Today is a 20 year anniversary of a very sad event - the 3rd worst nuclear event in recorded history. I guess it is a tie for the first two places, although feel free to sound off on which is the worst (hint: they happened in Japan). Hopefully the history of this dreadful incident does not go down the memory hole and disapear. The full version of my view of this "OOPS" event is below. And yes, it may be a little New York centric, but them's the breaks.
Chernobyl - A Generation Later
About 20 years ago, the third worst nuclear incident in history happened in a region that was a part of the Soviet Union, and is now called The Ukraine. While the two worst incidents (the A-Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - your choice as to which one is the nastiest) were deliberate, Chernobyl was a horrible example of an "Oops!", with several added explanations. However, if you wish to look on the bright side, it really could have been even more of a disaster...This dreadful incident cost the Soviet Union tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and it arguably was a significant contributing factor to the demise of the Soviet Union.
The immediate incident was most likely the equivalent of a boiler explosion that occurred during a plant test/experiment. The explosion that blew the 1500 ton "lid" off the reactor and punched a hole in the building containment roof was caused by water/steam contacting an extremely hot section of the reactor in a manner similar to one of the more frequent causes of conventional boiler explosions. When water and or steam touches very, very hot boiler materials (in this case, graphite, which melts at over 3500 C), it undergoes an extremely fast expansion, and the resulting pressure wave easily can be transmitted by any water present, destroying most structures in its wake. In the case of Chernobyl, there was a lot of radioactive material that was belched out of the reactor along with the steam, water and reactor parts. The radioactive materials still liberated huge amounts of heat (especially the "hot" daughter by-products), and many parts of the graphite became very hot, and then started burning when air came into contact with the red and white hot graphite. In effect the exposed graphite reactor became a giant ball of burning coal, and the plumes were heavily laden with uranium, and uranium fission products and by-products, such as Strontium 90 and Plutonium 239.
Within a day, radioactivity detectors all over Europe were going off - many labs actually thought they had a spill of trace amounts of radioactive material. At the time, the prevailing winds were from the southeast, and the plume of radioactivity moved towards Scandanavia. This was the ultimate "dirty bomb" to date, as every reactor is a potential one, but for the Chernobyl reactor (one of four at this site), the potentiality became a wretched reality. It even ruined the feeding grounds for the reindeer in northern Finland. Many people died in the effort to put a cap on this open sore of a broken nuke, and then construct an emergency containment for this ruined reactor. Hundreds of thousands of people had to be moved from the contaminated zones. Millions of people were dosed with a bevy of radioactive isotopes, and the rates of cancer in the people exposed ...well you can guess what that scene is like. Much of it is highly under-reported, as the money to describe and document the disaster.....well, these people went through an intense economic contraction in the late 1980's and 1990's, barely recovering around 2000 when the prices of oil and natural gas rose significantly. The correct term would be MIA for much of this information...
So, what are the lessons to be drawn from Chernobyl? Obviously, nuclear accidents suck big time, and these should not occur. But there is now a significant effort to revive nuclear energy as "environmentally friendly", or else "better than the fossil fuel alternative". The technical details of the reactors and their operation, economics and construction are often extremely complex, not readily accessible and often subject to differing interpretations. But this technology also has other aspects that are far more important - such as proliferation, The Bomb, where to dump the trash, security aspects, catastrophic insurance costs, the probability of catastrophic "Oops!" type incidents, the probability of "near-misses" like the two partial core meltdowns of commercial scale reactors in the U.S. to date (yes 2!), and how much to subsidize them. Or whether a police state is a requirement for the security of safe operations of nukes - after all, you can't just let anyone be in position of nuclear materials, or to be able to tour operating nukes, or to fly airplanes over them...
So, are nukes a way around Global Meltdown (the new term that replaces the obsolete expression "Global Warming")? Will these prove to be a way of providing electricity at reasonable prices and in a dependable manner. Or, in the case of New York State, does using electricity in a smart and efficient manner, combined with wind turbines, make more sense? After all, odds are, you'll outlive most of us AARP eligible citizens, so you have a bit of a stake in the outcome of this conundrum. And by the way, in this decision of nukes or nukes, you vote not only with your dollars but with your votes in elections. As FZ was known to say, "Register to vote". Otherwise, you may be registering for the draft so that you can "participate" in Oil War 3 and beyond, or be pulling security duty guarding an electrical production facility where it is deemed necessary to require highly armed guards.
DB