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    Mortal DictataTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 1:21pm

    As I recall the security of the Exclusion Zone is only beefed up now because of dickheads who wanted to have their own private S.T.A.L.K.E.R or All Ghillied Up fantasies and kept fucking about in what is effectively a giant deathtrap.

    Even without the risk of a massive steam explosion (that would’ve made a large of Eastern Europe uninhabitable entirely) the contamination from fallout was widespread, with it managing to make some parts of Wales no-go areas for a while until it dissipated and farmers were banned from selling livestock.

    There’s a pretty good docudrama on the incident and the attempted cover up by the Soviet authorities by the BBC even with some slight inconsistencies, such as the mistaken belief the divers all died.

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      skefflesMortal Dictata
      1/30/18 1:41pm

      The BBC did a good documentary in 2016 about building the new sarcophagus, I don’t know if that is the same one but I highly recommend it. It was a good blend of pop science and actual heavy engineering.

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      Mortal Dictataskeffles
      1/30/18 1:44pm

      Very different one but I know which one you mean. The one I linked was made when the “New Safe Containment” was still on the drawing board.

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    Not Enough Day DrinkingTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 1:44pm

    I’ve always wondered how pockets of radiation form. Like why is that spot over there more radioactive than this spot here. It seems to me that radiation should be relatively constant (inversely proportional to distance from the site), but from reading things like this, I gather that’s not the case.

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      crowsfanNot Enough Day Drinking
      1/30/18 2:25pm

      I guess more radioactive material fell in certain spots than others?

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    Squib308Terrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 1:09pm

    It would been interesting, and a little creepy, if you had a geiger counter clicking away as you went on your tour.

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      sTalkinggoat, first and last of his nameSquib308
      1/30/18 1:39pm

      Which is my question. Why don’t they have radiation monitors?

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      Teh.sTalkinggoat, first and last of his name
      1/30/18 2:08pm

      The residual radiation is generally pretty low. Years ago, I saw YouTube video of a bunch of goons looking for the most radioactive thing they could find... They were crawling on the dozers that were used to push radioactive material into piles. The geiger counters lit up pretty good, but their dosimeters read all clear when they got done with the tour. You DON’T want to take souvenirs or eat/drink anything while you’re there due to the risk of contamination, but your face isn’t going to melt off unless you get into the actual reactor building. 

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    rusholmeruffianTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 1:39pm

    My wife was 11 when Chernobyl happened. She and her mom had moved out of their apartment in what was now the Exclusion Zone, in the northern suburbs of Kiev, barely a week before the explosion. She still has white spots on her arms and neck from the “black rain” that fell over much of Europe.

    I, meanwhile, grew up in ComEd nuke country southwest of Chicago. My church congregation was full of operators, technicians, and engineers at Dresden and Braidwood. All that excess overnight electricity built up a massive heavy industrial complex in the area: an oil refinery, a bunch of petrochemical plants, some big metal-bashing factories, some enormous industrial food processing facilities. I totally understand conservatives’ particular sentimental attachment to nukes.

    The fact that you need so goddamn many people—highly paid, highly trained people—to keep them from fucking up catastrophically, though, makes them just uneconomical compared to a combination of wind, solar, and gas peakers for load balancing. There’s a reason nukes in the US have been closing left and right, one of the two under construction just failed spectacularly, and the remaining one is going to drive up electricity prices in Georgia so badly that it much of its heavy industry will move into Tennessee and Alabama.

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      Cayde-6's Unloaded Dicerusholmeruffian
      1/30/18 2:50pm

      Right, because you can have total joe schmoes off the street run solar, electricity, or gas power plants with no problems. Nuclear power isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as you make it out to be.

      The reason Vogel failed is because Westinghouse hired a contractor who didn’t have the technical expertise to build it. Source - my profession, and an acquaintance who worked on Westinghouse’s bankruptcy filing.

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      rusholmeruffianCayde-6's Unloaded Dice
      1/30/18 3:30pm

      I work in the electric utility biz. The CEO of Consumers Energy (one of the two big Michigan investor-owned utilities) noted that on a per-megawatt basis, even combined-cycle gas needs one fifth as many people on salary as either coal or nuclear; wind needs half as many as gas, and utility-scale solar needs half as many as wind. (My utility manages its own simple-cycle gas peaker fleet with a very small double-digit number of personnel, FWIW.) Now obviously the capacity factor is a lot lower for either wind or solar, but they also have zero fuel costs, don’t need long refueling outages, and have far fewer and much more durable moving parts.

      You’re thinking of VC Summer, BTW. And yes, Westinghouse fucked up in a lot of ways on that one and Vogtle (which is going to be completed at a large single-digit multiple of its original cost, costs with which Georgia Power ratepayers will be saddled for decades), but part of the problem is that because FREEDOM, we can’t do the most logical thing with regard to nukes, which is to ask Areva to come in and build the same plant they build every year in France.

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    lostinspacecampTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 1:34pm

    So then on a scale from 1-10, how excited are you for the US to be exactly like that in 2019?

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    disco_tango_whiskeyTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 2:15pm

    I wonder if its possible to freely find your way to the elephants foot.

    http://nautil.us/blog/chernobyls-hot-mess-the-elephants-foot-is-still-lethal

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      Keithdisco_tango_whiskey
      1/30/18 5:23pm

      Derek Mueller of Veritasium got very close. From what I remember, the radiation was far too dangerous to even go get a brief glimpse. The geiger counters they had were going nuts.

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      disco_tango_whiskeyKeith
      1/30/18 5:42pm

      its insane, just 30 seconds of exposure would be enough to get very sick

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    VinTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 2:05pm

    Terrell Jermaine Starr the type to follow the mysterious sounds in a haunted building and end up killed.

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    AP BearTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 8:51pm

    So why does Terrell visit Kiev, Ukraine every three months? ldr?

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    Manic OttiTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 4:18pm

    What kind of souvenirs do they sell? Mugs and t shirts?

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    Neo Haibane RenmeiTerrell Jermaine Starr
    1/30/18 1:45pm

    Im not going. Anywhere near. Chernobyl.

    Fuck. That.

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