A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986 | Hacker News Reader

A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986

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167 pointsquakeguy59 comments

It was interesting that there were firm denials at the time, yet everyone was used to propaganda (yes, fake news) so it wasn't at first clear if there was a coverup or the claim of a problem was western misdirection!

But reports from neighboring countries pretty quickly put that to rest, and then the narrative switched to the heroics of the emergency workers (who were indeed heroic and, sadly, literally self-sacrificing.

The plume traveled over northern Western Europe, but West Germany, at least, didn't take any immediate action. 15-20 years later there appeared to be a slew of unusual cancers (e.g. my mother in law's tear duct; my friend's mother salivary gland...unusual ones in accretive tissue. But I don't know if there's been any systematic survey to see if there was an assignable increase in the death rate, or if I am just divining a signal from what's actually small-n noise.

Theres some studies done of the effects of Chernobyl over the years since. Of note are the WHO and the Chernobyl Tissue Bank.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ http://www.chernobyltissuebank.com

I went to a talk by Prof Geraldine Thomas, of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank and Imperial College London, sharing her insights and research into radiation and its effects on the body. The key takeaway from the talk is to take into account the type of release, what radionuclides were exposed to the public and their half-life, and then what the passage of that particular element is through the body to determine what damage can be done.

A notable example is of Iodine-131 causing of thyroid lesions and cancers in the direct aftermath of an event because of its short half life of alpha decay directly into tissue that bioaccumulates Iodine, keeping the alpha decay focussed on a very specific tissue. Other heavier elements tend to (I am not a biologist or nuclear scientist, paraphrasing from a talk a couple years ago) can leave the body without being bioaccumulated, having only released 'tolerable' amounts of alpha decay into a broad area of tissue.

It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors. But I — a nobody with a causal subject matter interest — would be hesitant to suggest that there was causation in absence of a hypothesis based on biology tied to the known Chernobyl emissions. Either way, we can find out more about radiations effect on biology if a study takes place — or if there is already one out there?

the reports you're referring to are very docile to say the least.

"Otherwise, the team of international experts found no evidence for any increases in the incidence of leukemia and cancer among affected residents."

Except that according to official numbers Belarus, which after the explosion was right down the wind from it, has overall 1.5 times higher cancer rates than Russia or Ukraine have (Russia and Ukraine have the same rate) with some cancer rates being 2x-3x in the Gomel and Mogilev region - the regions right next to the Chernobyl. Such cancer picture is a new development compare to pre-Chernobyl years.

>It would be interesting to know if those "unusual cancers" were in some part a result of radionuclide exposure from Chernobyl or the result of other factors.

Anybody is welcome to suggest such "other factors" which would explain the overall rate increase after Chernobyl with the distribution of rate so that it clearly increases in the regions closer to Chernobyl, while these factors must also be Belarus specific compare to Russia and Ukraine.

The Belarus officials like to play with the numbers to get money from different foreign organizations. I'm not saying there are no health implication from radiation fallout in these regions but x2 sounds like statistics are used to drive someone's agenda. Instead if blaming drinking and smoking (and trying to solve the societal ailments that are causing that) they blame radiation, because it brings them money.

you can google it yourself. NCBI has a bunch of works on Belarus situation. If anything, real situation coming from people sounds even more gloom than official numbers.

I specifically mentioned Russia and Ukraine because such factors like drinking, smoking, food, genetics, lifestyle/habbits are very similar across all 3 countries and thus can't explain those post-Chernobyl appeared high cancer rates in Belarus.

But at the same time, radiation and exposure is more nuanced than when and where an event happened that might coincide with some later generalised health effects. Not all radiation is the same and radiation exposure does not always lead to negative health effects. Cancers occurring in a geo-specific region in correlation to an event don't point to one source.

The radionuclides expelled from Chernobyl are known and traceable, not being found in nature they can be detected easily. Knowing their decay chain over time and, later, the bioaccumulation of those isotopes (based on how people will come in to contact with them) you can start to figure out how tissues that bioaccumulate or come into contact with an alpha source could react.

What I am saying is, it's important to understand that its not just about 'radiation' may equal 'cancers'. We know how to understand this deeper than that, on how to measure and calculate health effects based on the specific isotopes and their related exposures on tissues, primarily internally — because alpha decay has the highest energy but is easily absorbed by paper or the outer epidermis, to do damage it has to be in close proximity to sensitive tissues. So its important to stick to those more calculable and verifiable hypothesis rather than broad 'radiation' and 'cancer' labels.

The Russian diet also played a huge part. Bioaccumulation of iodine depends on how much iodine is in your diet previously. That's why the Japanese (fish-eaters with lots of iodine) shrug off radioactive iodine while Russians (bread-eaters) readily absorb and are damaged by it. If you are worried about a recent nuclear incident, a meal of imported cod is a good defense.

I think it's more interesting that people were so used to Soviet denials of any disaster they now remember this as one of them. They were slow to report the accident and slow to acknowledge its scope and severity. On the other hand, it was perfectly clear to Western observers that a serious accident had taken place, you can see that in the ABC report from April 28, 1986 linked in my other comment. I can't imagine any reasonable person thinking this was 'western misdirection'.

A UN IAEA team visited the site on May 8th, unthinkable in pre-Gorbachev times. Gorbachev was elected Secretary General only a year before.

> A UN IAEA team visited the site on May 8th, unthinkable in pre-Gorbachev times

The agreement by the USSR to permit IAEA inspections was signed in February 1985, a month before Mr Gorbachev was appointed.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/02/22/Soviets-to-allow-ins...

These are inspections by IAEA Safeguards, their main goal is to track fissile material for non-proliferation treaty compliance purposes. They did not oblige the Soviets to allow the IAEA to show up in case of an accident and I'm not sure if that particular plant was supposed to have any inspectors visit at all. Here's an update from August '85 that gives you an idea of how things were going:

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/06/world/soviet-said-to-appro...

Inviting the Director General of the IAEA to the accident site was independent of that.

I lived in Gdansk at the time. My canary developed these red bumps on its chest and died a few days after.

I was 7 years old and still remember crying to this day.

> It is concluded that the two explosions in the reactor that many witnesses recognized were thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions at the bottom of a few fuel channels and then some 2.7 s later a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor vessel. The nuclear explosions formed a plasma jet that shot upward through the still intact refueling tubes, rammed the 350-kg plugs, and continued through the quite thin roof and then some 2.5 to 3 km into the atmosphere where the meteorological situation provided a route to Cherepovets.

That's pretty crazy. It ended up as a nuclear canon firing 350kg (700lbs) projectiles straight up into the atmosphere, right through the roof. Even more odd is that some lab, for a completely unrelated reason (building a liquid oxygen and nitrogen facility) was sampling noble gases from the atmosphere. And then someone could go back and draw these conclusions more than 30 years later.

Previously theorized by Charlie Stross in a significantly more fanciful, but riveting take: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

That was new to me, thanks! Excellent example of pulling several plausible ideas into one outlandish tale.

Sure, it’s a devil’s brew, but who wouldn’t say no to a specific impulse on the order of twelve thousand?

That kind of Isp is great for interplanetory/interstellar cruising, not so much for getting off the pad. That's why ion engines aren't used to get to orbit; thrust to weight matters when starting from zero m/s.

Isp just says how efficient you are at turning reaction mass into delta-v. Nuclear rockets can attain both high Isp and high thrust.

How much truth is there in it? Did they lie about their experiment?

We decided to analyze this scenario in detail, but the project was postponed at the time [1987] due to the lack of high-quality, high-resolution gridded weather data covering April-May 1986 for driving the dispersion model. When in 2016 the high-resolution regional reanalysis for Europe was published and extended back in time to 1980, it became possible for us to perform good-quality dispersion modeling.

Wow.

I’m just reading the abstract at the moment, but this paper says that there was a -nuclear- explosion, not just a steam explosion?

Correct. There's a decent lay summary here: https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-cr...

That's right. The finding is that the runaway fission reaction produced an explosion of the fissile material directly instead of merely overheating the enclosing cooling system. It didn't remotely approach the yield of a warhead relative to the amount of material, but it was still a "nuclear explosion".

An important threshold is crossed if the core, or part of it, becomes 'prompt critical'. Normally, a reactor's chain reaction is only sustained with the contribution of the delayed neutrons, which are occasionally emitted by fission products, in addition to the prompt neutrons, which are emitted during fission itself. If an assembly becomes so supercritical that the reaction can be sustained by the prompt neutrons alone, the doubling time of the exponential growth in the reaction rate suddenly becomes orders of magnitude shorter, leading to an explosive release of energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_n...

It's always been known that there was a nuclear explosion, it was just called a "power excursion" so avoid frightening the children.

It was an excursion... mind you that if you drenched me in gasoline and tossed a match I’d be, “In a state of accelerated thermal decomposition.” That’s not a lie, it’s just a bland way of saying that I’d be burning like a Yule log.

And there is a large new release of Ru-106 somewhere in Russia... what's going on?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac...

Posted on its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240

Russia has just confirmed that they too have detected it, previously they denied they have detected anything

> The highest concentration was registered at the station in Argayash, a village in the Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals, which had "extremely high pollution" of Ru-106, exceeding natural background pollution by 986 times, the service said.

> It did not point to any specific source of the pollution, but the Argayash station is about 30 kilometres from the Mayak nuclear facility, which in 1957 was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.

https://phys.org/news/2017-11-russia-extremely-high-radioact...

Note Ru-106 has a half-life longer than a year (373 days) so it's not going any where quickly except the ground water.

I was reading a speculation that there was a run of new nuclear waste processing tech in Mayk factory just two days before the they started to register the high readings. So it's possible they had an accident there. I will try to find the blog post but any news can be regarded as disinformation from both sides.

That's the blog post in Russian(Google Translate ), the guy has quite a large readership (top20 in Russian blogosphere), topics mostly on nuclear stations, not a crackpot. Still it's just a speculation : https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...

"Russia reports radioactivity 986 times the norm after nuclear accident claim"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac...

"Russia’s meteorological service has confirmed “extremely high” concentrations of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 were found in several parts of the country in late September, confirming European reports about the contamination this month."

Events repeat, denial at first for a month and than downplaying the accident and the contamination of larger part two continents.

There was a documentary some years ago on TV where a guy who repeatedly had gone inside the Chernobyl power plant came to the same conclusion. He based his theory on the amount of core material that was found, and which was less than expected, meaning that some of it must have been consumed in a nuclear explosion.

Thats all I remember, and I can't find the source anymore.

I can see how voids in the water cause an increase in neutron flux, but I thought water was needed to slow the neutrons, and that fast neutrons result in reduced reaction.

Chernobyl journal by a Elena Filatova, who biked around the ghostly place a few years later, is worth reading: https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-vol...

Apparently she took a bit of artistic licence with some of the things she wrote, although the pictures are real, the place is real, and she did visit there.

http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/chernobyl_trip

I remember how furious the slashdot community was over this!

I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can’t be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don’t remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.

And we are lucky for it. If the runaway core had reached the water table beneath, it would have exploded and irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.

What? Holy smokes! This is the first I've heard of this. Can you share any more info? Sources?

That's the case for any nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl isn't special in that regard. If you have a very dense blob of liquid fuel (called corium after a meltdown) generating megawatts of power it's going to melt through concrete and steel, it's just a matter of time. Once that blob hits a ton of water underneath it forcing all of that water to heat up will create enormous pressure and the only way out is up.

Speaking only for myself, the surprising claim was not “explode”, but “irradiated most of Eastern Europe, if not the whole continent.”

It appears to be based on a quote from the 1979 film "The China Syndrome".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrom...

Why it didn't happen in Fukushima?

They managed to cool the corium by flooding it with water.

Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl has many stories like this, highly recommended reading if you want to know more about the incident

The accident was acknowledged by Soviet news on April 28th, two days after it took place. While they were slow to provide details there was no public denial - they initially denied anything was wrong in response to private inquiries by Swedish diplomats since elevated radiation levels were measured in Sweden. This is an ABC news report from the time which also shows the Soviet announcement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmeeEpWxfRY

That may have been what they said to the Western media. It does not necessarily match what they said to their own government run TV channels and newspapers.

What do you mean? The Soviet announcement is right there in the video. It's an announcement on Vremya, the official evening news TV program broadcast across the Soviet Union.

The accident happened on April 26th, and was acknowledged 36 hours after when they began to evacuate Pripyat, a town in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl. As I said, it took about a day for them to acknowledge it, and it was only acknowledged when it became clear that it could not be swept under the rug. Your video does not contradict that.

You wrote "Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day)". That's not what happened, you can look it up in any of the numerous timelines and accounts of the accident and the reporting and Soviet disclosures. The evacuation of Pripyat started before the first public Soviet announcement as described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Evacuation

And the section immediately following regarding the announcement.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...

Maybe it's been edited since you supplied the wikipedia link, but it doesn't support your narrative.

One page down, it describes Ukrainian Soviet officials claiming there was no danger from the accident to regional Ukrainian SSR officials. It says that Pripyat was only evacuated 24 hours after the disaster, after more than 50 residents were hospitalized for radiation poisoning.

Even then, the letter to the residents was that the evacuation was temporary, and primarily as a precautionary measure.

The only thing you effectively refute is the timeline, Pripyat was evacuated 24, not 36 hours later, as the parent poster erroneously stated.

The wikipedia article doesn't mention internal Soviet press releases, so you haven't refuted that Ukrainian or Russian officials denied a disaster. However, the parent poster nor the OP haven't demonstrated that officials lied to the public either.

Proof: Soviet TV as of April 26. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EdubXu5GYxA

“And this is the main building of the station itself. As you can see there is no major destruction incessantly touted by the Western press...”

This isn't from April 26th 1986. How can it possibly be, the 'Western press' didn't know about the accident then. It's also not a 'flat out denial anything had happened at all', you're just misremembering that part.

Note also this was very close to May holidays (May 1st etc.) when people customary go out, with kids, some go camping, etc. Kiev - a city with population over 2 millions - is 90 km from Chernobyl, and nobody there knew what's going on for a while. I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced. And of course when it was known there was no proper information on dealing with radioactive contaminations, mostly everybody would go by wildest rumors and home remedies. No tools for measuring radioactivity either anywhere to be bought, people made their own eventually. Etc., etc.

> I'm not even sure there's any statistics of what health effects this produced.

My post with some effect summary for Belarus https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15737928&goto=threads%...

AFAIR due to the weather patterns Belarus got a lot of the fallout and Kiev area was affected much less.

Yes, we were camping as well. It all happened during a sunny weekend.

It was raining very heavily in Scotland unfortunately. Probably also Norway.

Check this story - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-ch...

" seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning"

I heard those hero's had mostly no clue, that they were on a heroic suicide mission, nor did they had any choice in the matter. Knowing a bit about UDSSR I can very well imagine this to be true, but does anyone knows more?

edit: this article confirms it, but I am not sure if the site is reliable (it quotes the "socialist worker")

http://www.upworthy.com/you-probably-dont-know-their-names-b...

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