8 ms·

A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986

167 points by quakeguy 9y ago

0xbear 9y ago
I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can’t be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don’t remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.
- tantalor 9y ago
  And we are lucky for it. If the runaway core had reached the water table beneath, it would have exploded and irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.
  - git_rancher 9y ago
    What? Holy smokes! This is the first I've heard of this. Can you share any more info? Sources?
    - MertsA 9y ago
      That's the case for any nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl isn't special in that regard. If you have a very dense blob of liquid fuel (called corium after a meltdown) generating megawatts of power it's going to melt through concrete and steel, it's just a matter of time. Once that blob hits a ton of water underneath it forcing all of that water to heat up will create enormous pressure and the only way out is up.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        Speaking only for myself, the surprising claim was not “explode”, but “irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.”
    - mseebach 9y ago
      It appears to be based on a quote from the 1979 film "The China Syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrom...
  - myth_drannon 9y ago
    Why it didn't happen in Fukushima?
    - proaralyst 9y ago
      They managed to cool the corium by flooding it with water.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- a_bonobo 9y ago
  Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl has many stories like this, highly recommended reading if you want to know more about the incident
- pvg 9y ago
  The accident was acknowledged by Soviet news on April 28th, two days after it took place. While they were slow to provide details there was no public denial - they initially denied anything was wrong in response to private inquiries by Swedish diplomats since elevated radiation levels were measured in Sweden. This is an ABC news report from the time which also shows the Soviet announcement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmeeEpWxfRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmeeEpWxfRY
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    That may have been what they said to the Western media. It does not necessarily match what they said to their own government run TV channels and newspapers.
    - pvg 9y ago
      What do you mean? The Soviet announcement is right there in the video. It's an announcement on Vremya, the official evening news TV program broadcast across the Soviet Union.
      - 0xbear 9y ago
        The accident happened on April 26th, and was acknowledged 36 hours after when they began to evacuate Pripyat, a town in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. As I said, it took about a day for them to acknowledge it, and it was only acknowledged when it became clear that it could not be swept under the rug. Your video does not contradict that.
        pvg 9y ago
        You wrote "Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day)". That's not what happened, you can look it up in any of the numerous timelines and accounts of the accident and the reporting and Soviet disclosures. The evacuation of Pripyat started before the first public Soviet announcement as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Evacuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Evacuation And the section immediately following regarding the announcement.
- smsm42 9y ago
  Note also this was very close to May holidays (May 1st etc.) when people customary go out, with kids, some go camping, etc. Kiev - a city with population over 2 millions - is 90 km from Chernobyl, and nobody there knew what's going on for a while. I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. And of course when it was known there was no proper information on dealing with radioactive contaminations, mostly everybody would go by wildest rumors and home remedies. No tools for measuring radioactivity either anywhere to be bought, people made their own eventually. Etc., etc.
  - trhway 9y ago
    > I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. My post with some effect summary for Belarus https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dtrhway%2315737928 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%...
    - smsm42 9y ago
      AFAIR due to the weather patterns Belarus got a lot of the fallout and Kiev area was affected much less.
  - petre 9y ago
    Yes, we were camping as well. It all happened during a sunny weekend.
    - dboreham 9y ago
      It was raining very heavily in Scotland unfortunately. Probably also Norway.
- Yizahi 9y ago
  Check this story - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-chernobyls-most-dangerous-radioactive-material-was-a-selfie https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-ch...
- hutzlibu 9y ago
  " seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning" I heard those hero's had mostly no clue, that they were on a heroic suicide mission, nor did they had any choice in the matter. Knowing a bit about UDSSR I can very well imagine this to be true, but does anyone knows more? edit: this article confirms it, but I am not sure if the site is reliable (it quotes the "socialist worker") http://www.upworthy.com/you-probably-dont-know-their-names-but-30-years-ago-they-saved-europe http://www.upworthy.com/you-probably-dont-know-their-names-b...
ribs 9y ago
I’m just reading the abstract at the moment, but this paper says that there was a -nuclear- explosion, not just a steam explosion?
- meritt 9y ago
  Correct. There's a decent lay summary here: https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-crippled-chernobyl https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-cr...
- ajross 9y ago
  That's right. The finding is that the runaway fission reaction produced an explosion of the fissile material directly instead of merely overheating the enclosing cooling system. It didn't remotely approach the yield of a warhead relative to the amount of material, but it was still a "nuclear explosion".
- mannykannot 9y ago
  An important threshold is crossed if the core, or part of it, becomes 'prompt critical'. Normally, a reactor's chain reaction is only sustained with the contribution of the delayed neutrons, which are occasionally emitted by fission products, in addition to the prompt neutrons, which are emitted during fission itself. If an assembly becomes so supercritical that the reaction can be sustained by the prompt neutrons alone, the doubling time of the exponential growth in the reaction rate suddenly becomes orders of magnitude shorter, leading to an explosive release of energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_nuclear_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_n...
- dboreham 9y ago
  It's always been known that there was a nuclear explosion, it was just called a "power excursion" so avoid frightening the children.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    It was an excursion... mind you that if you drenched me in gasoline and tossed a match I’d be, “In a state of accelerated thermal decomposition.” That’s not a lie, it’s just a bland way of saying that I’d be burning like a Yule log.
gumby 9y ago
It was interesting that there were firm denials at the time, yet everyone was used to propaganda (yes, fake news) so it wasn't at first clear if there was a coverup or the claim of a problem was western misdirection! But reports from neighboring countries pretty quickly put that to rest, and then the narrative switched to the heroics of the emergency workers (who were indeed heroic and, sadly, literally self-sacrificing. The plume traveled over northern Western Europe, but West Germany, at least, didn't take any immediate action. 15-20 years later there appeared to be a slew of unusual cancers (e.g. my mother in law's tear duct; my friend's mother salivary gland...unusual ones in accretive tissue. But I don't know if there's been any systematic survey to see if there was an assignable increase in the death rate, or if I am just divining a signal from what's actually small-n noise.
- alexeckermann 9y ago
  Theres some studies done of the effects of Chernobyl over the years since. Of note are the WHO and the Chernobyl Tissue Bank. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com I went to a talk by Prof Geraldine Thomas, of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank and Imperial College London, sharing her insights and research into radiation and its effects on the body. The key takeaway from the talk is to take into account the type of release, what radionuclides were exposed to the public and their half-life, and then what the passage of that particular element is through the body to determine what damage can be done. A notable example is of Iodine-131 causing of thyroid lesions and cancers in the direct aftermath of an event because of its short half life of alpha decay directly into tissue that bioaccumulates Iodine, keeping the alpha decay focussed on a very specific tissue. Other heavier elements tend to (I am not a biologist or nuclear scientist, paraphrasing from a talk a couple years ago) can leave the body without being bioaccumulated, having only released 'tolerable' amounts of alpha decay into a broad area of tissue. It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors. But I — a nobody with a causal subject matter interest — would be hesitant to suggest that there was causation in absence of a hypothesis based on biology tied to the known Chernobyl emissions. Either way, we can find out more about radiations effect on biology if a study takes place — or if there is already one out there?
amenghra 9y ago
Chernobyl journal by a Elena Filatova, who biked around the ghostly place a few years later, is worth reading: https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-volume-1 https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-vol...
- josephcooney 9y ago
  Apparently she took a bit of artistic licence with some of the things she wrote, although the pictures are real, the place is real, and she did visit there. http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip
  - audiometry 9y ago
    I remember how furious the slashdot community was over this!
paulgerhardt 9y ago
Previously theorized by Charlie Stross in a significantly more fanciful, but riveting take: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/
- le-mark 9y ago
  That was new to me, thanks! Excellent example of pulling several plausible ideas into one outlandish tale. Sure, it’s a devil’s brew, but who wouldn’t say no to a specific impulse on the order of twelve thousand? That kind of Isp is great for interplanetory/interstellar cruising, not so much for getting off the pad. That's why ion engines aren't used to get to orbit; thrust to weight matters when starting from zero m/s.
  - Zaak 9y ago
    Isp just says how efficient you are at turning reaction mass into delta-v. Nuclear rockets can attain both high Isp and high thrust.
- rurban 9y ago
  How much truth is there in it? Did they lie about their experiment?
cmurf 9y ago
We decided to analyze this scenario in detail, but the project was postponed at the time [1987] due to the lack of high-quality, high-resolution gridded weather data covering April-May 1986 for driving the dispersion model. When in 2016 the high-resolution regional reanalysis for Europe was published and extended back in time to 1980, it became possible for us to perform good-quality dispersion modeling. Wow.
rdtsc 9y ago
> It is concluded that the two explosions in the reactor that many witnesses recognized were thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions at the bottom of a few fuel channels and then some 2.7 s later a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor vessel. The nuclear explosions formed a plasma jet that shot upward through the still intact refueling tubes, rammed the 350-kg plugs, and continued through the quite thin roof and then some 2.5 to 3 km into the atmosphere where the meteorological situation provided a route to Cherepovets. That's pretty crazy. It ended up as a nuclear canon firing 350kg (700lbs) projectiles straight up into the atmosphere, right through the roof. Even more odd is that some lab, for a completely unrelated reason (building a liquid oxygen and nitrogen facility) was sampling noble gases from the atmosphere. And then someone could go back and draw these conclusions more than 30 years later.
kurthr 9y ago
And there is a large new release of Ru-106 somewhere in Russia... what's going on? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac... Posted on its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240
- mikkom 9y ago
  Russia has just confirmed that they too have detected it, previously they denied they have detected anything > The highest concentration was registered at the station in Argayash, a village in the Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals, which had "extremely high pollution" of Ru-106, exceeding natural background pollution by 986 times, the service said. > It did not point to any specific source of the pollution, but the Argayash station is about 30 kilometres from the Mayak nuclear facility, which in 1957 was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high-radioactive-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high-radioact...
  - kurthr 9y ago
    Note Ru-106 has a half-life longer than a year (373 days) so it's not going any where quickly except the ground water.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  I was reading a speculation that there was a run of new nuclear waste processing tech in Mayk factory just two days before the they started to register the high readings. So it's possible they had an accident there. I will try to find the blog post but any news can be regarded as disinformation from both sides.
  - myth_drannon 9y ago
    That's the blog post in Russian(Google Translate ), the guy has quite a large readership (top20 in Russian blogosphere), topics mostly on nuclear stations, not a crackpot. Still it's just a speculation : https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fmaxim-nm.livejournal.com%2F370875.html&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...
MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
There was a documentary some years ago on TV where a guy who repeatedly had gone inside the Chernobyl power plant came to the same conclusion. He based his theory on the amount of core material that was found, and which was less than expected, meaning that some of it must have been consumed in a nuclear explosion. Thats all I remember, and I can't find the source anymore.
frik 9y ago
"Russia reports radioactivity 986 times the norm after nuclear accident claim" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac... "Russia’s meteorological service has confirmed “extremely high” concentrations of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 were found in several parts of the country in late September, confirming European reports about the contamination this month." Events repeat, denial at first for a month and than downplaying the accident and the contamination of larger part two continents.
madengr 9y ago
I can see how voids in the water cause an increase in neutron flux, but I thought water was needed to slow the neutrons, and that fast neutrons result in reduced reaction.

167 points by quakeguy 9y ago

I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can’t be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don’t remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.

tantalor 9y ago
And we are lucky for it. If the runaway core had reached the water table beneath, it would have exploded and irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.
- git_rancher 9y ago
  What? Holy smokes! This is the first I've heard of this. Can you share any more info? Sources?
  - MertsA 9y ago
    That's the case for any nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl isn't special in that regard. If you have a very dense blob of liquid fuel (called corium after a meltdown) generating megawatts of power it's going to melt through concrete and steel, it's just a matter of time. Once that blob hits a ton of water underneath it forcing all of that water to heat up will create enormous pressure and the only way out is up.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      Speaking only for myself, the surprising claim was not “explode”, but “irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.”
  - mseebach 9y ago
    It appears to be based on a quote from the 1979 film "The China Syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrom...
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  Why it didn't happen in Fukushima?
  - proaralyst 9y ago
    They managed to cool the corium by flooding it with water.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
a_bonobo 9y ago
Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl has many stories like this, highly recommended reading if you want to know more about the incident
pvg 9y ago
The accident was acknowledged by Soviet news on April 28th, two days after it took place. While they were slow to provide details there was no public denial - they initially denied anything was wrong in response to private inquiries by Swedish diplomats since elevated radiation levels were measured in Sweden. This is an ABC news report from the time which also shows the Soviet announcement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmeeEpWxfRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmeeEpWxfRY
- 0xbear 9y ago
  That may have been what they said to the Western media. It does not necessarily match what they said to their own government run TV channels and newspapers.
  - pvg 9y ago
    What do you mean? The Soviet announcement is right there in the video. It's an announcement on Vremya, the official evening news TV program broadcast across the Soviet Union.
    - 0xbear 9y ago
      The accident happened on April 26th, and was acknowledged 36 hours after when they began to evacuate Pripyat, a town in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. As I said, it took about a day for them to acknowledge it, and it was only acknowledged when it became clear that it could not be swept under the rug. Your video does not contradict that.
      - pvg 9y ago
        You wrote "Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day)". That's not what happened, you can look it up in any of the numerous timelines and accounts of the accident and the reporting and Soviet disclosures. The evacuation of Pripyat started before the first public Soviet announcement as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Evacuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Evacuation And the section immediately following regarding the announcement.
smsm42 9y ago
Note also this was very close to May holidays (May 1st etc.) when people customary go out, with kids, some go camping, etc. Kiev - a city with population over 2 millions - is 90 km from Chernobyl, and nobody there knew what's going on for a while. I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. And of course when it was known there was no proper information on dealing with radioactive contaminations, mostly everybody would go by wildest rumors and home remedies. No tools for measuring radioactivity either anywhere to be bought, people made their own eventually. Etc., etc.
- trhway 9y ago
  > I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. My post with some effect summary for Belarus https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dtrhway%2315737928 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%...
  - smsm42 9y ago
    AFAIR due to the weather patterns Belarus got a lot of the fallout and Kiev area was affected much less.
- petre 9y ago
  Yes, we were camping as well. It all happened during a sunny weekend.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    It was raining very heavily in Scotland unfortunately. Probably also Norway.
Yizahi 9y ago
Check this story - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-chernobyls-most-dangerous-radioactive-material-was-a-selfie https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-ch...
hutzlibu 9y ago
" seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning" I heard those hero's had mostly no clue, that they were on a heroic suicide mission, nor did they had any choice in the matter. Knowing a bit about UDSSR I can very well imagine this to be true, but does anyone knows more? edit: this article confirms it, but I am not sure if the site is reliable (it quotes the "socialist worker") http://www.upworthy.com/you-probably-dont-know-their-names-but-30-years-ago-they-saved-europe http://www.upworthy.com/you-probably-dont-know-their-names-b...

ribs 9y ago

I’m just reading the abstract at the moment, but this paper says that there was a -nuclear- explosion, not just a steam explosion?

meritt 9y ago
Correct. There's a decent lay summary here: https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-crippled-chernobyl https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-cr...
ajross 9y ago
That's right. The finding is that the runaway fission reaction produced an explosion of the fissile material directly instead of merely overheating the enclosing cooling system. It didn't remotely approach the yield of a warhead relative to the amount of material, but it was still a "nuclear explosion".
mannykannot 9y ago
An important threshold is crossed if the core, or part of it, becomes 'prompt critical'. Normally, a reactor's chain reaction is only sustained with the contribution of the delayed neutrons, which are occasionally emitted by fission products, in addition to the prompt neutrons, which are emitted during fission itself. If an assembly becomes so supercritical that the reaction can be sustained by the prompt neutrons alone, the doubling time of the exponential growth in the reaction rate suddenly becomes orders of magnitude shorter, leading to an explosive release of energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_nuclear_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_n...
dboreham 9y ago
It's always been known that there was a nuclear explosion, it was just called a "power excursion" so avoid frightening the children.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  It was an excursion... mind you that if you drenched me in gasoline and tossed a match I’d be, “In a state of accelerated thermal decomposition.” That’s not a lie, it’s just a bland way of saying that I’d be burning like a Yule log.

gumby 9y ago

It was interesting that there were firm denials at the time, yet everyone was used to propaganda (yes, fake news) so it wasn't at first clear if there was a coverup or the claim of a problem was western misdirection! But reports from neighboring countries pretty quickly put that to rest, and then the narrative switched to the heroics of the emergency workers (who were indeed heroic and, sadly, literally self-sacrificing. The plume traveled over northern Western Europe, but West Germany, at least, didn't take any immediate action. 15-20 years later there appeared to be a slew of unusual cancers (e.g. my mother in law's tear duct; my friend's mother salivary gland...unusual ones in accretive tissue. But I don't know if there's been any systematic survey to see if there was an assignable increase in the death rate, or if I am just divining a signal from what's actually small-n noise.

alexeckermann 9y ago
Theres some studies done of the effects of Chernobyl over the years since. Of note are the WHO and the Chernobyl Tissue Bank. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com I went to a talk by Prof Geraldine Thomas, of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank and Imperial College London, sharing her insights and research into radiation and its effects on the body. The key takeaway from the talk is to take into account the type of release, what radionuclides were exposed to the public and their half-life, and then what the passage of that particular element is through the body to determine what damage can be done. A notable example is of Iodine-131 causing of thyroid lesions and cancers in the direct aftermath of an event because of its short half life of alpha decay directly into tissue that bioaccumulates Iodine, keeping the alpha decay focussed on a very specific tissue. Other heavier elements tend to (I am not a biologist or nuclear scientist, paraphrasing from a talk a couple years ago) can leave the body without being bioaccumulated, having only released 'tolerable' amounts of alpha decay into a broad area of tissue. It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors. But I — a nobody with a causal subject matter interest — would be hesitant to suggest that there was causation in absence of a hypothesis based on biology tied to the known Chernobyl emissions. Either way, we can find out more about radiations effect on biology if a study takes place — or if there is already one out there?

amenghra 9y ago

Chernobyl journal by a Elena Filatova, who biked around the ghostly place a few years later, is worth reading: https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-volume-1 https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-vol...

josephcooney 9y ago
Apparently she took a bit of artistic licence with some of the things she wrote, although the pictures are real, the place is real, and she did visit there. http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip
- audiometry 9y ago
  I remember how furious the slashdot community was over this!

paulgerhardt 9y ago

Previously theorized by Charlie Stross in a significantly more fanciful, but riveting take: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

le-mark 9y ago
That was new to me, thanks! Excellent example of pulling several plausible ideas into one outlandish tale. Sure, it’s a devil’s brew, but who wouldn’t say no to a specific impulse on the order of twelve thousand? That kind of Isp is great for interplanetory/interstellar cruising, not so much for getting off the pad. That's why ion engines aren't used to get to orbit; thrust to weight matters when starting from zero m/s.
- Zaak 9y ago
  Isp just says how efficient you are at turning reaction mass into delta-v. Nuclear rockets can attain both high Isp and high thrust.
rurban 9y ago
How much truth is there in it? Did they lie about their experiment?

cmurf 9y ago

We decided to analyze this scenario in detail, but the project was postponed at the time [1987] due to the lack of high-quality, high-resolution gridded weather data covering April-May 1986 for driving the dispersion model. When in 2016 the high-resolution regional reanalysis for Europe was published and extended back in time to 1980, it became possible for us to perform good-quality dispersion modeling. Wow.

rdtsc 9y ago

> It is concluded that the two explosions in the reactor that many witnesses recognized were thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions at the bottom of a few fuel channels and then some 2.7 s later a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor vessel. The nuclear explosions formed a plasma jet that shot upward through the still intact refueling tubes, rammed the 350-kg plugs, and continued through the quite thin roof and then some 2.5 to 3 km into the atmosphere where the meteorological situation provided a route to Cherepovets. That's pretty crazy. It ended up as a nuclear canon firing 350kg (700lbs) projectiles straight up into the atmosphere, right through the roof. Even more odd is that some lab, for a completely unrelated reason (building a liquid oxygen and nitrogen facility) was sampling noble gases from the atmosphere. And then someone could go back and draw these conclusions more than 30 years later.

kurthr 9y ago

And there is a large new release of Ru-106 somewhere in Russia... what's going on? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac... Posted on its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240

mikkom 9y ago
Russia has just confirmed that they too have detected it, previously they denied they have detected anything > The highest concentration was registered at the station in Argayash, a village in the Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals, which had "extremely high pollution" of Ru-106, exceeding natural background pollution by 986 times, the service said. > It did not point to any specific source of the pollution, but the Argayash station is about 30 kilometres from the Mayak nuclear facility, which in 1957 was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high-radioactive-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high-radioact...
- kurthr 9y ago
  Note Ru-106 has a half-life longer than a year (373 days) so it's not going any where quickly except the ground water.
myth_drannon 9y ago
I was reading a speculation that there was a run of new nuclear waste processing tech in Mayk factory just two days before the they started to register the high readings. So it's possible they had an accident there. I will try to find the blog post but any news can be regarded as disinformation from both sides.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  That's the blog post in Russian(Google Translate ), the guy has quite a large readership (top20 in Russian blogosphere), topics mostly on nuclear stations, not a crackpot. Still it's just a speculation : https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fmaxim-nm.livejournal.com%2F370875.html&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago

There was a documentary some years ago on TV where a guy who repeatedly had gone inside the Chernobyl power plant came to the same conclusion. He based his theory on the amount of core material that was found, and which was less than expected, meaning that some of it must have been consumed in a nuclear explosion. Thats all I remember, and I can't find the source anymore.

frik 9y ago

"Russia reports radioactivity 986 times the norm after nuclear accident claim" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac... "Russia’s meteorological service has confirmed “extremely high” concentrations of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 were found in several parts of the country in late September, confirming European reports about the contamination this month." Events repeat, denial at first for a month and than downplaying the accident and the contamination of larger part two continents.

madengr 9y ago

I can see how voids in the water cause an increase in neutron flux, but I thought water was needed to slow the neutrons, and that fast neutrons result in reduced reaction.