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Chernobyl

#11
Yazata Offline
(Jun 23, 2019 07:49 PM)Leigha Wrote: if you haven't yet seen this HBO series, you must. It's riveting, and I'm blown away. I had read about what had happened there, but didn't realize the magnitude of it.

They had to evacuate a nearby small city in what is now Ukraine. Today it's a city of ghosts. Apparently most of the radiation cloud went northeast and a large part of southeastern Belarus is low-level radioactive today. It's a farming area and Belarus doesn't like to talk about it. Probably lots of that produce is on sale in markets in Minsk.

Quote:The radiation levels are still dangerously high there, many years later.

I guess dangerously high if you are worried about developing cancer decades out. I've wondered why they don't allow reasonably physically fit senior citizens back in. If these radiation-induced cancers take 20 years to develop and you are already 70... people that age aren't going to be having babies in the radiated zone either.

Even if human beings aren't going in and resettling the zone, others are. I've heard that the Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a giant animal refuge, with all kinds of animals (deer, bear, wolves) native to the area living there without having to worry about human beings. I guess that most animals' lifespans are shorter than ours, so that they will be dead before the cancer risk becomes real. They seem to be multiplying well, though they probably do suffer from more birth defects than normal populations of the same species.

(Jun 26, 2019 03:51 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Chernobyl sports team names : Glow Worms, Atom Splitters, Rems, Roentgens

Feel free to add your own

You made me smile with that one.
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#12
Zinjanthropos Online
Quote:You made me smile with that one.

Easy to laugh at another’s misfortune. If you watch The Simpsons then you’d know Isotopes already taken as a team name. I’ve heard only one Chernobyl joke but I guess it could apply to anyone where a nuclear accident took place.....are you ready for this?

There was this guy who said he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d been to Chernobyl....told us he’d been there eight times.
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#13
Syne Offline
(Jun 26, 2019 12:40 AM)confused2 Wrote:
Syne Wrote:If nothing else, apparently it's a good Rorschach test for your views on communism.
Let us not to forget a Rorschach test for capitalism...

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile...d_accident

Quote:The Kemeny Commission noted that Babcock & Wilcox's pilot-operated relief valve had previously failed on 11 occasions, nine of them in the open position, allowing coolant to escape. More disturbing, however, was the fact that the initial causal sequence of events at Three Mile Island had been duplicated 18 months earlier at another Babcock & Wilcox reactor, the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station owned at that time by Toledo Edison. The only difference was that the operators at Davis-Besse identified the valve failure after 20 minutes, where at Three Mile Island it took 80 minutes, and the Davis-Besse facility was operating at 9% power, against Three Mile Island's 97%. Although Babcock engineers recognized the problem, the company failed to clearly notify its customers of the valve issue.[70]

Under any political system - in any crisis  - lie through your teeth..
Quote:Twenty-eight hours after the accident began, William Scranton III, the lieutenant governor, appeared at a news briefing to say that Metropolitan Edison, the plant's owner, had assured the state that "everything is under control".[59] Later that day, Scranton changed his statement, saying that the situation was "more complex than the company first led us to believe."[59]

By comparison, capitalism still fares worlds better. Accidents happen, but institutionalized incompetence takes real work.
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