

What Happened at Chernobyl? - oscardelben
http://www.babeled.com/2009/12/07/what-happened-at-chernobyl/

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Kliment
There have been a number of reports about Chernobyl. This one was rather
sparse on details and seemed to have as its take-home point "The USSRians were
morons, this could never happen in the US because we are better and people who
do tests on reactors go to jail." Now, this is not very useful. What happened
in Chernobyl was a combination of technical failure, failure to follow
regulations, bad design and an error cascade. This combination was
significantly more likely in the conditions in the USSR at the time, but
accidents on a smaller scale have happened, even in the US.
<http://www.csirc.net/library/la_13638.shtml> is an interesting read,
especially the first document linked. It contains data and detailed accident
reports for a number of radiation criticalities in various situations.
Failsafes are good, but they are not enough, and someone stupid, uninformed,
or willful enough can always find ways of circumventing them.

~~~
dkersten
The USSRians made some decisions which, in retrospect, seem pretty evil. For
example, I hear they were cloud seeding to force the fallout to be rained.
This hit Belarus very badly. BUT if they hadn't done this, then the clouds
would have continued towards Moscow and many many many more people could have
been affected. The one thing I do criticize them on, though, is not evacuating
people earlier. I also hear they never told anyone the extent of the accident
until many days later, when they were already poisoned by radiation.

As for the actual accident - there were many factors at play here, including
miscommunication between the day and night shift people, untrained staff, bad
reactor design etc etc.

I just hope people learned from the accident and we can prevent this from
happening again.

~~~
ajuc
Soviets only tell the people of this catastrophe, when independent scientists
from Finland reported that radiation levels are unusually high, if they could,
they would get away with this, no matter peoples' health.

~~~
dkersten
Probably. They did wait something like ten days, afterall... :-(

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justintnt
did he really say renewable??? fail.

~~~
oscardelben
Maybe he is not referring to nuclear power but energy in general, though I
don't know if renewable is still the right word to use.

