HBO's 'Chernobyl' is Now the Top-Ranked TV Show of All Time (variety.com) 298
"Chernobyl," HBO's gritty and horrifying retelling of the worst nuclear disaster in human history, has jumped to the No. 1 spot on IMDb's all-time TV rankings just days after the limited series concluded. From a report: As of Tuesday, "Chernobyl" had a 9.7-star (out of 10) average rating from about 140,000 users on the Amazon-owned IMDb site. The five-episode limited series finished its run on HBO Sunday, June 3. For now, that puts the critically acclaimed "Chernobyl" ahead of AMC's "Breaking Bad" (9.5), BBC's "Planet Earth II" (9.5), HBO's "Band of Brothers" (9.5), the original "Planet Earth" (9.4), HBO's "Game of Thrones" (9.3) and HBO's "The Wire" (9.3), according to IMDb's ranking of TV shows. (Fandango's Rotten Tomatoes currently doesn't provide an Audience Score for "Chernobyl.")
Variety TV critic Caroline Framke, in her review of the show, wrote, "Rather than bursting into shocking twists, writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck build a steadily creeping unease, allowing the scale of the atrocity to sink in with terrible, fitting gravity." "Chernobyl" dramatizes the story of the April 26, 1986, massive explosion of the nuclear power plant in Ukraise that released radioactive material across Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and as far as Scandinavia and western Europe.
Variety TV critic Caroline Framke, in her review of the show, wrote, "Rather than bursting into shocking twists, writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck build a steadily creeping unease, allowing the scale of the atrocity to sink in with terrible, fitting gravity." "Chernobyl" dramatizes the story of the April 26, 1986, massive explosion of the nuclear power plant in Ukraise that released radioactive material across Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and as far as Scandinavia and western Europe.
I remember. (Score:5, Informative)
Back in '86 the first news of a nuclear mishap came from the Swedish nuclear plant Forsmark, they thought they had a problem - until they realized that the contamination came from outside the plant with isotopes indicating a major disaster.
So then they started to look elsewhere.
To this day some wild animals in Sweden still exceeds the safe levels, so wild boar may be too contaminated to be suitable as food.
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Which has nothing to do with any such animals being actually "too contaminated", as those same animals have been used for food near ground zero for about a decade at this point. There was a great BBC documentary on it a few years ago.
It has everything to do with long debunked LNT still being applied because "radiation scary".
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You sure about that? Citations? Because the research I'm finding shows the effects of radiation on Chernobyl wildlife were worse than anticipated.
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Re:I remember. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That may be the effect on wild life in Chernobyl, but the discussion was about eating wild boar from Sweden
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Basically, the presence of humans is worse than radiation from Chernobyl
One way to interpret this is to say that the danger of the radiation is small, as you have chosen to do, another way is to say that the presence of humans is terrible on wildlife. We already know [wikipedia.org] that the presence of humans is terrible on wildlife, so this seems like the more plausible explanation.
Re:I remember. (Score:4, Informative)
Papers by Anders Pape Møller [sciencemag.org] and Timothy Mousseau [rationalwiki.org]?
"A Danish government committee has ruled that one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, Anders Pape Møller, is responsible for data fabricated in connection with an article that he co-authored in 1998 and subsequently retracted."
"Unfortunately for Professor Mousseau, his work is now widely viewed as unscientific because nobody else has been able to find the damage he reports. Although he routinely speaks at anti-nuclear rallies rather than scientific conferences, unlike most anti-nuclear activists he still participates in the scientific community."
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Actually those animals living in the exclusion zone aren't safe to eat. I mean some of them are, but it's not easy to tell. If you consume some of those elements they can sit inside your body for decades, slowly irradiating your DNA until something breaks.
Of course you will never be able to prove that a particular cancer was due to eating wild boar from the exclusion zone or not. It's very easy to deny there is a problem because of this.
Re:I remember. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I remember. (Score:4, Funny)
Night lights can be also made from the bones, and they give out a soothing blue light
Captcha: luminous, heh
Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
Yep, earworm's in your brain now. You're welcome.
I'm looking forward to next season (Score:2)
Cant wait to see what these crazy Russians and EU bureaucrats get up to next. Who will sit on the meltdown thrown?
Iodine martinis for everyone!
Re:The cause of Sweden's high crime rate? (Score:4, Informative)
It actually passed over most parts of Southern Sweden but fell primarily out over the northern parts due to the weather conditions these days.
See this map of where the fallout ended up: https://www.bedug.com/pics/Fun... [bedug.com]
The lady really made the show (Score:4, Insightful)
Her courage and levelheadedness in the face of a nuclear disaster was inspirational.
Re:The lady really made the show (Score:5, Informative)
Her courage and levelheadedness in the face of a nuclear disaster was inspirational.
While almost all characters in the show portray real people that were involved in the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath, the character you are referring to, Ulana Khomyuk, is the one notable exception. Her character was used to represent the great many scientists who investigated the accident.
Re:The lady really made the show (Score:5, Insightful)
Simpsons (Score:3)
During the course discussions, Millennials would repeatedly refer to various Hollywood movies and other works of fiction as if they were historical fact.
I know. I cannot believe how many people keep whining on about president Trump as if that episode of the Simpsons was real.
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Meh, we all know most movies are totally accurate. Even down the the depiction of Cockney Irish in "Churchill: The Hollywood Years" [imdb.com], along with authentic rap singing of The Maginot Line.
Re: Millennials treat fiction as historical fact (Score:2)
I view these 'historical' shows as fairly accurate... In broad swathes.
Take Evita. I have pretty much no knowledge of the actual events from the historical perspective, but given the events of the movie, I'm willing to believe that somebody of that name existed in Argentina during a period of sociopolitical unrest, there was a swift series of coups, ending with... Juan? Peron on top, whereupon Eva tried to implement social reforms (with mixed degrees of success), and drum up support around the world (which
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Other than making monsters into movie stars... nothing wrong with Evita. It's like making a movie portraying Hitler as kind to puppies and small children, in-between which he takes a little time out to murder millions of people and bring his country to the brink of destruction, except of course, that'd be more historically accurate than the movie Evita.
So yeah, somebody of that name existed in Argentina. Beyond that, it's pretty much made up to fit a Hollywood wishful-thinking version of history.
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Almost everyone does this. I can't think of a single "historical" movie that didn't make some crap up, compress events to make them exciting, consolidate people into a single character etc.
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I thought The Queen actually visited a baseball game in Los Angeles. Disappointed when I found out the events in the movie were fake. "Protecting the Queenâ(TM)s safety is a task that is gladly accepted by Police Squad. No matter how silly the idea of having a queen might be to us, as Americans, we must be gracious and considerate hosts."
Fun fact: the Queen only makes state visits to the US for Republican presidents. The only Republican presidents she didn't visit were Nixon and Trump. I'm surprised she gets past customs given her lack of passport or drivers license - the paperwork for the exceptions must be immense.
The? (Score:5, Informative)
Why do people insist on calling Ukraine "The Ukraine". There's nothing "the" about it. It's just "Ukraine" guys.
No one says "The Germany".
Was born in Crimea in '87 and it's a pet peeve.
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Nobody says "The Germany", we say "The Reich".
Re:The? (Score:5, Informative)
"The Ukraine" is an abbreviation for "The Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic". So, it is certainly inappropriate to call Ukraine that now.
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The timing is not the issue here. Before the USSR was formed Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. It's the Russians themselves who referred to that region as "The Ukraine" before it became a separate country.
Language has momentum, especially when the names of things in common use around the world change, and when they are treated differently depending on language. Just the other day I cringed when I was speaking English and referred to it as "the English" as you do when you refer to languages when speaki
Because that's how Ukrainians referred to it (Score:5, Informative)
I grew up with everybody in my family (all four of my grandparents are from Ternopil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternopil) and the people that emigrated with them calling it "The Ukraine". Other Ukrainians I've met over the years have always referred to it as "The Ukraine".
So, why are you surprised when non-honks refer to it this way?
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Because in the late 19th, early 20th centuries the linguistics were very much dictated by immigrant peasants so they were really referring to the region which I can understand. However we live in a technologically advanced modern culture now where countries are very distinct. Sure you can talk about it as a region by saying "the" but these days when I say Ukraine I mean the country. When calling it "The" Ukraine you can actually be referring to parts of land in or out of the distinct country. Crimea for exa
Re:Because that's how Ukrainians referred to it (Score:5, Interesting)
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How would you like some ignorant foreigner to redefine your culture, your history, your language?
It's not the foreigners who are redefining it. It's the official title from the country itself. Just because locals historically called that region "The Ukraine" doesn't mean the country isn't officially called "Ukraine" by the locals.
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Language is funny that way. It became a tradition. And also it was the official English name for a long time.
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Because for a long while the Ukraine called itself "the Ukraine". That the modern state is only called Ukraine, I learned on /. ... erm, is that actually true? I never checked it. Same like with Kosovo, in German it is "das Kosovo", no idea if they call them self that way. But I'm 100% sure it is "Die Schweiz".
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I know it as "der Kosovo", but both is officially correct in the German language: https://www.duden.de/rechtschr... [duden.de]
In German it is also "die Ukraine": https://www.duden.de/rechtschr... [duden.de]
Other examples would be "der Iran", "die Türkei" etc.
For our language we probably need these articles in order to make the words roll off our tongues correctly, because we are used to to apply arbitrary ma
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How 100% sure are you that it's called "Die Schweiz" rather than "Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft" which is the official name in German ;-)
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Note that it is standard to use 'the' on plural countries such as the United States or the Netherlands.
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It's most of the world who thinks that way. Or in my case, as someone who lives on the coast of the black sea, who do you think I'm more concerned with? Russia annexing a piece of land that is less than 1000km away or America annexing a piece of land over 10000km away from me half around the planet?
Of course it's difficult for you to think in something else than the "us" vs. "them" terms. Which is why you need broad umbrella terms like "The West" to describe those who aren't y
bots at work? (Score:2)
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indeed. isn't it dreadful when you have to waste five hours of your life determining if you like something or not? time you could have spent whining on slashdot?
... ".What a long time life takes! Sometimes I think it's hardly worth encroaching on." - Clarice Gormenghast
Dangerous and disturbing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an excellent series. IMHO, the most disturbing shot is in the first episode where one of the lead plant workers goes up to the roof and looks down into the burning core of the reactor. If you believe in Hell, that's probably what it looks like.
That said, what should trouble people watching is not nuclear power because nobody makes second generation reactors anymore. Fourth generation reactors are going to be the only way to satisfy the demand for electrical power going forward. No, what should trouble people watching is the culture of fear and blind obedience to political ideology. No dissent is tolerated. Facts are irrelevant if the political elite say so. Furthermore, the ass-covering and blame-shifting that accompanies such deeply entrenched political ideology should scare the crap out of people in the U.S. today who buy into it. It won't but it should.
Re:Dangerous and disturbing (Score:5, Interesting)
The generation of nuclear reactor had nothing to do with the accident. The Soviet-era nuclear reactors used a design with a positive void coefficient [wikipedia.org]. Basically, water is the moderator (slows down the nuclear reaction). If the water gets hot enough to boil into steam, the steam bubbles have much lower density than liquid water, which reduces its moderating capability, allowing the nuclear reaction to proceed even faster. This is what killed Chernobyl - they let the temperature get to hot, and the moderating water began to boil. The moment that happened, within a fraction of second the multi-fold increase in fission rate created enough heat to generate a thermal explosion which blew the reactor core (and building) apart, spewing vaporized fuel into the atmosphere. Only after the fuel (chunks and vapor) were dispersed (thrown far enough away from each other) did the rate of fissioning decrease.
Western nuclear plants have never been designed with a positive void coefficient for precisely this reason. The typical boiling water reactor contains the water in a pressurized chamber (hence why they're sometimes called pressurized water reactors), and is always boiling. If the fissioning starts to speed up, more water boils. The addition of steam to a constant volume vessel causes the bubbles to actually become smaller than in its normal operating state. Thus decreasing the void coefficient and slowing down the fission reaction, rather than speeding it up as with Chernobyl. The Soviets used the dangerous reactor design because it was cheaper to build, and allowed them to use unrefined uranium as fuel. Safety be damned.
Pointing to Chernobyl as an example of the dangers of nuclear power is like pointing to Banqio as an example of the dangers of hydroelectric power. What's Banqio you ask? Just the worst power generation-related accident in history [wikipedia.org]. A series of earthen dams in China meant to hold water for a hydroelectric plant failed during history rains. The subsequent flooding killed an estimated 170,000 people, destroyed 6 million buildings, and left 11 million people homeless. Fukushima and even Chernobyl sound downright tame in comparison. But it's not a valid criticism of hydroelectric power because the West never used earthen dams for hydroelectric power, just like the west never used positive void coefficient reactors for nuclear power.
Re:Dangerous and disturbing (Score:5, Informative)
No. In the RBMK reactor, graphite is the moderator (slows down the neutrons, but speeds up the nuclear reaction). The water is coolant, and absorbs rather than moderates neutrons. Water does moderate, but in the RBMK the dominant effect is absorption, so water slows down the nuclear reaction.
Boiling water reactors (BWR) and pressurized water reactors (PWR) are two different designs (neither of which is similar to Chernobyl) A PWR keeps the water in the primary loop under pressure so it does not boil.
Reactors are fine. (Score:3)
Positive Void Coefficient, and a control rod design that increased reactivity as they were inserted, not so much.
The fact that it blew the Fuck up when they Scrammed it, shows just how much of a fuckup it was.
Neat fact: they changed several things in the rest of those reactors, but those two "FEATURES" remain to this day.
Read the report by the IAEA: Pub913e_web.pdf
I pusha de button, and it all blow up!
What I learned from the miniseries. Cost cutting. (Score:5, Interesting)
On /., I have read many times that the accident was caused by rogue engineers performing an unsanctioned test.
The series makes it clear that the test was sanctioned, but was not performed correctly.
However, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the emergency shutdown actually increased reactor activity, instead of reducing it. This was because the reactor design was compromised in order to reduce costs (positive void coefficient, graphite tips on the control rods). Because of this cost cutting, the emergency shutdown mechanism could not work.
Bottom line: the accident was caused by a structural focus on reducing costs. These problems were known about for years and ignored, again: costs.
The test that the engineers were performing was intended to see if another design flaw could be overcome. Again, cost cutting.
Re:What I learned from the miniseries. Cost cuttin (Score:4, Informative)
Don't need the miniseries to know it
http://digitalarchive.wilsonce... [wilsoncenter.org]
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Part of my point was to highlight the falsehood that some people here in /. have promulgated: that the Chernobyl disaster was entirely the fault of rogue engineers performing an unsanctioned test and unrelated to the reactor design.
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Nuclear nuts, like gun nuts, always insist it is not the fault of their object of worship.
The operators have their share of blame, but the reactor design was, indeed crap, as was the manufacturing quality of the power plant. Put these factors together and add some nuclear fanboi figureheads who insist that nuclear reactors are inherently safe and simple to operate (this is how that particular design was allowed to be manufactured despite concerns of some scientists) and you'll get a boom at the first oppor
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However, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the emergency shutdown actually increased reactor activity, instead of reducing it
Not quite. It's difficult to pin this on a single cause. The RBMK was safe to operate so long as it was operated as designed. The concepts of a water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor are well understood. One of the downsides of the design is instability at low power levels which, again, was well understood at the time *but ignored*. The upside of the design is the ability to run on unenriched Uranium, cheaper to construct, and the ability to change out fuel assemblies without shutting down the reacto
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Aren't we clever. Remove any accident condition and it wouldn't have happened.
Except that is true for any accident.
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As I understand it the walls where higher than the the tsunamis at Fukushima. The problem was the earthquake that lead to the tsunamis caused the land to sink. Something that is not unheard of I hasten to add.
Fundamentally the issue at Fukushima was putting the generators in the basement. Had they been placed higher up in the building nothing of importance would have happened.
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Please Solandri,
just stop it.
Just for everyones sake: stop it.
You have no clue.
A moderator slows down neutrons. Not the nuclear reaction. It speeds up the nuclear reaction by making neutrons slow enough to interact with the uranium ... WTF ... go back to school.
And the Chernobyl reactor in question was not moderated by water but by graphite ... WTF go back to school.
You are so annoying in your ignorance and your stupid spilling of it, it really hurts me. To bad /. has no block function.
I don't dare to read
Used by who? (Score:2, Informative)
How soon can the land around Cernobyl be used again, versus the land below the Banqiao Dam?
In case you were not aware, the land has been used since the accident.
People go into the area all the time. Some people still live there, along with a ton of plant and animal life.
You comparison is false because of how much life was destroyed forever by the dam accident, which destroyed whole ecosystems forever...
Yes there are very specific areas that are truly not usable but that is an incredibly small area.
Mini-series, ffs (Score:2)
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t's a show. It was produced to air on a service that is (majorily) viewed on televisions. It's a television show.
Saying a 'series' is 50+ episodes and anything less than that is a 'mini-series' is a very American-centric world-view. It doesn't take into account that the BBC and other broadcasters call a 'series' what American television generally refers to as a 'season' and quite often those other series will have only 3-6 episodes in it, compared to American television's approximately 22.
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Making great TV isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier to make five hours of a self-contained story than to put on a semi-open-ended arc that runs over five or six seasons.
almost good enough to justify having the accident (Score:2)
Is Slashdot becoming E News or something, but yeah it was great. Almost worth having the accident just so we could have this. Great acting. Great atmosphere. Truly great television. Easily worth being seen in a cinema but of course it would have been too long I guess. Maybe an art cinema would show a 5 hour movie but not the gigaplex chains. Would have been nice to see it projected on a big screen though. HBO seems like they are trying to out-movie AMC and they did a fine job of that with this one. They eve
A TV show about an western disaster... (Score:2)
I don't have HBO (Score:2)
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Putin and his Ilk don't like it (Score:2)
https://www.themoscowtimes.com... [themoscowtimes.com]
"The fact that an American, not a Russian, TV channel tells us about our own heroes is a source of shame that the pro-Kremlin media apparently cannot live down. And this is the real reason they find fault with HBO’s “Chernobyl” series."
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Not better than Breaking Bad; when you pull it off for five seasons on an AMC budget, that’s a bigger accomplishment than making a five-hour miniseries on an HBO budget. When you manage to go out on a high note like BB did... you have defeated a huge number of TV series that had great starts, even great mid-runs, but shit endings.
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> Didn’t strike me as perfectly historically accurate
Based on what? Be specific.
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It's good. There is a fair bit of adaptation from actual history to make it fit neatly in a miniseries; composite characters and conflated events, etc., but it is a credible representation of events. I think it is a hit because it doesn't pull punches; the effects of extreme radiation exposure are vividly portrayed and the guilt of the Soviet system is exposed unvarnished and without apology or the obligatory whataboutism.
I can't help but think this appears now in part because Russia is no longer treated
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Economic Warfare (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the Chinese, and they're doing it because nuclear power is critical to a post-carbon infrastructure. Brainwashing the next generation of westerners to be anti-nuke gives them an amazing strategic advantage in economic warfare.
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You realize that neither of us are serious right? Just checking because you didn't write much.
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I assume you don't like watching The Hunt for Red October then. 8^)
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I assume you haven't watched the movie recently. You should watch it again and observe the Russian-English accents, especially with Connery
I'm not learning Russian just to watch a movie and I despise the distraction of trying to read subtitles and missing the visuals, but there is an aspect to Chernobyl that is "off" because of the accents.
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Connery's "Russian" accent had a pronounced Scottish brogue.
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I liked that they didn't use fake russian accents. They're appropriate for when a native russian is supposed to be speaking english as a second language, but certainly not in a setting where they'd be talking with each other.
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Then I expect when any UK show makes a story based on the US they will not fake a US-English accent.
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Looks like you are the actual snowflake here, whining about people downvoting a stupid post.
Re:Seriously scary stuff. (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we have the hubris to say 'that wouldn't happen in modern designs'. This is EXACTLY what they were saying about Chernobyl. Over and over, it's repeated that "an explosion can't occur".
Because engineering is a real thing. Because we're not a communist dictatorship, so there's at least some credibility to such statements. Because US engineers were, in fact, saying that Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen. Because Three Mile Island was a worst-case nuclear disaster for US designs, and no one died.
Given that universal law, and just how much harm would come from this type of disaster, how is this even on the table?
Because coal is worse.
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Fukushima was also a minor issue compared to the damaged done by and lives lost to the tsunami that caused it.
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Or right! Hmmm.. Where were they during the building and resolution of Chernobyl?
You don't think they knew the risks? Doesn't mean they could stop it. Communism is like that.
Orange Man Bad!
Bit of non-sequitur.
Geez, I didn't think of that: we can only build two different kinds of power station. *cough* False dichotomy. *cough*
The biggest death toll from failed engineering, by a very large margin, was the cascading dam failure in China. Hydroelectric has a much, much worse track record than nuclear, if measured objectively. Are you terrified? Why, it's almost as if the real problem is Communism.
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You don't think they knew the risks? Doesn't mean they could stop it. Communism is like that.
At that time the USSR had a lot of experience with channel-type reactors. They were used extensively for plutonium production. So there was a big experience with possible accidents and they were deemed acceptable.
The maximum planned accident was a partial meltdown of the core (informally called somewhat amusingly "a small goat") with channel rupture. The reactor was designed to compensate for it - there was a water pool below the core to condense the escaping water vapor and catch any fuel that might be b
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It doesn't help that they deliberately disabled most of the reactor safety mechanisms in order to perform tests, and then ran it outside of design parameters. The failure was only peripherally related to reactor safety.
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You know nothing of 20th century history, and only beclown yourself.
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Your lack of an actual response is noted. Almost like you couldn't make one.
Capitalists: communism is horrible because it doesn't reward personal performance or ambition.
Also capitalists: yeah, those dirty commies would be just as greedy on a personal level as the Boeing engineers who signed off on the MCAS system to get a promotion, and the executives who ordered it to boost their stock options. Because reasons.
Oh, hai Roman (Score:2)
Oh yes, t
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The radiation levels are the same as a chest x-ray. Etc, etc.
The radiation, unshielded, would have killed you in a few hours.
The firefighters fighting the fire first, only had typical firefighter gear, heat protection (very low neglectible shielding) and breathing masks.
All of the 30 people died a few days later. Without breathing masks they had died in a few hours.
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You are basing this on a TV series... a work of fiction riddled with inaccuracies. A 'thermal explosion' would not blow up a 30 mile area, a single mile would be about the upper limit. Chernobyl was a worst case scenario and it caused maybe a couple of hundred deaths (no research has managed to show statistically significant increase of cancer deaths despite endless efforts). Go compare this to disasters with dams or even air quality deaths from coal plants. More people have been proven to have died on wind
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A 'thermal explosion' would not blow up a 30 mile area
Indeed. Radiation levels in Pripyat immediately after the explosion were elevated but not yet dangerous. What actually caused the majority of nuclear contamination was the graphite fire that followed. A steady stream of aerosolized particles can easily travel great distances.
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i will take a stab at this, and unlike the AC below, not revert to insults.
I live within 10KM of a nuclear power plant (Pickering Nuclear - 3,100 MW)
the big problem wiht Nuclear power is fud - fear uncertainty doubt
Does the nuclear power plant create waste? Yes.. How much? a few drums full? How much waste would a 3,100 MW coal plant create?
i think if people understood the technology better, they would be less afraid. For example, are you aware that the earth itself created a nuclear fusion reactor?
https [iaea.org]
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OMG>. cant beleive i did this.. wasnt focused on what i was doing..
"itself created a nuclear FISSION reactor?"
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Oklo was just an example of a concentration of naturally enriched U in one place. The entire Earth is a fission reactor: It's hot inside because of the continual slow decay of radioactive elements. In suitable places, this energy can be tapped sustainably as geothermal.
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Well, we can compare the risk of nuclear power to the risk of driving to work. In the USA, we have about 40K traffic deaths per year. Worldwide, the number is closer to 1M traffic deaths per year. And yet, we don't have people screaming that cars are the most dangerous things in the world.
Note that traffic has killed more p
Well if you know the science and can speak freely. (Score:2)
"How do we have the hubris to say 'that wouldn't happen in modern designs'. This is EXACTLY what they were saying about Chernobyl. Over and over, it's repeated that "an explosion can't occur".
The RMBK 1000 design necessitated positive void coefficients, positive temperature coefficients, and a reactivity spike when the shutdown rods were being inserted. (Translation: Under certain conditions in an RMBK 1000 reaction, if you lose coolant, power goes up. If your temperature increases, power goes up. And when
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Then Fukushima happens, with a free-speech American designed reactor operated by the free-speech Japanese. Because of free-speech cost-cutting.
Where's your objective moral difference now?
Re: Seriously scary stuff. (Score:2)
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You would but you'd be wrong. The tests were planned to avoid fallout and underground tests are surprisingly clean if done right (they were most of the time).