19 ms·

One thing I found really eye-opening about this show is that it really showed both the bad side as well as the good side of Soviet culture. It is unquestionabl

by OskarS 7y ago

One thing I found really eye-opening about this show is that it really showed both the bad side as well as the good side of Soviet culture. It is unquestionably the case that Soviet authoritarianism and disregard for safety is to blame for what happened. But one thing that is often forgotten, but I think the show highlights, is how well the aftermath was handled. Yes, Pripyat should have been evacuated earlier, and yes, they should probably have notified the rest of the world sooner. But think of this: the Soviet Union mobilized 500,000-750,000 people to clean up the enormous exclusion zone. They got thousands of men to don full lead suits (that could only be used once) to run out on a roof for 90 seconds each to throw off radioactive rocks one at a time. They built the enormous containment structure in just a few months, arguably the greatest feat of civil engineering in history. One of my favorite scenes in the show is when Legasov says he immediately needs 5,000 tons of sand and boron to cover the core, and Scherbina basically just walks off and gets it for him (along with a full fleet of helicopters to drop it). All of this was necessary, and they did all of it, no matter the cost. This was unquestionably a real strength of the Soviet Union. Can you imagine that the US would have been able to respond like this? Either today or in the 80s? I can't. With the exception of wartime mobilization, I can think of almost nothing else that even compares. There are few (if any) societies in history that could have done what the Soviet Union did in response to Chernobyl. In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else.

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egao1980 7y ago
USSR in 1986 was not autharitarian as depicted in the series. There were no inspections at gunpoint - people went to certain death to save lives of others. Knowingly. This is Cold War's 80s, even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation, including symptoms of radiation sickness etc. Evacuation started as soon as disaster recovery team got evidence of dangerous levels of radiation, there were sanitary norms and pre-planned measures for any kind of problem at the station.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation And yet crowds of schoolchildren were made to March in Kyiv for International Workers' Day right after the disaster, where they were exposed to radiation. Had Soviet society really been aware of the dangers, and leadership truly concerned with the welfare of the local people, that march would have never happened.
  - myth_drannon 7y ago
    There was publication ban on the disaster, no one knew it was that serious.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - pps43 7y ago
      Many people listened to BBC Russian Service, Radio Freedom/Radio Free Europe, RFI, VOA, etc. broadcasts on short waves. It wasn't that much of a secret.
      - myth_drannon 7y ago
        Many? I doubt it. I went with my family to the parade and no one knew anything. We were living close to Minsk. My uncle was a policeman and one of the liquidators(later time, outer zones) and despite been high ranking officer he didn't know.
        pps43 7y ago
        Pretty much everyone I knew, knew. Those who did not have a shortwave radio got gossip. Some of the details were murky, but the big picture was clear within a couple of days, way before official acknowledgement.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  So by comment history, there is a pretty good chance this is someone working for the famed "Russian troll farms". Should we allow this kind of poster on HN?
fghtr 7y ago
> Can you imagine that the US would have been able to respond like this? Either today or in the 80s? I can't. You are exactly right: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open (washingtonpost.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959889
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ccffph 7y ago
  Stop posting this. That's isolating some weapons testing fallout from the 1950s, not civilian reactor spent fuel.
  - fghtr 7y ago
    The topic under discussion is response to any serious disaster, not specifically civilian.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      Except the US doesn't need a response like this to the correct the dome, the dangers aren't even remotely comparable. And of course the US can respond like this when needed. The WWII move from a pacifist nation to building more war materials than every other nation combined, happened in months.
      - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
        >a pacifist nation I think you mean isolationist.
        jcranmer 7y ago
        It wasn't isolationist: the US was a big player in the naval disarmament treaties in the 1920s and early 1930s. The US in the inter-war period had a very strong pacifist movement, to the point that one member of Congress was unable to vote for the declaration of war on Japan, even after Pearl Harbor.
basch 7y ago
Theres a pretty good book about Soviet era mega-project disasters, and how the soviet answer to "thats impossible" was always "nah we will just throw more people at it, itll work" It was kind of their MO, they were well practiced for Chernobyl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_the_Executed_Engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_the_Executed_Engi... >Joseph Stalin had an ideological outlook for economic advancement in the Soviet Union that set unrealistic goals that required massive human effort. Stalin emphasized that all industrial establishments should be of great size (preferable the largest in the world). This came to be known as "gigantomania" by the Western observers. The results of taking on these astronomical industrial establishments were high accident rates and shoddy production. The high death rate and exposure to disease was an acceptable cost for Stalin. Stalin's motto was that "technology decides everything" no matter at what cost. After Peter's death, in 1929 the Soviet Union launched the first five-year plan, a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the economy. >Three of the monumental projects in the early Five-Year Plans were the building of the world's largest hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the construction of the world's largest steel plant (Magnitogorski) and the digging of the White Sea Canal. These Soviet industrialization projects were greatly flawed and wasteful, costing many people who worked both voluntarily and involuntarily their lives. >Many engineers, including Peter Palchinsky warned the USSR not to rush and go ahead with the building of the dam. They argued that the water flow was ultimately going to be too slow and no good studies had been made of the flow patterns of surface and underground water in the area. Ultimately, 10,000 farmers were forced out of their farmland with little or no compensation >Construction began in 1929 at the site of one of the country's richest iron deposits, known as Magnetic Mountain. Peter Palchinsky published articles in 1926 and 1927 complaining that the Soviet government was going ahead with plans for the construction of the mining plant without adequate studies of geological resources, availability of labor, economics of transportation and supplying proper housing for the work force.
- ivankolev 7y ago
  If one wants to delve deeper into the murkiness and absurdist hilarity ot the society in the freshly minted Soviet empire, I can't recommend Ilf and Petrov more, their books about the charming and combining hustler Ostap Bender are a great read for entertainment alone but also a good picture of the 20s and the great changes that the Revolution brought.
pp19dd 7y ago
> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else. I understood your comment to reflect decisiveness in responding to a crisis, but just on a loosely related tangent, with nuclear issues NIMBY standards fall apart. In Germany, hunters are required to take boars they shot to get tested for radiation - direct result of Chernobyl's aftermath. Over a third of them are over the radiation limit. Same thing is happening in Japan right now. Even if they could kill off all the animals, there's the problem of disposal. [1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11068298/Radioactive-wild-boar-roaming-the-forests-of-Germany.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/11/thousands-of-radioactive-boars-are-overrunning-farmland-in-fukushima/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/1...
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  The German dose limits are beyond ridiculously low due to a scientifically unjustifiable fear of radiation. A person would have to eat 28 lbs of contaminated meat to get the same low-level radioactive effects of being on a transatlantic flight [1]. Longitudinal studies of air crew who fly every day for decades have shown no increase in health risk from low doses. The linear no-threshold model of radiation at super low levels is unsupported by any evidence. The terrifying death rate numbers people calculate are like saying that since CO2 can suffocate someone at a certain level, millions of people die suffocating on low levels of CO2. It's really wild. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/05/germans-boared-with-chernobyl-radiation/#66fd67db43b0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/05/germans-b...
  - pp19dd 7y ago
    I only have one question for you: would you eat it? Served on a plate, cooked just right. With a side dish of sauteed mushrooms from the area?
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Of course I would eat it. I'm a scientist. I understand that radiation at these low doses has never been shown to cause any harm. It's not some mysterious boogeyman to me. I've read the papers. I understand that natural background radiation is all around me all the time, and has been since the dawn of life. Biological systems are well-adapted to dealing with low-dose radiation. I understand that in certain parts of the world like Ramsar, the natural dose rate is 50x my dose rate, and that the hundreds of thousands of people living there show no increase in health effects. If you'd like to send me some, we can arrange a live-stream of me eating it. I will measure it with my Geiger counter and then eat it in front of the world.
BoorishBears 7y ago
>All of this was necessary, and they did all of it, no matter the cost. From Wikipedia: The official contaminated zones became stage to a massive clean-up effort lasting seven months.[71]:177–183 The official reason for such early (and dangerous) decontamination efforts, rather than allowing time for natural decay, was that the land must be re-peopled and brought back into cultivation. ... Yet this land was of marginal agricultural value. According to historian David Marples, the administration had a psychological purpose for the clean-up: they wished to forestall panic regarding nuclear energy, and even to restart the Chernobyl power station.
AndrewThrowaway 7y ago
> they did all of it, no matter the cost That's the beauty of authoritarian state - people who did the job had no choice, authority who ordered had no sympathy. E.g. helicopter pilots summoned from Baltic states didn't even know where they were flying or what will be the task. And even if they knew, do you think they could argue not to participate? In this sense slavery could be called "strength" of some country because it allows unprecedented workforce mobilization.
- orcdork 7y ago
  This would have ben handled by military personnel in the (democratic) west, who would also "have no choice".
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    If a western country has conscription, agreed. Where there's no conscription, they had a choice to join up or not.
    - kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
      Is it a choice when alternatives are die poor and homeless? Oh wait, that is their fate after they leave the army. Think about how many people take jobs they don't like: why did they choose it? Pretending like you have a "choice" when the other choice is dying/suffering, is harmful to growth imo. I'm not commenting on the SU fetishism in this thread, but just making a general statement.
    - therealgranton 7y ago
      Of course they had a choice to join. But romanticism of the military is (thankfully) starting to die out, much like the people forced to die as part of a radiation cleanup. Most people join the military at a young age, when their brains aren't fully developed, so stating "Well, they shouldn't have signed up if they didn't want to die a horrible, unpredictable death" is easy to state, but hard to wrap your head around at that age. Hindsight is always 20/20.
781 7y ago
This is one thing that worried me during the Fukushima disaster, they were quite concerned about the safety of the responders and many things were delayed until they could figure out a way to do them safely. If things deteriorated even further, a mega-disaster couldn't have been averted since the Japanese wouldn't have sent people to die to do what had to be done.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  I remember this happening several times during the accident. At one point there was discussion that bubbled up in the media of completely abandoning the plant while meltdowns were in progress because they were worried about workers going over 250 mSv. Even though they did stay, there were critical actions that were repeatedly delayed that contributed to making the accident worse. Sometimes you have to say "your job is to keep people safe, and to do that you're going to have to take some risk." You see this in the U.S. too with police officers. At Parkland and at the Pulse nightclub, police prioritized "officer safety" over public safety. People just want to follow a fixed rulebook about what is an acceptable risk, when in certain situations, an abnormally great threat justifies abnormal risks to avert it. This used to be understood intuitively.
  - effie 7y ago
    You cannot expect the actual workers in radioactive disaster area to make such reckless decisions on their own. Such worker typically is not competent enough to decide that the directive of maximum acceptable risk should be overruled to make further work possible. The decision to expose workers to extraordinary risk should be made by the people in charge of the recovery effort, who should either be nuclear/biology experts or largely rely on what such experts tell them.
    - cameldrv 7y ago
      Of course not. Much of the story has never really been comprehensively told, but just look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_(Unit_1_Reactor)#Hydrogen_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The Prime Minister calls the plant manager to ask why a valve hasn't been opened that's critical to avoiding a large radiation release. He's told that because they have no electrical power, it can't be opened electrically, and due to radiation, they haven't sent someone in to turn the valve manually. After a call from the Prime Minister of the country, the valve still wasn't turned for another 7.5 hours. From a resourcefulness standpoint, I question why there wasn't enough electrical power to actuate a valve, and from a human standpoint, why there wasn't enough bravery to send someone to do the essential job, certainly involving a far lower radiation dose than is accepted willingly by astronauts who go to the International Space Station, when the safety of their country is not on the line.
paulcarroty 7y ago
> the Soviet Union mobilized 500,000-750,000 people It's normal for Soviet Union and modern Russia, they don't care about people in general, just use them. Conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria shows it pretty well too.
brightball 7y ago
IMO the US would and could respond this quickly via the military. Coordination between branches, Army Core of Engineers, etc. It’s one of the reasons that I’m a firm believer that the US Navy should be the primary operators of government funded nuclear facilities.
- spamizbad 7y ago
  Wasn't the US military responsible for the shoddy levies that contributed to the Hurricane Katrina disaster? It also has repeatably failed to stabilize several middle eastern countries - In about a year, adults born after the start of the Afghanistan war will be eligible to serve in it. And on the "cyber" front it repeatedly gets caught flat-footed by smaller, less funded operations in Russia and China and has to go to congress, hat-in-hand, asking for more money while the cyber command budget is already 10x the rest of the globe's.
  - behringer 7y ago
    If you think that's bad, just wait till you see what private industry is doing for the government.
    - spamizbad 7y ago
      It's time to come to terms with the fact that we're bad at doing hard things.
      - shanxS 7y ago
        Did land person on moon. Do have world's biggest tech companies / Vertical landing rockets / AI leadership etc. Doesn't sound like we are bad at hard things although we do have our fair share of screw ups.
        techdragon 7y ago
        Landed on the moon, ok that one was hard. But let’s get realistic here. There are events like the Manhattan Project, the Operation Overlord/D-Day landings, the Apollo missions, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl... these are the things that required coordination and cooperation across tens to hundreds of thousands of humans, organised into hundreds of subgroups responsible for aspects of the overall outcome in complex interdependent ways... these are significant human achievements. And then there’s things like Google, Amazon, SpaceX and Microsoft, these are for the most part companies driven by money. Either the accumulation of it for a secondary goal (SpaceX needs money to pay for a mars colony), or the accumulation of it as the primary goal (Microsoft has a quarterly earnings target to hit) Comparing across these two categories feels horribly unfair to the people who aren’t in it for the money. The astronauts, the soldiers, the scientists and the liquidators (a term for the people involved in the Chernobyl cleanup)... this isn’t to say the achievements of today’s companies are nothing, just that these two categories are driven by two tremendously distinct drives and comparing the results directly as though 100% equivalent feels inappropriate.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
The self-inflicted ... sigh Btw japan
mikeash 7y ago
It’s not luck that made it happen there. It happened in the USSR because that same authoritarian state couldn’t be bothered to build safe reactors.
masterofpuppets 7y ago
> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else. Its a mixed bag, while that might be true its important also to remember that kind of accident could have really only occurred in the USSR. Western countries simply couldnt muster the political support to build reactors with that lack of concern for safety, or those kind of design flams. The USSR? No problem. Just wow to think they build power reactors without even a containment structure.
- effie 7y ago
  That is naive, the western countries had their share of failures. For example, the UK officials pushed hard on becoming part of the big boys club in 1950's and this resulted in relaxed safety and resulting disaster in Windscale. The politicians didn't care or know too much about safety even in this western country.
  - khuey 7y ago
    Windscale was bad but it was at least three orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl in terms of radiation release. Cockcroft had also insisted that the chimneys at Windscale be fitted with expensive scrubbing equipment, which everyone thought was idiotic until the fire. Not exactly "relaxed safety" there.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      One dude insisting on one safety measure being added to a catastrophically stupid and unsafe design, while being resisted by everyone else, is very much within the realm of “relaxed safety.” In fact, I’d say that’s a rather mild and understated way to describe it. “Utterly negligent on safety” would be more accurate.
Balgair 7y ago
I agree with your sentiments. Though the system had major flaws that allowed the disaster to occur, the unchainable heroism of the men and women on the ground is absolutely astonishing. If anything, this event showcases that the people of the former USSR exemplify qualities that all humans hold dear: self-sacrifice, courage, intelligence, alactrity. Despite the Soviet system of that era, these people fought for all citizens of the Earth, and especially for the lives of their 'enemies'. If there are silver linings in the diaster (and there a quite a few), one of them is that even the most average person of a repressive regime has incredible heroism baked into their bones. Those people are the same heroes of myths and all humans are now comming to recognize their sacrifice for us all. EDIT: The medal awarded for participation in the clean-up can be seen in the below link. The page has more information on it that details the many pecularities of this medal and it's true uniqueness in world history (hopefully forever). Wikipedia has a good overview of the liquidators and their efforts and their subsequent lives. I've also included the wiki article on the Fukushima 50. Aside: Though nuclear power is, to me, a God-send for human energy woes, I cannot look away from the horrible cost that these heroes paid for our energy future. Nuclear power plants must be considered after a careful reading of the liquidator's sacfifices to determine the depths of risk to our neighbors and ourselves. Though deaths per thousand may be less overall, we should soberly study those deaths and decide if we want to risk that sort of trade-off. http://collectinghistory.net/chernobyl/index.html http://collectinghistory.net/chernobyl/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50
zzzcpan 7y ago
Well, they showed only very mildly bad stuff about the Soviet Union. It was much worse than that. Millions of people were affected, not just in Pripyat. They were kept in the dark, they were not allowed to take vacations, they were lied to about being affected and were exposed to huge levels of radiation. Medication became immediately unavailable. Train tickets to leave were impossible to buy. There was a lot of disregard towards personal protection and anything related to human life. In Kiev grass on the ground was extremely dangerous, but that's a lot of people, so they were focusing on preventing panic at any cost, not helping people. > There are few (if any) societies in history that could have done what the Soviet Union did in response to Chernobyl. I completely disagree. Soviet Union handled the Chernobyl disaster very poorly. It's too bad the show gave you the opposite impression.
syber_punk 7y ago
"They built the enormous containment structure in just a few months, arguably the greatest feat of civil engineering in history" Slow down Igor have you not seen the B2 stealth bomber that at 172 ft long has a radar signature of a bumblebee, the Us highway system or the Hoover dam, which used so much concrete that it is still curing to this day 83 years later and hot to the touch. While the dome of Chernobyl and the bravery of the Russian clean up workers is admirable, As someone who has seen some of the worlds best feats of engineering and is an actually engineer I think you are getting ahead of your self with that statement.
- syber_punk 7y ago
  plus the fact that the "enormous containment structure" had to be rebuilt twice in under twenty five years, speaks to its flawed design and the soviets lack on engineering know how

by OskarS 7y ago

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egao1980 7y ago

USSR in 1986 was not autharitarian as depicted in the series. There were no inspections at gunpoint - people went to certain death to save lives of others. Knowingly. This is Cold War's 80s, even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation, including symptoms of radiation sickness etc. Evacuation started as soon as disaster recovery team got evidence of dangerous levels of radiation, there were sanitary norms and pre-planned measures for any kind of problem at the station.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation And yet crowds of schoolchildren were made to March in Kyiv for International Workers' Day right after the disaster, where they were exposed to radiation. Had Soviet society really been aware of the dangers, and leadership truly concerned with the welfare of the local people, that march would have never happened.
- myth_drannon 7y ago
  There was publication ban on the disaster, no one knew it was that serious.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pps43 7y ago
    Many people listened to BBC Russian Service, Radio Freedom/Radio Free Europe, RFI, VOA, etc. broadcasts on short waves. It wasn't that much of a secret.
    - myth_drannon 7y ago
      Many? I doubt it. I went with my family to the parade and no one knew anything. We were living close to Minsk. My uncle was a policeman and one of the liquidators(later time, outer zones) and despite been high ranking officer he didn't know.
      - pps43 7y ago
        Pretty much everyone I knew, knew. Those who did not have a shortwave radio got gossip. Some of the details were murky, but the big picture was clear within a couple of days, way before official acknowledgement.
brianwawok 7y ago
So by comment history, there is a pretty good chance this is someone working for the famed "Russian troll farms". Should we allow this kind of poster on HN?

fghtr 7y ago

> Can you imagine that the US would have been able to respond like this? Either today or in the 80s? I can't. You are exactly right: U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open (washingtonpost.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959889

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ccffph 7y ago
Stop posting this. That's isolating some weapons testing fallout from the 1950s, not civilian reactor spent fuel.
- fghtr 7y ago
  The topic under discussion is response to any serious disaster, not specifically civilian.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    Except the US doesn't need a response like this to the correct the dome, the dangers aren't even remotely comparable. And of course the US can respond like this when needed. The WWII move from a pacifist nation to building more war materials than every other nation combined, happened in months.
    - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
      >a pacifist nation I think you mean isolationist.
      - jcranmer 7y ago
        It wasn't isolationist: the US was a big player in the naval disarmament treaties in the 1920s and early 1930s. The US in the inter-war period had a very strong pacifist movement, to the point that one member of Congress was unable to vote for the declaration of war on Japan, even after Pearl Harbor.

basch 7y ago

Theres a pretty good book about Soviet era mega-project disasters, and how the soviet answer to "thats impossible" was always "nah we will just throw more people at it, itll work" It was kind of their MO, they were well practiced for Chernobyl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_the_Executed_Engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_the_Executed_Engi... >Joseph Stalin had an ideological outlook for economic advancement in the Soviet Union that set unrealistic goals that required massive human effort. Stalin emphasized that all industrial establishments should be of great size (preferable the largest in the world). This came to be known as "gigantomania" by the Western observers. The results of taking on these astronomical industrial establishments were high accident rates and shoddy production. The high death rate and exposure to disease was an acceptable cost for Stalin. Stalin's motto was that "technology decides everything" no matter at what cost. After Peter's death, in 1929 the Soviet Union launched the first five-year plan, a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the economy. >Three of the monumental projects in the early Five-Year Plans were the building of the world's largest hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the construction of the world's largest steel plant (Magnitogorski) and the digging of the White Sea Canal. These Soviet industrialization projects were greatly flawed and wasteful, costing many people who worked both voluntarily and involuntarily their lives. >Many engineers, including Peter Palchinsky warned the USSR not to rush and go ahead with the building of the dam. They argued that the water flow was ultimately going to be too slow and no good studies had been made of the flow patterns of surface and underground water in the area. Ultimately, 10,000 farmers were forced out of their farmland with little or no compensation >Construction began in 1929 at the site of one of the country's richest iron deposits, known as Magnetic Mountain. Peter Palchinsky published articles in 1926 and 1927 complaining that the Soviet government was going ahead with plans for the construction of the mining plant without adequate studies of geological resources, availability of labor, economics of transportation and supplying proper housing for the work force.

ivankolev 7y ago
If one wants to delve deeper into the murkiness and absurdist hilarity ot the society in the freshly minted Soviet empire, I can't recommend Ilf and Petrov more, their books about the charming and combining hustler Ostap Bender are a great read for entertainment alone but also a good picture of the 20s and the great changes that the Revolution brought.

pp19dd 7y ago

> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else. I understood your comment to reflect decisiveness in responding to a crisis, but just on a loosely related tangent, with nuclear issues NIMBY standards fall apart. In Germany, hunters are required to take boars they shot to get tested for radiation - direct result of Chernobyl's aftermath. Over a third of them are over the radiation limit. Same thing is happening in Japan right now. Even if they could kill off all the animals, there's the problem of disposal. [1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11068298/Radioactive-wild-boar-roaming-the-forests-of-Germany.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/11/thousands-of-radioactive-boars-are-overrunning-farmland-in-fukushima/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/1...

acidburnNSA 7y ago
The German dose limits are beyond ridiculously low due to a scientifically unjustifiable fear of radiation. A person would have to eat 28 lbs of contaminated meat to get the same low-level radioactive effects of being on a transatlantic flight [1]. Longitudinal studies of air crew who fly every day for decades have shown no increase in health risk from low doses. The linear no-threshold model of radiation at super low levels is unsupported by any evidence. The terrifying death rate numbers people calculate are like saying that since CO2 can suffocate someone at a certain level, millions of people die suffocating on low levels of CO2. It's really wild. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/05/germans-boared-with-chernobyl-radiation/#66fd67db43b0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/05/germans-b...
- pp19dd 7y ago
  I only have one question for you: would you eat it? Served on a plate, cooked just right. With a side dish of sauteed mushrooms from the area?
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Of course I would eat it. I'm a scientist. I understand that radiation at these low doses has never been shown to cause any harm. It's not some mysterious boogeyman to me. I've read the papers. I understand that natural background radiation is all around me all the time, and has been since the dawn of life. Biological systems are well-adapted to dealing with low-dose radiation. I understand that in certain parts of the world like Ramsar, the natural dose rate is 50x my dose rate, and that the hundreds of thousands of people living there show no increase in health effects. If you'd like to send me some, we can arrange a live-stream of me eating it. I will measure it with my Geiger counter and then eat it in front of the world.

BoorishBears 7y ago

>All of this was necessary, and they did all of it, no matter the cost. From Wikipedia: The official contaminated zones became stage to a massive clean-up effort lasting seven months.[71]:177–183 The official reason for such early (and dangerous) decontamination efforts, rather than allowing time for natural decay, was that the land must be re-peopled and brought back into cultivation. ... Yet this land was of marginal agricultural value. According to historian David Marples, the administration had a psychological purpose for the clean-up: they wished to forestall panic regarding nuclear energy, and even to restart the Chernobyl power station.

AndrewThrowaway 7y ago

> they did all of it, no matter the cost That's the beauty of authoritarian state - people who did the job had no choice, authority who ordered had no sympathy. E.g. helicopter pilots summoned from Baltic states didn't even know where they were flying or what will be the task. And even if they knew, do you think they could argue not to participate? In this sense slavery could be called "strength" of some country because it allows unprecedented workforce mobilization.

orcdork 7y ago
This would have ben handled by military personnel in the (democratic) west, who would also "have no choice".
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  If a western country has conscription, agreed. Where there's no conscription, they had a choice to join up or not.
  - kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
    Is it a choice when alternatives are die poor and homeless? Oh wait, that is their fate after they leave the army. Think about how many people take jobs they don't like: why did they choose it? Pretending like you have a "choice" when the other choice is dying/suffering, is harmful to growth imo. I'm not commenting on the SU fetishism in this thread, but just making a general statement.
  - therealgranton 7y ago
    Of course they had a choice to join. But romanticism of the military is (thankfully) starting to die out, much like the people forced to die as part of a radiation cleanup. Most people join the military at a young age, when their brains aren't fully developed, so stating "Well, they shouldn't have signed up if they didn't want to die a horrible, unpredictable death" is easy to state, but hard to wrap your head around at that age. Hindsight is always 20/20.

781 7y ago

This is one thing that worried me during the Fukushima disaster, they were quite concerned about the safety of the responders and many things were delayed until they could figure out a way to do them safely. If things deteriorated even further, a mega-disaster couldn't have been averted since the Japanese wouldn't have sent people to die to do what had to be done.

cameldrv 7y ago
I remember this happening several times during the accident. At one point there was discussion that bubbled up in the media of completely abandoning the plant while meltdowns were in progress because they were worried about workers going over 250 mSv. Even though they did stay, there were critical actions that were repeatedly delayed that contributed to making the accident worse. Sometimes you have to say "your job is to keep people safe, and to do that you're going to have to take some risk." You see this in the U.S. too with police officers. At Parkland and at the Pulse nightclub, police prioritized "officer safety" over public safety. People just want to follow a fixed rulebook about what is an acceptable risk, when in certain situations, an abnormally great threat justifies abnormal risks to avert it. This used to be understood intuitively.
- effie 7y ago
  You cannot expect the actual workers in radioactive disaster area to make such reckless decisions on their own. Such worker typically is not competent enough to decide that the directive of maximum acceptable risk should be overruled to make further work possible. The decision to expose workers to extraordinary risk should be made by the people in charge of the recovery effort, who should either be nuclear/biology experts or largely rely on what such experts tell them.
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    Of course not. Much of the story has never really been comprehensively told, but just look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_(Unit_1_Reactor)#Hydrogen_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The Prime Minister calls the plant manager to ask why a valve hasn't been opened that's critical to avoiding a large radiation release. He's told that because they have no electrical power, it can't be opened electrically, and due to radiation, they haven't sent someone in to turn the valve manually. After a call from the Prime Minister of the country, the valve still wasn't turned for another 7.5 hours. From a resourcefulness standpoint, I question why there wasn't enough electrical power to actuate a valve, and from a human standpoint, why there wasn't enough bravery to send someone to do the essential job, certainly involving a far lower radiation dose than is accepted willingly by astronauts who go to the International Space Station, when the safety of their country is not on the line.

paulcarroty 7y ago

> the Soviet Union mobilized 500,000-750,000 people It's normal for Soviet Union and modern Russia, they don't care about people in general, just use them. Conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria shows it pretty well too.

brightball 7y ago

IMO the US would and could respond this quickly via the military. Coordination between branches, Army Core of Engineers, etc. It’s one of the reasons that I’m a firm believer that the US Navy should be the primary operators of government funded nuclear facilities.

spamizbad 7y ago
Wasn't the US military responsible for the shoddy levies that contributed to the Hurricane Katrina disaster? It also has repeatably failed to stabilize several middle eastern countries - In about a year, adults born after the start of the Afghanistan war will be eligible to serve in it. And on the "cyber" front it repeatedly gets caught flat-footed by smaller, less funded operations in Russia and China and has to go to congress, hat-in-hand, asking for more money while the cyber command budget is already 10x the rest of the globe's.
- behringer 7y ago
  If you think that's bad, just wait till you see what private industry is doing for the government.
  - spamizbad 7y ago
    It's time to come to terms with the fact that we're bad at doing hard things.
    - shanxS 7y ago
      Did land person on moon. Do have world's biggest tech companies / Vertical landing rockets / AI leadership etc. Doesn't sound like we are bad at hard things although we do have our fair share of screw ups.
      - techdragon 7y ago
        Landed on the moon, ok that one was hard. But let’s get realistic here. There are events like the Manhattan Project, the Operation Overlord/D-Day landings, the Apollo missions, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl... these are the things that required coordination and cooperation across tens to hundreds of thousands of humans, organised into hundreds of subgroups responsible for aspects of the overall outcome in complex interdependent ways... these are significant human achievements. And then there’s things like Google, Amazon, SpaceX and Microsoft, these are for the most part companies driven by money. Either the accumulation of it for a secondary goal (SpaceX needs money to pay for a mars colony), or the accumulation of it as the primary goal (Microsoft has a quarterly earnings target to hit) Comparing across these two categories feels horribly unfair to the people who aren’t in it for the money. The astronauts, the soldiers, the scientists and the liquidators (a term for the people involved in the Chernobyl cleanup)... this isn’t to say the achievements of today’s companies are nothing, just that these two categories are driven by two tremendously distinct drives and comparing the results directly as though 100% equivalent feels inappropriate.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

The self-inflicted ... sigh Btw japan

mikeash 7y ago

It’s not luck that made it happen there. It happened in the USSR because that same authoritarian state couldn’t be bothered to build safe reactors.

masterofpuppets 7y ago

> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else. Its a mixed bag, while that might be true its important also to remember that kind of accident could have really only occurred in the USSR. Western countries simply couldnt muster the political support to build reactors with that lack of concern for safety, or those kind of design flams. The USSR? No problem. Just wow to think they build power reactors without even a containment structure.

effie 7y ago
That is naive, the western countries had their share of failures. For example, the UK officials pushed hard on becoming part of the big boys club in 1950's and this resulted in relaxed safety and resulting disaster in Windscale. The politicians didn't care or know too much about safety even in this western country.
- khuey 7y ago
  Windscale was bad but it was at least three orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl in terms of radiation release. Cockcroft had also insisted that the chimneys at Windscale be fitted with expensive scrubbing equipment, which everyone thought was idiotic until the fire. Not exactly "relaxed safety" there.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    One dude insisting on one safety measure being added to a catastrophically stupid and unsafe design, while being resisted by everyone else, is very much within the realm of “relaxed safety.” In fact, I’d say that’s a rather mild and understated way to describe it. “Utterly negligent on safety” would be more accurate.

Balgair 7y ago

I agree with your sentiments. Though the system had major flaws that allowed the disaster to occur, the unchainable heroism of the men and women on the ground is absolutely astonishing. If anything, this event showcases that the people of the former USSR exemplify qualities that all humans hold dear: self-sacrifice, courage, intelligence, alactrity. Despite the Soviet system of that era, these people fought for all citizens of the Earth, and especially for the lives of their 'enemies'. If there are silver linings in the diaster (and there a quite a few), one of them is that even the most average person of a repressive regime has incredible heroism baked into their bones. Those people are the same heroes of myths and all humans are now comming to recognize their sacrifice for us all. EDIT: The medal awarded for participation in the clean-up can be seen in the below link. The page has more information on it that details the many pecularities of this medal and it's true uniqueness in world history (hopefully forever). Wikipedia has a good overview of the liquidators and their efforts and their subsequent lives. I've also included the wiki article on the Fukushima 50. Aside: Though nuclear power is, to me, a God-send for human energy woes, I cannot look away from the horrible cost that these heroes paid for our energy future. Nuclear power plants must be considered after a careful reading of the liquidator's sacfifices to determine the depths of risk to our neighbors and ourselves. Though deaths per thousand may be less overall, we should soberly study those deaths and decide if we want to risk that sort of trade-off. http://collectinghistory.net/chernobyl/index.html http://collectinghistory.net/chernobyl/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50

zzzcpan 7y ago

Well, they showed only very mildly bad stuff about the Soviet Union. It was much worse than that. Millions of people were affected, not just in Pripyat. They were kept in the dark, they were not allowed to take vacations, they were lied to about being affected and were exposed to huge levels of radiation. Medication became immediately unavailable. Train tickets to leave were impossible to buy. There was a lot of disregard towards personal protection and anything related to human life. In Kiev grass on the ground was extremely dangerous, but that's a lot of people, so they were focusing on preventing panic at any cost, not helping people. > There are few (if any) societies in history that could have done what the Soviet Union did in response to Chernobyl. I completely disagree. Soviet Union handled the Chernobyl disaster very poorly. It's too bad the show gave you the opposite impression.

syber_punk 7y ago

"They built the enormous containment structure in just a few months, arguably the greatest feat of civil engineering in history" Slow down Igor have you not seen the B2 stealth bomber that at 172 ft long has a radar signature of a bumblebee, the Us highway system or the Hoover dam, which used so much concrete that it is still curing to this day 83 years later and hot to the touch. While the dome of Chernobyl and the bravery of the Russian clean up workers is admirable, As someone who has seen some of the worlds best feats of engineering and is an actually engineer I think you are getting ahead of your self with that statement.

syber_punk 7y ago
plus the fact that the "enormous containment structure" had to be rebuilt twice in under twenty five years, speaks to its flawed design and the soviets lack on engineering know how