HBO's Chernobyl was bleak and and yet insightful.

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

They knew about the serious issues with Comanche Peak in the 70's and managed to continuously cover it up until the mid 90's. When I posted on these forums a few years ago, the same man responsible for the NRC cover up, the same man who was bought off still held a senior position within the NRC. Go figure.

Sixty percent of the welds on pipes that would carry radioactive water were found to be defective, but the NRC said the system to detect errors was obviously working because the bad welds had been found. Then came a major mistake: TU built the concrete and steel supports for the reactor in Unit 2 out of alignment by 45 degrees. TU jack-hammered out the bad supports and rebuilt them in the right place. The NRC said the event did not indicate any major problems at the plant. Ellis was livid. It showed, she says, just how much attention to detail TU was paying as it built the new nuclear plant, and she contended that the same type thing might be happening all over the plant. But with the NRC supporting TU, the ASLB would not take Ellis?s concerns seriously, despite her growing pile of documentation.

WHILE ELLIS WAS DOCUMENTING THE PROBLEMS of Comanche Peak, the whole nuclear industry was being shaken by two unprecedented accidents that terrified the public and pressured the NRC to crack down on every plant in the nation. Comanche Peak was no exception. In 1975, at the Brown?s Ferry nuclear reactor in Alabama, an electrician using a candle flame to check for air leaks caught some electrical insulation on fire. The fire threatened the control of the reactor, and a meltdown was only narrowly avoided. The NRC responded by changing the design and construction regulations for all nuclear plants being built. One of the changes was to require two widely separated sets of electrical wires leading to the reactor control room, where before there had only been one, and to use better, less flammable insulation material. TU had to go back and redesign major portions of Comanche Peak.

Then came the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the country, and the nuclear industry was changed forever. On March 28, 1979, Pennsylvania?s Three Mile Island Unit 2 went out of control. A pressure relief valve on the reactor?s cooling system stuck open and most of the coolant leaked out. The control room indicator light for that valve showed that it was closed, which confused the operators. While they made a series of wrong decisions, such as turning off the flow of coolant, the reactor temperature soared to more than 5,000 degrees, and the core partially melted and fell to the bottom of the reactor vessel. The danger of radiation leaking into the environment lasted for weeks before the situation was brought under control. A small amount of gaseous radiation was released, and some 120,000 gallons of radioactive water escaped into the Susquehanna River. Nuclear engineers, perpetually optimistic, point to the Three Mile Island incident as proof of how well their hardware works. ?Three Mile Island,? says John Beck, vice president for nuclear engineering with TU, ?is a dramatic example of how that multiple layer of protection has actually worked.?

As construction proceeded at the plant, confusion mounted. A construction crew was dispatched to install a door in a wall that wasn?t there-but was shown on the current blueprints to have already been built. Or a crew would be ready to put up a pipe support-and find an electrical cable tray already occupying the spot. The construction crews would do the best they could, improvising on the spot to make things fit, constantly assured by management that this procedure was normal and that any problems would be caught by the iterative process. Another as-built would be drawn of what the crew had designed and built on the spot, and sent back to the engineers. At any one time it was difficult or impossible to know which part, if any, of the plant conformed to federal safety regulalions.

Most of the construction problems at Comanche Peak, taken singly, were relatively minor, but the sheer numbers were daunting. More than 85,000 reports of potential safety violations (a large portion of them, by the way. filed after TU said the plant was ready to start up in 1982) have been filed by TU and the NRC to date at the plant-so the overall cumulative problem is enormous. In places the plant doesn?t remotely resemble the original design. It has become difficult to determine whether all the pieces of the final plant will work together correctly and whether the plant will be safe. Incredibly, that confusion took about eight years to show, Then, in 1982, Juanita Ellis?s efforts finally paid off.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1982 ELLIS GOT A call that changed everything. Mark Walsh, an engineer for TU. had quit his job in exasperation a few weeks earlier. He worked in the pipe-support group, which designed and checked the safety of brackets that held up the pipes that would carry coolant to the core. Walsh was convinced that the supports were unsafe, but none of his bosses seemed to care about his concerns. A couple of weeks after he left TU. he heard about Juanita Ellis.

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1987/december/cloud-over-comanche-peak/

My Dad was involved with them much later, but it was still these problems being discussed here that were never properly repaired even then. They just kept lying, threatening and burying no matter who got hurt.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I'd argue in a capitalist democratic society a power plants owner would be even more worried about covering up a nuclear disaster. Because there was no alternatives in Communism, all monopolies no competition. They would fear a public outcry against nuclear use, meanwhile in communism its like "Oh you're worried about nuclear power? Shut the fuck up Boris, eat your bread rations and keep working on that power plant."

 

[CaitSeith]

I'd argue in a capitalist democratic society a power plants owner would be even more worried about covering up a nuclear disaster. Because there was no alternatives in Communism, all monopolies no competition. They would fear a public outcry against nuclear use, meanwhile in communism its like "Oh you're worried about nuclear power? Shut the fuck up Boris, eat your bread rations and keep working on that power plant."

Care to remind me which electric power provider alternatives to TEPCO the individuals living at Fukushima had to power their homes?

 

[Hawki]

https://au.ign.com/articles/2019/06/07/hbos-chernobyl-russia-planning-its-own-series-blaming-cia?abthid=5cfad52fe371294f36000059

This is gold.

Irradiated gold, but still, gold.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

https://au.ign.com/articles/2019/06/07/hbos-chernobyl-russia-planning-its-own-series-blaming-cia?abthid=5cfad52fe371294f36000059

This is gold.

Irradiated gold, but still, gold.

And most of the actual show is bullshit in terms of the science according to Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong/#70973956632f

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

And most of the actual show is bullshit in terms of the science according to Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong/#70973956632f

That article is...rather fast and loose with the very record they claim to be correcting. At least, in a couple spots I noticed offhand.

Lyudmila Ignatenko's child did die shortly after birth, of congenital cirrhosis and heart failure and it was almost certainly due to exposure. This is well documented, by the woman herself, in _Voices from Chernobyl_. The notion the fetus "absorbed" the radiation sounds preposterous on its surface, but fetal uptake of radionuclides is actually a studied and known phenomenon. Rather important when it comes to nuclear medicine and pregnant women.

No, radionuclides do not stop emitting once they've been internalized by a human body. Beta, gamma, and X-ray emission as a byproduct of decay still occurs. No, this is not stopped by disrobing and washing exposed persons.

Meanwhile, they said nothing about the "two to four megaton" potential bubbler pool steam explosion. The number was actually 3-5, and came from Vassili Nesterenko, who was quite the hyperbolic kook to begin with, and whose "plan" to stop the reactor core fire got more than his fair share of people killed. Said plan being to fly helicopters directly over the exposed core and into the smoke plume while it was still burning, and drop tanks of pressurized liquid nitrogen directly onto it.

The only justification I've heard for that figure that even approaches the boundary of realism, or even possibility according to the laws of physics as we know them, is the steam explosion would have generated fallout equivalent to a multi-megaton groundburst. Except in reality, it likely would have been equivalent to a multi-hundred-megaton groundburst.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

https://au.ign.com/articles/2019/06/07/hbos-chernobyl-russia-planning-its-own-series-blaming-cia?abthid=5cfad52fe371294f36000059

This is gold.

Irradiated gold, but still, gold.

So, will Comrade Putin travel back in time and force the radiation to submit before the awesome power of his dad-bod?

 

[Squilookle]

I was curious to see if they mentioned why Chernobyl was built in the first place, and that giant Over the Horizon Radar array it powered, but they didn't. The one thing I definitely wanted them to cover though was the liquidators doing the 90 second dash to remove graphite from the roof in the lead suits that were good for one-use only.

The show did not disappoint.

 

[bluegate]

"HBO's Chernobyl was bleak and and yet insightful."

You should see Earth's Chernobyl, that's a whopper.

Earth's Chernobyl's doing pretty good, actually. It's like a nature reserve now.

True.

That might be the key to protecting the environment; irradiate enough places so that nature can still thrive, but humans can't "safely" live there.

"HBO's Chernobyl was bleak and and yet insightful."

You should see Earth's Chernobyl, that's a whopper.

Can't find it this Earth's Chernobyl.

I was joking; I was talking about the actual Chernobyl and what happened there in the 80's, not about a different network's series.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'm watching it now. It's great. And also bleak, and harrowing, and more than nightmarish.
Having said that it's amazing it only got as awful as that, considering all of the apocalyptic predictions they were making at the time. I don't know how true to life this is but Legasov makes it sound like the whole of Europe was this close to getting fucked.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Also I cannot believe even the internet is meme-ing the hell out of this show:

Actually meme-ing the show went viral in Argentina last Sunday when the entire country suffered a historical power outage. Everybody was making jokes about Dyatlov running the guilty power plant.