The Soviet infiltration of the "Green"' movement was a real thing.

Not according to the questionnaire the Blood Bank asked me to fill out before I was denied and told I cant donate.

Oh well, so far so good, no third ear or other weird growths have shown up.  

I was young and single and subsisted off alcohol, nicotine and jaeger schnitzel but it must have sucked for the families.  I remember the stores not having any fresh milk, eggs or veggies for some time.

I was 8...

Around 6pm, there was a knock on our door. Two men in cheap brown suits stood there and asked for my dad. They told me, my mom and my grandma to go the neighbors apartment and wait there until they came and got us. At this point my mom (telling me this story later) though that they were arresting my dad and we would never see him again. Instead,  they told him to pack his bags and they he was going to help a matter of national security and help set up communications around a disaster site and this was a national security matter. He would be leaving in 24 hours and to be ready. He worked around the cleanup site for almost two years, one month on, two months off starting with day 3 after the disaster.

My dad worked at the TV broadcasting studios in Ukraine,  Kiev and was a senior broadcast engineer.

He went to work in Chernobyl and helped design and set up their radio communication needs. He was supposed to.work outside of the 30 kilometer zone but he was a dumbass and did a number of helicopter rides to check out the ractor, test coms, etc.

My dad is a typical Russian. A smoker and an alcoholic that never took care of himself.

Today, he is a 70 year old recovering lung cancer survivor. Still drunks, although less, still smokes(doctors orders)...

As for me, as soon as my parents found out, they put me on a train to go live with my aunt in Moscow.  I still remember looking at my mom from the window of the departing train thinking that I would never see her again... I stayed away from Kiev for six months until they had some containment. The morning I left, the news broke globally.  

Crazy times...

I was 15 at the time - living in Berlin

fun times

TMI received enormous amounts of reporting and publicity. It was a huge deal in this country and became a rallying cry against anything nuclear that lives on to this day. The fact that everyone knows the name is testament of that.

That the TMI incident occurred in conjunction with the release of the movie The China Syndrome really amplified the situation, too. Then we had the movie Silkwood as well.

Chernobyl certainly didn’t help, but anything nuclear already had an extremely negative perception in this country due to leftist activism.

Think of how much vodka went up in that blast.

I was in kindergarten when it went down. I remember the news, I also remember them bringing TV's into the class room so we could watch the Challanger because there was a teacher going to space... yeah that was awkward.

Chernobyl is one of the events that got me interested in science and engineering at an early age.



About 10 years ago I worked on a combustion research project with a guy from Ukraine. He was in about 60 and he constantly was going outside for a cigarette. He worked on the site after the accident. He was part of the team that injected liquid nitrogen under the reactor. I don't smoke but a bunch of us would go outside with him and he would recount his experience there. In his opinion a lot of people died in the decades that followed. They were not fucking around through, as fucked up as the Soviet Union was, they threw everything they could at that plant.

I was 11.

Dumb question. What would the result be today if they had simply walked away and done nothing?

It would have burned for months and stayed completely exposed all these years, lots more in Eroupe would have died from cancer. More of the Ukraine would have been evaluated permanently. There was real chance that there could gave been a ground water explosion, did they prevent one? Maybe we don't know a for sure, but if they had walked away and it did the disaster would have been exponentially worse.

The helicopters coped fine; the danger was for the meatballs inside; the steam/smoke plume was intensely radioactive.

The radiation did destroy every remote controlled vehicle that went on the roof, but that is much, much closer to the source, and I don't doubt drones would suffer the same fate.

Green Movement, Anti-Nuclear Movement, they had their fingers in all of it.

I was stationed in Germany when it happened.

Another gift, brought to you by communism!

The soviet infiltration of America was already well underway by the 1920s.

Went in for swing shift. At crew briefing the shift supervisor handed out an alert from the NRC. Given that this was a few days after it happened, when the world finally figured out something went wrong in Russia.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/1986/in86032.html

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/1986/in86033.html

https://www.history.com/news/chernobyl-disaster-timeline

I think like four ROV’s /drones crawling around Fukushima all got fried pretty quick.  Granted, that was inside the structure.

Decades of anti-nuclear propaganda funded by the Soviet Union /Russia.

No one believes me when I tell them this



I turned 16 that year. I'll be honest: I was WAY more upset by challenger and FOPA. For context; wall hadn't come down yet; we weren't actively doing bomb drills in school, but... that shit wasn't reaching us, and I was happy the combloc own goaled themselves. Wondered if we had a hand in it, actually.

It was interesting to see people change their opinion as to my stupid pointless hobby of owning radiation detectors and learning about CBR. Met a relative of a friend at one time that worked for Duke Energy, he was terrified that a hillbilly child understood frisker selection and basics of atomic theory. (I thought he could come off some older gear from work... seemed plausible, right?)

Still haven't watched this masterpiece

Fuck

Main reason I came here, someone on reddit (is it true or not? Don't care)

The chopper blades hit a cable from a crane. It didn't just magically fall

Edit: beat on pg 1

I vaguely remember all my buddies that worked Air Force Tech Ops (air & water radiation testing/gathering) being gone for a while after that event.

No.

Unfortunately, despite the heroic and desperate efforts of the soviets, all of their efforts in the first few days helicopters etc did absolutely nothing to contain or stop the fire/meltdown.  The materials in the reactor all melted together into a mass of radioactive lava that melted through the bottom of the reactor containment vessel and spread all through the lower levels of the building and eventually cooled and solidified on its own.

Virtually all of the helicopter dropped materials missed the reactor anyways and did nothing to stop it.

Likewise the gargantuan efforts by the soviets to decontaminate the surrounding area were completely pointless; even when they were effective, wind and rain would quickly recontaminate those areas again.

Would doing nothing have been worse?  I've no idea but what we know now is that what they did do was not effective.  One of the most effective things they should have done, evacuation, was one of the things they did most badly.

I was in high school and my town was halfway through building a nuke plant in it.

This definitely held our attention.

I was 16 . I think that moment was a good contributor to the collapse that would come 5 yrs later .

I have always wondered why the boron control rods were graphite tipped.  I am going to try to speak above my knowledge here, but it is my understanding graphite acts as a moderator.  This seems counterintuitive.

@JustinU235

Given that, I am still amazed NASA had not figured out a 100% oxygen command module could be a really bad day until Apollo 1.

Yeah what the guy above said. They likely thought they had a good idea for flux shaping and power optimization. It may have been a good idea if they had their other coefficients of reactivity correct.

Megawatt graphite pile reactors with a positive void coefficient will get all 'splody when operated at gigawatt levels.

Who knew?

Exactly.

The balls on those guys.

They also have a BRDM in the scene and a lot of actual, soviet era vehicles. It's a gold mine for me.

Green on the outside, red in the middle

The Soviets used other social causes as a divisive point to fuel anti-American groups.



Yep, they had people praising the USSR way back then including, I believe, the New York times or some other big news agency by focusing on their little Potempkin villages.



You're not alone.

The producer of the Chernobyl mini-series (2019) had the intention of harming Trump by showing what harm an "autocrat" like Trump could do to a country, even though Trump was never mentioned in the series. Unfortunately for the producer, it instead showed the viewers the real dangers of communism and the inability to question government decisions.