Reply to Chernobyl on HBO

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As horrible as this incident is, I hope rehashing it in this miniseries is not bad PR for nuclear power.  A lot went wrong in this situation, and a lot has changed since then.  [/quote]

Really? This is your concern? There are, perhaps, millions of individuals dealing with radiation-induced cancers and birth defects related to the Chernobyl disaster. And that's just one incident.

I really hope that nuclear power does not spread. We have other options. I'll take tar sand oil before more nuclear power.[/quote]

Then you really know nothing.  [/quote]

Educate me.

PS - do you work at one of these "public affairs" groups that are trying to shape the narrative online about this mini-series?[/quote]

My spouse is a former nuclear engineer.  I certainly don't understand nuclear power to the depths that he does, but he's been blathering on endlessly about the Chernobyl miniseries, so I pick up a thing here and there.

The type of reactor built for Chernobyl has never been built outside of the USSR.  A Chernobyl type incident couldn't be replicated in the US because we simply don't have reactors like that.  The physics are different.

There's never been a death in 50 years of the US using nuclear power.  There's been three historic incidents in all that time.  The horrible one, Chernobyl. The one where there was some containment leakage and the lasting impact is unknown, Fukushima. And three mile island, where it was completely contained and no one was injured.

The space it takes to run a nuclear power plant is incredibly small compared to the power generated.

Most of the waste is recyclable. The small amount that isn't recyclable is exactly that....small.

It's cheap, low impact to the environment, safe, and doesn't use land which could best be used for other purposes.  I'll never convince people of all that, of course.  Some people are still afraid of air travel, and the incidents of accidents are historically low...but that's not on the news.        [/quote]

NP.  Out of curiosity, is the one you didn’t name the one that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1960s or 1970s that they suppressed information about?  I think it was maybe near Tomsk but I could be wrong. I lived in the Soviet Union for a short time  and knew someone who lived there as a child.  He said all the kids in his school got really sick and the government told them all not to worry.  His mother pulled a lot of strings to get his family moved out of town. [/quote]

PP here.  I realized I was talking a little out of my behind, so I went back and look up some more incidents.  There's an international scale of nuclear events where things are ranked from 1-7 with 7 being the worst. There's been two 7s..Fukushima and Chernobyl.  Three Mile Island was a 5.  The one 6 was the Kyshtym disaster at Mayak Chemical Combine in the Soviet Union in 1957.  I've never heard of that one; maybe that's what you're referring to?  [/quote]

Yes, that's it.  It's been so many years, I was totally not counting right about how old my acquaintance was.  He was in his 40s in the early 90's, so that's exactly the right timing. He was a little boy.  Oddly, he said his mother treated him with betacarotine -- so much that his skin turned orange and kids made fun of him for it.  I've always wondered if there was something to that, or if it other precautions she took that allowed him to be healthy into his 40's.  Of course, he may also have dropped dead by 1995, for all i know.  I hope not because he was a really nice guy.

I knew someone else that was in tomsk when there was another, smaller nuclear accident in 1993 at a nearby nuclear faciilty.  That one was reported in the press. He said people were passing around an iodine bottle and a vodka bottle, advising a chug from each (or maybe a bunch of chugs from the vodka bottle) as a preventive.[/quote]

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