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November, 2009

A TOWN NEAR CHERNOBYL

 
"The firemen who were sent to put out the reactor fire were fried on the spot by gamma radiation".
 Elena Filatova, Chernobyl Photographer
 

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HOW NUCLEAR POWER HELPS THE ENVIRONMENT
Nuclear power stations are NOT built to produce electricity. Every other type of power station produces cheaper power simply by not producing nuclear waste that the taxpayer has to pay for thousands of years hence. Nuclear power stations are built to split uranium atoms; this process produces nuclear weapons material like Plutonium 239. Just  eight pounds of Plutonium 239 was in the bomb that demolished the entire city of Nagasaki.
What happened to Reactor No 4. Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Had the reactor "gone nuclear" the town below and it’s 45,000 inhabitants would have disappeared in a mushroom cloud.

NUCLEAR GHOST TOWNS 2009.
The town of Pripyat, above, is the same size as the English port of Dover. Eventually, Pripyat and Chernobyl's two thousand poisoned villages will disappear in a uranium fallout poisoned forest.
What happened to Reactor No 4. Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Had the reactor "gone nuclear" Pripyat and it’s 45,000 inhabitants would have disappeared in a mushroom cloud. A nuclear explosion would also have mushroomed the other three nuclear reactors creating a sonic bang that would have been heard in London and enough uranium fallout to send most of Russia back to the Stone Age.

above The abandoned town of Pripyat.
below The abandoned port of Chernobyl.

FALLOUT:  Abandoned metal and concrete structures will eventually breakdown into deadly toxic nuclear rust and dust. Despite being impregnated with fatal nuclear atoms most of the flora and fauna will continue to grow, albeit mutated, as long as the sun shines. 
 
 FALLOUT: 'Wolf is radioactive and no use for hat or anything, only good for sun to breed maggots.' 
Elena Filatova, Chernobyl Photographer

Waiting To Happen:  Reactor No 4. Chernobyl
April 26, 1986 - 01:23:40. & 01:23:42.

"Reactor No 4. Chernobyl over-heated and flipped it's lid. It was a steam explosion. A nuclear explosion would have been a million times worse."
Chernobyl nuclear power station covers an area the size of six-soccer-fields. Reactor No 4, above, could be likened to a gigantic kettle standing forty-feet high. Made of twelve-feet-thick steel, with millions of gallons of water on the boil.
The kettles elements were 1,661 six-foot-tall uranium fuel rods arranged in ascending circles.
Miles of integrated stainless-steel water-channels carried the heat from the - white-hot - fuel rods.
Over 200 tons of black graphite bricks surrounded and supported the metalwork holding the fuel rods in place. The water came in from eight enormous high-pressure-pumps.
A reactor this size needs nine tons of water every 60 seconds. Nine tons of steam leaves the reactor every minute. The steam drives the Turbines generating 1,000 Mega-watts of electricity (enough for ten million 100-watt. light-bulbs).
The safe working temperature of Reactor No. 4 was 600 degrees Centigrade.

When uranium fuel passes its melting point (2,700 Centigrade) it can double it's temperature as it melts. Going from 2,700 to 5,400 to 10,800 to 21,600 and so on, quicker than you can do the maths.

April 26 1986. No. 4 went out of control.
This happened because the Automatic Temperature Control (ATC) had been illegally disabled.
Imagine the operator's sat in the control room watching all two-hundred of No 4's temperature gauges flying into the red! They were powerless as the surge of nuclear heat flashed hundreds of tons of water  into super-heated-steam. Walls of black graphite bricks turned white and disintegrated.
Miles of stainless steel water channels melted and vaporized into exploding, expanding gas.

Within minutes of the operators realizing something was wrong, an almighty explosion tossed the 2,000-ton steel & concrete reactor lid up in the air like an old penny.
It somersaulted and landed on top of the reactor, balanced on its edge (above right).
Oxygen rushed in causing a spectacular series of Roman Candle explosions; shooting out blazing lumps of melting nuclear waste. Aircraft reported some of these lumps went one-mile-high. Radiation warning klaxons screamed from the roof of every building in the sprawling nuclear complex. Erupting cascades of flaming nuclear waste started thirty more deadly toxic fires. Every fire engine within 50 miles answered the call to Chernobyl Power Station.

Fourteen hours later. The smaller fires were all under control but the reactor fire was still failing to respond to the millions of gallons of water hundreds of high-pressure-fire-hoses were pumping on it - direct from the station's own storage pools and the local river.

By now an Emergency Meeting was in progress at the Kremlin. The Politburo heard their top nuclear scientists explain how the increasing temperature could cause a fast-chain-reaction.
At one-million-degrees-Centigrade (super-critical) all the nuclear atoms in the blazing reactor could split in unison. Causing a nuclear explosion bigger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. The blast would smash Chernobyl's other three reactors into atoms - sending over 800 tons of eternally fatal fallout up in a mushroom cloud. The same cloud would have contained the atomized town of Pripyat.
Prevailing winds would have brought tons of fallout to Moscow.

The Politburo were left in no doubt Moscow could become a nuclear ghost town if Chernobyl went nuclear. Kremlin scientists ordered-in squadrons of helicopters to bomb the fire with ten-ton-loads of wet sand and clay, limestone, and chunks of boron-carbide steel. The chunks of steel would slow down the splitting nuclear-atoms and lessen the risk of a fast-chain-reaction. Limestone when burned releases carbon dioxide, which would starve the fire of oxygen. The wet sand and clay was intended to form a heat-sink to trap some of the fatal fallout.

May 3. Geiger-counters recorded the radioactive release was steadily increasing. So was the temperature! The attempt to smother the fire was apparently feeding it! It seemed the sacrifice of over 2,000 fire fighters, who, by this time, had received fatal doses of radiation, had all been for nothing...

May 6. By the Grace of God, the Geiger-counters slowed down...

One year later the remains of the molten nuclear fuel had cooled and set like warm volcanic lava.
Scientists found 70 tons of the original 204 tons of nuclear fuel had escaped (become lighter than air and quite literally gone-up in smoke). Chernobyl was surrounded by farmland. By 1994, fallout-poisoned collective farms and nearly 2,000 villages covering an area the size of Wales had been abandoned - forever.

April 1986. Clinic No 3 Moscow
Most of the firemen who raced to attend Chernobyl died horrible deaths of radiation poisoning.
Plane-loads of firemen like this poor man were rushed to radiation specialists in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk - to no avail.
(Unlike the fire-fighters who rushed to the Twin Towers anyone rushing to a Nuclear 9/11 would be knowingly committing suicide).





Chernobyl: 500,000 Dead and Counting

'Leading scientists and doctors claim that up to 500,000 people may have already died as a result of the world's worst environmental catastrophe... '
Guardian In March 25, 2006.
As far back as 1976 the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, made it abundantly clear.
The Defence Of The Realm is best served by decreasing our nuclear risks. Not increasing them.
After the Royal Commission - 1976.
After Three Mile Island - 1979.
After Chernobyl - 1986.
Who? Other than a inbred imbecile could have ordered Sizewell B in 1989?

June 11,  2009.  SIZEWELL:  THE USUAL DECEIT
Using the Freedom Of Information Act nuclear power protesters have just found out how Her Majesties  Government covered-up a near catastrophe at Sizewell nuclear power station in January 2007.
Were it not for a local man spotting a leaking pipe we could have had a British Chernobyl!  more

FALLOUT 2009.  In 1986 these woods glowed red with radiation. They cut them down and buried them under 1 meter of earth. Trees and plants that manage to grow here now are loaded with fatal cocktails of nuclear poison. The readings on the asphalt paving is 500 - 3000 micro-roentgens. That is 50 to 300 times normal radiation. If I step 10 meters forward towards the trees my Geiger counter will run off the scale.
If I walk towards the reactor the radiation will reach 3 roentgens per hour - which is 300,000 times normal. If I walked all the way to the reactor I would glow in the dark tonight - and never ride my beautiful Kawasaki Ninja again. Not on earthly roads anyway. Elena Filatova, Chernobyl Photographer

News Black-Out

As thousands of brave men were giving their lives fighting the Chernobyl fire, the Kremlin began the usual cover-up that accompanies all things nuclear. An All Soviet Directive (U2617) was issued forbidding details of radiation victims ever being released. For two days the Politburo enforced a complete News Black-Out.
Only when Chernobyl's uranium fallout triggered nuclear alarms in Norway, Finland and Sweden did the Kremlin admit they had a problem.
The orderly evacuation of every person, and every farm-animal, living within nineteen miles of the reactor was going smoothly to plan when Moscow Television reported. "There has been an accident at Chernobyl. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences."
The newsreader had no idea the Kremlin had ordered everything, within nineteen miles of the nuclear fire that could be buried, was to be buried. Including the forests.
From every direction the Red Army were heading for Chernobyl. Bringing their fleets of highly efficient earth-moving-machines.
In the next ten months over six-hundred-thousand civilians, from all parts of Mother Russia, found themselves conscripted and transported to the Ukraine. They were cheerfully told they were needed to assist the Red Army in "Burial Duties" .
Villages in the woodlands were bulldozed into the same shallow grave-pits as the forests.
Many villages and the towns of Chernobyl and Pripyat were too radioactive to demolish. Nuclear dust would have killed the demolition crews within hours. Hastily formed "Battalions" of civilian "Liquidators" were ordered to empty these same highly contaminated buildings.
Earth-movers dug eight hundred "emergency nuclear waste dumps", of all shapes and sizes, to take the contents of factories, food storage depots, builders-compounds, office-blocks, schools, libraries, garages, hospitals and clinics. Even the telephone exchanges were stripped out. Nothing that would attract looters was left above ground. Everything from typewriters to butchers-benches; from teddy bears to dentists chairs was tipped and crushed into makeshift nuclear waste dumps.
After three months of "Burial Duties" dozens of civilian Liquidators and super-fit soldiers died of what the Kremlin called "heart-attacks." Soldiers were threatening to go on strike. Tours of Duty were scaled down from three months to three weeks. Army Chiefs began to question the wisdom of sending anyone to fight nuclear waste. Thousands of Battalions of civilian Liquidators were returned to their respective corners of Russia - after falling sick (most of the Liquidators have since died of "ionizing cancers" (i.e. both; skin peeling-off and internal organ failures)).

The "Liquidators" were liquidated by uranium poisoning.

As the summer of 1986 wore on, birds, rats and foxes left the Chernobyl area. Trees, grass and flowers stopped growing or grew mutated. Remote-controlled mechanical-shovels, flown in from USA, refused to move or went comically berserk in the radiation. Over 200,000 convicts arrived in the First Exclusion Zone. In return for forgotten sentences they did most of the work building a 450,000-ton concrete tomb over the wrecked, red hot, reactor.

After twelve months of "Elimination" the Politburo realized no amount of people and machines can ever clean-up a nuclear power station accident.
Thousands of the tens of thousands of army vehicles that became radio-active were used as roadblocks, covered in tons of concrete. They now seal-off hundreds of roads and lanes into the first nineteen-mile round Exclusion Zone (twice since extended). Kiev and Moscow city buses used in the evacuation of 135,000 townsfolk and farmers also became too radioactive to ever use again. They were parked-up along with countless units of army and contractors building and earthmoving equipment forever to remain in the "Dead Zone" rusting into everlastingly fatal nuclear dust.

To stop the migration of fatal nuclear atoms, one-hundred-miles of fifty-foot-deep-sunken-dams were constructed by Red Army Engineers assisted by tens of thousands of civilian Liquidators.
Unfortunately the dams have served to raise the water-table. This has hastened, rather than hindered, the spread of fatal uranium and plutonium atoms from most of the 800 emergency nuclear waste dumps. People living 200 - 300 miles away are now - 2009 - falling ill with low-dose-radiation-syndrome (LRS), a sister of Gulf War Syndrome, caused by uranium fallout in the food & water supply. 
Burying contaminated forests, or any other kind of nuclear waste, is no answer to nuclear poison. The sensible answer is stop making it.
Anybody who say's we need any more nuclear power stations has been born too soon. It will be many decades before medical science can help these poor souls with a brain transplant.

The Queen's Business: August 2009
When Electricité de France (EdF) bought British Energy last year, it was envisaged that Centrica would take 25% of it. Centrica has now agreed to take 20% of the company for £2.3 Billion, along with the rights to that portion of production. It will pay £1.1 Billion and asset swap with EdF its 51% stake in the major Belgian utility SPE, giving EdF a significant stake in that country.
The Queen has also arranged for RWE and E.On to obtain two sites for new nuclear power plants - Oldbury in Gloucestershire and Wylfa in Wales. RWE and E.On are planning to build Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. EdF are planning four EPR reactors at Sizewell in Suffolk and Hinkley Point in Somerset, the first one starting up in 2017.
Ministers of the Crown who do NOT speak-out against producing needless nuclear waste, simply prefer feathering their off-shore-nests with their backhanders before we have a British Chernobyl and everyone has to leave this green and pleasant land. Stealing millions by claiming false expenses, double-dipping, housing flips and staffing fiddles are no more than the tip of the iceberg. 

Chernobyl Today Altered States:
Nuclear fish

These catfish no longer swim away from humans! You can step into this stream and catch them with your hands. Eating one could kill you.
Everything that still grows around Chernobyl contains nuclear poison. Fish grow twice the size they used to, but only live half as long.









Pripyat, the nearest ghost town to Chernobyl; slowly disappearing in a nuclear poisoned forest of deformed nature.
Bad Day In April: How the boys on the nightshift blew it

Reactor No 4 Chernobyl  01:23:40.  &  01:23:42. April 26, 1986
To speed-up safety checks, the night-shift maintenance crew by-passed the Automatic Temperature Control (ATC) Had they not. Reactor No 4 would have shut itself down safely.
When a reactor "Fails to Safety" it takes 50-80 hours to power-up again. To save this time. The ATC was, illegally, disabled.
Chernobyl plant manager Viktor Bryukhanov was sentenced to 10 years hard labour. Viktor was home in bed at the time. But. Viktor was held responsible for "introducing illegal practices that caused the accident." The maintenance crew told a specially convened Soviet Court they knew they were pushing the reactor into the Red Zone. But they believed it would "do no harm as they had done so several times before!"
No 4 was not jerry-built as the controlled media CBS, ITV, BBC et al reported. No 4 was abused. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) records clearly show No 4 had not suffered any hideously expensive teething troubles - as most reactors do. No 4 had a better sustained-output-record than any British reactor. Had it not been abused No 4 would still be working.

Fall Out Zones: November 1989
  
The BBC Panorama program visited some of the contaminated area’s around Chernobyl. In a town called Narodici, reporter Jane Corbin spoke to a District Nurse. The nurse was obviously angry and upset when she told Corbin.  "All our children have enlarged thyroids. What are we supposed to do now? Wait for every second child to die of cancer?"

February 1990

BBC reporter Bill Turnbull reported from Narodici for the Nine O’clock News. He found 'a gathering of young mothers crying with despair. They were waiting for a Faith Healer. They had given up on the doctors.' Doctors had run out of drugs to treat their dying children. The nurse's words were coming horribly true. Narodici, 40 miles South of Chernobyl, has since become a Nuclear Ghost Town. The fall-out poisoned 8,000 square miles. Countless farms in Western Russia, Northern Ukraine and Byelorussia, are now surrounded by concrete-posted razor-wire-fences and Fatal Radiation Keep Out signs.

April 1991

Horizon (BBC2) and This Week (ITN) visited the wrecked reactor at Chernobyl Power Station. Both filmed the remains of the reactor hall, and confirmed 134 tons of the original 204 tons of fuel has now solidified, like lava from a volcano, in the ruins. The massive explosion that tossed the two-thousand-ton reactor lid up onto the rim; also, blasted the two-thousand-ton reactor base downwards; allowing tons of the melting fuel to leak into the foundations. This slight separation of the melting mass of fuel reduced the temperature and with it the possibility of a nuclear explosion. Both programs made the point. Chernobyl could have been much, much, worse. 

March 1979

The mechanical fault at  Three Mile Island  was actually more terrifying than Chernobyl. Four independent inquiry’s into the mechanical failure at Three Mile Island (President Carter’s Special Commission. Babcock, who built the reactor., Edison Power., who owned the reactor., and the US Dept. Of Environment) illustrate how Unit No 2 came very close to a nuclear explosion. Nuclear poison would have wiped-out Pennsylvania. Plans to build forty new nuclear stations across the US were thrown in the bin where they belong.
In 2001 the Queen's cousin, a criminal lunatic called George W. Bush, became "president" of America and started allocating Billions of taxpayers money to a revival of the insane nuclear waste making industry. The Queen is hell bent on following cousin George's lead.

August 2009

Former head of the Green Party Sir Jonathan Porritt is stepping down as Chairman of the Government’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). Porrit has finally realised Her Majesties Government is hell bent on building ten more Chernobyl's. Her Majesty will not tolerate losing her oil, gas and nuclear profits in favour of giving the bloody peasants cheap electricity. Porritt says. 'We had eight years of prevarication when we could have been deploying renewable energy... Little more than a year ago, nuclear companies were telling the media nuclear reactors would not require public subsidies. Now, they are all in there asking for billions of public money.'

23 October 2009

SELLAFIELD has been hit by another plant failure. Evaporator B known as Bravo and which treats highly radioactive liquor has failed for the second time in six months due to coil corrosion.
Thorp is in a seven month planned shutdown and Magnox reprocessing had already closed for routine engineering not long before the latest failure.
Magnox reprocessing is due to re-start before the end of the year by which time Evaporator A known as Alpha will be brought back into service to treat the arising radioactive liquid effluent.
This evaporator has been undergoing a safety upgrade to its equipment at a cost.
It is expected to cost around £500,000 to repair the corroded coil in Evaporator Bravo.
First published Friday, 23 October 2009
Published by http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk
also see Finnish Folly: November 2009 http://www.olkiluoto.info/en/30/3/166/


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