“The price of the Chernobyl catastrophe was overwhelming, not only in human terms, but also economically. Even today, the legacy of Chernobyl affects the economies of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.” - Mikhail Gorbachev
He wrote: “Chernobyl opened my eyes like nothing else: it showed the horrible consequences of nuclear power even when it is used for non-military purposes.” -- Mikhail Gorbachev
"On 26 April 39 years ago, the worst nuclear accident so far exploded in Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was a Soviet-made RMBK, high-power channel reactor design that could produce plutonium for nuclear bombs as easily as it could produce electricity.
A major reason for the disaster was that those in Moscow who decided to re-purpose reactors originally designed to produce materials for nuclear weapons to produce electricity kept secret a good deal about the inherent design dangers and instability of the reactors even from the reactor operators (including its “positive void co-efficient of reactivity”). The operators with pressure to fill production quotas cut corners.
In the reactor, 1,661 zirconium pressure tubes contained fuel rods and cooling water within 1,700 tonnes of graphite and a complex system of control rods, without heavy engineered containment. The design was 20 years old, but the plant had only been operating for three years.
An experiment was conducted to determine how much electricity could be generated by the freewheeling turbine to which supply of steam from the reactor had been cut. The experiment was delayed by 12 hours but continued in the wee morning hours despite failure to reset the automatic control system.
Multiple safety rules were deliberately violated. Reactor power was lowered to prohibited levels before attempts were made to insert shutdown control rods into the reactor core. Because of an inherent flaw in the reactor design, this did not lead to powering down, but to a rapid explosive burst. Nuclear criticality increased rapidly in some fuel elements, leading to their explosive disintegration, generation of vast quantities of steam and a hydrogen explosion. Chunks of highly radioactive molten fuel were blasted 7 – 9 km into the air, much of it into the stratosphere. A burning plume extended 500 m high. The two explosions and graphite fire over the next 10 days ejected about one third of the 190 tonnes of fuel inside the reactor and radioactive material continue to be emitted for a month.
The World Health Organisation observed that the Chernobyl disaster released 200 times as much total radioactivity as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.
Early fallout more than 1,500 km away was first detected the following day when unusually high levels of radiation were measured when a nuclear power plant worker in Sweden was checking out of work. For a day and a half, nobody understood the full extent of the disaster. Initial attempts to put the fire out with water only worsened the situation. Evacuation of nearby residents was only implemented after 34 hours.
Nuclear reactors may produce useful electricity for a brief few decades, but their enduring products are uniquely hazardous radiation and high-level radioactive waste which persist over geological time frames.
Thirty nine years is a little over one half-life of caesium 137, so the cesium-137 in fallout across the world will by now have decayed by a little over half. The plutonium 239 released, however, with a half-life of 24,400 years, will have only decayed by one seventh of 1% by now. It will take a quarter of a million years for it to substantially decay away.
The misguided arrogant and dangerous hubris and vested interests that brought us the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, and at least 11 other core melt accidents in different nuclear reactors, now brings us the willful madness of the alternative parties of Australian government’s plan for nuclear reactors proliferated around our wide, sunny and windy land. If we don’t act on evidence and learn from the past, we will be doomed to repeat it."
The RBMK reactor type had an extremely positive void coefficient, which means that without careful proper oversight, the reactor can rapidly become unsafe. The economic and political significance of Russia's RBMK reactors https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/112373
Well, the horrible consequences of getting it wrong. Nuclear power itself is a wonderful thing, far cleaner and more reliable than any other form, provided it's run competently.
It does, but a properly-run nuclear system has many layers of safeguards in place so that it takes many, many people all simultaneously doing something wrong for a disaster to occur.
>No, you can't run a natural gas pipeline through this land, it's sacred or something. <Okay, let's build nuclear plants. Then we won't need as many pipelines. >YOU CAN'T DO THAT EITHER REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>Needs to go back to nineteen fifty-fucking-seven to find examples to use for their flat earth-tier scientifically illiterate scaremongering. :marseyfoidretard:
@ChasingWaterfalls@Nudhul@Hoss@vic@AnungIkwe Cumbria had twice that number of extra cancer deaths in the years following the fire at Windscale, and that's just one power station in a relatively unpopulated part of the country.
@Nudhul@Hoss@vic@AnungIkwe@ChasingWaterfalls Your original statement was about how many people have died ever, but now you are only interested in deaths that occured post 1957?
Truly you are one of the most logical beings ever to have logiced.
@EatKnitSleepAgain@Hoss@vic@AnungIkwe@ChasingWaterfalls actually you know what, you're right. i underestimated the deaths from nuclear power. 9000 is the high estimate total, but i also underestimated smog deaths. WHO claims around 4.2 million yearly die from coal smog. nuclear is actually much, much safer comparatively than i suggested earlier.
@AnungIkwe >A major reason for the disaster was that those in Moscow who decided to re-purpose reactors originally designed to produce materials for nuclear weapons to produce electricity kept secret a good deal about the inherent design dangers and instability of the reactors even from the reactor operators (including its “positive void co-efficient of reactivity”). The operators with pressure to fill production quotas cut corners. And you know they were told to go over the allowable limits to impress the higher ups
It's almost like it was actually more of communist disaster than a nuclear one. No, surely that can't be. It was clearly the dastardly uranium's fault that retarded vodkaniggers were allowed to mishandle the power of the atom.
What about Fukushima? Out of the 19,500 deaths from the earthquake and tsunami, zero are directly attributable to the meltdown. 30 people died immediately following the reactor explosion at Chernobyl either directly from the blast or acute radiation exposure. Fukushima was not worse than Chernobyl in any conceivable way, quit your bullshit.
@Hoss@egirlyuumimain What about Fukushima? That was worse and not done by a "communist" state. The radiation that's slowly killing you right now doesn't have an economic position.
I'd love to know how nuclear radiation is apparently killing me as I speak. I'd go dig out my geiger counter and take a background reading right now, but honestly this retardation ain't even worth the effort.
Again. Do you realize how massive the Pacific Ocean is? It is so large, it actually makes you spinster users seem tiny by comparison. Learn about the concept of dilution.
Surely that comparatively small amount of irradiated wastewater in the vast Pacific Ocean is more dangerous to human health than the massive amounts of mercury that coal burning has dumped into the ocean. I mean, the media only wrote a bunch of really scary sounding headlines about the former, that means it's more worser.
@Hoss@egirlyuumimain@AnungIkwe It’s called the Pacific (passive) because its enormous depths absorb and distribute enormous amounts of energy just like AnungIkwe’s mom.
Folks, the Pacific is INCREDIBLE, but the name? Boring! From now on, we’re calling it the TRUMPIFIC OCEAN—the greatest, most spectacular ocean in history! The fake news will say, "Oh, Mr. President, you can’t do that!" But guess what? I just did! The Trumpific is YUGE, powerful, just like our country under MY leadership! 🇺🇸🌊 #Winning
@cjd@Hoss@vic Really? Big Nukes has been trying to sell the public old style Chernobyl RBMK Reactors as "new and improved" and "green" since 2017. There are thousands of gullible fools who fell for it. Look at all the industry shills that come out of the woodwork to fanatically defend the industry at the slightest criticism of nuclear power. Apparently white supremacists love Big Nukes too
> Big Nukes has been trying to sell the public old style Chernobyl RBMK Reactors as "new and improved"
Well there aren't any under construction, and the only ones operational are in Russia, so whoever this Big Nukes guy is, he's a pretty shit salesman.
> industry shills
People who like the lights to work.
> Apparently white supremacists love Big Nukes
Oh great, I'm followed by dozens of these people so we can just ask them.
ATTN WHITE SUPREMACISTS : Are you familiar with Big Nukes, and did he try to sell you a 75 year old soviet reactor design that was used in Chernobyl ?
Lastly, before you ask, no. To be a white supremacist, I'd have to believe that just because of her race, a liberal white woman is superior to an Italian, and that's just is self-evidently rubbish.
@AnungIkwe@vic They have so many sensors on Western nuclear reactord that if a pinhole leak occurs, they'll have it caught in seconds. They can't even use regular smoke detectors on some of those areas because the spare alpha particle emissions can trigger sensors. Mother nature could still do something insane like a massive unpredictable earthquake damaging the reactor site in an uncontrollable way, but that's why people prefer molten salt and other styles of reactors that are "off-line" when they stop working rather than at risk of going critical.
I prefer molten salt because it can be safer *cheaper*. If you have 10 years and 100 billion euros, you can make anything safe, but that's not a sustainable way to build out power generation infrastructure.