chernobyl (a must read)

[driveway]

take the time and read through this.a must read!

[big_sur]

thats crazy

[Kassel]

thats awesome.... and eery and creepy

[Evil 330ci]

I'm gonna try to check that out next time i'm in eastern europe.

[petar7408]

i saw it a while ago.. very interesting. and evil 330 you dont want to check it out because you'll get like cancer and stuff lol

[hofbrau8]

thanks for the link very powerfull

[J Clark]

that was amazing. im so into that stuff too. me and my friends would explore that place inside and out.

[BavBrwlr]

if your in and out within a few hours, and you dont stop at the nuc plant you wont get any radiation that will affect you. there is a giant dome around the actual plant now to restraint the radiation. i look forward to do what she did one day

[driveway]

wasnt to thrilled when i first found link until i started reading, i now know what it means to stop and smell the roses.

[Evil 330ci]

I dont plan on staying for long, just to drive around and check it out. I mean, you can always find someone willing to show you around for some extra $. J Clark, since you're into exploring old/abandoned things, and assuming you live not to far from staten island, i suggest you and your friends go check out the old abandoned monestary by St John's University. I went there 3 summers ago, the last sublelvel was flooded, so we couldnt go any deeper underground.

[Ximian]

Actually, there is radiation from the "fallout" (the ash and smoke from graphite) and stepping out from the road will really increase your dosage of radiation. The asphalt is pretty safe because the particles aren't in there and most of the dangerous elements that were in the environment had a short half-life and have disappeared.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/ki...chapter10.html

"The place in front of me called red or magic wood. In 1986 this wood has been red with radiation and then they cut it off and left there and bury under 1 meter of earth. As you can see, on asphalt things not bad, but if I step 10 meters forward, my dosimeter will run out of scale, if I walk few hundred meters towards reactor, then I will find 3 roengen. If I keep walking all the way to reactor, then at the end of a journey I will glow in a dark. May be this is why they call it a magic wood. this sort of a magic when one walk in in a biker leather and coming out like a knight in a shinning armour. "

She's not kidding when she says that.

You need permission to visit that area, it's not like you can just go there.

Some info on the incident:

"One of the units at Chernobyl had gotten a license to operate, even though they hadn't run all of the required tests. One of the tests they hadn't run was to verify that the spin down of the turbine after a turbine trip could power the unit until the standby generators could be activated. The unit was coming up to a planned shutdown, so they decided (or were told) to run the test and get it out of the way.

However, rather than simply tripping the turbine and reactor, which would only give them one shot to get the test right, they decided to keep the reactor running at low power level and simply trip the turbine. That would let them repeat the test as many times as they needed to in order to make sure they passed it.

Sure enough, the operators flubbed the test on the first run through, but they also allowed the reactor to sink to an extremely low power level. So low, in fact, that they got into an unstable operating range that they didn't know about. So, when they goosed the reactor to repeat the test, they got a runaway instead.

The resulting pressure excursion and/or steam explosion blew the head off of the reactor and the roof off the building. The reactor, like all Soviet reactors, had no containment structure. This allowed air to enter, which allowed the graphite blocks that served as a moderator to catch fire, creating a radioactive smoke plume blowing downwind. The rest of the world (ie., us) found out about the accident when Swedish scientists reported a radioactive cloud passing overhead.

The graphite in the reactor all burned away eventually, in spite of many days worth of truly heroic (and fatal) efforts to put it out. The fuel all coalesced into a magma and the proceeded to sink down through the building structure where it (fortunately) dispersed into the different basements and sub-structures until it had been dispersed and cooled enough that it stopped. It's all still there and will be continue to be deadly dangerous for thousands of years to come."

[533i]

Wow, awesome read. Anyone up for a road trip this summer?

[driveway]

hell yeah

[speed limit?]

thank you for posting that

[E36DJ]

Kinda freaky..


her picture..


Something I found..


edit: here is reactor #4 with the concrete cover over it.


edit: other cool info I found.. the plant was still in use after the accident (something I didn't know.. I guess you can't just shut down reactors though.)

"In the early 1990s some US$400 million was spent on improvements to the remaining reactors at Chernobyl, considerably enhancing their safety. Energy shortages necessitated the continued operation of one of them (unit 3) until December 2000. (Unit 2 was shut down after a turbine hall fire in 1991, and unit 1 at the end of 1997.) Almost 6,000 people worked at the plant every day, and their radiation dose has been within internationally accepted limits. A small team of scientists works within the wrecked reactor building itself, inside the shelter. "