Chernobyl

[Slick]

Again, no offense intended. I decided to provide the link because I have had much training on what happened at Chernobyl since I operate and test reactors for a living, I decided to squash some urban legends.

The "faulty" design is somewhat misleading. Their reactor design (and some of the designs in the US) are a boiling water reactor design. These are more difficult to control than other designs, but that does not make them faulty. They have been operating safely for many years. What the US considers "faulty" is that many other countries including the former Soviet Union don't believe in the idea of "containment". Containment buildings are built around all US reactors and are designed to keep a reactor design contained in all but the most severe circumstances. They are designed for earthquakes up to a certain magnitude and most were designed to survive an aircraft impact (at the time of design, but there have been bigger aircraft built since). They are also designed to contain any reactor accidents. Indeed, Three Mile Island containment worked perfectly. There was a minor release of some low level radioactive steam via a relief valve, but that was designed to relieve pressure outside of the containment. If Chernobyl had a containment building, there would be no contamination or radiation outside the building. That is what was faulty, but under Soviet economics, deemed too costly.

The "wrong coolant" idea is just an urban legend. Many operating reactors use light water with no problems.

As far as "military involvement", that's also mostly irrelevant. It's true that the military was very involved in many things in the former Soviet Union, but they did not contribute to the problem.

"Switching off failsafes". Let's talk about this one. They were testing a failsafe at the time. They were trying to ensure that, following a loss of power, the turbine generators would be able to provide enough electrical power until the standby generators came on. Making sure that the failsafes work is a very good thing. In order to do this, they had to temporarily disable other safety systems for the test. This is not necessarily a bad thing either. What made this one very, very bad, was that the operators were not trained very well and did not understand the effect on the plant. When the problem happened, there were ample opportunities for the operators to take action to correct the problem. They did not understand what was going on and through action and inaction did not do the right things to prevent an accident. They were poorly trained and asked to operate in a very abnormal condition. What compounded this was a sense of urgency to complete the test so they were rushing. This is the true tragedy - they weren't trained well enough to handle an abnormal situation so it got worse and lead to a reactor accident.

I can tell you that whenever problems (even small ones) occur on any reactor plant anywhere, investigations occur and the problems, causes and corrective action reports are disseminated to the nuclear community so that training on these problems can be done and any changes put in place to prevent similar occurrences. This may involve changing or upgrading plant components, modifying operating procedures or other processes to prevent the problem from happening again.

Fossil fuels won't be around forever. I am also involved with other "alternate energy sources". Hawaii is a unique place where solar, tidal, wind turbine, OTEC and geothermal sources all exist in one place. Fusion is looking more promising every day, but it is probably a generation away from producing power for commercial use. There are some other fancy designs being developed for long term space travel (ironic that we're discussing this on the SE4 forum) and other applications. These are probably a generation away from being practical as well.

Until then, people need to conserve energy and support alternate energy research. They also need to be a little more tolerant of nuclear plants until a better substitute can be used.

Slick.

[Atrocities]

This is all very interesting to say the least. Thank you for posting it Slick.

I remember when Trojan, about 35 miles from here, had its little scare and was then shut down. To be honest with you I was more frightened by Trojan with a 99% chance of never blowing up than by Mt St. Helens which did. And I see Mt. St. Helens from my window and it is 80 miles away.

Have any of you ever seen a volcano blow before? It is awe inspiringly as it is frightening. If you want to see what an area would look like after a nuke went off take the drive around St. Helens and become inlightened.

[Slick]

Yea, we have volcanoes too, but not the kind that blow the whole top of the mountain off . Ours do more of an ooze thing than an explosion thing, although seeing lava being bLasted a few hundred feet in the air at night is a sight to behold.

I'd also like to take this chance to try to eliminate another common misconception about reactors. They cannot blow up in a nuclear explosion like you see in the movies. They have steam plants just like fossil fuel plants and there can be conventional steam explosions, but they cannot explode in a "nuclear" explosion in the way that a nuclear bomb explodes. They simply are completely different devices and whatever you may have seen in the movies is just impossible (K-219, for example). If there were a large enough problem at a plant, there could be some release of radioactive material as has happened a few times in the past, but none of these were, or could have been, your typical Hollywood "mushroom cloud".

Also, not many people know this or choose to acknowledge it, but people working at coal plants generally get more radiation exposure from the coal (which contains Carbon-14) than most nuclear workers. Even though C-14 is only found in trace amounts in natural coal, those huge piles of coal collectively have a lot of "trace" C-14 which is exposing coal plant workers to radiation. Also, since their exposure is not tracked, there is no real record of this. It's kind of ironic to me that this fact is not widely known and people think that nuclear plant workers are the only people who get occupational radiation exposure.

People who fly in airplanes for a living spend a lot of thier time high in the atmosphere where cosmic radiation levels are not as shielded by the atmosphere, but their exposure is not tracked either.

Slick.

[oleg]

Slick is certainly the best expert here. My Farther in law works in the Leningrad Nuclear Plant which has the same design as Chernobyl and has no concerns whatsoever for its safety. The real reason of Chernobyl disaster was the violations of the specifications during the construction (to save money and time)and criminally negligent maintanence (sheer incompetence of the director and the chief safety officer). There is no foolproof defence against that

[Ruatha]

Ahh Slick..
You forgot us who are working in the radiologic and isotope medicine departments..
But we have good records of our exposure, our personal levels are measured all the time and checked off each month, and we are soo far below limits that it would be a real challenge to meet the limits!!

Edit: Hmm, I guess our patients are exposed a bit too...
I think a single chest x-ray is equavilent to an transatlantic flight, IIRC.

[ April 25, 2004, 10:48: Message edited by: Ruatha ]

[Slick]

I didn't forget you folks. I know that the medical folks who deal with radiology keep good exposure records. Both on the x-ray side and the medical isotopes side. I was trying to point out some of the occupations who receive exposure, but don't keep records or even acknowledge that they are getting exposed.

My lifetime occupational radiation exposure (after 15 years as a radiation and contamination qualified worker) is less than the equivalent of 1 chest x-ray. Of course, as an engineer, I don't get as much exposure as some of the other workers.

Slick.

[ April 25, 2004, 11:09: Message edited by: Slick ]

[Loser]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
Thank you for posting the link to this site. Thank you very much. I wonder why no one has done a documentary on what this lady has done. THAT would make a fine evening of television to be sure.

I think one of the problems with doing such a documentary, and that could keep it from being done, is that at some point they would just have to go into the dead zone with her.

Considering her views on bringing people with her maybe this is highly objectionable.

Considering the time that has passed since that site was first put up maybe she doesn't do it anymore and has no interest.

And today, or tomorrow morning at 0123 rather, is the aniversary. Nice timing on Timstone's part, posted with enough time to get a lot of interest, and threadjacking, before the day rolled around.

[PvK]

I expect most modern TV "journalists" proposed with this story would want to do it themselves to get the spotlight points, but then probably be afraid to do it.

PvK

[freduk]

Very nice story indeed!
I also remember the Chernobyl accident, I was only 7 years old when it happened.
We were not allowed to eat vegetables from our garden that year and I also remember my parents we're pretty freaked out about it.
Looking back, the radiactive cloud went for finland and sweden, got bounced of by northern wind thus skipping norway and sweden and spread throughout parts ofgermany and the netherlands instead.

Also: the chernobyl area havent been deserted totally now is it? I heard the russian government just kept the other 3 reactors running because they had no money building new ones. Until a few years ago.
Yes, they are quite crazy.

Ook grappig dat er nog redelijk wat nederlanders op dit forum/ pbw zitten, dat had ik niet verwacht!

[Timstone]

Slick:
Thanks for this excellent answer. I really like this. It only rarely that I get speak with persons who have such an interesting job as you have. Thanks again for the fabulous explanantion.
Two thumbs up for you!