Manny's Reviews > Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

I hope you'll like it

was this intentional timing with everything happening in Japan at present?

I'd had the book lying around for several months and suddenly remembered it. I really hope that this is not how things are in Fukushima.

Reading about this books-reminded me of meeting/treating a young survior in my ER about 3-4 years after this happened. I wish I could remember more about him-20's. We all knew he would not see 30. Thanks for rattling my brain cells.

ah, just curious - looks like an interesting book
and totally with you about Japan

poor Belarus - Manny have you seen 'Come & See' about the Belarussian experience in WW2? It's one of the most brutal and haunting films I have ever seen, here's a trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Ro0S...

The boy in it is a wonder, you'll never forget his face.

I ordered it this am to read.

the salami sausage joke is a killer. I have this on my to read list.
also
@ Alan, yes eerie film...thanks for the link - saw it sometime ago stayed with me for days.

I totally need to add this to my Chernobyl library. Have you gained any insights on the root causes of the accident? I attribute a big portion of the problem to IBS (Ignorant Bosses Syndrome). All of us in technical fields have experienced that at different times, I think. I love that all high level officers in my nuclear engineering company must have their Senior Reactor Operator license (SRO) and know at least one of the the plants backward and forward and inside-out. This protects my company from IBS.

Hi Tatiana! I didn't know you worked in nuclear engineering... well, that is somehow reassuring to discover. And no, there is very little about causes. Just one reference to the operator on duty who pressed the emergency button, and nothing happened.

It sounds like you've read a lot about Chernobyl - I'd be very interested to hear what you think of this book.

You all might be interested in Filatova Elena Vladimirovna photo-documentaries of Chernobyl online at;
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kid...

Yes, my discipline is Electrical Engineering but I've worked in design and installation of control systems for nuclear plants.

I guess this is more of a book about the aftermath, the people's responses to the accident, then, which is also wonderful and important.

We study Chernobyl, TMI, and all the bigger accidents and close calls in class, plus we have a database constantly updated in which the whole industry shares information about anything unexpected that occurs no matter how insignificant. We study that information before we make any changes in design for new projects.

Chernobyl is the most fascinating because it's the biggest, and because there were so many huge mistakes involved. They had jumpered out most of their safety systems, for instance. It makes you shake your head and ask how, how, could they be that insensitive to the danger. They really actively drove the plant into that condition. It's not an easy thing to do.

The guy who finally hit the red button to shut down the reactor, ironically was the last straw that made the thing blow up, because of a design flaw in that RBMK type reactor which had voids at the rod tips. So for a brief instant as the rods dropped, the reactivity becomes higher when the void at the tip passed each section of the fuel on the way down. Usually not a problem but in this case they had succeeded in nearly driving the reactor into exploding to begin with by removing too many rods, and then of course they lost control because they had jumpered out all their safety systems to run this test.

In the case of Chernobyl, the operators, or actually the bosses, acted with reckless abandon because they knew nothing about nuclear energy. The boss that day was a turbine specialist. The operator knew better, and refused to do it, but the boss and the next shift operators were standing there saying "if you don't, then I'll fire you and let him do it" and so the guy who didn't want to lose his job went ahead and did what he knew was wrong, and instead of just his job he lost his life. So did the boss and the next shift operator, for that matter, so they paid the ultimate price for their mistakes.

IBS is tragic. The answer to it is to be sure the bosses are as knowledgeable as the staff. Another way to insure it is to give the staff a way to override the bosses, which we also do. Anyone at all can call the NRC directly with any nuclear safety concern and it's taken very seriously. There are posters up all over telling people how to do that. We're taught that each of us has responsibility for nuclear safety. It's part of our job constantly to be monitoring everything we know and do around the plant for safety.

I don't know yet any details about what's happening in Japan just now. I'm sure these accidents will be added to the list of things we study. I'm shaking my head in incredulity that things could have gotten this bad, even given the horrific initial conditions (no offsite power, diesel generators swamped by seawater, etc.) We'll have to wait for the full answers to know that. But believe me everyone in the nuclear industry all over the world is sitting on the edge of their seats watching and wondering and wishing they could help. The people there in the control room are risking their lives to protect the public. Our first and foremost thought, our prime directive, is always and everywhere to protect the public.

Wow. That was amazingly informative. Thank you!

You're welcome! Nuclear energy is so amazing and wonderful for the human species. Imagine running a generator that can power a small city, and that you only have to refuel every 18 months or 2 years! It emits no CO2 so causes no greenhouse gases or climate change whatsoever. (Though anti-nuclear people like to say the diesel fuel used to mine and transport the fuel counts, which I think is stretching the point.) The plants are the cleanest industrial sites I've ever seen, and I've worked in a lot of different industries. The safety systems, not just the physical components but the procedures in place, are amazing and precise. They're far better than, say, in health care, where they kill people regularly without much concern. The nuclear industry has killed fewer people by far than the air travel industry, for instance, or coal mines, or bridge construction, or just about any sector of the economy you can name.

We do have Chernobyl, though, and now this. So we learn by it, we change our designs to take it into account, to make sure it doesn't happen again. And we grieve, of course. Along with everyone else we grieve.

Do you know... I was reading Voices, which as you can see is harrowing in the extreme, and the whole time I was thinking: nuclear power is still the least bad option. We just have to learn from this appalling catastrophe. I'm really glad to hear that you and your colleagues have been so diligent in doing that.

Several times, my mind flashed back to that wonderful scene from Superman, where Christopher Reeve rescues Margot Kidder from certain death after her helicopter has an accident. He plucks her up fifty meters from plummeting into the ground and lands her safely back at the top of the skyscraper. Then he says,

"Well, I hope this experience hasn't put you off flying. Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel."

Hahaha, I loved that scene! It's totally true about nuclear energy, too, including the incredible nerdiness of us saying so. =) =) =)

Tatiana, that was amazing. I am hoping you have a blog on this or something. The way you write about it, as little as I know about nuclear energy, captivated me.

Thanks, I do have a blog but I rarely update it. Maybe I should write a post about all this, though. If I get inspired to do that, I'll link you on this thread.

In fact, Tatiana, since you seem to know absolutely everything about this subject, could you recommend a good technical book on Chernobyl, covering the kind of issues you touch on in your note? I'm really curious to learn more.

PS Also, have you seen the discussion of nuclear safety in McKay's Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air? I'd be interested to hear whether you agreed with his figures.

I really like The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev. He was the guy who interviewed all the people involved in the short time before they died, and he's a nuclear expert, so he gives all the technical information, but in a very readable form.

I'll be happy to read your link when I get some time tomorrow and let you know what I think.

In the meantime, here's a lovely little chart Randall Munroe put together to put various doses in correct perspective. It's a few days old, so things seem to have gotten worse in Japan since this. Things are a little more complicated than this because absorbing radiation in your organs is worse than your extremities, and that's not taken into account here, but this is a very good start.

That's an excellent chart. I never knew that bananas were a radiation hazard. The potassium, I assume?

Very tempted to buy the Medvedev book, but it's surprisingly expensive... will think about this. Thank you for the recommendation, anyway!

I got mine new for about $10. Maybe look around for other sources of used books. You can probably find it cheap somewhere else. It's not been out of print for that long.

From Wikipedia: Many foods are naturally radioactive, and bananas are particularly so, due to the concentration of potassium that they contain, of which is 0.0117% is radioactive. Bananas are sufficiently radioactive to be detected by radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.

Some other foods that have above-average levels are potatoes, kidney beans, nuts, and sunflower seeds. Among the most naturally radioactive foods known are Brazil nuts, with activity levels that can exceed 444 Bq/kg (12 nCi/kg). This is four times the radioactivity of banana.

Nearly all foods are slightly radioactive. All food sources combined expose a person to around 0.4 mSv (40 mrem ) per year on average, or more than 10% of the total dose from all natural and man-made sources.

Ah, Chernobyl. We behind Iron Curtain knew nothing of it because The Soviets kept quiet.

The Polish radiation insititute discovered alarmingly high levels of radiation in the East of Poland so the Polish government questioned the Soviet denied everything.

Then the story goes that the Polish government eventually learnt about it from BBC. But there are different stories.

Then we all had to drink iodine at school. (Shit was so disgusting it made spinach taste as good as chocolate).
And we would all scare each other with stories about how we are going to grow third arm now.

I was in Uppsala, Sweden at the time. We also got quite a lot of fallout, but the government gave us almost too much information - precise warnings about which parts of the country were worst affected.

Unfortunately, Uppsala was near the bottom of the list. We panicked and went to Stockholm for the day to avoid radioactive rain, then felt stupid afterwards. But I'm sure this was infinitely better than what you went through.

One of the Swiss newspapers featured a macabre cartoon yesterday. The picture showed the winner's podium at the "World's Worst Nuclear Accident Games". Russia took gold, Japan silver and the US bronze. Next to the podium there was a Swiss athlete. The caption said: "And the chocolate medal goes to our guy!"

There was indeed an extremely serious accident at Lucens in 1969. I'm pretty sure I'd never even heard of it before.

That's one I don't remember studying either, though there were mentions of some accidents of experimental reactors here and there. I seem to remember one in which a serviceman was impaled by control rods being explosively ejected out the top of the reactor vessel. Of course the military has many different reactors going and there are fewer controls on those. Also, if accidents occur in military reactors, it's much less likely for the public to be told about them, at least not right away. There are also one or two nuclear subs sunken at the bottom of the ocean, too, I believe.

There is even one place that uranium began reacting underground spontaneously in geological history. I forget where that one is, maybe South Africa?

Some not insignificant portion of the earth's heat input comes from decaying nuclei in the mantle and core, too, if I recall correctly. That would count as background radiation.

So far the planning for colonization of Mars is stuck because nobody can figure out how to shield the astronauts from radiation during the 2 year trip in space. Every proposed idea is too massive to lift out of earth's gravity well. We may well have to mine the moon for water or something else to use as shielding. Radiation from cosmic rays is quite high and the earth's atmosphere protects us from most of it.

Manny wrote: "I really hope that this is not how things are in Fukushima."

Some extracts from the article on Yahoo News that I read a few minutes ago:

NISA and the NSC have been measuring emissions of radioactive iodine-131 and cesium-137, a heavier element with a much longer half-life. Based on an average of their estimates and a formula that converts elements into a common radioactive measure, the equivalent of about 500,000 terabecquerels of radiation from iodine-131 has been released into the atmosphere since the crisis began.

That well exceeds the Level 7 threshold of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale of "several tens of thousands of terabecquerels" of iodine-131. A terabecquerel equals a trillion becquerels, a measure for radiation emissions.

The government says the Chernobyl incident released 5.2 million terabecquerels into the air — about 10 times that of the Fukushima plant.

Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear physicist at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, said the revision was not a cause for worry, that it had to do with the overall release of radiation and was not directly linked to health dangers. He said most of the radiation was released early in the crisis and that the reactors still have mostly intact containment vessels surrounding their nuclear cores.

The change was "not directly connected to the environmental and health effects," Unesaki said. "Judging from all the measurement data, it is quite under control. It doesn't mean that a significant amount of release is now continuing."

It all sounds horribly familiar.

Indeed. This seems to be a confirmation of what I strongly suspected a good while ago, that if the reactor coolant boundary (including the reactor vessel and "doughnut") was breached then there are no further barriers between the fuel and the outside world.

There's no graphite fire in this type reactor, which keeps it less serious than Chernobyl, but there are several reactors involved, not just one. The situation is extremely bad. I'm glad the operating company is recognizing and publicizing that now. There may be orders soon for several more sarcophagi.

If you have a macabre sense of humor, you may be amused to know that we're currently running initial tests for a speech-enabled language teaching course called Survival Japanese. This is nothing to do with Fukushima and is just a complete coincidence.

A couple of examples do take on a new significance, in particular 危ないでしょう ("abunai deshou", "it's kind of dangerous").

I totally want to be a beta tester of that! Do you have Russian, Arabic, or Spanish?

Tatiana wrote: "I totally want to be a beta tester of that! Do you have Russian, Arabic, or Spanish?"

I'm afraid that so far we only have courses for Japanese, English, French and German. Greek is next.

If you want to sign up as a worker on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (it takes a minute), we will be delighted to take you as a beta tester, and you will even get paid $1.00 per session! Just mail me your AMT user ID when you have it and we will fix you a login.

Oh, I could use those languages too. And it pays, woo! I'll definitely sign up!

Here's my AMT user id: A2W3MMLVW9N8SG

Thank you Tatiana!

The Amazon Turk job is here.

I will send you your userid and password separately.

Okay, I went through that one and it was fun! I didn't do it for long enough to memorize the phrases without having to prompt for a listen first, but I would definitely do that for a language I was earnestly trying to learn. I liked that process for learning. I thought the notes in the right hand column were excellent.

Hey, thank you! Though I can't claim any credit for the lesson notes - they were written by Ian Frank at the University of Hakodate, who also designed the Japanese course content. I'll pass on your comments to him.

It sounds like you were able to get it to recognize your voice at least some of the time when you were speaking Japanese?

Yes, most of the time it recognized what I was trying to say. Only occasionally did I have to try several times to get it to understand me, and only on one phrase was I unable to get it to understand me correctly.

Tatiana wrote: "Yes, most of the time it recognized what I was trying to say. Only occasionally did I have to try several times to get it to understand me, and only on one phrase was I unable to get it to underst..."

Let me guess. You weren't able to go to the toilet. Me too. It's a real bummer.

Lol, that's the most important phrase of all! For me it was "I don't understand Japanese", though.

Tatiana wrote: "Lol, that's the most important phrase of all! For me it was "I don't understand Japanese", though."

Interestingly enough, there was a great deal of discussion about that phrase. Ian wanted it to be taught as "nihongo wakarimasen", which isn't strictly grammatical, but our native Japanese speaker pushed hard for "nihongo GA wakarimasen". Ian thought it was too complicated though, since it's difficult to explain what "ga" means without going into linguistic technicalities (it's a postposition that functions as a subject marker).

Since the vast majority of the phrases are grammatical, it's possible that going against the grain here is making things harder for the recognizer. I will check to see if other people are having trouble.

Yeah, I don't know much about the technology of nuclear reactors, but I'd read some about the mistakes made at Chernobyl, elsewhere, focussing more on the safety aspects from a sort of ergonomic/human factors/ how to build in safety catches for human error point of view.

It really is scary how relatively easily they could simply bypass all the safety measures with no procedural repercussions until suddenly the worst nuclear accident in human history resulted.

You'd think one would need kind of higher up permission including quite a bit of consensus before just bypassing such a lot of the rules.

This is the paragraph out of your review that really breaks my heart: "From a father's account:

My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything.

Just makes the tears choke out.

This is the paragraph out of your review that really breaks my heart

There is a passage like that every few pages. It is one of the two or three most affecting books I've ever read.

OMG.. ok, a question to you scientists: Since nuclear waste is radio-active, what do you think the chances are that we will find technology that will... um neutralize it efficiently? So in other words, neutralize almost as fast as we dump?


Ok, I'm struggling to word that well, but do you know what I mean?

To me, it seems unlikely that we'll find ways to neutralize radioactivity. The only realistic solution I can see is to be very careful about how we dump it, and stories like Bennet's above are kind of worrying, to put it mildly.

Of course, the Earth already contains trillions of tons of radioactive material. It's a question of how many people are exposed to significantly higher risks due to the extra stuff we're creating, some of which has shorter half-lives and is correspondingly more dangerous than naturally occurring things like uranium and radium.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/... That looks interesting. But I'm sure doesn't help for nuclear waste repositories? Since I imagine those need to be sealed off? ..and as I understand it, nuclear waste consists of a mix of isotopes making it hard to utilize one solution that would neutralize all of them?

I do engineering for nuclear plants and read widely about everything to do with the industry. The answer to the waste disposal question is that it should be viewed as raw material for fuel for the next generation of reactors (after this one they're building now). The reason it's so radioactive is that only 5% of the energy has been used. A generation of reactors which could use an extra 90% of that energy is coming. And we're very lucky we didn't glassify and dispose of all the spent fuel long ago when we planned to, because there's enough fuel there (and in radioactive mine tailings) to power all the US energy needs for a century or more, even by the most liberal standards.

So spent fuel isn't a bane, it's a great bounty. We should leave it in place until we're ready to use it.

After it's all used up, only 5% of the energy will be left, and it will only be toxic for around 500 years (rather than 10k years as the current fuel is). It's far easier to dispose of something safely for 500 years than for 10k years, when we literally have no idea what will happen in that time, what civilization will look like, etc.

I had forgotten all about this thread. So glad Traveller posted! Here's a rather technical report on what happened at Fukushima https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www...

And here's a page on what the NRC has done to respond to what we've learned. http://www.nrc.gov/japan/japan-info.html I called it pretty well on this. Reevaluate the design basis for each site, add instrumentation, and make a plan for what to do in extreme unforseen circumstances. We hate not having a plan in place already for every conceivable thing in the nuclear industry. Even if we're making a fairly small change, adding some instruments or whatever, we have to scratch our heads and dream up every conceivable thing that could possibly go wrong and plan for those contingencies.

Slowly more detailed information is getting out there.