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Quoted: Coolant/fuel channels, and control rods https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rita_Plukiene/publication/316348340/figure/fig1/AS:485786702356485@1492831983970/RBMK-1500-reactor-lattice-with-fuel-14-and-CPS-2-channels-Fuel-assembly-in-the.png http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/stephanus2/images/f2big.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Rbmk_fuel_rods_holder.png/250px-Rbmk_fuel_rods_holder.png View Quote |
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Holy shit, all that stuff got knocked right on it's side. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
Quoted: Coolant/fuel channels, and control rods https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rita_Plukiene/publication/316348340/figure/fig1/AS:485786702356485@1492831983970/RBMK-1500-reactor-lattice-with-fuel-14-and-CPS-2-channels-Fuel-assembly-in-the.png http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/stephanus2/images/f2big.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Rbmk_fuel_rods_holder.png/250px-Rbmk_fuel_rods_holder.png |
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The one where the bigger guy is pushing open the reactor room door and almost immediately after starts bleeding. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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The scene where the kids were playing in the dust particles like snow was infuriating. The Geiger counter sounds during the credits were creepy as hell. Not only were they all irradiated in the control room already, but going closer to the uncontrolled reaction of the remnants of the core and touching massive metallic objects was a quick way to be burned from radiant "solids". I thought the episode might have taken a bunch of artistic license in how they depicted certain events, but looking through archival and photographic evidence, it appears their special effects might have been pushed to the limits when trying to accurately portray some of the injuries. The firefighter uniforms are spot-on, which must have been hard to source, and the sequence of events seem to follow the detailed after-action reports from the engineers and survivors. |
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A question for those who are hip with the nuclear stuff. How does the fallout from Chernobyl compare to the fallout from a Nuclear Weapon? Was the contamination better or worse then if the same area had been hit by say 475kt W88? View Quote |
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Think about how much radiation had been imparted to that large metal door for however many minutes/hours after they already ignored the first reports from a worker who saw that the reactor core was gone. Not only were they all irradiated in the control room already, but going closer to the uncontrolled reaction of the remnants of the core and touching massive metallic objects was a quick way to be burned from radiant "solids". I thought the episode might have taken a bunch of artistic license in how they depicted certain events, but looking through archival and photographic evidence, it appears their special effects might have been pushed to the limits when trying to accurately portray some of the injuries. The firefighter uniforms are spot-on, which must have been hard to source, and the sequence of events seem to follow the detailed after-action reports from the engineers and survivors. View Quote |
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Russian RBMK design doesn't have a bigass containment dome like western designs do (designed to keep shit inside should something go terribly wrong), so it just vented right into the air http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/2012/09/Diablo-Canyon-Power-Plant_resized.jpg https://chem.libretexts.org/@api/deki/files/63686/CNX_Chem_21_04_NuclearPwr.jpg?revision=1&size=bestfit&width=753&height=344 View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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A question for those who are hip with the nuclear stuff. How does the fallout from Chernobyl compare to the fallout from a Nuclear Weapon? Was the contamination better or worse then if the same area had been hit by say 475kt W88? http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/2012/09/Diablo-Canyon-Power-Plant_resized.jpg https://chem.libretexts.org/@api/deki/files/63686/CNX_Chem_21_04_NuclearPwr.jpg?revision=1&size=bestfit&width=753&height=344 |
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Gosh I wish I could watch this series. I don't have cable at all, hence no HBO. Chernobyl is one of those events that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. This thread is a good read.
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I only give it 6.5/10 because everyone speaks with a British accent. Its annoying as hell. They couldn't find any Russian/Ukraine actors? View Quote Other than that, the first episode was stellar. What an incredible atmosphere of dread and horror. The fact that it happened makes it all the more surreal. The baby getting hit with the ash at the end of episode one made me so sad and sick. All those poor people. |
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The previously linked imgur album answers a lot of the questions...
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How did they unload spent fuel without a water pool? View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Attached File Quoted:
is all the spaghetti the control rods? Most people think of a reactor as a huge metal tank with the stuff inside.... this one, however, is not. It's a big block of graphite with a bunch of pipes going through it. The pipes have fuel rods in them, and then water/steam flows through the pipes to take the heat away from the fuel. Some of the channels do not have fuel and instead have control rods. Attached File This is during construction and would be below the bottom of the reactor. Individual pipes for each fuel channel through the reactor core, water supplied under pressure from the bottom, is heated in the reactor changing to steam and the steam and some residual water goes out the pipes at the top. Attached File Top of the reactor after construction. At the top of the reactor the pipes have some kind of a "T" I think - during operation the cooling water runs off to the side, but top access is possible to change out the fuel rods. Attached File Initial loading of fuel rods. Brand new fuel rods are relatively benign. |
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But didn’t the RBMK have something like a 100 ton concrete slab on top of it that got flipped sideways? Guess the nuclear community figured out a dome was better than a slab View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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A question for those who are hip with the nuclear stuff. How does the fallout from Chernobyl compare to the fallout from a Nuclear Weapon? Was the contamination better or worse then if the same area had been hit by say 475kt W88? http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/2012/09/Diablo-Canyon-Power-Plant_resized.jpg https://chem.libretexts.org/@api/deki/files/63686/CNX_Chem_21_04_NuclearPwr.jpg?revision=1&size=bestfit&width=753&height=344 |
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Did you notice that the political officer called it “Socialism”? Splitting hairs socialism/communism View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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watched it a few nights ago and I enjoyed it. I have always been fascinated with the Chernobyl disaster. As others have said, It kind of shocked me that they portrayed communism in such a bad way. Also, the accents didn't bother me one bit. Splitting hairs socialism/communism |
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Quoted: Seriously. Other than that, the first episode was stellar. What an incredible atmosphere of dread and horror. The fact that it happened makes it all the more surreal. The baby getting hit with the ash at the end of episode one made me so sad and sick. All those poor people. View Quote |
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For those noting that the workers are simply using rags when handling the fresh assemblies ... this isn't to protect the workers, it's to protect the assemblies from the grease in the workers' hands. The grease from a fingerprint can inhibit heat transfer enough to cause stress and fuel cladding failure, the same way an errant fingerprint can cause a car headlamp to fail.
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Quoted: That's not splitting hairs, it's being accurate to how they talked at the time - that's how the Soviets referred to it amongst themselves. View Quote ???´? ????´????? ??????????´?????? ?????´???? (Soyúz Sovétskikh Sotsialistícheskikh Respúblik) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics |
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It's in their name.... ???´? ????´????? ??????????´?????? ?????´???? (Soyúz Sovétskikh Sotsialistícheskikh Respúblik) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
Quoted: That's not splitting hairs, it's being accurate to how they talked at the time - that's how the Soviets referred to it amongst themselves. ???´? ????´????? ??????????´?????? ?????´???? (Soyúz Sovétskikh Sotsialistícheskikh Respúblik) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics |
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What a great thread this turned into. Unusually high signal to noise ratio for an Arfcom GD thread.
Thanks to all who are contributing good info. Especially the SMEs. Speaking of SMEs, does anyone know if @Mongo001 still hangs out here? |
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But what's shielding the operators from the core?
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But what's shielding the operators from the core? View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
But what's shielding the operators from the core? |
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But what's shielding the operators from the core? View Quote Above the core is a massive concrete cap, that those pipes come through. So some radiation does come up through the pipes, so there's another layer of shielding above the pipes. When they refuel they take up a single block exposing one pipe, and that machine goes over that space to do the rod change. The massive concrete cap is what was blown upward by the explosion and ended up sitting at an angle. What wasn't known until years later is that the equally massive concrete base of the reactor was blown downward by the explosion. That's how the corium drained out of the core and ended up in the lower levels to create the elephant's foot. The sides of the reactor were shielded with layer of a water tank and then what is described as serpentine columns of sand. My suspicions are multifaceted, I figure the water jacket was for tritium breeding first and foremost, but also to make it possible to introduce other items for high-level irradiation. Also, those sides of the reactor would be extremely high levels of radiation and would likely be subject to damage over the long term, so the water and sand shielding would make it possible to replenish the shielding materials as needed. The sand from the shielding is supposedly a big part of the corium flow. |
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What a great thread this turned into. Unusually high signal to noise ratio for an Arfcom GD thread. Thanks to all who are contributing good info. Especially the SMEs. Speaking of SMEs, does anyone know if @Mongo001 still hangs out here? View Quote |
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I knew just enough about this to have a firm grasp of what went wrong, after reading the whole thread the emergency management side seems almost as bad as the event itself.
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Yep, love these high signal strength threads. Always learn little bits here and there. I Love getting to learn. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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What a great thread this turned into. Unusually high signal to noise ratio for an Arfcom GD thread. Thanks to all who are contributing good info. Especially the SMEs. Speaking of SMEs, does anyone know if @Mongo001 still hangs out here? https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/Fusion-power-start-ups-go-small-in-effort-to-bring-commercial-reactors-to-life/5-2216942/&page=2 |
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The core is 10 meters underneath that floor. Above the core is a massive concrete cap, that those pipes come through. So some radiation does come up through the pipes, so there's another layer of shielding above the pipes. When they refuel they take up a single block exposing one pipe, and that machine goes over that space to do the rod change. The massive concrete cap is what was blown upward by the explosion and ended up sitting at an angle. What wasn't known until years later is that the equally massive concrete base of the reactor was blown downward by the explosion. That's how the corium drained out of the core and ended up in the lower levels to create the elephant's foot. The sides of the reactor were shielded with layer of a water tank and then what is described as serpentine columns of sand. My suspicions are multifaceted, I figure the water jacket was for tritium breeding first and foremost, but also to make it possible to introduce other items for high-level irradiation. Also, those sides of the reactor would be extremely high levels of radiation and would likely be subject to damage over the long term, so the water and sand shielding would make it possible to replenish the shielding materials as needed. The sand from the shielding is supposedly a big part of the corium flow. View Quote They had secret cities...their versions of Hanford and Los alamos..arazmas, chelyabinsk, tomsk....they probably didn't need the power reactors for breeding. |
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Their documentation stated that the assemblies would cycle out of the core, and presumably into another core location, around 1.0 to 1.1 GWd/mtU. That is amazingly close to where you'd want to be to maximize Pu239 and Pu239/Pu240 ratios. Irradiate the fuel beyond that, and you get too much Pu240, which is a neutron poison from the standpoint of a prompt response, and too much of it will inhibit the chain reaction of a plutonium weapon.
You can chemically separate the UO2 from the PuO2 with acids. But, because Pu239 and Pu240 are chemically identical, you need mechanical means to separate the two isotopes, and with just a 1 neutron difference in mass, mechanical separation isn't feasible. But, the way they moved power around in those reactors, and their poor flux monitoring … it just doesn't seem like they were paying the necessary attention for the isotopics needed for weapons work. |
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A question for those who are hip with the nuclear stuff. How does the fallout from Chernobyl compare to the fallout from a Nuclear Weapon? Was the contamination better or worse then if the same area had been hit by say 475kt W88? View Quote The problem is that as reactors consume fuel..they transform it into various other isotopes, some of them very highly radioactive and dangerous. These isotopes decay in a predicatable series with known emissions of alpha, beta and gamma energy over a known time period. Chernobyl was a huge reactor..1k MW thermal is getting toward the large end of commercial reactors. It was also late in its fuel cycle. Meaning that a lot of the uranium had been converted into isotopes known as trans-uranics So not only was it open to the atmosphere and potentially still undergoing fission..but the fuel that was burning was old and full of the most dangerous isotopes that are ever present in a reactor. It's the same reason that on day 5 the elephants foot would have killed you badly from 50 feet away..and now you can stand next to it long enough to take a decent picture. The daughter isotopes are hot as hell but the hotter things are the faster they decay. Now the corium is much safer than it was in May of 1986. |
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Chernobyl was a huge reactor..1k MW thermal is getting toward the large end of commercial reactors. It was also late in its fuel cycle. Meaning that a lot of the uranium had been converted into isotopes known as trans-uranics So not only was it open to the atmosphere and potentially still undergoing fission..but the fuel that was burning was old and full of the most dangerous isotopes that are ever present in a reactor. View Quote |
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Just watched this last night. As someone who had done some research into it before nothing surprised or shocked me. I was alive in 1986 and remember it vividly (having a fear of all things nuclear at the time.) It was the stuff of nightmares then, it's the stuff of nightmares now.
I watched another BBC documentary called "Living in the Shadow of Chernobyl" about the exclusion zones, and I just can't decide how big a scale the deaths, disease, and birth defects were. To hear the "people's BBC" you would think it was a minor incident! I'm leaning towards "more massive than the world could handle," some say on the order of millions affected. I know the rad safety officer/physicist on the east coast that oversaw installation of a small university reactor, he said they called him after the accident and all he could tell them was "start thyroid loading." He abandoned the field because "the NRC took all the fun out of it." LOL. |
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Ah yes, got my numbers backassward. BIG is the point I was trying to convey. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
Quoted: Chernobyl was about 1GW in electrical power IIRC, that would translate to about 3GW in thermal power output at the core. Even the decay heat right after shutdown would be in the ~180MW range. |
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What a great thread this turned into. Unusually high signal to noise ratio for an Arfcom GD thread. Thanks to all who are contributing good info. Especially the SMEs. Speaking of SMEs, does anyone know if @Mongo001 still hangs out here? View Quote |
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I really like the actor playing Valery Legasov. He was fantastic in The Terror. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes |
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I'm just reading up on it on World Nuclear Association's site right now, covering the sequence of events. Sequence of events video with graphical explanation showing basic representation of the reactor power output, the test, and what went wrong. Watch this before watching the HBO series, especially from 9:00 forward if you want a sequential explanation of what went wrong with their test and the steam-driven positive power coefficient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc-vvhWXL9Q View Quote I’m sure it was not meant to be this way, but I was laughing my ass off the entire episode. The pants on head stupid shit. “What does the levels read?” “3.6... but only because the machine tops out at...” “Good. Good! 3.6 isn’t great but it ain’t terrible.” |
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Thank you for this. I watched this before the first episode and it helped lay a solid foundation in understanding what was going on. I’m sure it was not meant to be this way, but I was laughing my ass off the entire episode. The pants on head stupid shit. “What does the levels read?” “3.6... but only because the machine tops out at...” “Good. Good! 3.6 isn’t great but it ain’t terrible.” View Quote |
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The core is 10 meters underneath that floor. Above the core is a massive concrete cap, that those pipes come through. So some radiation does come up through the pipes, so there's another layer of shielding above the pipes. When they refuel they take up a single block exposing one pipe, and that machine goes over that space to do the rod change. The massive concrete cap is what was blown upward by the explosion and ended up sitting at an angle. What wasn't known until years later is that the equally massive concrete base of the reactor was blown downward by the explosion. That's how the corium drained out of the core and ended up in the lower levels to create the elephant's foot. The sides of the reactor were shielded with layer of a water tank and then what is described as serpentine columns of sand. My suspicions are multifaceted, I figure the water jacket was for tritium breeding first and foremost, but also to make it possible to introduce other items for high-level irradiation. Also, those sides of the reactor would be extremely high levels of radiation and would likely be subject to damage over the long term, so the water and sand shielding would make it possible to replenish the shielding materials as needed. The sand from the shielding is supposedly a big part of the corium flow. View Quote |
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Watched it this morning for the first time, then read this thread. I'm hooked.
Watched it again with the wife when she woke up. She had a lot of questions and I was able to answer them. Which led to her last question, "Why do you know all this?" hahaha For the folks sayings its not authentic enough because they don't have Russian accents. It must have gone straight over their head that they're speaking English! lolol Thank you to the contributors of this thread. Its as interesting to read this as it was to watch the show. |
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It was mentioned elsewhere but it's really tough to do russian accents in english so a lot of russian accents are "british". It's always been like that.
Pro Tip: If you want to see a fantastic dark comedy about the ineptness the soviet central committee watch The Death of Stalin. |
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Watching the coverup shows me where the FBI learned how to do it. The same pathetic mixture of arrogance, ignorance and ineptitude.
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“What does the levels read?” “3.6... but only because the machine tops out at...” “Good. Good! 3.6 isn’t great but it ain’t terrible.” View Quote Meanwhile the 1000R/hr meter is locked in the safe. And we'll just ignore the core fragments scattered across the lawn.... |
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Quoted: The number one requirement to be a good true believer commie is the ability to lie to yourself. Its important to realize these particular people weren’t unintelligent, there were dishonest, like all commies. View Quote |
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Watched it this morning for the first time, then read this thread. I'm hooked. Watched it again with the wife when she woke up. She had a lot of questions and I was able to answer them. Which led to her last question, "Why do you know all this?" hahaha For the folks sayings its not authentic enough because they don't have Russian accents. It must have gone straight over their head that they're speaking English! lolol Thank you to the contributors of this thread. Its as interesting to read this as it was to watch the show. View Quote |
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Don't forget "I have reported to Moscow that the level is 3.6, situation is under control" Meanwhile the 1000R/hr meter is locked in the safe. And we'll just ignore the core fragments scattered across the lawn.... View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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“What does the levels read?” “3.6... but only because the machine tops out at...” “Good. Good! 3.6 isn’t great but it ain’t terrible.” Meanwhile the 1000R/hr meter is locked in the safe. And we'll just ignore the core fragments scattered across the lawn.... |
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When the fire fighter picked up the chunk of graphite with the fuel channel in it I just said “that’s bad”. What’s the reason they tasted metal? Ionization in their mouth or just metals in the air? View Quote |
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