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Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Mon May 13, 2019 8:28 pm
by Steve James
The guy who used to be a baker(?) who's now "the man in charge" is just too familiar.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2019 9:25 am
by everything
is this the HBO show? I have HBO Now for GoT only, but maybe will keep it for a little while

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2019 9:27 am
by Steve James
everything wrote:is this the HBO show? I have HBO Now for GoT only, but maybe will keep it for a little while


Yep, the HBO series.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2019 11:11 am
by everything
want to provide a little longer review?

did you ever view that old site where the girl rides her motorcycle through the chernobyl area with her father (scientist)'s geiger counter, and takes a bunch of interesting photos?

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2019 11:56 am
by Steve James
What I found familiar was that people who knew nothing about the situation made every attempt to minimize the dangers. The scientists and nuclear physicists were (almost) ignored by politicians and party bureaucrats. Fortunately, there were a few scientists (who in the series are condensed into a couple) who got some attention. We (i.e., the world) was lucky. There could have been an explosion that would have made from Kiev to Minsk, and most of the Ukraine, uninhabitable for decades or more.

Well, I shouldn't have said the world. The Earth recovers quickly to almost anything. It's just that human habitation becomes problematic. Anyway, for me, it's emblematic of the climate controversy today. I.e., sure, any dummy can say there's nothing to worry about.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Fri Jun 14, 2019 9:46 pm
by everything
Oh man this is amazing (and horrifying) to watch.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 12:56 am
by GrahamB
Superb. For me Chernobyl the series was about how powerful ideology [miasma] (in this case, communism) makes people blind to the reality of what is actually happening, often with fatal results.

Unfortunately that human flaw has been repeated constantly throughout history and is still going on today.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 4:43 am
by Bao
Haven’t had time watching it yet, plan to do so. ...eventually... Here many people know quite a lot about it as Chernobyl is quite close geographically speaking (thanks God Finland is between us and Russia. ;D ). Here in Sweden, the authorities advised to not pick berries and mushrooms in the Northern parts of the country for several years after the accident due to contamination. I was ten years old back then. I had a cat, a black fat lazy cat. I remember that the day of the accident, before we knew anything about it, my mother sat in our library and my cat was on the table in front of her. The cat suddenly began to shake, tremble and looked frightened, behaved as he was scared of something. We held him, stroke his back trying to comfort him and calm him down. Didn’t know what was wrong. But he stopped after an hour or so. We were prepared to take him to the vet, but after we heard about the accident we waited to see if he was alright. Strange. Have no idea what he had felt or sensed but there must have been something, and there was contamination that spread over our country. The sanitary work here in Sweden has costed us SEK 900 million SEK or approx USD 90 million so far and there’s still job left to do.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 5:15 am
by Bao
Oh, and maybe you want to have a look at this?

https://www.boredpanda.com/side-by-side ... l-footage/

Image

Image

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 7:39 am
by Trick
For me i didn’t reacted/though too much about the Chernobyl incident when it happened and neither afterward. Could be because I lived in the most southern part of Sweden that was supposed to be out from the risk zone.
But I did like to occasionally eat a “renklämma”(reindeer meat ”sandwich”wrap) a quick thought about nuclear contamination always came, but as quickly it came as quickly it vanished when the taste of delicious reindeer meat hit my palate.
Harrisburg on the other hand I remember seemed more worrisome, maybe because such a thing was not supposed to happen in the developed world ?
The Fukushima disaster a few years back I also didn’t reacted too much about despite living in “nearby” Dalian, the winds and streams supposedly went the other way, across the pacific.
Nuclear power is so far the most efficient “cleanest” energy source ? So if the world is going to be saved from pollution that cause the great climate changes we experience now, nuclear power is the thing ? 8-)

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 8:19 am
by windwalker
Nuclear power is so far the most efficient “cleanest” energy source ?


Agree.

It is the most cleanest and efficient source so far.
Unfortunately it seems like the newest reactors thorium won't be developed in the US not really politically vaible.

The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today’s nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6020 ... power/amp/

we have to create something new, something strategic,” says Kun Chen, the molten-salt scientist who led my virtual tour in Shanghai. “You have to think big.”

Educated at the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, Chen earned a PhD from Indiana University and worked for several years at Argonne National Laboratory (which, like Oak Ridge, is part of the U.S. Department of Energy). But he came back to China to build a world-changing reactor.

He heard about it in 2009, when he visited Shanghai to present a seminar at the Institute of Applied Physics. A scientist there told him about the thorium molten-salt reactor—a project not yet funded or announced. “Our team got most of the technical documents from the Web—they were posted by the Oak Ridge team,” recalls Xu Hongjie, the director of the molten-salt program, shaking his head in either admiration or amazement at the openness of the Americans.

“They posted everything there for free.”

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 8:30 am
by everything
Trick wrote:For me i didn’t reacted/though too much about the Chernobyl incident when it happened and neither afterward. Could be because I lived in the most southern part of Sweden that was supposed to be out from the risk zone.
But I did like to occasionally eat a “renklämma”(reindeer meat ”sandwich”wrap) a quick thought about nuclear contamination always came, but as quickly it came as quickly it vanished when the taste of delicious reindeer meat hit my palate.
Harrisburg on the other hand I remember seemed more worrisome, maybe because such a thing was not supposed to happen in the developed world ?
The Fukushima disaster a few years back I also didn’t reacted too much about despite living in “nearby” Dalian, the winds and streams supposedly went the other way, across the pacific.
Nuclear power is so far the most efficient “cleanest” energy source ? So if the world is going to be saved from pollution that cause the great climate changes we experience now, nuclear power is the thing ? 8-)


The side stories from you guys in Sweden are really interesting. Like I've never heard of reindeer sandwich wrap before, for example.

For energy, I have no idea if nuclear energy is really clean, but renewable energy in the USA has surpassed energy from coal for the first time: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/29/business ... index.html.

One of my friend's parents worked on special materials to contain nuclear waste. Another one worked on studying safety of nuclear "stuff". My dad worked in nuclear physics. My father in law did civil engineering of the power plants. I've never really talked with any of them about this, but will have to do so.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 8:40 am
by Bao
Trick wrote:So if the world is going to be saved from pollution that cause the great climate changes we experience now, nuclear power is the thing ?


The whole consumption needs to be changed. It's not only climate change and temperature that is a threat, but the whole acceleration of destroying the world's resources.

What WW's link is about is that new nuclear power plants are coming soon. China is developing the new generation of nuclear power, safer, more efficient, with far less waste and no risk of a meltdown. The first one will be taken into use in 2024. If things are going as planned, they will be available for international use in 2030.

https://youtu.be/JRCIwSV7NMk

Everything wrote:One of my friend's parents worked on special materials to contain nuclear waste. Another one worked on studying safety of nuclear "stuff". My dad worked in nuclear physics. My father in law did civil engineering of the power plants. I've never really talked with any of them about this, but will have to do so


Would be interesting to hear more about it. 8-)

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 9:01 am
by everything
Bao wrote:

Everything wrote:One of my friend's parents worked on special materials to contain nuclear waste. Another one worked on studying safety of nuclear "stuff". My dad worked in nuclear physics. My father in law did civil engineering of the power plants. I've never really talked with any of them about this, but will have to do so


Would be interesting to hear more about it. 8-)



Most likely, I've met some of the generation of scientists that came after Weinberg, but before the current molten salt folks. However, I wouldn't know any of the science. I do know some second generation scientists. Not sure where they ended up working. My stories would be more trivia around what it was like to grow up around this kind of strange environment. Like, if you imagine your parents and friend's parents were ALL like the two scientist characters (very smart, very math-y, very academic, very interested in technical and not politics), and then you put them not at Chernobyl but at a place like Hawkins (with no "Upside Down"), you start to get a feel/imagination for this weird environment of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. For the most part, these were the people who invent the underlying technology or do the underlying science that comes way before the practical engineering based on these discoveries or inventions. The people who built these cities (way before my time) of course had no idea what they had worked on.

As kids we would ride our bikes and later drive our cars around and kind of look wherever there were signs that said "no trespassing" or the like. Once we biked on gravel past a sign that said "do not enter" with an arm blocking car entrance (but not kids on bikes). We discovered this concrete silo - not a grain silo attached to a barn - but not obviously any kind of active military building as far as we could tell. There were no people around. To us, it was probably like a cool "fort" in the woods. and we should've wondered and investigated more what it really was.

Another time, we drove out by one of the huge, huge facilities by the gate that says "do not enter, patrolled by arm guards" or something like that. We peered through the fence, and there were just multiple football field sized areas of barrels and barrels. They looked like they had been there for decades. No idea what they were.

Re: Watching Chernobyl

PostPosted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 9:25 am
by Trick
windwalker wrote:
Nuclear power is so far the most efficient “cleanest” energy source ?


Agree.

It is the most cleanest and efficient source so far.
Unfortunately it seems like the newest reactors thorium won't be developed in the US not really politically vaible.

The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today’s nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6020 ... power/amp/

we have to create something new, something strategic,” says Kun Chen, the molten-salt scientist who led my virtual tour in Shanghai. “You have to think big.”

Educated at the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, Chen earned a PhD from Indiana University and worked for several years at Argonne National Laboratory (which, like Oak Ridge, is part of the U.S. Department of Energy). But he came back to China to build a world-changing reactor.

He heard about it in 2009, when he visited Shanghai to present a seminar at the Institute of Applied Physics. A scientist there told him about the thorium molten-salt reactor—a project not yet funded or announced. “Our team got most of the technical documents from the Web—they were posted by the Oak Ridge team,” recalls Xu Hongjie, the director of the molten-salt program, shaking his head in either admiration or amazement at the openness of the Americans.

“They posted everything there for free.”

University of science and technology in Hefei/China is truly an hot spot in the nuclear research field especially on fusion energy. Wouldn’t be surprised if China would be the first to make it work on a large functional scale. But anti China powers will probably try their best to undermine any Chinese success in that field .....as they trying to do to them in other field of technology too. Claiming the Chinese have been spying’n stealing. 8-)