* spoiler alert*













I think episode 4 was worth watching for the roof clearing scene. That was incredibly intense but so well done.

Pavel's story line made my stomach turn.

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Long Chile was a silly place.

From the podcast, the Pavel story is based on first hand accounts (including the puppies) and I can't recall whether the creator said they filmed it and just couldn't show it because it would be too much or if there were just accounts that sometimes the dogs wouldn't be dead when they dumped them in the pits to be buried in concrete, so they'd just buried them alive.

They shot the scene, but felt it was gratuitous and manipulative. It's fascinating listening to the writer talk about the decisions of what to show and what to leave to the viewer's imagination.

They struck a fine balance.

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The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W

Russia to make its own show about Chernobyl that implicates the US

Sweet baby Jesus, please let a reporter ask Trump about this.

"Many people are saying this, very strongly. I don't know. Do you know? No one really knows what happened there and believe me, no one knows more about nucular power than me."

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The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W

Just finished watching the series last night. Wow! Just wow! Well done, and very eye opening. A few disjointed thoughts.......

* The show had a very late 70s/early 80s style to it. Lots of scenes that would just play out with no dialogue, backed by creepy music to really let the tension build. It reminded me a lot of the way Alien was shot.

* I think I sat on my couch holding back tears during the last 5 minutes of the series. Band of Brothers is the only other show to have had that kind of effect.

* It really makes me rethink the idea of using nukes for power. Yes, its relatively safe, but when something goes wrong, it can be really, really, really bad. Like holy shit, how much worse could Chenobyl have been? What if an earth quake happens in the wrong place? What if someone figures out how to sabotage a plant? Is the only thing keeping these things from blowing up really a bunch of humans turning knobs and pushing buttons?

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

The type of reactor the Soviets were using are completely different than even old reactors elsewhere. Their reactor had no containment vessel, it was just an ordinary building. The containment vessel is incredibly expensive because it is several feet of hardened concrete surrounding the entire core. They are designed so a plane can fly into them and not crack it. There are other crazy design features that make Chernobyl dangerous as well. There are plenty of youtube videos about it. All I can say, is the Russians are nuts when it comes to nuclear power and sadly they haven't changed much even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Modern reactors are designed in such a way that an explosion is physically impossible, even if all the water boils away. That is the safeguard western reactors have that the Soviets ignored, physics.

If they'd had that steam explosion, it would have been way worse.
Fukushima is a good example. The main problem here was that they did not have sufficiently imaginative people working on the failure scenarios (or, the scenarios they came up with were disregarded). Putting the backup generators for the (essential) coolant pumps below sea level? What were they thinking?
That will always be a potential risk but it applies in some respects to regular generation plants as well. A prolonged power outage in a densely populated area (in winter) is no joke.

Well, no (or at least, not normally). Chernobyl was a case where under-trained and poorly educated operators deliberately put the reactor system into an unsafe state, after first having disabled all the safety mechanisms and automatic controls that would have prevented them from doing so. Then, the RMBK reactors control rod design was such that it would exacerbate any problems with the recovery from that state.

I think that (fission) nuclear power is still going to have to be a necessary technology until we hopefully figure out how to do fusion power at any efficiency level. The problem with the current reactors, pretty much over the entire world, is that they're based on 1960's technology and understanding of nuclear physics. There have been lots of proposals for third and fourth-generation reactors that are more scalable as well as being less of a problem from a nuclear arms proliferation point of view, and having better inherent safety.

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Less is more.

Wasn't Three Mile Island also pretty close to a disaster?

No offense, but it seems like every defense of nuclear is a "Well, yeah but........."


I'm just thinking in terms of stacking errors and probability. "Safe," means "mostly safe," and "would only happen in this unlikely circumstance." But the more reactors we have, and the longer we have them for, the more likely those unlikely circumstances become, and when its bad, it can be really, really bad.

Again, I'm not saying that we should shut them all down, but.......wow.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

Not like Chernobyl. And TMI is why would should be building new reactors. We are keeping older reactors alive because nothing can replace the power they generate.

I don't think we have to beat around the bush there. It was a disaster.


As other posters noted, the physics of reactor operation are understandable and they are predictable. It's a people problem. Three Mile Island, according to Wikipedia:
The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape. The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as human-computer interaction design oversights relating to ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant's user interface. In particular, a hidden indicator light led to an operator manually overriding the automatic emergency cooling system of the reactor because the operator mistakenly believed that there was too much coolant water present in the reactor and causing the steam pressure release.[5]

They had bad training, hidden indicator lights, and ambiguous controls.

Could we do future reactors better? Absolutely. But it would cost time, money and effort to provide the extra training, and to properly design the system so that the unlikely circumstances had known remedies (and so that the remedies would be properly applied). So, I don't know if we will actually get there.

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Less is more.

I'm hopeful that the political will to expand nuclear will return but at the moment (following Fukushima and HBO's irresponsibly fictionalized account of Chernobyl) I don't see it happening for a long time. There are currently just too many ignorant people who want to have their cake (clean energy) and eat it too (clean energy that has no drawbacks).

Here's an article on some of the startups in the space and their innovations:

https://www.wired.com/story/next-gen-nuclear/

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War is god

Sad they put out these scarumentaries that are off by a factor of a million. This guy explains a lot of outrageous exaggerations in the movie. Like how the experts say that the plant could blow up like a 3-5 megatons nuclear bomb (or 3-5,000 tons worth of TNT). Plants are not complexly designed to be a nuclear bomb, and they don't use super expensive highly enriched uranium, not even close.


Even under worst case scenario (which this was real bad), they talk of about an explosion that would raise Minsk (city) 320 km away. Using software Nukemap if you blew up not at a 5 megaton bomb but a 100,000 megaton bomb you still would have been fine in Minsk.



To bad they have scared the populace about Nuclear energy. It is one of the cleanest and safest ways to produce clean energy

Japanese technology, operations and quality is generally considered much more refined than Soviet.
Yet Fukoshima happened. Better government response, and somewhat different events - but there were multiple hydrogen explosions and core criticality and ultimate meltdown.

The problem is that Nuclear Power Plants are designed to withstand 1-in-a-1,000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 year events. The engineering is pretty good to withstand conditions below that event. But we have proven pretty shitty at predicting the frequency of rare events.

For example- whether its Climate change or something else - we've been getting 1-in-a-20 year storms every year. 1-in-a-100 year storms every few years. Our designs are not coping with these. https://fivethirtyeight.com/...-of-100-year-floods/

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Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

Fukashima was an older reactor. It was built in 1967. TMI was built around the same timeframe.

And for everything that happened at Fukashima, the radiation hasn't killed anyone afaik. The disaster/storm killed many people. The stress has killed many people. There might be elevated risk of cancer for some people, but even that is a big if.

I do know that people die and get cancer every day from pumping carbon fuels into the air. People die in mining and petro operations on a regular basis. People die from refinery and chemical processing related to carbon use. Plenty of sites are contaminated from carbon use, which lead to death and cancer.

If you look at the totality of risk, nuclear seems to be far safer than using carbon fuels.

There are still RBMK reactors running in Russia. And based on their recent failed missile test, they seem to have not learned the lessons of Chernobyl. So my confidence in their nuclear efforts is not high.

I read Midnight in Chernobyl after watching the series and it focused heavily on the design flaws associated with the Soviet-built reactors. The book was also more critical of Legasov than the series where he toed the party line when he presented in Vienna; the series mentioned it but the book took him to task.

I thought the series as a whole was excellent, one of the best that HBO has done. Jared Harris should walk away with an Emmy.

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"You can never win or lose if you don't run the race." - Richard Butler

Yes, but they've supposedly been retro-fitted to change void coefficients, etc, so the specific fault conditions of Chernobyl are far less likely.

I haven't read the book, but my impression from the series was that he *didn't* toe the line in Vienna. Toeing the line would have been blaming the operators for everything. Instead he pointed out design flaws, and when questioned about why the design flaws existed answered "to save money." That may not be true to reality, but was my impression from the series.

In any case, it's pretty clear that no one was more critical of Legasov than Legasov.

It's not so much the reactors I'm worried about, but the government which manages them. It's very troubling that they are back to their old tricks of hiding deadly accidents.

  


So to keep half the continent from being uninhabitable, I just have to rely on people not screwing up? That doesn't make me sleep well.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

How many people here, in the US, want to dismantle the department of energy? Think about that for a second.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

You might feel differently if you knew a little bit more about the people that you are counting on to not screw up. The training program for in-plant operators is about a year, for control room operators it's another 2 years on top of that. For senior reactor operators (supervisors in the control room), it's an additional 2 years on top of their 4 year engineering/tech degree. Every 5th or 6th week (depending on the rotating shift schedule at that specific plant) is spent requalifying and training in the simulator. Their NRC issued licenses state their overriding priority as (paraphrasing from memory) "taking all necessary actions to protect the health and safety of the public."
Also, the training and industry changed substantially after TMI - moving to a symptom based approach for transient mitigation that relied more heavily on an understanding thermo-hydraulic nuclear physics and how to protect the 3 fission product barriers, prioritizing and maintaining critical safety functions, and ultimately protecting the health and safety of the public.

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"Life is fragile - we are all just a slip or a car crash away from being a very different person."

Fukushima is a good example. The main problem here was that they did not have sufficiently imaginative people working on the failure scenarios (or, the scenarios they came up with were disregarded). Putting the backup generators for the (essential) coolant pumps below sea level? What were they thinking?

A couple of points worth making in regard to this statement - TEPCO knew that their design basis tsunami barrier was insufficient for the worst case risk calculated wave height...and did nothing with that engineering documentation to mitigate the issue. There were discussions almost a decade earlier about raising the seawall height.
Also, the emergency diesel generators were not below sea level - they were at least 15 feet above sea level from everything I have read, then they were hit with a 47 foot wave and everything was flooded, the fuel supply was destroyed, and the batteries were damaged. Why would you put a huge, heavy piece of equipment on the lowest floor of a building? Seismic qualification.

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"Life is fragile - we are all just a slip or a car crash away from being a very different person."