
They Fictionalize Nuclear Disasters Like Chernobyl Because They Kill So Few - mpweiher
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/09/the-reason-they-fictionalize-nuclear-disasters-like-chernobyl-is-because-they-kill-so-few-people/
======
schoosi
Not to say I don't appreciate how safe modern nuclear is, but if you're
writing an article about the over-dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster, I
think it hurts your argument when you neglect to mention the hundreds of
thousands who were forced to permanently relocate and the thousand-square mile
Exclusion Zone that is still uninhabitable 30 years later. If the disaster
were at the nuclear plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Exclusion Zone would
include all of Eastern Massachusetts, including the cities of Boston,
Providence, and Worcester.

~~~
Circuits
You don't think not mentioning any of the other problems with nuclear energy
hurts the argument? Are we really going to ignore the problem of containing
spent fuel?

~~~
Circuits
People down voting this comment, care to add a comment about why you are down
voting it? Surely, it's not because you believe spent fuel is not a problem? I
hope not because it is a HUGE problem perhaps bigger even than dumping CO2
into the air if you ask me.

~~~
simonsarris
Dumping CO2 into the air kills ~6 million a year, ~1 million from particulate
pollution alone. Burning coal is _dumping spent fuel into the air,_ including
uranium and mercury particulates.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-
more-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-
radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/)

Of course it's a bigger problem than storing spent nuclear fuel.

~~~
Circuits
You say that as if you can predict what will happen over the course of the
next 10 thousand years. What happens when we run out of places to put the
spent fuel? We dig another hole in a another mountain?? What if there is an
earth quake 10k years from now and all that spent fuel goes tumbling into the
local drinking water? Are you under them impression that stuff like that can't
happen or doesn't ever happen? Sounds like a pretty ignorant point of view to
me. What if the American government falls and the security details guarding
these storage facilities go away and unscrupulous agents have free access to
it. They then build thousands of dirty bombs and send the Earth into chaos?
You think that's impossible? Sounds to me like you are counting your chickens
10k years before they hatch.

Edit: I read the article, its bias untruthful trash... should I have expect
more from Mara Hvistendahl author of such classics as: 'The Vibrator' and
'Origins: The Start of Everything (Where do rainbows come from? What about
flying cars, love and LSD?)'

~~~
DuskStar
> You say that as if you can predict what will happen over the course of the
> next 10 thousand years. What happens when we run out of places to put the
> spent fuel?

You're missing something - coal power ALSO produces radioactive waste. We just
seem to be fine with dumping it into the atmosphere.

~~~
Circuits
I am definitely not advocating coal power that's an assumption you made all on
your own. The options aren't coal or nuclear, the options are limited, but
they are not limited to just two.

------
alkonaut
The dramatic death added is of course fiction. But the economic damage of
Chernobyl is still very hard to measure. For example, 20% of reindeer
slaughtered in Sweden (of 50-75k per year) had to be discarded because of
radiation for years after the incident. This wasn’t in Ukraine, or even in the
Soviet Union. It was in Sweden.

We talked about CS137 and radiation levels of meat and other things for many
years even though we were never of course in any risk of suddenly bleeding
from our skin or having an increased rate of birth defects. The levels were
low but still very much there. You were fine so long as you didn’t
overconsume. A lot of things had too high levels to be _sold_ , which affected
a lot of companies (the reindeer industry is just one example.)

~~~
nosianu
To add to your Sweden, here is government information from Germany, about
radioactivity in game and mushrooms in the state of Bavaria:
[http://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushr...](http://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-
game/mushrooms-game_node.html) (latest data is from 2018)

The "BfS" is "the federal government office for radiation protection".

So even today they still have measures in place introduced after Chernobyl.
Measurements have gone down of course, but it will take a long time before
they can stop maintaining that webpage.

~~~
zaarn
To add some anecdotes; the local hunter organisation in my village (south
bavaria) has to dispose almost 50% of the killed boars due to the radioactive
contamination, many of those over 10 times the legal safety limit. And that's
only the boars that are measured, there is likely a huge dark number of
radioactive boars being consumed or hunted.

------
jonawesomegreen
As the article mentions it seems like the show "Chernobyl" is a dream come
true for the anti-nuclear crowd. Its dramatization of the event is truly
horrific and actually had me questioning my support of nuclear power as a
sensible alternative.

Watching it has me wondering a lot about how bad the accident actually was.
I've done a little research and the number of fatalities seem to vary wildly
depending on the source.

Does anyone have any reasonably good un-biased sources of information about
the accident?

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
Estimating the health impact of the disaster is very difficult because we
don't have a robust model for the damage that low radiation exposure causes.

Ultimately, it's a problem of statistical power. High doses - large effect
sizes - are relatively easy to work with and we can see effects without too
much issue. But small effect sizes require large samples for suitable
statistical power to avoid type II error, and perhaps more importantly,
observational studies become extremely prone to even small confounding
factors. In the case of studying radiation, or any number of drugs, diets, or
environmental risks, you can't ethically perform experiments. "Natural"
experiments like Chernobyl, Hiroshima, etc. are still beset by confounding
factors.

So the best we can do is take the data from higher exposures and extrapolate
that data back to the origin. But then you run into the issue of whether the
regression comes back to meet the origin (linear no threshold - LNT), curves
and sits along the x-axis for a while (threshold effects), or even dips below
(hormesis). The truth is that we don't really know what happens at lower
levels of exposure. The conservative approach is to assume the worst case, and
thus LNT tends to get the most play in the literature. Hormesis has also
picked up an air of woo and psuedoscience over time, but the idea isn't
altogether unreasonable.

Calculations of 'how bad' Chernobyl was all depend on what model you assume,
so there's plenty of room for variation in that, in addition to the spotty
historical evidence.

------
cletus
I used to be pro-nuclear power but I've long since come to the conclusion that
there are three fundamental problems that basically make nuclear power a non-
starter:

1\. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other
forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal
plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for
centuries.

2\. Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants. This requires
long-term thinking way beyond quarterly profits. Because catastrophes are so
unlikely but profit hits are so short term there is inevitable pressure to cut
corners.

3\. Governments have generally been pretty terrible at overseeing nuclear
power industries. There are the dangers of regulatory capture and the
temptation for politicians to kick the can down the street for the next guy to
deal with. Political expediency is a powerful motivator. In the US, for
example, the entire election/voting process has been politicized. Why is a
Supervisor of Elections a political office? This is something fundamental to
the function of our democracy and politicians are happy to throw it under the
bus to get some short term political goal.

Just look at the politics of climate change. That can't trump (pardon the pun)
politics. What makes you think the safety and oversight of nuclear power
generation will?

4\. Nuclear waste. We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to
dispose of nuclear waste. What's more, governments seem to bear the cost for
this rather than the corporations that profit from the power generated. The
issues here range from making areas around sites uninhabitable (eg nuclear
waste leaking into the water table) to human threats (eg certain isotopes make
for great dirty bombs).

Unless you have some solution for these problems, honestly I feel like you're
wasting your time advocating for certainly fission power generation (and I'm
not yet convinced nuclear fusion power generation is commercially viable).

~~~
Grue3
>A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles
uninhabitable for centuries.

Neither is a nuclear plant. Cleaning up within a century seems feasible. A lot
of Chernobyl exclusion zone is completely safe, it just hasn't been revised in
decades. Just compare to how fast Fukushima exclusion zone is shrinking. And
you're ignoring loss of land due to rising sea levels.

>Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants.

If companies can be trusted to run hydroelectric plants, which have a
capability to drown everyone downstream, then they can be trusted to run
nuclear. I've never seen anyone campaigning to end hydro even though potential
for disaster is much bigger (and hydro disasters with more casualties than
Chernobyl happened several times).

>We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to dispose of nuclear
waste

Given the amount of nuclear waste that is produces this seems a weak concern.
Anything that's heavily radioactive is just an energy source to be reused (and
there's a lot of research being done on this). And the alternative is a lot
(and I mean a lot) of solar panels and batteries, and these need to be
disposed of as well.

~~~
LorenPechtel
The Fukushima exclusion zone should never have existed in the first place.
More people died in the evacuation than if everyone had just stayed put.

And the waste is a political issue, not a scientific one. Reprocess it to
recover the fuel and useful isotopes. What's left decays to ambient in 10,000
years--and even if we used nuclear power forever it would never amount to more
than one year's worth of fly ash from coal plants. And that fly ash is nasty
stuff. A nuclear plant that emitted radiation like a coal plant would be shut
down pronto.

------
radcon
> There is no reliable evidence. . .

The premise of the entire article seems to rely on this one fallacy.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in a case like this
where the effects are extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to measure
AND there were extraordinary efforts made to suppress all the evidence.

~~~
pitaj
Reason dictates we assume the negative when there is not conclusive evidence
towards the positive claim.

~~~
ncallaway
That's...not always true.

We also have to consider the risks of the various results, _and_ weight them
against our priors.

If we think something is fairly unlikely (1% chance of being true), and as yet
has no evidence to support or refute it, but would cause the total destruction
of the earth, reason would dictate that we assume that it is _true_ until we
have evidence that it is not.

This is obviously quite sensitive to what our individual priors are about
something in a world where we don't yet have any evidence. This will naturally
produce different conclusions for different people (you may assess the world-
destroying event to only have a .000000001% chance of occurring, in which case
it's pretty reasonable for you to assume it's _false_ until we have evidence
that it's true). But, for any individual, I don't believe the situation should
not be as simple as your suggestion.

Edit: of course, this presumes self-preservation as a goal which is _not_
something which can be determined by reason. Of course, it's a goal shared by
a vast majority of humans, so I feel it's a reasonable assumption here. As
reason/logic are used as a tool to support our goals, I feel it's fair to
include such a goal as part of our reasoning consideration.

~~~
RaptorJ
and therefore, we have to invade Iraq

~~~
ncallaway
...I don't think that conclusion naturally follows from my suggested reasoning
process.

~~~
close04
I guess it's about how you interpret the burden of proof. If you always expect
the other guy to present evidence regardless of who made the proposition then
OP is perfectly right.

But if you choose the sensitive approach and expect evidence from the party
who proposed the theory then starting from the article's premise that there's
no reliable evidence (if true) is a perfectly valid argument to support the
title.

Consider this: _I am the Always-Right-All-Knower-and-All-Seer_. Now what is
more reasonable, to expect evidence from my side supporting my premise, or for
you to provide evidence against it and assume the premise true until you do
that?

~~~
ncallaway
I'll answer your hypothetical, but then I would appreciate if you answered one
of mine.

> I am the All-Knower-and-All-Seer.

My prior that this is true is _extraordinarily low_. I put this at a
0.000000001% chance of likely to be true. Suppose you provide me a theory that
Iraq possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, and must be invaded in order to
prevent the destruction of a major city.

I would assign an extremely-high negative consequence to that outcome. I would
assign a low-ish probability to the outcome based on my inherit disbelief that
you are Always-Right-All-Knower-and-All-Seer, and that you have not furnished
any evidence.

If your proposed solution is to invade the country, I would assign a very-high
negative consequence to the outcome. As such, I would ask you to provide quite
compelling evidence that your claim was true, before supporting such a rash
action.

If, instead, your proposed solution was to propose international monitoring to
the country of Iraq I would assign a quite-low negative consequence to the
outcome (probably even a slightly positive consequence). As such, before
backing your proposed solution I would require a _much_ lower bar of evidence.

But I _believe_ you about the WMDs in either scenario to the same degree. Your
proposal changes how much I _need_ to accept your premise about the WMDs to
accept your solution.

So, I think accepting decision D based on belief X is a _far far_ more
complicated question that "do you believe X"?

\----

Let me also look at this from the other side. Let's say I, for some reason,
conclusively believe you to be an All-Knower-and-All-Seer. My belief in this
is 100%. Perhaps I am easily convinced, or perhaps you made 1,000,000,000,000
predictions of fully stochastic events, and I have assigned a 10-sigma
confidence that you are some kind of All-Knower-and-All-Seer. Let's also
assume that I have 100% confidence that you are honest, and that I have some
way of gaining that confidence. However I got there, it's somewhat irrelevant
at this point.

If I have 100% confidence that you are truly an All-Knower-and-All-Seer, and
you suggested a particular course of action was strictly beneficial to me, I
would almost certainly follow that course of action without requiring further
evidence from you.

I would argue that, in such a scenario (and such a scenario is quite
contrived, I believe, for anyone who is truly skeptical) it would be
_irrational_ for me to ask you for more evidence before acting. After all, at
that point we've already moved by belief threshold high enough for me to take
actions in the world to further my goals.

This all assumes that we are an actor in the world with _goals_ (which, I
again assert that _goals_ cannot be defined rationally, but rather that
rationality serves as a tool to achieve goals). If you have _no goals_ , then
I agree that pure reason would require you to ask for more evidence.

\----

My return hypothetical is to ask you this question:

You are a key decision maker for a scientific body. You are deciding whether
you should run an experiment code-named Alpha. There is a low-likelihood but
not preposterous theory (say, accepted by 10-15% of the scientific community),
but lacks any solid experimental support. This theory says that running the
Alpha will destroy the planet. The gain from running the experiment will be
furthering scientific knowledge in quite useful, but not ground-breaking ways.

Again, this "Destruction Hypothesis" seems like it's not super likely to be
correct, but it's not a crackpot-theory.

Do you run Alpha today without delay, or do you order more investigation of
the Destruction Hypothesis to conclusively rule it out before running Alpha?

~~~
close04
My example was meant to highlight the principle and it stands because it's a
simple straight-forward example that covers almost all if not all the cases.
The burden of proof stands with the party making the claim.

You're free to believe an unsubstantiated theory but you can't expect others
to _prove_ it wrong in order to make their point.

Now coming back to your hypothesis, it's too complex and contains way too
little data to assist in a decision. A random answer would be just as good and
proves nothing. I would probably consider performing the experiment on another
planet. Or even on this one. Or wait a little longer (which is equivalent to
not doing it). What I would definitely not do is say "The premise of your
entire [theory] seems to rely on this one fallacy" [approximate quote from
OP]. It's only a fallacy after you prove it.

P.S. Is experiment Alpha the detonation of a thermonuclear bomb that might set
the atmosphere on fire? Because we know how that decision went :).

~~~
ncallaway
I guess my point is who carries the _burden_ is irrelevant if you have to make
a decision based on your state of knowledge.

You have a decision to make, and Bob makes a claim which could influence that
decision.

Does it matter where the burden lies? _You_ have to make the decision, and Bob
has presented new information but doesn't well substantiate it.

My point is this: From a _pure reason_ standpoint, I think it's fair to always
assume the negative when there is not evidence for a positive claim. But in
the real world where you have to achieve real goals based on partial
knowledge, _reason_ would dictate that you sometimes evaluate and consider
claims that are not yet well substantiated, and you might have to do the
legwork to substantiate the claim yourself (if you decide there is enough
merit and value in doing that substantiation).

My point is the burden of proof is, practically, often on the person who needs
to make a decision based on information and not on the person who makes a
claim with related information.

\---

For Alpha, I didn't have something specific in mind but some kind of
combination of "light the atmosphere on fire" and more crackpot "your particle
accelerator will create a black-hole" were definitely both in the back of my
mind.

~~~
close04
> Does it matter where the burden lies

> the burden of proof is, practically, often on the person who needs to make a
> decision

You're contradicting a logical principle that is strong enough to be put in
actual law.

It's the difference between being right and pretending or hoping you're right.
Or hoping that the other guy is wrong.

> The premise of the entire article seems to rely on _what might be_ a
> fallacy.

Just doesn't have the same righteous ring to it :).

------
dfsegoat
Couldn't agree more. Take Harold McCluskey [1] - "The Atomic Man" \- who was
involved with a pretty horrendous accident at Hanford, WA - and ended up with
radioactive Americium-241 [2] embedded in his face/hands etc. - continuously
irradiating him with a-particles.

You would think - "That's it for that guy"... Well, he ended up dying of pre-
existing coronary artery disease - nothing to do with radiation or cancer,
despite having massive amounts of radioactive material in his body, post-
mortem.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_McCluskey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_McCluskey)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium-241](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium-241)

~~~
adrianN
Sample size of 1. That's like the smokers who tell stories of centenarian
smokers to prove that tobacco is not all that dangerous.

~~~
dfsegoat
No. It's a case study that shows that a worst case exposure to radioactive
material is not a death sentence.

Are you familiar with the term "Case study" or "Case report"? It it is a
medical/other study that follows a single individual over time. These are
published daily in many medical journals.

~~~
neuronic
Worst case? What? Those were alpha particles. You're lucky to get them through
a postcard.

~~~
rndmio
Which is precisely why you don't want them inside your body, every alpha
particle emitted by the delay will hit and be absorbed inside you, it is the
worst. That's why the Russian chose Polonium to kill Litvinenko.

------
mLuby
On why we fear radiation >nuclear accidents remind us of nuclear bombs and our
vulnerability to them.

I disagree. I think we fear radiation because we know there is a lethal threat
present but we can't individually detect it, like nerve gas or perhaps
something like Ebola. It triggers our threat response without giving us a
clear source for the danger, which causes the generalized fear.

~~~
lixtra
> there is a lethal threat present but we can't individually detect it

But this is true for so many pollutants: lead in the water, mercury in
lamps...

------
thrower123
It just makes me very angry that Chernobyl and Three Mile Island occurred, and
the public was whipped into such an ignorantly self-destructive fervor to
lobby against nuclear power and make it so expensive to develop. We've lost a
good fifty years of additional experience and improvements and iterations on
design, and meanwhile we have burned billions of tons of coal in the interim,
releasing pollution and exhaust particles that contain more radioactive
material than all the nuclear accidents ever, and even all the military atomic
munitions testing.

Such a pyrrhic victory for the environmentalists, and a catastrophic disaster
for the rest of us.

~~~
emiliobumachar
+1. It's a very little-known fact that coal energy produces radiation for all
practical purposes. It does so by digging up naturally radioactive particles
that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in
the atmosphere.

------
mimixco
It's worth mentioning that the lead Chernobyl investigator committed suicide
[0] over his feelings of guilt in not being more forthright about the inherent
dangers of the RBMK design.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2019/may/29/chernob...](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2019/may/29/chernobyl-horrifying-masterful-television-that-sears-on-to-
your-brain)

------
option
Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages:

1) anti-vaxxers 2) anti-nuclear 3) anti-GMO

Let’s have a better public education before it is to late.

I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies
it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in
(most) of the Western world is disgusting. As of today (accounting for all
past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even
safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt). Do we want to stop climate change?
If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.

~~~
beat
Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a
certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just
alienates the very people you want to win to your side - environmentally-
minded folks who might be convinced of the benefits of nuclear power.

From a less narrow perspective, it shows a total ignorance of how risk
analysis works. It's not how many people _have_ been harmed, it's how many
people _could_ be harmed. This is intuitively obvious to the people you're
trying to impress with this line. So don't use it.

~~~
falcolas
Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total
number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's
safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the
number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation
related injuries and deaths).

~~~
DubiousPusher
But Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario. It was bad but the Soviet
government did respond to it seriously. It could've been much worse had they
not.

In fact, that's what this article gets entirely wrong about the film. The most
disturbing thing the film highlights is not the gruesome deaths of a handful
of individuals. It's how the disaster could've been much worse.

~~~
falcolas
> the Soviet government did respond to it seriously

If by seriously you mean covering up the problem so the appropriate experts
could be brought in to contain the problem before the fallout covered half of
Europe, or in not providing proper shielding for the first responders, or by
not providing proper funding and training for the staff at Chernobyl... sure,
they took it very seriously.

/s

~~~
DubiousPusher
I have read many books about the Soviet Union. The government was full of
perverse incentives which encouraged fraud, deception, denial and corruption.

The dogma was so perverse it lead to a total corruption of logic and reason.
To the point it essentially warped reality.

In the Soviet Union, to ask for a better tool was to imply that your managers
were incompetent. Or the tool designers were. Or the manufacturers were. All
of whom were appointed by the government. A government which saw itself as the
manifest will of the people. To imply something wasn't good enough was to
imply the Russian people themselves weren't good enough.

That horrendous logic may have been self inflicted but it none the less set
the ground rules for any action taken by the government. The inadequacies you
point out say nothing about how seriously the Soviet government took
Chernobyl. You will find the exact same problems pervade almost every single
Soviet government initiative.

------
beat
The whole article reeks of politicized shaming of those stupid treehuggers
falling for the lies of corrupt Hollywood. Sigh.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the arguments for nuclear power are rapidly
fading - on economic grounds, not safety grounds. Even assuming that nuclear
is as safe as its most enthusiastic proponents claim, it's not a good
investment anymore. Why? Because the cost/energy of storage-backed wind/solar
is plummeting, and we don't know yet where the bottom is, due to rapid
advances in technology and increasing economies of scale in production and
deployment. The cost of nuclear plants is largely up-front - they're cheap to
operate over decades, but expensive to build. If someone spends billions on
new plants, and by the time they're built a decade later, solar costs half as
much as nuclear, there's almost no reason to even fire the plants up.

This isn't a safety risk. This is a _capital_ risk. Businesses care more about
risking their money than risking people's lives. Building more nuclear power
right now could turn into the kind of boondoggle that bankrupts utilities.
Think the public is mad about nuclear disaster risk? Wait til they're being
asked to pay more on their bills to bail out a utility that wasted billions on
unused nuclear plants.

And the financial risk just begs the question... what's the benefit of nuclear
at all, in a world where storage-backed solar/wind is clearly the future? The
cost is lower, the risk is lower, it's available to nations that can't afford
(or shouldn't be allowed to have) nuclear plants, etc. Barriers to entry in
terms of cost and time to market are extremely low, so low that even ordinary
citizens can get in on the game.

Demanding nuclear power at this point makes no economic sense. Which means the
demands have other motivations, and we should think about _why_ we think
nuclear is so darn important in this day and age.

~~~
clucas
If there is no economic sense in building nuke plants, we can just stop
talking about it, right? Presumably the utilities will run their analysis, and
if you're right, the plants will just never get built. Is the nuclear lobby so
strong that it is able to force utilities to go against the simple economics?
Even the coal lobby, which I assume (perhaps incorrectly?) is larger and more
entrenched, is losing that battle...

I hope you're right, because these periodic debates (on HN and elsewhere)
always have the same old arguments and no one ever seems to be convinced.

~~~
beat
When's the last time a new plant got built in the US? What's the construction
rate for new plants, even in less regulated and more centrally controlled
nations like Russia and China?

Economics is very powerful.

~~~
earthicus
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_plant_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_plant_construction.jpg)

There's a source for the recent data given in the 'description section'.

------
mpweiher
_“With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip
Thomas, a professor of risk management who led a recent research project on
nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”_

~~~
whatshisface
According to Wikipedia,

> _At present, radiation levels have dropped considerably, compared to the
> fatal levels of April 1986_

Which says that yes, Pripyat should have been evacuated.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat)

~~~
Tharkun
Not to mention the whole groundwater incident...which, had it not been for
(suicidal?) miners digging a tunnel, the water supply of FIFTY MILLION people
would have been contaminated.

~~~
CyanBird
When it comes to the miners, they actually weren't necessary, the corium lava
didn't breach the lower levels of concrete, it solidified before that, so all
those miners were exposed to all that radiation and risk of cancer needlessly,
of course at the time it wasn't known that would be the situation so they made
the right call anyways

~~~
pdkl95
The people that were _very unfortunately_ necessary that deserve to be
remembered are the 3828 "liquidators" that cleaned up the radioactive graphite
(mixed with bits of reactor fuel/waste) that covered the roof above the
reactor. In their own words[1]:

> [the remote control bulldozer] has overridden a graphite block with it's
> right caterpillar track, and now was sitting on 12,000 Roentgen fragment.
> [...] Starodumov was already thinking about something else... what all of us
> have already known: robots failed, and the extra radioactive zones will have
> to be cleaned by men.

> The shift lasted only two minutes. [...] Here, the unthinkable background
> radiation of nearly 8000 Roentgens. 20 meters away from us is the naked
> muzzle of the destroyed reactor. [...] With each succeeding group, with each
> fragment removed, the background radiation will reduce. This means the risk
> for the next group will already be lower.

[1] (this includes footage of the cleanup)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk)

------
dnautics
The article fails to mention the liquidators.

------
Circuits
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl for another 20 thousand years... the
author persecutes the director of the show for up playing the severity of the
disaster while simultaneous down playing it, fact. The author makes it seem
like the disaster at Chernobyl was nothing more than a slight hic-up or a
little boo-boo... let me reiterate, no one can live in Chernobyl for another
20 THOUSAND years. There are a LOT of reasons for why (current) nuclear energy
productions methods are dangerous, fallout from a total meltdown is 1% of
them. It certainly isn't the primary concern. The primary concern is what we
do with the by product of a nuclear power plant, the spent fuel. What do we do
with it? Shove it into some hole in the ground and write a note to the next
200 generations: "Oh, hey, sorry about poisoning your drinking water with our
radioactive waste. We figured you could fix our problems for us if you dont
mind!" There is nothing clean about nuclear power plants. Just because we
aren't pumping CO2 into the air doesn't make it clean.

~~~
Grue3
...except people live in Chernobyl all the time. It wasn't evacuated. The
plant itself kept working with the remaining reactors until like 2000. You
might have meant Pripyat but nobody has seriously tried to decontaminate it.
It was a city built specifically for nuclear plant, with no history to speak
of, so there was no sense to restore it.

~~~
Circuits
It was evacuated immediately (some 100k people), no one is allowed to live in
the exclusion zone (19 square miles) and yes the final reactor wasn't closed
down until 2000 but the other two were closed down before then, unit 1 in 1996
and unit 2 in 1991. The only reason and despite world outcry that those
reactors stayed in operation was because they had no choice. So either your
ignorant of the facts or your trying to put a positive spin on a terrible and
tragic event... which makes you a huge pos.

~~~
true_religion
Why did they have no choice but to use the reactors for the next 14 years?

~~~
bradleyhb
For the answer see...”dissolution of the Soviet Union”

------
microcolonel
Like... about half of the Gomel region of Belarus has almost no young people
anymore. When the incompetence is sufficiently extreme, the outcomes are dire
and felt by many.

I want nuclear to become the energy of choice for the west, primarily because
the alternatives would practically bankrupt even the richest regions of the
U.S. (if you look at the relation between increased reliance on batteries, and
the subsequent increased demand for higher daily/monthly/bimonthly minimum
supply) if taken too seriously.

However, downplaying Chernobyl in particular (considering how similar many
plants either are, or seem to the public; and considering how near-soviet
levels of incompetence can be seen regionally in the west today) is a bad
play.

The single incident is extremely dramatic, ruined _many_ people's lives, and
still costs a fortune to keep in check. While some of the response is
exaggerated or driven by unfounded fears; the fact remains that people from
widely varying cultures tend not to find the places that faced the aftermath
of Chernobyl desirable or healthy places to live.

