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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was scheduled to go on a trip to the Soviet Union two weeks after the Chernobyl accident.  We were supposed to go to Kiev for a few days but that got rescheduled and we spent those days in Vladimir and Suzdal.  I remember our American guides talking about how they figured that most produce in the USSR came from nearby farms so that it was probably okay to eat it in Moscow and Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) but I noticed that our guide wasn't eating butter on her bread or ice cream. I figured I shouldn't eat it either but it's hard to be in the Soviet Union and not eat ice cream!

Also there was a famous picture of the destroyed reactor vessel in Pravda, the official newspaper - which was shocking at the time because the Soviet government was basically admitting that there was a problem.  I think it was also considered a sign of the coming of glasnoct (but I may be remembering that wrong - 86 seems too early for that).

Anyway, I'll never forget our Soviet guide standing in the front of the bus and showing us that picture in Pravda. I think she was trying to show that maybe the government wasn't as closed off as it seemed (and as it was in reality).  [/quote]

I am the PP from Minsk. I don't know if this is true, but the prevailing opinion at the time was that the radiation went west, was detected outside the country, and the news were announced over Voice of America, and the USSR couldn't keep it silent. But certainly, there was no stomach at the time for the kind of scary government actions that took place in the 1930s or even 1950s. But until then, they didn't bother telling anyone and the news didn't travel that quickly. These days, with cell phones and social media, things would be completely different, though the rumors would still be a huge problem, I'm sure there'd be a lot of conflicting information going around.[/quote]

Hi, I am also from Minsk.   The way we found out - our neighbor worked in Borovlyany, there was some (research?) facility there.  Bottom line, they had the equipment to measure radiation, and they picked it up.   They first got worried that something happened at the facility, then they got worried even more when they realized that whatever happened did not happen in a close vicinity, and yet it was enough to set off their equipment, so must be something major.   But of course the May 1 festivities went on - I don’t think there even was an announcement before that.   [/quote]

Is that how it got out to the international community as well- a facility in Sweden picked up the radiation levels?  Craziness.[/quote]

Nuclear plants check everyone who comes into the plant for radiation.  That way, they know everyone comes in "clean," and any radiation they pick up on their monitors in the plant must come from inside.  I visited the plant in Sweden that picked up on the Chernobyl radiation, and as we were being monitored on the way in, they mentioned that this was how the west found out about Chernobyl. The workers coming into the plant were setting off alarms.  This is also how it was discovered that basements in the northeast U.S. sometimes have radon issues.  Workers coming into nuclear plants in Pennsylvania were setting off radiation alarms.

I'm not all the way through the show, but one thing that hasn't been emphasized is the fact that the Russian reactors effectively had no containment vessels around the reactors (they were basically an aluminum shed).  In addition to a completely different reactor design, U.S. reactors have massive reinforced concrete containment vessels that surround the reactors.  The work that has been done there since the accident has been to build containment structure(s) that a U.S. reactor already has. [/quote]

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