The woman scientist said 3-4 Megatons if I heard her correctly.

The answer to D43 is calcifications.

@Backnblack, you must have learned wrong. It is 1700.

Ok, so I see that you have the mind of a child. I always hate to assume.

Perhaps you should endeavor to learn a bit about the origins of the Soviet and how many of their own the Party liquidated in the cruelest manner for any and no reason at all, real or perceived.

I understand this might be difficult for you to comprehend since you are lucky enough to have lived in a comfortable insulated bubble.

Perhaps you should read book or two on the actions and history of the Communist Party in Russia and elsewhere.

I understand books can be boring. Perhaps start with wikipedia?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin

The accepted estimates for the explosion at Chernobyl are around 10 Tons equivalent of TNT.

3 to 4 megatons is just dumb. It wasn't even close to that. Don't believe everything you see on TV.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225731774_Estimation_of_Explosion_Energy_Yield_at_Chernobyl_NPP_Accident

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/alnoaimi2/docs/kr79.pdf

Still waiting on that evidence that the KGB was responsible for Chernobyl...

It would help if you understood the context... he's referring to the potential steam explosion of the bubbler pools that they were worried about, not the initial explosion itself.

Try to keep up.

You can keep on saying it, but it's not having the effect you think.

Any way to watch this show if you don't have HBO?

You can sign up for a one month at a time HBO subscription through Amazon Prime.

Your stupid shit is polluting a quality thread.  Go somewhere else.

This discussion of the possible explosion they're trying to avoid as of the end of Ep 2 interests me, because  the truth is we still cannot understand some of the shit water does under extremely high temperature.

Remember those videos with thermite dripping through a bucket into ice?   The crazy guy on the hydrolic press youtube channel even did one on a frozen lake.  Pretty good sized explosions from a melt mass equal to maybe a few tablespoons of molten material at less than half the temperature of the Chernobyl melt.  And the guys of Mythbusters said no one knows wtf is happening, although there are some theories.   I think its a temporary confinement that lets water get into some sort of extreme superheated state followed by a BLEVE explosion.

When I was in college a girlfriend's roommate nearly blew up their kitchen putting full sized tea leaves into an old 50s style screw on lid teapot.   The leaves floated up and plugged the teaspout, and when the pressure got high enough it popped off the knob from the screw top letting the entire 3 or so cups of water instantly boil in the container.  It blew the top off like shrapnel, blew the vent hood off their kitchen stove, and shot bits of metal through the ceiling.    SHe said it sounded like dynamite.

No add in that there was zirconium from the fuel cladding in that melt, and that Zirconium is a catalyst for popping hydrogen and oxygen atoms apart at high tempurature so you can add a hydrogen explosion to the mix too.    It would not have been small, but not as large as supposed by the made-up scientist.

One thing that's most interesting is that the fallout from whatever sized explosion it would have been.   That was the bad part.

The little Uranium bomb we popped over Hiroshima had about 55 pounds of Uranium.    A mass equal to the dime in your pocket actually fissioned, the rest was just bathed for an instant in an insane neutron flux and them blown to pieces and spread.

Now, remember those fuel bundles at Chernobyl (they look like a cluster of rods) EACH have over 300 pounds of Uranium.   And there are like 1700 of those bundles  in the RBMK reactor type.    That is a whole lot of nuclear material, all angry and saturated with daughter nucleotide products from the fission that are insanely radioactive.  The amount of shit that could have gone airborne if that mass actually plopped into a relatively confined pool of water... yikes.

There is no possibility of any evidence to be found. All major decisions at the top were communicated down through secret channels. There would be no record to be discovered. If you do not understand this then you do not understand how the Soviets worked.

I never said I could prove anything. I just said that knowing what was on the minds of the top Party men at the time, they saw western nuclear power as one of the biggest economic and military threats to them. They already had a large number of clandestine programs underway which included direct and indirect intervention including destructive sabotage of commercial and military nuclear plants. The anti nuclear "Green" movements in the UK, France, South Africa, Spain, and Germany were funded and enabled directly by the Soviet government through "Active Measures" type programs. They blew up plants, they sabotaged plants, they stole nuclear materials, they staged violent protests... the list goes on and on.

They already knew through their success in Vietnam and elsewhere that controlling public opinion in the West was far more important and effective than direct intervention. Far more effective. The Chernobyl incident put all of Europe under a potential plume of contamination.... very scary sounding to the ignorant masses but at the end of the day really not that big a deal long term. You think the Soviets had any plans to close their plants or curtail their programs from an event like this? Not a chance. They are not beholden to public opinion. On the other hand, much of the Western world's nuclear program was mortally wounded by this single event. I would never put anything past the Party Apparatchik from that time. They were ruthless and intelligent and played the long game.

See the following blurb from one of the links I posted above: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/alnoaimi2/docs/kr79.pdf

"The Chernobyl accident was practically "planned". Its roots lay in the history of the RBMK development. The RBMK design was developed by the same organizations and specialists that were involved in the development of the Soviet nuclear weapon. Therefore, the same level of secrecy was brought in the development of nuclear power reactors for electricity generation. It was forbidden in the
USSR to make public any information about incidences even at foreign NPPs. The former deputy head of the department for the NPP construction supervision in the USSR Ministry of Power, Grigorii Medvedev
remembered that the technical information about the accident at the Three Mile Iceland NPP was classified in the USSR [11]. "

I realize that I am going beyond what the author there is saying. But I am free to say what I want, that author wasn't. I have researched the history of the Soviet government for many years, and the actions of their leaders. Nothing they do or did would surprise me. Nothing.

You don't get a steam explosion without a pressure boundary so that steam would just boil off so forgive me if I didn't understand which windmill you were tilting at.

You will generate enough hydrogen to get a hydrogen explosion which still wouldn't come close to "megatons of TNT" range.

Just wanted to point out that the General reversed into the locked gate and didn't ram it head on with the dosimeter on the grill. That was a nice touch.

HBO usually has a 7 day free trial. If you really don't want to pay for it, you should wait till it's over so you can binge watch it.

The contamination...physically spreading of highly radioactive debris was the issue.

Water somehow being the fuel in a BLEVE?  Usually the BLEVEs I worried about and trained on involved a substance that was flammable...maybe the high temp and various elements like zirc could cause water to disassociate and create hydrogen..not sure if that could have happened practically in the bubbler pool situation but even if it didn't the simple steam explosion would have doubled the disaster.

They've gotten enough right..or at least possible in this show that I'm inclined to believe that the 3 megaton number was briefed. Why it was briefed is an open question. Scientists, recognizing the inertia of the bureaucracy, may have done that to motivate action.

Did a helicopter really go down like they showed?

Yes. Video on you tube. They recreated it well.

My wife is Russian. She hasn't seen the show, but her and her older brother will HAPPILY tell you about the failures of Communism, the corruption of the USSR (and their current government) and have no qualms about calling out the BS the USSR did. She hasn't seen the show (yet) but she knows about the failures there too.

You aren't totally wrong, and outsider criticizing goes over like a fart in church (I have some special treatment with this topic with her- criticism of communism, not farting ) BUT asking a simple question like "what do you think about the show" would be totally fine with about any Russian. You may not like the answer, but asking is fine.

TL;DR- there's a LOT of anti-communist Russians

I actually haven't seen episode 2 yet.

My guess is that they (the screenwriters) mixed up the kiloton and megaton units, and perhaps it's total energy release, and not initial explosive force.

Yes, according to wiki, but months later.

I'll go with that one as it led to the incident in the first place, not in the conspiracy sense that they did it on purpose mind you, then in the immediate aftermath - made things worse.

Episode 2 I thought was better than EP1.  But you have to pay attention, especially when the scientists are talking.

The Party Officer actor did a great job.

Completely agree.

I don't know how accurate the portrayal was, but it was something that definitely resonated: you've got somebody who isn't an SME, but he becomes your boss in very adverse circumstances, adversarial circumstances, and then becomes your best champion for getting stuff done in the situation.

Where are you going?

To get you 5000 tons of sand and boron.

Fucking powerful.  And, that scene couldn't have been too far off the mark, because someone, somewhere got that stuff in there, stat.

Only problem was, they could only find 4 tons of boron, so they used sawdust and factory floor sweepings to make up the shortfall.

Yeah that scene and the busses rolling into pripyat...the impressive thing about the USSR was consistently scale. They didn't do anything small.

Anand that was the other impressive thing..stuff done bigly...and poorly.

It was impressive what the soviets were able to do once they finally came to the realization of what had happened.

There is certainly something to be said for centralized unopposed control. And a populace that toed the line. No fucking whining. No legislative debating. No cockholster Hawaiian judges.

Shit. Got. Done.

Slavery built the pyramids.  For the guy who enjoyed the pyramids it was pretty damn good, for the tens of thousands of slaves building it, not so much.

Still not going to get anywhere near what was stated with a steam / hydrogen / oxygen explosion..

And little boy had roughly 140 pounds of uranium.

Hopefully this thread continues to be an excellent source of SME related info, and historical references. And not bullshit conspiracies...

It wasn't until 26 years later that the West had a serious and cohesive conversation about how to respond to an accident.

Hopefully. GD is going to GD though.

Yeah a lot more than a dime's worth of U underwent fission. About a dimes worth of mass was converted into energy. Big difference.

I wont touch the GD bro science about "not understanding shit water does" or the spelling and grammar for that matter. All I can picture is ICP singing that Magnets song.

The reason he resonates as such an authentic character is because those around him are all essentially British actors and he's the first "Russian" character on the show.

I'm wondering how intentional it is, as you almost seem to forget.

I like him though, the line about how he knows concrete and it's not burnt concrete. . . . beautiful

Blame U of MD for that then....

You guys are hilarious.

GD: Watches TV drama... becomes SME. Clownin.

This show is fantastic. I was planning on ditching HBO after GoT but we're hanging onto it now. So good.

There are some seriously smart dudes in this thread.  You're just causing a ruckus and ignoring what has already been stated.

There more than a few of us radworkers on arf.

I've been watching it closely I'm really glad that it was nobody's fault, I mean the plant director and chief engineer were sleeping, how could they be responsible?

At the end of Episode 2, they explain that her character is a composite of over a hundred Soviet scientists distributed across the USSR who were picking up high levels of radiation at their locations with their dosimeters and detectors, then reporting their findings up the chain.

Seems appropriate...

I've worked in the industry for 20 years, and even worked at Fukushima Daiichi after their disaster.

There is a lot of good technical information in this thread.

In the wake of the "Great Patriotic War", there simply weren't as many male candidates for academics, so you not only saw more females become highly-accomplished PhDs, but filled into positions that were normally occupied by men across multiple disciplines.

The Russian Academy of Sciences did a post-war study that concluded 26.6 million people died throughout the Soviet Union, including 8,668,400 military deaths.

But they have a list scribbled on a piece of paper of the people they think can be held accountable.