And you thought you had a dangerous hobby. . .

[Magill]

It's all about a woman in Ukraine who motorcycles through "the dead zone" around Chernobyl. You have to have a special permit to get there, but her dad is a nuclear scientist and she got hers through him. The photos are really spooky--it's what I imagine cities and villiages would look like 15 years after The Stand or a similar phenomenon.

www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

[PoolMan]

Wow... thanks for sharing that, Magill. That's unbelieveable. I studied Chernobyl as part of my automation and instrumentation training in college (it's widely argued that the Chernobyl incident was caused by a VERY simple, but extremely poor choice in the plant's control systems, so it makes an effective demonstration to people in the field). Adds a lot of emotion and depth to what I already knew about it.

Amazing.

[dajaymann]

I believe Justin mentioned this website earlier in another thread. I've read through it already, and it's real nifty, plus her "limited" mastery of english is pretty awesome. This website led me to research Chernobyl one very boring day at work last week.

[Magill]

dajaymann said:

I believe Justin mentioned this website earlier in another thread.

D'oh! Can admins combine threads?

PoolMan--weren't most of the problems with Chernobyl due to the fact that they turned off the control systems? Or is that the lesson--don't make your critical monitoring systems able to be bypassed?

[PoolMan]

It's been eight years since I looked at this, so my recollection is pretty shoddy. I remember the moral, so to speak, better than the lesson.

Basically, they had applied a certain technique inverted in a relatively minor system. Something was supposed to open when pressure rose, and instead it closed. Something like that (sorry for being vague, but I can try to look into the exact control scheme, if you're interested). Basically though, a rather small problem cascaded from system to system until the whole thing was out of control.

Damn. Now I wish I remembered better. I'm going to see about digging that back up.

[Head Mutant]

The interesting thing I'm wondering is exactly how many people died resulting from the explosion, fallout and other radioactive spider bites. She listed some incredibly high number, in the 300-800k's, I think. When I researched it around the web, many places don't even get up past 100. That's people, not thousands.

[PoolMan]

Well, that's the thing. There's no official count. And keeping in mind the powers that were at that point in history, there's sure to have been some coverup going on.

[DocD83]

I recall seeing on the History Channel that the most fundamental reason for the disaster was that they were going to do an experiment, but ran out of time and left it for the second shift to do, and since the second shift didn't understand the experiment they couldn't handle the minor technical problem that came up.

It was a screwed up operation all around.

[Lissa]

I seem to remember hearing the rumor (which could be utterly false) that the experiment basically amounted to "how little cooling water do you need to run a nuclear reactor?"

No research has been done in writing this post.

[DocD83]

That's what happened at Three Mile Island too, I think. They cut off the coolant altogether for several hours.

You think they'd have learned since Chernobyl...or whichever. I don't know which one was first. The only research that went into this post is the knowledge that I need three hundred posts in two months.

[duckie]

DocD83 said:

That's what happened at Three Mile Island too, I think. They cut off the coolant altogether for several hours.

You think they'd have learned since Chernobyl...or whichever. I don't know which one was first. The only research that went into this post is the knowledge that I need three hundred posts in two months.

TMI was first ('79 vs '86). The nuclear powerplant in our backyard was going up when TMI melted down, and that caused a major backlash in our area.

Wow... 25 years since TMI... more importantly, almost 25 years since the nuclear powerplant went on-line in our backyard. Don't they design them for 20 years?

We've got our KI pills, will be fine

[Lissa]

Incidentally, he's not joking.

[duckie]

I think they've since replaced the fuel rods in the reactor down the road, but I'm not quite sure...

[DocD83]

I hear that whie the fuel and peripheral equipment may last 20 years, the reactor vessels themselves are a lot stronger than that. Those suckers are built to last.

My grandmother tells me she remembers the reactor for the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant being dragged by her house. They took down the telephone poles and covered the road in a foot of gravel or more to protect it.

One time when my brother and I were visiting her house she took us to Peach Bottom to see the visitor's center. It was long since closed, but we didn't know that. We drove through a dilapidated guard house with weeds partially obscuring the sign reading "Deadly Force Authorized," and circled the cooling towers in her Caprice at a distance not much further than arm's length while lab techs wearing scrubs and socks over their shoes stared at us. We eventually wound up on a tour of a hydroelectric plant not too far away.

That is 100% true. I can only assume security there has been upgraded since 9/11 if not before. Makes you feel all cozy, doesn't it?

[Hucklebubba]

Wow. That website give me the jibblies.

I've always had an unhealthy sort of fascination with all things nuclear, which means that if I win any sort of review-choosing contest, I'm picking either The Day After or Threads. Possibly When the Wind Blows if I happen to be feeling particularly weird and difficult.