chernobyl} what does an apocolypse look like?
Exactly, 36 years ago today, as I record this. Chornobyl, Ukraine’s turbine sector, exploded on April 26th, 1986, leaving about 69 people dead on immdeite contact. A low power test went out of control, leading to the explosion and fire that demolished the reactor building and released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. Safety measures were ignored, the uranium fuel in the reactor overheated and melted through the protective barriers that shielded the employees from these toxic materials. Initially, that day, the two workers that tested, died from severe burns and immediate blast trauma (don’t look that up) , soon later 28 firemen and rescue workers died only days later from radiation sickness. Experiencing horrific in 2 phases prodrome, latency, manifest illness, and either recovery or death. During the prodromal phase, they usually present with nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and even loss of consciousness at higher doses. The power plant was not equipped to deal with any sort of disaster, they were too focused on success and did not consider any chances of accidents. Traditionally a power plant would have a containment sector, with a gas-tight structure around the nuclear reactor in case anything dangerous occurred. Initially, the Soviet Union tried to hide the real severity of the damage from the rest of the world, It actually took a week for them to announce globally that the explosion had occurred but still, they failed to warn anyone that radiation had leaked into the large area surrounding Chornobyl. The USSR prevented people from leaving certain locations and cut phone lines to avoid the spread of information. Because of this measure, a lot of the information about this catastrophic event is not known. The other responding officers and reporters died a month later of cancer, usually thyroid cancer, with levels going back to radiation syndrome. But now, we can predict that at least 4,000 people died due to this accident. The safest way to overcome radiation poisoning would be threw a blood transfusion, but now we have evidence that proves nobody received any transfusion, even though Ukraine knew of these treatment possibilities at the time. About 60,000 of the people that inhabited Chornobyl at the time, believed this city would gift them with endless opportunities, like sending their kids to great new schools and making connections in the new world of U.S.S.R technology. It’s really disturbing now, going to Chornobyl to see the devastation and disappointment left behind.
So much wasted material could've been used to raise intelligent and contributive members of Ukrainian society. The saddest part to me was that the victims that died from radiation exposure had to be buried at Chornobyl to keep the spread down, with steel metal coffins and concrete ceilings. However, far after the explosion, things had to be done to contain the radioactivity. The U.S.S.R dropped 5,000 tons of sand, clay, lead, and boron over the 4th sector and burned the surrounding wildlife. The molten reactor core underneath the reactor was still full of water and if the reactor melted beneath into the water it would cause a third even worse explosion of steam, 3 nuclear plant workers had to go down in that basement, in the dark to turn odd the valves and release the water. They were named the suicide squad because their chances of survival were slim to none, however, to this day all 3 of them survived radiation sickness. Now, we can confirm that Between 50 and 185 million curies of radionuclides escaped into the atmosphere. Millions of acres of forest and farmland were contaminated, livestock was born deformed along with pregnant women’s fetuses, and of course, humans suffered long-term negative health effects. It’s like something out of a horror movie or a creepy sci-fi film. Nobody would ever think this tragedy would happen, they never even saw the need for protective gear back then and contamination protocols. It may all be scary and freaky to the eyes that look in, but to the people that were there, it’s really just devastating.
One may say, Events like Chornobyl are the reason why we shouldn't trust authority and governmental powers. We depend on them to make big decisions about our economy, healthcare, market, and pretty much every important thing you need to live in an organized society. I’m about to tell you about one individual scientist that held much of the answers to the mystery surrounding Chornobyl’s nuclear explosion. Valery Legasov was a Ukrainian chemist, employed to investigate the causes and mistakes made by the crew working the shift that night on April 26th, 1986. Though the U.S.S.R preferred to keep it known as a simple test gone wrong, Legasov really discovered it was really the outcome of a long history of employee ignorance, gross irresponsibility, neglect of basic protocol, rules and training. The designers that constructed the monitoring lab failed to even build standard safety equipment and protective structures surrounding the labs. People want to believe that the 4th sector was already unstable and dangerous to make sense of the mystery. In Legasov’s investigation, he found Soviet engineer, Vikton Bruykhanvoc, who was a deputy chief engineer for the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. He supervised the safety test which resulted in the disaster. He continued on with the test even after the other chemists on shift that night urged him to shut off the reactors. In court, he argued it was just a simple accident and caused by the “imperfection of technology” even though Bruykhanov was the most trained chemical engineer on staff that night and knew of the reactor’s design flaws and limitations, he had to know somewhere in the back of his head that the reactor 4 was possibly vulnerable to unstable nuclear reactions. With Legasov’s findings presented in court, Bruykhanov was given a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. But still, the Investigation was not over for Legasov and his team. All we do know is that Legasov knew for decades he was uncomfortable operating with reactors in Serbian and Ukrainian chemical plants because there was a significant lack of safety equipment. Emergency training and automation, but like other chemists in the industry at the time, he was almost entirely convinced that nuclear energy could not be dangerous at all and was totally harmless.
“I, as a chemist was worried about the huge potential of chemical reactions in these devices, there seemed to be too much of graphite, a lot of zirconium and water” -Legasov on trial in 1987
It would be no secret to learn there was a gross lack of responsibility taken by Brukhanov and he continued to deny his responsibility in court. Legasov recorded his research with an audio recorder and now It’s transcribed and translated for us to read. He found in files where he stayed at an abandoned psychiatric ward. He stayed there for about 3 weeks while he discovered files after files proving Chornobyl’s hospital system was extremely ill-prepared to deal with a chemical explosion or contamination emergency. They failed to rinse off not even a single patient before treating them, nurses, docters and surgeons lacked proper protective gear and even touched some patients without gloves. Here’s a transcript between Legasov and Ales Adamovich, one of Legasov’s friends that was a Soviet Journilist at the time. Apparently, Adamovich had special ties with Chernobyl’s nuclear plant, he had worked with Alexei Ananenko (who worked sector 4 that day) and Anatoly Dyatlov, that obviously who we know as responsible for the disaster. This was meant to be a private conversation, but because of the pressure Legasov was under to gather as much information as possible, he secretly recorded this, to listen later for evidence.
Legasov: But after the 2nd of May, there were traces of a glow a few times in some spots. Either graphite or metal structures were heating up. The last time this was observed was on the 9th or 10th of May. And that’s it. After that, nothing happened.
Adamovich: [Unclear] ...you talk about nitrogen.
Legasov: About nitrogen. There is a lot of confusion in the international press, for example, that Velikhov was measuring something on the roofs around the 26th, Evgeny Pavlovich [Velikhov]. But he was at his dacha, drinking vodka
, and was not aware of anything.
Adamovich: And he was not there on the 26th?
Legasov: He was not there. Yes, he wasn’t.
About nitrogen. This was during Silayev’s time when he has already arrived. It was I who proposed using liquid nitrogen for cooling. This proposal was stupid as practice ha showed. But what was my reasoning? I thought that the reactor shaft was intact. Do you see? And so if we add liquid nitrogen to the air—and we had, very quickly I must say, an entire train of nitrogen brought to us—then that cold air would cool the hot zone better. But then it turned out that the sidewalls of the reactor were wrecked. So all the nitrogen we supplied—and we did find a place for to supplying it—leaked out of the zone and cooled nothing. The natural air circulation was so strong that this nitrogen was like a drop in the ocean. That’s why we quickly discontinued this measure. And in the report I prepared for Vienna, to tell the truth, the Central Committee removed this phrase, but it was in the initial version, that among the ineffective measures was supplying liquid nitrogen.
Now, what else did I want to say about these measures? I repeat that they were invented in continuous phone conversations with Moscow, with experts who assessed, did the thermophysical calculations. For example, dolomite. Anatoly Petrovich Aleksandrov and my student, who called me just now, Silivanov, they thought about which material to use that would generate CO2 and also conduct heat. This is how we chose dolomite which was quickly shipped.
We received many telegrams from abroad, by the way. From these telegrams, I immediately realised that no one [in the world] was prepared for this kind of accident. Because, well, one telegram was just provocative, clearly provocative. It proposed to create another explosion by introducing nitrate mixtures there.
Adamovich: To blow up…
Unfortunately on April, 27th 1988 the day after the 2nd anniversary of the accident. Valery Legasov was found in his moscow apartment dead, he had apparently hanged himself. He left behind his files where all of this information had been recorded, before It could be seized by the Russian federation, his wife, Margarita Legasova collected these for her own investigation to come about the injust treatment that lead to her husband’s tragic suicide. But why did he commit suicide? Apparently he had been sick for the past 2 years, due to Chernobyl He was in fact very very sick. He was diagnosed with a radiation-induced pancreatic injury, radiation sickness and his bone marrow was damaged. According to his family, he was slowly dying. Legasov became cachectic, almost stopped eating and sleeping. He clearly understood that he was circling the drain. He was under immense pressure form the Soviet labs about this and they would’ve filted most of his findings to keep their name and nuclear work praise. And, this wasn’t his first suicide attempt, previously while in a hospital, he had tried to kill himself by OD’ing sleeping pills. So the reason for his suicide was a combination of several problems. Legasov claimed that Soviet security prevented plant operators from knowing about previous accidents with RMBK reactors and were allowing 16 of the faulty reactors to continue to operate across the Soviet Union in his recordings. He would’ve shown his research work in front of the western world by speaking about what happened in Cherynbol in the Viena Conference but he stated that it was a Human error and also because of poorly design reactors. Vladimir Gubarev, a close friend of Valery Legasov’s who wrote the popular play, Sarcophagus based on Chornobyl, told local publication Pravda that Legasov was ridiculed by his colleagues for his handling of the accident despite receiving international praise for it. He was excluded by a 129-100 vote of his peers from a seat on the scientific and technical council of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, where he was once a deputy director. It was a hard blow of rejection for him, and he believed he would get much more praise for his discoveries than he actually did.
Becuase of Chornobyl many safety procedures were put in place at the request of victim’s families. The Law of Belorussian SSR - "On Social Protection of Citizens Affected by the Catastrophe at the Chernobyl NPP" from the 12th of February 1991, the Law of the Ukrainian SSR - "On Status and Social Protection of Citizens Affected by the Accident at the Chernobyl NPP", the Law of Russian Federation. Government decrees have been adopted in Russia regarding social protection of citizens from different regions of the country affected by radionuclides as result of radiation accidents at industrial and military enterprises, or nuclear tests. The existing trend to spread the "Chernobyl law" onto other regions of Russia that have been affected by radiation impacts practically doesnt even consider the peculiarities of radioactive contamination and radiation dose formation to the population. A direct application of the articles of the "Chernobyl law" for these situations is inadmissible. I’d like to make it clear that the Russian government is not to blame here, but they could’ve implemented these laws ages ago, to avoid any catastrophe happening in the first place. Though some citizens are valid to apply for the chernobyl protection program many never get any notice back and have no choice to return to the Exclusion zone to be near family and collect their valuable belongings. Now some changes that have been adopted from this. According to world nuclear.org (sited) The safety of operating staff is a prime concern in nuclear plants. Radiation exposure is minimised by the use of remote handling equipment for many operations in the core of the reactor. Other controls include physical shielding and limiting the time workers spend in areas with significant radiation levels. Hopefully, this makes working conditions more comfortable for chemical engineers.
But one question still remains to stand, Is this what a post-apocalyptic world looks like?
Credits:
https://www.livescience.com/chernobyl-exclusion-zone
https://www.britannica.com/event/Chernobyl-disaster
https://euobserver.com/world/21409\
https://www.gao.gov/blog/2019/09/12/how-chernobyl-jump-started-the-global-nuclear-safety-regime
http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr21/kr21pdf/Zgersky.pdf
Comments
Post a Comment