Chernobyl

[Fatboyming]

Yes watching this on Foxtel Australia. With the anti-climatic end of Game of Thrones in my mind I could not help but think that GOT was fictional so the writers could make up anything, it should have been epic but for drama Chernobyl beats GOT hands down. That’s unfair, not the same thing, because watching Chernobyl you know that this, or something like this was a real event. The callous human sacrifice, the heroic self sacrifice is heartbreaking, the production, cast and acting.... superb.

Raissermisser, a good reminder on half life because it’s often misunderstood. BTW for those interested there's a great book on the subject: The Deadly Element by Leonard Bickel. It tracks the story of the discovery of uranium in an apothecary shop in East Berlin in 1789 to the development of the H bomb. It sounds like an academic read but I assure you its full of drama and amazing scientist the are mostly unknown. For example nuclear fission was discovered by Lise Mieitner and her nephew Otto Han in 1938, (other scientists had been working for years trying to understand how uranium neutron disintegration happened). But one day Lise and Otto went for a walk and in the forest sitting on a log surrounded by snow they figured it out together. They did the math on a scraps of paper from Lise's handbag. Amazing intellects. It is indeed the deadly element.

 

[Boghopper]

I was 11 when this happened and living in Ireland. I remember there was genuine concern that we would be affected by the fallout from this.
What a great show. I love the leader of the miners.

 

[Bakker1964]

There was a show on Discovery Channel, though I cannot remember the title. It dealt with the last 24-48 hours leading up to various disasters, ending at the moment the event reaches climax. The one they did on Chernobyl was particularly riveting. Really made you wonder about what makes people "stay", while others run. I mean, the people in the Control Room had to know what was happening, and it's not like it took place all in a split second.

 

[Tester28]

There was a show on Discovery Channel, though I cannot remember the title. It dealt with the last 24-48 hours leading up to various disasters, ending at the moment the event reaches climax. The one they did on Chernobyl was particularly riveting. Really made you wonder about what makes people "stay", while others run. I mean, the people in the Control Room had to know what was happening, and it's not like it took place all in a split second.

It was just a perfect storm compounded by a series of unfortunate events and wrong decisions.
All the senior staff on the day shift went home and they left the junior staff to carry out the safety
exercise. In the end, the actions of the guy who raised the rods out of the reactor were not co-ordinated with the
guy who shut off the turbine....so with those two actions, the temperature in the reactor went up...and the turbine
stopped pumping water to cool the reactor....BOOM....that's what I remember of that documentary altho my details
may not be 100% accurate.

 

[shavefan]

I love the leader of the miners.

He's great!

Really liking the series but we cancelled our HBO Now subscription so we'll have to wait for ep 4+. The heroic actions contrasted with the bureaucratic cover up/denial is interesting. My wife asked me why the men would knowingly go into the fray knowing they would die. I told here that that is what some men do. She quipped about (literal) toxic masculinity.

 

[Raissermesser]

What they did is not how such men die, but how such men live.

 

[Toothpick]

If you like the show you should really listen to the podcast too. It goes more in depth about the events, the characters, true stories that didn’t make the show, production, etc. It ties everything together really well and gives the viewer a better understanding.

 

[esswun]

Anyone remember this site from way back? The girl who rode her motorcycle through Chernobyl and took pics? There's a newer version now.

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/chapter1.html
KIDDofSPEED - GHOST TOWN - Chernobyl Pictures - Kidofspeed - Elena

 

[Umma2gumma]

While Chernobyl utilized a far less safe reactor design than what has been practiced in the West, the existing safety provisions, both hardware and procedural, would have prevented any disaster.

Instead, the hardware was deliberately disabled, and the procedural checks and balances were bypassed, because the people in charge of experiment were sloppy and arrogant.

It's been a while since I read the detailed description of events, but IIRC, they had designed a very risky experiment to prove that they could avoid runaway heat up of reactor in case of the main cooling system failure, and basically deliberately caused the reactor runaway condition; and the worst thing was that, even thought the design itself was far less fail proof than the western designs, and the experiment has been far too risky, it would have worked if they had only followed the conditions of that experiment that they themselves said were necessary to make it safe. As it is, they were unable to achieve these conditions yet proceeded anyway.

It's not that anyone held a gun to their heads, either. They wanted the praise and rewards associated with making the Fourth Energy Block operational ahead of schedule by May 1st (a Communist holiday) but there would be no bad consequences for not doing it. That entire disaster was caused by gross arrogance and total disregard for procedures coming from some very talented, very highly educated and very well compensated (by Soviet standards), mostly young, and very elite nuclear scientists and engineers. Basically the Soviet version of MIT and Stanford brats. An ode to human recklessness and arrogance.

 

[FarmerTan]

I would love to binge that, but I was born without the patience gene.

(Okay, and without the empathy, tolerance, and regard for human life genes either.)

My long lost brother!

 

[tube_guy]

I’m a mechanical engineer, so Chernobyl has always interested me. I’ve always thought what they were trying to accomplish was especially interesting. Each reactor at the Chernobyl plant had right around 1600 passageways for cooling water, with each passageway requiring a flow rate of about 8000 gallons per hour. For years, the Russian nuclear power-plants that were designed like Chernobyl operated with a known safety issue. If the plant suddenly and completely lost electricity, the cooling water would stop flowing. Backup diesel generators would take about 15 seconds to start up and then about a minute more to get up to speed before they could start the cooling water pumps again. This risk of loss of cooling water flow for over a minute was unacceptable, so the Russians had been working for years trying to come up with a solution. Russian engineering is usually very simplistic and frequently results in out-of-the-box thinking. They came up with the idea to run the cooling pumps off of the residual electricity generated while the steam turbines spun down from speed, after the electricity failed, until the diesel generators could take over. Calculations that were done had shown that there was enough energy in the rotating mass to power the pumps for about 45 seconds. They were experimenting to determine if the spinning-down turbines would power the cooling water pumps as expected. These experiments were carried out previously at Chernobyl, but none had actually proven to work. Another experiment to see if this concept would work was being carried out on the day of the disaster. A series of events surrounding this experiment caused the reactor to generate more than 10 times its design power, which caused a large steam explosion and the resulting disaster.

 

[xxvaleria]

I’m a mechanical engineer, so Chernobyl has always interested me. I’ve always thought what they were trying to accomplish was especially interesting. Each reactor at the Chernobyl plant had right around 1600 passageways for cooling water, with each passageway requiring a flow rate of about 8000 gallons per hour. For years, the Russian nuclear power-plants that were designed like Chernobyl operated with a known safety issue. If the plant suddenly and completely lost electricity, the cooling water would stop flowing. Backup diesel generators would take about 15 seconds to start up and then about a minute more to get up to speed before they could start the cooling water pumps again. This risk of loss of cooling water flow for over a minute was unacceptable, so the Russians had been working for years trying to come up with a solution. Russian engineering is usually very simplistic and frequently results in out-of-the-box thinking. They came up with the idea to run the cooling pumps off of the residual electricity generated while the steam turbines spun down from speed, after the electricity failed, until the diesel generators could take over. Calculations that were done had shown that there was enough energy in the rotating mass to power the pumps for about 45 seconds. They were experimenting to determine if the spinning-down turbines would power the cooling water pumps as expected. These experiments were carried out previously at Chernobyl, but none had actually proven to work. Another experiment to see if this concept would work was being carried out on the day of the disaster. A series of events surrounding this experiment caused the reactor to generate more than 10 times its design power, which caused a large steam explosion and the resulting disaster.

As I understand it, it didn't help that the moderator in an RBMK reactor was made of Graphite. The extreme power surge caused the water in the steam to hydrolyze into free Hydrogen and Oxygen which exploded and set fire to the Graphite.

 

[tube_guy]

The design of the graphite rods also caused a short duration spike in power when they were inserted to slow the reaction. This was noticed at other power plants in Russia but was not considered to be a problem. When the graphite rods were inserted, the unintentional spike in power broke fuel rods. The broken fuel rods prevented the insertion of more graphite rods, so the reaction couldn't be slowed and the power increased very quickly. Like you mentioned, the explosion sprayed burning graphite, which actually started fires in other reactor buildings at Chernobyl. Of course the human element is what caused all of this to be a problem in the first place. Like Umma2gumma mentioned. All the people that risked their lives and died to contain the problem are genuine heroes.

 

[Tester28]

Podcast is great...thanks.

 

[noahpictures]

Great series. Both my wife and I are impressed with the show.

 

[Space_Cadet]

I remember Chernobyl. I was 7 yo, living in Ukraine.

 

[Ad Astra]

Just started it ... wow. When I saw the fireman pick up the graphite chunk ... oh, oh.


AA

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

Yesterday's final episode was fantastic and IMO did an excellent job of wrapping things up.

For @tube_guy or anyone who's interested in the technology behind nuclear power you might want to check out Nova - The Nuclear Option, Miles O'Brien reviews what happen with the meltdown at Fukushima but also some of the next generation reactor designs and their inherent safety features.

As an aside and follow up to the other mini-series mentioned in this thread, The Hot Zone, it also came to an end this past week and well.....meh. IMO made for a so-so work of fiction but strayed too far from the book and got a little preachy.

 

[Toothpick]

Yup. Great series. May even watch it again. I’m going to get the book Voice of Chernobyl. A few stories and facts from the book were in the series. They talk about it on the podcast.

 

[Ad Astra]

"A containment vessel would have helped."

Like all great human stories, there were genuine heroes and genuine idiots ...

AA