28. Chernobyl Trip Report by Jake Hecla

The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT opencourseware at ocw.mit.edu, one of The NFC veterans who came to Chernobyl for the second time returned from there two weeks ago, so if you remember , on Tuesday we go over all the physics and intuition about why Chernobyl happened and leave you with what it looks like today. James will tell you what it looks like today, so first of all, I'm going to go over a little bit of the reactor physics involved in the Chernobyl accident.

I realize you guys have already covered this to some extent, but I didn't plan on it. that's why it's in my presentation too yeah, I'm also a little sick so I'll probably start coughing sorry, I'm not dying, it's just a cold. I've heard that joke about eight times in the last two days and I'm done, but yeah, it's not radiation poisoning, yeah, okay, where's Chernobyl? Ah, damn, come on, no, go to the other side, to the other side, yeah, okay, okay, so one of the first questions I got when I said I was going to go and visit Chernobyl is wait, isn't it? a war zone?

It's not entirely Ukrainian, the war in Ukraine is taking place mainly in this part here, it's not completely under rebel control in that area and I say rebel and in quotes because rebel means Russian, however, if you notice that those arrows Russian forces They're piled up along that border, so while it's not, you know it's not an active war zone, it's certainly not a place to spend a lot of time. He said Chernobyl is north of kyiv about I. I don't know, let's look at 200 250 kilometers, so it's not completely out of control, right? I hope this gives you a good idea of ​​where everything is right, so what does the oval nuclear power plant look like?

It appears to consist of 4 finished reactors. there are two unfinished reactors, units 5 and 6 not shown in this image, units one and two are located on the right, they were completed in the 1970s and early 1980s, there are all of these reactors or units 1 and 2 RBMK type operated with some successes, I will talk about that later for several years before the accident that occurred in 1986. I also have some notes here showing some of the incidents that I will talk about here a little later. presentation, but this just gives you a general idea of ​​the layout, so it's two separate buildings, four units one and two and then units three and four are in one building, all connected by this turbogenerator room, so here It is where the generators that spin the steam from the RBMK to power are located.

This is a giant long before the accident. This was a giant, unseparated hallway, basically, so you could theoretically walk from one end to the other. So what is an RBMK? An RBMK is a lightweight water-cooled graphite. Moderate channel type reactor, this means it does not have a giant pressure vessel like you would see in a VV ER or equivalent US light water reactor. Why does that mean anything? Well, building giant pressure vessels is very difficult if any of you have done your research. on nuclear reactor manufacturing, you will find that the equipment needed to build a pressure vessel for a reactor is no longer something we have in the US, is Korea doing it for us now?

Japan, the one that does it now in Soviet times. It was very, very difficult for the Soviet Union to produce such pressure vessels at a reasonable rate, so the RBMK got around this by using individual channels that were their own pressure vessels, so to speak, so the way this works is Let's start from scratch. The side that takes the cold water goes through these things here, these are the mcps main circulation pumps, as you will see later in the presentation, it goes up the bottom of the core, these are the hot rods, the water goes from the liquid phase to the vapor phase. as it flows through the channels it comes out, the top part goes to the steam water separators, the steam goes to the turbines, it spins the turbines and produces electricity.

The important thing to remember here is that we have a giant graphite core, the graphite is what does the moderation. In this circumstance, it is not water that allows you to use very low enriched uranium, so in theory you could use an RBMK. I think 1.2 percent was the lowest they could go, but regardless of extremely low enriched uranium, which is convenient if you don't want to spend a lot of time enriching uranium, the problem with this is that you have a giant core. If you remember the scattering cross section of graphite, it's pretty small and the amount of energy lost per collision is also pretty small, so the core of this thing is c11, yeah, eleven point five meters wide for an American reactor. equivalent, so there's no real equivalent to this, but let's say an AP 1000, an equivalent electrical production reactor is about four meters wide, so the core is huge.

As I already mentioned, this is what the individual pressure channels look like, so cold water enters at the bottom, passes through the fuel rods, and exits at the top. The RBMK has some serious design flaws, so as I said, the core is huge, allowing local power anomalies to occur. They form very, very easily, if you look at the nucleus, one portion can be a sort of neutron lis separated from the others because the neutrons just don't go as far when they diffuse through the nucleus, so you can have very, very powerful very high in a corner. and a very low power in the other, which is not something that can be developed in a physically smaller nucleus that has a characteristic scale equivalent to that of the free path of the neutron beam.

Furthermore, core flux monitoring at RBMK is seriously deficient, so there are a variety of neutron detectors that exist around the periphery of the core, but they are totally insufficient to detect these local energy anomalies. Chernobyl really found out the hard way on this one in 1982. Unit 1 suffered a localized meltdown of the core, something that can't really happen in and LWR or really any other type of reactor, but a couple of fuel channels actually they experienced one of these local energy anomalies and ended up melting, so if you go into the unit 1 control room, you can see that on the fuel channel cartogram on the wall.

There are two of them that are just iffy, those are the ones that melted the most. It has a positive vacuum coefficient of reactivity. What does that mean? When water boils in the core, the density of the water there decreases and the power of the reactor decreases. ends up going up because the water acts primarily not as a moderator but as a neutron absorber, this is bad for a wide variety of reasons and Lee discovered in 1986, quite catastrophically, exactly why, furthermore, the system is extremely unstable at low power , then how? Did the 1986 accident happen? I was part of this thing called turbogenerator test run.

The general idea is that if you have an off-site power outage and your main circulation pumps no longer have off-site power, you need to somehow maintain yourself. Water flows through the core so that the fuel does not melt. The problem is that large diesel backup generators are simply diesel and therefore take a long time to come online and reach full power. The way this gap can be closed is by using the energy that was stored in the turbines to effectively power the main circulation pumps until the diesel generators can come online when unit four was fully built in 1983 and was turned on for the first time.

I had actually never done this test where they did a turbogenerator overhaul even though the law in the Soviet Union required that all new power plants had to do this test, it was delayed until 1986 and yes, it was delayed until 1986. In a nutshell, the test procedure, sorry for everything, the text on this slide is basically as follows, so I would scale down the reactor to reduce it from a normal thermal output of up to about 2,400 thermal megawatts to six hundred or seven hundred megawatts. You would take the turbogenerators to full speed to store as much energy in them as possible and then cut off the steam supply so that you are now only drawing power from the rotating turbogenerator, this would then be used to power the main circulation pumps, each of the which consumed around 40 megawatts, eight of them in total.

I think six could be used for normal operation. The shutdown would take 60 to 70 seconds, and hopefully by then their diesel generators would be running. They turned on the water pump and everything would be fine. What happened in the test was decidedly quite different from that, so on April 26, 1986 they tried to start this test about six hours late because there was an incident in another part of Ukraine where a coal-fired power plant went offline. , then what happened was that the grid authority in the area ordered that Chernobyl should remain online at full power for an additional six hours, they began the test by cutting the power, but as a result of running for an extra six hours they had accumulated a significant amount of xenon precursors in the core, so when they started reducing the power, the power started to go down and down and down and they couldn't stop it from falling, what ended up happening was the power dropped down to 30 thermal megawatts and the reactor operators panicked, their response to this instead of canceling the test was to pull out as many control rods as they could get, they did so and this rescued the reactor's thermal output and increased to around 200 thermal megawatts.

At this point, the reactor was in an extremely unstable state. Note that almost all the rods they could get were outside the reactor, the only thing maintaining reactivity. At a reasonable level was all the xenon that had accumulated in the core, at this point they began running tests of the turbogenerator and cut off steam to the main turbine or to one of the turbines after it was running at full power. and then tried to run the main circulation pump, the main circulation pump began to consume the energy of the rotating turbine and as a result it ran slower and slower, meaning the flow through the core was less and less , more water boiled and turned into steam, which increased.

As a result of the reactivity, the core's power output increased, it burned more xenon, and the cycle continued. They noticed a power excursion about 40 seconds into the test and at that point they recognized they were in bad territory and hit the stop button. This would lock almost all available control rods in the core, including some emergency extras, and shut everything down in most circumstances. This would be a fairly safe move, but in the case of the RBMK it certainly wasn't. RBMK control rods have graphite. The tip of them when they got stuck in the core caused a localized power increase because graphite is a great moderator and it is displacing water, which is a great absorber and as a result, after they got a couple of meters into the core, pressure in the core increased. core of the power output that was located around the tips, the control rods ended up breaking the drive mechanisms of the control rods and instead of basically shutting down the cycle, the power continued to increase for the next few seconds and finally arrived somewhere around. 10 to 20 times the system's rated maximum thermal output and a massive steam explosion ended up destroying the facility.

He dropped the 2,000-ton biological shield onto the reactor through the facility's roof. It expelled a significant portion of the fuel as well as the moderator in the core and started a massive fire around the facility just to give you a good idea of ​​the scale. See how I have the virtual laser pointer. That is the person here, this little guy, he is the peak of the biological field. Alena shield and then this is a model, a cut-out model of the Chernobyl reactor facility with the shield and with the yes, with a folding shield that went up through the roof and came down again, so as you can see, It was a completely massive explosion.

So the damage to the reactor was, immediately, quite catastrophic. The moderator blocks, the fuel spread throughout the immediate area. If you look at this photo, it's pretty hard to see, but at the bottom of that column of smoke, you can actually see the bottom of the bioshield giving you an idea of ​​the scale of the damage to the reactor after the explosion occurred. In reality, none of the operators believed that the reactor had reached its confinement.no way. They didn't really have an immediate way to see what had happened, so he opened the door and went to the main turbogenerator building to investigate the damage.

They thought maybe it was one or two broken fuel channels, like what happened in I think Leningrad. I think it was at the Leningrad Power Plant a few years earlier, in a few seconds. who were there, received fatal doses and died in hospital in May 1986. This is a photo of the control room of reactor 4 showing a control rod stuck in the six meter position, so it was probably a rod . rod coming up from below and that yes, seven meters would be all the way, zero meters would be all the way in the initial response to this even though the not-yet-dead reactor operators realized it was a violation. total containment was that the response was to an accident that was not nuclear in nature, so when the fire department received a call from the authority at Chernobyl, the message they received was that there was a three-actor complex as a result than they appeared.

There was no equipment suitable for a hazmat situation in any way that said there was virtually nothing that could protect someone from the extremely high radiation field one would encounter around the reactor and the immediate aftermath of the accident, but they were still extremely vulnerable. , it was night time when this accident occurred, as I mentioned, this happened at 1:23 in the morning, they could not actually see the extent of the accident and at first they believed that it was simply a fire on the roof of the turbogenerator building , they tried to put out the fire and some of them succumbed to acute radiation poisoning or acute radiation syndrome, almost immediately several firefighters went up to the roof and they just didn't do it.

We did not return after the accident, the cleaning was carried out by the Soviet army. The people involved in this were known as the liquidators. They spent several minutes on the roof of the turbogenerator building or near where the reactor was. The containment building was and they would effectively receive a lifetime dose, which I think their limit was believed to be 50 REM and that would be a couple of minutes up there. This photo doesn't show much evidence of that, but I guess it shows a little. There is a little bit of evidence of it, if you look around the bottom of the chart you can see some hazing periodically.

Let's see if I can point it out here here here here and here that's the gear that moves. the film actually protects the film from radiation exposure at those points the radiation dose rate was so high there that most of the photographs that were taken simply didn't turn out at all, some smarter photographers used a lot of lead and they were able to capture photographs like this, but still the dose rates were tremendous, the reactor structure itself was entombed in this thing we call a sarcophagus, people in Ukraine call it the shelter object or the shelter object in which It was built starting almost immediately after the accident, basically to prevent radioactive graphite and fuel fragments from leaving the reactor structure and contaminating further land.

This is a photo from when it was under construction. It basically consisted of steel and concrete walls that were erected around the reactor using a variety of technologies. At first they tried to use robots which were almost immediately disabled by the high radiation field, later they ended up using biorobots, people also move things to their place, as I said before, many people died in this accident immediately. and after many things during the construction of the sarcophagus, during the initial extinguishing of the fire, our initial firefighting measures, since the core remained burning for several weeks after the accident, they tried to put it out with sandbags dropped from helicopters and during that effort.

In fact, a helicopter ended up hitting one of the cranes they were trying to use for this and falling into the reactor and a good part of their remains remain buried inside the sarcophagus, from what I understand well, so my visit to Chernobyl, why Would anyone ever do it? wanted to go there, the main focus was to learn about radiological decontamination at the site, basically how contamination control was handled, how workers are kept safe. Keep in mind that there are 3,000 people who go to work there every day and what are the strengths and what are the shortcomings. of their radiological program was seven days in total, four of which were on site, other days were spent in Pripyat and also in classroom training of which I have excellent photographs, so this is a slide stolen directly from the PowerPoint That they sent me. the first day, but this was organized by three people, Carl Willis, Eric Embry and Ed Geist.

I have known Carl for a few years. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a radiation safety officer for a company that I believe is in advanced energy. storage technologies I'm not exactly sure Eric is a firefighter specializing in radiological emergency response and Edward works at the RAND Corporation doing research on nuclear history and nuclear safety. This is this year's team, so let's start here. This is Luke. he does environmental radiation monitoring, that's me after not sleeping because I did a series of 22-6 11 before I knew it. I look very happy to be there. This is Nathan.

Nathan builds organs like the musical instrument he was into because he's always been interested. Chernobyl, but he didn't really have any experience in the field. This is Stanislaus. Stanislaus was our guide from the Chernobyl authority. He has been working at the plant since 1991 and is a fantastic resource for information. This is Edie, who I think I talked about earlier and this. It's Ryan Pierce, I'm not really sure what he does. This is Harris, who is a friend of Carl's and works in radiation oncology, and then Danelle Hogan, who is an educator based in Phoenix, Arizona, who, by the way, works with the do-e.

I wonder why we're all wearing those silly robes we had before going into another room and changing into basically easy-to-decontaminate jumpsuits. One of the activities we did was real decontamination training, so that's a truck. from the job site without Varco, which by the way is me with the Geiger counter, I am inspecting for contamination, then we pressure wash the truck, since it turns out that there is a very specific technique that one must use for pressure washing when treat a contaminated object so as not to throw contaminated soil back into the truck. This was a very interesting experience and also very entertaining for the workers involved because they don't actually wear that when they are decontaminating due to their respect for safety protocols or should we say a little differently so that they would see us wearing the absurd rubber duck suits while They stayed still smoking and laughing at us.

I think you can actually see the corner of that guy's jacket back there and he's just wearing everyday clothes. I also went to the new safe confinement work site, so I haven't talked about that earlier in this presentation, but I guess I should have. There is an object called the new safe confinement arch which is basically a giant stainless steel structure on rails that is being slid over reactor four to prevent the spread of any kind of contamination. This is known as the new safe confinement or NSC arc. It's been under construction since 2007 and was actually moved for the first time while I was there.

November 12 is supposed to last a hundred years and hopefully in that time frame they will be able to dismantle what's left of the reactor, so actually what you see here is the corner of the sarcophagus and then if you were to Move a little this way and you will see on the right a set of clues for the new safe confinement arch. We also did some classroom training. Admittedly, the classroom training was the most disappointing part of this. The instructors weren't particularly interested in showing it to us. Anything other than YouTube videos and other things that would just waste our time, that was the only part of this

trip

that I didn't enjoy, regardless of the fact that we learned a little about the various hazmat outfits that people would wear when working on the site, as I mentioned, we were also able to visit Pripyat, which I will have more photos of later, as well as the reactor for the control room that is inside the sarcophagus, which is a real pleasure to visit the reactor for the control room , since it is not terribly contaminated.

As a result of decontamination efforts during the accident, the dose rate would have been in the range of 5 to 10 mm per hour, but today it is in the range of 10 mm per hour. This is the new safe confinement arc I've been talking about. This is actually a photo from 2015 with a clip art image of the Statue of Liberty, but it gives you an idea of ​​how big it is. You know, it's 5 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty and it's on rails, which is interesting, it's actually too big for wheels. It's not on rails with wheels, it's on rails with giant Teflon skids.

This is the inside of the turbogenerator hallway. Remember that long building I showed you that connected reactors one, two, three and four. This is right outside reactor 3. Partly, I think I'll show you these photos later. There are pieces of the reactor 4 turbine that are here in this area that are quite visibly radioactive and are very easy to detect if you wave a Geiger counter around inside. Pripyat we also visited a 126 hospital which is where the firefighters went immediately after the accident, who are the ones who managed to get off the roof. This piece of clothing here we're not exactly sure what it was because none of us are actually going to touch it. but we think it could have been part of a cover, it would be placed under the hull, it was extremely radioactive, it was contaminated with alpha beta and gamma, which is quite unusual.

Alpha contamination is quite rare at the Chernobyl site and occurred between 50 and 75 years per year. contact time I think I already showed you photos of the control room, yes unit four, that's the cartogram, so it would show various reactor parameters for each fuel channel depending on how it was configured, that's an external photo of the sarcophagus and I think it is For the PowerPoint slides, I have a bunch of photos that I think you will find interesting. I apologize if it's a little disorganized. This was done relatively recently because I just returned from Chernobyl and then went to a conference. and then I came back here and tried to do the job correctly so that they are in roughly chronological order.

I'll go over it and hopefully tell you a little bit about how you like the places, okay, okay, so this is the first day we're driving. to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site, that blue and white bus is pretty much what everyone uses to get around there, so we're not supposed to take photos in this area, so everything is tilted because I was taking out the window. with a chamber like that, that's the new safe confinement arch, it's in considerably better condition than last year at this point they've done a fantastic job putting it together, it's actually almost a year ahead of schedule, there it is again, you can see the sarcophagus with the new supporting wall that is right there, okay, this is our excursion to Pripyat on our second day, so this is the group led by Stanislaus, as you can see, there is not much left compared to what we saw last year.

The number of buildings that had been illegally dismantled for scrap metal was of course quite large, in I don't know five or ten years it will be very difficult to see much of Pripyat, frankly, so this is a standard apartment block in Pripyat . As you can see many broken windows, many bricks have fallen, these things are quite dangerous, many tourists enter them if one decides to do a tourist expedition to Chernobyl, which I do not particularly recommend, do not go. in the apartment blocks this is on the way to one of the schools this is Lukas who has more detectors than anyone I've ever met at the time he was wearing seven so I had to take a photo of him this is Aris imitating some of the graffiti that has unfortunately appeared around everywhere in Pripyat is rotting quickly, as I said, there is a big problem with looting, plus there is a big problem with graffiti and vandalism.

Honestly, it's really depressing to go there and see how much has changed in just a year, so despite my previous warning, we went to an apartment block. This is just a measurement that shows that the bottom up there is actually not very high. Aris is not particularly security conscious at times. This gives you a good idea of ​​how. The furthest preparation yacht is from the reactor, which is not far away, about twokilometers, as you can see the new safe confinement arc at the top left of the detector background, and in this particular apartment block at this particular time there were about four to five times as many as you would see in the center from Cambridge, there are wild animals on the staging yacht and in the rest of the exclusion zone, this is a big problem, so even though the cats are very cute and the puppies are very cute, they also have rabies, no It's like that. all of them, but a large number of them, in 2009 five workers were injured by No joke, a rabid wolf.

There is a video of this on YouTube that you can look up at your leisure if you wish. This is because Ukraine does not have much money, so they have not been able to continue with their vaccination program. They actually use baits that contain a rabies vaccine; They normally suppress rabies and wild animal populations, but Ukraine has no money. They finished the program about five years ago. years ago and as a result there is a big problem with especially rabid foxes because everyone thinks foxes are cute, especially tourists and foxes, when they get rabies, some of them go through a stage where they seem to be very friendly, even where I know. one contracted rabies from a rabid animal at Renault in Chernobyl, but it's certainly a possibility, so Estanislao was setting a very bad example by feeding one of the feral cats, which is why I took a photo of him.

This is one of the many memorials we will find in downtown Los Angeles. We stayed in the city that was effectively built as a replacement for Pripyat. It's actually a fantastic city. I really enjoy the touch of Slava and as expected there are memorials everywhere because the entire population is basically the people who retired from the city of Pripyat, this is a train we would take every day so Abuta CH It is separated from Pripyat by a small isthmus of Belarus going down, so that's bad because you can't get a visa for Belarus, it's not really a thing.

You can do it as an American, I mean, you can apply for one and you'll never hear back. Belarus is the last dictatorship in Europe and it is not a place you want to go for any reason. So when we got on this train, the doors would close, we would go through Belarus and we would all pray that it wouldn't break down because then we would have to go through some time in a Belarusian prison, but yes, this is the shiny train yard. and early, the various areas at the reactor site for cleaning, so to speak, radiological cleaning, are effectively separated by these benches that you have to step over to remind you that this is the clean area, you have to wear shoe covers and you know. at least these governments to go here sideways for some reason this is part of the good I don't know why everyone is sideways but regardless you get the picture if you notice at the top of the screen that it should be to the left of the screen let's see if I can rotate it that's a giant puddle of water this place is falling apart even though they have money from the European Bank for the reconstruction and development of the new safe confinement arch the Chernobyl site itself doesn't have much of money and as a result things are falling apart and the amount of pollution that is getting into places where it shouldn't be like this quote, the clean area is quite high, that puddle of water was quite warm, something like 5 to 8 mr at contact time, that's generally pretty bad as I said water gets in everywhere and in this case they were using leg covers to catch the water.

In another of the corridors water leaked and, therefore, all the lights are off, the footwear, which was given to us, breaks after walking about a kilometer which is not particularly encouraging if one wants to put the shoes back on. boots walking down the hall if you notice this gold corrugated material that you see on the sides it is anodized aluminum and it is placed there Because it covers all the lead sheets that were attached to the wall, which happened after the accident, the entire installation was hopelessly contaminated and you can scrub all you want, but in the end it is very difficult to remove radioactive contamination. things so what they ended up doing was lowering it to an acceptable level and then putting lead sheets over it and then designing and fastening these things on top of this is the unit two control room so this is what a complete...

In the control room it appears that unit C and unit two were shut down in 2000. The reactors actually continued to operate after the 1986 Chernobyl accident because Ukraine desperately needed power and as a result the fuel is still quite hot and is producing a reasonable amount of decomposition. heat and there is a team that sits in the control room at all times monitoring it, that's Nathan. I actually took a photo of this because it's a really cool diagram of the Chernobyl reactor that's simplified, it shows the core and the relative locations of These water and vapor separators are okay, like I said, there's some equipment that stays there, so that there are people working on site and in the reactor control rooms, which I have to imagine must be a bit of a surreal job, this is within the main interior.

The turbogenerator, all those bits you see here are from the reactor 4 turbogenerator, so they're pretty contaminated and pretty easy to spot. There's actually a good story behind it, so we were trying to figure out exactly what he was doing. the dose rate was so high in the area when we were there, so we got a group of us standing in a circle, one person, so there's a space, we have one person in the center with a central scintillator and we all rotate it. around until we found out which direction the center, the subsequent reading was high enough, who basically made like a 2 pie meat shield, worked pretty well, completely baffled all the guides who were with us, they said what are you doing by linking your arms and spinning? around anyway, that's a good way to find sources if you're in a pinch, this is to look in the other direction from that same vantage point that's in the last photo behind those walls with the little signs of radiation on them there are pieces of the ventilation chimney. which is quite iconic, they have been pretty well decontaminated in that area of ​​the fence, the dose rate or more precisely the exposure rate was 10 m/h and yes, that's another close up photo and I managed to place my phone above. and get a good shot, unfortunately none of the pieces are uncovered.

I really would have liked to see the orange and white of the ventilation stack, but I didn't take the same shot again, a slightly different shot of the turbogenerator hallway looking in unit 1 2 Direction more detritus oh, here's a close up a little better of those components. One of the interesting things I discovered about the facility is a way that access is controlled, so instead of having an RFID card or something, they have cameras and operators, so what? You see, there is a camera here, so Stanislaus would scan a license plate which would automatically call someone who is an operator.

Stanislaus would say: Hey, I'm at this door. I want to enter this location. Will you let me in? and then they would look at the The camera determined that yes, that's Stanislaus, he wants to go to this area and then they would approve him and let him walk through the halls of the sarcophagus. In fact, I can see those sheets of lead here that he was talking about, I don't know how. how thick they are in there or how close they are to falling over, but I'm sure there are several thousand pounds of lead in there alone.

These are the main circulation pumps, half of the main circulation pumps for reactor two and each of these. It takes something around Luke, around 40 megawatts to really work. These are aligned differently and are a different type and the ones used in reactor four because the reactors wanted them to be of an earlier design, ironically reactors 1 and 2 actually don't. It has all the safety measures that reactor 4 has, which is a little scary to think about getting more photos right, like I said. The Dawg problem at Chernobyl is right outside the entrance to a clean facility and occasionally these dogs wander in there, unfortunately the dogs are big. hairy piles of easily airborne pollution, so they would come in, you know, people would go shoo them away, shake their coats or whatever, and then, you know, cleaning in aisle 3 because now there's pollution in everywhere, more sad-looking puppies, yet new safe confinement.

Again, to give you an idea of ​​the scale, let's play find the workers, zoom in those are workers right there, you see them, yes, they are very, very small next to this facility, yes, I think I have a chance a little better here, that's a guy over there there's also another guy here yeah, this place is or this structure is absolutely huge, it's really hard to understand exactly how big it is, so this is in an area called the local zone, so which are the immediate surroundings of several hundred meters. the reactor, as you can see, the hazmat equipment that we use there is significantly different than what we would use inside the reactor or inside the sarcophagus, mainly because the threat of dust in this area is quite large, as you can see, we are walking. fill is actually meters and meters of fill because the ground was so contaminated that they scraped it off put fill there put fill on top because just the residual contamination was enough to make it dangerous to use as a workplace, although they are not shown in this image or I think in any picture here there are little concrete and lead structures behind which workers take breaks because you have a dose limit that applies while you work there and if you're going to take a smoke break like a large fraction of the population of Ukraine smokes or you know you're going to take a break of some other kind, they don't want you to accumulate doses during that time, so you basically hide in a little concrete shack for a while with a few inches of lead between you and the reactor, another shot inside the sarcophagus.

Edie explains something about which I know, as you can see, this place is not exactly in the best condition inside and one thing that worried me a lot was the amount of dust that was very, very easy to kick up in the area inside from the reactor control room 4 selfie I didn't want to have in the control room in this album because it hasn't changed much since last year, but there is a partition wall that actually separates reactors 3 and 4 that are being assembled and It runs through the edge of the fourth control room and for a while we didn't know if we would be able to visit it or not due to the continuous construction.

I am very happy that we were able to remove most of the instruments, it is not clear why we were told which part was due to contamination, but the pattern doesn't really make sense, this is reactor control. cartogram of the room, excuse me, cartogram of the reactor core which, as I said, was illuminated and could display various parameters related to the various fuel channels, there are only two control bar indicators, well, yes, actually only these are left control bar indicators and we think that actually some of these might not be original, someone might have stolen the real one and put another one in.

I don't have any evidence to support it, but I suspect there is significant looting here. This is a pretty entertaining photo that means the smoking area is under control. room you shouldn't smoke you shouldn't take off your mask for any reason it's a warning sign of high gamma radiation in fact it wasn't that high the dose rate somewhere in the range of 30 mr per hour we also explored a little bit outside of the most formal part of the reactor facility, that is, we went to a place called Berea Kafka, which is a burial place for reactor waste, not waste like nuclear waste, but the waste is pieces of metal and other things that are contaminated. and so they were removed when the new Safe Confinement Arch was being built or when let's say they were building the separation wall between reactors 3 and 4 and there were some incredibly hot spots, so I think I'll have some more photos later, but just below that little triangle. the dose rate was a hundred and fifty mr per hour so 0.15 REM per hour is extremely high and that was just in a basically uncontrolled, unpatrolled field, no warning signs, dress up, very fun, that It was the truck they sent us to decontaminate honestly.

It wasn't particularly contaminated in the first place, they weren't going to give us really fun things to play with, it's all of us and then as you can tell, the real workers here don't use even a fraction of what we are or decontamination, yeah, look. hardly nothing these are pieces of metal that have come out of the reactor, we are not exactly sure what parts they are, no one couldanswer our questions about them but they were also quite contaminated somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 mr per contact hour in some places more photos of Chernobyl or of Chernobyl from Pripyat yes yes just the cold I caught on the way back The total dose I received on this entire expedition - the round

trip

flights was 0.6 millisievert so effectively, nothing.

Well, all the high radiation areas we were in encouraged us to walk quickly. Basically what it boils down to is that time portion, distance, and shielding were emphasized. More questions, yes, no ideological control in Ukraine is a totally different Game than in the US. There are the same types of controls that exist in the United States. they just don't exist on that site, there are four areas that are immediately dangerous to your health, you know, 10 R an hour, something like that, from what I understand, there are closed doors that prevent one from accidentally accessing them and there are signs of warning in a variety of places, but I don't think there is the same standardization of, you know, 5 minutes per hour in a radiation area, etc., yes, also, no, you won't be able to see the sarcophagus itself because it will be contained . inside the new arc of safe confinement it is practically now at 75 degrees, let's see one last time.

I checked the new safe confinement arch with 75% of the way over the reactor. Regular tourist visits to Pripyat will continue to occur. This program that I participated in is something very special Carl Eadie and Eric have done this kind of thing once before, that was the trip I took last year and they intend to do it once a year whenever they can, but that is pretty much your only chance to get that kind of access. to the reactor it takes a lot of work, someone else eats something that actually disappeared here Chernobyl in the state yeah, no, um, there's a pretty disturbing place across from the Kadhim truck memorial, so when the accident happened there was a guy who depended on how you look at it, whether he was lucky or unlucky and he didn't die from radiation poisoning, he died from being crushed in the explosion and his remains are inside the reactor and inside the sarcophagus, he never recovered better than dying from radiation poisoning, but of anyway You don't know, it's a fantastic way to go, the memorial inside the sarcophagus is quite interesting to visit and you know, quite somber, it makes you reflect a little on the enormous human cost that the accident had on you.