Riding through the Chernobyl "dead zone"

[bigD]

Sorry for the non-aviation topic, but this web site was really interesting to me, and I thought perhaps some of you would feel the same way.

Motorcycle Riding through the Chernobyl Dead Zone

 

[skyking1976]

Awesome site BigD. That would be one neat bike trip.


SK

 

[piav8r]

my God...

 

[Timebuilder]

Man.

27 pages of desolation.

Makes me glad that none of the US reactors use this kind of design.

 

[rvsm410]

Wow, How sobering!

This was a power plant accident, I cant imagine and would not want to see what nuclear war would be like..........


Amazing piece of work on this gals part, it should be published for all to see. I still question her sanity for being there in the first place, but I guess she is being as safe as possible....

On a lighter side:
Good horror move script here somewhere.....mutated killer hogs in buildings.....exploration team trying to get to some left behind fortune...etc.....

 

[EagleRJ]

Pretty chilling...

There's a video I've seen that was shot from one of the military helicopters as they dumped boron on the fire. As they hover overhead, the camera pans down and you can briefly see the white glow of the burning reactor core- open to the air. All of the pilots and fire fighters were dead within several days.

 

[dmspilot00]

What's scary is they were still USING another reactor in the same plant up until four years ago.

Personally I think the idea for anyone to use nuclear fission as a power source was a huge mistake.

 

[dispatchguy]

Wicked.

 

[huncowboy]

I still remember when the radio and TV advised to wash fruits all year long... of course they did not forget to mention that it was only a precautionary measure and there was no need to worry. We were 1150 km to the west, and we did not even get any major clouds immediately after the meltdown, yet still a significant increase in miscarriages and birth defects were reported in the following years.

Funny that right now I am waiting for this awesome PC game to be released, which deals with a futuristic version of the aftermath of Tschernobyl.

If anyone is into 3D PC gaming, you need to check it out:

http://www.stalker-game.com/

 

[ShawnC]

What I find most intresting is the time standing still part of the article. It's like walking back twenty years to see what the real Soviet Russia was like, to see that it wasn't much better than a US slum.

 

[Sean]

Great post...

cool place to ride, maybe once

 

[Hawker rider]

read THIS LINK about the Chernobyl disaster....very interesting stuff

 

[Vladimir Lenin]

trial and error, too much error this time though

 

[skeezer]

read THIS LINK about the Chernobyl disaster....very interesting stuff

While the site you link to is very interesting it is severely biased to make it seem like Chernobyl was not that big of a deal when in fact it was. A large number of people were either killed or sickened by the disaster. Those who worked on the cement sarcophagus for the reactor essentially gave their lives so that more people would not be harmed by the radiation. It was a prime example of the damage that can be done if proper precautions are not taken with nuclear plants. The real truth lies in the middle between that book and those that have overly exaggerated death tolls.

As the child of a nuclear engineer, I have grown up with an understanding of nuclear energy's pluses and minuses. I feel that it is a shame that accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (more of an incident) have been used to thwart the creation of nuclear plants in the US (none have been built in a long time) because nuclear power is on the whole cleaner than burning coal as long as the proper precautions are taken. A lot of my home state's (CA) power problems could be solved with a few plants, but too many people can't get past the stigma of the word nuclear, due in no small part to the exaggerations of the press over Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

Skeezer

 

[AxisVDP]

Isn't it ironic that her license plate is "K I A?" Maybe it will only be coincidental if she inhales some of the poisonous dust...

 

[Typhoon1244]

Makes me glad that none of the US reactors use this kind of design.

Actually, we have operated reactors of this type, though not widely. In fact, U.S.S. Seawolf, our second nuclear submarine after Nautilus, was initially equipped with a Chernobyl-style reactor. It was found to be very inefficient, though, and replaced.

Read the book (not the movie) K-19: the Widowmaker, by Capt. Peter Huchthausen, USN, retired. In it, Captain Zatayev of K-19 expresses his outrage that the accident that nearly destroyed his boat and killed his crew was repeated almost exactly at Chernobyl. The Russians were not known for learning from mistakes.

 

[rettofly]

What's scary is they were still USING another reactor in the same plant up until four years ago.

Personally I think the idea for anyone to use nuclear fission as a power source was a huge mistake.

The Chernobyl plant, like most Soviet industry at the time, was developed without much regard for safety. This does not mean that the idea of using nuclear fission is a mistake.

France and Japan are the most prolific users of nuclear energy for power generation. The U. S. has many nuclear plants. There has not been a fatality connected with nuclear power generation anywhere except Chernobyl.

But for environmental concerns, mostly unfounded, we would be much less dependent on sometimes hostile sources for our own energy needs.

 

[shooter13]

My first post I think

I'm normally a lurker but this is a topic I have experience with...I'm not yet a pilot so I stick to the things I know.

A few errors with what has been said.

Seawolf's plant may have been designed in a similar fashion but it was also built with the idea of containment. The containment for the Chernobyl plant was nothing more than a tin roof. The same accident in a US plant wouldn't have been as catastrophic. We have several safeguards built into the design to prevent fission product release to the environment. The design goal is to keep all fission products inside the pressure hull of the containment building.

The statement about Chernobyl being the only power generation plant to have death associated is also a bit misleading. In the 50s, the US Army experimented with small power generating reactors. One of them, SL1 through operator error and a crappy design had an overpower accident that killed all three operators at the station. One was impaled on the ceiling by a control rod. Pretty gross if you ask me.

Nuclear Power is a good source of power. It requires tight controls over the design, construction, operation and maintenance of the plant. The soviets weren't very big on most of those aspects.

 

[goaliemn]

I visited the Chernobyl area in 1989. It was amazing. I was there as an exchange student in high school. The train stopped at one station near there for fuel. We were told not to get out of the train, but, of course, we did. There were speakers playing music to try to keep the spirits up of the people working there and on the ground, there were circles with numbers in them. The numbers were the RADs of radiation measured at that spot.

The film in my camera for that segment of the trip was severely streaked. I kept the rest in an x-ray safe bag and they had light streaking.

It is something I will never forget.
Its something that also requires me to get checkups every couple of years to verify everything is still OK from the extreme exposure.

 

[dmspilot00]

But for environmental concerns, mostly unfounded, we would be much less dependent on sometimes hostile sources for our own energy needs.

I wasn't basing my criticism of the nuclear power industry on Chernobyl alone, but a lot of research and effort.

First from an economic standpoint, when all factors are taken into consideration, nuclear power plants are a financial nightmare. Factor in fuel mining, government subsidies, and waste disposal, and you'll see the financial costs far outweigh the benefits. Along the same lines, I believe I read somewhere nuclear power plants don't have to have any insurance at all, because if they did it would be cost prohibitive.

I don't deny nuclear power stations themselves are relatively safe. The chances of an accident happening are small but the consequences unfathomable. Although TMI didn't result in severe injuries, I wouldn't call a partial core meltdown (partial as in half, according to the NRC) an "incident."

What concerns me and most informed people are the by-products. Nuclear waste is one of the most dangerous substances known to mankind. I believe the half-life alone is estimated to be between 100,000 and 1,000,000 years. It takes 10 to 20 half-lives before such a substance would no longer pose a threat, meaning one to twenty million years. To continue to produce this waste with no solution in sight for disposing it is absurd.

Just because nuclear waste can be bottled up and stored doesn't mean it's clean. Can you imagine how much it will cost to safety store it, continuously monitor it, repair or replace containers, etc. over the next million years? Now you know why it's not only environmentally unsound but economically unsound.