[LMB] OT: Sad link of the day

[David McMillan]

James Nicoll wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, Bear Master wrote:
> 
>> On Dec 31, 2007 4:29 PM, Marilyn Traber <mtraber251 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGLRrQEBqAs
>>>
>>> Cherynobyl.
>>>
>>> I have no words.
>> Wow.
>>
>> Thank you for sharing that.
>>
> SNIP
> 
>> Chernobyl was a warning shot, and somehow by some miracle we, as a 
>> species, listened for once!  We owe a debt to those who died or became 
>> refugees, and to the Ukrainians still living in its shadow.
> 
>  	Not to encourage the wanton use of nuclear weapons but while I 
> think we all learned an important lesson about not getting drunken 
> engineers to build reactors from flammable materials [1] before allowing 

	Not merely flammable, but reaction accelerators. [warning:  working 
from memory of an old NRC post-accident report]  For lubrication 
reasons, the first few feet of the reactor control rods were made out of 
solid graphite.  Which would have been fine, except that graphite 
*increases* reactor fission activity.  So when the Chernobyl reactor 
started to get into trouble, and the control crew tried to drive the 
fully-withdrawn control rods in to reduce the reactor activity, the 
initial entry of the rods generated a massive *spike*, which, combined 
with the way the reactor had been brought to the edge of its operating 
envelope and the disengaged (in some cases padlocked OFF) mode of the 
other safety systems, was enough to push the reactor right over the edge.
	Soviet reactor designs were always rather... iffy.  I spoke with a 
Naval friend who once sat in on a NavInt briefing back in the early 90s 
concerning a near-disaster at Vladivostok (I have some distant relatives 
who live near there).  Apparently, the local power grid manager cut 
electrical power to the naval base for non-payment... not realizing 
that, when docked, the SSNs and SSBNs *had* to have external power to 
keep their pumps running and the reactors from China-Syndroming their 
way to the bottom of the bay.  Fortunately, the base commander was a Man 
of Action, and had a big chunk of his security force storming the local 
power grid facility and forcing the power back on before anyone started 
to glow in the dark.

> bureaucrats to run extremely poorly thought-out safety tests from 
> Chernobyl, the death toll so far has been comparatively low: United 
> Nations Scientific Committee of the Effects of Atomic Radiation puts the 
> total so far at about 57.

	Harder to quantify the elevated cancer rates, but yes, Chernobyl has 
been over-blown.  Decades of popular misconceptions about how nuclear 
weapons could End Civilization are probably to blame.

>  	To put this in perspective, the WHO estimates that something like 
> three million people die each year from air pollution.
> 
> 1: Although I would have said that Windscale taught us much the same 
> lesson and yet people still used massive amounts of graphite in reactors 
> built after the Windscale fire.