Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl | Hacker News Reader

Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

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154 pointsvkb121 comments

Remember watching the evening news with my dad when they finally announced it publicly. They completely downplayed it. In came in as "Oh by the way, an accident at ChAES happened, next up - sports...".

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.

To be fair, the lady from TV announcement said that one of the reactors is damaged, which is a really bad thing for nuclear power plant.

I think OP's point was that a 20 second blurb, no matter how truthful or accurate, is downplaying the situation.

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.

"One of the reactors is damaged" was a huge understatement that ignored, by omission, the real issue, which was, of course, the massive release of radioactive material.

> 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.

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.

Ummm, that's ~2 lbs per day. Was he running a marathon each day without eating, for 3 weeks straight? That alone should have shut down his heart. Your friend's father is much stronger than an ox, as I am sure most farm animals could not have survived that either.

The interviews are interesting.

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.

----

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.

Problem is, that wouldn't satisfy the "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills" narrative that underlays much of the activism around climate policy and other environmentalist causes.

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.

A movement is composed of people, and those people can be reasoned with individually. If we reason with enough of them, the narrative changes.

The tricky thing is separating those people from their support groups long enough for the reasoning to stick. Otherwise, all the effort only gets wasted on trying to overcome people's need of belonging to a group.

China did managed population growth, guess what happened, no one is happy. I doubt human can overcome their own nature to step ahead and regulate population effectively.

Isn't population growth close to zero for most industrialized countries?

What's your point?

I am not blaming other countries being irresponsible in controlling population. I was saying simply control population is not as easy a social policy to carry out.

That it isn't human nature that is the problem with population growth, otherwise we wouldn't have large parts of the free world with almost none and even slightly negative growth. The problem is cultural/historical and the problem of chinas one child policy was that it tried to combat the effect while the people still saw having a male heir as important.

I cannot seem to understand your statements.

Fact: we don't have an issue with positive population growth in most western nations. Fact 2: the populations of these western nations are human. Q.E.D.: explosive population growth is not human nature.

It is a cultural, educational, social security and rights issue. The Chinese failed because they tried to fight the result instead of the cause(s).

Would you prefer the "humans are basically good" narrative?

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.

That's assuming that all the harm we do, we do it just to do harm. I think this assumption is false. Most of the harm we do is a side effect of things we're trying to achieve.

So, basically, we're just another (slightly smarter) animal.

It's not like, for example, invasive species introduced from another continent stopped for a second and thought: "hey! maybe we shouldn't breed too much and we shouldn't eat all the bees/birds/whatever!".

Life is like a gas, it expands to fill all the space given to it.

I don't think that's inherently bad. After all, life is the exception in the universe. And frankly, most of the universe is boring :)

There are a number of problems with nuclear power.

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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

> in terms of cost, risks, environmental impact and power output, hydro is hard to beat if it's an option.

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...

You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer.

“I know three women my age (between 30–40) who have experienced thyroid cancer. When one of them was surprised to get the diagnosis, her doctor told her they see women our age from the Soviet Union very frequently with the same. Not a coincidence.” — Z. K.

I think it should be kept in mind that the design of Soviet reactors was incredibly unsafe compared to their western counterparts. Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

This is not true in this form. There were unsafe soviet designs, but also there were unsafe western designs. Soviet designs were not all categorically unsafe. The design used at Chernobyl was a problematic design, but still many layers of human error had to be involved to create the accident.

Military reactor designs are generally less safe. Civilian designs were usually OK in the USSR.

It's not just the design(s), it is the implementation too.

At Chernobyl the powers at be (accountants?) got involved and decided to use flammable bitumen coverings on the roof of reactor 3, one would assume to save money. Unsurprisingly, the roof of reactor 3 caught fire.

This is a good example of one of the failings at Chernobyl, but it took many of them coinciding to make the disaster as bad as it was.

They were required to use another material to build the roof, but they were also required to be finished with construction by a certain time. Soviet central planning led to a shortage of the proper roofing material. I'm sure the decision to use bitumen was either made in ignorance or with the assumption that it wouldn't matter for other reasons. Lots of mistakes were made with the assumption that the rest of the system was safe so it wouldn't matter.

Soviet era designs generally didn't use containment buildings. The RMBK (Chernobyl) in addition used graphite moderator with a positive void coefficient.

In combination this made such reactors intrinsically unsafe compared to their western counterparts, especially the positive void coefficient which can't be found in any western reactors as far as I'm aware.

Not all Soviet designs were as unsafe as RMBK but most were less safe than the average western reactor.

The meltdowns at Fukushima would have been as bad as Chernobyl if the design was similar. And the Fukushima reactors used an old western design dating from roughly the Chernobyl era. The cause of the meltdowns(loss of power) was similar.

The major difference was that Fukushima had containment buildings, no graphite in the core to burn, and a reactor designed to become less critical as the water boils (void coefficient less than 1.0).

If we do that, we also need to bear in mind that dams can be pretty safe if designed and operated correctly too.

> Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

> The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

The evacuation made necessary to avoid direct casualties from the nuclear incident killed 34.

I wouldn't say they were direct. That number is based on a comparison with a 1916 tsunami and earthquake death toll, and with around one of those thirty-four being under sixty that seems hard to calculate exactly.

All of this needs to be put in the context of a natural disaster that killed >15,000 people and leveled hundreds of thousands of buildings. The power plant really shouldn't lead the story here.

>You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer.

Neither are you, you're speculating that they must exist in high numbers. That quote doesn't show anything, that could be a coincidence and frequently is a vague term for a very busy individual.

There has been a noticeable increase in thyroid cancer incidents in the area, but treated thyroid cancer is the second least fatal cancer. About 93% of people are alive thirty years later.

The highest peer reviewed studies estimate 27,000 deaths, still far below the Banqiao dam failure.

The apparently most extensive study lead by the WHO even puts this at around 4.000 deaths [1].

[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

That's a writeup on the report from the Chernobyl Forum, a group created by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. The WHO was a member of the forum, and it won a Nobel Peace Prize, but there are some large issues with their projection methods.

That said, mine wasn't peer reviewed, and used the same method as the Forum report with some small tweaks. I didn't check my sources well enough, but I also can't find anything credible listing it far above that number.

and how many will die from starvation this year? Here's a hint, more than all those who died from nuclear accidents and dam breaks. You could total them all up and you might get to this year's starvation numbers.

The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't.

The threat to hydro is the reclamation of environment which tends to go unchallenged in many parts because of the feel good lobby.

>The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't.

That isn't the point, any time you mention nuclear power you get a swarm of people saying it's so unsafe and we need to move towards renewables. It's safer than the largest renewable source currently, and the UN considers some nuclear power a renewable source. The US doesn't, largely due to fossil fuel lobbying.

Even the heavily agenda-driven Greenpeace report on Chernobyl deaths gives an upper limit of 200,000 (and if we're counting non-lethal casualties, the benchmark is 11 million displaced, so let's not go there) - so the absolute insane, totally reckless and avoidable nuclear disaster was in the worst case as bad as a hydro disaster that most people haven't even heard of because everybody had just decided that it doesn't matter. I think GPs point stands.

If a dam burst it kill a lot of people in short time. And 36 hours later rebuilding the infrastructure and towns begins.

If a reactor bursts it might not kill lots of people but it will devastate a large area for a very long time. We still do not know internal details about the Fukushima reactors because not even robots can go there.

A dam burst is a nightmare but it is a nightmare which is easy to clean up afterwards. A reactor catastrophe is a nightmare nobody knows how to clean up at all.

Not quite. The majority of deaths from the Banqiao Dam burst was from subsequent epidemics and famine. The 11 million displaced also weren't exactly spending three nights in a hotel, then going home.

The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on purpose, planned years in advance. Fukushima (2011) has a 20km exclusion zone that is now gradually being reopened a few years later, and 100,000 persons are still displaced.

One of these are acceptable collateral damage in the battle against climate change and the other is so bad that it constitutes conclusive evidence of the fundamental futility of the very technology itself. But you need to drink a lot of koolaid to see which is which on face value.

Water is less scary than uranium. I agree with you, but it seems to be futile to convince people because there's just more movies about the harm of radiation than deaths by flooding. They keep rebuilding New Orleans and living in coastal Florida too.

There's a chicken-and-egg situation here -- people are never going to get comfortable with nuclear while politicians are leading the FUD-charge.

Yet we keep being told, "Oh no, it's safe this time. Really." and then Fukushima happens. Not to mention cleanup costs that started at $50B are now estimated to surpass $0.2T. I would be surprised if they don't double a couple more times before all is said and done, and that's fractions of a trillion dollars.

Because compared to the cost of climate change, really is was safe this time, even after Fukushima. And a substantial fraction of the cost is due to extreme, very likely unwarranted caution, motivated by an unreasonable level of, exactly, fear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/13/is-it-sa...

The point I'm trying to make is that every system has risks and externalities, but for some reason they only get added up when we're talking about nuclear.

A hundredseventythousand?! :-o I have never heard of that dam accident.

May be because we are used to dangers of water, and floods for millions of years.

On the other hand, dangers of nuclear is a very recent thing. Common people's primary recollection point of nuclear is probably nuclear bomb.

Thanks for posting. I'm in the nuclear industry and would like to try to address some of these issues if you don't mind.

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...

Hi, interesting answers.

1) Could you tell me more about replenishment of Uranium in seawater, or point me towards your source?

Wouldn't it mean that we would reach a maximum saturation of Uranium in the ocean after some time (with precipitation of excess Uranium in the form of salts)?

Have you seen / access to estimates of Uranium electrode deposition cost from water? Are they cost competitive in any way in comparison to other energy systems that will be employed in the future?

At the end, you would need to use electrical energy converted from another source to gain Uranium. For me, that scenario is a bit 'fishy'.

Thanks, and sure. You're right to be skeptical. The renewability of uranium isn't a widely accepted idea and unfortunately is hard to definitively prove experimentally due to the hilariously long time scales. So we're left with less rigorous claims of this to treat rationally more than scientifically. Also, haha: 'fishy'!

Here's a good source: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/11/3088/htm And it points to an older one: http://tmtfree.hd.free.fr/albums/files/TMTisFree/Documents/E...

From the first:

"One additional aspect of nuclear sustainability—noted long-since by Bernard Cohen—is that a significant fraction of the nuclear fission energy resource is in fact completely “renewable” in the same sense as wind and solar energy [32]. Wind and rain constantly erode the Earth’s crust, which contains an average uranium concentration of 3 parts per million. Rivers then carry this dissolved uranium into the oceans, at a rate of approximately 10,000 MT per year [33]. In a breeder reactor energy system, this is a sufficient rate to supply the world’s entire electricity demand at the present time more than five times over—or is roughly one quarter of what’s needed to supply a continual 100 TW to a hypothetical global civilization of 10 billion persons which is energy supply-replete by any contemporary measure.

As the crust is being eroded by rivers, it is constantly replaced by new layers of rock being pushed upward by plate tectonic processes. The supply of uranium in the Earth’s crust is effectively inexhaustible, on the order of 40 trillion metric tonnes, a factor of 10,000 more than is present in the oceans. At present erosion rates, this source of uranium would last on the order of 4 billion years, similar to the timespan over which the Sun will become a red giant.

Therefore, this assured source of “continually mined-by-Nature and oceanically presented” uranium will last as long as life on Earth does—even if burned at rates sufficient to supply a large fraction of a fully-developed human civilization—and represents an astronomical amount of nuclear energy, one that is in fact truly renewable and inexhaustible by any human measures."

EDIT: As for increasing concentrations of uranium in the sea, it's already in equilibrium so the incoming stuff that leaches in through rivers is leaching back into the rocks, giving us the equilibrium concentration we observe today. The point here is that if we start extracting it that concentration is not expected to drop because we can't offset the balance very much.

Hi,

thank you very much for your detailed elaboration on the subject, and the references. I was not aware of the bigger, geologic perspective:

   ~ 3 mg Uranium in 1 m^3 ocean water.

Makes sense, when one thinks about the relative ratio of chemical elements on earth. I guess, as always, it is the demonstration of chemical enrichment procedures that is the key here, and there is currently no economic incentive to do such a thing. Although, I have not looked into current fuel production procedures. How expensive is 1g (sufficiently) pure Uranium fuel?

The sentence that our energy requirements could be covered with breeder reactor systems for 50K years made my smile, though. It will be probably the lack of higher "level fuels" such as proteins and carbohydrates that give us headaches, first.

Please note that I am not at all hypercritical regarding nuclear energy. There is a lot of industrial and green propaganda out there, and it is sad to see that we scientist are loosing the battle in media. Too often, rigorous scientific explanations in not sexy enough for us apes.

> Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it.

Isn't there a substantial energy cost associated with collecting that Uranium?

The same goes for gold, there is a huge amount of gold in seawater and yet, nobody has been able to extract it in a way that left money on the table after the process had run.

This article suggests a total cost of $1000-$1500 which is ~20x the cost of mined uranium (and 40x less the cost of gold). It does not mention energy as a significant driver of this cost.

http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2013/06/the_cost...

Great question, and one that I don't have a quantitative reply to on hand. The thing with uranium is that it is so unimaginably energy dense that with the success we've seen so far in seawater extraction technology, it's hard to imagine the energy required for extraction being anything but minuscule in comparison. Obviously there's a limit of concentration where this becomes not true but my understanding is that we are not near that limit.

Here's a summary of some recent work on seawater uranium extraction: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

And here's a special edition of Industrial and Chemical Engineering dedicated to the topic: http://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15#UraniuminSeawater

Thank you for the links and the answer.

I also had my fair share with nuclear power plant design and power plant design in general in the past. From that time I have kept a rather moderate/positive view of the technology. However 'we' seem to be implementing it so badly that I am concerned. The total (from end to end) are unknown and even based on what is known not fully accounted for.

While you point out that there are technical solution to the challenges I strongly believe Countries/Corporations/Governments are not willing or capable of operating these plants to a safe standard and earn money doing so.

The whole issue of decommissioning and deconstruction is only in its infancy and already a huge money drain on the backs of the people and not the Corporates who earned money for 30 years running the plant. I think we should speak of deconstruction and not of demolition. Demolition is mainly smashing buildings to pebbles with a big steel ball, for nuclear power plants that is not the case. See [1] or [2] - sorry both in German

Re 1. Until the technology has actually been built and scaled up we won't know what technical details and challenged await us. I don't see that as a reason to not do it but rather a call for caution on over-optimistic timeline.

Re 2. Indeed many aspects of the reactors have been improved on paper/in theories. See for example the European Pressurized Reactor [3]. The first 3 plants to that nature are riddled with technical detail problems and budget overruns, see [4]. When I was at Unit learning about EPR most lecturers where approaching retirement or already past retirement. The nuclear power industry - at least for the German part - has had the issue of very few skilled successors. This might have a big role in the building of the actual new types of plants. 35-45 years ago when the current old plants where built there was a large pool of experts - engineers, construction, QA/QC - they are all retired now.

Re 3. That is good, and there surely are technical solutions but I am very sure they are no easy find. Just think about the discussion of material selection for certain vessels in light of the current material embitterment news from Belgium Power plants [5]. I'm not saying that these issues are insurmountable but that the process to get to an agreed (experts and governments) new solution is slow and painful with no ETA.

Re 4. In Germany at least the search for a repository was driven by politics into the wrong direction. This should have been driven buy science and technology people. By now the topic is so far down the drain so that changing course is political suicide. Another point regarding the waste is the discussion of marking the nuclear wasted depositories for >1000 or rather 10000 years. Interesting YC discussion here [6]

[1] http://www.focus.de/finanzen/eon-spaltet-akws-ab-muessen-jet... [2] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/milliarde... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_energy_in_Belgium#Hydr... [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530978

Notice how reprocessing or fast breeders solve problems 1 and 4. As for 3 the US has never had an release of radioactivity to the environment from a nuclear reactor aboard a ship or submarine in several thousand years of operation time.

That's not correct, there have been several releases of radioactivity from US military vessels. This is all prior to the late 1980s, since the mid 1970s many controls and monitors were added to prevent releases.

Personally I'd attribute this to lack of awareness rather than lack of budget. The Soviet program looks quite different.

December 12, 1971, The USS Dace spilled 1,900 litres of radioactive coolant water in to the Thames River, Connecticut.

Undisclosed location, radioactive resin being dumped at sea from the USS Guardfish blows back on to the vessel.

May 22, 1978, USS Puffer releases another 1,900l of radioactive water near Puget Sound, Washington, United States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

Apparently 'millions of gallons' of primary loop coolant was released in to the environment prior to 1973. This even references some sources if you want to dig deeper http://www.environment-hawaii.org/?p=3836

Thanks for correcting! It seems that these are low-level intended releases, not core damage. Bad for a power plant, but not horrifically bad.

Hydro is great, so great that around 90% of dammable rivers are already used for power generation. Further hydro generation is not really possible so it will never fulfill more than a fraction of energy needs.

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.

Hydro is not an option at many places. Also dams also have negative environmental impact, which is often simply ignored.

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.

> 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.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884030

How can you list scarcity of uranium as an issue for nuclear, then advocate for hydro without mentioning the same?

There are only so many suitable locations for hydro, and the further down the list we go the worse the incremental environmental impact.

Tidal is hydro and has barely been tapped.

Tidal's problem is that it's low-density energy and has a low capital-to-extracted-power ratio. And that capital is sitting in salt water.

My intent was not to advocate for nuclear, just to push back at a one sided argument.

You can make a compelling case for anything if you leave out inconvenient details.

Your #1 is wrong in at least 3 ways. (Seawater, Thorium, breeders).

You tell us some short emotional story. And then provide a second completely contrary paragraph comment how bad the propaganda is and how great nuclear is. You know what, your tactic is called Zersetzung, and what you are doing is not nice.

My story has nothing to do with the facts about nuclear power. The moral of the story is about socialist dictatorships, the lack of free speech and free flow of information.

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.

What I see on HN is a stream of technological idealism that tends to ignore the practical difficulties. Blaming protestors for lack of progress is very easy as it allows you to neatly ignore those issues. There are many economic and engineering reasons why nuclear is so hard to get right.

France, a rich, functional, liberal, western democracy, is more or less uncontroversially nuclear powered to a very high degree. There are no more practical difficulties than any other large, important project. The only problem is politics.

That's like saying that building a road is no more difficult than launching a rocket into orbit.

It turns out that nuclear physics is really quite hard. That is not a reason to not do something. But we shouldn't take these issues so lightly.

Of course it's hard. But it's not like we've never done it before and that operating nuclear power plants is this weird theoretical endeavour.

Or, put in another way: the hardness isn't why we're not doing it.

I don't agree. A lot of countries have been open to new nuclear developments. In the UK for example there is a supportive government, and schemes are even quite popular locally due to jobs. Yet the commercial and political risk is still huge. Despite the legacy of nuclear schemes it is still difficult to get schemes of the ground. And those kind of issues are in a large part due to the unqiue challenges that nuclear presents that are not relevant in other large infrastructure projects.

Despite those unique challenges, the French built 56 reactors in the 70s and 80s. GDP had quadrupled since then, while those unique challenges haven't gotten bigger -- but they have been amended with 40 years of rabid FUD. That is the challenge, and as long as politicians are repeating the FUD, it's not going to get easier.

So massive overuns in time and money are due to FUD? Does the explain design flaws? Politicians are used to taking flack for infrastructure projects, that is hardly unique to nuclear. But funding the next generation of reactor is hugely expensive and risky regardless of public perceptions.

Partially, yes. The reactors currently under construction are third generation, as opposed to tested, proved and wildly successful second generation plants (plus tweaks and updates). There are of course many good (and even more really bad) reasons to prefer a new and unproven design over a slightly older proven one, and few of them unique to nuclear projects -- but massive unwarranted fear (including conflation with nuclear weapons) has been the defining narrative of nuclear between 30-40 years ago when we were perfectly capable of building nuclear projects and today.

So why did they choose to not use proven designs? Honestly I don't have a problem using riskier designs if it could reduce costs. And increased complexity is a risk in itself.

It's difficult to say, but it's likely to be a factor that an official expressing a risk tolerance >0.00 would have a very short and unglamorous career ahead of him in the hostile climate surrounding anything nuclear, despite us casually accepting much, much higher risks in all sorts of areas.

I think we have the nuclear physics part figured out. It is more of an engineering challenge.

Implementing the practical considerations sensibly is political, though - see TEPCO's out of date contingency planning for a clear case of regulatory capture.

I wouldn't say uncontroversially. There are political issues around what to do with aging nuclear power plants (see Fessenheim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant) and whether to invest more. I don't know much about it, but nuclear energy was a talking point during the latests elections.

Personally, I think it would be an enormous mistake not to invest enough to at least assess the feasibility/practicality of cleaner nuclear sources. I really hope France keeps on investing in nuclear energy & research.

More or less uncontroversially ;)

Especially compared to the fate of nuclear in most other countries around Europe.

It's "dairy", not "diary".

the OP is a sequence of brief (100 - 500 words) (skillfully edited & translated) vignettes from people who have first-hand memory of the events related to the Chernobyl disaster.

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.

Maybe in contrast Polish authorities decided to go against our USSR occupation masters(first time in whole Warsaw pact?) and distributed stable iodine to 18 million people just 4 days after the accident.

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.

Editor here. Thank you for sharing your memories. And, for the note.

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.

I was five in Estonia when it happened. I remember:

- 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).

I visited Chernobyl and Pripyat about four years ago; it was a rather sobering experience.

If anyone is interested, my unedited photos can be found here:

https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5...

I find these pictures fascinating!

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!

In states near the Nevada test site, senior government officials evacuated before test series, with their families. And Kodak was notified in advance, so they could avoid using fallout-contaminated paper to interleave with their X-ray film.

What's even creepier is that the main reason Kodak was notified is because they were able to determine when the testing was occurring based on their manufacturing defects (and it meant they lost a lot of product to sell). They sued to stop the US Govt but got an agreement to know the testing schedule so they wouldn't produce film on those days.

The article mentioning this was on HN awhile back,

Right. And there was no publicity about potential health impacts. Also, results of fallout deposition tests were kept secret for decades. And even after they became public, health impacts, mostly hypothyroidism and thyroid cancer, were bullshitted away. Because they're readily treatable. So there was no need to alarm people.

While interesting, what does chernobyl have to do with nuclear weapons testing?

The common thread is governments lying to their people about radiation releases.

Chernobyl is the earliest memory I recall. I was less than 1y old, but I can remember staring through the window into the garden not comprehending why I was not allowed to be outside like usual and everyone being in a strange mood.

“Everyone who thinks the EPA is not necessary and the regulations on power plants are there to stifle growth and profit should read every comment here… ”— Ilya K.

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.

I got a similar set of stories from a friend who's parents were nearby. She translated them here: https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl/memories.html

There's a good lesson to be learned. http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/

If anyone enjoyed this, I can recommend Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (who won the Nobel a few years ago). It's basically the same thing, but more and more in depth.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0312425848/ref=as_li_tl?...

Some people who post comments didn't read the article - thousands of people dying of cancer, children loosing hair, etc. It wasn't just 36 people, it's couple million tragedies, as their families were affected, themselves, children because of the lies of the communists

> The biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history.

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.

Disasters usually refer to isolated, unexpected, incidents. Air pollution is not a disaster.

Great documentary about Chernobyl can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezohqY-vg4s&feature=player_e...

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.

A family member almost became a liquidator when he was told about a possible way of emigrating from the Soviet Union to Europe as a graduate student. He was told that he'd just have to do some work in Ukraine in between for a month or two.

You wonder how many other liquidators were tricked into doing the job.

Any chance there's a Russian version of this somewhere?

Not what your asking for but these are stories from the same event in Russian: https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl/memories_ru.html

Editor here. These were originally written in English, so we have plans to translate to Russian, which might take a while since we only have one fully-qualified translator. Help is welcome! Shoot me an email (included in my profile).

fyi you can't see your email in the email field; you have to put it in about

Added, thanks.

Oh, interesting. Were the original interviews not done in Russian?

No, they were comments on a Facebook post.

I found the comment about "intelligentsia"-phobia interesting; it echos the conservatives slurring of education and "elitists"...

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

This really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dust effects you can wash away with inhaled/ingested particles that get incorporated to bones and tissues with grim long-term effects.

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?)

Well, now that the dust settled, it turned out they were perfectly right, and pretty much all the damage to lives and the region was caused by panic and evacuation.

And that's why there is a permanent exclusion zone no one is allowed to enter and the videos posted on YouTube by Japanese themselves showing significantly raised background radiations on certain spots in Tokyo were produced by irresponsible people using uncalibrated unapproved instruments, right? Or reports of metallic taste after first rains since meltdowns etc. It was just a show produced by Hollywood spread by fake news, right?

Fukushima is several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl. Raising panic is not without risk either, people die because of evacuations.

Fukushima: "As of 2014, a peer reviewed estimate of the total was 340–800 PBq, with 80% falling into the Pacific Ocean.[8] Radiation continues to be released into the Pacific via groundwater."

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.

People who raised panic are responsible for huge damage of people's lives.

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.

Are you friggin kidding me? Not a single person was killed by nuclear exposure after a 8.4M earthquake killed 25000 people. The forced removal of people lead to 1000+ suicides.

This is obviously a loaded statement. There were reports of plant workers that died because of unexpected radiation exposure. Moreover, in many cases radiation causes damage after XY years of being inside human body, so we will only see in the next decades what the toll is. There is also water leaking for how many years already, nobody able to do anything about it and radiation from Fukushima detected on Hawaii in the sea water already (though minuscule amounts). And how much information is swept under the rug to maintain "face"? Your statement is either naive or intentional, the effect is the same.

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