Some Cherobyl photos
 

I came across these Chernobyl photos tonight, and they are some very spooky photos indeed. :o http://englishrussia.com/?p=293

Let's hope we never see another meltdown like that :dead:

Thats Photos from Pripyat, Chernobyl is the name of the NPP, Pripyat was built for housing the workers at chernobyl NPP.

Been there once, was quite an experience, quite remarkable that nature can take over so fast when you leave something.

Make me greatful that the only nuclear reactor in Australia is a medical/research reactor. It would have a hard time even getting to 1% as bad as this if everything went wrong!

Those pictures are pretty disturbing. They show us time and again how careful we have to be with this technology.

There are some more pictures here: http://forums.filefront.com/s-t-l-k-...tra-death.html

:dead:

Pictures are one thing but its the stories that strike dread in my heart - a white-hot reactor melting its way into the earth, the desperate actions of the disaster response units, the sarcophagus, etc.

Especially the Firefighters, they rushed to the site to extinquish the fires, not knowing of the radiation they would be exposed too.

We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning ... We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: What is graphite? I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up. It's hot, he said. The pieces of graphite were of different sizes, some big, some small enough to pick up ...

We didn't know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had no idea. There was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled the cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof - Vashchik Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik ... They went up the ladder ... and I never saw them again.

I'd love to go there, looks stunning.


Good hunting Stalker... :D

I'm actually all for nuclear power. If done right, it is cheap, safe, and plentiful.

Nuclear power is like flying in an airplane. Both are the safest in their respective categories. But all it takes is a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl to happen to give the opposition exactly what they need.

Sigh. I remember seeing some statistic (after 9/11, I think) where you'd have to fly TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, non stop, to likely be killed in in an act of terrorism. It just takes one dramatic example to screw up perceptions among the unwashed masses, and lead to an unreasonably large reaction which screws things up even more.

The problem though, is when something does go wrong, the results are pretty large. When a plane crashes its not a couple of people it can be a couple hundred. We also don't know the full extent of what Chernobyl did, how many really died or suffered from it will never be fully known.

While I am no eviromental activist etc I am against nuclear power plants as Obama has proposed.I am against it because of Three Mile Island and especially Chernobyl.

Sure nuclear power is relatively safe, cheap, and plentiful but if something does go wrong like a Chernobyl, not only is the immediate area affected but people thousands of miles away are as well.When a plane crashes usually, it "only" takes out a small number and usually there are not long term health problems with your "standard" plane crash, 9/11 is a whole different story.We have other options than nuclear power,
so need to use them.Want some evidence, watch the documentary that aired on HBO a while back called Chernobyl Heart, people many miles away having children years later born with serious birth defects.


Torvald Von Mansee,

I have found the perception of nuclear power among the "unwashed masses" which I will assume you meant the uneducated or misinformed, is that nuclear power plants are good things because of the jobs but during their construction and once they are operational.I understand both sides of the argument but my education along with instrict and knowledge of history(Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, whichever nuke distaster is next) tells me that while nuclear power has benefits, they are not worth the risk.I don't want to see parts of my country end up like Chernobyl.Unlikely, perhaps but not worth the risk.

Another problem is where do you put the radioactive waste? That stuff stays dangerous for millenniums. If you calculate the "safe" storage of nuclear waste from power plants into your running costs, nuclear power isn't that cheap any more all of a sudden. But that is usually paid by the tax payer so the nuke companies can keep saying that it is cheap.
Over here in Germany we have quiet a problem with finding a final storage place for nuclear waste. A "research" mine that was used for storing barrels with radioactive stuff has started to take water some years ago and now all the waste has to be removed from it again (if that is possible, the barrels are corroded beyond recognition and the company which ran the show didn't take safety too serious at all...they don't even know exactly what they stored down there:damn:).
The mine was supposed to prove how safe such a final storage place is. The stuff stays dangerous for about 30.000 years and that mine remained solid for....30 years:damn:! Yeah, awesome how safe that is (let alone that the company tried to cover the mess up of course)!
With nuclear power you give a heavy burden to the generations to come. Assuming that a final storage place would last for 30.000 years to come is ridiculous at best. Imagine, if Jesus had stored nuclear waste somewhere it would still be dangerous in 28.000 years. Do you believe any one would still know that someone has stored something there thousands of years ago?

You and other anti- nuclear power detractors are seriously overestimating the risk I think.

What you're all saying is that you prefer the ongoing, constant environmental damage caused by coal and oil power plants over the potential damage of a nuke power plant meltdown in spite of the fact that your two examples: Chernobyl was a particularly bad design that is now totally obsolete and Three Mile Islands spill was so minor that it didn't even raise local cancer rates.

Think about it.

Bubblehead1980,

well what form of energy are you in favour of? I think from a moral/environmental point of view the best,or closest to the best, would be stuff like wind, solar, wave and biomass energy, and maybe some others that I don't remember now. These haven't been invested in, the reasons behind might be due to intense lobbying from pro-nuclear/some other more polluting form of energy producers.

Nuclear, coal, hydroelectric (damming rivers etc.) seem all pretty popular and also all have some pretty significant environmental downsides. Now I don't claim to know the politics behind, say, the building of nuclear but I do know that it's a question of big, and I do mean BIG, bucks.

Here's a list of the most expensive things, make a note of the dams and nuclear plants. No. 6 is a 'thing' from Finland, a pretty sad endeavor, I might add.

"According to Professor Stephen Thomas, "Olkiluoto has become an example of all that can go wrong in economic terms with new reactors"" :D

How many people died in the Three Mile Island accident?

Zero

My favourite TMI story was when the lawyers were trying to claim that the radiation levels released at TMI were at a dangerous level. To give an example of normal background radiation, a sample was taken inside the courtroom. The people in the courtroom were receiving more scintillating radiation due to the granite used in the construction of the courtroom than was released by TMI.

Oops.

TMI still remains our worst commercial reactor accident (there have been worse non-commercial accidents though). If TMI is the worst commercial accident we have had, we have an excellent safety record.

I do not think that nuclear power is our permanent solution to our energy problems, but it is a great source we can use until we do find a better source.

With today's technology we can build null void reactors that can operate with a negative void coefficient as a back up "fail-safe" design. No longer is the objective to get the absolute most energy out of reactors, but to build them safely as we can always get more power out of two negative void coefficient reactors than one positive one.

Nuclear reactor technology is too varied and complex to be assigned a simple label of "safe" or "unsafe".

The reality is that there exists reactor designs that - because of the design itself - actually take DAYS from a major malfunction (say a total cooling failure) to going critical. This gives a window of response that all but insures that the reactor will be either fixed OR deactivated to avoid a meltdown.

To say nuclear power is not safe is to ignore reality, on purpose.

As to "storage" - I have to ask, why does everyone want to ignore new generation reactors that can burn 90% of the fuel, instead of the designs from the 50's and 60's that can only burn like 10% - and thus leave highly toxic wastes. I mean, a safe, clean reactor that puts out 10% of the current waste? With the money saved from storage alone, we could repurpose NASA - and let them shoot the stuff into Jupiter or some other gas giant (or maybe the sun???) where it can't do any damage and doesn't impeded future space travel. I mean - heck - if we shot the waste into the sun (and surely we could hit the thing, its not like its a small target and its own gravity would help!) - the waste would be burnt up before it even got close.

Don't get me wrong - but it seems to me solutions like that solve more than one problem without causing more of them. Come to think of it - using the sun for a giant garbage disposal since it would just burn it all up into component atoms and consume it all could actually be a useful idea for LOTS of things.......

Do you know what it would cost to send a few tons of toxic waste to the sun every few months? If you do that you can say bye, bye to cheap nuclear power for good IMHO.

Figure I better get these links in here. These were the first photos of the Zone I was able to see as an adult. There are a few videos there somewhere, too. They were taken by a lovely and adventurous gal named Elena.

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl...of-the-wolves/

She tends to keep her chapter links at the bottom of each page.

Her main page is here: http://www.kiddofspeed.com

I highly recommend giving her site a good browse.

As a kid living here in the US, Chernobyl was a scary thing. What Elena and others have contributed in photographs and video and written word has helped me obtain so much perspective on a subject I never had hope of knowing about. We were behind our own kind of Iron Curtain here, namely fear I guess. I never thought there would be a time when we could see inside (what was then) the Soviet Union.

I read a book named Voices From Chernobyl a few months ago. I read it cover to cover in one night and it broke my heart in many places. I gained a much better understanding of the catastrophe and why so many people were thrown into (or threw themselves into) such a dangerous predicament. Who else could have prevented a greater disaster than the men who heaved broken chunks of graphite shielding from the roof of the shattered power block, or the brave helicopter pilots that airlifted and dumped load after load of sand onto the molten core? Who else could have been there to tend to their pain afterward but their loved ones (and only those beloved that were allowed in to the hospitals)?

The links, the book, the knowledge I sought afterward, it has all given that frightened little American kid from '86 a sense of closure that could not have been attained without the information that has been brought to light in the years since. But I have to wonder now, what of those who were directly affected by the meltdown? Have they found peace and closure?

This may be a better link for the book:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1564784010

I should also add, aside from all the heroism, that many of the folks in what is now the Zone knew nothing about radiation. They knew absolutely nothing except perhaps that the plant had blown up, that it had emitted a strange flame and odd-colored smoke. And not long after the plant blew they would know that they were to leave their homes, their livelihoods, their pets, many of their belongings, all of it indefinitely. There are those who never left, and there are those who missed home so much that they eventually found a way back.

Anyway, I had to share this with you. It's not an exercise in guided enlightenment. It's been an experience so far that, in a great sense, has taken a burden off my heart. To know what I know now is far more rewarding than the guilt I have carried for having hated the Soviets for so long... imagine that. An American so far removed from Soviet influence having any right whatsoever to hate them. And yet, when that plant blew... I will not share here that thought from so many years gone by. That was what I had learned then.

What I have learned since is that humanity is the core of our being, no matter our nationality or beliefs. I am thankful to have grown as far as I have and to discover what I have discovered within myself, and of our mutual struggles as an intelligent species. Hopefully there will be many more years of discovery to come.

I think I'm out of breath. *scoots the soapbox over for someone else*