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Ghost Town - My rides through chernobyl.
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/ ^ | March 27, 2004 | Elena

Posted on 03/27/2004 7:55:38 AM PST by Shooter 2.5

My name is Elena, I run this site and I don't sell anything in here and to tell the true, I don't have anything to sell. What I do have is my bike and this absolute freedom to ride it wherever curiosity and speed demon take me to.


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Travel
KEYWORDS: chernobyl; elena; kidofspeed; russia; travel
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The photos gives a sense of tragedy, sadness, haunting beauty and exhilaration.
1 posted on 03/27/2004 7:55:39 AM PST by Shooter 2.5
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To: Squantos; Travis McGee
Unbelievable.
2 posted on 03/27/2004 7:56:53 AM PST by Shooter 2.5 (Vote a Straight Republican Ballot. Rid the country of dems.)
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To: wardaddy; Beelzebubba; Eaker; neverdem
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/
3 posted on 03/27/2004 7:59:44 AM PST by Shooter 2.5 (Vote a Straight Republican Ballot. Rid the country of dems.)
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To: WhyisaTexasgirlinPA; in the Arena; Joe Brower; archy; El Gato
I guess I have always been fascinated with abandoned towns and buildings but I don't think the world has ever seen it on this scale before.
4 posted on 03/27/2004 8:03:59 AM PST by Shooter 2.5 (Vote a Straight Republican Ballot. Rid the country of dems.)
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To: Shooter 2.5
Wow.

Incredible.

She should compose and publish this.
5 posted on 03/27/2004 8:19:43 AM PST by wardaddy (I want that peckerhead Clarke's head on a pike after he's eviscerated....slowly...)
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To: Shooter 2.5
I just now received this via e-mail and am brought to silence by this amazing tour. If you haven't seen it -- stick it out. Look at every photo in the collection. If nothing else, it is a museum of Soviet Communism at its best and worst.
6 posted on 03/27/2004 8:28:37 AM PST by T'wit (Liberals are always wrong, even when they come down on both sides of the issue.)
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To: wardaddy
Wardaddy,
When I first looked at it I was stunned and then I started to realize what courage this woman has. What a sense of freedom she must possess. I hope she doesn't pay a price for this.
7 posted on 03/27/2004 8:36:59 AM PST by Shooter 2.5 (Vote a Straight Republican Ballot. Rid the country of dems.)
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To: T'wit
When I looked at the photos I was wondering if she had a partner to take some of the shots. Then she said she rode alone so the dust would be at a minimum as she drove.

Incredible.
8 posted on 03/27/2004 8:39:26 AM PST by Shooter 2.5 (Vote a Straight Republican Ballot. Rid the country of dems.)
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To: Shooter 2.5
WOW!

It was right out of a Sci-Fi movie. I was moved by her expression "the beautiful shining". Poor people didn't know what they were first observing.

Not much looting in the Ghost town. Guess people are afraid of the objects being radioactive.

The picture of the doll and child's gas masks was chilling.

Thank you for this amazing tour.

sw

9 posted on 03/27/2004 9:04:17 AM PST by spectre (Spectre's wife)
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To: Shooter 2.5; archy; Squantos; wardaddy; Eaker
Damn!

radiactive technics as far as only eyes can see. There were people inside of each vehicle.

She should have somebody send this to National Geographic. The best 20 pictures could make a terrific feature, and pay her well for her efforts.

10 posted on 03/27/2004 9:16:47 AM PST by Travis McGee (----- www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com -----)
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To: Shooter 2.5
Amazing
11 posted on 03/27/2004 9:27:47 AM PST by Tijeras_Slim (Just once I'd like to get by on my looks.)
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To: wardaddy
Incredible.

She should compose and publish this.

Expand it a bit into a book, with her explaining things in a bit more detail, perhaps accompanied by someone who hasn't seen it before.

It'd be quite a book. It's quite a story. And we don't yet know the ending.

12 posted on 03/27/2004 10:19:22 AM PST by archy (Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT! Done dirt cheap! Neckties, contracts, high voltage...Done dirt cheap!)
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To: Travis McGee; spatzie; hookman
She should have somebody send this to National Geographic. The best 20 pictures could make a terrific feature, and pay her well for her efforts.

I know a girl who's a shooter for the Geo. Think I'll send her an e-mail.

13 posted on 03/27/2004 10:21:13 AM PST by archy (Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT! Done dirt cheap! Neckties, contracts, high voltage...Done dirt cheap!)
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To: Shooter 2.5
Thanks Shooter, that is an amazing documentary...

This is incredible, people lived, had homes, country houses, garages, motorcyles, cars, money, friends and relatives, people had their life, each in own niche and then in a matter of hours this world fall in pieces and everything goes to dogs and after few hours trip with some army vehicle one stands under some shower, washing away radiation and then step in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no money, no past and with very doubtful future.

14 posted on 03/27/2004 10:40:08 AM PST by in the Arena (<taps>..........</taps>)
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To: Shooter 2.5
Incredible!!!! Thank you for sharing this with us.
15 posted on 03/27/2004 10:45:11 AM PST by GatĂșn(CraigIsaMangoTreeLawyer) (``)
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To: Physicist; KC Burke; PatrickHenry; VadeRetro; RadioAstronomer; Noumenon; atlaw; NathanR; D-fendr; ..
Biker "literate in issues of atom"
16 posted on 03/27/2004 11:21:10 AM PST by cornelis
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To: Shooter 2.5
The photos gives a sense of tragedy, sadness, haunting beauty and exhilaration.

I always hated the bedtime stories when Cinderella's coach turned into a pumpkin at midnight.


17 posted on 03/27/2004 11:41:04 AM PST by archy (Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT! Done dirt cheap! Neckties, contracts, high voltage...Done dirt cheap!)
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To: Shooter 2.5; RussianConservative

Chernobyl, Ukraine–Disasters demand heroes, and the explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the V. I. Lenin nuclear power station was a disaster on an unimaginable scale. During 10 days beginning April 26, 1986, the burning reactor belched over 100 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Dozens died, and fallout settled on millions downwind. Since then, thousands of youngsters in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have come down with thyroid cancer. The catastrophe caused untold social disruption and dealt a heavy blow to the tottering Soviet Union.

The line between hero and victim was thin in the first frantic weeks after the accident. Firemen fought the flames but lacked instruments to tell them they faced lethal doses of radiation. Military helicopter pilots hovered in the radioactive smoke plume to smother the burning reactor with tons of sand and lead, but their bombing runs missed the mark.

Yet the catastrophe–and the chance for heroism–did not end when the fire burned out. In the months and years that followed, a band of scientists led by physicist Alexander Borovoi explored the reactor's corpse to make sure it could not reawaken. Working in a hot, dark labyrinth where lingering radiation could kill within minutes, they mapped and analyzed tons of reactor fuel remaining. It was heroism of a quieter and more effective order than had come before. "Borovoi knew what he was doing," says Harvard University nuclear physicist Richard Wilson, "and he had the imagination and common sense" to succeed.

Now, 15 years after the accident, the miles of deserted countryside around the plant are turning to wilderness. Pripyat, once a gleaming city of some 45,000 plant workers and their families, is a nuclear ghost town, silent except when wind rustles the weeds or bangs a door. Inside the con­ crete "sarcophagus" built over the ruin, Borovoi still searches for signs of danger. A bearish, white-haired man of 63, he did not expect to crown his career this way. But he says that when asked, he and his colleagues "could not say no. We had to go and do it [because] we understood that our work was very important for other people."

At the prestigious Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Borovoi studied neutrinos, wispy subatomic particles that stream harmlessly through the human body. But he spent the spring and summer of 1986 calculating the radioactive hazards from the ruined reactor. He stayed in Moscow because his mother was dying. But by the fall he was at Chernobyl, where he faced a simple question: Could the remnants of the reactor fuel explode again? The lives of the thousands of workers erecting the sarcophagus were at stake.

To find the remnants, Borovoi and his men had to venture into the heart of the destroyed reactor. Robots were not up to the job; they got stuck in debris or ran amok, circuits scrambled by radiation. "We had only one kind of robots [that worked]," says Borovoi. "Biorobots–ourselves." They called themselves "stalkers." Coveralls, gloves, and a respirator were their protection–lead suits were too bulky for dashes through the reactor. A fall or wrong turn could be fatal.

Late in 1986, beyond a gantlet of highly radioactive rooms and narrow passages, the stalkers discovered a glassy, black formation resembling a giant elephant's foot. Getting a piece to analyze was not easy. It was so fiercely radioactive that the scientists could spend only seconds near it, and its surface shrugged off a drilling machine and an ax. Finally a marksman took aim with a Kalashnikov rifle. The shards gave the first clues to what had happened to the nuclear fuel and the chance of a future catastrophe.

When Borovoi and his colleague Eduard Pazukhin analyzed the fragments, they found the elephant's foot was made of uranium and zirconium from the reactor fuel rods and silicon from sand packed around the reactor vessel. As the reactor core burned at thousands of degrees, molten fuel had apparently eaten through the concrete floor and oozed into the warren of rooms below, where it cooled and hardened. The uranium in this "Chernobyl lava," it turned out, was too dilute to threaten a new nuclear reaction.

That was good news, but the elephant's foot was only a small fraction of the 180 tons of fuel. Dividing his time between Moscow and Chernobyl, Borovoi went on exploring the bowels of the reactor. He and his colleagues found more glassy lava–heaps of it, lakes of it. In May 1988, they drilled through concrete walls into the reactor pit itself–and found it empty. All of the fuel, it appeared, had either been blown out in the explosion or had oozed into the lower rooms as a dilute lava. The reactor seemed unlikely to reawaken.

To win this peace of mind, the stalkers had to brave radiation exposures that are a health physicist's nightmare and may ultimately raise their risk of cancer. Borovoi will not reveal his own dose. "Top secret," he says with a laugh, adding that his supervisors might bar him from the reactor if they knew. So far, he and his men have suffered "no specific radiation illnesses," he says. Strokes and heart attacks have taken a heavy toll on the stalkers, but he attributes that to the stress of their work.

He continues exploring trouble spots: rooms where dangerous, unmelted fuel may be buried in the rubble, outcrops of lava crumbling into toxic dust. The hastily built sarcophagus itself is riddled with holes and rests on the ruined reactor's weakened walls. A collapse would raise clouds of radioactive dust in a second, smaller Chernobyl. An international project is underway to plan and build a second, secure shelter over the existing one. Until then, Borovoi will be bound to the ruined reactor he calls "my main enemy, and my main friend."

18 posted on 03/27/2004 11:47:23 AM PST by archy (Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT! Done dirt cheap! Neckties, contracts, high voltage...Done dirt cheap!)
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To: Shooter 2.5; spatzie; hookman
My dream home:


19 posted on 03/27/2004 11:51:06 AM PST by archy (Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT! Done dirt cheap! Neckties, contracts, high voltage...Done dirt cheap!)
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To: Shooter 2.5; MarMema
What incredible pictures and commentary. I'm going to write her and thank her for this.
20 posted on 03/27/2004 12:33:18 PM PST by katnip
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