Here I found the 20 seconds blurb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouJjaV_NbY (sorry in Russian, obviously).
My dad, a mechanical engineer, also specializing in workplace safety was really concerned and told me. "This is bad. They are probably downplaying the accident who knows who horrible it really is...".
The fact that people knew government lied routinely in cases like that, nobody believed them so all kinds of rumors started to circulate.
My mom kept some flowers on the balcony. She claimed they died that year because of the radiation. I don't really believe that was the cause, but it just explains the anxiety and worry people experienced.
Then there was a call to go help clean up. They promised money, even better apartments for volunteers (housing was government provided). Some went and they came back to a new apartment but they didn't enjoy it for too long. Others told stories of people burned so badly by the radiation their skin and meat was falling off their bones.
Another really sad thing happened when evacuees started streaming to different cities. They were shunned and treated horribly by others. It was paranoia, prejudices and mistrust. Mixed with lots of irrational fear ("Maybe they are still radioactive, I wouldn't get near them". I can remember my uncle saying...). How horrible. Those poor people had to leave everything behind only to be faced by that kind of attitude.
Just as a complementary data point, there were people who turned out OK. My friend's father was on his honeymoon in the area and when the call for volunteers came, he signed up. From looking at the family album, my friend tells me he lost something like 20kg in 3 weeks, but otherwise, it turned out well - he's alive and healthy today, and so is my friend.
If an analogous event happened in the US, all entertainment programming would be suspended and there would be continuous news coverage on all the major channels for several days, just like after 9/11.
I was a kid those days, and my mother keeps telling me that diary products were suddenly put on a sale (before the news release). I live in Eastern-Europe, in the former Warsaw Pact bloc. My father worked in a research institute, so managed to get a hold of the information before the official announcements. He told her not to buy any diary or vegetable for a while.
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What troubles me is the contant flow on anti-nuclear-power propaganda to HN. If we accept the fact of global warming, and humanity as its cause, then the fearmongering about nuclear power should stop, as it is a necessary component in reducing CO2 emissions while not giving up too much from our lifestyle. With the lessons learned from the nuclear accidents we have every measure to avoid them in the future, until the fusion technology is ready, and to have reliable, zero-emission power in our energy mix.
1. The world's uranium supply won't actually go that far [1].
2. A lot of places aren't suitable for nuclear reactors (eg they're seismically active).
3. We have to trust either corporations or governments to run such plants. Corporations will tend to maximize short term profits at the cost of long term safety. Governments will tend to do the same for budgetary reasons.
4. We'd create a whole bunch of radioactive slag that we honestly have no good way of dealing with.
So far it seems the best power source we have is hydroelectric. Of course it's only possible in some places. This can devastate certain species (eg salmon) but in terms of cost, risks, environmental impact and power output, hydro is hard to beat if it's an option.
Solar has been on a stellar (pardon the pun) rise for some years simply because the cost of cells has decreased by way more than I ever would've predicted.
Widespread electric vehicles are still hindered by the relative expense and scalability issue of batteries, notably how much lithium we have available as well as the environmental impact of mining the necessary materials. It does seem like we're one big battery breakthrough away from completely changing this landscape however.
Wind has a place but I think will remain a niche energy source.
I increasingly have the view the the economic production of electricity from nuclear fusion is a pipe dream. The temperatures are too high, magnetic containment seems too problematic and, worse, the neutron emissions are a big problem (yes, yes, I know about He3).
This does seem like it's a problem we're going to have to solve this century.
1. Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. It is effectively totally sustainable and even renewable on a 4+ billion year time frame, even without breeder reactors. But really, breeder reactors will become a thing when uranium gets expensive enough to warrant them. The reactors that were attempted so far just weren't needed because it turned out we had way more uranium that we originally thought.
2. With passive cooling systems, even seismically active regions can be powered by nuclear. Also, there are exciting possibilities for offshore nuclear, floating 10km out to sea where tsunami wavelengths are huge. Cooling is guaranteed and huge shipyards can do the construction. I agree that it's clear from Fukushima that designs requiring active cooling are no good in such places.
3. There are teams of nuclear engineers and other reactor designers in San Francisco right now at the American Nuclear Society meeting whose goal is to reduce the price of nuclear so that corporations can make a profit from them without compromising safety. I believe it can be done.
4. The Finns are about done with their deep geologic repository [1] and it's looking great. We definitely know how to dispose of nuclear waste. It's just a matter of political will and outreach. The tradeoff you have to keep in mind is that you can get all your primary energy for literally your entire life while personally producing 2 soda cans of nuclear waste. Compare that to fossil fuel (2 million times more waste) or to the vast energy harvesting resources for wind and solar (concrete bases, fiberglass, steel, silicon, glass, semiconductor processing, etc.) and you see that nuclear is extremely low footprint and that's its magic.
I sympathize with your concerns and am working to mitigate them. Biggest hurdle in my mind is standardizing designs. I dream of coordinating an open source reactor design effort some day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
The death tolls tell a different story.
You aren't alone in this belief, but I've never really understood it. Banqiao dam bursts and kills 170,000 people: hydro is fine, we should do more. Chernobyl melts down and kills 30: nuclear power is inherently unsafe!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
Wind is an excellent source for some countries. Much of the US is great for wind generation and unlike hydro the resource is largely untapped. Wind is unpredictable but averages out over large areas. It will never be a base source but has much potential remaining.
Solar is held back by cost alone. All predictions point to solar providing the majority of our electricity in the future.
Nuclear fuel is essentially unlimited. Uranium is in seawater and if prices rise high enough we can extract from that and basically never run out. On top of that thorium is also usable as fuel if we ever get around to building anything that uses it.
In some countries the best power source is nuclear. If you don't have a lot of wind, water, or sun, your options become limited to fossil fuel or nuclear.
Note that according to one recent study, reservoirs also contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Previous HN discussion [1].
It's just one study and its quantified result should probably be debated, but it's general argument that reservoirs contribute to greenhouse gas emissions sounds well-reasoned to me.
There are only so many suitable locations for hydro, and the further down the list we go the worse the incremental environmental impact.
Fusion will work eventually, but currently it is in the constant "we'll be there in 30 years" since the 1970s. Yet we are not getting further, but closer to it. Just thnik about it: now you have technology in your pocket that was used in putting humans on the Moon. More and more durable and special materials becoming cheaper and affordable. We are getting close to handle the heat, EM and possibly the neutron flux. It is doable in the near future (<100 years), thus worth pursuing. What we must avoid (this also applies to the energy storage tech for renewables) is the wishful thinking: "we can shut down nuclear powerplants, as fusion/battery tech will be solved in ten years: extrapolation from 2 conviniently chosen datapoints..."
Breeder reactors and Thorium based fuel cycle will mitigate the problem of running out of U235. Radioactive residual reprocessing will eventually be solved. Maybe peak-uranium will make it economically desireable. Btw there is current work on reprocessing spent radioactive fuel in reactors, at least in Russia and China.
I firmly beleive that while solar and wind will stay with us, they cannot be the fundamentals of our energy mix, and nuclear is here to stay. Simply many politicians are not ready to admit it yet.
The solution always has to be fewer humans and less human activity, with the possible exception of temporary "sorry, we were never here" cleanup efforts.
Do you honestly find that to be a better explanation of human history the past few thousand years than "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills"?
Personally, I find the latter proves true to life. Better to accept it and deal with it, than to sweep it under the rug.
The fact that you very subtilely called me a nazi (I had to google the word Zersetzung to recognize this) tells me something else: your ad-hominem attack is just annother example of the anti-nuclear propaganda I talked about. My opinion about nuclear power does not match yours, thus you call names on me, point finger at me, and even try to tell me what my idea should be after the experiences I have, or how should I present them. This is the very attitude which made the Eastern block be a bad, opressive place. This attempt to kill conversations about inconvenient/controversial topics, which starts to get the norm even in the western world is very troubling for me.
To conclude: what you are doing is just as much not nice as what you attributed to my story and opinion.
i clicked and began reading the first one; two hours later and i just read the last one. The editor (who compiled, edited and translated these brief accounts) did a remarkable job, but stories themselves are extraordinary and compelling--many deeply sad; many of them provide revealing snapshots of the former USSR.
here's a portion of one from a radiation scientist working in Kiev at the time:
> Both sides of it were lined up with buses. Dozens upon dozens of them, parked bumper to bumper. People were streaming out of them endlessly. Most wore house coats, pajamas, tapochki (slippers),…. Very few passengers had as much as a purse on them....it was almost silent. The trolley had to stop and I walked all the way to the institute mingling with these unusual and unwilling passengers. They were evacuees from Pripyat. Their destination was that same facility I was heading to. Reason: decontamination. It was only one place that can handle it en-masse. I remember marching with them in a very solemn procession. Not like a funeral one, rather a trip to a “then what?” destination. People talked in hush tones, kids didn’t jump and yell, even infants were uncharacteristically quiet.”
i'm from southeastern Belarus (Gomel region) but at the time attending Lyceum ("science high school") in Moscow. Like many students, i listened to Voice of America on the radio late in the evenings; at 0800 the next morning, i went to the Lyceum authorities and requested immediate leave to visit my family. The response was not a disposition notice ("approve"/"denied") but an urgent request to meet in an administrator's office. When i was led into her office, she spoke to me in an uncharacteristically gentle voice and told me i should not go in sum because there is absolutely nothing i could do to help my family and because to do so would likely irreparable damage my health. i asked her what she would do if she were in my place. She signed my request, then after a 14-hour wait in the queue at the train station, and a 17-hour journey by train, i was home.
Some details about the origin: the vignettes were originally English-language comments in a private Facebook group.
It was a huge team effort to get them all collated, organized, and to check and re-check attribution and consent to share. We are so happy that we are able to share these collective memories and eyewitness testimonies, particularly outside of Facebook's walled garden.
There is even a documentary about it called 'Chernobyl. Four Days in April' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1904869
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0pG3TPxeM https://www.cda.pl/video/6949094e?wersja=720p sadly no english subtitles.
- being told not to keep water in my cup anymore in kindergarten.
- dad going to grandparents farm for a few weeks (to hide from mobilisation into cleanup crew).
- a few frames of TV news about the helicopters flying over the reactor (tho this memory could be from years later).
If anyone is interested, my unedited photos can be found here:
https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5...
https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5...
Would you be willing to share the albums as zip files or such for downloading? Strangely, google photo albums don't seem to have a method to download the complete album for public albums (there is supposed to be a way to do it for your own albums, though - but that doesn't apply here - though if you were willing to create a download file of the albums, you could download them that way to your google drive, then share the drive files publicly).
Regardless - thank you for sharing these!
The article mentioning this was on HN awhile back,
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-ko...
Didn't this catastrophe happen in a communist country with the government in complete control of all aspects? The presence of a government agency regulating the activity is not like some magic amulet that will prevent bad things from occurring.
The EPA has caused its own share of disasters, such as the MBTE fiasco.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0312425848/ref=as_li_tl?...
I stopped reading right there. Now I expected to reach exasperation somewhere in the article, but not at the second sentence. Chernobyl is a wildlife haven, it shelters a sea of fauna and flora that would otherwise have been the typical suburban death zone of humans, cat and dogs and nothing else. The biggest man made disaster has been committed and is being committed as we speak. Billions of tons of CO2 is pumped into the ocean and into the air right this minute. The Chernobyl accident affected a few hundred square kilometers maybe killed 5000 people. Air pollution kills 700 000 people a year.
Please stop propagating this bloody bullshit.
It touches on all aspects of the accident and cleanup. There are a lot of good interviews and actual footage from the event. The most amazing/sad part to me were the men who did the clean up in 30 second - 1 minute shifts.
You wonder how many other liquidators were tricked into doing the job.
Comparing to Japan, even USSR behaved in some way more responsibly as they threw a couple of million people at the problem at the cost of waging a war just to clean up what they could. All we got from Japan was there is no issue, TEPCO saying all is fine and then suddenly a big hole in the reactor where all robots stop functioning and who knows how much water continuously being contaminated for a few years already. All because panic is the bigger evil (is it? or just the "fat cats" decided it is?)
Chernobyl: "5.2 EBq (5,200 PBq)"
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch...
So it's a magnitude (though still in progress) and "luckily" most of the damage went to the ocean. Now how much sea life and derived food is contaminated is anyone's guess and what the long-term consequences on ocean ecosystem from continuous flow of radioactive particles will be is an interesting question.
It was same in Chernobyl, tens of thousands got their life fucked. Alcoholism general belief in being damaged and worthles. I fucking hate USSR government(I was born an lived in Kyiv at the time). But people who fear monger come up with bullshit ar just as guilty.
