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Comment by cuteboy19 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

> 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.

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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