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Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl
- mirimir 9y agoIn states near the Nevada test site, senior government officials evacuated before test series, with their families. And Kodak was notified in advance, so they could avoid using fallout-contaminated paper to interleave with their X-ray film.
- windlep 9y agoWhat's even creepier is that the main reason Kodak was notified is because they were able to determine when the testing was occurring based on their manufacturing defects (and it meant they lost a lot of product to sell). They sued to stop the US Govt but got an agreement to know the testing schedule so they wouldn't produce film on those days. The article mentioning this was on HN awhile back, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-kodak-accidentally-discovered-radioactive-fallout/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a21382/how-ko...
- mirimir 9y agoRight. And there was no publicity about potential health impacts. Also, results of fallout deposition tests were kept secret for decades. And even after they became public, health impacts, mostly hypothyroidism and thyroid cancer, were bullshitted away. Because they're readily treatable. So there was no need to alarm people.
- Glauc 9y agoWhile interesting, what does chernobyl have to do with nuclear weapons testing?
- mirimir 9y agoThe common thread is governments lying to their people about radiation releases.
- valuearb 9y agohttps://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- archagon 9y agoAny chance there's a Russian version of this somewhere?
- acidburnNSA 9y agoNot what your asking for but these are stories from the same event in Russian: https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl/memories_ru.html https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl/memories_ru.html
- vkb 9y agoEditor here. These were originally written in English, so we have plans to translate to Russian, which might take a while since we only have one fully-qualified translator. Help is welcome! Shoot me an email (included in my profile).
- doug1001 9y agothe OP is a sequence of brief (100 - 500 words) (skillfully edited & translated) vignettes from people who have first-hand memory of the events related to the Chernobyl disaster. i clicked and began reading the first one; two hours later and i just read the last one. The editor (who compiled, edited and translated these brief accounts) did a remarkable job, but stories themselves are extraordinary and compelling--many deeply sad; many of them provide revealing snapshots of the former USSR. here's a portion of one from a radiation scientist working in Kiev at the time: > Both sides of it were lined up with buses. Dozens upon dozens of them, parked bumper to bumper. People were streaming out of them endlessly. Most wore house coats, pajamas, tapochki (slippers),…. Very few passengers had as much as a purse on them....it was almost silent. The trolley had to stop and I walked all the way to the institute mingling with these unusual and unwilling passengers. They were evacuees from Pripyat. Their destination was that same facility I was heading to. Reason: decontamination. It was only one place that can handle it en-masse. I remember marching with them in a very solemn procession. Not like a funeral one, rather a trip to a “then what?” destination. People talked in hush tones, kids didn’t jump and yell, even infants were uncharacteristically quiet.” i'm from southeastern Belarus (Gomel region) but at the time attending Lyceum ("science high school") in Moscow. Like many students, i listened to Voice of America on the radio late in the evenings; at 0800 the next morning, i went to the Lyceum authorities and requested immediate leave to visit my family. The response was not a disposition notice ("approve"/"denied") but an urgent request to meet in an administrator's office. When i was led into her office, she spoke to me in an uncharacteristically gentle voice and told me i should not go in sum because there is absolutely nothing i could do to help my family and because to do so would likely irreparable damage my health. i asked her what she would do if she were in my place. She signed my request, then after a 14-hour wait in the queue at the train station, and a 17-hour journey by train, i was home.
- rasz 9y agoMaybe in contrast Polish authorities decided to go against our USSR occupation masters(first time in whole Warsaw pact?) and distributed stable iodine to 18 million people just 4 days after the accident. There is even a documentary about it called 'Chernobyl. Four Days in April' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1904869 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1904869 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0pG3TPxeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0pG3TPxeM https://www.cda.pl/video/6949094e?wersja=720p https://www.cda.pl/video/6949094e?wersja=720p sadly no english subtitles.
- steevenwee 9y agoThere's a good lesson to be learned. http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/ http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/
- rdtsc 9y agoRemember watching the evening news with my dad when they finally announced it publicly. They completely downplayed it. In came in as "Oh by the way, an accident at ChAES happened, next up - sports...". Here I found the 20 seconds blurb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouJjaV_NbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouJjaV_NbY (sorry in Russian, obviously). My dad, a mechanical engineer, also specializing in workplace safety was really concerned and told me. "This is bad. They are probably downplaying the accident who knows who horrible it really is...". The fact that people knew government lied routinely in cases like that, nobody believed them so all kinds of rumors started to circulate. My mom kept some flowers on the balcony. She claimed they died that year because of the radiation. I don't really believe that was the cause, but it just explains the anxiety and worry people experienced. Then there was a call to go help clean up. They promised money, even better apartments for volunteers (housing was government provided). Some went and they came back to a new apartment but they didn't enjoy it for too long. Others told stories of people burned so badly by the radiation their skin and meat was falling off their bones. Another really sad thing happened when evacuees started streaming to different cities. They were shunned and treated horribly by others. It was paranoia, prejudices and mistrust. Mixed with lots of irrational fear ("Maybe they are still radioactive, I wouldn't get near them". I can remember my uncle saying...). How horrible. Those poor people had to leave everything behind only to be faced by that kind of attitude.
- AnonNo15 9y agoTo be fair, the lady from TV announcement said that one of the reactors is damaged, which is a really bad thing for nuclear power plant.
- desdiv 9y agoI think OP's point was that a 20 second blurb, no matter how truthful or accurate, is downplaying the situation. If an analogous event happened in the US, all entertainment programming would be suspended and there would be continuous news coverage on all the major channels for several days, just like after 9/11.
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- kodfodrasz 9y agoThe interviews are interesting. I was a kid those days, and my mother keeps telling me that diary products were suddenly put on a sale (before the news release). I live in Eastern-Europe, in the former Warsaw Pact bloc. My father worked in a research institute, so managed to get a hold of the information before the official announcements. He told her not to buy any diary or vegetable for a while. ---- What troubles me is the contant flow on anti-nuclear-power propaganda to HN. If we accept the fact of global warming, and humanity as its cause, then the fearmongering about nuclear power should stop, as it is a necessary component in reducing CO2 emissions while not giving up too much from our lifestyle. With the lessons learned from the nuclear accidents we have every measure to avoid them in the future, until the fusion technology is ready, and to have reliable, zero-emission power in our energy mix.
- tbrownaw 9y agoProblem is, that wouldn't satisfy the "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills" narrative that underlays much of the activism around climate policy and other environmentalist causes. The solution always has to be fewer humans and less human activity, with the possible exception of temporary "sorry, we were never here" cleanup efforts.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoA movement is composed of people, and those people can be reasoned with individually. If we reason with enough of them, the narrative changes.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe tricky thing is separating those people from their support groups long enough for the reasoning to stick. Otherwise, all the effort only gets wasted on trying to overcome people's need of belonging to a group.
- justicezyx 9y agoChina did managed population growth, guess what happened, no one is happy. I doubt human can overcome their own nature to step ahead and regulate population effectively.
- acidburnNSA 9y agoI got a similar set of stories from a friend who's parents were nearby. She translated them here: https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl/memories.html https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl/memories.html
- jnsaff2 9y agoI was five in Estonia when it happened. I remember: - being told not to keep water in my cup anymore in kindergarten. - dad going to grandparents farm for a few weeks (to hide from mobilisation into cleanup crew). - a few frames of TV news about the helicopters flying over the reactor (tho this memory could be from years later).
- bitL 9y agoThis really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dust effects you can wash away with inhaled/ingested particles that get incorporated to bones and tissues with grim long-term effects. Comparing to Japan, even USSR behaved in some way more responsibly as they threw a couple of million people at the problem at the cost of waging a war just to clean up what they could. All we got from Japan was there is no issue, TEPCO saying all is fine and then suddenly a big hole in the reactor where all robots stop functioning and who knows how much water continuously being contaminated for a few years already. All because panic is the bigger evil (is it? or just the "fat cats" decided it is?)
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWell, now that the dust settled, it turned out they were perfectly right, and pretty much all the damage to lives and the region was caused by panic and evacuation.
- anon182429 9y agoYes except for all the radioactive groundwater, total loss of fuel as it melted through the containment vessel into the ground as discovered by the robots they sent to investigate causing potentially unknown damage, and by the TEPCO's own admission, will take 40 years to clean up with technology that hasn't been invented yet. Besides that, everything is a-okay.
- bitL 9y agoAnd that's why there is a permanent exclusion zone no one is allowed to enter and the videos posted on YouTube by Japanese themselves showing significantly raised background radiations on certain spots in Tokyo were produced by irresponsible people using uncalibrated unapproved instruments, right? Or reports of metallic taste after first rains since meltdowns etc. It was just a show produced by Hollywood spread by fake news, right?
- cel1ne 9y agoChernobyl is the earliest memory I recall. I was less than 1y old, but I can remember staring through the window into the garden not comprehending why I was not allowed to be outside like usual and everyone being in a strange mood.
- choult 9y agoI visited Chernobyl and Pripyat about four years ago; it was a rather sobering experience. If anyone is interested, my unedited photos can be found here: https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5878479734452453425 https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5... https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5883312026173839569 https://plus.google.com/photos/115800995007308025308/album/5...
- cr0sh 9y agoI find these pictures fascinating! Would you be willing to share the albums as zip files or such for downloading? Strangely, google photo albums don't seem to have a method to download the complete album for public albums (there is supposed to be a way to do it for your own albums, though - but that doesn't apply here - though if you were willing to create a download file of the albums, you could download them that way to your google drive, then share the drive files publicly). Regardless - thank you for sharing these!
- lkramer 9y agoIf anyone enjoyed this, I can recommend Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (who won the Nobel a few years ago). It's basically the same thing, but more and more in depth. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0312425848/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0312425848&linkCode=as2&tag=fub07-21&linkId=7eabcc13573fabd9282bcfd5ad48917a https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0312425848/ref=as_li_tl?...
- ageofwant 9y ago> The biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history. I stopped reading right there. Now I expected to reach exasperation somewhere in the article, but not at the second sentence. Chernobyl is a wildlife haven, it shelters a sea of fauna and flora that would otherwise have been the typical suburban death zone of humans, cat and dogs and nothing else. The biggest man made disaster has been committed and is being committed as we speak. Billions of tons of CO2 is pumped into the ocean and into the air right this minute. The Chernobyl accident affected a few hundred square kilometers maybe killed 5000 people. Air pollution kills 700 000 people a year. Please stop propagating this bloody bullshit.
- GhostVII 9y agoDisasters usually refer to isolated, unexpected, incidents. Air pollution is not a disaster.
- xattt 9y agoA family member almost became a liquidator when he was told about a possible way of emigrating from the Soviet Union to Europe as a graduate student. He was told that he'd just have to do some work in Ukraine in between for a month or two. You wonder how many other liquidators were tricked into doing the job.
- tomohawk 9y ago“Everyone who thinks the EPA is not necessary and the regulations on power plants are there to stifle growth and profit should read every comment here… ”— Ilya K. Didn't this catastrophe happen in a communist country with the government in complete control of all aspects? The presence of a government agency regulating the activity is not like some magic amulet that will prevent bad things from occurring. The EPA has caused its own share of disasters, such as the MBTE fiasco.
- unlmtd 9y ago> the biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history No, that would be Fukushima.
- matwood 9y agoGreat documentary about Chernobyl can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezohqY-vg4s&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezohqY-vg4s&feature=player_e... It touches on all aspects of the accident and cleanup. There are a lot of good interviews and actual footage from the event. The most amazing/sad part to me were the men who did the clean up in 30 second - 1 minute shifts.
- bolololo12 9y agoSome people who post comments didn't read the article - thousands of people dying of cancer, children loosing hair, etc. It wasn't just 36 people, it's couple million tragedies, as their families were affected, themselves, children because of the lies of the communists
- jjt-yn_t 9y agoHmmm... in small a subset MORE prone to tornadoes in one of the of tornado alley states, pre-evacuate [cash for keys] 200 mile radius THEN build a test nuclear reactor UNDERGROUND, with the missing 'two days on 4 days off, nuclear of course' less-tired operators scheduling, etc etc. More upfront costs but seemingly no multi-century accident to mitigate, vs multi-decade, if that...
- cr0sh 9y agoI found the comment about "intelligentsia"-phobia interesting; it echos the conservatives slurring of education and "elitists"...