Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS
In the tons of reading material on this topic floating around, I found a very interesting journo article which outlines differences between the Fuskishima situation and Chernobyl.
Article here .. (apologies if you've already read it). |
Hi Craig,
Thanks to the link to the article.
In
Richard Rhodes' 2007 book, "
Arsenals of Folly", on page 5 he talks about the
2,000,000 pound concrete lid atop the Chernobyl reactor which acted as a
biological shield.
The men who operated this class of reactor jokingly referred to the lid as the
pyatachok, which is a very small five-kopek piece Russian coin.
When the accident began, water flashed to superheated steam and an eyewitness
later reported that the
pyatachok "began to bubble and dance".
There were then two explosions lasting four seconds and they lifted the two
million pound
pyatachok up and tilted it almost vertically.
The reactor core blew tons of redhot radioactive debris "past the
pyatachok,
through the roof, and half a mile into the air".
Parts of the red hot material then landed on the roofs of the reactor complex.
Rhodes writes, "To lower construction costs, the roofs had been covered with
flammable asphalt; the hot graphite set them on fire."
in the days and months that followed, a squadron of big Soviet Mi-8 helicopters
was deployed to drop sand onto the reactor.
Rhodes writes, "Pilots protected themselves by stuffing lead plates under their seats.
They coined a slogan to suit the circumstances: "
If you want to be a dad,
cover your b*lls with lead".
"Each crew member received 20 to 80 rads of radiation on each flight".
Many were sent to Kiev for radiation treatment and the number who died or
were disabled was never revealed.
The fallout reached Kiev. Rhodes reports that when the chestnut trees dropped
their autumn leaves, they raked up three hundred thousand tons of them and
buried them "outside the city as low-level nuclear waste".
One worker reported "We buried the forest". "We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half
pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves".
Eventually Reactor 4 at Chernobyl was entombed into a sarcophagus of "half a million
cubic tons of reinforced concrete".
as is smoking
or exceeding the speed limit by 5 klms
.... so given these facts NP must be safer than smoking
however we need to learn or understand that the demands for energy will not go away or be solved ...human population has trebled in my lifetime and I expect population to grow beyond our wildest dreams (or nightmares)...AND so I suspect the demand for energy will always be ahead of supply as thats the way it is for humans
....so in an effort to make NP safe I suggest that all future plants be constructed at the bottom of lakes
