10 ms·

Radiation Spikes at Chernobyl

140 points by 8organicbits 3y ago

jncfhnb 3y ago
> The IAEA sent experts to do a radiological survey in the CEZ in April, but their focus wasn’t on determining the cause of the spikes. Investigators instead wanted to determine if Russian soldiers who dug trenches in a small section of the CEZ had released dangerous levels of radiation in that area that could have sickened the soldiers or anyone else who passed through that area. (The IAEA determined the radiation levels from trench-digging could not have made the soldiers ill.) Three months later, the Ukrainian government invited Greenpeace to conduct its own radiological survey of the areas where Russian soldiers had camped, and they also did not look into the cause or veracity of the February spikes. (They concluded that the radiation levels where the soldiers camped were three times what the IAEA reported and accused the IAEA of being untrustworthy because IAEA Deputy Director Mikhail Chudakov, a Russian, is a long-term official with ROSATOM, Russia’s state atomic corporation.) Interesting. The article asks a lot of questions about the Russians’ thinking but I think the most likely answer is that they were just uninformed and unorganized. It’s very unlikely they had any sort of calculated plan. They thought they were going to get all of Ukraine in 3 days. The dumbasses digging radioactive dirt probably didn’t even know about Chernobyl to begin with.
- deleted 3y ago
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- dylan604 3y ago
  Being from the West, it is very difficult to think that information black out can be achieved at such a level that younger generations would know nothing of a disaster on the level of Chernobyl.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - vkou 3y ago
      3 mile island was a nothingburger, though.
      - KerrAvon 3y ago
        Revisionist bullshit. It was bad enough to cause the reactor to be removed from service permanently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
      - failuser 3y ago
        Core meltdown is never a nothing burger. The containment vessel worked though, so at least the engineering was sound.
      - hnaccount141 3y ago
        Perhaps Castle Bravo would be a closer comparison? I think the point stands.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      It's funny, my comment originally went in more depth specifically calling out how nobody in the US younger generations would know about 3 Mile Island, but decided to edit it back. To me, to even equate 3 Mile Island to Chernobyl isn't even in the realm of sane. What's the exclusion zone around 3 Mile Island? Exactly. My bet would be future generations in Japan will be very aware of Fukushima. Stipulating that Russians knowing about things in Ukraine is totally different than the Japanese knowing about things in their backyard.
  - failuser 3y ago
    Between Stalker and Call of Duty they probably know at least something. And documentaries about Chernobyl were common on Russian TV.
    - deleted 3y ago
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  - cafard 3y ago
    How many Americans, younger or not, would raise an eyebrow if invited to go camping around Hanford? The Russian soldiers might have heard about Chernobyl, but had no idea a) that they were there or b) how far the contaminated zones extended.
    - eindiran 3y ago
      I tend to agree with your overall point, but the comparison is not a particularly good one; you are comparing knowledge of a black site decommissioned in the 1960s to one of the most famous events in human history.
      - jychang 3y ago
        I think "most famous events in human history" is probably overstating it, and even then it wouldn't be well known anyways. Outside of the HN bubble, the average 18 year old person (even in america, as opposed to russians) would not be very informed about Chernobyl. I'd say Chernobyl is a lot less famous than WWII or 9/11 or events of that sort. And even for big historical events... if you go to a Taylor Swift concert and asked the people there about it, 50% would probably have no clue about most historical events. For example, my 24 year old younger sister doesn't know what a floppy disk is, or what the Berlin wall is. I'd bet you can take any regiment of fresh 18 year old US Marines and tell them they're doing military exercises in Pripyat and they'll mostly ask if there's going to be air conditioning or if there are hot girls around.
        sbierwagen 3y ago
        Around the time the Shuttle program was ending, I made a casual reference to Soyuz to a Russian national. "Huh? «Union?»" No man. Soyuz, the space rocket. Literally the only way to get to the ISS right now. Your country's manned space program. That Soyuz? "If you say so." Amazing they even kept it going! We've over here twisting ourselves in knots in embarrassment that we let our only spaceflight system sunset and are reduced to begging rides from Putin, but his citizens don't even notice.
  - cf141q5325 3y ago
    You dont really need a blackout. How many people can actually tell you the size and location of the contamination? Even the official limits of the exclusion zone are nonsense dating back to Soviet Bureaucracy. Wind meant there are contaminated areas outside and harmless areas inside. Also like the article stated, they are unlikely to have experienced any negative impact themselves. Also, the Greenpeace statement mentions fires, which are a far far better explanation for a spike in measurements. https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762/greenpeace-investigation-challenges-nuclear-agency-on-chornobyl-radiation-levels/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762... They also have pictures and mention the Russian camp was at "Stantzaya Yanov" which i cant find a reference to outside of the Greenpeace report. But i would suspect that wouldnt be directly in front of the very visible sarcophagus. edit: Maps in the report https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-mis-chornobyl-study.pdf https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-... Page 6 says the camp was 26km from the plant. edit1: Estimates from https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/essd-10-339-2018-f01-web.png https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/essd-10-339... with longitude and latitude and Greenpeace puts the camp at 51.1663, 29.9645 SSW of the reactor. Which would put it in a safe area. Meaning they were right to be not worried if the trenches were at the camp. edit2: It being the byproduct of Russian navigation efforts is quite a compelling explanation. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-soldiers-disturbed-radioactive-dust-chernobyls-red-forest-2022-03-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol...
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      exactly, I know the pyramids exist, but would you actually fund them on google maps without using the search bar?
      - cf141q5325 3y ago
        You can tell by the signs. The point is the camp site was fine from a health and safety perspective. There are more heavily contaminated areas outside and it saw little impact due to the weather back then. Which leaves either damage to roads that might not have seen much use before (doubtful, they have police driving around to catch real life Stalkers), lost Russians or the fires Greenpeace mentioned. Some context for the heightened readings would be nice. Especially in comparison to the fires in March and 2020. They seem to be an obvious cause. edit: Vehicle impact sounds quite likely https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-soldiers-disturbed-radioactive-dust-chernobyls-red-forest-2022-03-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol... Maybe dont drive tanks through the red forest.
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    If you’re posting here, you probably have some degree of bias. Of course the millennial crowd interested in engineering is going to know about Chernobyl. But if you ask the average Gen Z not associated with tech or engineering, I bet they’d have no idea.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    How much do you know about The Red Scare in the US? I'm American and barely know anything about it. It's just not really talked about and not, as far as I know, due to fear of being imprisoned for it. Ugly history is often "forgotten" even when there is no compulsion to "forget" it.
    - craftkiller 3y ago
      I'm also American and The Red Scare was taught in my high school. That being said, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the MOVE bombing were left out of my curriculum.
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        And there can be other distracting factors. The biggest massacre of Native Americans in what eventually became the Continental US is largely forgotten by the modern US in part because it occurred during the Civil War at a time when there was no TV, internet, etc. The date: 29 January 1863. It gets remembered by various names and various sources give different counts for how many died. Wikipedia says 250 Natives were killed. Other sources say closer to 500. https://boaogoi.org/ https://boaogoi.org/
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    You are too optimistic about Russian education system in poor regions. Even ignoring tons of corruption and the fact that many teenagers are skipping school to do house/agriculture/other work, consider the fact that those schools are severely underfunded and good teachers migrated long time ago for a better life to bigger cities and even if they have internet, that doesn't meen the information they consume is educational type. I've seen some similar regions when I've visited Russia when I was in school and it looked depressing and I've only visited a bit of west part. The eastern russia is has much bigger problems in this regard, aside mybe from big cities. And that's just abt education, other comments abt how soldiers maybe didn't know where they are or were thinking that all Chernobyl is a thing of past may be also true
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  Everyone knows about Chernobyl. Most likely what they didn't know was where they are. I saw too many videos of soldiers asking locals for directions in the first days of war.
  - shagie 3y ago
    Looking for some pre 2020 content about Russia and Chernobyl... https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nunn-lugar-russia-programs/2019-08-15/top-secret-chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-through-eyes-soviet-politburo-kgb-us-intelligence https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nunn-lugar-russia-pr... > Documents from the highest levels of the Soviet Union, including notes, protocols and diaries of Politburo sessions in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, detail a sequence of cover-up, revelation, shock, mobilization, individual bravery, and bureaucratic turf battles in the Soviet reaction, according to the “Top Secret Chernobyl” e-book published today by the National Security Archive. > Key sources include protocols of the Politburo Operational Group on Chernobyl that were published in Russian by the journalist and former Supreme Soviet deputy Alla Yaroshinskaya in 1992. The posting today begins with Yaroshinskaya’s essay (written exclusively for this publication) reviewing the Chernobyl story and her own efforts dating back to 1986 to document and expose the lies and the secrecy that surrounded the disaster. https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a27787022/chernobyl-russian-response/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a27787022/cherno... > "The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down," Shepelin writes. How the Soviet Union stayed silent during the Chernobyl disaster - https://wapo.st/3shRS4M https://wapo.st/3shRS4M > Information inside Russia was sparse, too. Russian residents and even some officials were left unaware that the accident had occurred. In the news reports that trickled out, Soviet media stated that nuclear accidents like Chernobyl were "virtually impossible." > ... > The Soviet Union's refusal to release any information speaks to the mentality of the Kremlin. Perhaps the best explanation of trying to make sense of this mentality came from Ellen Goodman writing in 1988, shortly after the accident: > Exactly a year ago, in Moscow, I had a conversation with a young journalist who acted as interpreter. After a session with three bureaucrats, which bored him as much me, we went to a local coffee shop and talked about journalism and censorship. > Andre was among the elite of his Soviet generation. He was informed about America -- down to our frequent-flyer coupons -- and not reflexively defensive about the Soviet system. Yet, at one point, animatedly debating our countries' attitudes toward information, he reached for this analogy, "In the U.S.S.R. we do not tell a patient if he has cancer. Many times we treat people like they are children to be protected." > And in many ways, those living in the Soviet Union at the time would have agreed. --- While I can't say for certain, the reporting suggests that there is a deliberate willingness to collectively forget about Chernobyl within Russia.
- tguvot 3y ago
  >The dumbasses digging radioactive dirt probably didn’t even know about Chernobyl to begin with. Not probably. Definitely. Saw a couple of interviews with people who worked there while Russians took over the place. They said that most of the had no idea where they are (i.e. what Chernobyl is, what happened there, etc)
  - vGPU 3y ago
    I’m going to call BS on this. Even if such videos existed, it’s completely implausible for something like that to true. Imagine asking random New Yorker’s what 9/11 was. Chernobyl is pretty close to being equivalent in terms of fame and media coverage. I’d be extremely surprised if you could find even 1% of people from a random sample who, when asked about Chernobyl, would respond with at least some vague statement about nuclear contamination and radiation.
    - tguvot 3y ago
      such videos existed. personally saw it. a couple of station employees been interviewed in ukrainian about how things went down while russians occupied the area. filmed outside. intermixed with deserted russian camp with bunch of trash and some trenches. chernobyl happened almost 40 years ago. there were a couple of generations in russia ever since. chernobyl wasn't even in russia. why would random russian rural dudes (majority of army. people from major cities are rare) will know that it happened ?
    - rewmie 3y ago
      > Imagine asking random New Yorker’s what 9/11 was. Chernobyl is pretty close to being equivalent in terms of fame and media coverage. The mistake you're making is projecting your personal experience onto others, and extrapolating your personal account to everyone. In the meantime, the Soviet union employed a massive censorship and disinformation effort regarding the Chernobyl accident, and Russia's invasion force deployed throughout Ukraine is renowned to originate primarily from remote regions of the Russian federation. Just because you have access to the internet and CNN and benefitted from living in a society where information flows freely, that does not mean that random people from Buryatia enjoyed the same privileges.
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- cedws 3y ago
  The story of Russians digging holes and getting radiation poisoning was propaganda, just like Ghost of Kiev. The levels of radiation in the soil are not high enough to cause radiation poisoning, except for very few hotspots that they'd have to go looking for. It's mostly alpha radiation left which is dangerous only if radioactive particles are inhaled. I'm more inclined to believe the IAEA. Also, >They concluded that the radiation levels where the soldiers camped were three times what the IAEA reported Three times more is not much when talking about radiation. Flying in a plane exposes you to about that much more radiation compared with being on the ground at sea level.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    > It's mostly alpha radiation left which is dangerous only if radioactive particles are inhaled. As someone who's dug a few ditches in my day, I'll testify that dry dirt is pretty easy to inhale.
    - cf141q5325 3y ago
      He is right, that part of the exclusion zone is relatively harmless. Greenpeace has the coordinates in their report, if i am not too far off people still eat mushrooms from such conditions. The story here seems to be tanks driving off the roads, not the digging at the camp site.
      - dralley 3y ago
        I recall seeing a heatmap of residual radiation levels produced in (I think?) 2015 and the reported location of the trenches was very close to the hottest part of it.
        cf141q5325 3y ago
        I posted the sources in the edits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182828#37183914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182828#37183914 Do you have another position for the trenches?
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > "accused the IAEA of being untrustworthy because IAEA Deputy Director Mikhail Chudakov, a Russian, is a long-term official with ROSATOM, Russia’s state atomic corporation.)" Fair enough, such a team might be biased.. > "Three months later, the Ukrainian government invited Greenpeace to conduct its own radiological survey" Lmfao, of all the organizations they could have called on, they picked Greenpeace? Anything Greenpeace says about anything nuclear can safety be assumed a lie until proven otherwise. They have negative credibility.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Greenpeace Germany didn't really pull that one off (IMHO). I went looking to see if the commissioned an independant industry standard radiometric spectral survey .. they flew a drone themselves at 100m altitude (standard for big heavy crystal packs - bit high for some lightweight count detector) recording gamma CPS (counts per second total, not banded to identify types of radiation). They did hire a UK company to compile sat data images (to identify areas of interest) What's missing from their release is a detailed radiometric techical report - gear that was used, calibrations, raw data, processed "normalised data" etc. Greenpeace press release: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762/greenpeace-investigation-challenges-nuclear-agency-on-chornobyl-radiation-levels/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762... McKenzie Intelligence Services: https://www.mckenzieintelligence.com/ https://www.mckenzieintelligence.com/ MIS- Chornobyl Report: (32 pages) https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-mis-chornobyl-study.pdf https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-... (FWiW I did some decades of radiometric environmental survey work related to geophysical exploration and IAA inspections)
- andreygrehov 3y ago
  > They thought they were going to get all of Ukraine in 3 days. The claim of a 3-day takeover has never been official. It came from a random article that was erroneously published. The reason it was written stems from the fact that many news agencies prepare drafts for various scenarios. To rely on a news article as evidence of one country's legitimate plan to invade another defies common sense.
  - driuha 3y ago
    It was said by main propagandists who are the official mouths of kremlin on national tv channels. Also it was said by Lukashenka.
- vGPU 3y ago
  >Greanpeace I can’t say I’m inclined to trust a source with the unofficial motto of “It does not matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” Not to mention how they consider doing things like paying people to torture animals on film for propaganda campaigns acceptable, and multiple incidents of them ramming ships.
  - timeon 3y ago
    Is this true?
    - vGPU 3y ago
      http://www.noahide.com/infiltration/greenpeace.htm http://www.noahide.com/infiltration/greenpeace.htm There are plenty of sources online. There are several videos on YouTube of them ramming ships.
      - zimpenfish 3y ago
        I'd probably not use that one, myself, given the other links on that site do somewhat tend to detract from its credibility. "So it is entirely possible that Obama is already planning to declare a national emergency and suspend the elections this year [2012]." "With such forces at his disposal, you can be sure Obama is now actively planning a new Holocaust against the Jews in America as well as in Israel." I admit I don't watch the news as assiduously as I used to but I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about that happening.
refulgentis 3y ago
Interesting until the extended meditations on "why didn't anyone look into this more?????" -- as laid out, IAEA knew and said so publicly, the readings were few and transitory (30m-2h), and if there was a hack, there's 0 real evidence and it's not clear to me it'd be worth disclosing publicly (Russia hacked nuclear radiation in a headline for a schoolboys prank level 'hack' that is completely unprovable)
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- nullc 3y ago
  A bunch of sensors don't just give very high readings at once by chance. There is a reason. If it had just been one sensor that would be another matter (and perhaps it needs to be replaced...) It doesn't make sense as a prank in that it was only a few sensors and not persistent, it's not like they drew a dick with the results or set them to over 9000.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - stefan_ 3y ago
    So what? There is no conspiracy here. There are lots of other sensors not in Ukraine and they didn't report zilch. This entire article is just crazy talk.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Looking at the reported patterns of the spikes (just a few widely seperated sensors having their stored aggregated data routinely being corrupted at similar times of day) there's another highly probable cause. Brittle software and data management. According to the linked third party piece and the Wired reporting things are going wrong at the first aggregate server that collates all the sensor data. The first port of call for the regular data admin HN crowd would be bad cron jobs, sloppy scripting, glitchy deamon whacking memory, .. a thousand possible causes all of which have happened before in the history of remote sensor data aggregation. It's likely persisting as ground zero is in a war torn country at a place that likely faces time, resource, and staffing challenges; and it's likely being "ignored" at the higher action levels as the data has been looked at and random spikes are being filtered away and there's a big yellow post it note somewhere to look into the root causes as soon as possible (which may take some time).
h2odragon 3y ago
suspecting the sensors or collection network has been subverted; does it make sense to presume the normal looking signal is the true signal and the abnormal one is false data? would the opposite assumption have testable traces? just letting paranoia run free, if theres some later "dirty bomb" whose signatures match chernobyl debris, can that now be tied to either party or has reasonable doubt been established, anyone could have been smuggling some 'stuff" out in that period?
- deleted 3y ago
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- mannykannot 3y ago
  I imagine that the prior data is consistent with the contamination being distributed by the wind from the reactor fire, and thereafter being subject only to the weather, and to a lesser extent, geological and biological processes. It seems unlikely, however, that the unusual features of the spikes can be explained by natural processes alone.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
These may not be radiation spikes at all. They supposedly don't match what should be happening if they were real, so: The patterns led him to conclude that the data was likely manipulated — either by a remote hacker or someone with direct access to the server that processed the data.
0xDEF 3y ago
The Ukrainians played it down and claimed it was because of fires and Russian military vehicles driving around in the area were stirring up the radioactive top layer of soil. Why would they have faked the sensor data?
LeonB 3y ago
If Ukrainian people (whether state sanctioned or independent) manipulated the sensors to amplify concern about Russia’s invasion —- it would not be remarkable. Deception, misdirection, sabotage, these are all crucial elements in every war.
- YeBanKo 3y ago
  Agreed, but if would also be self-sabotaging. Their emergency services are stretched thin. And the population does not believe that the government can deal with a nuclear threat. It can cause a panic among population, within and outside of Ukraine and the sentiment might be hard to control.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    Obviously we are not privy to all relevant information, personalities, bureaucracies, etc etc, to be able to make such a strong claim as “would also be self-sabotaging”. A more reasonable claim, may I offer, would be something like “that may turn out to be…”
    - YeBanKo 3y ago
      I am 100% certain, that fall out from a panic from a nuclear threat is as unpredictable as stock market. Surely there may be enough idiots in any government who might think that they have a grip on public opinion strong enough to direct it.
- andreygrehov 3y ago
  > Deception, misdirection, sabotage, these are all crucial elements in every war. If the Ukrainians tampered with the sensors, the Russians undoubtedly knew about it. In such a scenario, the deception and misdirection are aimed at the rest of the world. If that is the case, there are much more similar manipulations taking place.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
Maybe it is not that these few sensors were hacked, but that these are the only ones that weren't.
abalaji 3y ago
3.6 - not great, not terrible
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
Qui bono? "OK, guys, we'll just hack into these radiation sensors to manipulate the data feed, and make them display highly elevated level of radiation for a few minutes. Then we'll reset them back to normal... muwuhahahaha [evil laugh]...."
- kennyloginz 3y ago
  I don’t want to imply that this is what happened here. But that scenario has absolutely happened.
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  And the part where Russian soldiers take the server offline because they know the data is fake and they want to avoid a panic… What? If the Russians are doing it they can just stop If the Ukrainians are doing it the Russians don’t know they’re doing it None of this makes any sense, why would either side care about this? I’m now more inclined to believe it was just a weird sensor issue or for whatever reason the traffic through the area caused the sensors to (accurately or inaccurately) read higher - just because there’s absolutely no clear motive and it would be asinine for any of the actors involved to be doing this.
  - qweurisjskgi 3y ago
    It never implies that it was Russia who took the server offline. It says that, if Russia was responsible, it was likely Ukraine instead. There are a couple of different credible explanations at the end, which specifically mention motive.
  - catchnear4321 3y ago
    > If the Ukrainians are doing it the Russians don’t know they’re doing it wouldn’t that explain it rather cleanly? aren’t there plenty of asinine actions taken in war? speculation, yes. the cost will likely be downvotes for me. that’s ok. taking your sentence, let’s run with that and show a possibility. ukraine fights asymmetrically. you have seen this with drone boats, drones dropping bombs, drones taking prisoners, soldiers on e-bikes, etc. scrappy. (many americans dig this subconsciously - echoes of the revolutionary war ringing in their ears from centuries ago.) russia seems to fight… dumb. brute force. big stick. not the country, not the people, but the military operation - dumb. crude. if you were a smart, ukranian allied (but maybe not even affiliated) hacker and you wanted to make the russian military look worse, you amp up the damage signals from their march into cez. who cares how plausible, it just needs to be upsetting. russians + radiation. done and done. if you were a dumb russian, upon learning that “you caused this massive radiation spike,” you might want to hide the evidence - the sensor data. because you don’t want to deal with the fallout, no pun intended. if you were a smart ukranian hacker, you might get real quiet now, because oops those modified values aren’t exactly going to blend in. but it doesn’t matter. the dumb russian believed your ruse, and hid your manipulation, thinking it their failure. which might be better than you hoped. the motive can be quite simple. hurt the other side. it doesn’t need to be rational, and the execution can be anything but. which, once all sides are involved, can look more like chaos. or maybe it was nothing of the sort.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
cbmuser 3y ago
We're talking about nSv/h here. Even a ten-fold increase is still negligible and even less what you would measure in some regions of the world from natural background radiation in places like Ramsar in Iran.

140 points by 8organicbits 3y ago

> The IAEA sent experts to do a radiological survey in the CEZ in April, but their focus wasn’t on determining the cause of the spikes. Investigators instead wanted to determine if Russian soldiers who dug trenches in a small section of the CEZ had released dangerous levels of radiation in that area that could have sickened the soldiers or anyone else who passed through that area. (The IAEA determined the radiation levels from trench-digging could not have made the soldiers ill.) Three months later, the Ukrainian government invited Greenpeace to conduct its own radiological survey of the areas where Russian soldiers had camped, and they also did not look into the cause or veracity of the February spikes. (They concluded that the radiation levels where the soldiers camped were three times what the IAEA reported and accused the IAEA of being untrustworthy because IAEA Deputy Director Mikhail Chudakov, a Russian, is a long-term official with ROSATOM, Russia’s state atomic corporation.) Interesting. The article asks a lot of questions about the Russians’ thinking but I think the most likely answer is that they were just uninformed and unorganized. It’s very unlikely they had any sort of calculated plan. They thought they were going to get all of Ukraine in 3 days. The dumbasses digging radioactive dirt probably didn’t even know about Chernobyl to begin with.

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dylan604 3y ago
Being from the West, it is very difficult to think that information black out can be achieved at such a level that younger generations would know nothing of a disaster on the level of Chernobyl.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - vkou 3y ago
    3 mile island was a nothingburger, though.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      Revisionist bullshit. It was bad enough to cause the reactor to be removed from service permanently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
    - failuser 3y ago
      Core meltdown is never a nothing burger. The containment vessel worked though, so at least the engineering was sound.
    - hnaccount141 3y ago
      Perhaps Castle Bravo would be a closer comparison? I think the point stands.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    It's funny, my comment originally went in more depth specifically calling out how nobody in the US younger generations would know about 3 Mile Island, but decided to edit it back. To me, to even equate 3 Mile Island to Chernobyl isn't even in the realm of sane. What's the exclusion zone around 3 Mile Island? Exactly. My bet would be future generations in Japan will be very aware of Fukushima. Stipulating that Russians knowing about things in Ukraine is totally different than the Japanese knowing about things in their backyard.
- failuser 3y ago
  Between Stalker and Call of Duty they probably know at least something. And documentaries about Chernobyl were common on Russian TV.
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- cafard 3y ago
  How many Americans, younger or not, would raise an eyebrow if invited to go camping around Hanford? The Russian soldiers might have heard about Chernobyl, but had no idea a) that they were there or b) how far the contaminated zones extended.
  - eindiran 3y ago
    I tend to agree with your overall point, but the comparison is not a particularly good one; you are comparing knowledge of a black site decommissioned in the 1960s to one of the most famous events in human history.
    - jychang 3y ago
      I think "most famous events in human history" is probably overstating it, and even then it wouldn't be well known anyways. Outside of the HN bubble, the average 18 year old person (even in america, as opposed to russians) would not be very informed about Chernobyl. I'd say Chernobyl is a lot less famous than WWII or 9/11 or events of that sort. And even for big historical events... if you go to a Taylor Swift concert and asked the people there about it, 50% would probably have no clue about most historical events. For example, my 24 year old younger sister doesn't know what a floppy disk is, or what the Berlin wall is. I'd bet you can take any regiment of fresh 18 year old US Marines and tell them they're doing military exercises in Pripyat and they'll mostly ask if there's going to be air conditioning or if there are hot girls around.
      - sbierwagen 3y ago
        Around the time the Shuttle program was ending, I made a casual reference to Soyuz to a Russian national. "Huh? «Union?»" No man. Soyuz, the space rocket. Literally the only way to get to the ISS right now. Your country's manned space program. That Soyuz? "If you say so." Amazing they even kept it going! We've over here twisting ourselves in knots in embarrassment that we let our only spaceflight system sunset and are reduced to begging rides from Putin, but his citizens don't even notice.
- cf141q5325 3y ago
  You dont really need a blackout. How many people can actually tell you the size and location of the contamination? Even the official limits of the exclusion zone are nonsense dating back to Soviet Bureaucracy. Wind meant there are contaminated areas outside and harmless areas inside. Also like the article stated, they are unlikely to have experienced any negative impact themselves. Also, the Greenpeace statement mentions fires, which are a far far better explanation for a spike in measurements. https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762/greenpeace-investigation-challenges-nuclear-agency-on-chornobyl-radiation-levels/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762... They also have pictures and mention the Russian camp was at "Stantzaya Yanov" which i cant find a reference to outside of the Greenpeace report. But i would suspect that wouldnt be directly in front of the very visible sarcophagus. edit: Maps in the report https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-mis-chornobyl-study.pdf https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-... Page 6 says the camp was 26km from the plant. edit1: Estimates from https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/essd-10-339-2018-f01-web.png https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/10/339/2018/essd-10-339... with longitude and latitude and Greenpeace puts the camp at 51.1663, 29.9645 SSW of the reactor. Which would put it in a safe area. Meaning they were right to be not worried if the trenches were at the camp. edit2: It being the byproduct of Russian navigation efforts is quite a compelling explanation. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-soldiers-disturbed-radioactive-dust-chernobyls-red-forest-2022-03-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol...
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    exactly, I know the pyramids exist, but would you actually fund them on google maps without using the search bar?
    - cf141q5325 3y ago
      You can tell by the signs. The point is the camp site was fine from a health and safety perspective. There are more heavily contaminated areas outside and it saw little impact due to the weather back then. Which leaves either damage to roads that might not have seen much use before (doubtful, they have police driving around to catch real life Stalkers), lost Russians or the fires Greenpeace mentioned. Some context for the heightened readings would be nice. Especially in comparison to the fires in March and 2020. They seem to be an obvious cause. edit: Vehicle impact sounds quite likely https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-soldiers-disturbed-radioactive-dust-chernobyls-red-forest-2022-03-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-sol... Maybe dont drive tanks through the red forest.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  If you’re posting here, you probably have some degree of bias. Of course the millennial crowd interested in engineering is going to know about Chernobyl. But if you ask the average Gen Z not associated with tech or engineering, I bet they’d have no idea.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  How much do you know about The Red Scare in the US? I'm American and barely know anything about it. It's just not really talked about and not, as far as I know, due to fear of being imprisoned for it. Ugly history is often "forgotten" even when there is no compulsion to "forget" it.
  - craftkiller 3y ago
    I'm also American and The Red Scare was taught in my high school. That being said, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the MOVE bombing were left out of my curriculum.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      And there can be other distracting factors. The biggest massacre of Native Americans in what eventually became the Continental US is largely forgotten by the modern US in part because it occurred during the Civil War at a time when there was no TV, internet, etc. The date: 29 January 1863. It gets remembered by various names and various sources give different counts for how many died. Wikipedia says 250 Natives were killed. Other sources say closer to 500. https://boaogoi.org/ https://boaogoi.org/
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  You are too optimistic about Russian education system in poor regions. Even ignoring tons of corruption and the fact that many teenagers are skipping school to do house/agriculture/other work, consider the fact that those schools are severely underfunded and good teachers migrated long time ago for a better life to bigger cities and even if they have internet, that doesn't meen the information they consume is educational type. I've seen some similar regions when I've visited Russia when I was in school and it looked depressing and I've only visited a bit of west part. The eastern russia is has much bigger problems in this regard, aside mybe from big cities. And that's just abt education, other comments abt how soldiers maybe didn't know where they are or were thinking that all Chernobyl is a thing of past may be also true
myth_drannon 3y ago
Everyone knows about Chernobyl. Most likely what they didn't know was where they are. I saw too many videos of soldiers asking locals for directions in the first days of war.
- shagie 3y ago
  Looking for some pre 2020 content about Russia and Chernobyl... https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nunn-lugar-russia-programs/2019-08-15/top-secret-chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-through-eyes-soviet-politburo-kgb-us-intelligence https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nunn-lugar-russia-pr... > Documents from the highest levels of the Soviet Union, including notes, protocols and diaries of Politburo sessions in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, detail a sequence of cover-up, revelation, shock, mobilization, individual bravery, and bureaucratic turf battles in the Soviet reaction, according to the “Top Secret Chernobyl” e-book published today by the National Security Archive. > Key sources include protocols of the Politburo Operational Group on Chernobyl that were published in Russian by the journalist and former Supreme Soviet deputy Alla Yaroshinskaya in 1992. The posting today begins with Yaroshinskaya’s essay (written exclusively for this publication) reviewing the Chernobyl story and her own efforts dating back to 1986 to document and expose the lies and the secrecy that surrounded the disaster. https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a27787022/chernobyl-russian-response/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a27787022/cherno... > "The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down," Shepelin writes. How the Soviet Union stayed silent during the Chernobyl disaster - https://wapo.st/3shRS4M https://wapo.st/3shRS4M > Information inside Russia was sparse, too. Russian residents and even some officials were left unaware that the accident had occurred. In the news reports that trickled out, Soviet media stated that nuclear accidents like Chernobyl were "virtually impossible." > ... > The Soviet Union's refusal to release any information speaks to the mentality of the Kremlin. Perhaps the best explanation of trying to make sense of this mentality came from Ellen Goodman writing in 1988, shortly after the accident: > Exactly a year ago, in Moscow, I had a conversation with a young journalist who acted as interpreter. After a session with three bureaucrats, which bored him as much me, we went to a local coffee shop and talked about journalism and censorship. > Andre was among the elite of his Soviet generation. He was informed about America -- down to our frequent-flyer coupons -- and not reflexively defensive about the Soviet system. Yet, at one point, animatedly debating our countries' attitudes toward information, he reached for this analogy, "In the U.S.S.R. we do not tell a patient if he has cancer. Many times we treat people like they are children to be protected." > And in many ways, those living in the Soviet Union at the time would have agreed. --- While I can't say for certain, the reporting suggests that there is a deliberate willingness to collectively forget about Chernobyl within Russia.
tguvot 3y ago
>The dumbasses digging radioactive dirt probably didn’t even know about Chernobyl to begin with. Not probably. Definitely. Saw a couple of interviews with people who worked there while Russians took over the place. They said that most of the had no idea where they are (i.e. what Chernobyl is, what happened there, etc)
- vGPU 3y ago
  I’m going to call BS on this. Even if such videos existed, it’s completely implausible for something like that to true. Imagine asking random New Yorker’s what 9/11 was. Chernobyl is pretty close to being equivalent in terms of fame and media coverage. I’d be extremely surprised if you could find even 1% of people from a random sample who, when asked about Chernobyl, would respond with at least some vague statement about nuclear contamination and radiation.
  - tguvot 3y ago
    such videos existed. personally saw it. a couple of station employees been interviewed in ukrainian about how things went down while russians occupied the area. filmed outside. intermixed with deserted russian camp with bunch of trash and some trenches. chernobyl happened almost 40 years ago. there were a couple of generations in russia ever since. chernobyl wasn't even in russia. why would random russian rural dudes (majority of army. people from major cities are rare) will know that it happened ?
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > Imagine asking random New Yorker’s what 9/11 was. Chernobyl is pretty close to being equivalent in terms of fame and media coverage. The mistake you're making is projecting your personal experience onto others, and extrapolating your personal account to everyone. In the meantime, the Soviet union employed a massive censorship and disinformation effort regarding the Chernobyl accident, and Russia's invasion force deployed throughout Ukraine is renowned to originate primarily from remote regions of the Russian federation. Just because you have access to the internet and CNN and benefitted from living in a society where information flows freely, that does not mean that random people from Buryatia enjoyed the same privileges.
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cedws 3y ago
The story of Russians digging holes and getting radiation poisoning was propaganda, just like Ghost of Kiev. The levels of radiation in the soil are not high enough to cause radiation poisoning, except for very few hotspots that they'd have to go looking for. It's mostly alpha radiation left which is dangerous only if radioactive particles are inhaled. I'm more inclined to believe the IAEA. Also, >They concluded that the radiation levels where the soldiers camped were three times what the IAEA reported Three times more is not much when talking about radiation. Flying in a plane exposes you to about that much more radiation compared with being on the ground at sea level.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > It's mostly alpha radiation left which is dangerous only if radioactive particles are inhaled. As someone who's dug a few ditches in my day, I'll testify that dry dirt is pretty easy to inhale.
  - cf141q5325 3y ago
    He is right, that part of the exclusion zone is relatively harmless. Greenpeace has the coordinates in their report, if i am not too far off people still eat mushrooms from such conditions. The story here seems to be tanks driving off the roads, not the digging at the camp site.
    - dralley 3y ago
      I recall seeing a heatmap of residual radiation levels produced in (I think?) 2015 and the reported location of the trenches was very close to the hottest part of it.
      - cf141q5325 3y ago
        I posted the sources in the edits of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182828#37183914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182828#37183914 Do you have another position for the trenches?
mcpackieh 3y ago
> "accused the IAEA of being untrustworthy because IAEA Deputy Director Mikhail Chudakov, a Russian, is a long-term official with ROSATOM, Russia’s state atomic corporation.)" Fair enough, such a team might be biased.. > "Three months later, the Ukrainian government invited Greenpeace to conduct its own radiological survey" Lmfao, of all the organizations they could have called on, they picked Greenpeace? Anything Greenpeace says about anything nuclear can safety be assumed a lie until proven otherwise. They have negative credibility.
- defrost 3y ago
  Greenpeace Germany didn't really pull that one off (IMHO). I went looking to see if the commissioned an independant industry standard radiometric spectral survey .. they flew a drone themselves at 100m altitude (standard for big heavy crystal packs - bit high for some lightweight count detector) recording gamma CPS (counts per second total, not banded to identify types of radiation). They did hire a UK company to compile sat data images (to identify areas of interest) What's missing from their release is a detailed radiometric techical report - gear that was used, calibrations, raw data, processed "normalised data" etc. Greenpeace press release: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762/greenpeace-investigation-challenges-nuclear-agency-on-chornobyl-radiation-levels/ https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/54762... McKenzie Intelligence Services: https://www.mckenzieintelligence.com/ https://www.mckenzieintelligence.com/ MIS- Chornobyl Report: (32 pages) https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-mis-chornobyl-study.pdf https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220718-greenpeace-... (FWiW I did some decades of radiometric environmental survey work related to geophysical exploration and IAA inspections)
andreygrehov 3y ago
> They thought they were going to get all of Ukraine in 3 days. The claim of a 3-day takeover has never been official. It came from a random article that was erroneously published. The reason it was written stems from the fact that many news agencies prepare drafts for various scenarios. To rely on a news article as evidence of one country's legitimate plan to invade another defies common sense.
- driuha 3y ago
  It was said by main propagandists who are the official mouths of kremlin on national tv channels. Also it was said by Lukashenka.
vGPU 3y ago
>Greanpeace I can’t say I’m inclined to trust a source with the unofficial motto of “It does not matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” Not to mention how they consider doing things like paying people to torture animals on film for propaganda campaigns acceptable, and multiple incidents of them ramming ships.
- timeon 3y ago
  Is this true?
  - vGPU 3y ago
    http://www.noahide.com/infiltration/greenpeace.htm http://www.noahide.com/infiltration/greenpeace.htm There are plenty of sources online. There are several videos on YouTube of them ramming ships.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      I'd probably not use that one, myself, given the other links on that site do somewhat tend to detract from its credibility. "So it is entirely possible that Obama is already planning to declare a national emergency and suspend the elections this year [2012]." "With such forces at his disposal, you can be sure Obama is now actively planning a new Holocaust against the Jews in America as well as in Israel." I admit I don't watch the news as assiduously as I used to but I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about that happening.

refulgentis 3y ago

Interesting until the extended meditations on "why didn't anyone look into this more?????" -- as laid out, IAEA knew and said so publicly, the readings were few and transitory (30m-2h), and if there was a hack, there's 0 real evidence and it's not clear to me it'd be worth disclosing publicly (Russia hacked nuclear radiation in a headline for a schoolboys prank level 'hack' that is completely unprovable)

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nullc 3y ago
A bunch of sensors don't just give very high readings at once by chance. There is a reason. If it had just been one sensor that would be another matter (and perhaps it needs to be replaced...) It doesn't make sense as a prank in that it was only a few sensors and not persistent, it's not like they drew a dick with the results or set them to over 9000.
- deleted 3y ago
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- stefan_ 3y ago
  So what? There is no conspiracy here. There are lots of other sensors not in Ukraine and they didn't report zilch. This entire article is just crazy talk.
- defrost 3y ago
  Looking at the reported patterns of the spikes (just a few widely seperated sensors having their stored aggregated data routinely being corrupted at similar times of day) there's another highly probable cause. Brittle software and data management. According to the linked third party piece and the Wired reporting things are going wrong at the first aggregate server that collates all the sensor data. The first port of call for the regular data admin HN crowd would be bad cron jobs, sloppy scripting, glitchy deamon whacking memory, .. a thousand possible causes all of which have happened before in the history of remote sensor data aggregation. It's likely persisting as ground zero is in a war torn country at a place that likely faces time, resource, and staffing challenges; and it's likely being "ignored" at the higher action levels as the data has been looked at and random spikes are being filtered away and there's a big yellow post it note somewhere to look into the root causes as soon as possible (which may take some time).

h2odragon 3y ago

suspecting the sensors or collection network has been subverted; does it make sense to presume the normal looking signal is the true signal and the abnormal one is false data? would the opposite assumption have testable traces? just letting paranoia run free, if theres some later "dirty bomb" whose signatures match chernobyl debris, can that now be tied to either party or has reasonable doubt been established, anyone could have been smuggling some 'stuff" out in that period?

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mannykannot 3y ago
I imagine that the prior data is consistent with the contamination being distributed by the wind from the reactor fire, and thereafter being subject only to the weather, and to a lesser extent, geological and biological processes. It seems unlikely, however, that the unusual features of the spikes can be explained by natural processes alone.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

These may not be radiation spikes at all. They supposedly don't match what should be happening if they were real, so: The patterns led him to conclude that the data was likely manipulated — either by a remote hacker or someone with direct access to the server that processed the data.

0xDEF 3y ago

The Ukrainians played it down and claimed it was because of fires and Russian military vehicles driving around in the area were stirring up the radioactive top layer of soil. Why would they have faked the sensor data?

LeonB 3y ago

If Ukrainian people (whether state sanctioned or independent) manipulated the sensors to amplify concern about Russia’s invasion —- it would not be remarkable. Deception, misdirection, sabotage, these are all crucial elements in every war.

YeBanKo 3y ago
Agreed, but if would also be self-sabotaging. Their emergency services are stretched thin. And the population does not believe that the government can deal with a nuclear threat. It can cause a panic among population, within and outside of Ukraine and the sentiment might be hard to control.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  Obviously we are not privy to all relevant information, personalities, bureaucracies, etc etc, to be able to make such a strong claim as “would also be self-sabotaging”. A more reasonable claim, may I offer, would be something like “that may turn out to be…”
  - YeBanKo 3y ago
    I am 100% certain, that fall out from a panic from a nuclear threat is as unpredictable as stock market. Surely there may be enough idiots in any government who might think that they have a grip on public opinion strong enough to direct it.
andreygrehov 3y ago
> Deception, misdirection, sabotage, these are all crucial elements in every war. If the Ukrainians tampered with the sensors, the Russians undoubtedly knew about it. In such a scenario, the deception and misdirection are aimed at the rest of the world. If that is the case, there are much more similar manipulations taking place.
- throwaway290 3y ago

dr_kiszonka 3y ago

Maybe it is not that these few sensors were hacked, but that these are the only ones that weren't.

abalaji 3y ago

3.6 - not great, not terrible

Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago

Qui bono? "OK, guys, we'll just hack into these radiation sensors to manipulate the data feed, and make them display highly elevated level of radiation for a few minutes. Then we'll reset them back to normal... muwuhahahaha [evil laugh]...."

kennyloginz 3y ago
I don’t want to imply that this is what happened here. But that scenario has absolutely happened.
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
And the part where Russian soldiers take the server offline because they know the data is fake and they want to avoid a panic… What? If the Russians are doing it they can just stop If the Ukrainians are doing it the Russians don’t know they’re doing it None of this makes any sense, why would either side care about this? I’m now more inclined to believe it was just a weird sensor issue or for whatever reason the traffic through the area caused the sensors to (accurately or inaccurately) read higher - just because there’s absolutely no clear motive and it would be asinine for any of the actors involved to be doing this.
- qweurisjskgi 3y ago
  It never implies that it was Russia who took the server offline. It says that, if Russia was responsible, it was likely Ukraine instead. There are a couple of different credible explanations at the end, which specifically mention motive.
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  > If the Ukrainians are doing it the Russians don’t know they’re doing it wouldn’t that explain it rather cleanly? aren’t there plenty of asinine actions taken in war? speculation, yes. the cost will likely be downvotes for me. that’s ok. taking your sentence, let’s run with that and show a possibility. ukraine fights asymmetrically. you have seen this with drone boats, drones dropping bombs, drones taking prisoners, soldiers on e-bikes, etc. scrappy. (many americans dig this subconsciously - echoes of the revolutionary war ringing in their ears from centuries ago.) russia seems to fight… dumb. brute force. big stick. not the country, not the people, but the military operation - dumb. crude. if you were a smart, ukranian allied (but maybe not even affiliated) hacker and you wanted to make the russian military look worse, you amp up the damage signals from their march into cez. who cares how plausible, it just needs to be upsetting. russians + radiation. done and done. if you were a dumb russian, upon learning that “you caused this massive radiation spike,” you might want to hide the evidence - the sensor data. because you don’t want to deal with the fallout, no pun intended. if you were a smart ukranian hacker, you might get real quiet now, because oops those modified values aren’t exactly going to blend in. but it doesn’t matter. the dumb russian believed your ruse, and hid your manipulation, thinking it their failure. which might be better than you hoped. the motive can be quite simple. hurt the other side. it doesn’t need to be rational, and the execution can be anything but. which, once all sides are involved, can look more like chaos. or maybe it was nothing of the sort.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

cbmuser 3y ago

We're talking about nSv/h here. Even a ten-fold increase is still negligible and even less what you would measure in some regions of the world from natural background radiation in places like Ramsar in Iran.