Ghost town

[Bert]

This is an interesting read- What it's like after a nuclear incident/accident.
Ghost Town (http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/)

[steyr]

It's good. Mysterious... It ended so fast, leaving secrets after.

Maybe someone can rip it to PDF, upload to ftp and post here?

[Jacks Complete]

Wow. That really makes you wonder. There are nuclear plants all over the place... What would you do? Would you even know? At least the people on this site would know what was happening...

Utterly aweing.

[festergrump]

An interesting read, indeed. Thanks, Bert.

Once again I’m proven wrong… there really IS a place on Earth migrating niggers cannot ruin the property value of. :D

[NightStalker]

What I find interesting is that the core material is buried in the town cemetery, waiting for retrieval and extraction of the plutonium by someone with an expendable workforce. :D

[festergrump]

That’s an interesting point, Nightstalker, but don’t you think Ms. Elena’s movements were monitored via satellite during her little ventures? The checkpoints might be to keep the unknowing from harms way or from bringing polluted artifacts out, but the entire site will surely be watched more closely from above.

How would you go about covertly extracting the weapons-grade plutonium unnoticed? I believe there are some wonderfully developed minds here at the Forum who could collectively (and, of course, theoretically) pull it off.

My thoughts are of tunneling, maybe (?!). Could this be feasible? I'd also rely more on radiation protection than expendible forces to breech and extract from the site. (I'm clueless, though, to the limits of such radiation-proof gear needed for such an operation).

[MightyQuinn®]

What an incredible read. This little girl seem wise beyond her years.

What a sad story indeed.

I can see the steam from a nuclear reactor on a good day.......i just so happens it is a very famous reactor which almost became the "second" meltdown in the world.

The first reactor disaster being the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho on Jan 3 1961. The reactor expoded killing three workers, impaling one against the roof of the containment building with a control rod.

[mesmashy]

Freaky,just looking out on to the street now and imagining empty empty streets,grass/weeds growin from storm drains,derelict buildings and complete silence....freaky. Fair play to that girl,i have to admit througout all my dreams i never thought of goin for stroll through a desolite urban landscape it must have been cool.....(with respect unfortunate victims) :(

[Jacks Complete]

I seriously doubt anyone is going to get to remove the waste dumped in that graveyard.

Not without a battlemecha or remote working drone type of thing, plus enough armour and weapons to stop the Russian army dropping a few tonnes of bombs on your head.

Let these dead lie, I think.

[vulture]

What I find interesting is that the core material is buried in the town cemetery, waiting for retrieval and extraction of the plutonium by someone with an expendable workforce.

IIRC, besides the stuff that got blown into the air, the reactor core is still present in the reactor building. What's the point of building a sarcophagus when there's no more shit in there? How the hell could they have moved a boiling hot reactor core that'll radiate the fuck out of anyone, protective clothing or not?

[Bert]

The stuff buried in the graveyard was said to be graphite moderator/matrix blocks and whatever crap got stuck to these during the explosion and meltdown. The melted down core is down below the sarcophagus, possibly slowly moving towards China...

(edit)
Here's a bit more info on what's in Chernobyl #4's basement (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1997/chernobyl/33005.stm) And a drawing of the dammage (http://www.uic.com.au/graphics/chernowreck2.gif)

[Zeitgeist]

How the hell could they have moved a boiling hot reactor core that'll radiate the fuck out of anyone, protective clothing or not?

By sending lots of expendable grunts to their deaths....

As she mentions, the sarcophagus is breaking down, they really need to repair it soon

[kingspaz]

IIRC the core is 2miles down in the rock. i don't think it would still be reacting since if it had a meltdown the fuel would be gone reasonably fast.

[tiac03]

Definately must be awsome to walk around those deserted streets. And all those vehicules just sitting there rotting away...


surprisingly deep though (even without the amazing pictures)
I admire those people, because each of them is a philosopher in their own way. When you ask if they are afraid, they say that they would rather die at home from radiation, than die in an unfamiliar place of home-sickness. They eat food from their own gardens, drink the milk of their cows and claim that they are healthy.....but the old man is one of only 400 that have survived this long. He may soon join his 3,100 neighbors that rest eternally in the earth of their beloved homes. It appears that the people with the most courage were the first to die here. Maybe that is true everywhere.

[senjoronie]

Steyr suggested ripping the web site to PDF and uploading it to the FTP, so I took the liberty of doing so. PDFs were created with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and compressed with WinRAR 3.0, in case there was any confusion.

[steyr]

Ya, ya, I've made it, but I didn't uploaded it to the ftp. I can't upload anything, and I don't have account....

[Efraim_barkbit]

It´s kind of like my town during a early summer morning, you could walk across the whole town, without seeing anyone.
It is a strange feeling, just like it would be completely deserted, espescially when the sun has got up enough to give a good lightning to the scene.

[megalomania]

An interesting story, but no way in hell would I tempt fate by taking an idle stroll through a hot zone :(

[vulture]

Here's a bit more info on what's in Chernobyl #4's basement And a drawing of the dammage

The pictures in the first link don't work for me. :(

Chernobylite, intruiging... :D

Crystals formed under extreme conditions could have stunning properties. Maybe even commercial potential.

I feel a madscience vibe coming up... :o

[Anthony]

I did a bit of googling for more information on chernobyl, (particularly about the chunk of core melting its way down into the Earth's crust - very cool, but haven't found any references yet) and some of the facts are quite surprising.

The sources are good, being UN and WHO studies. Examples of things I didn't know:

Only 30 people have died as a direct result of the disaster. 10 of those were killed whilst working during the initial explosion. I was given the impression that hundreds/thousands of helicopter pilots, firemen and cleanup workers had all died of radiation poisoning?

The only real health impact is increased cases of thyriod cancer in children. Although it is not normally fatal.

The other reactors at the plant were restarted and continued to make power untill only 2003, when the whole plant was decomisioned. Indeed the main reason for building the concrete shield around Unit-4 was to allow continued operation of the plant. 6000 people continued to work at the plant, and their radiation exposure was within European safety limits.

A small team also work within the shield, in the recked reactor itself.

So is the whole place that dangerous?

[senjoronie]

Only 30 people have died as a direct result of the disaster. 10 of those were killed whilst working during the initial explosion. I was given the impression that hundreds/thousands of helicopter pilots, firemen and cleanup workers had all died of radiation poisoning?

As I understood it, 31 people died immediately, followed by some unknown (possibly thousands) number later. If the deaths were radiation-related they were in that sense a direct result of the accident.

So is the whole place that dangerous?

Apparently just visiting isn't that bad, and maybe not even working there, but I sure wouldn't want to live in Pripyat or nearby and be exposed 24/7. And who knows what the long-term effects on the workers will be?

I've tried looking around for better pictures of the core and accident site, but good sources seem to be lacking.

[nbk2000]

It's the enviro-freaks boogeyman of RADIATION! :eek: that scares people shitless for no reason.

Yes, rads is hazardous, but no more so than a thousand other things we use everyday and yet somehow manage to survive exposure too, like ELECTRICITY!. :p

[Flake2m]

Alot of people would have died because the meltdown sent a huge plume of radioactive dust and smoke into the air. They would have breathed that in and died from radiation poisioning.

This nuclear accident is the primary reason that people seem to fear nuclear power so much. People remember Chernobyl and since they know bugger all about nuclear power = bad.

Russian designed nuclear reactors are also considered more flawed then American designs. Russian built reactors have also been known to have shoddy workmanship.

[vulture]

The reactor design of Chernobyl was A PIECE OF CRAP. All these BMRK water moderated reactors have endless flaws. The few fail safe mechanisms they had can easily be overrided, which is exactly what happened at Chernobyl.

Furthermore, the reactors only have one hull, contrary to the double walled/seperated cooling circuit design of western reactors. The hull also was made up of many segments, instead of a one piece steel reinforced concrete dome, which can keep much more pressure.

EDIT: That's also why the EU has been pumping heaps of money into eastern european countries to pay for getting rid of these unsafe reactors built during the Soviet era.

It's the enviro-freaks boogeyman of RADIATION!

Tell me about it... It's like the people that are afraid of powerline and cell phone radiation, but happily smoke ten cigs a day. :rolleyes:

[Bert]

Russian designed nuclear reactors are also considered more flawed then American designs. Russian built reactors have also been known to have shoddy workmanship.

Yesterday, I was looking at video of the inside of the 3 mile island reactor. More than half of the core's fuel rods were laying at the bottom of the reactor vessel in a twisted, partialy melted heap, like a pile of twisted up straws. The came within a couple of minutes of a complete melt down.

OT, but here's a couple of weapons related sites- Want to see what a working nuclear weapons production facility looks like inside?
Dimona photos (http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/photos.html)
And here's a bit of background on the facility.
Dimona nuclear weapons production facility (http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/israel/dimona.htm)
And the FAQ, to let you understand what you're seeing:
Carey Sublette's nuclear weapons FAQ (http://www.saunalahti.fi/voas0560/nwfaq/Nfaq0.html)

[vulture]

To this day, the Israeli government refuses international inspection of Dimona and continues to deny the existence of its nuclear arsenal.

Alongside with their failure to comply with a few dozen UN resolutions...

Experts estimate that Israel has about 200-300 more or less immediatly deployable weapons. The new submarines Isreal wants to acquire would allow it to gain "the tripod": Air, land and submarine based nuclear weapons.

More than half of the core's fuel rods were laying at the bottom of the reactor vessel in a twisted, partialy melted heap, like a pile of twisted up straws. The came within a couple of minutes of a complete melt down.

True, but because of adequate design, there was no steam explosion, no ignition of the moderator and no hull failure, which contained the radiation.