Chernobyl’s new sarcophagus
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's pretty enthralling
A lot of fascinating images I have never seen before, thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Fungus that is essentially using "photosynthesis" of gamma radiation from the melted core instead of sunlight to grow.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. itself is unusual game.
The sense of desolation, claustrophobia, isolation and hopelessness in the world the developers created is something that still stands unmatched for me.
Has interviews from the likes of Gorbachev saying even he didn't know what was going on at the time.
> Following the news, global media had a fit and made wild assumptions about the accident. In fact, only 2 men had died when these were published.
The attribution of the sarcophagus contract to those two was suspicious at the times. It's not unheard of in Vinci and Bouygues cases that whistleblowers and witness tend to die or be sued into oblivion using SLAPPs. AFAIK no one came forward to speak and the deal went on.
Seems to be a nice engineering work though, sadly it funnels money to rich family with poor ethics and practices.
Last time I read about this subject, historians and egyptologists were still having some disputes about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_...
There have been a few "dirty jobs" type shows which have shown this process in action: when replacing a turbine on a nuclear generator, there was a literal line in the floor everyone watched - materials and people could only move in one direction with respect to that line without a lengthy cleaning and inspection. There's also a few Veritasium YouTube videos about a visit to Chernobyl which goes into detail about the exposure limits.
It is available paid on Youtube/Amazon
On 26 April 1986, the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded during a routine stress test.
… which is emphatically not what happened!
I imagine the author is trying to convey that it was a pre-planned action, not a response to some kind of emergency. It was still a terrible, terrible idea of course.
She won the Nobel prize for her writing.
The accident happened in Ukraine but a fact that is not usually written is that Belarus had a QUARTER of it's land mass polluted (and Belarus is a large country).Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
http://time.com/4468168/steven-seagal-carrot-watermelon-mins...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch...
In comparison the Tohoku Tsunami caused 25k casualties, which (outside of Japan) seem have been largely ignored over by the coverage of the radiation leaks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
fukushima is still leaking. 400 tons of radioactive water. this will probably go on forever. the meltdown may have reached ground water. nobody knows because tepco and japans enlighted gov won't tell.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/15/whats-really-going-on...
I studied mechanical engineering... and was mostly interested in off shore (heavy) tech. this is kind of comparable. My background makes me more then interested in these kind of things. The size of this mobile structure is just impressive.
I never considered VR as a way to explore things that would kill you in reality. That's awesome. I want to go poke the elephant's foot.
In addition, I'm skeptical that the biorobots and liquidators were true volunteers. If the Soviet government comes to your house and hands you three sets of clothing saying "we need volunteers", you didn't really have a choice.
I suppose it could all be a Soviet psyop, but to me it's convincing.
Glad to see the work done though the world paid a huge, huge price for it.
You have people saying "we shouldn't be making more nuclear plants, they're all too dangerous and can explode!" And then you have others who say something in the lines of
"But they get the cleanest energy" or "you can't depend on solar energy for everything"
I think the question almost nobody is asking is what will happen to this if it goes unmantained and workers leave the plant unattended, for example, a disease striking the region, economic collapse or a civil war. What containment do any goverment have for that kind of situation, it's not like you can put someone in there and push some random buttons or something to keep the entire thing from melting...
>What’s more, the new plants should produce little waste and might even eat up existing nuclear waste.
>That means they should dramatically reduce the amount of nuclear waste that must be handled and stored.
But doesn't go into detail about exactly how much waste is generated, how waste is handled and where waste should be stored. This is exactly the problem with nuclear, and our ongoing battle with Chernobyl's corpse is exactly the worst manifestation of that problem.
EX: What happens if a meteor hits it.
A nuclear or conventional strike is probably much more likely.
Since way before Chernobyl, the US has been operating LWR and PWR designs, which have a negative void coefficient and therefore can be built to be passive-safe[2]. Correspondingly, no deaths have ever been directly attributed to failure of a production LWR or PWR.
[0] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25204744759.pdf (page 51)
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1986-05-02/news/mn-3039_1_cherno...
As far as I know the primary containment for all Fukushima reactors is still intact.
This is disinformation. It's an arbitrary bureaucratic designation (Level 7 means "measures were taken to mitigate effects"), and the two events were incredibly different.
> that will result in large swaths of Japan being uninhabitable for lifetimes.
This is completely false. I've said before that if it were legal for me to do so, I'd pack up and move to the Fukushima site tomorrow. I would never say the same thing about Pripyat.
Utter hogwash. This statement could not be more false.
1. You could refuel it while the reactor was running. 2. It could supply needed Plutonium for nuclear weapons.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223h9r_bbc-horizon-1996-in...
The elephant's foot presents an intriguing problem not only because of how deep it is in the facility, but that it's essentially a super-dense, super-concentrated glob of radioactive junk that is essentially fused to the structure of the reactor. And of course, kills anyone who gets close to it.
One article I read, of course, suggested that when it comes to cleaning up radioactive waste, the longer you wait, the easier it is. Which is true, what was done recently would've been drastically more dangerous a couple decades ago. It gets safer to work in the area the longer you wait.
So as long as we can be relatively confident it will hold containment in the facility, it may be best left alone.
Part of the problem is that if they don't do it in time, this sarcophagus is mostly impossible to repair because of all the radioactivity, so they'd need to encase it in a third, even huger one.
We need to find safer technology. God knows what the final consequences of Fukushima will be. I think nuclear power proponents have no case. I am not russian and have nothing to do with Russia but as a fellow human being those images of ordinary russians trying to deal with the crisis bring me to tears and I don't want any human being to be in that position or suffer in this grotesque way because of someone's overconfidence or mistake.
Its main competitor, coal, is estimated to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year when working exactly as intended, and is the single biggest culprit with regards to human induced climate change, the results of which may be catastrophic.
I wouldn't say I am exactly pro-nuclear but it makes no sense to me to target nuclear when we have this fossilized wooden elephant in the room.
Solar is at $.029/wH now.
Stop the nuclear power non-sense. Stop the coal power non-sense. All of this is obsolete technology now. Both have disastrous and costly consequences.
Going pure solar and wind in the US would require several hundred thousand square kilometers of photovoltaic panels. More for the windmills if you can't build them all out at sea.
Aside from the cost running in to the trillions, you need so much steel and concrete that the emissions produced by those ingredients being made (remember steel in particular requires coal) that the overall emissions from such a project are, let's say, non-negligible.
I'm afraid even visionaries like Elon Musk know that renewables are only part of the solution. Solar and wind's energy output per area is just too small, even before you consider their consistency drawbacks.
Molten salt looks cool but it's not prime time for that yet, and certainly not .029/wH. If we want to reduce emissions now while waiting for better technology to be made, nuclear is as viable an option as any. It's been a shame here to see Germany go backwards and shut down its nuclear plants for new coal ones.
http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear...
The options for base-load are: nuclear, gas, oil, coal, dammed rivers. Pick one. Of that set, I prefer nuclear.
[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...
while birds and rainwater went in and out of the defective roof he concluded that that more than 90% of the radioactive material exploded into the atmosphere and unless you're living in chernobyl, there's no danger for the rest of the world anymore. in fact, ppl are living in the zone...
the elephant's foot is no radioactive material. it is just molten material from the building.
if it is that dangerous, why is there no military protecting it from terrorists?
meanwhile, money is to be made from the spectacle that is the fud being spread about chernobyl.
in another film, ranga yogeshwar demonstrated how european companies sold and built decommission facilities on-site, multimillion euro projects, and handed them over w/o instructions. it is left up to the ukrain to use the tools but they don't know how.
scroll to timestamp 35:00 https://youtu.be/eFt1SezekaE
the new sarcophagus is a testament to the political corruption and bankruptcy of the eu. nothing more.