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Chernobyl

ajkel64

Check Out Chick
Staff member
I have not seen it advertised out here in Australia yet. If it’s that good I will keep my eye out for it.
 
It's very well made...basically a horror movie without any zombies
or ghosts....the level of secrecy that allowed this to worsen is just staggering.

Ive seen the first 2 episodes...wondering whether to watch the rest as they appear
or just collect them all and then, binge.
 
I’m watching it and pretty happy with the portrayal so far. I thought last night was extremely clunky with the science explanations and I disliked the unnecessary chronology shift toward the end (vague to avoid spoilers). I really like it overall, though.
 
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ouch

Stjynnkii membörd dummpsjterd
Ive seen the first 2 episodes...wondering whether to watch the rest as they appear
or just collect them all and then, binge.
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.)
 
While I'm glad I grew up in a country which chose to run slightly safer reactors for power generation and worked on reactors which were the best that could be made in their time (Naval Reactors), I don't wish the things that happened to these good folks upon anyone. I hope humanity takes very good lessons from what did occur and it's lasting after effects. I know it's all about balance and I pray we keep balance in mind as we continue using the power of atoms.
 
I've been following it on HBO.
It has to be a challenge to make a suspenseful series about a topic where everybody knows the ultimate outcome.
I just hope it does not turn people against adoption of Generation IV reactors. They'll be some of the few dependable carbon-free power sources left to us. Some designs can even use stockpiles of existing nuclear waste.
 
I haven't watched that series. I have lived it, thankfully from afar (although we all took our "fair share" of it, at the end). The radioactive cloud traveled throughout Europe, with the exception of western France and Spain. I still remember the first Soviet declarations, that the whole thing is bloated out of proportion by "anticommunist US propaganda". Then the cloud started coming out so badly out of USSR and the western European Research Institutes could measure for themselves how bad it was and they couldn't cover it up any longer.
 
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Not meaning to make light of that and all, but how does that compare to fallout from above ground atomic tests? Some of us here are from that era, and probably had Strontium 90 in our bones.
 
I've been following it on HBO.
It has to be a challenge to make a suspenseful series about a topic where everybody knows the ultimate outcome.
I just hope it does not turn people against adoption of Generation IV reactors. They'll be some of the few dependable carbon-free power sources left to us. Some designs can even use stockpiles of existing nuclear waste.

The Chernobyl design used graphite blocks as moderators, IIRC. A standard design for when the goal was to produce plutonium for you-know-what. Graphite blocks caught on fire at Chernobyl. US power plants don't use the graphite blocks. I'm not bothered by US designs. OTOH, when the Russians offered to help Cuba build a nuclear power plant using their standard design, that got my attention.
 
The Chernobyl design used graphite blocks as moderators, IIRC. A standard design for when the goal was to produce plutonium for you-know-what. Graphite blocks caught on fire at Chernobyl. US power plants don't use the graphite blocks. I'm not bothered by US designs. OTOH, when the Russians offered to help Cuba build a nuclear power plant using their standard design, that got my attention.

The burning graphite greatly helped spread radiation, but it had nothing to do with the explosion. Graphite-moderated cores are included in some Gen IV (next gen) reactor designs and are not inherently less safe. One of the biggest reasons that Chernobyl was so catastrophic is that it lacked a containment vessel. The USSR started adding containment structures just a couple years after the #4 reactor at Chernobyl was constructed. So #4 at Chernobyl had nothing to retain the spread of radiation in the case of the core exploding. The rest of the western world has been using containment vessels for many years. It would have stopped or greatly reduced the impact of Chernobyl.
 
It was pretty scary at the time. I was out walking on the hills of the English Lake District as some of the first clouds of radiation came over, and only later did I realise I am might have taken on a fairly heavy dose — when they started taking sheep grazing on those hills out of the food chain. As it turned out I was fine, but it makes you think. Meat from hill sheep from some parts of the Lake District was not considered fit for human consumption until many years later.
 
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