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20 years after Chernobyl

CFLarsen

Penultimate Amazing
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An photo-narrative about the aftermath of Chernobyl.

Go to: http://www.jp.dk/

Look for: "Arven efter Tjernobyl - i ord, lyd og billeder"

Click on "Arven efter Tjernobyl".

Very strong stuff. It's in English.
 
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the heritage of chernobyl makes you think of ABBA. wow, what have you been smoking, where can i get some
 
Ahhh...don't think I'll ever need to pull out this reference again.

The first movie to be shot at Chernobyl since the meltdown: Return of the Living Dead 4. Crappy movie, crappy Saturday night.
 
Chernobyl is one of the worst catastrophes in human history, and the tragic aftermath is just heartbreaking. :cry1 The pictures says it all...
Generation after generation will have to pay for this with their suffering.

And the really sad part is that humanity _never_ learn by their misstakes!! We should be ashamed - we continue to use nuclear power and making atombombs as nothing happened... :mad:
 
Gargoyle said:
Chernobyl is one of the worst catastrophes in human history, and the tragic aftermath is just heartbreaking. :cry1 The pictures says it all...
Generation after generation will have to pay for this with their suffering.

And the really sad part is that humanity _never_ learn by their misstakes!! We should be ashamed - we continue to use nuclear power and making atombombs as nothing happened... :mad:
Click to expand...

Using nuclear power is not at all a problem, if you would look up just how horribly unsafe the place was run you would see the problem, that's what people should have learned not to do...and hopefully did.
 
Grammatron said:
Using nuclear power is not at all a problem, if you would look up just how horribly unsafe the place was run you would see the problem, that's what people should have learned not to do...and hopefully did.
Click to expand...

Using nuclear power is a problem.
I know it was in a bad state and was of an old russian reactor type called RBMK. The "human factor" were also partly responsible for the catstrophe. I assume you know this...
I assume you also know about the "little incident" at Harrisburg in 1979...

Consider this:

The radiation at Chernobyl is equal to the amount of 500 Hiroshima-bombs.
No one will be able to live in the vicinity for thousands of years and people will be born with malformations and die in cancer for centuries to come.
The atomic waste will take several hundred thousand years to be harmless (homo sapiens has been around for about 10000 years).
And ponder that AlQaeda flew their Boeings into nuclear plants instead of two skyscrapers...

And history has thought us that humanity will never learn...
 
Gargoyle said:
Consider this:

The radiation at Chernobyl is equal to the amount of 500 Hiroshima-bombs.
No one will be able to live in the vicinity for thousands of years and people will be born with malformations and die in cancer for centuries to come.
Click to expand...

Arn't people living there now?
 
Good question.

The UN report indicates that the impact of chernobyl was not all that grand, and did not cause the predicted death and destruction.

I'm ALWAYS careful about taking UN reports at face value, but in absense of any other study of equal standing, or any logic or evidence to the contrary, I'm pretty much stuck with their assessment: not so big a deal in the scheme of things.
 
Gargoyle said:
Consider this:

The radiation at Chernobyl is equal to the amount of 500 Hiroshima-bombs.
Click to expand...

In what sense? Define your terms

No one will be able to live in the vicinity for thousands of years
Click to expand...

The same is true of the mid atlantic trench.

and people will be born with malformations and die in cancer for centuries to come.
Click to expand...

So situation normal then

The atomic waste will take several hundred thousand years to be harmless (homo sapiens has been around for about 10000 years).
Click to expand...

There are degrees of harmfulness

And ponder that AlQaeda flew their Boeings into nuclear plants instead of two skyscrapers...
Click to expand...

The plants are desighned to withstand plane strikes.
 
great rebuttal Geni. I'm interested in the counter-rebuttal.

I'm very pro-nuke but I will aways consider opposing viewpoints such as Gorgoyle's, should an opposing argument be forthcoming.
 
I just heard an interview with a guy on NPR who moved back into his house in Chernobyl a few years ago. Apparently it's still pretty much a ghost town, and I guess there are wanted signs everywhere along the boarder because alot of criminals hide out there now too. The man living there said it was pretty lonely, but there were others as well who simply had no choice but to come back after having been displaced for so long.
 
Mycroft said:
Arn't people living there now?
Click to expand...

The city of Pripyat, about 10 km from the Chernobyl reactor, was evacuated a few days after the disaster and is still a ghost town, and nobody except a few bullheaded old people lives within 30 km or so of the reactor. At least that´s what a news magazine article (Der Spiegel, print edition) said last week.

On the other hand, a few years ago I read an article in the same news magazine that said at least one of the reactor blocks of Chernobyl was still being operated. :eye-poppi The article from last wekk, OTOH, hinted that it has since been shut down.

Good question.

The UN report indicates that the impact of chernobyl was not all that grand, and did not cause the predicted death and destruction.

I'm ALWAYS careful about taking UN reports at face value, but in absense of any other study of equal standing, or any logic or evidence to the contrary, I'm pretty much stuck with their assessment: not so big a deal in the scheme of things.
Click to expand...

The *official* death toll - like you can take Soviet government agencies at face value... - is about 2 or 3 or so.
Judging from the above-mentioned news magazine article, if you count everybody who has died who would probably still be alive with the disaster*, a realistic death toll could be anything from the high hundred to the lower tens of thousands. The uncertainty is mainly because no coherent records of all the victims exist, and those who do have records on victims are mostly Soviet (now ex-Soviet, i.e. Russian and Ukrainian) government agencies who are keeping these records sealed away - bad for national prestige, you see.

*For starters, all the volunteers who were picking up radioactive wreckage and throwing it back into the reactor chamber in 90 second shifts are done for. They may not all be dead yet, but I sincerely doubt that even one of them is going to die from old age.
 
Chaos said:
On the other hand, a few years ago I read an article in the same news magazine that said at least one of the reactor blocks of Chernobyl was still being operated. :eye-poppi
Click to expand...

Sure why not? As long as the people running it knew what they were doing you could round the problems with the reactor desighn.

The article from last wekk, OTOH, hinted that it has since been shut down.
Click to expand...

It has been.
 
The effects-long and short term- of ionizing radiation on humans have been studied for over a hundred years and are very well understood. Based on an exposed population of 350 million (those who will have received a dose much above that of background radiation ) estimated excess cancer deaths range around 4 to 5 thousand. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that in that population of 350 million close to 100 million people will get cancer from all causes, and almost 50 million will die of cancer. Those several thousand excess cancer deaths will be very hard to identify indeed.
The Health Physics Society's web page has quite a bit on Chernobyl and it's aftermath: http://www.hps.org. Look under "expert's answers". For the technically inclined, an excellent overview of exactly what caused the accident is the US NRC "Report on the Accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station" NUREG-1250.
Incidentally, short term deaths (within weeks of the accident) were around 32 or so- all either plant operators or responding firefighters.
 
Of course the hundreds of nuclear tests performed during the cold war put so much radiation into the air that base line for cancer is quite high compared to a 'natural' exposure. National Geographic has an issue with few articles about the incident and radiation in general. Certainly worth reading.
 
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