Riding through the remains of the worst nuclear accident on earth...

Sorry. Snopes that one. The woman who wrote it was never there

 

Don't take this as my endorsement of nuclear power, but it is good to remember that the Chernobyl reactor design was, as I recall, carbon block and was known even at the time they built it to be very poor and unsafe. I've seen a documentary on the plant, its melt-down and the current state a year or so ago. The robots they sent in to check out the place were fried. The nuclear slag that ran out of the bottom of the containment vessel spread to the point the concentration allowed them to cool enough to solidify. And there they sit today, still extremely radioactive (as they will be for hundreds of years).

I can't wait to read this journey at home tonight - thanks for posting it!

 

DARN! I was looking forward to a good read. Too bad, because I've seen a lot about this area. Really spooky.

 

Good read. Just not true

 

The closest we ever had to such remarkably unsafe designs was the reactors at Hanford. They were designed for quick plutonium production, to increase the thermonuclear warhead stockpile, at *all* costs.

For example, the cooling system on those Hanford reactors was Open Loop. Cooling water from the Columbia River was piped into the reactors, circulated among the tubes to become intensely radiioactive, then sent to "retention ponds" to supposedly "cool off" for an hour or so

Even that laughibly stupid premise was wiped out when production increased, so the radioactive cooling water barely spent 10 minutes in the retention ponds. The design of those single-pass light water reactors was so flaky, it's only luck we didn't have serveral Chernobyl accidents at the Hanford site

Breeding in the Reactors at Hanford

There is a lot of speculation that the KGB spy network was very advanced. The Mayak plant near Chelyabinsk, the Ural mountains, is a virtual carbon copy of the Hanford design. I think it's interesting that Greenpeace has an article on this, as they have usually been very quiet about Mother Russia

Mayak Story []

Although we have a lot of work to do regarding waste treatment (Preferred) and disposal (Not so good an idea), our Western reactor designs have always been much safer

Consider that France derives the vast majority of its electricity from nuclear power

 

It's a good read but it should be clearly labeled as fiction. I was up in the resturant at the WTC 9 months before they came down but I'm not going to write a book about watching the event.

 

There was a great article in National Geographic a few (several) years back about the aftermath in Chernobyl. It was just a really great window into a particular area and time. It was sad how many elderly people just did not want to leave their homes because they had lived there their whole lives.

It was also fascinating to see that hideous soviet architecture of the 50s and 60s crumbling in ruin.

 

It's interesting to see how well plant and animal life is doing in that area. With people gone, everything else is flourishing.

Tom

 

I hear the five legged three eyed deer are flourishing.

 

Apparently a lot of the more hideous mutations were self-aborting. No doubt with time, one can expect some sort of genetic drift. But since the Soviets were dumping high level radioactive waste from Mayak into the River Techa from the 1949-1956 timeframe, one would have expected that problem to show up by now

The Chelyabinsk region is considered - by far - the most radioactive place on earth.

Russia's toxic shocker - Bomb factories created the most radioactive place on Earth - 06 December 1997 - New Scientist

Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet

The fact it's routinely inhabited is even more amazing. Yes, there are terrible cancer clusters, especially among children, due to the 35 year plutonium person load of almost 6 Becquerels

Much like the Hanford discharges into the Columbia River, the discharges from Mayak were a State Secret. Additionally, medical issues related to radiation exposure were also considered a State Secret