Posted on 03/31/2022 8:10:51 AM PDT by Meet the New Boss
They were shutdown around 2002. You can’t “convert” an RBMK to some other type of (safer) reactor; it’s a graphite moderated power reactor with no real containment vessel, something only Soviet engineers with Stalin’s pistol pointing at their heads could conceive of.
Lying? It depends upon where you get your information.
You mentioned the IAEA. Here is a detailed report from them that includes such things as:
“The fate of the fourth reactor where the tragic accident occurred in 1986 is as yet undetermined.”
“The isotopes Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 are therefore still present in the area to this day.”
” Although some of the radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere still linger (such as Strontium-90 and Caesium-137), they are at tolerable exposure levels for limited periods of time. Some residents of the exclusion zone have returned to their homes at their own free will, and they live in areas with higher than normal environmental radiation levels. However, some of these levels are not fatal. Exposure to low but unusual levels of radiation over a period of time is less dangerous than exposure to a huge amount at once, and studies have been unable to link any direct increase in cancer risks to chronic low-level exposure.”
Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 year) At reactor four, in 2009, it was measured at 2.4 to 2.6 in the surrounding area, and an immense 14 to 22 at the Pripyrat Cemetery. So even if you determine lowering levels at a thirty year half life, you still have a strong possibility of radiation poisoning and death with exposure. And if you can remove it and put it somewhere else, it is still going to be a contaminated area for an extended length of time in the surrounding area. 22 years after the explosion, 2008, radiation levels inside the reactor hall were approximately 34 Sv/hr – a lethal dose in 10-20 minutes. That’s 14 years ago and if you consider a half life which would be in 2038, it would still by 17 Sv/hr moving the the lethal dose to about an hour when less than 1 Sv/hr is considered safe background.
So, finding these types of measurements from various sources, and understanding the “half life” needed to erase the exposure problem to be safe, and the possibility of existing radiated rods to be melted down with stupidity of shutting down the water circulation, as water heats and fails to cool the rods in a standing situation, then I’d say when they turned off the pumps, they opened Pandora’s box.
So before you call someone a liar, you might do a little better research which I am not going to do for you.
wy69
Also, there is a two part British produced series titled: Chernobyl: The New Evidence. It can be found on some of the torrent sites.
Also, a two hour program titled Chernobyl: Secrets, Lies and the Untold Stories is scheduled to air on Sunday, April 10th on the Science Channel which is part of Discovery. I'm not sure if the two part British series is the same as the one being shown on the Science Channel. In many cases, if a British narrated series airs on the Discovery Channel there, they sometimes rename it, and use an American narrator instead.
Finally, I recommend the book: Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham.
Thanks for that information.
No one will ever know if this is really true or not, but there is clear evidence combat went on around this plant.
Someone said stirring up the dirt/dust would irradiate things again and I wonder if that is true?
If it permeates the ground itself, that would be virtually impossible to clean up and no nuclear accident site will ever truly be “safe” it seems like.
You're confusing a couple of different things. One is the high radiation levels inside the blown-up remains of reactor 4 (which can't be cooled; the cooling system was blown up in the explosion) and the other is the heat (not radiation) generated by the spent fuel rods from the other (decommissioned) reactors. Those fuel rods are twenty years old by now, and shouldn't have required active cooling much past the 6 month mark.
Those reactors aren’t very good at making highly fissionable materials.
L
IIRC, it was something to do with the most direct route.
I don’t believe anything from Ukrainian sources—propaganda.
The soil is contaminated with fission products, uranium, plutonium, etc. Stirring it up makes it possible for people to breathe it, inadvertently eat it, get it in their hair and clothing, etc. Whether it's still radioactive enough to cause acute radiation sickness, I don't know.
I have many memories that will never go away. Excuse me if I don’t buy everything the government is selling.
You need to read the rest of this thread we started talking about storage and dirty bombs.
According to an article from the Washington Post, 9 March this year and around two weeks after the Russians took control of the Chernobyl site, Ukraine’s closed Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been disconnected from the nation’s power grid by Russian forces, Ukraine’s state-owned grid operator Ukrenergo said Wednesday, potentially jeopardizing the cooling of nuclear material stored at the site. Seeing as how it was a power plant the only nuclear source the Ukraine is admitting is the rods.
Electricity is needed for cooling, ventilation and fire-extinguishing systems at the closed site. In a statement on its Facebook page, Ukrenergo, an electricity transmission system operator in Ukraine and the sole operator of the country’s high-voltage transmission lines that is 100% owned by Ukrainian government (Ministry of Energy). said that emergency diesel generators have been turned on but that the fuel would last for only 48 hours.
They further warned that after reserve diesel generators run out of fuel, “cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent. Putin’s barbaric war puts entire Europe in danger.”
So what you end up with is a state-owned grid operator saying radiation leaks are imminent and he runs the operation while the International Atomic Energy Agency says there is no real danger but they are not saying there isn’t radiation there. And the only place it could be, supposedly, is sealed in reactor #4 as the other three are empty and destroyed.
In an article from the South China Morning Post dated 1 April, it stated:
Russian troops have left the Chernobyl nuclear plant after soldiers got “significant doses” of radiation from digging trenches at the highly contaminated site, Ukraine’s state power company said Thursday as heavy fighting raged on the outskirts of Kyiv and other fronts.
If it was safe before, then what changed that to the point of radiation sickness being diagnosed so quickly. Ukraine is saying it’s because they stopped the storage water cooling systems of water by killing the power and the diesel ran out. That was protecting against a possible melt down.
Like I said, it depends on who you believe. The Russians, or the people that have been running the plant since the 1986 accident and their separation in 1991? Toss up. But since there are confirmed soldiers leaving with radiation poisoning, then I think that narrows the choices a little. It is there now when it wasn’t before, and is strong enough to emit enough radiation to poison and we’re not being told how much. But it sure happened quickly.
Wy69
They're empty, but I'm sure their spent fuel rods are still stored on-site. There's nothing that can be done with reactor #4 except seal it up and hope for the best.
“There’s nothing that can be done with reactor #4 except seal it up and hope for the best.”
The rods, I think to include the ones from reactors 1 through 3, have a life of around 60 years. If they were stored properly and not allowed to melt down by circulating cold water to contain the heat that would turn into steam and go away, they should be deconned around 2050 and they can be disposed of safely. But until then, by shutting down the water cooling through cutting the electricity, and expecting 48 hours of diesel generators to accomplish the feat holding out for another roughly 28 years, they obviously didn’t attend the math class. And they aren’t saying how bad the radiation poisoning is or how they got it except through being in the area. The reason I thought all the rods were stored in #4 is because they did some work on #4 before they sealed it and they may have set up that one for deconning out service for all the rods.
Japan has about the same problem with at the Fukushima power plant where three of their six reactors are in shut down. But their problem continues. While the nuclear technicians searched for better cooling options, the water levels continued to decrease, exposing the tops of the fuel rods. Pressure also began building in some of the reactors. So far, at least three explosions have occurred in Reactors 1, 2, and 3. The explosions happened when the fuel rods began to melt and release gases that reacted with the surrounding steam, producing hydrogen. To release some pressure and prevent explosions, technicians vented some of the reactors, which also released some radioactive material into the environment. Officials have said that the pressure in Reactor 2 dropped significantly after the explosion there, suggesting that the explosion breached the steel containment structure - the reactor’s “last resort” for containing leaked radiation. It’s the gift that just keeps giving.
wy69
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