Chernobyl

by Bryan

As the BBC reports, it is the 25^th anniversary of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the world: the failure of the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility [Чернобыльская АЭС им. В.И.Ленина] near Pripyat, Ukraine. The West found out about the problem from alarms at Swedish nuclear facilities due to the fall out from Chernobyl. The Soviet authorities did not admit the problem for three days.

The BBC put up one of their excellent In Depth sites for the 20^th anniversary that features great slide show that helps you to understand what happened, if not why.

The concrete cap over the destroyed reactor is cracking and must be replaced, but the site is still radioactive and can’t be worked on directly without killing people. There is still a 10-mile exclusion zone around the plant itself.

This is the future for Fukushima Daiichi.

4 comments

1 Suzan { 04.26.11 at 3:09 pm }

Thanks for the info.

I’ve been trying to ferret out the facts from the Fukushima explosions/meltdowns to give us better insight than they had after Chernobyl.

Same lack of info from the companies involved now as there was earlier from the USSR.

Think people will ever wake up to the desperate need for truly independent reporting?

2 Bryan { 04.26.11 at 4:42 pm }

In the end I think the Japanese government is going to be forced to take over TEPCO and run the operation, because they keep getting blindsided by TEPCO’s lack of accurate information.

Sampling by university researchers and NGOs have shown that TEPCO is hiding, or just doesn’t know what is going on at the reactor site.

3 Steve Bates { 04.27.11 at 2:14 am }

A good friend of mine was in Italy on holiday from his musical studies when the Chernobyl incident happened. I remember his reciting to me… understand, he was back in America by then… the list of foods they were advised not to eat until anything that might have come from the region of fallout had been eliminated. All I can say is that it’s a good thing he wasn’t a lacto-vegetarian; dairy products were prominent on the list.

4 Bryan { 04.27.11 at 2:21 pm }

Milk is a concentrator of fallout. It fall on the grass; the cows eat the grass; it enters the milk.

If you can identify strontium-90, the uranium will be found sooner or later.

There are safe ways of doing nuclear energy, but they raise the cost significantly and business doesn’t want to do it right. They make the profits, we get the risk.