10 ms·

Chernobyl's legacy 30 years on

67 points by ghosh 10y ago

sbdmmg 10y ago
It was a horrible disaster. But, 30 years after the accident, this article is trying to get readers using punchy headlines, like "Children are still being born with severe birth defects". I would have expected a BBC article to be a bit more objective on such controversial conclusions [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Controversy_over_human_health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...
- scott_s 10y ago
  I was also surprised they were citing those numbers as fact, as my understanding was that disagreed with the UN investigations. A recent story on HN from the Guardian contradicts the claims in the BBC article, and cites the UN investigations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11479097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11479097 In particular: The word Chernobyl became synonymous with death on a massive scale. But perception and reality do not always neatly align; in the wake of the disaster, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and others undertook a co-ordinated effort to follow up on health effects. In 2006, after two decades of monitoring they outlined the health effects; of the firefighters exposed to the huge core doses and incredibly toxic smoke, 28 died from acute radiation sickness. A further 15 perished from thyroid cancer. Despite aggressive monitoring for three decades, there has been no significant increase in solid tumours or delayed health effects, even in the hundreds of thousands of minimally protected cleanup workers who helped purge the site after the accident. In the words of the 2008 UNSCEAR report: “There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. It added: “The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.”
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    I found it interesting how different the BBC story was slanted from the Guardian story. As an advocate of nuclear power to my friends it was also interesting (although not scientific) to see who sent me links to which story. The clear cutting story is interesting. It would be interesting to get a read on the lumber they pulled from the forests in terms of how much Cesium it had in the wood.
  - trhway 10y ago
    there is a lot of whitewashing of history is happening (after all there is a huge money race between big solar and wind installs and new "safe" reactors - notice that even 5-10 year ago we didn't have this tsunami of "Chernobyl was really not that big a deal of an accident" articles). Decades after the Chernobyl there is much higher rate of cancer of internal organs, adeno- and thyroid (ie. cancers related to ingestion of radiation sources) among people who lived or spent time in the North Ukraine, South Belarus in the months right after the catastrophe. Only official statistics points to 5000 additional thyroid cancers in Belarus in people who were children at the time.
    - scott_s 10y ago
      What are you basing your claim of increased cancer on? As an outsider, the only way I can get a grip on the situation is to look at claims, and the support for those claims.
      - trhway 10y ago
        for an outsider google is your friend (i intentionally didn't mention any specific cases i'm personally aware of because they can be easily shot down by "sample of 1" type of argument even though everybody around understands what it really is). For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18923372 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18923372 "After the Chernobyl accident, children from Belarus living in highly exposed regions received mean thyroid doses by radioactive fallout higher by a factor of approximately 2 as compared to the survivors of the atomic bomb explosions. This lead to a radiation related increase of thyroid cancer incidence in children and adolescents with the highest incidence in age group 0-4 years up to now totally amounting to approximately 5 000 cases. "
- warmwaffles 10y ago
  BBC is hardly objective. Like all other news agencies in the world, they too, have an agenda.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    That's both correct and useless information. What is the BBCs agenda in this case and how do you figure it influences how they report this story? (FWIW, I don't think the BBC has a particular agenda here, they just have the bias of having lived in a "OMG nuclear" world for the past few decades and nobody cared enough to challenge how a fairly unimportant story is angled)
- marze 10y ago
  It is cute that you have so much faith in Wikipedia. And that world powers haven't tried to downplay the impact.
pieter1976 10y ago
Two years ago I was lucky enough to visit Chernobyl with an organized tour out of Kyev. Strange to think of part of this planet as a forbidden zone, even stranger that it's a tourist attraction.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  It's kind of turned into the world's weirdest nature reserve.
  - lb1lf 10y ago
    -Definitely. I had a tour there a couple of years ago, and the takeaway memory (in addition to the slightly eerie feeling of having been dropped into a massive Fallout game) was as we walked across a bridge over a small canal, I saw the biggest sturgeon-y fish I'd ever seen. The guide shrugged and observed something along the lines of 'This is what happens when #2 in the food chain suddenly becomes #1.' Considering the number of people who now go on Chernobyl tours, I am just waiting for the Lonely Planet crowd to label the place 'spoiled' ;)
  - julianpye 10y ago
    Another amazing 'weird' nature reserve is the DMZ between South and North Korea. You can see the most amazing birds of prey there hunting animals in the area between the propaganda villages.
- overcast 10y ago
  There are far worse places in this world than Chernobyl at this point. Agra, India and war torn Syria comes to mind.
  - Avalaxy 10y ago
    Sorry, I'm not too familiar with India; why is Agra such a bad place?
    - 10y ago
mikeokner 10y ago
I visited about five years ago. Quite frankly it's pretty safe at this point. There were a few spots here and there that made the Geiger counter tick faster than usual, but for the most part the radiation level wasn't out of the ordinary. I definitely wouldn't think twice about going back. Actually, I'm pretty sure some wanderers live there these days. Photos from my trip: https://www.flickr.com/photos/127718378@N07/albums/72157648501650282 https://www.flickr.com/photos/127718378@N07/albums/721576485...
- phreeza 10y ago
  There are other risks which won't show up on a geiger counter. For example the ingestion of radioactive material, which will cause a much higher effective dose than estimated by a geiger counter or dosimeter. This is called a committed dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose
  - saganus 10y ago
    How easy is it to ingest something by accident while in the area? I mean, I don't imagine people going there to be eating random stuff they find. So maybe from dust and other small particles you don't notice?
    - ommunist 10y ago
      From experience. Contamination is patchy. Especially there. You can briefly step into some plutonium contaminated patch for a second, and if you had no proper decontamination on exit - bring this shit home. Once its inside the body - there is no cure.
    - mikeokner 10y ago
      They had all of us go through these scanners on our way out of the city to ensure nothing dangerously radioactive clung to our clothes. They didn't look like the most robust or reliable of devices, though. Found someone else's photo of them: https://www.flickr.com/photos/73155136@N00/518812012 https://www.flickr.com/photos/73155136@N00/518812012
Kenji 10y ago
The most interesting thing about the Chernobyl disaster is that it seems like human inhabitation is a more destructive force towards wildlife than the levels of radiation that are present - wildlife seems to flourish in this area.
- ommunist 10y ago
  Quite the contrary. I lived there in the 90-ies. The nature just recovers, and in 3 years humans are forgotten by wildlife. Moose and blackcock will stare at you from a 2 meter distance not recognising the threat anymore. Basically nature swiftly took back what was colonised by humans during centuries of industrial and agricultural activity there in just few years. So the event shows how insignificant humans are.
  - exar0815 10y ago
    I would rather say the contrary. You can see "our" significance there, anmials forgetting their most dangerous hunter after not even 3 decades. Thats the difference, a society that can remember.
    - ommunist 10y ago
      Unfortunately, the society has no memory as a system. Certain people have.
lanewinfield 10y ago
Well, looks like we're about 1.00011779755% of the way until it's safe again. https://twitter.com/chernobylstatus/status/724956664160509952 https://twitter.com/chernobylstatus/status/72495666416050995...
- samcheng 10y ago
  Someone who clearly doesn't know about half-lives and exponential decay!
ommunist 10y ago
Basically 30 years after it become more and more clear that only the USSR was capable of containing such events properly. In 1986 Soviet Army soldiers with impregnated coats and shovels in just 2 weeks ensured containment of the accident to the controllable level. Something Japanese government in the 21st century cannot achieve in Fukushima with nanotech and robotics in 5 years.
- googletazer 10y ago
  Japanese "construction companies" were rounding up homeless people at subway stations and sending them to Fuku cleanup. They got paid around $80/day from which their room and board fees are deducted. I recall articles and photos that they didn't even have protected footwear, and had to wrap their shoes in plastic bags. If anything, USSR had a more organized and humane (funnily enough) response to Chernobyl.
- bronson 10y ago
  Japan wasn't willing to send 30+ rescue workers to their deaths. That makes it a lot harder.
  - ommunist 10y ago
    Dude, Soviet Army did not sent anyone to death. There were hit and run 2min runs. Once soldier got 5Rh exposure, he was removed, directed to medics and replaced by another soldier. There have been volunteers who dedicated there lives to save the others and we honour them greatly. Only 30-yrs old or elder soldiers were accepted for decontamination works, and only those who had kids already. Their Army contractual payment was tripled. Don't speak of things you do mot know, please. So Japanese managers simply failed to account the exposure and deliver appropriate human ps up to task.
    - niccolop 10y ago
      I think for many people who cannot remember these times, they automatically assume that Chernobyl was worse, simply because how could an advanced country like Japan repeat the same mistakes. Clearly, both incidents were very bad, but to assume one is worse than the other, is probably a mistake, particularly considering the Fukushima incident was so recent.
Floegipoky 10y ago
>> Design flaws led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off reactor four Anybody else catch this wildly inaccurate representation of what caused the explosions? While there certainly were design flaws, it's well-known that this disaster was a direct result of the recklessness of the reactor's operators. I have to wonder if this mischaracterization is an attempt to further scare the public about nuclear power.
- ekun 10y ago
  The whole article is written to scare the public about nuclear power.
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  It's unconscionable for such a reactor design to have been made and put into service in the first place. The particular bungled test that caused the disaster was somewhat of an exceptional circumstance but the RBMK design was really just a ticking timebomb waiting to go off. If it wasn't that test it would have been something else, maybe it wouldn't have been as bad, but it would almost certainly have been at least Fukushima scale regardless.
ams6110 10y ago
Design flaws led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off reactor four Yes, admittedly the design was not great. But deliberate human actions lead to the power surge and subsequent explosion. They were running experiments on the reactor and continued dispite a series of events that were clearly not happening as planned.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  I suspect the specific design flaw they're referring to is the graphite tips of the control rods, and the fact that, for the first few seconds of a SCRAM, the reaction rate is increased. And the control rods jammed in that position. Yes, there was serious human failure in Chernobyl. But when the maximum emergency "oh shit" safety feature works by making things even more unsafe before shutting stuff down, that is the sort of design flaw that probably should be criminal.
  - sickbeard 10y ago
    OP is right the automatic system controlling the rods only had control over 12 rods. The others had been switched to manual. It jammed after the massive power spike causing the rods to fracture. There were a long series of fuckups before they even got to this point.
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      The summary on Wikipedia says: "The SCRAM was started when the EPS-5 button (also known as the AZ-5 button) of the reactor emergency protection system was pressed: this engaged the drive mechanism on all control rods to fully insert them, including the manual control rods that had been incautiously withdrawn earlier." I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it ought to be true from a fail-safe perspective.
  - hga 10y ago
    The 2nd design flaw is the positive void coefficient due to it using light water as a coolant and graphite as a moderator. In its scheme, the light water is a neutron absorber, and if steam voids form in it, there's less water absorbing neutrons. More neutrons -> more split atoms -> more heat -> more/bigger voids, this repeats until the reactor sufficiently disassembles itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient Such designs are illegal in the US, one of the reasons all but the latest version of the CANDU reactor can't be used here.
frik 10y ago
Half of Europe got contaminated with the fallout for thousands of years, from the north down to the Alps many countries were and still are effected. The same idiotic disaster happened again in Japan (and could have been easily prevented by attaching generators, but fearing loosing the face, it was a cultural problem), and contaminated huge parts of the ocean, Hawaii and the west coast. Only a few countries stopped using or never used this very problematic technology. Hopefully, we don't have to see a third such disaster. Neither Soviet Union (USSR) nor Russia, Ukraine or Japan paid other countries money for the damage their action or non-action they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Effects Apparently the downvoters are either lobbiest of the atom lobby, from those named countries or should read more about the history. The true history isn't always nice.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  Coal power is probably responsible for more radiological deaths and injuries than nuclear power, certainly in normal operation (although given the acute impact of specific release events, you might have to include the entirety of the Industrial Revolution to balance out again, which isn't necessarily a fair comparison). On the other hand, if you want to go for specific acute events, hydroelectric dams make nuclear power look safe. The only way to claim otherwise is to choose your dates to ignore the failure of the Banqiao Dam (171,000 deaths) and take the unreasonable high end of death toll estimates from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Presently, Mosul Dam is an excellent example of just how dangerous and real major dam failures can be.
  - frik 10y ago
    All true, but there is one difference, those are visible, their danger is visible or can be smelled (at least by educated people). The half life of C137 and other are invisible and contaminated larger areas and will be not good for people health for many hundreds and often thousands of years. So these two disasters are rather serious, and there isn't even an real solution where to store the waste of atomic plants. Just dumping the waste somewhere in Nevada, Ural, Kazakhstan or at the bottom of the ocean isn't a real solution. No other energy technologies (beside fusion) needs any thinking about storage of waste (secure storage for thousands of years).
user10001 10y ago
Is news coverage of an old nuclear accident Britain's way of consoling Ukraine after failing to offer significant support in the fight against Putin's invasion?

67 points by ghosh 10y ago

It was a horrible disaster. But, 30 years after the accident, this article is trying to get readers using punchy headlines, like "Children are still being born with severe birth defects". I would have expected a BBC article to be a bit more objective on such controversial conclusions [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster#Controversy_over_human_health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...

scott_s 10y ago
I was also surprised they were citing those numbers as fact, as my understanding was that disagreed with the UN investigations. A recent story on HN from the Guardian contradicts the claims in the BBC article, and cites the UN investigations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11479097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11479097 In particular: The word Chernobyl became synonymous with death on a massive scale. But perception and reality do not always neatly align; in the wake of the disaster, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and others undertook a co-ordinated effort to follow up on health effects. In 2006, after two decades of monitoring they outlined the health effects; of the firefighters exposed to the huge core doses and incredibly toxic smoke, 28 died from acute radiation sickness. A further 15 perished from thyroid cancer. Despite aggressive monitoring for three decades, there has been no significant increase in solid tumours or delayed health effects, even in the hundreds of thousands of minimally protected cleanup workers who helped purge the site after the accident. In the words of the 2008 UNSCEAR report: “There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. It added: “The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.”
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I found it interesting how different the BBC story was slanted from the Guardian story. As an advocate of nuclear power to my friends it was also interesting (although not scientific) to see who sent me links to which story. The clear cutting story is interesting. It would be interesting to get a read on the lumber they pulled from the forests in terms of how much Cesium it had in the wood.
- trhway 10y ago
  there is a lot of whitewashing of history is happening (after all there is a huge money race between big solar and wind installs and new "safe" reactors - notice that even 5-10 year ago we didn't have this tsunami of "Chernobyl was really not that big a deal of an accident" articles). Decades after the Chernobyl there is much higher rate of cancer of internal organs, adeno- and thyroid (ie. cancers related to ingestion of radiation sources) among people who lived or spent time in the North Ukraine, South Belarus in the months right after the catastrophe. Only official statistics points to 5000 additional thyroid cancers in Belarus in people who were children at the time.
  - scott_s 10y ago
    What are you basing your claim of increased cancer on? As an outsider, the only way I can get a grip on the situation is to look at claims, and the support for those claims.
    - trhway 10y ago
      for an outsider google is your friend (i intentionally didn't mention any specific cases i'm personally aware of because they can be easily shot down by "sample of 1" type of argument even though everybody around understands what it really is). For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18923372 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18923372 "After the Chernobyl accident, children from Belarus living in highly exposed regions received mean thyroid doses by radioactive fallout higher by a factor of approximately 2 as compared to the survivors of the atomic bomb explosions. This lead to a radiation related increase of thyroid cancer incidence in children and adolescents with the highest incidence in age group 0-4 years up to now totally amounting to approximately 5 000 cases. "
warmwaffles 10y ago
BBC is hardly objective. Like all other news agencies in the world, they too, have an agenda.
- mseebach 10y ago
  That's both correct and useless information. What is the BBCs agenda in this case and how do you figure it influences how they report this story? (FWIW, I don't think the BBC has a particular agenda here, they just have the bias of having lived in a "OMG nuclear" world for the past few decades and nobody cared enough to challenge how a fairly unimportant story is angled)
marze 10y ago
It is cute that you have so much faith in Wikipedia. And that world powers haven't tried to downplay the impact.

pieter1976 10y ago

Two years ago I was lucky enough to visit Chernobyl with an organized tour out of Kyev. Strange to think of part of this planet as a forbidden zone, even stranger that it's a tourist attraction.

theandrewbailey 10y ago
It's kind of turned into the world's weirdest nature reserve.
- lb1lf 10y ago
  -Definitely. I had a tour there a couple of years ago, and the takeaway memory (in addition to the slightly eerie feeling of having been dropped into a massive Fallout game) was as we walked across a bridge over a small canal, I saw the biggest sturgeon-y fish I'd ever seen. The guide shrugged and observed something along the lines of 'This is what happens when #2 in the food chain suddenly becomes #1.' Considering the number of people who now go on Chernobyl tours, I am just waiting for the Lonely Planet crowd to label the place 'spoiled' ;)
- julianpye 10y ago
  Another amazing 'weird' nature reserve is the DMZ between South and North Korea. You can see the most amazing birds of prey there hunting animals in the area between the propaganda villages.
overcast 10y ago
There are far worse places in this world than Chernobyl at this point. Agra, India and war torn Syria comes to mind.
- Avalaxy 10y ago
  Sorry, I'm not too familiar with India; why is Agra such a bad place?
  - 10y ago

mikeokner 10y ago

I visited about five years ago. Quite frankly it's pretty safe at this point. There were a few spots here and there that made the Geiger counter tick faster than usual, but for the most part the radiation level wasn't out of the ordinary. I definitely wouldn't think twice about going back. Actually, I'm pretty sure some wanderers live there these days. Photos from my trip: https://www.flickr.com/photos/127718378@N07/albums/72157648501650282 https://www.flickr.com/photos/127718378@N07/albums/721576485...

phreeza 10y ago
There are other risks which won't show up on a geiger counter. For example the ingestion of radioactive material, which will cause a much higher effective dose than estimated by a geiger counter or dosimeter. This is called a committed dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose
- saganus 10y ago
  How easy is it to ingest something by accident while in the area? I mean, I don't imagine people going there to be eating random stuff they find. So maybe from dust and other small particles you don't notice?
  - ommunist 10y ago
    From experience. Contamination is patchy. Especially there. You can briefly step into some plutonium contaminated patch for a second, and if you had no proper decontamination on exit - bring this shit home. Once its inside the body - there is no cure.
  - mikeokner 10y ago
    They had all of us go through these scanners on our way out of the city to ensure nothing dangerously radioactive clung to our clothes. They didn't look like the most robust or reliable of devices, though. Found someone else's photo of them: https://www.flickr.com/photos/73155136@N00/518812012 https://www.flickr.com/photos/73155136@N00/518812012

Kenji 10y ago

The most interesting thing about the Chernobyl disaster is that it seems like human inhabitation is a more destructive force towards wildlife than the levels of radiation that are present - wildlife seems to flourish in this area.

ommunist 10y ago
Quite the contrary. I lived there in the 90-ies. The nature just recovers, and in 3 years humans are forgotten by wildlife. Moose and blackcock will stare at you from a 2 meter distance not recognising the threat anymore. Basically nature swiftly took back what was colonised by humans during centuries of industrial and agricultural activity there in just few years. So the event shows how insignificant humans are.
- exar0815 10y ago
  I would rather say the contrary. You can see "our" significance there, anmials forgetting their most dangerous hunter after not even 3 decades. Thats the difference, a society that can remember.
  - ommunist 10y ago
    Unfortunately, the society has no memory as a system. Certain people have.

lanewinfield 10y ago

Well, looks like we're about 1.00011779755% of the way until it's safe again. https://twitter.com/chernobylstatus/status/724956664160509952 https://twitter.com/chernobylstatus/status/72495666416050995...

samcheng 10y ago
Someone who clearly doesn't know about half-lives and exponential decay!

ommunist 10y ago

Basically 30 years after it become more and more clear that only the USSR was capable of containing such events properly. In 1986 Soviet Army soldiers with impregnated coats and shovels in just 2 weeks ensured containment of the accident to the controllable level. Something Japanese government in the 21st century cannot achieve in Fukushima with nanotech and robotics in 5 years.

googletazer 10y ago
Japanese "construction companies" were rounding up homeless people at subway stations and sending them to Fuku cleanup. They got paid around $80/day from which their room and board fees are deducted. I recall articles and photos that they didn't even have protected footwear, and had to wrap their shoes in plastic bags. If anything, USSR had a more organized and humane (funnily enough) response to Chernobyl.
bronson 10y ago
Japan wasn't willing to send 30+ rescue workers to their deaths. That makes it a lot harder.
- ommunist 10y ago
  Dude, Soviet Army did not sent anyone to death. There were hit and run 2min runs. Once soldier got 5Rh exposure, he was removed, directed to medics and replaced by another soldier. There have been volunteers who dedicated there lives to save the others and we honour them greatly. Only 30-yrs old or elder soldiers were accepted for decontamination works, and only those who had kids already. Their Army contractual payment was tripled. Don't speak of things you do mot know, please. So Japanese managers simply failed to account the exposure and deliver appropriate human ps up to task.
  - niccolop 10y ago
    I think for many people who cannot remember these times, they automatically assume that Chernobyl was worse, simply because how could an advanced country like Japan repeat the same mistakes. Clearly, both incidents were very bad, but to assume one is worse than the other, is probably a mistake, particularly considering the Fukushima incident was so recent.

Floegipoky 10y ago

>> Design flaws led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off reactor four Anybody else catch this wildly inaccurate representation of what caused the explosions? While there certainly were design flaws, it's well-known that this disaster was a direct result of the recklessness of the reactor's operators. I have to wonder if this mischaracterization is an attempt to further scare the public about nuclear power.

ekun 10y ago
The whole article is written to scare the public about nuclear power.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
It's unconscionable for such a reactor design to have been made and put into service in the first place. The particular bungled test that caused the disaster was somewhat of an exceptional circumstance but the RBMK design was really just a ticking timebomb waiting to go off. If it wasn't that test it would have been something else, maybe it wouldn't have been as bad, but it would almost certainly have been at least Fukushima scale regardless.

ams6110 10y ago

Design flaws led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off reactor four Yes, admittedly the design was not great. But deliberate human actions lead to the power surge and subsequent explosion. They were running experiments on the reactor and continued dispite a series of events that were clearly not happening as planned.

jcranmer 10y ago
I suspect the specific design flaw they're referring to is the graphite tips of the control rods, and the fact that, for the first few seconds of a SCRAM, the reaction rate is increased. And the control rods jammed in that position. Yes, there was serious human failure in Chernobyl. But when the maximum emergency "oh shit" safety feature works by making things even more unsafe before shutting stuff down, that is the sort of design flaw that probably should be criminal.
- sickbeard 10y ago
  OP is right the automatic system controlling the rods only had control over 12 rods. The others had been switched to manual. It jammed after the massive power spike causing the rods to fracture. There were a long series of fuckups before they even got to this point.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    The summary on Wikipedia says: "The SCRAM was started when the EPS-5 button (also known as the AZ-5 button) of the reactor emergency protection system was pressed: this engaged the drive mechanism on all control rods to fully insert them, including the manual control rods that had been incautiously withdrawn earlier." I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it ought to be true from a fail-safe perspective.
- hga 10y ago
  The 2nd design flaw is the positive void coefficient due to it using light water as a coolant and graphite as a moderator. In its scheme, the light water is a neutron absorber, and if steam voids form in it, there's less water absorbing neutrons. More neutrons -> more split atoms -> more heat -> more/bigger voids, this repeats until the reactor sufficiently disassembles itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient Such designs are illegal in the US, one of the reasons all but the latest version of the CANDU reactor can't be used here.

frik 10y ago

Half of Europe got contaminated with the fallout for thousands of years, from the north down to the Alps many countries were and still are effected. The same idiotic disaster happened again in Japan (and could have been easily prevented by attaching generators, but fearing loosing the face, it was a cultural problem), and contaminated huge parts of the ocean, Hawaii and the west coast. Only a few countries stopped using or never used this very problematic technology. Hopefully, we don't have to see a third such disaster. Neither Soviet Union (USSR) nor Russia, Ukraine or Japan paid other countries money for the damage their action or non-action they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Effects Apparently the downvoters are either lobbiest of the atom lobby, from those named countries or should read more about the history. The true history isn't always nice.

jcranmer 10y ago
Coal power is probably responsible for more radiological deaths and injuries than nuclear power, certainly in normal operation (although given the acute impact of specific release events, you might have to include the entirety of the Industrial Revolution to balance out again, which isn't necessarily a fair comparison). On the other hand, if you want to go for specific acute events, hydroelectric dams make nuclear power look safe. The only way to claim otherwise is to choose your dates to ignore the failure of the Banqiao Dam (171,000 deaths) and take the unreasonable high end of death toll estimates from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Presently, Mosul Dam is an excellent example of just how dangerous and real major dam failures can be.
- frik 10y ago
  All true, but there is one difference, those are visible, their danger is visible or can be smelled (at least by educated people). The half life of C137 and other are invisible and contaminated larger areas and will be not good for people health for many hundreds and often thousands of years. So these two disasters are rather serious, and there isn't even an real solution where to store the waste of atomic plants. Just dumping the waste somewhere in Nevada, Ural, Kazakhstan or at the bottom of the ocean isn't a real solution. No other energy technologies (beside fusion) needs any thinking about storage of waste (secure storage for thousands of years).

user10001 10y ago

Is news coverage of an old nuclear accident Britain's way of consoling Ukraine after failing to offer significant support in the fight against Putin's invasion?