TMI was nothing. And it represents exactly why Chernobyl cannot occur here. In fact there are very few RMBK reactors (Early Soviet) operating today, and mostly in former Soviet Satelites. Actually, that's something I should look into. Those reactors SHOULD have come to the end of their useful life cycle.

Awesome story though. Been poking through it, the pictures are great. Just saw a thing on the TV today about them working in the tomb built around it, the workers going in for 15 minutes at a time in shifts to patch up the holes and fill cracks. The news anchor held up a geiger counter, and it was showing something like 300+rem standing outside the plant. And it was still rising then they took the focus off of it. That's probably one of the worst sounds to hear...the clicks of a geiger counter.

Edit: I assumed rem was the standard measure for geiger counters, but it may not be. So its 300+ units and increasing. It may be what SHE is measuring.

 

Right. If anything, we should look at TMI as a success story -- everything was/is contained.

 

I remember seeing that site, "Kid(k) Of Speed", a few years back.

I have a buddy who's from Odessa, Ukraine who "had" friends that "volunteered" for cleanup duty around Chernobyl.

They're gone.

 

If memory serves me right, standard unit for measuring radiation is millirem- 1/1000 of a rem. Standard might even go as low as 1/10000 of a rem. Whatever it is, if you see 1 rem on a geiger, you're toast. There was a story awhile back about a guy in Japan who was transferring fuel rods into containment structures, and you can only do it 1 by 1 because of the intense heat they put out. Well, he was getting towards the end and decided it was taking too long, so he was gonna load 2 at a time, no problem right? Resulted in a steam explosion and he was exposed to something like 1000 rem. Was dead within the hour.

As far as TMI/Chernobyl goes, TMI has a containment structure. Actually, TMI has about 3 containment structures, each housing the lower ones. Chernobyl had no containment, so when they blew the reactor, it was directly released to the environment. THEN they decided they should build one...little too late.

 

Exactly, hence my statement that Chernobyl cannot happen here or in any "Western-designed" reactor. Actually that's one of many reasons it cannot. I don't even know where to begin looking to see if all of the old RMBK (Chernobyl) style reactors have been decommissioned. I could only assume. And Hope.

I don't know what the reading was ove. All I know was that it was in the 300's and still going up when they flipped the camera off of it. I know I would love to be able to go and visit the area. It'd be worth it. Especially the remains of the plant. I've always wondered what they will actually do. They have to get it sealed up from underneath as well, or else they're gonna REALLY have a problem with leaching and such someday. I was surprised nobody said anything about it yesterday or today in school though.

 

She has some interesting videos on her website.

http://elenafilatova.com/

 

Wikipedia has a pretty good writeup on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

This is pretty scary, in regards to leaching:

 

Yeah, I've read about those situations as well. The "Elephant's foot" is what is most worrying. (For those that don't know) When the core blew its top off, the graphite moderation material inside combusted almost instantly upon exposure to O2 (High Temperature C + O2 = boom). This caused an even sharper rise in temperature which caused many fuel rods to burst open, spilling fissionable material to the bottom of the reactor core where it could not be cooled properly, causing a chain reaction. Apparently this material melted down through the bottom of the core and eventually solidified into a glassy lava-like formation known as the "elephants foot." (http://chernobyl.in.ua/im/sarcophagu...nts%20foot.jpg)

So you've got water leaking in through the top, getting down there to this mass of what is literally reactor-grade fuel sitting down there. To my knowledge, its still producing heat, as well.

Btw, on Wikipedia it stated that 13 RMBK reactors were built, with 4 being decomissioned in Chernobyl, and 1 decomissioned in Lithuania with another being scheduled for 2009. So, that means there are still 8 operating today. Kind of worries me based upon the part of the world that these are in, the corruption that is there, and their age. Of course, they've taken safety steps to rectify this issue.