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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

BTW, there is an even more (much more) polluted left-over of the Soviet Union, Ozersk/Ozyorsk/City40: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast

It's the place where nearly all the fissile material for nuclear weapons was produced. The nearby Lake Karachay received so much nuclear waste that it evaporated entirely from the heat. Just this one small lake received as much radiation contamination as was released in all of Chernobyl.

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>it evaporated entirely from the heat

Hmm, that is not what your source (Wikipedia) says happened:

>"After a drought caused water levels to drop, revealing contaminated silt, which was then wind blown, further polluting surrounding areas, it was decided to completely fill in the lake."

That is a leftover after Kyshtym disaster (Кыштымская авария), which is relatively well documented even though it is not well known in the west.

City-40 is the name of the movie about the city, city was named Chelyabinsk-40 (Челябинск-40) at the time of the incident.

>so much nuclear waste that it evaporated entirely from the heat.

That's just bs.

They put so much effort into containing Chernobyl. Why was it not needed (I hope it wasn't) for this incident? Airborne vs liquid maybe?

They only admitted that Chernobyl happened when elevated levels of radioactivity were detected by other countries and you could not hide it anymore.

That was not the case of this lake and the related Mayak plant disaster -- world learned about it only when the Soviet authorities said that they have previous cleanup exp during the Chernobyl disaster.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouiFZrrVKIQ

I mean, yes - but authorities realized very quickly how bad Chernobyl is, and started cleanup operations immediately. International knowledge of the incident had nothing to do with the starting the procedures. It's quite clear from Legasov's tapes that at least in the early days, Soviet Union and its leadership was genuienly interested in containment and cleanup.

So yes, I'm also interested in the same question as op - why has Chelabynsk-40 not caused the same reaction? Was it because it was a military installation?

That is propably the worst factual error in the otherwise brilliant series about Chernobyl. The series made it look like the Soviets woupdn't uave done anything without international preasure. Truth is, Prypyat was evacuated before anyone in the West was aware what happened.

> The series made it look like the Soviets woupdn't uave done anything without international preasure

How else you show what Russkies - bad?

As I said, it is the one of the very few things the series kind of got wrong. It was unneeded, sure, but overall it showed everyone who helped the clean up in a "good" way. E.g. by having them speak without an accent to show they are Russian. Or by showing the efgort of the Liquidators on the ground. I can live with some dramatization, it is after all entertainment.

TIL, Wikipedia confirms this.

If you are interested, you can read the IAEA (?) incident report and the translation of the latest, not hiding anything, report from Soviet authorities. Both are available online, and both should be mandatory reading in any engineering studies. For both, how to investigate incidents and what to learn from incidents / how incidents can happen.

Because the final Soviet report (the series over dramatized in the last episode) is really good. For added fun, read the official incident reports on the 737 Max and compare both. Because the parallels are staggering.

I guess the need was different in the .. khm .. political sense.

One could argue that nature does not care either way and the Chornobyl exclusion zone has shown a lot of natural diversity/activity. No dead wasteland at all.

I wonder whether the true wastelands are more specific poisoning than radiation related.

I wouldn’t say nature doesn’t care, it’s more complex than that. Insects and arachnids in particular seem very sensitive to it as opposed to mammals.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19324644/

Reduced abundance of insects and spiders linked to radiation at Chernobyl 20 years after the accident

And genetic mutations in plants and animals increased by a factor of 20.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

Nature as a whole may change, habitats change. That is not caring tho, no?

Also, mutation (as in variation) is one of the pillars of evolution.

That said, I would rather we don't mess with nature without a very good reason and lots of care.

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