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.
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
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.
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.
I know a girl who's a shooter for the Geo. Think I'll send her an e-mail.
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.
I always hated the bedtime stories when Cinderella's coach turned into a pumpkin at midnight.
Chernobyl, UkraineDisasters 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 catastropheand the chance for heroismdid 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. "Biorobotsourselves." They called themselves "stalkers." Coveralls, gloves, and a respirator were their protectionlead 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 lavaheaps of it, lakes of it. In May 1988, they drilled through concrete walls into the reactor pit itselfand 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."
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