20 years....

....ago this week at 1:23 am on April 26, Unit Number Four of the Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station located at Pripyat, Ukraine exploded. The world knows it by the name taken from a small town located eight miles distant: Chernobyl. The result was this little town, which has stood on a bluff overlooking the Pripyat River for a thousand years and Pripyat itself, at the time the newest and most modern city in the USSR, will remain uninhabitable for generations to come.

Pripyat today remains a nuclear ghost town slowly being reclaimed by nature. A city where 50,000 people with an average age of 28 (16,000 of whom were children under 16) left in three hours time, never to return. They left behind everything they owned including 10,000 beloved domestic pets whom, soon crazed with hunger, began feasting on each other. Soldiers were sent in to shoot them all. Walking Pripyat's abandoned streets, shops, schools, hospitals, and homes today can be a very moving experience. In all 135,000 people were uprooted, many from ancestral villages which were then buried whole. Today all that remains are giant mounds of earth bearing hand scrawled signs with the village name and a radiological warning. In spite of the profound natural beauty and abundant widlife that exists in the area today there is an immense sense of sorrow when visiting these places.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time working in and around the Exclusion Zone I'd like to ask everyone take a moment to remember what happened 20 years ago this week, an event that much of the world has forgotten because it occured in an obscure part of the former Soviet Union few ever visit. My request is based upon the deep affection I've acquired over the years for those who continue to work in the zone and the Ukrainian and Belarusan people in general, tens of thousands of whom continue to suffer. Theirs is a kind and gentle culture that I've found impossible not to respect and admire. They certainly didn't deserve what befell them.

Indeed those not affected are quick to "forget" when the lessons are still being learned and should never be forgotten!

Thanks for posting this!

As a Radiographer, I appreciate you bringing this to everybodies attention.

Yes, good point. I also saw a show on the brave souls that were working to build the concrete dome, knowing they would have a horrible fate.

Thank you Thermalarc for that very good post. I remember well the news coverage of the time but none of it expressed the loss as well as you just did. In addition I haven't seen or heard a thing about it in many, many years.

Living close to three reactors, this event gave me great pause and it still does. I live where I won't suffer floods, mudslides, hurricanes, earthquakes, or wildfires, only tornadoes or a man made disaster threaten the area.

It must be one of life's saddest tragedies: losing loved ones and your ancestral home.

Here is a great website on this topic.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

Scientists have noted that wildlife in the Chernobyl fallout area appear to be thriving and have mutated to tolerate the radiation and thrive. Perhaps radioactive fallout is not as damaging to nature as having people around.

Nitroz said:

Here is a great website on this topic.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

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Fwiw Elena and her motorcylce ride through the zone was long ago exposed as a fraud. In fact I had a hand in doing it. She took a normal 4 hour public tour and faked the rest. At the time it was simply not possible to ride a bike in the zone and to obtain access other than the tour is no easy task. It took me almost two years to get it. That said, Elena did bring bring focus to the accident and for that she's to be commended. It's a pity she had to deceive the world in order to do so however.

Thermalarc said:

Fwiw Elena and her motorcylce ride through the zone was long ago exposed as a fraud. In fact I had a hand in doing it. She took a normal 4 hour public tour and faked the rest. At the time it was simply not possible to ride a bike in the zone and to obtain access other than the tour is no easy task. It took me almost two years to get it. That said, Elena did bring bring focus to the accident and for that she's to be commended. It's a pity she had to deceive the world in order to do so however.

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I'd heard about that, long after I'd practically fallen in love with her, in a distant, cyber way. As you say though she raised attention to it because ever since I read her account I've become very interested in the subject and tell alot of people about it- in fact this interest caused me to revive this thread when I saw it.
I posted in a few forums after the Japan incident on the almost criminal way the international nuclear watchdogs who are financed by the nuclear industry, have covered up the true human and economic costs of Chernobyl. It is said Chernobyl is an anomaly, can't happen again and was the unique product of Soviet incompetance.
Yet it wasn't supposed to happen, just like Fukushima and Three Mile Island, and the next one whatever its cause. They will say statistically it is safe.... yet they colluded with the WHO in a study on Chernobyl to wildly distort the statistics.

It may be dwarfed in time by the DU problem in Iraq and the coalition veterans who served there. That is unless they can cover it up too. Gulf war syndrome=lungs full of aerosolized uranium dust? Hmmm...

Great thread revival, thanks for bringing it back.

and the protective dome keeps getting older.. last i heard they were still planning to rebuild it. i think the original sarcopfagus was supposed to be replaced 5 years ago already.. and the "new" plan is to have new dome on top of the plant in couple years from now.. we will see if it gets done in time (personally i doubt it).

i worry the old russian made nukeplants near us. i worry of them much more than the "local" plant few dozen miles away.

Well, I feel like a dolt. I read Elena's whole motorcycle story for two hours, savoring her amazing prose and the many metaphors and all the photographs, emailed it to a dozen different people, and only after that scrolled further down this thread to see it was a work of fiction.

That being said, I really did enjoy reading it, and encouraged at least one other person to read it anyway (after the quick apology, ten minutes after the original email, explaining it is all fake).

What I would like to know is whether the science Elena incorporates into her tale is true.

Her science is mostly true, but it's grossly exagerated.

Also, is it me, or are Nuclear Reactors built with the worst thermal management designs imagineable?

Well, I can't speak for everyone else on the forum, but I recently had to replace the AC unit in the one in my backyard, because the darn thing kept popping fuses!

There was an episode of the television show "Destination Truth" that took place in Chernobyl. Needless to say security was quite tight when trying to reach the city. I have to say it was quite scary and creepy when they started their investigation, seeing all the empty cribs in the hospital, notebooks lying open with the pens still laying there, shoes laying near doorways where someone had taken them off, etc.

LEDAdd1ct said:

Well, I feel like a dolt. I read Elena's whole motorcycle story for two hours, savoring her amazing prose and the many metaphors and all the photographs, emailed it to a dozen different people, and only after that scrolled further down this thread to see it was a work of fiction.

That being said, I really did enjoy reading it, and encouraged at least one other person to read it anyway (after the quick apology, ten minutes after the original email, explaining it is all fake).

What I would like to know is whether the science Elena incorporates into her tale is true.

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If you like Elena's writing as I did, check out her piece on Kiev:

http://www.theserpentswall.com/

As there's more content it's actually more enjoyable than the Chernobyl story. Elena and her friends go into the bunkers that are the walls surrounding the city of Kiev, her dry wit really shines here.

You know about this "Elenas is a fraud" thing, from the point of view of those who exposed her yeah sure they felt she was "taking people for a ride" (pun intended). However since it probably was well intentioned there's no need to feel too much joy about bringing her down.

In the United States we don't know a lot about the people and places of the former Soviet Union. I served in the Navy on a carrier from 79-83, which along with the late 50's-early 60's, was considered a peak in the tensions of the cold war as Reagan was trying to provoke them into a mistake like what happened to KAL007. We clearly trained with the attitude they were a mortal enemy, indeed much of my squadron's activity was intercepting nuclear armed Soviet Bear bombers on long range incursions into the pacific to probe our defenses. Much of the media at the time portrayed them as the Red Menace, and while the political system was surely every bit as bad as they said, I have found the Russian people I have encountered since to be gracious and friendly. People like Elena who are good storytellers are hard to come by, I'm glad she wrote that.