Chernobyl's lost city - 20 years on Options

[The Ghost of Inept Pig]

Although I appreciate pretty things, I find photos of abandoned places much more interesting (former insane asylums and fairgrounds tend to be more interesting than most), and these pictures of Chernobyl 20 years later are just as interesting.

BBC

[Cataclysm=J]

Wow, its brilliant how when left alone nature has began to slowly move in, I bet if no-one ever goes back there it will just dissappear.

[Slim Jim]

Read it.

Some of you may have seen this, indeed it may have been posted before, but I think its well worth the read, and there are loads more pictures to look at.

I also watched a documentary about Chernobyl on BBC2 a while back, basically it showed how misinformed people were. The town was evacuated 36 hours after the raditaion began spreading, when if certain people hadn't of lied, it would probably have been 3 or 4.
Also, the only way to cool down the core to stop it exploding (i think) was to pour lots of sand over the exposed core, this took 100s of pilots and helicopter crew, I think most of which were killed because of the radtiation. It was very moving to see people willing to sacrifice themselves in order to stop worse things happening.

[Cataclysm=J]

Notice the way that the Soviet Government sent in all black people to clean up the mess.

[The Ghost of Inept Pig]

Ordep posted a similar link to Slim in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. thread (back when we actually thought the game might come out) - here it is on the original pages, there were accusations that her journey wasn't as she originally told it.

Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl By Robert Polidori - more photos.

[Slim Jim]

Ah I was sure I had seen a link to something similar on here before.
Even if it is true that she didn't go around Chernobyl by herself on her bike, I guess its the story of Chernobyl that interests me, not of the woman on her bike. (and the pictures I assume she took are still interesting to look at)

Some of those "Zones of Exclusion" pictures were fairly disturbing. The hospital operating room, and the control room of the plant particulaly.

[DanMaggot]

Wow, its brilliant how when left alone nature has began to slowly move in, I bet if no-one ever goes back there it will just dissappear.

I bet if we return to explorations of further nuclear power stations it'll happen again.

Funny isn't it, how this place has been written out of our lives most of the time. When we talk about alternative sources of fuel you never see pictures of this place. Frankly to my mind it should be right up there inside the tourist centre.

As for nature moving back in.....well yes in a stunted kind of fashion. Radiation effects all cell life though so anything that's not been warned off (in otherwords anything non human) is going to have short sick lives.

When you see how huge the area was it almost makes me wonder if Stalker was an appropriate game anyway.

[The Ghost of Inept Pig]

Chernobyl was an accident though; and there were reasons why it happened - lack of communication, a design fault in the reactor and violation of procedures, it's not fair to say "because of this, we should never use or think about using Nuclear power ever again"

Google Chernobyl Wildlife and there's quite a few reports that wildlife isn't suffering and dying as much as you seem to suggest, try this BBC article:

Reappeared: Lynx, eagle owl, great white egret, nesting swans, and possibly a bear
Introduced: European bison, Przewalski's horse
Booming mammals: Badger, beaver, boar, deer, elk, fox, hare, otter, raccoon dog, wolf
Booming birds: Aquatic warbler, azure tit, black grouse, black stork, crane, white-tailed eagle

Cattle on the same island were stunted due to thyroid damage, but the next generation were found to be surprisingly normal.

Now it's typical for animals to be radioactive - too radioactive for humans to eat safely - but otherwise healthy.

[DanMaggot]

Now it's typical for animals to be radioactive - too radioactive for humans to eat safely - but otherwise healthy.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/blink.gif)

So how come it's not safe for humans to live there if it's ok for other animals? Sorry I must be missing something - we're just another mammal with a good opinion of ourselves aren't we?

Ah found it

the area is expected to be unsafe for humans for a long time to come. Cancer and other disease risks may be higher for people than for many wildlife species because humans live longer than most wildlife and worry about birth defects in their children.

Chernobyl was an accident yes. I'm not saying the same thing will happen exactly. What I'm saying is that you need to apply worse case scenarios when making a risk assessment and to me that goes .... when you get a spark in a fuel depo the depo goes up. When you get an explosion at a power plant the plant may get damaged. When you get an explosion at a nuclear power plant you get Chernobyl.

I have to admit I'm not speaking from a firm base of knowledge. This is gut stuff and bluster.

[Cataclysm=J]

Nuclear Reactors can't explode in the way everybody seems to think, what causes this was an explosion of steam wich ripped off the protective sheild to the core. The nuclear material is not actually explosive, this seems to be a large misconseption about nuclear plants.

They have a fail-safe of control rods which absorb neutrons, its the free neutrons that cause the Uranium-235 to under go fission, the control rods are lowers into teh reactor to slow it down and raised away to speed it up. If there is a malfunction or the Uranium needs replacing the rods the lowered into the reactor to shut it down completely. The reason this failed at Chernobyl is becuase teh control rods were damaged when the reactor went up in steam - a design flaw which has since been corrected.

In modern plants you could crash a commercial aircraft into the plant and still not do any damage to the core. This is becuase the plants now have a second layer of protection so if such an incedent did happened again the first layer of protection would be broken but the second would prevent any escape or radioactive materials. Chernobyl only had the single layer of protection.

Another material which can be used as nuclear fuel is Plutonium-239, which is produced when neutrions are fired at Uranium-238, only a small precentage of the Uranium in the reactor is Uranium-235, the desired Uranium to run the plant, the rest is Uranium-238 so Plutonium-239 is formed inside too.

Nuclear Power PLants are actually cleaner to the environment in the long run than coal or oil, which throw out more radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The difference between Uranium in a poer plant and a bomb is the concentration of Uranium-235. In a nuclear warhead there is about 90% Uranium-235, in a reactor there is far far far less (could be around 3%, I can't remember but you get the idea). The mass in the reactor is kept just above critical to control it, the mass in the bomb is designed to reach supercritical almost instantly due to its concentration and the chain reaction. This produces an immense amount of heat which destroyes the area around it. Anything not destroyed is be showered in radioactive nuclear waste.

If it had exploded in teh way that people seem to think the onenext-door might there wouldn't have been any remains to visit.

[Sureshot]

The Nuclear debate is something I have mulled over for a while and as yet I am still undecided. I believe that Nuclear power can offer the a solution to the worlds ever increasing demands for energy. The upfront technology in the generation of power is both safe and efficient. However I have two issues that remain unresolved.

The first is that although the technology is proven to be safe, I feel that we can never account fully for the human factor and the consequences of human error presents a far greater risk of long term pollution than if a coal or gas power station exploded. If an accident occured in one of these power stations they wouldn't render the surrounding area uninhabitable for centuries as would be the case with a Nuclear station.

The second issue is the management of the waste and by-products of the energy generation, its transportation, storage and disposal. We as yet seem to have no suitable solution to this other than shipping it abroad to some third world country and burying it in a very deep hole!

[Cataclysm=J]

They are now designed to take and explosion like Chernobyl and not break the secondary sheild, so the radioactive meterial cannot escape.

What need to be done is insted of bury the waste a method needs to be conceived of how to get energy from the decay of the radioactive waste, and then use that as a power supply too, that would make the system far more efficent and handle teh waste problem.

[The Ghost of Inept Pig]

You probably know this already, but you can see the BBCs in depth Chernobyl coverage - here, interesting reading.

[Cataclysm=J]

Yeah, the BBC is my homepage, I wouldn't keep up on the world otherwise. The news papers are getting too crap to read.