Chernobyl Nuclear Accident 1986 Still Threatens Lives, Land Unsafe For 20K Years

[appalachiablue]

Kieran Cooke, Climate News Network, Truthdig, March 2, 2019. *EXCERPTS:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/chernobyls-legacy-still-threatens-hundreds-thousands-of-lives/

The risk of an accident with civil nuclear power may be small, but when an accident does happen the impact may be immense, as a new book on Chernobyl’s legacy makes clear. The nuclear industry promotes its technology as a key way of battling climate change. A nuclear reactor can supply vast amounts of energy; compared with coal, oil or gas-fired power plants there are few or no emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. But nuclear energy does have considerable drawbacks. A nuclear power plant costs many billions of dollars to build – and is even more expensive to decommission at the end of its working life.

Nuclear power plants have been around for decades, yet the problem of how to deal with vast stockpiles of highly dangerous waste is still there – a poisonous legacy for future generations. And then there is the safety factor. On the morning of April 26, 1986 engineers at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in western Ukraine, close to the border with Belarus, were carrying out a routine turbine and reactor shut-down test “ There was a sudden roar. “That roar was a completely unfamiliar kind, very low in tone, like a human moan.” Then there was a loud blast. Nobody knew what had happened; some thought there’d been an earthquake.

In his recently published research study of Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy says no-one believed a nuclear reactor had fractured. Chernobyl used the latest Soviet technology. A nuclear accident was inconceivable. The nuclear industry today, whether in Russia, China or the West, is similarly confident of its safety. “As far as they (the engineers) were concerned, the reactor and its panoply of safety systems were idiot-proof. No textbook they had ever read suggested that reactors could explode.” Yet explode it did. A build-up of steam destroyed the reactor’s casing; a concrete structure weighing 200 tonnes that mantled the reactor was blown through the roof.

Vast clouds of radiation escaped into the atmosphere, blown by winds first northwest over Belarus and on over much of Scandinavia and to Wales. Later the winds changed and carried the radiation east, over Ukraine itself. The nuclear industry has always been obsessed with secrecy and the US military learned of the incident but decided not to disclose it to the public. “Both sides had a stake in keeping it under wraps so as not to frighten their citizens and make them reject nuclear power as a source of cheap energy."

Soviet authorities at first denied the scale of the disaster. The KGB, Soviet intelligence cut phone lines so people could not communicate the news, and toned down or suppressed reports. Top officials showed scant regard for their citizens’ safety, yet there were also many acts of great bravery. Divers swam through radioactive waters in order to manipulate submerged valves, knowing they would die as a result. Scientists, firemen and helicopter crews did their work despite absorbing often lethal levels of radiation...

More, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/chernobyls-legacy-still-threatens-hundreds-thousands-of-lives/

[Turbineguy]

1. Chernobyl

exposed the flaws in the Soviet system where political hacks could make decisions on matters they couldn't possibly understand. You know, the way republicans run things.

[delisen]

2. No civilization can guarantee the safety of nuclear power.

If our civilization suffer a very damaging event, there may be insufficient numbers of nuclear workers left and/or materials to even address a nuclear catastrophe. Species that survive the damaging event may be doomed by their inability to maintain the nuclear installations around the globe.

The event could be caused by people-such as war, climate change or it could be a natural disaster, such as impact from object from space.

The book is extremely important-but I am not eager to read it.

[appalachiablue]

5. The scary reality for sure.

[localroger]

3. The test that caused the explosion was not routine

The RBMK reactors were known to develop unstable hot spots at low power. On the day of the accident they were conducting a test to see how much energy they could get out of the reactor as it was shutting down, at low power. A safety system kept interrupting the test so they disabled it. The engineers who designed the reactor did not consider the test a safe way of operating the reactor, and they were overridden by bureaucrats and managers. Bottom line is the reactor didn't just up 'n 'splode one day; people doing stupid things made it explode.

And this is the real problem with nuclear power; the reactor at Chernobyl was a safe design, but you can't design any system that is proof against people who turn off the safety system while deliberately doing something they know is dangerous.

[appalachiablue]

4. Thanks for adding this info.