Posted on 06/06/2019 8:57:54 AM PDT by Cecily
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, once said that Chernobyl was ‘perhaps the real cause’ of the state’s collapse.
The attempted cover-up of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the endless lies and obfuscation, and the risk to the lives of millions laid bare the failings of the communist regime as never before.
It proved to the Soviet people that the time had come for radical change and that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost — openness — was the only option.
At the very least, the explosion in Reactor 4 on the night of April 26, 1986, hastened the end of the ‘Evil Empire’.
The blast emitted more than 400 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Excellent mini series.
As usual the main culprit is not charged and that person was the Soviet nuclear scientist that allowed graphite tips on the boron control rods to save money on all Soviet reactors. It was the graphite tips that caused the explosion.
There is a very good podcast out there that does an in depth analysis of catastrophic failure called ‘The Podcast of Doom’.
The episode on Chernobyl is one of the best, most thoroughly documented that I’ve run across.
A lot of those things also applied with regards to the Challenger explosion that same year.
Agreed,
The character of the “woman physicist” was an amalgamation of a dozen or so actual scientists that came together to correct the problem. I think it is interesting that they chose to make that character a women. In the epilog of the final episode they showed a picture of the group of scientists on a bus. There were a couple women, but by far most of them were men.
At least they did not make her a black or Hispanic woman with a cockney accent :)
They also 'advocate' for cheap labor to undercut American wages. It's nothing more than corrupt 'elites' (read white trash with money) standing for the 'rights of corrupt 'elites'.
No different than how Hollywood cheats to get their brats into the best schools while kicking out a hard working American kid who deserved the spot.
We have the worst 'elites' in the world...
It’s very compelling. I binged watched it.
One died in 2005. The other two were still alive as of 2017 when they were given bravery awards by the Ukrainian government.
}:-)4
[Toured a Russian Sub w/ a US Navy Submariner as a guide. He said - “When you have more people than you can feed, you get a different view on human life. So one should not assume that a different society/culture shares your values.”]
Stupid Russians irradiated half the planet and the monstrous carcass of the reactor is still sitting there. Chernobyl will be radioactive until the end of time and beyond.
Sam Giancana said - One thing better than being King, and this is King Maker
Actually, It's nonfiction. It dealt with a real Ebola outbreak that happened at two Army labs in the Washington, DC area.
It was a documentary. They even interviewed the real Nancy Jaax and her husband, toward the end of the series.
I read the book a few years ago, when we had the incident where someone with Ebola flew into the US. It really does seem to be the "Monster" that they nicknamed it. No vaccine, no cure, and 90% fatality rate.
If you are interested, here is the Wiki page about the incident. The Hot Zone
Indeed. The half-life of U235 is 700 million years.
At least there is a cover over it now finally after 30 years.
Of course, it will need to be replaced in 100 years.
The New Safe Confinement (NSC or New Shelter) is a structure built to confine the remains of the number 4 reactor unit at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which was destroyed during the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The structure also encloses the temporary Shelter Structure (sarcophagus) that was built around the reactor immediately after the disaster. The New Safe Confinement is designed to prevent the release of radioactive contaminants from exiting the shelter, protect the reactor from external influence, facilitate the disassembly and decommissioning of the reactor, and prevent water intrusion.[3]
The New Safe Confinement is a megaproject that is part of the Shelter Implementation Plan and supported by the Chernobyl Shelter Fund. It was designed with the primary goal of confining the radioactive remains of reactor 4 for the next 100 years. It also aims to allow for a partial demolition of the original sarcophagus, which was hastily constructed by Chernobyl liquidators after a beyond design-basis accident destroyed the reactor.
The word confinement is used rather than the traditional containment to emphasize the difference between the containment of radioactive gases—the primary focus of most reactor containment buildings—and the confinement of solid radioactive waste that is the primary purpose of the New Safe Confinement.
In 2015, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) stated that the international community was aiming to close a €100 million funding gap, with administration by the EBRD in its role as manager of the Chernobyl decommissioning funds. The total cost of the Shelter Implementation Plan, of which the New Safe Confinement is the most prominent element, is estimated to be around €2.15 billion (US$2.3 billion). The New Safe Confinement accounts for €1.5 billion.[5]
The French consortium Novarka with partners Vinci Construction Grands Projets and Bouygues Travaux Publics designed and built the New Safe Confinement.[6] Construction was completed in the end of 2018
And how many times did Rush visit Russia before the fall of the USSR to to know this was the case?
The mini series was extremely well done. A must see. I was stationed in Germany when it happened. I remember them remember them removing all the milk products from the Commissary. Probably received some sort of dose from it, got melanoma some years ago. Caught it very early. I’m not sure if there was some connection. Another good documentary is ‘Robots in Hell’ about the Japanese Nuclear disaster, at Fucashima (sp).
Another major cause of Soviet collapse was the first Iraq war. Sadaam had lots of Russian hardware. Soviet generals were telling their junior officers to sit back and watch the U.S. military get savaged by an army using Soviet tanks and doctrine.
And then the U.S. military totally destroyed the Iraqis within hours.
The Soviet hierarchy had been telling them for decades that when the time was right, they would roll right over Western Europe. The junior officers then realized what would have really happened, and suffered a major loss of confidence with their leadership.
Desert Storm finished in February 1991. The USSR ceased 10 months later.
A fine an VERY scary book. ALso very fine writing. I have gotten to watch the first two episodes, but, haven’t seen the last of it. At least it is recorded.
True, as far as it went, but not the whole truth.
It was cheaper because it was made with less technological sophistication. The lesser sophistication was a deal-breaker for the Reds because the USSR's whole technological base lagged behind all of Western Europe, and further than that behind the USA.
The Soviet's first "commercial" nuclear power plant went online in 1954, three year's before the US's first. They got there first because they only ever considered "water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors" (same basic design as Chernobyl's RKMB reactor) because they were both lowest-tech and cheapest. And, because, as Chernobyl showed, the Soviets were willing to scrimp on safety and risk the safety of their own citizens in order to create the impression that their system was superior.
The US, OTOH, spent years experimenting with different reactor designs in order to learn empirically which was most suitable. They chose the pressurized water reactor in part because it offered a wider margin of safety, at least in a country with a "modern" technological base. For one thing a PWO reactor produces less power as it gets hotter, which is the opposite of the RKMB, and why the Soviet design was susceptible to thermal runaway in the first place.
The sad truth is that the USSR had more than adequate coal to meet their energy needs so there was no point and no ROI on investing in such expensive technology (other than you need a nuclear reactor to make Plutonium-239). They only invested in nuclear reactors for political motives.
In the end, the "cheapness" Legasov referred to was most applicable to value the Politburo placed on the lives of the Soviet peoples.
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