily, no. I am to young. But I know some people who did and took the first chance to get away from there. More or less the tenor is: Good that its gone.
- acqq 10y agoMuch more information about the problems to keep the plant from causing more damage is in the NYT article from 2014, the one where the state of health of Artur Korneyev is given: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/27/science/chernobyl-capping-a-catastrophe.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/27/science/cherno... "These days Mr. Korneyev works in the project management unit, but because of his health — he has cataracts and other problems related to his heavy radiation exposure during his first three years — he is no longer allowed inside the plant. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.”"
- stplsd 10y agoThere is a very interesting documentary from 1991 made as part of BBC Horizon series called "Inside Chernobyl Sarcophagus" --> www.imdb.com/title/tt1607059
- LaFolle 10y agoA great use case for drones to fly in and take photographs. A quick Google search shows it already has been done => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7YbBvbRYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7YbBvbRYQ Had drones existed in 1986 and deployed to take close photographs of disaster, would it have been safe to access that drone after it returned?
- bigiain 10y agoYeah, except when: "TEPCO spokesman Junichi Matsumoto said that due to its small size and weight, the drone was “unlikely to crash through the rooftop and damage the reactor.”" http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/06/25/t-hawk-uav-fails-at-fukushima/ http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/06/25/t-hawk-uav-fails-at-fuk...
- Trombone12 10y agoThat was a bad link, those are just photos of the outside, where it was perfectly fine to visit if you avoided standing downwind. In fact, they apparently overflew it just two days later and took this footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoJTNC-3XLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoJTNC-3XLA They've tried to put drones into Fukushima, attempts so far have been unproductive one way trips. Not all of that is the radiation killing stuff, apparently the geometry to be navigated has some pretty narrow passages as well.
- exar0815 10y agoWell, maybe, except the fact that the SU tried to use Robots built in Western Germany, and the radioactivity just fried them. They were absolutely inusable under those conditions. Read about radiation shielding in space missions and the problems that microelectronics have there.
- LaFolle 10y agoI see. Quote from wikipedia: "Equipment assembled included remote-controlled bulldozers and robot-carts that could detect radioactivity and carry hot debris. Valery Legasov (first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow) said, in 1987: "But we learned that robots are not the great remedy for everything. Where there was very high radiation, the robot ceased to be a robot—the electronics quit working.""
- caf 10y agoOf the five corium creations, only Cherobyl's has escaped its containment. This is statement is a bit too definitive, because it simply isn't known yet how bad the breach is at Fukushima Daiichi No. 2 - from muon radiography it certainly seems to have breached the primary (steel) containment.
- cipherous 10y agoAmazing that Artur Korneyev, the guy in the picture, is still alive.
- owyn 10y agoThere's an amazing documentary about this that contains a lot of footage of the actual incident and cleanup called the "Battle of Chernobyl". http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/ http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/ Things that still haunt me: the helicopter pilots who put the initial fires out flew in 120-180C temperatures and pretty much all died of radiation. And the sequence that starts about here: https://youtu.be/ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430 https://youtu.be/ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430 Where they are picking up radioactive materials by hand and throwing it off the roof next to the reactor because the robots they were trying to use all break down. Even 1 hour of exposure was deadly so they rotated through shifts, and the guys who did it were called "Bio Robots"
- rdtsc 10y agoThat's a good documentary. Haven't seen it before. I remembered distinctly when it happened, well when it was anounced on TV on evening news. It was really mentioned in passing -- oh by the way, there was incident at Chernobyl, a quick flash or some white smoke coming out in the distance and then ... sports. My dad knew it was something more than that and said something like "Oh shit, this could be really bad". People have learned when they published something as small in the news, they would multiply by some factor to get an idea how bad it really was. Then something really bizare happened. Refuges had started to stream into different cities. And for some strange reason, they were shunned. Others somehow thought these survivors were contaminated, cursed, builty or what have you. So instead of being embraced and helped, they found themselves trying to hide who they are and where they came from.
- rsync 10y ago"Then something really bizare happened. Refuges had started to stream into different cities. And for some strange reason, they were shunned. Others somehow thought these survivors were contaminated, cursed, builty or what have you. So instead of being embraced and helped, they found themselves trying to hide who they are and where they came from." There is an excellent book that tackles this very subject named "All that is Solid Melts Into Air" by Darragh McKeon. I highly recommend the book and it's not too long - 200 pages give or take. It chronicles a bit of the disaster as well as the lives of some people that live near it as well as rescue workers called in to respond to it.
- rasz_pl 10y agoI bet bionerd23 knows Mr. Korneyev quite well.
- mclovinit 10y agoSomewhat related to this, I am amazed by the analysis done by bionerd23. Her study of cesium 137 levels in vegetation is interesting. She measured the levels in mushrooms found in Bavaria and apples found just 4km away from Chernobyl and saw that only 0.10 of cesium was found in apples. Interesting study. You can find her videos on youtube.
- xigency 10y ago> and in doing so has been exposed to more radiation than almost anyone in history This is patently absurd. Those exposed to the most radiation are all dead and died from radiation exposure, effects, and side effects.
- make3 10y agoI also thought the claim was really dubious, although I thought the author meant total over the guys lifetime, which would probably not be impossible if he spread the exposure quite a bit (compared to the people who died from shorter intense exposure)
- ars 10y agoSee here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis The idea is that a small amount of radiation spread over time is survivable. So in sum total he may have had more than anyone else. (I won't include anyone who instantly died in hiroshima.)
- xigency 10y agoYes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are obvious comparisons with the amount of instantaneous radiation affecting thousands of individuals. My initial thoughts went to Marie Curie (small amounts over time), and Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, or other Los Alamos engineers involved in criticality accidents. Plus, other clean-up workers working in disasters like Chernobyl whose deaths from radiation caused illnesses most likely went unpublished. So at best, that puts him in 10th place with a very loose interpretation, or otherwise significantly behind, and maybe in the top 10 of living individuals. The phrase "in history" is poor writing, however.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe most interesting thing about the elephant's foot was that it disproved the "China Syndrome" hypothesis. That hypothesis of course was that an uncontrolled meltdown would simply melt down through to China (not that it could really go past the core :-) However, what the elephant's foot showed was that the melted core would diffuse into the material as it was melting, eventually it loses enough mass that it goes subcritical, re-freezes and that's that. That is why pretty much every western reactor has a reservoir of sand under the containment vehicle, if the worst of the worst happens, it melts into the sand which becomes glass.
- pdkl95 10y ago> the "China Syndrome" hypothesis Having seen the movie, suspect that a lot of people saw what they wanted to see, and not what the movie actually said. I'm fairly certain the comment about the core melting "all the way to China" was a joke/hyperbole.
- superuser2 10y agoIIRC from the movie, it wasn't that it would burrow through to China, but that it would burrow to groundwater and then become a rocket propelled by steam.
- tajen 10y agoNuclear fusion (the next gen of energy - as opposed to the current, radioactive fission) requires temperatures of 1m degrees. In case of meltdown, would the sand be enough, or would we have something closer to a China Syndrome?
- wycx 10y agoI doubt you will melt very far. For the same reason it is difficult to sustain super-liquidus magmas on earth-you just melt more material until your composition and temperature converge. Even a fusion reactor has small thermal mass relative to the rest of the earth.
- unicornporn 10y ago> The shutter speed was probably a little slower than for the other photos in order for him to get into position, which explains why he seems to be moving and why the glow from his flashlight looks like a lightning flash. The graininess of the photo, though, is likely due to the radiation. Yeah, wouldn't that have been exotic. Having worked many years with high end scanning and digitizing photographs from the 1850 to today I can say that apparent grain in a photo from the 80s is not a strange thing, especially if it's a high ISO film. Correcting a bad exposure when post processing enhances that grain. The "graininess" here looks more like interpolation artifacts after upressing, possibly a highly compressed JPEG, though.
- RichieAHB 10y agoAlways makes me wonder whether these people know what the radiation is doing to them and they're doing it out of some heroic duty, or whether they have no idea whatsoever ... I can't stop looking.
- RichieAHB 10y agoAlways makes me wonder whether these people know what the radiation is doing to them and they're doing it out of some heroic duty, or whether they have no idea whatsoever ... I can't stop looking.
- mirap 10y ago“Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world." :)
- dickwads 10y ago"Was a Selfie" - not a selfie "Remarkably, he’s probably still alive." "the radiation probably caused the film to develop strangely" Is there any solid info or is this just clickbait at its best?
- lostlogin 10y agoIn case some didn't follow the first link, it contains this gem: Korneyev's sense of humor remained intact, though. He seemed to have no regrets about his life's work. “Soviet radiation,” he joked, “is the best radiation in the world.
- bobwaycott 10y agoI can't get past seeing two users of the Speed Force--one bent over an electric guitar, the other thumping along on bass, captured in a flash of lightning.