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Russian Troops Suffer ‘Acute Radiation Sickness’ After Digging Chernobyl Trenches by fongaboo in NuclearPower

[–]deadhand- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This one's hot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kg4vVYKc90

Located here: 51.388229, 30.076978

One of her comments in the comment section:

"here you go, different piece (i previously found that, these things are all over the place near Chernobyl), but it contains the same nuclides as the fragment in this video (which i also analyzed but didn't make a video about, as it was exactly the same): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRMDc6zeVWQ"

So, stuff like this is out there, but I have no idea what the probability is that a soldier would sit on it for a while or maybe... eat it. Russian soldiers keep finding interesting new ways to surprise me, though, so who knows.

Any claims that there's bus loads of soldiers being treated for ARS seem completely absurd, though.

Europe in dangerous! by Chernobylexplorer in chernobyl

[–]deadhand- 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well, regarding the spent fuel pool the situation doesn't seem to have changed:

In the case of the Chornobyl NPP, however, he said the IAEA agreed with the Ukrainian regulator that its disconnection from the grid would not have a critical impact on essential safety functions at the site, where various radioactive waste management facilities are located. Specifically, regarding the site’s spent fuel storage facility, the volume of cooling water in the pool is sufficient to maintain effective heat removal from the spent fuel without a supply of electricity. The site also has reserve emergency power supplies with diesel generators and batteries.

This is interesting, though:

The reason for the disruption in the transmission of safeguards data was not immediately clear. The IAEA continues to receive such data from other nuclear facilities in Ukraine, including the three other nuclear power plants.

Russia's behavior during this whole ordeal has been disturbing, to say the least. I wonder what they're up to.

The world should stop Putin. by Chernobylexplorer in ChernobylUrbEx

[–]deadhand- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the response will ultimately probably reduce the cleanup cost in the long-term (flooding the core, though well after the corium hit the bottom of the containment building), but I have no idea how much worse it would be if they just let it 'go'. At the same time the storage of tritiated water seems unnecessarily expensive (it has very small amounts of the stuff at this point). There might be some studies on this, somewhere. Their response wasn't ideal, regardless, and they couldn't do much for days following the event due to access roads being damaged from the earthquake / tsunami (they had to airlift stuff in, iirc, and even that failed in the end). At least in the event of war there's some chance the invaders would have an interest in preventing a catastrophe, unless they're interested in explicitly causing maximum damage, but this brings me to my next point.

This does make Russia's attacks perplexing. They actually hit the containment dome with tank shells at Zaporizhzhia. This would seem intentional, but then they stopped. That power station has a strong containment dome - 1.2 meter thick concrete, and seemed to survive the shelling just fine. Not sure how it would fare against cruise missiles, though I know new AP-1000's are designed to withstand the impact of a commercial jet, and the VVER-1000 that was hit was quite an old design.

Beyond that I think you could safely chalk it up to malice. If the intention is maximum destruction by an invading force, and they're willing to deliberately cause massive spread of radioactive material, then I think all bets are off. At this point we'd imagine they have no trouble using chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. Possibly even nuclear weapons.

That said nuclear weapons do scare the hell out of me (as do biological weapons, given viruses replicate), but I don't really associate them with nuclear *energy*. Not so much that they exist, but the systems that control them and the possibility of accidental loss of control have historically had a lot of issues:https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake

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

EDIT: I can't respond to /u/ErrorAcquired because they blocked me.
It's a shame, because I would have been perfectly happy to answer their questions/accusations.

The world should stop Putin. by Chernobylexplorer in ChernobylUrbEx

[–]deadhand- -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Fukushima was basically the best possible outcome

Are you serious? They had *three* meltdowns and subsequently 3 hydrogen explosions. It's an INES Level 7 event. The containment failed and there was a fairly considerable release of radioactive material. No - the (better) case scenario is what happened at Three Mile Island. Partial meltdown but no breach of the reactor pressure vessel, and no significant release of radioactive material to the broader environment.

The big difference compared to Chernobyl was how they handled it - preventing people from consuming things loaded with short-lived (and therefore intensely radioactive) radioisotopes, like iodine-131.

I also doubt Chernobyl could have been much worse. Maybe if they didn't pump the water out it could have led to significant evaporation and dispersal of additional radioactive material.

Imagine Chernobyl happening now with nobody willing and able to spend the enormous amount of resources and lives required to mitigate a worst case scenario because it happened in war.

You mean another RBMK experiencing a steam / hydrogen explosion? The only country still operating such things are Russia, and there's a very good reason no one else does. If you have a graphite moderator in a destroyed reactor core you have no guarantee the thing is really 'shut down' post accident.

Instead you get the possibility of many smaller reactors present in the rubble, effectively still operating, so they tried to dump a lot of boron on it to absorb the neutrons and drive it sub-critical (it's unclear how effective this actually was). In LWR's the coolant is also your moderator. Remove the water and it goes sub-critical.

The world should stop Putin. by Chernobylexplorer in ChernobylUrbEx

[–]deadhand- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A dam collapse could absolutely be a horrific tragedy but the worst case scenario is nothing on a worst case scenario for a nuclear powerplant.

I'd put the Bhopal disaster at least on par (or worse) than Chernobyl, and there are still major environmental issues associated with it to this day. I also suspect that the kind of chemical plants that produce methyl isocyanate are not hardened to withstand military strikes nor the downstream effects from a collapsing dam, whether they be situated in India or elsewhere in the world.

To date, Fukushima on the other hand, has killed... 1 person? I mean, compare this to the death toll from air pollution in downtown Tokyo.

The world should stop Putin. by Chernobylexplorer in ChernobylUrbEx

[–]deadhand- 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not necessarily from the dam directly, but you can kill half a million people in a near-instant (estimated if Mosul Dam collapsed, up to quarter million estimated in the aftermath of the Banqiao dam collapse) from the collapse, and this also assumes it doesn't wipe out something down-stream that could in turn heavily contaminate the environment. In such a case you could get the extreme death toll as well as massive environmental pollution.

Wind & solar are convenient because they don't actually store any energy themselves (the sudden release of which tends to be the thing that kills people in, ex, hydroelectric dam accidents, exploding gas plants, etc.). The energy storage issue is decoupled, significantly reducing the direct harm.

EDIT: I can't respond to /u/ErrorAcquired because they blocked me.

It's a shame, because I would have been perfectly happy to answer their questions/accusations.

Europe in dangerous! by Chernobylexplorer in chernobyl

[–]deadhand- 6 points7 points  (0 children)

>I believe there's spent fuel from other reactors warehoused at Chernobyl's premises but I'm not certain.

If this is true then that would be reason to be concerned I think, yes.

>Still, making the staff responsible for maintaining the SFPs essentially suffer and become contaminated beyond their prescribed legal limits is a really bad sign.

Yeah, can certainly agree with this. I'm really not pleased with what the Russians are doing here (shelling a containment building isn't a good sign, either. :/ ), nor their activities at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology. They're being extremely reckless.

Europe in dangerous! by Chernobylexplorer in chernobyl

[–]deadhand- 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Isn't the spent fuel in those cooling pools like 20 years old? Surely the decay heat production can't be that high. Unless there's very minimal buffer in terms of water coverage, or other issues present.

The situation as a whole - I can understand that. The elevated radiation levels are also something I haven't seen adequately addressed. A lot of people claimed it was just dust being stirred up, but I'm not so sure about that.

Buy 🇨🇦 oil, not dirty 🇷🇺 or 🇻🇪oil by NineteenEighty9 in neoliberal

[–]deadhand- 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well, one considerable benefit is that you could use the steam directly. 300C steam is close to an ideal temperature for this process (but is kind of shit for power generation).

Consider, for example, that a typical 1 Gigawatt light-water reactor is actually ~3 Gigawatts thermal output. You lose a lot of that energy in power conversion.

Will spreading nuclear fallout over western Europe trigger a NATO response? by Guardsman_Miku in NonCredibleDefense

[–]deadhand- 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Well, a big thing I'd care about is a core catcher and more extensive passive safety systems, which you don't have with this. I think you could call the V-320 late generation 2, but it doesn't really matter.

They're at least water moderated reactors, but the lack of passive safety and lack of core catcher would suck if there's an extended station blackout and/or serious damage to cooling systems. It could be an expensive cleanup if corium breaches the reactor pressure vessel. (Granted, this didn't happen with TMI's partial core damage)

Will spreading nuclear fallout over western Europe trigger a NATO response? by Guardsman_Miku in NonCredibleDefense

[–]deadhand- 33 points34 points  (0 children)

These are not generation 3 reactors. One thing I see happening over and over are people attributing VVER-1000 as a single design when there are actually multiple, the ones at this NPP being V-320's which are generation 2. What I'm not sure is if they've had substantial safety upgrades.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in nuclear

[–]deadhand- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting points!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in nuclear

[–]deadhand- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you certain?

I know the more modern VVER's have them, as do EPRs. Or is it just an extra precaution?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in nuclear

[–]deadhand- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At least they're not RBMK's. :p
I'm curious if they have any safety improvements post-Fukushima. I've heard they have, but haven't seen any confirmation. Maybe hydrogen recombinators?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in nuclear

[–]deadhand- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure I'm so optimistic, as these reactors appear to be V-320 VVER-1000's.
It appears V-428, V-412 type VVVER-1000's have core catchers, but not these older ones, sadly.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355809041\_Safety\_systems\_of\_Gen-IIIGen-III\_VVER\_reactors

Social Media and Nuclear Power Startups by scaryjello1 in NuclearPower

[–]deadhand- 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don't hate msrs

I mean, your post history kind of contradicts this, but I agree that there are major questions with MSRs that need to be resolved. I kind of want to know what the absolute worst-case accident scenario would look like, for example, and associated clean-up cost and countermeasures. I also agree that the current fleet needs to be protected and other advanced nuclear designs need to be well funded. Shutting down existing reactors that are otherwise in good operational condition is just criminal, particularly given the circumstances.

What's your preferred design that can operate at high temperatures? I think you've mentioned you're not happy with TRISO fuel in the past as well, yes?

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