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25. years from Chernobyl catastrophe
Today is 25. year from Chernobyl catastrophe.
Did the human race learn something from it - I don't think so.
As one graffiti in my town says: '' If repetition is the mother of knowledge, than we are wery educated ! ''
I think that it would be nice to remember those who gave their lives for mankind benefit, firefighters who responded to first alarm and liquidators who worked to clear the debris from explosion...and all brave anonymous who worked to reduce the size of this disaster.
Here is part of article on wikipedia....
Fire containment
Shortly after the accident, firefighters arrived to try to extinguish the fires. First on the scene was a Chernobyl Power Station firefighter
brigade under the command of Lieutenant Volodymyr Pravik, who died on 9 May 1986 of acute radiation sickness.
They were not told how dangerously radioactive the smoke and the debris
were, and may not even have known that the accident was anything more
than a regular electrical fire: "We didn't know it was the reactor. No one had told us."[37]
Grigorii Khmel, the driver of one of the fire engines, later described what happened:
Did the human race learn something from it - I don't think so.
As one graffiti in my town says: '' If repetition is the mother of knowledge, than we are wery educated ! ''
I think that it would be nice to remember those who gave their lives for mankind benefit, firefighters who responded to first alarm and liquidators who worked to clear the debris from explosion...and all brave anonymous who worked to reduce the size of this disaster.
Here is part of article on wikipedia....
Fire containment
Shortly after the accident, firefighters arrived to try to extinguish the fires. First on the scene was a Chernobyl Power Station firefighter
brigade under the command of Lieutenant Volodymyr Pravik, who died on 9 May 1986 of acute radiation sickness.
They were not told how dangerously radioactive the smoke and the debris
were, and may not even have known that the accident was anything more
than a regular electrical fire: "We didn't know it was the reactor. No one had told us."[37]
Grigorii Khmel, the driver of one of the fire engines, later described what happened:
We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning… We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: "What is graphite?" I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up. "It's
hot," he said. The pieces of graphite were of different sizes, some big,
some small enough to pick up…
We didn't know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had
no idea. There was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled the cistern
and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to
the roof—Vashchik Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik.… They went up
the ladder … and I never saw them again.
However, Anatoli Zakharov, a fireman stationed in Chernobyl since 1980, offers a different description:
I remember joking to the others, "There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We'll be lucky if we're all still alive in the morning."
Twenty years after the disaster, he said the firefighters from the Fire Station No. 2 were aware of the risks.
Of course we knew! If we'd followed regulations, we would never have gone near the reactor.
From eyewitness accounts of the firefighters involved before they died (as reported on the CBC television series Witness), one described his experience of the radiation as "tasting like metal," and feeling a sensation similar to that of pins and needles all over his face. (This is similar to the description given by Louis Slotin, a Manhattan Project physicist who died days after a fatal radiation overdose from a criticality accident.)
The explosion and fire threw hot particles of the nuclear fuel and also far more dangerous fission products, radioactive isotopes such as caesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90 and other radionuclides, into the air: the residents of the surrounding area observed the radioactive cloud on the night of the explosion.
Timeline
- 1:26:03 – fire alarm activated
- 1:28 – arrival of local firefighters, Pravik's guard
- 1:35 – arrival of firefighters from Pripyat, Kibenok's guard
- 1:40 – arrival of Telyatnikov
- 2:10 – turbine hall roof fire extinguished
- 2:30 – main reactor hall roof fires suppressed
- 3:30 – arrival of Kiev firefighters
- 4:50 – fires mostly localized
- 6:35 – all fires extinguished
‡With the exception of the fire contained inside Reactor 4, which continued to burn for many days.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by lutan1 on
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Nenad, do you want to elaborate on your statement, "Did the human race learn something from it - I don't think so."
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Permalink Reply by Jonathan on
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My guess is that he meant it happened before, you'd think we'd have learned from it, and yet here we are 25yrs later and it has happened again.
My opinion on the matter, what if 25yrs from 9/11 another act of terrorism happens to US? You can bet that the firefighter/police/medics/etc would all still respond just like they did then. Sure tragedies happen, but we will still respond to the incident and do our best to accomplish the 3 main goals of L.I.P.
Just my 2 cents though, I could be completely off on this.
-Jon LCFD
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But it hasn't happened again Jonathan- The Chernobyl incident is very different to the Fukushima incident- different cause, different equipment, different technology, etc.
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Permalink Reply by Nenad on
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Many latent Fukushimas and Chernobyls are just waiting to happend. Now it is known that japanese had no plan if Fukushima goes out of control.
In comunism cover-up was because comunists didn' want to admit that they can't follow western tchnology progress. In comunism adaptable and suitable people are on top positions instead of capable.
In modern capitalism, the profit is generator of progress,not politic dogma, but if there is not enough adequate control, the results can be pretty the same.
We can see on daily basis, from small local accidents, that the race for profit, if there is no control can easy transform in a disaster.
There are SEVESO accidents, radioactive accidents and so on , on a daily basis. Small scale accidents, and the owners don't want to invest in better protection (and spend money) until they are forced to do it. We (mankind) learn only when it's too late, when s***t already happend.
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The results are the same. Many people displaced over Japan. The soil and water poluted for ages. Time of half-life of radioactive materials is the same in Japan as in Ukraine.
It's not about technology or something else abstract, it is about small people that elite politicians and big money owners does not care.
Heroes of 9/11, liquidators, Fukushima 50's will be remembered once a year and then on round number celebrations...and so on
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Sorry Nenad, it's way too early to say the results are the same. The true levels of contamination are not known from Japan.
Even the causes are significantly different and play their own part.
One was a deliberate attempt to test and run the system in an abnormal mode, the other was a result of multiple redundancy failures caused by the initial earthquake.
In all seriousness, how many companies have plans in palce for an earthqauke, tsunami, power black out, etc? Not many, if any at all! To plan for so many causes and failures would be near on impossible.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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Agreed, Luke.
Chernobyl had no containment vessel, but it wasn't built right on the edge of a coastal tsunami zone or near a known major fault line.
The long-term effects from the Fukashima accident won't be known for a long time, but one advantage is that a lot of the radiation is going into the largest body of water on the planet, which will dilute a lot of the radiation concentrations to very low levels. Chernobyl didn't have that advantage, being essentially land-locked except for a lake that is exponentially smaller than the Pacific Ocean.
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Actually, profit isn't the primary motive for most nuclear power plants. Creating electricity is the primary motive.
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