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Chernobyl

Yes, I've viewed it before. My ex girlfriend had read the whole thing too. I suggest you read "The Truth About Chernobyl". I forgot the first name, but the author's surname is Medvedev.

Richard
 
Fascinating and well described! Thank you for posting it. I have spent a lot of time reading it all and I'm now starting to read the full Chernobyl web site of the author - Filatova Elena Vladimirovna. It is here:

HTML:
http://www.elenafilatova.com/
:cheers:
 
Some stuff like this on "Life After People" if you get whatever channel that is on. (History?)

Chernobyl was on there once and it seemed to mostly pivot off the red deer population as it is essentially the only place in the werld for this hybrid (strain? Breed?) and they are in bigger numbers as ever.

The radioactivity really didn't seem to have near the short nor long term effects as was expected. I believe that about the onlt people that really died from exposure were those that stayed behind to try to clean up and seal the chamber off after the fact. They prolly knew their fate and did what needed to be done regardless. Those are heros to many. (The last paragraph was not part of the "Life After People" show.)

Had a service guy in here that had lived 100 klicks SE of Chernobyl and he didn't seem to glow too bad either...


------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox
 
Thank you for posting a link to her blog, yes I see its an old post. I read about half of her blog many years ago, then one morning the link was dead, hopefully I can finish it this time.

Do any of you watch "Bald and Bankrupt" on YT? He has done some interesting excursions into the forbidden zone to visit the mostly senior citizens that still live there.
Inside The Belarus Chernobyl Zone 🇧🇾 - YouTube
 
Bell-a-roos.
Never heard it pronounced that way.
Good to hear that!
I know a fella that had a pair of Belarus loader tractors for clearing snow up north.

My boy and DIL have been wanting to take a trip there (Chernobyl) some day.
Was hoping to doo it for their honeymoon, but that didn't happen for whatever reason.


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I am Ox and I approve this h'yah post!
 
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I have a book recommendation for anyone interested in the story of Chernobyl: _Midnight In Chernobyl_, by Adam Higginbotham, published in 2019.

A lot of information has come out over the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, giving this book a more complete picture than other accounts I've read in the past. It's also got over 100 pages of notes,references, bibliography, etc, which may be boring but is a sign of a well researched book.
 
Cannot remember the name of the movie/documentary, but it did a great job of explaining how an RMBK reactor functions. Also did a fine job of elucidating all small parts of how the accident occurred. Cause as all of us know accidents of that scale don't usually have just point of failure.
 
Cannot remember the name of the movie/documentary, but it did a great job of explaining how an RMBK reactor functions. Also did a fine job of elucidating all small parts of how the accident occurred. Cause as all of us know accidents of that scale don't usually have just point of failure.

RBMK ...

[ more words]
 
The reason chernobyl went boom was a chain of events that occurred...these events were never planned to happen and were believed to never even be able to occur. On that unfortunate night, the impossible occurred. The area around chernobyl is still contaminated, not so much on the top layer, but just below the surface. Also you can still locate pieces of fuel and/or graphite moderator in the ground.
 
Some stuff like this on "Life After People" if you get whatever channel that is on. (History?)

Chernobyl was on there once and it seemed to mostly pivot off the red deer population as it is essentially the only place in the werld for this hybrid (strain? Breed?) and they are in bigger numbers as ever.

The radioactivity really didn't seem to have near the short nor long term effects as was expected. I believe that about the onlt people that really died from exposure were those that stayed behind to try to clean up and seal the chamber off after the fact. They prolly knew their fate and did what needed to be done regardless. Those are heros to many. (The last paragraph was not part of the "Life After People" show.)

Had a service guy in here that had lived 100 klicks SE of Chernobyl and he didn't seem to glow too bad either...


------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

i was born about 200 miles away from there 2 years before the incident. my siblings were born after, knock on wood no issues yet... haha
 
The reason chernobyl went boom was a chain of events that occurred...these events were never planned to happen and were believed to never even be able to occur. On that unfortunate night, the impossible occurred.

That was the party line at the time. The information that's come out since the collapse of the Soviet Union paints a different picture. The post-accident investigations determined that the accident was not only possible under a rare set of circumstances but was actually probable in normal operation (much like the Fukushima accident, which was essentially a certainty). The design flaw that caused the accident was known to the reactor designers but kept secret from the engineers who ran the reactors - the designers didn't want to admit that there was a flaw in Soviet technology. So the events of that night were not planned for, but they were intentionally not planned for.

The flaw was fundamental to the RBMK (Russian for "high-power channel-type reactor") design. I don't understand the physics of it, but what I've read says that the control rods were boron-tipped, which moderated the reaction less than the water that the tips displaced. When the control rods were inserted (such as in an emergency shutdown) and the tips entered the core the lack of moderation from the water that was displaced could cause a brief rise in the rate of reaction. Under some circumstances, like the ones on the fateful night, the brief spike could cause a very fast runaway reaction, before the control rods themselves could damp the reaction. There was human error involved as well, but there is always human error any time there are humans.

The Big One was not the first core meltdown at Chernobyl either, it was just the first that they couldn't hide, although they did try. The radioactive cloud floating over Europe was a bit of a giveaway, though.

Another book recommendation: _Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology_, by James Chiles. It talks about a bunch of famous disasters - the R101, DC10, Three Mile Island, the Johnstown PA dam collapse, etc - and the human/machine interaction (and frequently hubris) that allows a small failure to cascade into a big one. It's an easy and entertaining read, not a deep scholarly work, and can be had used online for a couple of bucks. I keep a stash of spare copies on hand so I can hand them out to anyone who will read it and, hopefully, learn something from it.
 
... but what I've read says that the control rods were boron-tipped, which moderated the reaction less than the water that the tips displaced. When the control rods were inserted (such as in an emergency shutdown) and the tips entered the core the lack of moderation from the water that was displaced could cause a brief rise in the rate of reaction.

Sorry to nit pick, but the control rod tips in question (actually "displacers") were graphite, not boron. Boron would have been great, as it would have absorbed the neutrons. The graphite moderated them very effectively, making many, many more fission-causing neutrons.

Regards.

Mike
 
This inspires a question. I know that there are countless types of radiation, but suppose you had a radioactive item that was worth the effort and whose primary emission was neutrons. Could you enclose it in a beryllium shell (with a better control system than a screwdriver) and increase the reaction to a level that would burn up the radioactive elements quickly instead of waiting 500 years, or whatever?

Love Elena's quote "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to hell. Girls with fast bikes go anywhere they want to.")

There are motorcycle owners and then there are bikers. Don't' confuse the two. She's a biker. I would like to meet her. At 85, I wouldn't be giving her a shower, but I would promise a beer and a pizza.

Bill
 
This inspires a question. I know that there are countless types of radiation, but suppose you had a radioactive item that was worth the effort and whose primary emission was neutrons. Could you enclose it in a beryllium shell (with a better control system than a screwdriver) and increase the reaction to a level that would burn up the radioactive elements quickly instead of waiting 500 years, or whatever?

Eh, no. The radioactivity is based on the isotope's half-life.

I guess if you happened to get just the right isotope, and the beryllium shell was exactly right such that you managed to make a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb, then yes, it could all burn up rather quickly, if you could hold it all together -- criticality tends to result in everything flying apart, disrupting the sensitive geometry that made the criticality possible.

But practically, no, the radioactivity is based almost entirely on the isotope's half-life. I don't know of any way to adjust an isotope's half-life.

About 1,000 years ago when I did a college internship at Los Alamos, they had a PU show-and-tell slug. They kept it in a thick metal shell (inside an isolation booth). When first removed from the shell, it would be glowing red-hot. Within a few minutes outside of its shell, it cooled. Back in the shell for awhile, glow red hot.

Regards.

Mike
 
Eh, no. The radioactivity is based on the isotope's half-life.

I guess if you happened to get just the right isotope, and the beryllium shell was exactly right such that you managed to make a nuclear reactor or a nuclear bomb, then yes, it could all burn up rather quickly.

But practically, no, the radioactivity is based almost entirely on the isotope's half-life. I don't know of any way to adjust an isotope's half-life.

About 1,000 years ago when I did a college internship at Los Alamos, they had a PU show-and-tell slug. They kept it in a thick metal shell (inside an isolation booth). When first removed from the shell, it would be glowing red-hot. Within a few minutes outside of its shell, it cooled. Back in the shell for awhile, glow red hot.

Regards.

Mike

Was the cooling from convection in the open air or from increased activity? If the metal cover was a neutron reflector and the reaction rate increased, the apparent half life had to decrease because it was using more atoms. The infamous incident where the guy let his screwdriver slip, causing a runaway reaction, was sure as hell using up PU atoms at a greater rate than normal. He was demonstrating the ability to make a controlled reaction, which could be adjusted to a low level.

Bill
 








 
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