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There are a number of memorials, slide shows, and videos floating around the web to mark the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl. The link below is to a piece that Slate put together. Some of the images are a little disturbing, but I thought it was well done.
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It wouldn't load for me this morning, but it worked just now. I agree, that's an incredible piece.
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It's very powerful. I'd like more information about the children. They are so young! Are people still being exposed so long after the event? I thought they made all the contaminated land into a huge nuclear national park, where nobody lives except for some few people who refuse to leave.
I've been studying the accident in great detail recently. I want to link to a wonderful book written by a Soviet nuclear engineer who had worked on the construction of unit 1 for several years before the accident, and was sent back to the site in the days after the accident to interview everyone and learn what happened. He wrote a very honest and complete account, and it was translated into English and published here. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the accident.
It seems the author of that piece feels that anything radioactive is something humans should eschew forever. I can see why some people might feel that way, looking at these pictures. I still feel differently, and have chosen a different path, (as an engineer doing design work on nuclear plants), though the horror of Chernobyl is something nobody in the nuclear industry ever minimizes or forgets. Chernobyl changed the way our industry worked, completely.
Reading the book and studying other sources of information about the accident, my assessment of the essential mistake (there were many many mistakes), the root cause underlying the accident is what I call "idiot bosses syndrome". Idiot bosses syndrome is a condition companies can get into in any field, when the high levels of management don't understand the technical details of the business. Because they don't understand, they make stupid mistakes that their workers know are wrong. I have seen it in various companies across many different industries in my career (before getting into the nuclear industry). It's a bad problem, but usually only causes companies to go bankrupt and people to lose their jobs and investments. Usually it doesn't make large swaths of land uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Among many other changes to the nuclear industry worldwide, it heartens me greatly to know that the upper levels of management of nuclear operating companies are now all staffed with licensed nuclear operators, who take a 4 or 5 year course of intensive study, and learn every last detail about their plants, including having a great deal of shift experience in the control room. They're called SROs, and if you aren't one, you aren't eligible for upper level management either in the plants or in the corporations that operate them.
Chernobyl was a nightmare. It is arguably one of the main reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, as it told most eloquently how soviet-style bureaucracy is an ineffective way to run a country, or a company, whether in Ukraine or the USA. I hope that the lessons of Chernobyl resound throughout not just the nuclear industry but throughout every human enterprise that is undertaken from now on for as long as the site is hot, for some 10,000 years.
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"A little disturbing" is kind of an understatement... but it's important for people to see these pictures, because it was caused by something manmade and its a problem we still haven't solved, at Chernobyl and everywhere else. I started crying half way through the movie thing, but maybe thats just me. I'm a little confused about the children's situation...I assumed they were children of people who had been exposed to the radiation, and some also had been exposed to the radiation themselves. It was clear that some of them were born with their bodies horribly deformed, but it said some others had acquired it....I guess? It said the little girl had "gone out to play in the black rain"... that was alittle confusing.
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Yes, I know that fewer than 70 deaths are attributed directly to the accident, with most being people who died of radiation exposure they received in the first day of the accident. The firemen on the roof who battled the fires, and the operators in the control room received massive doses. Some of the deaths were children who died later of thyroid cancer as radioactive Iodine was taken up by the thyroid. I haven't read about this orphanage or hospital or whatever it is that the feature is about. That's why I'd like to know more about it, and how old the children are, when those pictures were taken, and if people are still living in areas where they are vulnerable to radiation exposure from the accident. That would be a crime.
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My favorite part is: The average radiation doses for the general population of the contaminated areas over 1986-2005 is estimated to be between 10 and 20 mSv, and the vast majority receive under 1 mSv/yr. These are lower than many natural levels.
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Eisenoxyde, this report is pretty much exactly what I have heard, from studies conducted by the U.S. Nuclear industry. However, there's definitely positive spin here.
Is a Chernobyl-type accident virtually impossible? Yes, because there are no more unmodified RMBK reactors in operation with that positive temperature reactivity coefficient and those voids at the tips of the control rods, which briefly increase core reactivity at the onset of a scram. But is an accident as bad as Chernobyl possible? I have to say that of course it is, though we have levels and levels of safety that weren't there before, and much better designs than the RMBK. We have containment structures, for one thing, that are meant to keep any radioactive isotopes inside during an accident. But can a containment building hold any conceivable explosion of the core? It cannot. There's a small but finite possibility of a core explosion exploding the containment structure as well.
They also said there was no release of radioactivity during the Three Mile Island accident. That's not quite true. There was a small release, far more than acceptable, just not anything like the levels at Chernobyl.
The story this article doesn't tell are the near misses. Three Mile Island ended up with no loss of life and only moderate disruption of the people's lives in the area. Though if you ask one of the pregnant women who had to evacuate their homes how bad it was, they might feel there was nothing moderate about it. But what we in the nuclear industry remember constantly is that the hydrogen bubble that formed in the core could have exploded. We're very lucky it did not. If it had, would the containment building have held it? It's possible but doubtful.
They say there have been no deaths from commercial nuclear power plants except Chernobyl. That's again not the whole story. There have been deaths from experimental and military reactors. Why should we pretend that's totally irrelevant? Sure, there are many more deaths every year from constructing buildings, and we don't shut down the construction industry. We should not shut down the nuclear industry either, but neither should we pretend there are no nuclear deaths.
I don't think it's right to give the general public a polished up and well-spun version of nuclear safety. We must remember every accident very well, and remember that we too are vulnerable to the problems that cause accidents, such as complacency, lack of a safety culture, lack of willingness to lose production, and so on. We have to keep that thought in our consciousness, so that we don't ever let it happen again.
All technology has burps and growing pains. It takes experience to learn how to do anything well. Nuclear technology is no exception. I feel much safer knowing that the truth is not being polished or glossed over in any way, either inside the industry or to the general public. The reason we won't have another core explosion accident is because we all keep very close to our hearts the knowledge that if we don't do our jobs right, it's still a possiblity.
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