Re: OT - TV Mini Series HBO Chernobyl

Ah I see.

Its a bit like when the cordless drill breaks and I want to know how much a replacement costs. I ask my son who is in the pub, just down the road from Screwfix, he estimates 2-4 million quid.

We later realised this was an over estimate but an understandable mistake as no one had looked in the catalogue at the time.

Do you have a source for just who believed such nonsense at the time? It seems quite bizarre for anyone who grew up in the cold war let alone for a physicist.

Of course what they mean by 'nuclear explosion' is not what is commonly meant by 'nucler explosion'

I was not questioning the risk of a further explosion which would have spread additional radioactive material. I was questioning the claims about Minsk being razed and Europe rendered uninhabitable. On that all I see in the article is:

"By most estimates, such a blast may have wiped out half of Europe, leaving it riskier to live in for 500,000 years."

With no clue as to whose estimates the author considered forgive me for dismissing that as a "source", let alone one which supports a 320lm blast radius.

Returning to the original claim by Nesterenko, if the estimate was (as you indicated) what was thought /at the time/ it is odd that it has been repeatedly cited since around 2005 by people opposed to nuclear power as if it were his then /current/ view. Eg it appeared in the documentary in 2005 "Tchernobyl; la vie contaminée, vivre avec Tchernobyl".

It may be he was misreported. If not, I am sorry but I consider the professor at best mistaken.

And the source is a writer who'd written a "disaster" book.

What they certainly had was a flooded basement. What there *isn't* is a "tank of reactor coolant".

See above. They had certainly tripped Reactor 3 well before this stage, I'm not sure how long they kept Reactor 1 and 2 on load.

They use the weasel term "thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions" because it sounds dramatic. In the trade we'd normally say "prompt critical" (perhaps to avoid sounding dramatic). According to Wiki there have been at least 60 criticality accidents dating back to the 40's, a third in process environments and two thirds in reactors or test assemblies.

What has any of that to do with a power station accident?

Power stations are not nuclear bombs.

And guess what. No especial steps were taken at Nagasaki or Hiroshima to clean up and people have lived there with no remarkable rise in cancers ever since.

The extraordinary thing that emerged out of chernobyl is that apart from locals getting thyroid cancer from raqpidly decaying I 131, and firefighters dying within days, No one else got cancers. Not then and not in the years since.

The death rate was very very low for what has to be the worst possible scenario for a nuclear fission reactor, ever.

By the way IIRC the 'tsar bomba' - 50 Mt - destroyed everything in a 60 mile radius.

"All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 km (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometres from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, doors and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 km (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 km (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken for distances up to 900 kilometres (560 mi).[30] Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5?5.25.[13][25] Sensors continued to identify the shockwaves after their third trip around the world"

- Wiki