The Chernobyl Story in pictures | Hacker News Reader

The Chernobyl Story in pictures

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We speak of technical debt at times here on HN and other places where workers struggle with complex systems. The Chernobyl incident can be characterized as a consequence of technical debt. The test that was being performed had been deferred since prior to the start of plant operations and the operators were attempting to complete it while under pressure from multiple sources, including securing their own annual bonuses.

Dr. Paul Josephson covered a lot of the inside baseball surrounding Chernobyl and other aspects of Soviet nuclear power and weaponry in his book Red Atom (2005).

This is an excellent collection! Igor Kostin is mentioned in one paragraph but I do _highly_ recommend reading his "Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter" if you can get your hands on it. Confessions is an incredible bit of photojournalism. Everyone I've ever lent the book to has been moved by the scale of the unknowing sacrifices that were made to bring the plant under control.

I had never heard this story before about the Swedish nuclear worker who tested positive for radiation was what led to the discovery of the incident. I would love to know how they traced it back. This is fascinating and really incredible that the U.S.S.R. didn't feel any responsibility to share such information with Europe.

Amazing research and effort by the author. This is the Amazon link:

https://www.amazon.com/Chernobyl-01-Incredible-Nuclear-Disas...

Chernobyl occurred prior to the warming in relations that resulted from Gorbachev's reforms, so it is understandable that the Soviets perceived a significant threat from admitting the accident occurred. Unlike Fukushima, Chernobyl slowly released radioactivity for days due to the fire. Initial Soviet assessments of the accident severity were optimistic. I'm not saying that they were right in delaying, but the fire was still burning and the atmospheric release ongoing when they publicly revealed it.

The Soviets also covered up Kyshtym in 1957, a cover up that lasted for three decades. Many officials in the West were complicit in that cover up, adopting extraordinary skepticism of the available evidence to discredit those that either knew or believed a major nuclear incident had occurred.

One of the victims of that cover up in the West was Zhores A. Medvedev. He wrote a book (Nuclear Disaster in the Urals) in response to critics of his claims of a major nuclear disaster. The book is a truly fascinating survey of open sources of academic work published by Soviet researchers that reveals the incident indirectly; the papers (typically studies of the effect of contamination of various organisms; fish, plants, worms, deer, etc.) could only have been written if a large area of land had been heavily contaminated, and this subtlety was lost on the state censors, who were themselves not aware that Kyshtym had happened.

Medvedev was eventually vindicated when the Soviets fessed up in the late '80s.

Oh I know but at a certain level you have to consider humanity and put political ideologies aside is what I meant.

Amazing photos, but please see my other comment about this caption:

> It... was considered to be the best and most reliable of the Soviet Union’s nuclear facilities

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940

I still remember this. When it happened I was 7 years old and I was living in Germany. The town were I was living in blocked all playgrounds for weeks. And my parents warned me more about picking stuff up from the ground.

I actually never knew if this made a difference.

Exactly the same experience for me. I remember we stayed inside for weeks.

About as haunting a set of photos as you can have. Imagine going from a carefree existence as a child and in two days being evacuated with nothing, and not idea if you are going to die soon or not.

I had no idea that there could have been a second explosion. However, I didn't really get from this article why that is no longer a possibility.

My understanding was that until the "elephant's foot" and other radioactive lava flows were found, everyone was under the impression that there was still fuel in the reactor, which carried the possibility of a second explosion. The existence of the lava flows instead indicated that everything had melted together and spread throughout the lower parts of the building: radioactive, but no longer prone to an explosion.

Amazing collection! Really expanded on a few less-known aspects of the disaster

BRILLIANT.

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