I keep thinking "Blair Witch" as I read this thing.
Really weird.
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I keep thinking "Blair Witch" as I read this thing.
Really weird.
Thank you for posting this amazing read!
The section below really got to me. My parents went through a similar type of uprooting when they left to escape communist Cuba suddenly in 1962...however they had at least some time to prepare. And one thing they made sure to bring pver was the family photo albums. These are far more important than the jewels and silver.
I feel for the people who had to start again with nothing. Although no doubt they were grateful for their lives it does not negate how difficult this must have been for them.
Sprite
Most people had to leave everything, from photos of their grandparents to cars. Their clothes, cash and documents has been changed by state authorities. This is incredible, people lived, had homes, country houses, garages, motorcyles, cars, money, friends and relatives, people had their life, each in own niche and then in a matter of hours this world fall in pieces and everything goes to dogs and after few hours trip with some army vehicle one stands under some shower, washing away radiation and then step in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no money, no past and with very doubtful future.
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/ki.../image15.3.JPG
Fuckin A! That is pretty powerful stuff. This is something that more people should see.
She's pretty hot too..... ;)
Interesting timing for this thread with the 25th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident yesterday. Luckily, TMI fell short of being a disaster, but it certainly could have been. If you're curious what happened, read this:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-co...mile-isle.html
A "partial meltdown" of a nuclear reactor is some scary shit. Despite the risks, nuclear power definitely has some appeal. The ability of a nuke to generate power is amazing. Unfortunately, even when everything is working properly the reactor generates high level radioactive waste that is dangerous for a long, long time.
My Dad, who works for DoE, was one of the Physicists that went to TMI after the accident to monitor the clean-up and figure out what happened. He was also one of the guys sent to Chernobyl by the IAEA.
After the accident at Chernobyl I asked him what went wrong there, and why that couldn't happen here (or in Western Europe.) He said the problem was (is) this:
The power plants designed and built by the former Soviet Union are called Graphite reactors, and are much more prone to accident than the designs used in the West. They are also much cheaper to build and have a huge output. The problem facing the world of nuclear power are that there are Graphite Reactors all over the former Soviet Bloc. The ones in E. Germany have already been taken off-line and are being upgraded to the Western Standard (forgot the names, there are two types.) Many others remain, and it's too expensive and/or unfeasible to turn them off, since in many places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan they supply almost all the electrical grid.
It's really unfair to lump our reactors in with Chernobyl. The safety record in the US and (Western) Europe is beyond exemplary. More people have died from Solar Power accidents than nuclear. We're not even going to touch the health issues of fossil fuel pollution (remember all that acid rain?) or burst dams...
Solar power accidents? What, they got tanned to death?
My Dad has some friends that work out at INEEL in Idaho. I once heard a story about how they were building a nuclear (pronounced nook-u-lar) powered airplane. They figured it could fly around the earth a couple thousand times. Sounded like a good idea until one of the engineers had a moment of clarity and asked "what if it crashes?". Needless to say, they scrapped the project.
Solar power fatalities: So hot right now.Quote:
Originally posted by iceman
Solar power accidents? What, they got tanned to death?
Believe it or not, but DoE was building a solar power generator in the AZ desert that consisted of a field of mirrors that reflected and focused the sun on what could be called a watertower. The thing was painted black and would get hot enough to turn the water in it to steam, driving a couple of turbines. The damn thing expolded, killing like 3 people. That's 3 more deaths than US nuclear generators have killed.Quote:
Originally posted by iceman
Solar power accidents? What, they got tanned to death?
I bet those guys were steamed.
edit: Okay, bad joke. But you're telling me that in the history of the U.S. nuclear industry not a single person has been killed? No steamfitter, construction worker, nobody? I find that hard to believe. Perhaps no one has died as a direct provable result of radiation, I could buy that, I suppose.
:rolleyes: :p :D
It's also possible that those horses that did survive came from a very small population that harbored a mutation confering resistance to radfiation-induced genetic damage.Quote:
Originally posted by Sublime
I would think it would be a little more then odds. The horses would be some trait that would allow the animals to survive. Since horses can roam 15 - 20 miles in a day. There is a gene that is weading out the weak animals. But what trait would they be posesing? Would it be a 6th sense to not wander towards anything with major radiation?
Lot's of possibilities here, maybe those horsies wandered into the area only recently and no one's allowed to go in and retrieve them?
How long do they live? How many foals survive long after birth or are stillborn?
The two types in use in the US are PWR (pressurized water reactor) and BWR (boiling water reactor). Canada also has the CANDU heavy-water reactor.Quote:
Originally posted by Tippster
The ones in E. Germany have already been taken off-line and are being upgraded to the Western Standard (forgot the names, there are two types.)
I read this post and visited Elena's site on Saturday afternoon and I've been thinking about it ever since. Maybe I missed her explanation as I read her story, but does Elena go to Chernobyl strictly for entertainment puposes? Not that I need an excuse to take the motorcycle for a ride, but Chernobyl??? Yikes.
Some of those photos are haunting.
The more I read of this site, the more I like the author's writing style and personality. Not only does she have a lot of reverence for what was lost, but she also has a sense of humor about it which is cool.
I would love to be able to hop on a bike and go for a guided tour of the place w/ this lady. That would not suck at all!
:cool:
Sprite
Wow :eek:
Great site!!!
I remember driving home from work the day that "accident" happened. I was listening to the radio when the DJ came on and said "And this song is going out tonight for everyone in the USSR"
He played "I'll melt with you." Ouch!
I think she mentioned that she works for the atomic agency of some sort.. I don’t think they let just anyone in to wonder around.
On a side note I lived in Poland during the accident, it really sucked. Basically the radioactive cloud went NW, then stalled over Sweden/Norway. Kind of scary watching the news to see where the radioactive cloud will go next. During its trip it managed to pick up moisture and rain. The radioactive dust, kicked up in the explosion/fire would bond to the mist in the cloud, so if the cloud passed over you without precipitation you were more or less ok, however if it started to rain then all the radioactive elements trapped in the dust would fall contaminating the ground (bad)..
As to the accident the story that I heard form a neighbor who was an nuclear engineer working on Polands nuclear power plant, never completed due to the accident, (same design as charnobil). The Russian power plants had energy production quotas, the quotas had no correlation to energy demand (welcome to communism). In order to reach the quotas the operators of Charnobil decided to pull most if not all of the carbon rods out of the reactor. There was an automatic safety system that prohibited this, however they purposefully disabled it in order to pull the rods thus produce more hear thus produce more steam thus produce more electricity. This in turn over heated the whole system causing an explosion that cracked the top of the reactor. Once this happened they managed to slow down the fission by reinserting the rods. Basically they got very lucky, if in the end they would have not been able to reinsert the carbon rods the thing might still be active today.
ps
The carbon rods are used to take energy away form the fission process therefore slow it down. They are the only means of controlling a fission reaction.
http://www.augustachronicle.com/imag.../chernobyl.jpg
"Check me out! I'm gonna rip the shit outta this."
Something I just read about that I didn't realize before: there were four reactors at Chernobyl. The other three continued to operate after the accident with the final one finally going off-line in something like 1999 or 2000! So obviously there were still people working in the area until that time. Radiation be damned, I guess.
After the accident the damaged reactor was encased in a thick concrete "sarcophagus." Apperently this concrete shell has developed significant cracks, so dust can now escape and animals can get in!
More info:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-co...chernobyl.html
It was an amazing accident. Years ago I read an article on the events leading up to it. One passage has always stayed with me:Quote:
Originally posted by The AD
Something I just read about that I didn't realize before: there were four reactors at Chernobyl. The other three continued to operate after the accident with the final one finally going off-line in something like 1999 or 2000! So obviously there were still people working in the area until that time. Radiation be damned, I guess.
After the accident the damaged reactor was encased in a thick concrete "sarcophagus." Apperently this concrete shell has developed significant cracks, so dust can now escape and animals can get in!
More info:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-co...chernobyl.html
The people of Pripyat had no way of knowing that their small Ukrainian town was dying that morning as they gazed at the ruddy glow over Chernobyl reactor No. 4 some 2 1/2 miles away. It was a bright spring Saturday, April 26, 1986. A townsman came in from sunning himself on a roof, exclaiming that he had never seen anything like it, he had turned brown in no time at all. He had what would later be known as a nuclear tan. A few hours afterward, the man was taken away in an ambulance, convulsed with uncontrollable vomiting. Soon many of his neighbors were coughing, throwing up and complaining of headaches and a metallic taste in their mouth.
Yeah, amazing story, blah, blah, blah......
WHAT THE FUCK, OVER?
I do not care how great the motorbiking is, I would stay the fuck out of that place. This woman is an idiot. I am sure repeated exposure to radiation in small does is fine though and she has nothing to worry about...
Not enough credit goes to the people who knowingly gave their lives to contain the damage. Guys went in there to build the structural support of the scacophagus and pour the concrete knowing that they would die in weeks or months as a result. I don't remember how many hundreds were involved.Quote:
Originally posted by The AD
After the accident the damaged reactor was encased in a thick concrete "sarcophagus."
Chernobyl-fried rat?
:eek:
Sprite
Quote:
Originally posted by The AD
[B]Apperently this concrete shell has developed significant cracks, so dust can now escape and animals can get in!