Chernobyl – Thirty Years Ago Today
Posted by on April 26, 2016
On
April 26, 1986, a sudden surge of power during a reactor systems test
destroyed Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in
the former Soviet Union. The accident and the fire that followed
released massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment.So starts the NRC backgrounder on accident. Today, exactly three decades later, it’s still an event worth recalling.
Last year, NRC Commissioner William Ostendorff and several NRC staffers, (photo above right) visited the site and saw the progress for containment and decommissioning first hand.
Said Commissioner Ostendorff of his visit: “I was struck by the impact of this tragic accident in 1986, especially by the visit to the abandoned city of Pripyat. I saw first-hand the detailed work underway to more
permanently
contain the damaged reactor for coming generations. I am grateful for
the international support to fund the construction of the New Safe
Confinement structure.”The New Safe Confinement construction site can be seen in the photo to the left. The Commissioner’s visit included the construction site for the Dry Type Storage facility. The final completion date for this project is 2064.
As part of their tour, the Commissioner and NRC staff visited the abandoned city of Pripyat, home to an amusement park originally scheduled to open one week after the accident. (see photo below right)
After the accident,
officials
closed off the area within 18 miles of the plant, except for those with
official business at the plant and those people dealing with the
consequences of the accident and operating the undamaged reactors. The
Soviet (and later on, Russian) government evacuated about 115,000 people
from the most heavily contaminated areas in 1986, and another 220,000
people in subsequent years.For more information on the accident, check out this blog post or take a look at this video.
***Beyond the human and environmental tragedy, Chernobyl proved a catalyst in a chain reaction that would sweep away Soviet communism five years later. Writing in 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, wrote that Chernobyl — not his attempts at perestroika, or restructuring — was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union”.***
Most people don’t remember the testing at Chernobyl that created the meltdown. The accident emerged from a feeling by the professions the plant wasn’t properly designed. They felt the plant didn’t have sufficient diesel generator capacity in a LOOP.
How is our catastrophe with NASA Challenger and Chernobyl similar? They were under the gun of resources limitations or unjustified budget cuts. They were basically a paramilitary operation without independent oversight and full public transparency. It is secrecy that drives all bad outcomes. Budget cuts are the best secrecy generator in hierarchical organizations.
The take home for me; you never know the end point when a political system isn’t properly hard keyed into telling the absolute truth and full honesty to its citizens. When does everyone in the system have to lie, cheat and deceive just to survive? It is where at a nuclear power plant when there is so much painful cognitive dissonance for the employees to in a crooked system. They mal-adapt to the situation by rationalizing it is all a “game”… the term we use is “playing the game”. The rules and all the fundamental human relationships going on in the plant or organization has turned into mechanized games of no meaning other than making slave wages for survival or sport. You can make really big bucks in slave wages too. Working at a plant or organization has no higher meaning or in serving any higher ends…or supporting the vital needs of a nation and its citizens. It just turns into a selfish game or way of individual survival.
It is how organizations steals our humanity and the souls from us all?
Mike Mulligan
Hinsdale, NH
That only means that FUD sells papers, and is good click bait, face it the phrase “Could trigger” ….
is about as certain as the sky “Could” fall on your head.
Of course it was a tragedy for the people who died and their families and for those who had to leave their homes.
But where are all the millions or even thousands of cancer victims that are touted by the coal,oil and gas industries and the antinuclear lobby they support? Statistics can not find them.
Read the James Conca article “will the truth about Chernobyl ever come out”
What lessons were there to be learned from Chernobyl? Don’t fool around with a reactor especially not one that has a highly positive void coefficient. As for Fukushima, yes the NRC has implemented billions worth of security upgrades. To imply that it has done nothing is just a malicious lie.