I’ve read all about the Chernobyl disaster, and have seen various pictures, but this is the first time I’ve seen actual footage filmed from ground zero so soon after the disaster. Filmed by Vladimir Shevchenko, Severe Days features soundless footage of the first days during the disaster, when the liquidators and “biorobots” were attempting to stabilize the reactor’s foundation and clean up the radioactive graphite. It’s pretty stark stuff, seeing all of these people working at the site with little or no protection against radiation in the tens to thousands of roentgens that they weren’t even made aware of, not knowing that most if not all of them would be dead within weeks. Vladimir himself died weeks after making this footage, having gotten a lethal dose when he filmed atop the roof where the graphite cleanup was currently taking place. He had no protection at all.
YouTube is very slow for me now, and I’ve only seen about two minutes’ worth so far.
It is eerie to see the faces of men who likely suffered a miserable death not long after this was shot–like watching ghosts. I also find it so hopelessly, disastrously naive (or just uninformed by those who sent them) to see them walking around in masks, as though that would protect them.
Chilling. Such heroism. And so sad.
Oh my God… those poor men. My skin crawled watching them slog through all that dust, etc.
I feel sick.
Those men died horribly because their government was too scared and stupid to ask for help.
Seeing the masks was the first thing that made me shake my head – going in as though trying to protect themselves against pathogens, either totally unaware of the true danger or not understanding that radiation doesn’t work that way. Seeing people working without protection right around the cauldron is chilling. Their very skin must have been prickling. shudder
Oh, so sad. Those poor people.
Could someone more familiar with the layout of Chernobyl give me an idea of what I’m looking at in certain spots? I mean, I understand it’s bad to be that close, but I don’t know enough about the layout of nuclear plants or Chernobyl to understand some of the shots.
…these men’s bravery was in vain-far from helping things, these guys made it worse (shoveling debris off the roof). Not only did they die horrible deaths, but they made things worse. They had no protection, and no treatments were available for them.
A totally sick ,stupid waste of human life!
That film was both eerie and sad.
I well remember the whole debacle and it was so sad that the government over there basically handed out death sentences.
I am not overly familiar with Chernobyl, but having done plant refits in the US I can give you a rough idea.
Randiation is bad for living organisms, but very useful in generating heat. We need to find some way of turning heat into electricity.
You see the crater that was the reactor containment?
You put the reactor in a building that is heavily built to keep any radiation inside, and you have a system of pipes and coolant tanks called the primary coolant system. It was a RBMK system, running light water [they were skimming off the heavy water and selling it] This primary coolant circulated into contact with the secondary coolant system that was also water. This water produced steam to spin the turbines that actually made the electricity.
The main problem was that the plant was shut down [production wise, they were actually running a test.] and they caused a condition where there were bubbles of air in teh coolant system, letting the reactor [more or less] run hot. This caused a steam explosion, the graphite rods caught fire and the whole place more or less turned into a science project steam volcano hosing radioactives around the area.
In the youtube clip there was a scene of him standing on top of a building looking sort of down [iirc just before the poor helicopter crashed] that was the reactor containment about 10-14 days after the accident. The fires had been put out, and the russians had been dumping sand and other dry chemicals in an effort to control the whole problem so it is sort of difficult to see many details. THe biorobots moving the graphite rods by hand? they maybe had a lifespan of a few hours once they started carrying the rods. The poor reclamation brigade had a lifespan of a few days to weeks, depending on ther jobs. Tee poor miners had a lifespan of days. Changes in the blood start at 10 hours of exposure at that level, after 40 hours you just need to tell them where to ship your body and pick out the lead lined coffin you want it shipped in.
Now, most times you are reasonably safe working in nuke plants, at least in the US. THere are a serious amount of safety regulations in place, and you have to train for about a week before badging in to work [or at least back in the late 80s when i was a rad whore] and it can be seriously cool the first time you see thecherenkov radiation So far, I have never suffered any adverse issues from my working in teh field, but you can be sure that I was incredibly careful working safely!
aruvqan thank you, that is very helpful!
Perhaps you could also answer this - the text at the top says the biorobotss bodies would begin to “fall to pieces” after forty minutes. What, exactly, would have happened after such a short period of time?
Well this [not graphic, just word descriptions] in general.
Graphic yuckiness Hiroshim is a bit different, but scroll down to #16 for the subcue hemmoraging and cataract effects, and on this page the poor man just wanted to stay warm and used a discarded spent fuel cannister to do so.
I would say that ‘fall to pieces’ is not entirely correct, though obviously from the text the person providing it is russian, and english is probably not his first language. Idioms can be odd sorts of things, and when we say ‘fall to pieces’ it may not mean the exact thing he[or she] meant but they picked it out as sounding close to the original russian idiom. I would say that vomiting and shitting blood, stomach and intestinal lining and having ones hair fall out can count as falling to pieces though. I can say that it is pretty safe to say that every person that you saw on that footage had their hair fall out, had cataracts and subcutaneous bleeding like in the japanese picture, and died vomiting and shitting out pieces of themselves. On the other hand, they were also probably so tranked on morphine the doctors gave them they may have died of respiratory failure before the worst could happen. I would personally hope that someone would take pity on me and euthanize me if I was hit that badly.
So the Soviet authorities basically knew that all the men would die without proper protection, and sent them in anyway?
What about these guys? Were those type of protective suits used after the first wave of guys had all died and they realized that the men had to be adequately equipped?
I watched a BBC documentary from 1996 yesterday that shocked the crap out of me when it said 5,000 people were still working at the other, non-asploded reactors. Are you fucking serious?? The end of the documentary discussed the conundrum the Ukraine was in…it desperately needed the power provided by Chernobyl reactors, but of course there was also the nearly universal WTF?!? SHUT IT DOWN!-reaction they were getting from Europe and much of the rest of the world. Their response was described as in effect being, “Sure. But you pay the $4 billion it’s going to cost us to shut it down and then come up with another energy source.”
I checked Wikipedia, and stunningly, Chernobyl wasn’t entirely shut down until 2000. I can’t believe they kept it up and running that long. I can’t believe they didn’t need to replace workers on a weekly basis. Eeeeeeeep.
Yes and no.
keep in mind that for the most part [speaking from US experience, I no almost nothing about the soviet nuclear program and policies] our exposure [heh] to nuclear illness came primarily from 2 places. Hiroshima and industrial accidents during the manhattan project and other industrial incidents. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were good for bombs, but the industrial accidents [and the bombings for that matter] were nothing like what happened exposurewise at Chernobyl. Anti-Cs like in that picture are not really protective against ionizing radiation There are 4 types. Alpha, beta, gamma and xray.
Alpha can be stopped with paper. Literally. beta can be stopped with sunglasses, or tinfoil, or water or lead lined undies=) Gamma needs a lot more to protect, and xrays can be stopped with a layer of metal. I am really not a physicist, so I really don’t know they whys at all.
That type of hazmat suit isnt really good for chernoble unless it is lined with a significant amount of lead. Remember the narrator saying that the minister had been protected with about 30 pounds of lead and he still died? Reat the wiki on it, it is pretty good.
I can personally attest to them being very uncomfortable. Being female, I wore a bathing suit under mine, but in an all guy work crew tehy are worn with underwear. You dress in them and slog to where you are working, then do a very CAREFUL strip trease out of them so that you never come in contact with the outside of them at all, nor do you step with bare feet where the suit has touched down… sort of a twister between where you are in a tape box onto a ‘stepoff’ pad, a safe area to stand.
This film is horrifying in so many ways. It’s like viewing a nightmare. Even words used to describe people, “biorobots”, are sickening. Does there exist a more depraved ideology than communism?
aruvqan Thank you again!
NP =)
rad worker is an odd sort of profession =) and IIRC when I was working [i was technically working as a valve mechanic but i worked on pumps, filtration units, hell I even painted now and then. When you work 13 12hour shifts for 1 2 or 3 months they work you hard as they *need* to get the refit done and the plant recertifiedd and back online] there were maybe 20 women tops working as mechanics and another probably 50 as health physics techs in an industry of a few thousand people. The industry changed a lot since I was in, instead of us being independent contractors working for a company like Henze Movats or Firmanite on a contract by contract basis now they prefer keeping the same people so it isnt as nomadic=)
[frex I made mad cash one shutdown taking my $65 taxfree per diem and living in a campground for $10 a night instead of a hotel or short term apartment=). the KOA kamping kabins in Barium Springs rock!]
Communism isn’t depraved. Communism through the filter of humans interpreting it for their own ends can be depraved. There were just as many normal and nice people under communism as here in the US, or over in Britain, or in Japan. When the few in power at the top are self serving, and upon occasion mentally ill [I have no other way to describe Iron Felix] then you have depravity.
As far as it goes, they were sacrificing people for the greater good of the people, the mechanical robots of the time were incapable of performing any of the tasks the people could perform. The most robots of that period were sent to Chernobyl - they wiped out in under 45 seconds from the radiation affecting the electronics. They were the top of the line tech from the US. Not a single person in that film survived, An entire brigade died. The CO of the brigade [who was an engineer and fully understood he was going to die] stayed with his men. Even though he didnt physically work in the containment area [he remained at the admin area] and saw his men die fast. He took about a year and a half to die. Granted they were conscripted and not volunteer, but I could say that without a doubt that in the US you could find a brigade of people willing to die in the same situation. Hell, I would have volunteered. I know mrAru and the previous mrAru would have as well. Most of the people I worked with would have gone.
The primary plume caused significant contamination in Iceland, Scotland, Britain, Greenland and the continental US. The sub Rob was based on at the time was in Groton, CT and the rad techs were pulling air samples as a routine out side the boat and got solid readings. The boats in Faslane Scotland had to decontaminate the outside of the sub to meet US safety standards.
I was in Holland when Chernobyl blew up-and the Dutch were scare shitless. All green vegetables were thrown out-and people were told NOT to drink fresh milk . In Sweden, thousands of reindeer were slaughtered and buried in pits. The Russians didn’t say ANYTHING for 10 days! The only reason we knew was that workers at a Swdish nuclear plant had heir radiotion monitors pegged at the limit (fallout). ill the Chernobyl area ever be habitable again?