Chernobyl, The Worst Nuclear Disaster in History | Prism of the Past

In 1986,

nuclear

reactor 4 at the Chernobyl energy complex experienced a catastrophic meltdown as a result of faulty reactor design and a series of errors made by inadequately trained personnel, resulting in the largest uncontrolled radioactive release into the environment ever recorded in any civil operations in Chernobyl. It is considered the

worst

nuclear

disaster

in

history

and it didn't even happen that long ago. Exposure to radioactivity will have long-lasting consequences, but all is lost for this area of ​​Ukraine if we truly wall off an entire area and wait for nature to take its course. and the land recovers, will this area ever be habitable again or will there be no escape from the past?

Let's find out in today's episode of Prism of the Past Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode. Today I will talk about what happened in Chernobyl. I've talked about the Three Mile Island nuclear incidents and other nuclear incidents before and you can't really mention nuclear

disaster

s without Chernobyl coming to mind, so I thought I really had to cover Chernobyl even if it was just once, I'm sure that many of you tune in. We weren't even born when the Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986, but considering how far back some of these issues go from the

prism

of the past, this one honestly seems pretty recent, so let's start with the Chernobyl energy complex which is located about 130 kilometers away. north of kyiv.

Ukraine consisted of four nuclear reactors, the first two were built between 1970 and 1977, while units 3 and 4 were completed at two more reactors that were under construction at the time of the incident. This surprised me because it means that this nuclear incident took place within just a few years of the completion of these four units, this is already a big red flag pointing to a problem with the construction of the units. This area of ​​Ukraine has been described as a Belarusian-type forest area with a low population density of between 115,000 and 135 inhabitants. 000 people lived within a 30 kilometer radius of the power plant, 50,000 of them lived in Pripyat, which is the city that was about three kilometers from Chernobyl and when you see all these urban explorers they are going to like the abandoned towns of Chernobyl or whatever pripyat they usually go to, in other words, although there may not have been many people around, there were many people in the surrounding areas who could potentially be exposed now these nuclear reactors were of rbmk design, as the nuclear association explains world.

The rbmk-1000 is a Soviet-designed and built graphite moderate pressure tube that uses slightly enriched uranium dioxide fuel. It is a boiling light water reactor with two circuits that feed steam directly to the turbines without the intervention of a water pump with a heat exchanger to the bottom of the fuel. The channels boil as it progresses to pressure tubes that produce steam. There are four main coolant circulation pumps, one of which is always on standby, and several safety systems as part of the reactor design. The RBMK reactor also possesses a positive vacuum coefficient where an increase in steam bubbles is accompanied by an increase in the reactivity of the core, so to put it very simply, nuclear power plants are actually like fancy steam engines.

The boiled water turns into steam that spins a turbine which then generates power in a steam engine in a nuclear reactor. Heat is caused by the fission or splitting of uranium and that is what boils water. The Chernobyl plant was a high-power trough-type reactor that used water to cool the core and generate steam for its reactions. Crucially, Most of the Chernobyl control rods were made of boron with graphite tips. The control rod slid into the reactor to decrease reactivity. The boron slowed the reactions but the graphite tips initially increased the rate of fission. This was a manufacturing defect. design and one of the main factors that caused the explosion in some man-made disasters the cause There have been a series of falls in standards in this case, an inherent design flaw played a huge role, of course, the errors of the planned operators and lack of safety culture were also factors, but this particular mistake almost made the Chernobyl disaster destined to happen, I tried to understand.

First, he discovered what specifically triggered this catastrophe and found a 1986 New York Times article describing the events. Moscow had apparently been warned about defects in the reactor design nine years before the disaster. The accident was attributed almost exclusively to human error, but the power station's chairman, Lord Marshall, claims that Chernobyl's designers actually gave operators too difficult a task. He listed seven deficiencies in the Chernobyl unit discovered in 1977, when the British were deciding to build reactors with a similar design. The British used graphite. reactors, but cooled them with inert gas, not water, and warned the Soviets about their design flaws.

The biggest problem was the aforementioned positive vacuum coefficient, unique to Russian rbmk reactors. The water cools the core and slows the reaction, but when the water turns to steam, it can form bubbles or empty. The ratio of water to steam is the vacuum coefficient and in many nuclear reactors there is more steam which means less reactivity for the rbmk reactors. It's the opposite, meaning there is greater reactivity when there is more vapor. It makes nuclear fission more efficient and speeds it up, which equals more heat, more heat boils water faster, generating more and more steam, setting in motion a potentially dangerous cycle.

The point here is to say that the people at the Chernobyl plant were warned of its The large variation in neutron levels, the fact that the huge graphite core was getting much hotter than the fuel itself, and the weak structure, were points which caught their attention but they did not take it seriously and all of these events and lack of action is what led to the events that occurred in 1986 according to the nuclear regulatory commission a sudden surge of power during a test of reactor systems destroyed Unit 4 of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl Ukraine This was April 26, 1986.

There have been quite a few documentaries about Chernobyl itself and what happened there, but what can generally be agreed on is that the safety protocols were violated. Safety, the unit 4 reactor was supposed to be shut down for routine maintenance on April 25 and again this test which was scheduled for April 25, the day before the event, was delayed. for 10 hours by grid officials, this meant that the night shift staff had to perform something they were not trained to perform, the reactor had to be put into a low power state, a low power state in an rbmk reactor is not like putting your computer into sleep mode, as cnet explains that it cannot be quickly returned to its usual power state, however, the Chernobyl control room tried to do exactly that, the core temperature dropped so much that it stopped boiling water and producing steam once the plant workers shut down the reactor at 1:23 am water was no longer pumped to the core the safety test shut down the reactor the water remaining evaporated so there was more vapor more vapor results in greater reactivity the core became, as they put it, a giant ball pit for kids in an earthquake with neutrons bouncing around the chamber and constantly colliding with each other, The emergency stop button should have slowed the reaction, but because the graphite tips of the control rod caused the energy to increase even more, this was not a nuclear reaction, but rather a steam explosion caused by the massive buildup. of pressurized air slid into the reactor room, igniting a second explosion that ended nuclear reactions in the core and left a hole in the Chernobyl reactor building.

Two workers died as a result of these explosions. One body was never recovered and the second died in hospital a few hours later, radioactive debris from fuel and reactor components rained down on the area as the fire spread from the building housing reactor 4 to other nearby buildings, smoke and Toxic dust was blown by the wind and through the The initial fire was extinguished a few hours later, at 5 in the morning. The resulting graphite-fueled fire took 10 days and 250 firefighters continued pumping into the atmosphere to extinguish the toxic emissions for 10 more days. Fires broke out in the unit 4 building and the adjacent turbine hall. 14 firefighters arrived on the scene at 1:28 a.m. and dozens more arrived as reinforcements until approximately 4 a.m.

They received the most radiation exposure, and in late July, 6 firefighters and 22 other plant employees died from poisoning. Acute radiation, according to Live Science reports. Work on Pripyat began on April 27, about 36 hours after the accident occurred, by which time many residents were already complaining of vomiting, headaches and other signs of radiation sickness. Authorities closed an 18-mile area around the plant on May 14 and evacuated another 116,000 residents. In the coming years, according to the world nuclear association, 220,000 more residents were advised to move to less contaminated areas. Many residents believed they would return within a few days, so they left their personal belongings behind.

Some Ukrainian families learned about the danger of radiation. friends and family and fled the area of ​​their own volition, the government also provided little information about the radiation in April and May 1986. Fifty miles away, at a wool processing plant in Chennai, northern Ukraine, the Workers suffered nosebleeds, dizziness and nausea, researchers discovered radiation levels in the factory of up to 180 millisieverts per hour; In other words, these workers exceeded the safe annual dose of radiation in less than a minute. Nearly 300 women gained liquidator status, which was normally reserved for those who had documented exposure during the early years.

Days of cleaning up after the accident while researching, I was really surprised at how little information there seemed to be about the government's response to all of this. Well, by that I mean how little the government did. Many people chose some words to express their reaction. Responders to the disaster apparently stated that they believed they were responding to an electrical fire. Historians estimate that more than 600 pilots risk exposing themselves to dangerous levels of radiation by dumping sand, clay, lead and concrete into reactor 4 to seal it. Other sources add that the attitude of the superiors was always questionable even before the accident shortly before Chernobyl Ivanov head of the production department responsible for everything done by the operating personnel justified the increasingly frequent emergency situations at power plants stated To cite that not a single nuclear power plant with a nuclear reactor fully complies with the operating regulations is really impossible so to cite this source the Chernobyl notebook also says that the firefighters were there without respirators or protective clothing they were not warned of what they were really getting.

Getting into the first hours and even the first day after the accident no one seemed to understand that the reactor exploded and there had been a nuclear release into the atmosphere the message was simply that there was an explosion and a fire and there was no word about the radiation at all. Apparently the general secretary of the communist party mikhail gorbachev saw no need to wake up other members of the soviet leadership or interrupt their weekend by calling an emergency session when the deputy head of the soviet government, boris serbina, arrived in ukraine, it had elapsed 18 hours since the explosion and very little had been done, he suggested using water to stop the nuclear fire but the commission explained that this would make things worse after 9 pm as they thought three powerful explosions lit up the sky above the reactor they were told to evacuate I immediately told him that children were running in the streets, people were hanging washed bedding to dry, and the atmosphere was radioactive.

However, government regulations from 1963 stated that it was not necessary to evacuate until the radiation (a cumulative dose of 75 Rankin Mark Renkins is a radiation unit and citizens in the area may have been absorbing approximately 4.5 renkins per day yet because the threshold has not been reached. The commission's senior medical officer declined to order an evacuation while police and Military officers wore respirators and gas masks. Children returning from school were simply given iodine pills andIt was almost exactly 24 hours later, at 1 a.m. on April 27, when local officials received an order to prepare citizens for evacuation. For another 12 hours citizens remained in the dark, radiation levels that, according to Soviet laws, should have triggered an automatic public warning, were recorded but ignored Children from the area, like Sophia Moscalenko, had also spoken out in recent years and said party officials assured her and her family that the Chernobyl fire was under control, but whispers contradicted the news and more windows remained closed, she said in a 2019 Vox interview that through her connections with merchants From the black market known as speculators, our neighbor Irene produced a Geiger counter, a device used to detect radiation, and we dragged it home one night, placed its wand over milk, eggs, bread, everything crunched contaminated with radiation, we wondered. loud, if the device was defective, Irene had to return the counter the next day, but the creak remained in her mind.

A soundtrack to my worries. We'll talk about some of the lasting consequences of this incident, but first I want to spend some time talking about it. first responders and how they were treated, but before we get into that, I'm going to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, maybe you have back-to-back meetings, errands to run, or tasks to attend to, so what's the secret? to clear everything on your to-do list, well maybe it's a little help from Doordash, you can get dinner essentials delivered and everything on your shopping list, maybe you're cooking one of your favorites tonight but unfortunately you have forgotten a key.

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chernobyl

3828 is a 30 minute documentary about the 3828 people who risked and in some cases sacrificed their lives to clean dangerous and contaminated areas there are many more people who risk their lives, this documentary only focuses exclusively on cleaning the roofs and if you have 30 minutes in a day, I recommend you watch it , it is available on youtube anyway, it is explained that many of the people who were doing The Cleanup were actually volunteers, they were given a threshold of how much radiation they were allowed to absorb and then they were not allowed to return.

However, many of these brave volunteers insisted on working because they knew they would be forced to do so. leaving an inexperienced new recruit would have to take his place many remotely controlled robots and machines were used to clean up every time a robot couldn't do his job a large number of people had to take his place the civilian general in charge felt defeated as person whenever people needed to work on the roofs in these dangerous high radiation areas, although that general received the socialist labor hero award he later never used it, the men who worked on the sites were sent in two minute shifts to shovel graphite and how, transporting them there, he feels as if he were sending people to their deaths, those two minutes that, he says, lasted a quarter of a century for him and he will never be able to forget on a personal note, what really brought me here It was how completely depressing and helpless the whole situation seemed sending endlessly. person after person risked their life and his health by shortening its lifespan, all due to design flaws that people ignored from the beginning in the weeks and months that followed the disaster.

Hundreds of thousands of firefighters, engineers, civil and military personnel were tasked with participating in the clean-up. They were known as liquidators. One source claims there were eight hundred thousand. BBC reports indicate there were up to eight hundred and thirty thousand. Another source says there were eight hundred thousand. Official records state that only six hundred thousand were granted this liquidator status, most of them ranging in age from 18 to 22 years old. It is not known how many are still alive, but more than 90 of them had radiation-induced health problems, such as thyroid cancer, heart disease, and respiratory and digestive problems.

Many scientists say that not all of these health problems can be attributed to radiation. but there is no doubt that these men suffered and many continue to suffer after this disaster there is evidence that the authorities were not honest with the people without a doubt a report by members of the Russian Academy of Sciences indicates that up to 15 of these liquidators died from 2005. Considering how young these cleaners were, between 112,000 and 125,000 dying in 20 years is devastating, but for the record, many figures in this report have been largely disputed. Ukrainian authorities maintained their own registry and claim that in 2015 there were 3,118,988 Ukrainian cleaning workers in the database, although according to a recent report by the National Research Center for Radiological Medicine of Ukraine, 6,551,453 cleaning workers were screened for radiation exposure.

Mortality rates in contaminated areas are also much higher than in the rest of In Ukraine in 2007 the rate was 26 out of 1,000, while the national average was 16 out of 1,000. There are still millions of people living on contaminated land, so this story is far from over now that time has passed, the health effects have begun to become clear and the full scope of what happened at Chernobyl can be better understood. . I downloaded the Chernobyl at 30 update from 1986 to 2016 from the world health organization and it was quite eye-opening, to say the least. It is difficult to determine exactly which thyroid cancers are due to radiation in the area, but there is certainly an increased risk.

Food and water safety has also been a huge issue, as has the mental health of those in the area of ​​the incident. Sophia, the woman who was 10 years old at the time and who now listens to the Geiger. The accountant in her nightmares said the effects of radiation hit her after the evacuation. She had scaly patches between her fingers and learned that she developed dermatitis and an autoimmune disease. Yes, it can be caused by stress, but it was also a common effect of radiation exposure. Other options. They have reported children with heart conditions caused by contaminated food, extremely poor blood circulation, and worse.

A source interviewed children at Ukraine's largest medical clinic for people living with the consequences of Chernobyl and reads: a girl named Molina, also 14 years old, was too nervous to speak and fiddled with the sleeves of her dress. There was something about his mind after a few minutes said he would go home the next day his doctor said he had two left kidneys, both twice the normal size this was written in 2016 and it is difficult I think a lot has changed since then other people who were children at the time they said that their experience with Chernobyl involved losing their baby teeth suddenly, their lips and mouth turning black and being sick for a month and with a constant fever, there are countless reports about the increase in leukemia from thyroid cancer and More truly, there is no shortage of this, but Chernobyl not only affected people, it also changed the environment.

A report on the environmental consequences of Chernobyl published in 2006 states that the conditions of plants and animals changed rapidly in the months and first years after the incident before finally stabilizing during those first days, the areas closest to Chernobyl saw a rapid increase in mortality rates among plants and animals after animals and plants in the area experienced genetic consequences, some of the animals still living Perhaps it is surprising that to this day there are domestic pets. Hundreds of stray dogs still live around the plant. Descendants of pets that were abandoned. Many dogs tried to chase their owners, but the soldiers repelled them.

Owners often left notes on their doors begging officials to spare their pets. lives, but officials were ordered to kill as many as possible. many dogs have been authorized for adoption. Available dogs are decontaminated. Their fur is cleaned of radioactive dust and they are carefully examined. They pose no threat to anyone who handles them, although many of the dogs. People don't live long in Chernobyl, no more than four years, the main contributing factor is actually the harsh Ukrainian winters, not the radiation sources that confirm that the area around the former nuclear plant will not be habitable for humans. until about 20,000 years from now and I mean, maybe some technology will come along and change that, but as of now the area is not considered safe.

Scientists have found evidence of elevated levels of cataracts and albinism and lower rates of beneficial bacteria in wildlife there, as well as additional evidence of the long-term effects of radiation that humans may one day return there, but I think if we do it it won't be in our lifetimes, much less now that evacuated cities and early abandoned buildings are something of a tourist thing, which is a bit strange, a CNN article shows what looks like a kind of tourist trap store with bears and gas masks used for aesthetics. It has become part of the dark tourism phenomenon, like the 911 memorial and former concentration camps.

Personally I've always been a bit iffy about dark tourism, I'm not saying we shouldn't visit these places, they have huge historical significance and it's an important way to remember the people who risk their lives and see

history

with our own eyes . I know, like for me and for my Polish family. We will not go to Auschwitz, we will never visit it, I will never set foot there and I am perfectly fine with that. I went to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC and I almost cried there, so that was enough for me. I could really put off going to these kinds of really serious places where you should be very respectful of them and see people taking smiling selfies.

It just doesn't make much sense to me, but people now see Chernobyl as one of these dark places. tourist places as to how

chernobyl

is represented today, it has been somewhat controversial the hbo series chernobyl has sometimes veered between caricature and madness according to the new yorker some say it is intended to be a miniseries and the writer has never wanted Let no one think of their The series is the whole truth, however, when I address dark topics like this, I think it is best to be as accurate as possible and true to the reality of the situation.

If you're making up a movie about a nuclear accident, then I have some freedom, you know, leeway to create whatever you want, but when you name the program Chernobyl and then you get it wrong, it's a little strange to this day Chernobyl fascinates people. people and even at the time of writing this article. was published by biz journal on the subject, not that anything new has really happened there, but Chernobyl still absolutely captivates people, its impact is fascinating but tragic, but with all that said, that's where I'm going to end this episode of Prism of the past I hope you enjoyed it and if you did thank you for staying please consider subscribing after you like all that good stuff thank you for spending some of your time here with me today I appreciate it and I will see you in the next episode bye