Chernobyl disaster

Cherbobyl plant after the burning-out of the reactor

Chernobyl disaster ( 1986.04.26.Чернобыльская катастрофа ) - Catastrophe 26 April 1986, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in (Pripiat, now Ukraine). It is considered the worst nuclear accident in the history of human civilization. The estimates of the radioactivity released vary from 50 million Curie to one billion Curie . Apparent sabotage of the dosimetrists and administration disables the more accurate estimate.

The exact time of the explosion is not fixed ; some authors believe, it was around 1:23.

Unfolding of the accident to the disaster

After the explosion of the reactor, the fire spread was extinguished by the suicide fire-fighters. According to the first official news about the accident, it was not big (See 1986.04.28.Сообщение_ТАСС, in Russian). The active rods were spread over the territory of the nuclear plant, so, the chain reaction stopped; the wide area allowed the efficient convectional cooling without evaporation of the nuclear fuel.

Then, the activity of the Soviet veterans seem to convert the accident to the famous Chernobyl disaster. Instead of to let the nuclear waste to cool and to cover it with an artificial hill of sand, the soviet veretans sent thousands of soldiers to collect the active rods back in the ruins of the reactor. The concentrated nuclear fuel in the ruins become the nuclear chimney. Even if the soviet veterans were not successful to reanimate the chain reaction, the decay heat happened to be more than sufficient for the evaporation of the active rods to the atmosphere, spreading the radiation over Europe. Not only the reactor's content, but also thousands ton of sand delivered with helicopters were evaporated and felt down as a nuclear ash far away from Chernobyl and Pripiat. The fire and smoke stopped only after the burning-out of the nuclear fuel. The reactor building at the photo looks empty.

The amount of radiation released is estimated at hundreds of that due to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945

Contamination due to the Chernobyl catastrophe

The scale of the radioactive contamination due to the Chernobyl disaster exceeds that due to nuclear bombing of Japan in 1945 for many orders of magnitude. The region of size of order of hundreds kilometers become dangerous for the health and the life. The contamination may require centuries to drop down until the level appropriate for the agriculture. From hundreds thousand to millions deaths are attributed to the sequence of the radioactive contamination due to the Chernobyl disaster .

The Chernobyl catastrophe set the long-living monument to the Soviet epoch, giving the scale of the nuclear disasters. In particular, one hoped that the sequences of the disaster due to the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011, March are small compared to the sequences of the Chernobyl disaster; then (perhaps due to the poor handling) the catastrophe engraved and the scales of the disasters are considered to be comparable. The maps of the radioactive fall-out from Chernobyl appeared with a 20 year delay. (In the case of the Fukushima disaster. the delay with the release of information about the contaminaiton was about 3 months.) In the Soviet Union, such maps were not available for the most of people, that implies either the sabotage of the dosimetric professionals, or the crime of the top of the soviet veterans who used to keep such important information for the exclusive personal use.

The scale the Chernobyl catastrophe was greatly increased by the soviet politics of hiding the information; one indicates that the number of victims of the Chernobyl disaster greatly exceeds the number of victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 due to the hiding the information and misinformation by the soviet government. The cause of the Chernobyl disaster is usually attributed to the dangerous design of the nuclear reactor, the criminal management and the poor qualification of the operators. However, the behavior of the soviet veterans, and, in particular, the attempts to hide the fact of wide and deep contamination provoke the hypothesis that the Chernobyl disaster was planned .

There are many victims of Chernobyl over the world; the killing action by Chernobyl continues . One estimates the number of victims of Chernobyl is of order of a million . The soviet veterans used to hide the massive fallout from the people during several days; that greatly increased the number of victims. The information was hidden during many years . The authors who tried to distribute the true information were punished. The inconsistency of the official version of the tragedy is discussed . The secrecy and the lack of the official information about Chernobyl open a wide field for various hypothesis, including that that the disaster was planned by the soviet veterans to delay the reveal of their earlier crimes .

What part of the nuclear fuel had been burned into the atmosphere

The decay heat is usually more than sufficient to evaporate all the nuclear fuel into the atmosphere, even if the chain reaction did not reanimated when the "liquidators" had concentrated the active rods in a heap inside the reactor building. It seems, the most of the nuclear fuel had been evaporated from the reactor, together with thousands tons of sand, delivered with helicopters. The building with gap at the photo looks empty.

Eugeny Velikhov (Евгений Велихов) has opposite point of view. He thinks that the most of unstable isotops of the exploder reactor remain there, and only few percent of racioactivity had been released to the atmosphere . However, due to the total corruption in Russia, it is difficult to believe in the estimates by the Russian administration.

Questions

The picture indicates, that the most of the content of the reactor used to burn-out into the atmosphere. The heat, produced by the spontaneous decay made the reactor to act as a nuclear volcano. It is important to reveal the role to the suicide liquidators who used to collect the active elements and trough them into the rest of the reactor. It seems, they just assisted the complete burning of the nuclear fuel into the atmosphere. Wouldn't it better to act in the opposite way, just disperse the active elements to the area sufficient for the efficient cooling without evaporation of Uranium and Plutonium into the atmosphere? (Then, it would be possible to cover them with a layer of ground with the remote-control bulldozers, without to expose the workers to the ionizing radiation.)

Didn't the efforts of the soldiers, ordered to collect the debris of the exploded reactor inside the wreck of the building, just assisted the burning and the wide spreading of the contamination?

The burning of the nuclear fuel into the stratosphere caused the distribution on a wide area, mainly of the Western Europe, reducing the contamination of the USSR . Did the suicide workers (who used to drop the active rods back into the reactor) know, that they just distribute the death into the neighbor countries?

Suspected

http://pripyat-city.ru/books/121-chernobyl-kak-eto-bylo-preduprezhdenie.html

Копчинский Георгий Алексеевич

Штейнберг Николай Александрович

Historical analogies

No nukes, Protest in Tokyo, 2012.03.11

The concept of sabotage of the administration (who is supposed to alert citizen) applies not only to the USSR and the post–soviet Russia, and not only to the nuclear accidents.

Not only the USSR

In Century 21, the similar poor handling, misinformation and hiding of the contamination map took place during the Fukushima disaster (since 2011 March 9) in Japan. The same pretext had been suggested to justify the keeping the urgent notice in a secret during several weeks: "to avoid panic" .

Lessons of Chernobyl

Some options of the civil response on the sabotage of the administration are suggested in the article Уроки Чернобыля (in Russian). The response includes the self-evacuation of habitants as soon as the hiding of information by the official becomes evident.

During the Fukushima disaster, many people left from the country as soon as the hiding of information about the disaster had been detected. Then, many Japanese people did not believe that some regions become safe, and escaped from the Fukushima prefecture as far as they could without to leave from Japan, id est, to Okinawa . The evidences of the bad will of administration who could neither handle the nuclear accident (and gradually converted it to a disaster), nor alert the citizen, caused the mass protest. Protesters think, that the current level of legislation in principle cannot provide the safe use of the nuclear energetics. The demands to shut down forever all the nuclear plants in the country had been formulated .

In the case of Japan, the country learned the "lesson": After the Fukushima disaster, the prime–minister Kan Naoto and his government had to resign. After the Chernobyl disaster, contrary, the ruling party of the USSR, id est, the KPSS, was not pushed out; this caused the decay of the USSR and the criminal revolution of 1992–2000 in Russia and other post–soviet countries; corruption becomes the typical feature of the Russian society .

Not only nuclear disasters

"Administration alert: flooding is expected"

Similar sabotage of the administration may take place during the non-nuclear disasters too.

The flooding and the river tsunami at Krymsk in 2012 (See 2012.07.07.Наводнение в Крымске, in Russian) seems to be provoked by the administration with goals to release some land from habitants . Neither evacuation, nor even alert of the citizen had been performed, although the families of the governors and their friends had been evacuated in time. The inconsistent explanations had been suggested by governor of the Krasnodar region Alexandr Tkachev: he claims the precipitation to be 300 liters of water per square centimeter during a day . The alert appeared when the most of victims were already dead.

Literature about disasters in Russia indicate, that one should expect the similar sabotage and misinformation from the Russian administration, if any new disaster happens. Such a conclusion agrees with general concept of the terroristic character of activity of Edro, the ruling party in Russia at the beginning of century 21.

References

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/cherno2.html Contaminants Released, Chernobyl. A retrospective view of the Chernobyl accident of Apr 26, 1986 assesses the total radiation release at about 100 megaCuries or 4 x 10¹⁸ becquerels,...

http://mccannexposure.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/fukushima-crisis-now-at-chernobyl-level/ KANAKO TAKAHARA, KAZUAKI NAGATA and MASAMI ITO. Fukushima crisis now at Chernobyl level 12 APR 2011. NISA said Tuesday it estimated that radioactive materials of 370,000 tera becquerels was released from the Fukushima plant. (id est, 0.4 x 10¹⁸ becquerels )

http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/heiwa/JNL/31/imanaka31.pdf Tetsuji IMANAKA, Noriyuki KAWANO. Radioactive Contamination and Social Consequences Caused by the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident. 『広島平和科学』31 (2009) pp. 65-86. Hiroshima Peace Science 31 (2009)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-26-01.html Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People: New Book. , New York, April 26, 2010 (ENS) - Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility. The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus... Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/chernobyl-workers-recall-catastrophe-as-they-watch-fukushima/story-fn84naht-1226026588408 Tony Halpin. Chernobyl workers recall catastrophe as they watch Fukushima. March 23, 2011 10:27AM. At least 350,000 "liquidators" went to Chernobyl. The first arrivals worked in 40-second shifts because radiation levels were so intense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4ts1VlQwaUl oxion812. Чернобыль(Chernobyl). Apr 11, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuU97uiQom4 Bond715. Чернобыль(ЧАЭС) в центре событий. Mar 23, 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

http://pripyat-city.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16 (2010, In Russian)

http://www.lebed.com/2006/art4566.htm Юлий Андреев. ЧЕРНОБЫЛЬ И КОРПОРАЦИИ. № 472, 23 апреля 2006 г. .. разумной стратегией было бы вывести те сорок тысяч человек, которые каждый день получали свою дозу в зоне и тратили громадное количество всевозможных ресурсов, а также прекратить все те невероятные по размаху и стоимости работы, которые велись для Чернобыля по всей стране. Следовало огородить территорию забором, удалить ядерное топливо из уцелевших реакторов и законсервировать станцию в ее тогдашнем состоянии на долгие годы. Необходимости сооружать саркофаг не было, выброс радиоактивности из четвертого блока был ниже того, который допускался правилами для работающего реактора и никакой опасности ни для кого останки реактора не представляли. Это было ясно любому разумному человеку, но настоять на такой стратегии было абсолютно нереально... Был атомный взрыв с эквивалентом от нескольких тонн до десятка тонн тротила, который разворотил реакторное помещение и подбросил крышку реактора весом в две тысячи тонн метров на двадцать вверх. Крышка перевернулась и упала ребром на кромку корпуса реактора. Это падение перепуганные люди и приняли за второй взрыв. Два человека погибло под обломками и еще тридцать стали жертвами мощнейшей "тихой" паники, которая охватила почти весь персонал, помешав правильно оценить происшедшее. Особенно жаль пожарных, которым, в обстановке этой паники никто не рассказал, что случилось... Практически все топливо, масса которого составляла около двухсот тонн, было выброшено из реактора. Небольшая часть топлива, которое непосредственно участвовало во взрыве, мгновенно испарилось и ушло в атмосферу, остальное топливо в виде фрагментов топливных элементов и сборок было разбросано вокруг реактора, главным образом в сторону обвалившейся северной стены, но и на южной стороне вне здания реактора кое-где валялись топливные сборки, а одна даже повисла на проводах ЛЭП. Какое-то количество, не более нескольких десятков тонн, упало обратно в реактор и стало плавиться от собственного тепловыделения. Дело в том, что и без цепной реакции отработавшее ядерное топливо в течение нескольких недель выделяет достаточно тепла, чтобы расплавить и себя, и окружающие конструкции. Это топливо проплавило отверстие в искореженном взрывом основании реактора и протекло в смеси с расплавленным бетоном и песком под реактор, в так называемый бассейн-барбатер, где и застыло, превратившись в стабильный минерал, названный "чернобылитом" (он же - "слоновья нога", он же - ТСМ, топливосодержащие массы).// На этом чернобыльская авария закончилась. Чернобыльский реактор перешел в совершенно стабильное состояние... Если бы в этот момент, двенадцатого мая 1986 года, хотя бы один умный человек получил власть над событиями, Чернобыльская АЭС было бы погребена под песчаным холмом и забыта на тысячи лет. Это потребовало бы минимальных затрат и минимального геройства... Я как-то пошутил на правительственной комиссии, что для полной ликвидации аварии мне понадобился бы земснаряд и большая прищепка. Прищепкой я намеревался закрепить трубу земснаряда на трубе станции и качать песок, пока не получится холм высотой в сто пятьдесят метров (такова была высота этой красно-белой трубы, известной теперь всему миру; в 1988 году с похожей идеей выступал нынешний академик Н.Н.Мельников, уже имея в виду Саркофаг, но не был поддержан). Естественно, что никто в правительстве и сам шутить не любил, и другим не дозволял, и великая глупость началась. По настоянию Б.Е. Щербины, зам. премьера по энергетике, политбюро, состоявшее из сельских мудрецов, решило восстановить станцию. Сколько труда и здоровья людей было вбито в эту затею, даже мне трудно подсчитать, хотя многое прошло и через мои руки. Я уверен, однако, что на те деньги, что были и будут еще затрачены на это нелепое мероприятие, можно было бы построить не менее десяти таких станций, как Чернобыльская.. После 1987 года ситуация стала резко изменяться, и Чернобыль стал превращаться в "кормушку" с которой никто уже не хотел расставаться.. (in Russian)

http://library.narod.ru/tetr/tetr5.htm Григорий Медведев. Чернобыльская тетрадь. 1987 г. ..— Бросают песок, — снова загадочно сказал Решетников.—Ты атомщик... Что еще можешь посоветовать кинуть в реактор, чтобы заглушить его?.. .. Ночью 27 апреля... Мы уже к этому времени промерили вокруг реактора интенсивность нейтронного потока. Было не более 20 нейтронов на квадратный сантимер в секунду. Со временем стало 17—18 нейтронов. Это говорило о том, что реакции как будто нет. Правда, измеряли с расстояния и сквозь бетон. Какова же была подлинная плотность нейтронов, — неизвестно. С вертолета не мерили...// ..начальник Главснаба Минэнерго УССР Г. П. Маслак.. за неделю после взрыва из Киева уехало около одного миллиона человек. В первые дни на железнодорожном вокзале творилось невообразимое, народу больше, чем в дни эвакуации во время Отечественной войны. Цену на билеты спекулянты взвинтили до двухсот рублей, несмотря на дополнительные поезда-выделенные для отъезжающих. Вагоны при посадке брали с боем, уезжали на крышах, на подножках... А началось, говорит, все с того, что высокопоставленные работники стали тайком вывозить из Киева своих детей. Обнаружилось это просто: классы в школах стали редеть...

http://zhurnal.lib.ru/t/tiktin_s_a/adomdimitchernobil.shtml С.А.Тиктин. Адом дымит Чернобыль. (2010). ...топливо мгновенно вскипело и превратилось в сжатый газ с температурой порядка 4000\(^{\mathrm o}\)С, "выстреливший" бóльшую часть остального топлива частично в жидком виде, частично в твёрдом, с различной степенью дисперсности, а также сотни тонн раскалённого графита...

http://argee.net/DefenseWatch/Chernobyl%20Reality%20and%20Myth.htm Chernobyl: Reality and Myth. .. A careful examination of the Chernobyl incident reveals that it was a stupid, completely unnecessary accident resulting from gross criminal negligence and total managerial incompetence. This problem could only have happened within a political system that was completely out of contact with the real world...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBiKuOaSwFg Чернобыль (Редкие кадры расколённого реактора). mixerdrummer on Nov 15, 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmn8La6AD-0 snigblower on Jun 3, 2010. Guide Yuriy and SoloEast Travel director Sergei visit control room of the reactor # 4 just before the workers will finish a brick wall which will block the entrance to the site/

2016.04.30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc-vvhWXL9Q Compilation of Rare 1986 Videos of Chernobyl Disaster. (English). Apr 30, 2016 On April 26, 1986, Ukraine marked the sad 30th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.

Keywords

1986.04.28.Сообщение ТАСС, 2017.09.25.Puff, Fukushima disaster, Nuclear disaster

Рутений и Каюк, Уроки Чернобыля