Anybody watching Chernobyl on Sky

2b1ask1

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Child No.3 has just set up Chenoble via VPN, sitting down for a marathon with Jeanette.
 

mjheathcote

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I went through the photo archive I posted earlier after watching 1 to 4.
The 3 men that went inside to drain the tanks all survived and where given medals 20 years later, it came across as a death sentence at the time. A lot of the miners did die however, and no cooling heat exchanges where required after all the digging as the core cooled down sufficiently on its own.
 

Delmonte

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Superb programme. I’ve been fascinated by Chernobyl (and anti nuclear) ever since I delivered the morning papers the morning of the disaster as a lad.
The show is very well done, especially how it’s quite restrained in showing the true health and death toll, very unsensationalised. Downplayed if anything.

Some superb stuff available on YouTube:

This one by an ex Chernobyl liquidator, actual film of the liquidators on the roof, moving graphite with shovels and hopeless looking DIY ‘protection’ note especially the guy Viktor who died young not long after, and the narrator speaks of his own disabilities without detailing them:


This by a Ukrainian cameraman filming the immediate aftermath, he died soon after:


A more regular doc but still good:


It amazes me that Chernobyl stayed open and continued producing power until 2000... and there are I think 12 more RBMK reactors still running in Ukraine... Their life has just been extended until ‘at least’ 2030, and run on a shoestring budget in a country at (civil?) war...One of them very close to the ongoing war in the east, well within range of a stray (or deliberate) rocket strike...

Then there is the ongoing attempt to contain the disaster, there are big concerns over the ‘new sarcophagus’ and the continuing decay and sinking of the ‘elephants foot’ into the ground...

What I also find shocking is the now blasé acceptance of nuclear power as totally safe, the only option for mankind’s future power needs, even from environmentalists.... And the strange propaganda (not from the soviets or the Russians, we expect that) but from the West as well, see Pandora’s Promise, an American energy film which brushes off Chernobyl as pretty much a minor event and agrees with the official ‘31 deaths’ claim...

Deeply worrying. I wonder how much less we would know if the USSSR hadn’t collapsed, or this had happened in Russia instead of Ukraine?
 

Delmonte

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878
Avidly, having worked on reactors its especially compelling....

Also had graphite thrown at me, some mad some mad lads back then, the graphite dance. We all got away with it (so far) but the chaps who worked in the ponds almost always died shortly after retirement with some sort of cancer. I refused to go in there...

Bloody **** mate, where was that?
 

Wanderer

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5,791
Bloody **** mate, where was that?
Better not say! Was the 80’s. There was this old fella used to pull fuel elements out with no protection at all, when stuff was going wrong and he wanted them out quick. He lived into his late 80’s - guess some people are less effected by this stuff. Thinking back now it was cos this reactor was unsleeved and the graphite bricks had shifted, so sometimes they got caught and messed up the charge machine. Move it away, pull them out by hand!

Chief Reactor Physicist there, still a good mate if you want me to ask him owt, told me the charge machine from reactor 4 at Chernobyl was blown off the pile cap through the roof and never found. Must have been obliterated...
 

WaveyDavey

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What I also find shocking is the now blasé acceptance of nuclear power as totally safe, the only option for mankind’s future power needs, even from environmentalists.... And the strange propaganda (not from the soviets or the Russians, we expect that) but from the West as well, see Pandora’s Promise, an American energy film which brushes off Chernobyl as pretty much a minor event and agrees with the official ‘31 deaths’ claim...

I can't comment on Russian nuclear power but the 'blase' comment couldn't be further from the truth. The UK regulatory environment is almost excessively rigid - witness how difficult it is to build new nuclear plant in the UK right now.

Without wanting to belittle the obvious dangers, credible estimates put the number of deaths directly as a result of nuclear power generation, since the beginning, at around 200 (from memory). More will likely have died from the stochastic effects (i.e. increased chances of cancer), but the increase is so small, and the base instances of cancer so high (from memory, roughly a quarter of us all will die from cancer), it's difficult to reliably estimate.

This is all terrible stuff, BUT, to put it into context:

Millions of people continue to die from the pollution caused by conventional power (eg coal) generation - when everything works as intended! This ignores the indirect effects of climate change.

2000 people die in the road every year from accidents on the road. Should we ban motor vehicles? I have no idea how many die from smoking, but I suspect it's a lot more.

Unfortunately, nuclear power has a terrible (and quite unjustified) image problem. Anyone who tries to communicate any sort of scientific fact on the subject tends to be shot down as part of some sort of cover-up conspiracy.
 
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The main problem with nuclear power for me its longevity of waste - working dangers can and should be managed
Yes it is not Carbon based but it is certainly not 'green'
Also how are these recent energy plants that run on wood (trees) treated as 'green'?
thread drift alert.......................
 

Delmonte

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878
I can't comment on Russian nuclear power but the 'blase' comment couldn't be further from the truth. The UK regulatory environment is almost excessively rigid - witness how difficult it is to build new nuclear plant in the UK right now.

Without wanting to belittle the obvious dangers, credible estimates put the number of deaths directly as a result of nuclear power generation, since the beginning, at around 200 (from memory). More will likely have died from the stochastic effects (i.e. increased chances of cancer), but the increase is so small, and the base instances of cancer so high (from memory, roughly a quarter of us all will die from cancer), it's difficult to reliably estimate.

This is all terrible stuff, BUT, to put it into context:

Millions of people continue to die from the pollution caused by conventional power (eg coal) generation - when everything works as intended! This ignores the indirect effects of climate change.

2000 people die in the road every year from accidents on the road. Should we ban motor vehicles? I have no idea how many die from smoking, but I suspect it's a lot more.

Unfortunately, nuclear power has a terrible (and quite unjustified) image problem. Anyone who tries to communicate any sort of scientific fact on the subject tends to be shot down as part of some sort of cover-up conspiracy.

It seems to me the reason for lack of new reactors in the UK is the vast expense that no one wants to underwrite, rather than regulation, seeing as everyone from the government to the public to the environmentalists seem to want them?

I don’t think the industry has had an image problem since the 80s but if you read the post from Wanderer maybe it would be justified in having one...

Smoking? I’d ban it in all public spaces including outside but if you want to poison yourself in your own home fine.

No I wouldn’t ban cars, obvs!

200 deaths from nuke power ever? Really? How many from Chernobyl alone? The workers, the miners, the liquidators, the military that were sent there, the Pripyat residents...
The hospital for radiation diseases in Kiev (opened in 86 specifically for Chernobyl victims) that has treated over a million people, I don’t know how many of them lived...?
 

Delmonte

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878
Better not say! Was the 80’s. There was this old fella used to pull fuel elements out with no protection at all, when stuff was going wrong and he wanted them out quick. He lived into his late 80’s - guess some people are less effected by this stuff. Thinking back now it was cos this reactor was unsleeved and the graphite bricks had shifted, so sometimes they got caught and messed up the charge machine. Move it away, pull them out by hand!

Chief Reactor Physicist there, still a good mate if you want me to ask him owt, told me the charge machine from reactor 4 at Chernobyl was blown off the pile cap through the roof and never found. Must have been obliterated...

Christ....
I am going to take a wild guess that you were at the one that suffered a partial meltdown in the 60s, that at that point had a different name to what it does now. Was your mate around for that?
 

Wanderer

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5,791
Christ....
I am going to take a wild guess that you were at the one that suffered a partial meltdown in the 60s, that at that point had a different name to what it does now. Was your mate around for that?
The channel 'melt'? aka fire!? We had one where I was, 1967 I think, before my time.

Name never changed, must be the Windscale fire you are referring to, now Sellafield of course, mind you that was the 50's. I did go to Sellafield a lot, and Calder Hall sort of next door, wasn't based there tho.

My Chief Physicist buddy was given the task of running a project to remove all the contam from the pile at Sellafield, and bear in mind this is from memory and I'm not a physicist, they decided they needed some quantity I can't remember of Argon gas, and it would cost something like £90bn (there's huge amounts of dosh put aside for decommissioning, I mean HUGE!) but the plan was kiboshed because there wasn't enough Argon available in the world at the time. Probably still isn't.
 

WaveyDavey

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69
It seems to me the reason for lack of new reactors in the UK is the vast expense that no one wants to underwrite, rather than regulation, seeing as everyone from the government to the public to the environmentalists seem to want them?

Yes, and the expense is very much due to the difficulties in meeting the UK regulators' safety expectations.

200 deaths from nuke power ever? Really? How many from Chernobyl alone? The workers, the miners, the liquidators, the military that were sent there, the Pripyat residents...
The hospital for radiation diseases in Kiev (opened in 86 specifically for Chernobyl victims) that has treated over a million people, I don’t know how many of them lived...?

200 directly attributable to radiation (again, from memory). 30-odd of those happened during or immediately after Chernobyl.

I understand that there was sort of a reverse placebo effect after the accident, where if anyone in the area became ill it was immediately attributed to Chernobyl fallout (whether or not this was likely to be true). Add in the possibility of compensation and there is the potential for the indirect effects of radiation exposure in the local populace to be overestimated.

That said, it's certain that many may have had their lives shortened through long-term stochastic effects in the years since the accident - but we just can't reliably come up with a number. (If you get cancer, you can't be sure it was because of increased exposure to radiation, or you were going to get it anyway - unless it's something obvious like the thyroid). The effects of very low levels of exposure just aren't understood well.

I just quickly googled it and estimates seem to range from a few thousand up to 60,000 deaths in the long term from Chernobyl, which reflects this difficulty. Note that in the same period, hundreds of millions of people will die/ will have died from 'natural' cancer - so we are looking for needles in haystacks.

No-one died directly from acute radiation effects during the Fukushima accident, and estimates put the long-term impact in the 10s to low 1000s. Again, put it in perspective: 20,000 died almost instantly in the Tsunami.

So lets take the worst case estimates and pessimistically round them up to 100,000 to be sue. So, if we say that 100,000 have died or will potentially have their lives shortened* or as a result of nuclear power generation over the last 60 years, it is still, by orders of magnitude, the safest bulk power source available.

*noting you can just as easily die of something else before the radiation-induced cancer might have got you!

I can't find it now but I once read a study that calculated deaths per kwh of power generated. The most deadly? Solar power. Generates hardly any power, and it only takes one or two fitters to fall off a roof and the ratio becomes terrible.

I'll get off my high horse now! Back on topic: I'm planning on watching the first episode tonight. I've studied Chernobyl repeatedly over the years so I'm really interested to see it - though I understand it's entertainment, and not a documentary, so I suspect facts will have been altered for dramatic effect.
 
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Wanderer

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I think 66 directly died in the Kyshtym disaster in the 50’s. Given the secrecy in the USSR I’ll bet there were many more there and in other places..
 

WaveyDavey

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I think 66 directly died in the Kyshtym disaster in the 50’s. Given the secrecy in the USSR I’ll bet there were many more there and in other places..

Yes, that makes up part of the 200 or so total.

Fair point, though I bet you could say that about every industry in the USSR. Major nuclear incidents are hard to cover up though - the fallout is a bit of a tell-tale (Swedish health physicists alerted the world to the full extent of the Chernobyl accident when the USSR was still playing it down, for example).

Everyone's heard of Chernobyl and Fukushima, meanwhile unforgivable non-nuclear accidents, like the Bhopal chemical plant (killed many thousands), and the hundreds of thousands killed by dam failures (170,000 in one accident in the 70s; 200-odd in once incident just this year) occur all the time but are largely unknown by the general public.
 
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Couchtuner is very good for TV shows. Been using it for years.
Though when the copyright cops close it down every few months,
it'll morph into a new domain. Currently it's on https://2mycouchtuner.me
There's very little that you can't find on Couchtuner from US & UK
Enjoy ;)
 

Wanderer

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Just google pirate proxy or run your own proxy. If anyone is desperate I have on my Plex server in a Dublin DC, 100mb link no data limit restrictions or I can drop it in an SCP/SFTP area so you can download locally. There's nae pron on it mind.
 

Contigo

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There's an amazing docu on Youtube I watched on Thursday night about the history of Uranium which is well worth a watch.


That 3828 one above is pretty much all the content used in Episode 4 of Chernobyl!