Posted on 06/04/2019 5:16:10 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
The final episode of the HBO mini-series Chernobyl aired on Monday night and the end was profoundly grim as the truth is often very difficult to hear and see. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the then-Soviet Union happened on April 26, 1986. It was catastrophic. Thirty-one people died in the explosion and the immediate aftermath. The fallout from the accident, however, may have killed as many as ninety-three thousand. They died of cancers, many of the victims children.
The Soviet Union was not forthcoming about the cause and severity of the accident for many years. Only one nuclear scientist had the courage to tell the truth at the show trial of the three persons on duty in the control room that night. Only one of them, a twenty-five year employee, was truly responsible, but then even he had never been properly trained to understand the challenging complexities of how the reactor functioned. Bottom line? The series is a window onto the utmost criminal failures of communism, its primacy of the state above all else. People are just instruments of it, to be used and discarded. There is absolutely no value or respect for individual human beings.
It is curious that the series was aired at this moment in time. Our American left revered Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Ted Kennedy made several overtures to persons in the USSR in the hope of preventing President Reagan's 1984 re-election. Democrats worshipped Gorbachev and loathed Reagan almost as much as they hate Trump. Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988. Leftists also loved Soviet vassal state Cuba, led by dictator Fidel Castro and pretended Cuba was a successful enterprise.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
where they are taking us (Curtis Bowers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZb2KmKOZY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WO9XtfY1iU
They had created a Stalinist culture where no one dared speak the truth, regardless of the stakes. Likely things are not much different for those employed in the D.C. swamp today.
One report was that the nuclear engineers were running an experiment to see how long they could generate electricity after the reactor was shut down. They shut off the coolant pumps by over riding the interlock safeties which caused the meltdown. Truth is a rare commodity.
Ah but ask any ‘WOKE’ enthusiast, they will eagerly inform all and sundry that THEIR NEW IMPLEMENTATION will absolutely work as all previous efforts were obviously flawed. The ability of the human animal to be self-deceiving never ends!
I watched the first episode and it made me cringe to the point I couldn’t watch it. I have worked with radiation for a number of years with a related degree, and to watch it was difficult becase I know the effects of radiation on the body.
You know how you watch horror movies and someone goes to open a door to go into a dark cellar and you are saying “Noooo! Don’t do that!”
Watching Chernobyl was much like that for me. It made me quite queasy. I guess I will get it when it comes to our library and watch the rest.
In 1999 and 2000, I was going through orphanages all around the Chernobyl area, documenting the conditions for NGOs in the USA which supported these orphanages.
I found a few which had children damaged by the radiation. Some of the most horrible and vile conditions I have ever seen in my life. My wife, an RN, almost went postal when she saw the conditions of one of the medical treatment rooms.
Everyone needs to watch this 6 part series.
It shows the true evil of communism.
It also shows the heroism of individual people that were willing to sacrifice their own lives to save potentially millions of people.
About ten years ago, I picked up a book that a guy had gone and talked to two Russian nuke experts (years after the episode). They laid out this odd experiment that was part of this.
Russians had this extreme schedule for maintenance of nuke plants (would occur more often than French or Americans). As part of this....every single plant had to have a diesel generator made (customized) of a massive size and huge cost....to gently bring the power down on the nuke plant. This diesel generator engineer had this great idea....in theory, he felt that the plant itself, could continue to ‘shift gears’ and gently bring itself down, without the aid of a massive diesel generator. Would save a lot of money. Issue which is talked about later....he wasn’t a nuke engineer....he was a power engineer and background in diesel generators.
Somehow, he went to Moscow and got the chief folks to sign off on one experiment to avoid using the diesel generator, and use his idea of ‘bumping’ off the nuke process itself. They signed his paperwork and he shows up at Chernobyl. The management question this, but eventually allows the experiment to occur.
As it bumps down, an odd thing occurs....safety mechanisms occur, and the diesel generator starts up anyway. The plant management refuse to crank it back up and do it a second time.
So the idiot goes back to Moscow....requests a second permit. They sign off, and he goes back to Chernobyl. Now, he shuts off all these safety mechanisms dealing with the stupid diesel generator. Then they start the experiment to bring down the nuke system. That fails. There’s no power to handle this in a safe fashion. He walks out the backdoor, and the team is left with no way to resolve this because of the safety mechanisms dismantled.
Why no one talks about this? It all leads back to Moscow, and the supreme authority there.
There was a famous picture some years back from a book I think was titled “A Day in The Life of The Soviet Union” (or it might have been Russia.
It showed a guy on an table in a filthy, disgusting tiled operating room with dirt, grime (dried blood?) on the walls and the floor, and a surgeon or some medical person in filthy, soiled scrubs collapsed in a chair in exhaustion, smoking a cigarette. In the back you could see a filthy vacuum bottle with grimy rubber tubing, partially filled with a dark body fluid, sitting on the floor.
Good series, it gives a glimpse of what a communist state is like. I do wish they would have focused more on how it happened. A combination of human error, incompetence and insufficient safeguards to counter such ineptitude. Nukes can be very safe but you cannot cut ANY corners.
Barack Obama wanted Iran to have nuclear power and become a nuclear weaponized power. Yet Barack Obama didn’t want the United States to use nuclear power or have nuclear weapons (he took their use “off the table” even in response to a nuclear attack and wanted to take our arsenal down to ZERO and wanted to halt new weapons development).
There was an unAmerican traitor in the White House.
The control rods could never be completly removed from the pile, so they had graphite tips in order to make the reactor more effiicient and scavenge ever last neutron they could. This meant that when they were inserted, the graphite accelerated the reaction as the rods decended before the boron portion of the control rod quenched it. That caused this caused a sudden power surge which jammed the rods and lead to qreater power surge, which lead to the explosion. Cheapness was the cause of the disaster.
Sounds like a chapter in “Atlas Shrugged”.
Missed it but its on my On Demand list.
L
Very good series.
Communism rests on the presumption that bureaucrats in the capital have the knowledge and expertise to run things they have no real understanding of. Meanwhile, the people who DO have the training, are afraid of telling the senior Party people that they don't know what they are doing. The result, as you point out, is Chernobyl.
The miners that the Soviets conscripted to dig a tunnel knew the communist were all full of shit.
I saw this very same thing at a community college I worked at. People were promoted to manage people doing jobs they had no idea how to do instead of promoting people who had worked their way up through the ranks who could actually do the job themselves if need be in a crunch.
I believe they did this to advance the careers of those they "deemed" worthy to part of their upper echelon click. I did't know if all colleges were like this but it sure soured me on colleges in general. Now we know it was all about getting leftist pigs into positions of power so the minds of young people could be corrupted to their way of thinking.
Note: No offense to real pigs is intended or implied.
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