Doomed Chernobyl reactor to be buried in giant steel coffin

[madokie]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gjf3c3MTnLEa5HIrcNP_6JeE9KHwD90ABM480

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Twenty-two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, work is under way on a colossal new shelter to cover the ruins and deadly radioactive contents of the exploded Soviet-era power plant.

For years, the original iron and concrete shelter that was hastily constructed over the reactor has been leaking radiation, cracking and threatening to collapse. The new one, an arch of steel, would be big enough to contain the Statue of Liberty.

Once completed, Chernobyl will be safe, said Vince Novak, nuclear safety director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development which manages the $505 million project.

The new shelter is part of a broader $1.4 billion effort financed by international donors that began in 1997 and includes shoring up the current shelter, monitoring radiation and training experts.

[Olney Blue]

1. Interesting-thanks for the post!

[jpak]

2. but...but...but it wasn't a "disaster" - it's a wildlife haven now

and all the rest of those lies...

[madokie]

8. Kind of like this one here

Once completed, Chernobyl will be safe, said Vince Novak, nuclear safety director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development which manages the $505 million project.

[tabasco]

3. It was an heroic effort to cover that mess up.

The chopper pilots knew they would die a horrible death but did it anyway.

[Turbineguy]

5. The Chief Engineer

went in on top of the burning reactor to manually crank down the rods.

[Lasher]

4. I remember brave workers died after helping build that shelter 22 years ago.

Very sad.

[soothsayer]

6. Some say it's still burning its way down through the ground. China syndrome.

This is a last ditch effort, they'll tell you, to avoid some horrific catastrophe.

[Nihil]

7. Some say it is the gateway to Hell, burning its way up through the ground.

Some say that the catastrophe was a punishment from the gods for
refusing to build windmills and solar arrays.

Some say that it is still a nicer place to live than Baghdad as at least
no-one is shooting missiles at you.

Some say that any statement beginning with "Some say" is 99% bullshit.

:hi:

[Javaman]

9. some also say, that none of that is happening. nt

[losthills]

11. Some say it's a garden of eden.....

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[madokie]

13. the populations are mostly sustained by immigrant birds

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/nuclear/dn11473

A spokesperson for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds told New Scientist that the study is interesting, but points out the unexpected benefits of the Chernobyl explosion. Reports show that the large human exclusion zone around the site has led to a boom in animal populations, including eagles, wolves and bears.
"Whatever effect the radioactivity is having, it seems to be less of a threat than human activities, such as agriculture," said the spokesperson.
"There have been few rigorous scientific analyses of background radiation and the natural abundance of species," responds Mousseau. "But every rock we turn over, every survey we do, we find some previously unreported effect of background radiation."
Immigrant influxMousseau believes that the reports of sustained animal populations around Chernobyl mask fluctuations within the populations.
He says studies he has carried out looking at where the barn swallow populations in Chernobyl come from suggest that "the populations are mostly sustained by immigrant birds", rather than birds returning to their nesting sites as they normally would.
So an overall picture showing constant population size could hide the fact that the local population is dwindling but being constantly replenished by neighbouring ones.

[hunter]

17. So you can stay in a place where you will be killed off...

...or you can move to a place where you might be killed.

It is the plight of refugees everywhere. :(

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a place where these animals might be killed, but if they were in places populated or exploited by humans then they would surely they die.

As time passes the radiation danger to these refugee immigrants is reduced as the radioactive pollutants decay or are sequestered by natural processes. If these refugees are not prospering now (a claim that stretches the truth for most species) then eventually they will be.

An "unreported effect of background radiation" is merely that, an effect, and may or my not relate to the population dynamics of a particular species.

Nature doesn't discriminate between radiation and any of the other things that limit a particular population. Almost any way you look at it, especially from the perspective of most plant and animal species, human beings are worse than nuclear waste.

[NickB79]

18. Where would large numbers of rare species be immigrating from, though?

I can believe that common, highly mobile species like swallows could show high influxes of immigrants every year, but where are wolves, endangered species of horse, bears, etc, coming from? These species must be maintaining a sustainable breeding population within the exclusion zone, or their populations would be much lower than they are now if they are largely dependent on external influxes to maintain their numbers.

[madokie]

20. Personally I would like to read about the abnormalities or lack thereof

in these Chernobyl area inhabitants. Horses, bears and etc can travel many miles in a relative short time so I can see how that could be. Humans can live many years with some pretty severe abnormalities so why can't animals, reptiles and birds do the same?
We cannot continue on the path we are on with so called fossil fuels but going nuclear is not the answer either. We're wasting time, money and effort in painting the lips of the pig called nuclear energy is what I am saying. Until the question of what to do with the waste is answered in a way as to not put future generation in peril we must look elsewhere. 60 some odd years and many dollars spent and still no answer to that most basic of question tells me there is maybe no answer to be found so why keep kicking a dead horse. If our life is destroyed by the waste of burning coal, say in the future, life of some sort can and more than likely will rebound but if its by nuclear annihilation then all bets are off as that ever happening. I want better for our world than to turn it into a giant ball of radioactivity.

[Name removed]

21. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jpak]

14. Because the place was rendered uninhabitable for humans

9000 of which will *die* because of this accident.

Chernobyl apologists are loons...

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Oh, the horrors.

And how many have died from fossil fuels since Yesterday morning?

Oops, sorry - I forgot that you don't give a shit. My bad.

[kestrel91316]

19. Don't confuse not wanting to repeat one's mistakes with not giving a shit.

How many would die of the consequences of a nuclear power industry if we gave it FREE REIN like we have the fossil fuel industry?? I mean, let's make a REALISTIC comparison.

[NNadir]

24. In fact, the nuclear industry was the ONLY energy industry to evaluate its external risks before

construction.

This contrasts nicely for instance with the computer industry and the related solar industry with all of its handwaving and evasion.

There are ZERO hand waving purveyors of wishful thinking who seem to realize the consequences - a function of mass density - of building, say, ten exajoules per annum of solar energy capacity. In general, the people who offer this wishful thinking are scientifically illiterate and thus have not paused to consider the similarity to electronic waste.

Not to worry. These are the same people who jump up and down with irrational hysteria over every loose bolt in a nuclear plant but couldn't give a rat's ass if the equivalent of the population of New York City drops dead each year because of the dangerous coal waste indiscriminately dumped in the atmosphere each year.

In fact, if the "solar will save us" crowd ever manages to convert million ton quantities of toxic metals into vast waste heaps of heavy metals, the same twits will show up on environmental websites whining about "corporate greed." NOT ONE of these twits will have the insight, intellect, guts or moral depth to realize that a guilty party can be found by looking in a mirror.

If you don't believe me, witness the biofuels nightmare now going on. It sounded great until people actually went to try to do it.

In fact, since nuclear power was the only industry to discuss its potential public costs before it built a single plant. It was the only industry that could be subject to stupid interpretation of such prognostications by an illiterate public.

It now appears that the nuclear industry over-estimated the risks. Nuclear power has proved, measured in the anguished unit of deaths per exajoule, to be by far, the safest form of exajoule scale energy ever invented.

But the industry made a mistake by assuming that a literate public would exist to interpret the probabilistic analysis correctly. This was a mistake. The public - as we see here often - is abysmally stupid and ignorance prizes itself.

In fact, if you look at history - and there are ZERO fundie anti-nukes who know any history - you will find that one of the origins of the anti-nuke cult began with a bunch of yuppies in the wealthy Lloyd's Neck enclave on Long Island, who took the probabilistic calculations of the nuclear industry, and had them published in Newsday on Long Island. A lot of these people probably got rich working on Madison Avenue and they knew stupidity better than anyone. Later the government used this type of thinking - the thinking that mistakes a tiny probability for a certainty - to convince everyone that they should buy lottery tickets and also that it is a good idea to invade other people's countries (with the added benefit of being able to steal their oil) because they might try to make nuclear weapons.

The main reason for the rich guys getting up in arms on Lloyd's Neck was that LILCO at the time was proposing a power plant in a wealthy area. We all know that power plants belong among poor people. Since the plant in question was a nuclear plant, they selectively pulled information from the honest evaluations of the nuclear industry and foisted them on the ignorant masses. It worked like a charm. Within one year the nuclear plant near the golf courses of Lloyd's Neck were canceled.

No one ever went broke over estimating the power of ignorance.

[TheMadMonk]

25. How many die when ANY industry is given free reign?

The problems are not inherent in any technology. The dangers may well be, but the problems are not.

The actual real world problems arise as result of how any given process is regulated and managed.

9000 will die, because someone deliberately did some very, very stupid things.

Thousands died at Bophal and tens/hundreds of thousands were permanently maimed because someone chose not to install a few thousand dollars worth of safety equipment.

Tens of thousands die because it's cheaper to release toxins into the environment than it is to properly process them.

More thousands die recovering a few grams of gold from our discarded electronic kit.

People (mostly the poor and defenseless) die because people like you and I who have something to expend, want the maximum return from that expenditure, be it on shares in Union Carbide, an entertainment device that will be discarded and replaced every few years, or the electricity to keep said entertainment device operating throughout its brief lifetime.

People die because other people are prone to making decisions that give them the greatest personal (and usually immediate) benefit.

The only answer is that we police each other, not just in our immediate neighbourhoods but three continents over as well, through responsible government and our involvement in the same.

Simply attempting to ban everything "bad" would have us reduced to subsisting on what we can grub from the ground with our fingernails. And about five minutes after it would be: "Run he's got a stick", "Oh no, HE's got a stick with a ROCK tied to it" and away we'd go again.

[Nihil]

27. Excellent post - makes some good points! (n/t)

:applause:

[Dead_Parrot]

26. We did that

The USSR gave gave free-reign to engineers with the "what-happens-if-I-press-this" genome on uncontained reactors.

The result is Chernobyl - And yes it was bad, but given the tens of millions who have died from fossil fuel use since then, it was small potatoes.

Don't confuse not wanting to repeat one's mistakes with not giving a shit.

I don't. Easter Island, the 1952 smog, Banqiao, the great dying.

The question is, do you?

[NNadir]

22. In fact though, 9,000,000 people could die from dangerous fossil fuel accidents and the cults would

say nothing.

How do I know?

Millions of people die each year from dangerous fossil fuel wastes, and the cults couldn't care less.

There is NOT ONE fundie anti-nuke with a Chernobyl fetish who gives a rat's ass about the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who will die this year - not merely in the lifetime of the entire industry, but this year from dangerous fossil fuels.

Nuclear power does not need to be perfect to be better than everything else. It merely needs to better than everything else.

As for the dubious claim of "9000 dead," if you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up:

http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

If there are 9000 who are going to die, they have certainly waited a long time to do it. The accident took place 21 years ago, and has not been repeated.

I also note that many more than 9,000 people will die in cars this year, but there are ZERO anti-nuke fundies who call for banning cars. In fact, most of the anti-nuke fundies here keep talking about how cars are OK because Amory Lovins said that a hydrogen hypercar will be in showrooms by 2005.

I don't know if they know this in fundie land, but the city of Kiev is still inhabited. Ukraine plans to build more nuclear reactors. However, I would not be surprised if dumb fundies marched around claiming that all of the hundreds of references in the UNSCEAR report are lies, or that they know more about Chernobyl than the people who live there. Fundamentalism has never paid respect to knowledge, direct or otherwise.

[losthills]

15. "You can fool some of the people some of the time..."

[TheWraith]

10. Those people are mistaken. nt

[FREEWILL56]

23. This is stupid as the steel will rust away in short order no matter how thick you make it.

It's not easy keeping the genie in the bottle when the bottle itself won't last. This will be a pile of expensive rust in no time that will add to the amount of contaminated materials in the area.
Since some are so buried up to their necks in the denial of the volatility of such an event I say go live there or at least get a job putting in the dome. Oh I forgot they won't let you because of all of that nuclear waste you say doesn't exist. Go there anyway because if your beliefs are real about the subject then there must be something there they are trying to hide. Go see if we've been invaded by Martians and they made a colony under the dome.