Hundreds Still Live In The 'Exclusion Zone' Around Chernobyl (bbc.com) 100
This weekend the BBC reports on the site of the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion -- where "robotic cranes are dismantling 33-year-old, radioactive wreckage" -- investigating an area of more than 4,000 square kilometres [2,485 square miles] that's been abandoned since 1986. "That could be about to change..."
An anonymous reader summarizes their report: "Every community within a 30km radius [18.9 miles] of the plant was evacuated and abandoned; no one was allowed to return here to live." Yet the BBC visits a tiny community of 15 who reclaimed their homes in 1986 -- part of a population of 200 "self-settlers" deep in the exclusion zone, "an ageing population cut off from the rest of the country.... Almost every family forced to leave here was given an apartment in a nearby town or city. For Maria and her [88-year-old] mother, though, this cottage, with the garden wrapped around it, was home. They refused to abandon it. 'We weren't allowed to come back, but I followed my mum.'"
Parts of the exclusion zone in Ukraine and Belarus have become "a post-human nature reserve", home to prowling wolves and dozens of wild horses. Yet Professor Jim Smith from the UK's University of Portsmouth explains that "Most of the area of the exclusion zone gives rise to lower radiation dose rates than many areas of natural radioactivity worldwide." In fact, the abandoned nuclear-worker city of Pripyat was recently deemed safe to visit for short periods, "and has now become one of Ukraine's most talked about tourist attractions. An estimated 60,000 people visited the exclusion zone last year, keen to witness the dramatic decay."
And beyond the 18.9-mile line is Narodichi, a town of more than 2,500 people, where people "were quietly allowed to return home a few months after the disaster." Still considered an officially contaminated district -- and still in the "exclusion zone" -- it's a semi-abandoned area where all agriculture is banned, and the land can't be developed. 130 children attend Narodichi's kindergarten, but the kindergarten manager says half their parents are unemployed, "because there is nowhere to work." One of the least-contaminated areas in the exclusion zone, "Three decades of research have concluded that much of it is safe - for food to be grown and for the land to be developed." The BBC argues that "Fear of radiation could actually be hurting the people...far more than the radiation itself. "
An anonymous reader summarizes their report: "Every community within a 30km radius [18.9 miles] of the plant was evacuated and abandoned; no one was allowed to return here to live." Yet the BBC visits a tiny community of 15 who reclaimed their homes in 1986 -- part of a population of 200 "self-settlers" deep in the exclusion zone, "an ageing population cut off from the rest of the country.... Almost every family forced to leave here was given an apartment in a nearby town or city. For Maria and her [88-year-old] mother, though, this cottage, with the garden wrapped around it, was home. They refused to abandon it. 'We weren't allowed to come back, but I followed my mum.'"
Parts of the exclusion zone in Ukraine and Belarus have become "a post-human nature reserve", home to prowling wolves and dozens of wild horses. Yet Professor Jim Smith from the UK's University of Portsmouth explains that "Most of the area of the exclusion zone gives rise to lower radiation dose rates than many areas of natural radioactivity worldwide." In fact, the abandoned nuclear-worker city of Pripyat was recently deemed safe to visit for short periods, "and has now become one of Ukraine's most talked about tourist attractions. An estimated 60,000 people visited the exclusion zone last year, keen to witness the dramatic decay."
And beyond the 18.9-mile line is Narodichi, a town of more than 2,500 people, where people "were quietly allowed to return home a few months after the disaster." Still considered an officially contaminated district -- and still in the "exclusion zone" -- it's a semi-abandoned area where all agriculture is banned, and the land can't be developed. 130 children attend Narodichi's kindergarten, but the kindergarten manager says half their parents are unemployed, "because there is nowhere to work." One of the least-contaminated areas in the exclusion zone, "Three decades of research have concluded that much of it is safe - for food to be grown and for the land to be developed." The BBC argues that "Fear of radiation could actually be hurting the people...far more than the radiation itself. "
Re: (Score:2)
Ukraine is a country, not "the Ukrainian Slaveland" or whatever the Soviet-controlled name was. You uneducated swine.
Ukraine. Not "the" Ukraine.
I don't get it (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Right, so you can comprehend that it is inaccurate to refer to the US as an English colony, right?
"The Ukraine" is short for "The Ukrainian Soviet Blah Blah Blah." It is what their name was when a foreign power occupied their country. After gaining freedom as a sovereign State, their name became simple "Ukraine." Other examples not rooted in that name are from the translation of "Ukraine" as "borderland," which is just as insulting because it implies dismissively that it is part of Russia, and merely a remo
Slight correction for you Americans... (Score:2)
Re: Slight correction for you Americans... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What do you expect, they can't even tell the difference between Standard American units and the "Imperial" units from their own history.
Re: (Score:2)
We simply don't care.
Only a handful of craftsmen would be using old diagrams or drawings to recreate old machines, furniture or the like. (or historians etc.)
And hell, our current mixed system works just fine for us.
I can buy a gram of weed or an ounce,
I can buy a liter of soda or a 12 ounce can,
I can call the engine in my Corvette a 350 cu. in or 5.7 liter.
We use what is convenient for us and we don't care what the rest of the world does. We are slowly adding in metric, but within our lifetimes
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, seems to be a double conversion error (Score:2)
A 30 km evacuation radius yields a 2827 km^2 circle. So pretty close to 2600 km^2.
Average dosage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Average dosage (Score:5, Insightful)
You say this like it proves the exclusion zone is too big. In fact the problem with the exclusion zone is that it's not uniform; it has hot spots where you would not want to live, and less hot spots that you could live in and which are are closer to the sarcophagus.
You could reduce the area of the zone by producing an extremely detailed map of go/no-go areas. That has the advantage of reclaiming more land. But it has the disadvantage that given enough people living right next to no-go areas a certain number will inevitably stray into them, pick up or disturb contamination, then spread it.
No matter how you draw the line, you could probably draw it better by some criterion.
Re: (Score:3)
There's also lots of old buildings that could fall down and conceivably raise a cloud. You don't want to live next to something like that. It could be safe today, and unsafe tomorrow.
Re: (Score:2)
World Trade Center, 9/11/01.
Re: (Score:2)
Here is some wisdom for you...if you see a dust cloud from a falling structure, don't walk into it and breath. The risk of breathing demolition dust anywhere far outweighs the tremendously tiny risk of anything radiation related.
And yet, it's even worse if it's got radioactives in it.
Re: (Score:2)
So, you've never heard of this thing called 'wind' then. FML. Just make shit up, why not.
Re:Average dosage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
This was known ever since it happened. For example do you think Hiroshima or Nagasaki are barren?
That was with bombs. A meltdown is a much less dangerous event.
You just need to look at the decay chains.
For example dangerous elements are Iodine-131 and Strontium-90.
Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days. This is why people are advised to take iodine tablets in case they are exposed to uranium/plutonium fission products. It basically reduces the chance Iodine-131 will stay for long in the thyroid gland and redu
Re: (Score:2)
Here, this page has a photo of ground zero at Nagasaki. With tourists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
There are three reactors of the same design still in operation in St. Petersburg. You know where that is right?
The EU paid money to Ukraine to shut down the reactors in Chernobyl which were still operational. Otherwise they might even still be in use. And Ukrainians would have less dependency on Russian gas. Even though those reactors should have been retired like a decade ago at least.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> No matter how you draw the line, you could probably draw it better by some criterion.
Agreed.
I suspect the exclusion zone was much larger than required to avoid exposure until they could see where the hazards existed. It seems to me that the exclusion zone could be re-evaluated and potentially reduced without allowing habitation right up to the edge of a hot spot. However if the entire area is at risk from the dust raised from a building collapsing or similar, perhaps not much space would be regained.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think so (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
again cite required (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
the environmental exposure is 2.4 to 3 mSv. A quick search on EPA for "17 micro Sv per day" reveal nothing, and all source I cited have that 3mSv. The only way I can get to 6 mSv per year is if you count *medical* exposure in addition to environmental.
While what you posting is sort of correct, it seems to lack any sort of understanding of background radiation. The first problem is that measuring radiation is really complex. Your unit of measure, the mSv is used for something called absorbed dose which takes into account things like how far you are from the radiation source and how quickly your body absorbs radiation. Its a measure of how much biological effect, but it isn't a measure of background radiation. We use Curries or Becquerels for that. Th
I am aware of that (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
As for curie... It has been an eternity I had anybody speak to me in that unit when speaking of exposure or absorbed dose. Is that an US holdover ?
Bq or Becquerel which is the SI unit is 19 orders of magnitude less than a Curie so for activity its really weird to use the SI unit. Rem or Gray are absorbed dose which is probably the best of the choices of units of measure for physical radiation. So that's probably the best unit for a legal standard as the most damaging radiation is also the most common in the environment normally and the easiest to block. But you are right that since people really care about biological impact more than a physical uni
Re: (Score:2)
"Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm."
The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level below which there is no harm. There is a minority which claim otherwise but this but this is not the opinion of most scientists. Our best understanding of how ionizing radiation affects the body suggests that there is no safe level and large s
Re: (Score:2)
"Is a lot of radiation in a short time worse than a small amount of radiation over a long period? We don't know but there does seem to be a base level of background radiation below which there is no harm."
The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level below which there is no harm. There is a minority which claim otherwise but this but this is not the opinion of most scientists. Our best understanding of how ionizing radiation affects the body suggests that there is no safe level and large scale studies (.e.g from CT exposure) so far all agree with this even to relatively low levels.
Yea, but that's not what the data says. The data says that there is a level that's not harmful at a constant level and that level is several times higher than the amounts discussed in the article. And that's the problem. Its always easier to go with a higher degree of caution when it doesn't cost you anything. But it does cost us something. It costs use drastically higher amounts of CO2 production and that's almost certainly a bigger health risk to the population than changes to background radiation in
Re: (Score:2)
It is absolutely what the data says. But you are right that the risk is very small, I just disagreed to the "no harm" nonsense which is clearly against scientific consensus. But cost is a different topic: Nuclear is more expensive than renewables. This why it is dead no matter what we discuss here.
Re: (Score:2)
There are people in the world who live in granite houses which emit radon gas. Those are not even the worst places.
Could it happen here? (Score:2)
I used to have a contract where I spent a lot of time inside the power plant at South Port, NC. I am not a mechanical engineer but I was able to see and learn enough that I was reasonably assured that the kind of incident that happened at Chernobyl wouldn't happen there. At least not by accident. And that plant is pretty old tech.
If the plant was sabotaged -- that's another matter. That's also effectively what happened at Chernobyl. Nobody had the intent to do anything wrong. They were doing sta
Re:Could it happen here? (Score:4, Interesting)
It didn't happen by accident at Chernobyl. It happened by abject stupidity.
It wasn't. Unless you consider the mandate from Moscow to run that particular test "sabotage". The particular test in question was "is it possible to extract usable energy from a nuclear plant to deal with a meltdown in progress?" For which test, they pushed an out-of-the-way (in other words, on the back end of nowhere) nuclear plant as close to meltdown conditions as it was possible to safely go.
Unfortunately, they were wrong about how far "as it was possible to SAFELY go" was....
No, they weren't. They were doing experimental work prescribed by a bureaucrat several thousand km away. Which experimental work was completely unnecessary. The only good thing about the mess was that they had (barely) enough sense to do it on a reactor on the backend of nowhere...
Only to people who know little or nothing about them.
Remember, for all that Chernobyl was the worst nuclear power disaster in the history of the world, it killed fewer people than will die in traffic in the USA TODAY.
For that matter, hydroelectric power has killed three orders of magnitude (at least. the three orders of magnitude are from ONE incident) more people than nuclear power, much less coal....
Re: (Score:3)
And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator. Graphite that burns, but keeps moderating in event of runaway reaction, which maintains the chain reaction.
Modern reactors used heavy water as moderator for a very long time. If reaction runs away, water evaporates, and therefore ceases moderating the reaction, which means reaction no longer has slow neutrons to continue the chain reaction. So in event of
Re: (Score:2)
And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator.
That and the SCRAM rods where tipped with graphite as a lubricant. When they hit the SCRAM too late the graphite tipped rods was the last straw that broke the camel's back. It induced another "pulse" of neutrons that sent the reactor pile into an overload from which the rate of the falling SCRAM rods could not stop. The water flash boiled into steam, blew the roof off the building, and the rest is history.
Oh, and the lack of a containment dome didn't help. Most every other reactor built at the time had
Re: (Score:2)
And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator.
Yes and no. Yes modern reactors are inherently safer, but no their test specifically put the reactor in a position it was never allowed to go into. They could have happily shut the reactor down if they didn't have 5x less than the minimum required number of control rods inserted (a conscious decision they made during their demonstration of stupidity supreme).
I like referencing this case during safety system reviews at refineries and chemical plants. Operations always insist that they need the ability to byp
Re: (Score:2)
as close to meltdown conditions as it was possible to safely go.
Unfortunately, they were wrong about how far "as it was possible to SAFELY go" was....
This part here is not quite right. The minimum safe control rod scenario for the reactor design was known up front and they made a conscious decision not only to overstep the minimum safe operating number of control rods (30) but at the time of the accident only 6 rods were inserted.
Additionally during this "test" there was one unexpected problem after another. Any one of them should have been a trigger to abort the test even if the test itself wasn't an attempt at a large scale Darwin award. Yet they power
Re: (Score:1)
If the plant was sabotaged -- that's another matter. That's also effectively what happened at Chernobyl. Nobody had the intent to do anything wrong. They were doing standard procedures and "mistakes were made."
And that is why Chernobyl wasn't good enough. With a damage potential like that, you can't have a plant that explodes just because people make several mistakes in a row.
Mistakes may shut a plant off - possibly in ways that means you can't turn it on again in months, years or decades. It should still not burn or explode. A good nuclear design must be foolproof, for there will be fools, in 50 years of operation. On such a timescale, the political landscape will change, and the economy will change. Can't have
Re: (Score:1)
Its ironic that those greenies who want a carbon free future did more to block a carbon free now (or at least much less carbon now). Even now the Green Deal does not want nuclear power. This proves that they do not really think CO2 is the end of the world or else they would be calling for a short cut in the approval process for nuclear plants.
Re: (Score:2)
For every kilo of CO2 you can mitigate by building a nuclear power station you can mitigate a lot more by putting renewables in place.
Both renewables and nuclear are inflexible, if you only run nuclear 50% of the time then the power it produces costs nearly twice as much. So nuclear and renewables are in no way complimentary, it's one or the other, both need storage to take excess and supply it during higher demand periods. Storage has every reason to get cheaper as time goes on. Nuclear power clearly isn't
Re: (Score:3)
Can't have a big bang just because some suicidal terrorists fight their way into the reactor hall.
A safety feature I've seen proposed in some fourth generation designs is a big fat "fuck you" button for such a scenario. If there is a threat of release of anything even potentially weapons grade, or of sabotage, there is a mechanism that will dump a big load of fission poisoning isotopes to spoil the batch and render the core effectively inert. They might still be able to walk away with some radioactive material but it will be no more valuable in a weapon than natural uranium dug up from the ground. Ma
Re: (Score:2)
India apparently used a reactor very similar to CANDU to turn natural uranium into weapon grade plutonium for their first nuclear bomb test. This goes to show that there is no need to have enriched uranium for producing weapon grade nuclear material.
Re:Could it happen here? (Score:5, Informative)
Chernobyl began as a test where they intentionally shut down the automatic safety systems, then didn't react in time when the rate of fissioning began to go out of control. Due to the positive void coefficient design, once the boiling water began boiling, the heat generation began to increase exponentially. The fuel vaporized and exploded, blowing the reactor and containment building apart, and throwing radioactive debris and vapor into the atmosphere and countryside.
The accident at Three Mile Island was actually pretty similar in terms of buildup. They shut down a bunch of safety systems for a test, then didn't monitor the instrument readings closely enough (or more likely, the people monitoring them weren't trained well enough to understand what the readings meant - Homer Simpson as incompetent nuclear plant operator is actually a reference to TMI). The temperature went up, the cooling water boiled, and the fissioning stopped. The increased temperature was enough to melt the fuel rods, turning the reactor into useless slag. But it was all contained within the steel pressure vessel exactly like designed (there's a second reinforced concrete containment vessel around the pressure vessel in case it fails). The concern at the time was that a reaction between the fuel rod cladding and water had created hydrogen gas at sufficient pressure to crack both containment vessels, so they evacuated around the plant out of an abundance of \caution. But it turned out not to have been a concern as the hydrogen vented. It's a tiny molecule so can permeate through things that are designed to contain water and radioactive materials. (It's the reason the buildings at Fukushima blew apart. There's supposed to be a vent or fan which exhausts hydrogen into the atmosphere, but apparently that wasn't working at Fukushima so it built up until it reacted with atmospheric oxygen in an explosion that blew apart the exterior building. It did not affect the pressure vessel or the concrete containment vessel.)
The comparison I like to draw when people point to Chernobyl as an example of problems with nuclear power is Banqio. The worst power generation-related accident in history was actually the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams [wikipedia.org]. During intense rain, a series of earthen dams used to hold water for generation at a hydroelectric power plant failed. The resulting flood and devastation killed about 170,000 people, destroyed nearly 6 million buildings, and left 11 million people homeless. But no western country uses earthen dams for hydroelectric power. So citing Banqio as an example of why hydroelectric power is dangerous and shouldn't be used, is like citing Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear power is dangerous and shouldn't be used. They're both irrelevant outside of the Communist bloc, since the rest of the world never did anything so stupidly dangerous.
Re: (Score:2)
Chernobyl was also a "dual use" reactor, useful for power and plutonium production. No western country builds these any more. This creates the common complaint of nuclear power plants having to shut down for months every 2 or 3 years for refuel and inspection. The alternative to this is a more complex reactor that allows refueling while in operation, which also allows for the production of weapon grade plutonium.
So, make your choice. We either get dual use reactors that can stay online for decades at a
Re: (Score:2)
The Canadian CANDU design has a small positive void coefficient and hence is banned in the US. Las time I checked, Canada was a Western country, both geographically and politically.
You're also wrong about what the experiment was supposed to do. It was supposed to test whether a coasting turbine could deliver useful amounts of power during an unscheduled reactor shutdown, not a meltdown. The experiment had been delayed repeatedly and local management was desperate to get it done. But the day they were go
Re:Could it happen here? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, at the time of the explosion, the operators were doing things FAR from standard, and in fact, the precipitating event was an operation explicitly prohibited under any circumstances in order to do something they weren't supposed to attempt.
More specifically, they were SUPPOSED to bring the reactor down to a low output and stabilize it there, then scram the reactor to see if residual steam and inertia in the system would provide sufficient power to safely shut it down. In order to do the test, several safeties were disabled.
The test was supposed to happen during the day shift, but high power demands meant they had to wait. This left the less experienced night crew to carry out the test. They probably should have postponed, but that would anger the (seriously dysfunctional) upper management.
First stem, they reduced power, but they reduced it too much. So they tried to bring power back up to the starting condition but the reactor wouldn't do it. This shouldn't have been a surprise, when reactor power is reduced by a large amount, the production of neutron absorbing poisons temporarily outstrips their "burn off" from excess neutrons. Rather than wait the prescribed 24-48 hours for the poisons to decay, they decided to attempt to burn off the poisons by withdrawing more control rods (a prohibited procedure)
Still having no success, they eventually withdrew ALL of the control rods (an absolutely forbidden procedure) leaving the reactor in a VERY unstable condition. In fact, it was primed for a runaway positive feedback. As power output started rising rapidly, they attempted to drive the conntrol rods back in, but it wasn't possible to do it fast enough, so the reactor went to many times it's maximum rating and then part of the core exploded (a flash steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion) and much of the core was ejected through the top of the reactor.
So it was an inherently dangerous reactor design, disabled safeties, and undertrained and inexperienced operators doing all the don'ts that resulted in the disaster.
The reactor's design was a big contributor as well. For one, it had a positive void coefficient. Meaning if the coolant formed a void, power output would increase. Reactor designs approved in the rest of the world tend to have a negative void coefficient. The control rods were (for some odd reason) carbon tipped, meaning that the first few feet of the rod INCREASE output by improving moderation. It had no actual containment building, just standard industrial sheet metal.
GET OUT... (Score:1, Offtopic)
GET OUT OF HERE STALKER
Re: (Score:1)
GET OUT OF HERE, STALKER!
Re: (Score:2)
The data isn't all in yet on Chernobyl. Certainly not on Fukushima. If it turns out that living next to one of these radiation release sites is or isn't harmful in the long term, we'll find out eventually. If you want a better feel for long term radiation effects, you'll have to look at how slowly life has returned to two of the largest radiation release incidents in populated areas further in the past.
How many thousands of years will we have to wait for life to return to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Is that a joke? I have to assume it is. Hiroshima ground zero is marked with a fairly small plaque on a boring standard Japanese side-street next to apartment buildings, businesses and restaurants. The one in Nagasaki is a small park with apartment buildings and a busy street about 150' away.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. An obvious joke at that.
Re: (Score:2)
For peoplewho didn't get the sarcasm:
https://www.theguardian.com/ar... [theguardian.com]
Re: (Score:2)
That's a serious burn. Green and glowing!
Re: Counter post (Score:2)
Want to hear something worse? (Score:2, Funny)
Millions still live in New Jersey!