Anybody watching HBO's Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes?
- Thread starter 91Joe95
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Kind of. If I had to guess I'd say they came across a lot of this stuff when researching the series. They had some newer interviews with some of the people in the footage. This was definitely more of a documentary style show than the series, which took some liberties with some of the storylines.
That series was damn scary. Amazing what happened and what a govt is capable of doing.
It's funny you mentioned that because some of the first lines in the documentary deal with an actual government controlling information. They use it to frame the context of what comes next, but it was chilling nonetheless.
I watched it this evening. Very sobering.
Those RBMK Soviet reactors were a complete Clusterf$^%.
If that reactor had a containment like almost all western reactors, damage and injuries/deaths probably would have been minimal. As the documentary said, the Soviets wouldn't build a containment around the plant because that would be a tacit admission that something bad might happen. I've also heard over the years, that they were too cheap to build expensive containments. In engineering and construction, when you design/build things on the cheap, sooner or later things catch up with you.
Another thing that continuously amazes me is why the USSR put all that time, effort and money into nuclear when they have huge rescources of coal, nat gas and oil.
It's not like they developed nuclear power themselves - they stole most of their nuclear technology from the US and the Brits. Maybe they just didn't really understand it.
One thing that struck me was the standard of living. They talked about how new, clean, young and happy the city of Chernobyl was. They were delighted that they had a nice apartment. A genuine socialist paradise.
I worked in the nuclear business for 30 years. All the engineers, techs, operators owned their own house or were on their way to owning a house. Many had two or more cars, a motorcycle, maybe a boat. Most of these guys came out of the USN nuclear power program. Wives didn't have to work, some chose to, others chose to stay at home with the kids.
The difference between the standard of living for the elite Soviet engineers/technicians and their American counterparts was stunning.
Are the RBMK designs good at producing plutonium? For some reason I feel like I've heard that before, but perhaps I didn't understand that properly or am confusing it with a different type reactor.
There were a couple of images that stood out to me. Early on there was a scene with two attractive women in bikinis. Sadly, I did not see them again. The second was when they talked about the reactor explosion they showed a nuclear explosion. I have to take issue with that - it was an explosion that spread nuclear material, not a nuclear explosion from fission, as was implied by the image. Big difference between steam and then hydrogen going off as opposed to an actual nuclear explosion. That's about the only things I took issue with in the show.
the difference was that at TMI it was the company lying, and at Chernobyl it was the government
Just about any reactor that has U-238 in it will produce Plutonium. Not sure if the RBMK's are better Plutonium producers than western light water reactors. There's a little known fact that every fuel assemly in a light water reactor starts producing Plutonium almost as soon as it starts up. By the time a light water reactor fuel assembly is ready to be discharged from the reactor, almost 40% of the heat produced by fissions comes from Plutonium 239 or 241 fissions.
The whole idea of the nuclear fuel cycle as envioned in the 1950's and 1960's was that when a fuel assembly was discharged from a reactor, it would be reprocessed. The remaining unused U-235 and newly created and unused Pu-239, 241, etc would be chemically separated from the fission products in the fuel assembly and reinserted into new fuel assemblies. It was significantly economical to do this and extended the life of uranium extracted from the earth almost indefinitely. There was nothing really new in the process. The government had been doing it for years to harvest Plutonium from the production reactors for nuclear weapons. But in the late 1970's, Jimmy Carter (himself a product of Rickover's nuclear navy) banned all reprocessing and that ended the reprocessing dream.
I agree with you that there was not a bomb-like nuclear explosion. It seemed to have been a high power transient that resulted in melted fuel, fractured coolant pipes, extremely high temperatures that caused a lot fires - including graphite fires. As I understand it, the uranium was mixed in with graphite blocks. One thing I got from the documentary was that they really don't know (or aren't saying) exactly what happened. They have computer simulations suggesting what happened.
There was one statement that the explosion was the equivalent of many times the power unleashed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. I don't think that is true. If it was true, just about everything and everybody in a five mile readius would have been destroyed/killed. I think the other three reactors at the site continued operating for several years, so clearly there weren't atomic bomb like explosions.
Right at the end, they said that 200,000 people had died from the accident. That is probably way too high. General consensus is that somewhere around 100 people died as a result of the accident within a few days. As far as those who have died from long term effects, that number is probably in the 10,000 range. As always, reliable statistics were never the strong suit of the USSR.
I'm sure most of the 5,000 guys who were shoveling graphite/fuel from the roof of the building suffered radiation related diseases. Of course, they all smoked and probably drank a lot of vodka, so who knows what was the primary cause of an early death. Same with the chopper crews and the tunnelers.
I think the young girls in bikinis were placed in the story to show that life was pretty good in Chernobyl and was almost western-like. Those girls probably became models in NYC or LA and/or became tennis pros.
And in the ultimate irony, "bikinis" are named after Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands (half way between Kwajalein and Enewietok Atolls which were the sites of savage fighting against the Japanese in WWII). After WWII, Bikini Atoll was the site of numerous nuclear weapons tests which left the Atoll severely radioactive and uninhabitable. There were 23 nuclear explosions, including 20 thermonuclear explosion. When the designers of the swimwear that became the bikini were looking for a trendy, modern, up to date, name that would connote all things modern, they seized upon the Bikini Atoll where cutting edge technology was taking place. Thus they named the swimwear the "bikini". So every time one of these little girls puts on a bikini, they are really commemorating thermonuclear weapons. I'm sure they'd all be aghast if they knew this.
Just want to say thanks for taking the time to provide all this interesting info (including the bikini history).
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