Posted: 8/7/2007 9:26:17 AM EDT
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I thought this was interesting. www.liveleak.com/view?i=b48_1186490102 Matt |
There is something floating around the net about some chick that took a trip there and took tons of pics, etc. They were testing for radiation and to this day its wicked high.  Ill be honest, Id like to visit, but I like my health jus a bit more. I am intrigued though. |
+1....Crazy stuff www.kiddofspeed.com/ 
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Whenever watching these things it is important to note that US nuclear reactors are not built the same as the commie nuclear reactors. The containment around a reactor in the West is incredibly secure with several feet of concrete reinforced with steel. Chernobyl didn't have anywhere near as much containment around the reactor as the West has arounds its reactors. Secondly, it is important to note that the Chernobyl incident occured because idiots shut off the backup coolant systems. US standards would make such an occurance incredibly unlikely today. Almost impossible. Still, it is very sad what happened at Chernobyl. I have a co-worker from Ukraine who has some health issues from the radiation exposure she was a victim of while living there. |
Yeah im pretty sure that was proved to be not true. |
Really? Can you point me in the direction of any debunking? Not questioning your veracity or anything, it's just that I'd never heard these trips may be a fraud. |
Elena (Lena) Filatova (Russian: Елена Филатова, born 1974) is a Ukrainian motorcyclist who gained Internet fame in 2004 under the nickname KiddOfSpeed after her website was mentioned at Slashdot[1] and other online news sources. On her website, she posted photographs of her alleged motorcycle trips in the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 18 years after the nuclear disaster there. She mainly visited the virtually abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine. Filatova took a large number of photographs of buildings, cottages, rusting carnival equipment, the interiors or schools and homes, and even a couple people who had since returned to the area. The photos are arranged in the form of a story presented as an account of a trip by a biker who got a permit to travel alone in the radiation zone. However, Chernobyl tour guides and tourists to Chernobyl have claimed that Filatova visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone only as part of an organized tour.[2] Chernobyl tour guide Yuriy Tatarchuk recalls that Filatova "booked a tour, wore a leather biker jacket and posed for pictures." Her website appeared soon after.[3] Around May 16, 2004, Filatova posted to her website that she was "being accused that it was more poetry in this story then reality. I partly accept this accusation, it still was more reality then poetry"; by May 24 she had removed the note.[4] Among her more recent projects is a photo-journal about the Serpent's Wall near the city of Kiev, her home. The journal contains photos of Filatova's exploration of an ancient wall and more modern World War II fortifications built amongst its remains. Her website also contains a photo journal of the day of the Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Additionally, in March 2007, she posted more photos of the surrounding Chernobyl area that had been taken more recently. Well its not proven 100% but there still is doughts.
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This kind of fear mongering really bothers me - there are other examples of environmental disasters that have had a great of an impact as Chernobyl. Thousands of people used to die every year in coal mining - and their safety record is now much better. The new emerging reactors designs make meltdowns impossible. In fact, the pebble bed designs I have seen actually are incapable of melting down - they are incredibly safe. I am not belittling the obvious tragedy in Russia, but unfortunately that is sometimes how progress is made. Humans learn the most through making mistakes - unfortunately lots of times people die as a result. It just seems a shame to throw away a promising source of energy based on the fear that it could happen again. I mean, refineries explode, but we still use gasoline and LNG? I've seen enough episodes of Engineering disasters to know that nuclear plants are not that only places that have accidents - there is just more fear associated with nuclear b/c of the cold war and blatant under education about nuclear power. Done right, it can be safe! Mike |
Poor kids.
I agree with Mike, with the one exception that coal mines, coal burning plants, etc., don't have as much potential to impact such a large area as nuclear power. However, if managed properly nuclear power is as safe or safer than those other power sources. |
It's a sad thing about those children Our reactor design is much different than the Russians and new technology would make an accident like that remote but just imagine a dirty bomb and what the impact would be on the area that was effected if the material used was highly radioactive. It would be a nasty scene very nasty.
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I don't know shane there are coal fires burning that have been going on for decades Not saying that it is more dangerous than Chernobyl is, but it is certainly affecting a similar amount of land If a sour gas well blows depending on prevailing winds and percentage sour you can have alot of people impacted, we have had reservations evacuated because of sour gas leaks now the gas leaks are not as long lasting, but some of those coal fires can be, at least as far as it pertains to human life spans Done right there is no reason any of these types of energy can't be safe |
| it's funny. the nuke plant i work at is in the process of getting a licsence renewal. the anti's love to parade pics of chernobyl saying that it will happen again, and "NUKE POWER IS BAD!!1!!11!!!11!!!" i get a kick out of listening to their rants, and then totally debunking their misinformation. |
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A short word on design differences, if I might. The Chernobyl RBMK design has a positive void coefficient, meaning that power or reactivity is added by a decrease in core water level, a "positive" void insertion. They are unstable at low core flows, low power operation. This is a graphite moderated design. The turbine trip test performed was outside their safety analysis and should have stopped there, of course we know it did not. IIRC, they also installed shorting links to prevent reactor SCRAM but I cannot remember what the jumpered trips were. When the main turbine trip valves closed, a pressure increase led to the lowering of the boiling boundary, inserting postive reactivity and increasing power. This power spike was estimated at 100 times full reactor power. This tremendous increase in power led to a further pressure transient, depressing water level further. The second power transient was estimated at 1000 times full reactor power, and led to the vessel rupture due to steam explosion. The 800 ton core "plug" was hurled against, and actually shattered the control room boundary. The graphite began to burn. Coolant bundles were shattered. The rest is sad history. US reactors (BWR type, not a PWR guy) function with NEGATIVE void coefficient, such that lowering water level decreases reactor power, and the Emergency Procedures (EP's) call for doing exactly that in event of failure to SCRAM, in addition to boron injection. There's a little more to it, including steam cooling, but I tried to keep it simple. The potential failure of the deteriorating Chernobyl sarcophagus is also a really really big deal. The plume as it came over the US required the plant I was at to reset rad detectors due to the increase in background radiation, which sounds worse than it was in reality. |
Thanks for that input. |