It's been 30 years since the most catastrophic nuclear disaster in history. HBO is showing a 4-chapter miniseries on the subject, 1 hr each. It's masterfully written, with a level of realism that instantly draws the audience into the story. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

 

cmartinez said: ↑
If you ever decide to venture into that field, let me know and I'll be more than glad to help you any way I can.

Okay thanks

Is there any benefit of maybe learning z80 : programming and designing to learning arduino?

 

cmartinez said: ↑
If you ever decide to venture into that field, let me know and I'll be more than glad to help you any way I can.

Okay thanks

Is there any benefit of maybe learning z80 : programming and designing to learning arduino?

Zeeuz, open up a new thread in the general electronics chat area and tag me, and I'll be more than happy to help you. This thread is off-topic and it deals with its subject title only.

 

There is a distributed control system company named GSE in Baltimore that is widely used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission governed power plants due to its modeling capabilities which allow operators to be trained on simulators of the actual process. Used to run on PDP 11 and now runs on NEC computers using Open VMS. It was used in Chernobyl. Not my preferred distributed control system. I much prefer Foxboro. The GSE people were often in Chernobyl and had some good war stories about it. Such as their driver handing him the rag and telling him it was his job to wipe the windshield as they drove. There were no wiper blades because if you did not remove them when you parked the car they would be stolen as was the case for that car. The last training they booked with GSE was to be conducted in Baltimore and GSE asked them why since it would be enormously cheaper for them to do it in Chernobyl. The answer was WalMart. My cousin visited Russia and told me there were 2 things to remember when you go there. Carry your own toilet paper because most toilets don't have any and even if you have a reservation at the Hotel do not expect it to have food available for its restaurant. Contractors I have known who worked in both Russia and China have pretty much the same tales of utter chaos, abject pervasive poverty, near complete lack of infrastructure, and filthy conditions compared to the US. It's like stepping into a time warp and going back 50 or more years into the past. Amazes me that they can, on the other hand, have aeronautics and space capabilities.

 

I haven't see it but I have seen and read completely factual documentaries about the disaster soon after it happened.
https://thebulletin.org/2019/05/the-human-drama-of-chernobyl/

Chernobyl, an HBO television miniseries (co-produced with the British television network Sky) premiering on Monday, will introduce a new generation to the horrors of 33 years ago. HBO bills it as the “untold true story” of Chernobyl, but a New York Times review notes “the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation—to show us things that didn’t happen.”

Hopefully these types of things are not in the series.

So, there’s two really good examples. People talk about the “bridge of death,” about the idea that a load of residents of Pripyat went out to stand on this railway bridge, which stood at the top of Lenina Prospekt, the main boulevard into the city, and watched the burning reactor from that standpoint. And that, in the subsequent years, every person who stood on that bridge died. I could find no evidence of that. Indeed, I spoke to a guy who was seven or eight at the time, who did indeed cycle over to the bridge to see what he could see at the reactor, which was only three kilometers away. But he’s not dead. He’s apparently perfectly healthy.

There’s a lot of these assertions made, because they’re conveniently horrifying. People also say the Soviet Air Force sent in all of these helicopters to bomb the burning reactor with sand and lead and loads of boron—and all those helicopter pilots who flew over the reactor are dead now. But that’s not true either. One of the first things I did was to see if I could find some of those helicopter pilots, so I found them and interviewed them about their experience, and their friends’ experiences, and they’re not all dead. Don’t get me wrong: Terrible, astonishing things that sound like they spring from science fiction did take place as a result of the Chernobyl accident, but these things that are often repeated did not happen. Now I wonder whether I should have put this stuff in the footnotes, because people sometimes ask me about some of these incidents.

 

The documentary sounds good.

https://www.rt.com/news/461348-chernobyl-disaster-tarakanov-hbo/

 

I hope they talk about the down side of nuclear energy. As we (mankind) moves forward in our so called evolution and start learning how things work and try to implement them in our lives I for one disagree with using nuclear power plants. It's not that the energy we get from them but the waste that stays radioactive for thousands of years. We are poor custodians of our own world and this will only come back and bite us in our butts in the future. You can't get rid of this stuff! Placing it underground is like covering up a bomb... you can't see it but the threat is still there. Just let one of those containers start leaking and now the whole place is radioactive. We should have never started using it in the first place.

Brzrkr

 

Ummm and just where did that uranium come from???

 

Ummm and just where did that uranium come from???

+1
We are all star stuff.

 

It was in the context of we took it out of the ground to use and put it back when we finished with it. Albeit into a much smaller area than we took it out of. Yep we are all star children so just call me Sunshine for short.

 

It was in the context of we took it out of the ground to use and put it back when we finished with it. Albeit into a much smaller area than we took it out of. Yep we are all star children so just call me Sunshine for short.

I agree completely.

 

Ummm and just where did that uranium come from???

Yes it came from the ground but now you have the water and other items that came in contact with it contaminated. Once something else comes in contact with it, it also is not good for people to be around. Now we take this waste and place it underground near populated places. This isn't like a contaminated water source were you can just use a filter! It penetrates almost everything! Once in the air it destroys cells and causes mutations and KILLS. My advice stay away from places that have uranium in it.

Edit: And the uranium has been enriched making it more potent.

Brzrkr

 

And just what was it doing in the ground before we dug it up and then placed into a sealed containment when we buried it???? The uranium was contaminating the soil and water BEFORE we dug it up! Not more potent, more refined and concentrated. And there aren't any people anywhere near the disposal sites... It also produces 0 ash and 0 carbon dioxide. And we use some of the spent uranium in weapons systems. You receive more radiation exposure from the sun than nuclear power plants. I grew up near the Oak Ridge National Labs where the plutonium for nuclear weapons was processed and I sure don't glow in the dark from it I now live less than 100 miles from the Baxley GA nuclear power plant and less than that from the Kings Bay Naval Station where the nuclear weapons for their Trident submarine fleet are stored. Also the Mayport FL Naval Station which is soon to be the homeport for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier fleet. Less than 100 miles from the decommissioned SAC base in Savanah GA where they LOST one of their bombs which dropped near here and was never recovered and I STILL don't glow in the dark!

 

It's not just the spent uranium that's a problem, it's all the byproducts generated by the reactor during its operation that remain radioactive for hundreds of years or longer.
From Wikipedia: The back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, mostly spent fuel rods, contains fission products that emit beta and gamma radiation, and actinides that emit alpha particles, such as uranium-234 (half-life 245 thousand years), neptunium-237 (2.144 million years), plutonium-238 (87.7 years) and americium-241 (432 years), and even sometimes some neutron emitters such as californium (half-life of 898 years for Cf-251).
Most do not normally appear in nature in significant amounts.

But, of course, all that only applies to the nuclear fission process.
Nuclear fusion produces no significant radioactive by-products (if done properly), and there's no chance of a runaway accident with fusion.
(I know I know, fusion power is always just 10 years away, but I'm optimistic that recent developments means it will actually be viable in the next 20 years or so).

 

Oh So digging it up moving it to other places... Refining it as you say is better that just leaving it alone and not living near it. Radiation is one of the worlds most deadliest forms of anything. You don't have to glow for it to shorten your life. The Chernobyl accident is just one case of the disasters and damage this can place on civilization. Remember Japan and the years they suffered from just one large dose of it, Not the bomb blast but the radiation after affects. Once the Chernobyl accident happened no one can live near it. What will happen when this backfires on us.
The Fukushima power plant was done in by a tsunami and they are still dealing with the after effects.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sites
There aren't just a few of these places!

Brzrkr

 

Oh So digging it up moving it to other places... Refining it as you say is better that just leaving it alone and not living near it. Radiation is one of the worlds most deadliest forms of anything. You don't have to glow for it to shorten your life. The Chernobyl accident is just one case of the disasters and damage this can place on civilization. Remember Japan and the years they suffered from just one large dose of it, Not the bomb blast but the radiation after affects. Once the Chernobyl accident happened no one can live near it. What will happen when this backfires on us.
The Fukushima power plant was done in by a tsunami and they are still dealing with the after effects.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sites
They aren't just a few of these places!

Brzrkr

Fission reactors are a intermediate step to fusion power so I don't see our current waste problem as a long term problem we can't easily solve with safe storage until we find ways render it into a usable resource. As for possible danger sources, driving a car is a hell of lot likely to kill or shorten your life.

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/reconsidering-risks-nuclear-power/

Fossil fuels have a host of problems themselves. The byproducts from burning fossil fuels are toxic pollutants that produce ozone, toxic organic aerosols, particulate matter, and heavy metals. The World Health Organization has stated the urban air pollution, which is a mixture of all of the chemicals just described, causes 7 million deaths annually or about 1 in 8 of total deaths. Furthermore, coal power plants release more radioactive material per kWh into the environment in the form of coal ash than does waste from a nuclear power plant under standard shielding protocols. This means that, under normal operations, the radioactive waste problem associated with one of the most mainstream energy sources in use actually exceeds that from nuclear energy.
...
Dangers associated with nuclear power are, in many ways, different from the dangers we face from other methods of getting energy. This might explain why fear of nuclear power persists and why the above fatality rates may surprise you. However, we know that nuclear energy does not produce the greenhouse gases that fossil fuels have been producing for over a century. Research also concludes that the more familiar dangers from using fossil fuels claim far more lives. Furthermore, with the advent of modern reactors such as the pebble-bed reactor and careful selection of plant sites, nuclear accidents like the one in Fukushima are actually not possible. When balanced with these notable benefits, the problems associated with nuclear power do not justify its immediate dismissal as a potential energy source for the world.

 

@nsaspook
It won't take but one accident here (the USA) to prove all that wrong!
Just because we've been lucky doesn't mean the streak will continue.
What would happen it there was a melt down at three mile Island... Hell lets just move Pennsylvania! This is what would happen. you couldn't live anywhere near it. Relocation would be a disaster and the illness and side affects would last for 100's of years.

Brzrkr

 

 

I know I know, fusion power is always just 10 years away

wow... I'm glad the prediction for that has shortened ... 30 years ago people would say that fusion power was only 15 years away!

 

Actually, there are quite a number of useful byproducts used daily in nuclear medicines. There is enough radiation exposure from just the contrast dye isotopes they use for an MRI scan or the isotopes used in a Nuclear Stress Test to set off the radiation detectors they now use around NYC. The name for the technology used to be Nuclear Magnetic Resonance before they changed it to not scare people.

There are some things much more abundant and equally as deadly as radiation. Nitrogen for example, which makes up most of the air we breathe and is absolutely deadly to us by itself. More people probably die of solar radiation-induced cancer, Melanoma, in a year than all of the radiation deaths from Uranium and its isotopes put together and that probably includes the deaths caused by radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It will also be of use to future archeologists to aid in their trying to fix the date of ancient bones that those of us born in the fifties and sixties have bones that are tainted with Strontium 90 produced by the fallout of the Army's Nuclear Testing in the '40s and after. It fell upon the grass that cattle ate and we drank it in our milk so it was used by our bodies to make bones.