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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

The Chernobyl disaster is simply unimaginably expensive. The total costs so far are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The new containment structure that was finished in 2019 was $2,000,000,000 alone, and dismantling the reactors and cleanup is scheduled to take another 45 years.

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If hundreds of billions to address the first nuclear meltdown in world history is unimaginably expensive, what do you call the "conservative" estimate of covid-19's total cost of "$16 Trillion" for the US alone? Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7604733/ And that's assuming its all taken care of by fall of 2021.

In terms of cost per citizen that's actually the same order of magnitude as the $700 billion quoted here [1] (if as citizens we count Ukraine and Belarus, which is of course not totally fair).

But yes, Covid is also incredibly expensive, and with a couple of years of hindsight we will no doubt talk about its major political impact just like we are talking about Chernobyl contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union.

1: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...

There’s a cost to building back better.

Still cheaper than the Iraq and Afghan war though.

The Chernobyl accident was arguably a major factor in the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union and therefore the end of the Cold War so perhaps some good did come from those awful events.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster in itself. People had their savings wiped out, lost their jobs, and had to barter beg and steal just to feed themselves. Organized criminals bought up the state's assets for pennies on the dollar and set themselves up as oligarchs. Several former soviet allies turned into dictatorships or failed states.

Sorry, but what savings? I come from Baltics. Born late years of Empire. Most of SU people lived on the edge powerty. Ofc if you were in party or releated to defense then you had very good or decent living standards. But for my family where all of 4 grandparents were from kulaks almost zero chanche to get out from specific kasta.

No, the creation of the Soviet Union was a disaster of unimaginable scale. It simply had to end at some time, because it was corrupt and the economy inefficient in every way and morally bankrupt. The forced annexation of other countries and deportations of nations inside the SU were horrible crimes.

Do you suggest that the soviet union should not have collapsed?

> Do you suggest that the soviet union should not have collapsed?

Perhaps it could have collapsed in a better way?

It killed much fewer people collapsing than it killed when existing. So it collapsed in a pretty good way, considering the alternatives.

I think there were ways for the Soviet Union to have gone away that didn’t involve Russia (and to varying extents, the other states) becoming the kleptocracy it is now.

> I think there were ways for the Soviet Union to have gone away that didn’t involve Russia (and to varying extents, the other states) becoming the kleptocracy it is now.

It was, and rather violent: go, and cleanse the remnants of the old system. A missed opportunity now.

Instead, people let them live for them just to come back in 9 years time.

I also think there were ways it could have gone away while killing millions. And I am not exaggerating: while living through the collapse our parents kissed us kids goodbye and sent us to the country side. They fully expected the communist apparatchiks to shoot protesters point blank in the streets. And it some cases, they did.

Let’s just be glad it went away and pray it never returns: it was one of the greatest horrors this Earth has ever seen.

> Let’s just be glad it went away and pray it never returns

This optimism is very premature. CPSU has morphed into Russian mafia, and the current Russian Kleptostate, and ChiComs... well just turn on the news any day.

> The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster in itself.

A very positive "disaster" for multiple countries that were occupied by Russia since the end of the war. We regained our freedom and started to catch up to the NATO countries.

The nearly 50 year under Moscow's boot was a much bigger disaster and, although I was born in a communist state, I'm glad I could grow up in a now free and democratic country.

Thanks for your perspective. It's always good to remind people of the realities of life under communism, given its resurging popularity amongst some young people who have no living memory of it.

That returning popularity is no accident: when it collapsed, its propaganda machine mutated and adapted to the west. Now it has a new master rising on the ashes of the old empire and it started its work.

For sure, nothing to do with the rising inequalities, the economic perspective of the younger generations, and of course the whole climate and resources consumption issues the last decades have brought that maybe make some people question if we are on the right trajectory.

Oh, sure, good old Soviet Union was the master of equality. Everyone was equally hungry and equally oppressed. Everyone, of course, except them: the politically connected, the unelected ruling class. They and their good friends, the secret police.

But the propaganda machine LOVED telling us how much better we had it in such an equalitarian society and what a nightmare was to live in the decadent West where the rich took advantage of the poor. We were literally waiting for capitalism to fall... while queueing in line for the allotted bread, flour and sugar rations.

They were the masters of ecology as well. Just read up what happened to the Aral Sea and, you know, the subject at hand, Chernobyl.

Of course I was not defending Soviet Union but commenting on the returning popularity of "communism", and by that I was thinking of Marx ideas, notably regarding the economy[0]. I'm not sure there is really a returning popularity for Stalinism.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto

Marxism, communism, Stalinism - they are one and the same cancer: the inhuman system under which people's rights are forcefully confiscated and replaced with the all powerful State that knows better what you need. For your own good and the betterment of all mankind.

The people praising such a system it are either the purely evil overlords-to-be or their "useful idiots" losers blinded by desire of a of personal gain they are utterly unable to obtain in a meritocratic, free-market, capitalist system.

The Tsar was bad too. Cold comfort to the millions who were massacred after the revolution.

Who is arguing that? I never seen any credible evidence that it contributed in any significant way to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev for one

https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/chernobyl-and-the-fall-...

Edit: Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy also makes a claim that the accident let to political instability in the Ukraine which certainly didn't help with the integrity of the SU.

Gorbachev is directly responsible for collapse of USSR, — he ruled it when it collapsed. So he is responsible for both of the disasters.

Shouldn't you be a little skeptical, when he tries to blame one of his disasters for another?

Of course I'm sceptical - but given other accounts of the times that I have read I haven't seen anything in his account that seems fundamentally wrong.

Well, Mikhail Gorbachev has actually written about specifically this. You'd think he'd be a reliable source.

About as credible as you're going to get, I imagine

My perception of it is that the collapse had already started and was probably inevitable, but the Chernobyl disaster accelerated it and was a metaphorical nail in the coffin, further reducing any chance there might have been at recovery.

It’s the most expensive wildlife refuge in the world.

$2B is table stakes for anything in heavy industry. I haven't heard of a new oil refinery for anything less than $10B in a while.

I'm not saying Chernobyl wasn't a disaster. I'm just saying, as far as heavy industry goes $2B isn't much. I know that's hard to fathom but it's true.

Yeah but that refinery starts making money at some point. With Chernobyl, the $2B is completely gone.

A new nuclear plant can cost up to $10B. Spending $2B per 100 years to keep the worst disaster in nuclear energy safe and secure doesn't actually sound like a bad deal to me, in context. Of course the actual disaster in totality cost much more - up to $700B in impairment [1], overwhelmingly opportunity cost.

Further, consider that the Chernobyl complex did already produce value, and for many years. In fact, there were four reactors at Chernobyl. No. 4 is the one that suffered the catastrophic failure in 1986.

However the remaining 3 reactors continued to operate for many years. No. 2 was shut down in 1991, No. 1 was shut down in 1996 and No. 3 was shut down in 2000.

Even that was reluctant, the Ukrainians only agreed to shut them down in exchange for assistance with the NSC and putting up 2 new reactors, Khmelnitski 2 and Rovno 4.

[1] https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...

Considering renovation of one of the reactors in the STP (South Texas Project) nuclear plant cost ~$5B I find that $10B suspiciously low. The renovation project I was made aware of was supposed to be done by Fluor. I don't know if it took place.

The Wikipedia page for STP talks about some $10-14B for two new reactors on the existing site. Originally applied for circa'07. If the reactors ever get built they will cut down on natural gas usage and be more more profitable than gas plants over their 25+ year lifespan.

I can only imagine a modern net-new nuclear power generation facility in the most hospitable jurisdiction would cost beyond $20B when all is said and done.

> A new nuclear plant can cost up to $10B

you forget the $40B in cleanup costs if no disaster happens, of course disaster or cleanup costs will be socialized in "developed" countries. all cleanup costs were grosly underestimated, in germany and everywhere else.

Not to mention the site will need to continually rebuild the sarcophagus around it until half-lifing makes the sarcophagus unneeded.

The current one is only designed to last 100 years.

The objective of the New Safe Confinement is to shelter the site and allow for safe demolition of the structure and disposal of the material on the site. There will probably be some sort of "cap" over the site for a long time but it will not need to be as expensive or technically sophisticated once that work is done.

I'm considering the "safe demolition and disposal" to cost multiple orders of what it would cost to rebuild the containment ...

so yes, at some point the new containment cap need not be as expensive, but by the time we have gotten to that point, the site will probably have consumed a lot more money than just building the same containment over and over again. Some future leader(s) would probably do the calculations and just say "let's build another 100-year-containment so the next generation can deal with the disposal" and pocket the money.

It's the "tech debt" discussion embodied in real life.

"only"

Yes "only", meaning it's insufficient for the long run.

It's estimated that the ruins will remain highly radiactive for 20,000 years, meaning that a scarcophagus-like containment is needed at least for that long. If human technology remains as is (ok I am really hoping for tech advancements in this area), we will need to build 200 of such structures if the design specifications work as planned.

The area is only "safe" because we keep the site contained. Without renewal of the containment structure, the radiation will spread.

https://www.power-technology.com/features/making-chernobyl-s...

"Meanwhile, Reactor No. 4, now covered by the New Safe Confinement, is estimated to remain highly radioactive for up to 20,000 years. "

We do fuck all about carbon dioxide killing our planet, but are "extremely concerned" about the fact that people will have to spend some money on one building. That's as close to "non-concern" as we can have.

On the scale of the relevant half lives, yes, "only" a century:)

$2B is just the new containment structure. Wikipedia lists the original cleanup as costing $68B (inflation adjusted). This article [1] lists the total economic cost as $700B

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant-dis...

By comparison, BP paid around $65 billion for the Deepwater Horizon cleanup, fines and claims [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bp-deepwaterhorizon-idUSK...

> BP was paid around $65 billion

That's "BP paid", I believe.

These days I'd be more inclined to believe a corporation got paid 65bn to clean up it's own mess than they paid 65bn to do it.

Same. That's why I double-checked.

Yes, just a typo, fixed now!

The Chornobyl disaster is so expensive, that it collapsed the Soviet Union and put a hard burden on economies of Ukraine and Belarus for 20+ years. The full price of cheap nuclear energy is extremely high.

While Chernobyl may have played a role in the Soviet Union's collapse, it wasn't the only factor, and it wasn't the financial cost of the disaster that contributed to the collapse, but the loss of public trust in government.

Good news: we've paid for it, it was the costs associated with learning from these kinds of failures.

I hate that you're right. I wish experience wasn't such an expensive teacher.

I love that quote, it reminds me of a similar one:

>If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

I feel like we are doing that right now. We had our Age of Enlightenment. I feel like we are heading for Dark Ages 2.0.

I worked in the same office as a nuclear safety expert. One day he mentioned all the issues with why Chernobyl melted down. I can't remember the details (pulled the rods partly out then re-inserted?), but I think the summary was that the people on shift were inexperienced and did everything wrong every step of the way. People in general knew how to manage reactors safely, the corners cut by a communist regime made it unsafe. Sadly, I don't have any sources, and I'm open to refutation.

The most critical issue was probably the reactor design's positive void coefficient. The RBMK design was created to use less enriched fuel than other designs, so it had to have performance characteristics that would permit a stable reaction when that fuel was used. To get that "feature", the design had a positive void coefficient.

This meant that it to work in such a way that reactivity would increase if coolant boiled away or other voids (spaces without nuclear moderating materials) formed in the fuel assembly. To keep reactions under control, it was necessary to ensure that there was always some material present to moderate the reaction.

Almost every other reactor design will essentially shut itself off if coolant is lost (negative void coefficient). This is a safety factor in case situations unexpected by the designers occur. In the event something really strange happens, the reactor turns off.

With a positive void coefficient, if something unforeseen by the designers happens, the reactor ramps up to higher output. Combine that with human mistakes in a certain sequence and safety systems that don't operate 100% correctly when the reactor is overheating and running away and you can get an out of control excursion as happened at Chernobyl.

It's one of the most studied disasters in history, but basically the main causes boil down to:

1. Personnel who didn't understand the risks of deviating from written procedure

2. Engineers who didn't anticipate or underestimated certain failure modes and didn't design the reactor and monitoring systems with sufficient redundancy and failsafes

3. Grossly insufficient monitoring systems

4. Denial at every level once it was obvious that something was Seriously Wrong

The failure modes were already known before the disaster. They were kept secret from the rank-and-file reactor operators and supervisors, as the Soviet regime was loathe to admit they were imperfect in any way.

The monitors and failsafes were there. Maybe could have been better, but they would have worked had they not been disregarded and deliberately overriden.

It was completely preventable. RBMK reactors of the same design are still operating safely today.

Also the reactor design was flawed - the control rods that should have stopped the reactor actually increased the reactivity while moving down into the reactor. Energy spikes were observed in different plants when shutting down the reactors, but they were classified to not show the reactor design (and by proxy the soviet union) in a bad light, so the operators had no idea of this critical fault.

We’ll, one of the corners cut was in the design of the control rods, and the Soviet government hid that from the operators. Did they screw up? Sure, but they did so believing — having been told — there was a fail safe that simply did not work as advertised.

Your understanding is mostly correct.

The issue with the fuel rods is that they were double purpose - the lower portion actually increased the reaction rate, while the upper portion decreased it. Because the team had manually fully retracted the rods, both portions were outside the reactor vessel. When it scrammed, the first portion to enter the vessel was the lower portion, which counterproductively increased the reaction rate further. This was one of several poor design choices in RBMK reactors.

You are correct that the people on shift did everything wrong at every step along the way - alongside management, who pushed forward the safety test that caused the accident on a skeleton night shift who hadn't explicitly prepared for it. The test deliberately had the reactor operating in an unusual, low-power state because it was supposed to test whether you could use momentum still in the turbines to bridge a gap until emergency diesel could be brought on line in the event of a power failure affecting the pumps that circulated coolant water to the reactor. However, the shift let the power in the reactor get too low, starving the reaction, and then took increasingly dramatic steps to attempt to bring the power back to specified (low but not that low) levels. These steps included disabling automated control of fuel rods, decreasing the rate of coolant flow, the removal of 18 of the 28 'fail-safe' control rods which were never to be removed, and disabling most of the automated scram mechanisms. Obviously, these steps were not normal procedure and constituted serious flaws in judgement.

Normal procedure would be to shut down completely when power levels drop that low, and then a waiting period and a several-hour-long startup procedure. The extremely low power state allowed a phenomenon called xenon poisoning to build up, which made restoring normal operation difficult - hence the normal procedure to shut down completley and allow the xenon to naturally decay. The attempt at restoring power despite this condition led to very unstable neutron flux, and with it unstable core temperatures, triggering alarms from several systems that were continually ignored.

Finally, the flaw in the design of a positive void coefficient (meaning that as heat goes up, water turns to steam, and the presence of the steam causes the reaction to become more efficient and produce more heat, in a runaway) actually struck, as the unstable neutron flux presumably spiked and the coolant flow was already further decreased (they had started the actual test, so the coolant pumps were being powered only by leftover momentum in the turbines). In combination, large steam voids formed, and then thermal runaway, and then a scram that actually first increased reaction rates further. (And then fuel rods fractured and many control rods got stuck at only 1/3 insertion, with the increasing portion still within the reactor). The void coefficient is why the test was supposed to take place around 700 MW, not the ~200 the operators had managed to restore; above around 700 MW the void coefficient in RBMK reactors is negative and such a runaway would not occur.

It's the nature of the beast, not the regime. If you read the NRC or other detailed reports on Three Mile Island, it was a non-stop litany of design flaws and making the wrong decision at every step.

I guess the price for communism, corruption, mismanagement, censorship it way higher than nuclear energy.

But, hey what do I know, experienced Chernobyl when it happened.

I remember all the vegetables etc. thrown away / not eaten in Germany back then - especially mushrooms (not vegetables, not animals I know) if I remember correctly.

Sheep farmers in Wales were still being affected by this in 2012, with testing performed on lambs and restrictions on which could be sold and which land they could be raised on due to radioactivity in the soil and hence grass.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698

Just to put this in perspective, the affected part of wales in something like 1,500 miles from Chernobyl. I would guess some freak of the weather conditions caused Wales to be badly affected.

It was the prevailing winds at the time. The sheep in the Yorkshire Dales were also culled for a while, as I recall.

Yes, they were just unlucky that's where some of the rainclouds broke.

As a result of the Chernobyl accident, Mushrooms and wildlife feeding on them are still showing elevated levels of radioactive Caesium-137 in the Bavarian Forest and other parts of Bavaria. These levels are still monitored closely, even though they aren't considered dangerous anymore. Still, they are beyond the levels required by food safety standards.

All I got to say is the Japanese are really lucky the wind wasn't blowing onshore during the meltdown.

It wasn't that: The Fukushima reactors didn't contain graphite moderators that started to burn. In Chernobyl, this graphite fire carried fuel and fission products high into the atmosphere.

I remember having to drink powdered milk instead of regular milk for months afterwards. I thought it was very unpleasant.

Apparently there was fallout on the grass that cows would eat, resulting in radioactive milk?

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