Oh bull. Wherever there’s communism, there’s untold suffering. Present day communists trying to distance themselves from the likes of the Soviet Union has to be the greatest exercise in backtracking ever. Communists throughout the 40’, 50’s and 60’s were only too eager to associate themselves with the likes of the USSR (look at the Cambridge spy ring, for instance - highly educated men willing to give secrets to the Russians), and now, when the horrors of mass starvation, GULAGs and purges cannot be brushed off as Western propaganda quite so easily, they’re desperately trying to distance themselves from it.
If every attempt at employing communism has resulted in disaster, then shouldn’t that imply something about communism itself?
The two situations aren’t even remotely analogous. The USSR used conscripted men, with no idea of what they were getting in to. Even in the film it states that the cameraman was allowed right next to the reactor without any protective clothing - do you seriously think this would have been allowed in the UK or America, for instance?
You’re talking about American volunteers, who likely would know exactly what it is that they’re getting themselves in to, likely briefed on the dangers beforehand, especially if they were radiation workers, such as yourself.
aruvqan, I’m sure you had no intention of coming across this way but I found your post kind of sexy, actually. Women who do dangerous jobs appeal to me, I guess. Sorry if I’m coming off like a creep! I just had to say it.
How many americans of the time would actually understand the real dangers of chernobyl? What do you know about the nuclear power industry and radioactive materials that you didnt get out of the newspapers and magazines? Do you even realize the radiation dose you get from common household items? Did you know that granite has 10-20 ppm of uranium and you can get an infinitesimal dose hanging out in Grand Central Station waiting for your train? You get 4 mSv from our favorite SDMB procedure - a lower GI radiographic dye image. you get about .1 mSv sleeping next to another human for a year. We got fed a steady diet of nuclear horror stories by the media and people more interested in their agendas rather than truth [that nuke power is actually pretty safe.] Near as I can tell, soviet media never fed into the horror stories about how unsafe nuke power was.
And again I reiterate, the common Ivan iin the street is just like you and me. The problem comes when a perfectly good principal is put into practice by people. There is no doubt that pure communism is a nice idea, but people are only human. We have the urge for more Everybody would like to have a nice home, plenty to eat and drink, nice clothing, books and music [access to live musicians, a killer stereo and records or whatever format is common in your age] The problem with ANY form of government is human nature. Why the hell should a senator or congresscritter get multiple retirement packages? Why should they be able to vote themselves payraises, and whatever perks they have? Why shouldnt I get $50,000 a year instead of my social security of under $12000 a year + whatever I can manage to scrounge out of my income and put into savings. I bet I work at least as hard as a congresscritter, and I don’t have a staff to help me do my job. I would love to have the ability to junket off to investigate something and not show up at the office in person.
The average Ivan in Soviet era russia worked a job like any of us, hung out with his buddies, lived in crappy housing and didnt really get time off other than a state sponored vacation to a state sponsored resort once a year. Cars and phones were luxuries and expensive.
In our version, we worked, lived near our job - many people in what we today would consider crappy housing, we were LUCKY to actually take planned vacations to a resort - we would do something like in dirty dancing, head off to a small motel for a week or two and they were definitely not state sponsored. Cars were still expensive, we frequently had a party line rather than a private phone until into the late 60s. Multiple phone lines? That wasnt even common until the 90s and the proliferation of computers and the internet.
The common ivan didnt send people to Lubyenka or a gulag. The common ivan didnt get up in the morning and try to figure out a way to destroy the US and democracy. The common ivan didnt even covertly think about how to spy for the US.
The common american didnt keep the blacks and hispanics in a ghetto, apply double standards of law to blacks and hispanics and be so scared of the idea of communism that we broke constitutional law… um, wait a minute, yes we did. Oops.
I guess democracy sucks. Maybe we ought to try monarchy again.
Actually I am diabetic, and we work best on a stable schedule so 7 days a week I am up at 5 am for meds and breakfast. On weekends instead of schlepping off for work at 630 I slack around reading the dope and playing WOW =)
I happened to catch some '70s-era footage talking about the horrors of WWII, specifically how our POWs were treated. In this day of waterboarding, it’s impossible to muster righteous indignation.
Indignation, yes. Sorrow, yes.
But the righteous part has been taken away by our current Administration. All it took was for us to get truly afraid and the principles went out the window, didn’t they.
aruvgan, I’m struggling to see what relevance any of your last post has to my previous one.
Yes, I’m aware many otherwise innocuous objects are radioactive, including granite.
However, are you seriously contending that medical information on lethal doses of radiation were unavailable to the Russian government in the 1980’s, that Russian authorities were incredibly reckless in their handling of the crisis (they wait ten days to tell the rest of the world (!), allow cameramen on the roof without protective clothing etc.), that had such an incident happened in the UK or USA, authorities there would have handled it in the same way, sending uninformed conscripts to their deaths?
It has been said that Pripyat and the surrounding villages may not be habitable again for several centuries yet. Even the wider exclusion zone may take a couple hundred years for the radiation to dissipate enough for human habitation, possibly more depending on where in the exclusion zone you are. From what I have read there are areas where pockets of radiation in the thousands of rems have settled where the immediate surrounding area is only a few hundred rems.
There is also the question of when they are going to get off their butts and shore up the sarcophagus. It’s falling apart as it is, having been hastily slapped together, and if a breach develops or, Og forbid, it collapses, it could further irradiate the area.
As for communism – it is a nice ideal on paper. The two main problems are that A) It works against parts of human nature which makes it an unrealistic ideal to implement on the basis of people being willing to curtail that nature, and B) it has never been implemented properly, most likely owing to that very nature. Communism offers fewer freedoms than a capitalistic democracy does, and that makes it wholly unappealing to anyone born into a capitalistic democracy.
Nothing graphic, no. It’s mostly just a bit creepy. There’s one scene that shows a helicopter breaking its rotors against a crane and falling to the ground, but the film cuts before it hits the ground. That’s about as close as it gets.
Okay, thank you. That was a very interesting thing to watch. I was three years old when it happened and it’s been interesting learning the truth vs. the sensationalist stuff you just hear about. I wonder how many of those men had a pretty good idea they were going to die.
ETA: For anyone who remembers the news breaking… what was the general feel about it? Was it downplayed or really treated in the media as a major disaster? Also, I know nothing about Soviet Russia or how they handled the issue, so it’d be interesting to learn what it was like at the time.
Major disaster. Particularly in Europe. There was fallout dropping on Wales and northern England - not anything like as much as other parts, but some foodstuffs had to be destroyed.
As for Soviet Russia… difficult to sum up in a post. I visited Moscow and Leningrad in 1984, and it was bleak and grim, and I was followed everywhere by the KGB (secret police). It was a vast, oppressive, scary dictatorship with fucked-up ideological objections to the west, and armed to the teeth with nukes. Of course the west wasn’t totally innocent either, and it seriously looked at points like we’d end up literally obliterating each other. The Cold War was a frightening thing; I’d go so far as to say it was way scarier than today’s terrorism; full of skullduggery and evil deeds. (I recommend you read the Smiley series of books by John le Carré for some fictional background; also Graham Greene’s later novels.)
By the way, for anyone who’s interested in what Chernobyl looks like now, I recommend KiddofSpeed, a woman who claims to ride through the vast restricted zone, the last time being in 2004. Apartment buildings stand as they have done for twenty years like the Marie Celeste, mail still in their mailboxes and toys still in the living rooms. (I gather there’s some controversy over her site, or that she’s been discredited in some way by being accompanied rather than riding alone as she claims to have done, but the pictures appear to be genuine.)
Actually, биоробот (biorobot) is a Russian word meaning something like “android” and the workers and soldiers themselves used this term to describe each other, in typical Slavic black humor fashion.
*"It was difficult to collect all debris from the roof, more precisely, what remained of it. However, it was necessary to complete. But how? Technology refused to work: radiation killed the batteries quickly. I tried to use robots, but they do not even succeed in reaching the reactor. So, people had to clean the debris - specifically soldiers.
"Liquidators [name for those cleaning the radioactive debris] came running from the shelter, shoveled debris onto stretchers or into buckets, carried to the nearest proloma (storage) and dropping their cargo in the collapse. Only a few minutes of work at a time, due to the dangerous situation. Still, as the radioactive background declined, the risk for the people who have worked here grew.
“To defuse the situation, the soldiers described as a joke each other as biorobots; ‘biorobot Vasya’, ‘biorobot Fedya’ …”*
So the term “biorobot” was used by the liquidators themselves as a dark joke in a deadly situation.
There ARE people living near and even in the exclusion zone. They all seem to be elderly folks. They’re past reproductive age so what it might do to offspring is not a worry and old enough that they are likely to die of something else before radiation-induced cancer gets them. In that sense, the area is habitable in that it will not kill you immediately.
That said, there are hot spots that WILL make you immediately ill and might well kill you quickly. Those will be around a long, long while.
THAT"s what I’m most concerned with - keeping the worst of the mess contained indefinitely is no small problem.
There is no controversy over Elena Vladimirovna Filatova aka Kidd of Speed … her former website describing a motorcycle ride through the restricted zone is a hoax. She didn’t and couldn’t ride her motorcycle through the restricted zone. She made her photos on a typical tour of the restricted zone, which anyone can do if they are so interested.
She mixed fiction with some reality and presented it as non-fiction on the internet. She has admitted as much. The website that you cite isn’t actually her website, but represents some of her original materials.
This is MY recollection, based entirely on memory:
The first news was the Swedes finding contamination on workers coming into a plant. Extrapolating based on winds lead to the rapid conclusion the source was inside the Soviet Union. At that point the world know Something Really Bad had happened, but not exactly what.
The Soviets basically said "Radioactive cloud? What radioactive cloud? We don’t see any radioactive cloud. " which answers your question on how they “handled” the issue from the point of view of the outside world. After a few days they admitted to an accident at a nuclear plant, but by then the West had figured out that the most likely source was a really bad accident at the Chernobyl complex so it wasn’t so much news as admitting to what a lot of outside nations already knew. (I expect our government had satellite and surveillance photos of the affected are pretty quickly)
Meanwhile, it was only somewhat scary, living in the US Midwest - the radiation was distributed world-wide by the weather although we were far enough away that we weren’t throwing out fresh vegetables. Europe was in an uproar, understandably, given that someone else’s toxic waste was blowing into their backyard. My concerned thoughts at the time had more to do with the impact on Europe’s and the world’s economy, and the issue of scarcity of foods imported from affected areas, as well as the fact that some areas affected would need all their food imported for some time, affecting world wise distribution and supply of certain commodities. I suppose there was some concern initially for just how bad this was going to get, but although the damage was horrific locally, and bad enough over a wide area, it was limited and wasn’t going to be some sort of mass extinction event.
There was also concern about casualties. We knew a lot of people had died, but we didn’t know if that was measured in dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands. That was actually typical for the Soviet Union - everyone knew lots of people had died in various accidents, disasters, and catastrophes in there, but never exactly how many. We knew the Soviets were low-balling the numbers, but had no way to know by how much. So the speculation ran all over the place.
We also kind of wondered how they planned to clean the mess up. Well, that became apparent soon enough, as word of the firefighters dying and clean up crews dying did get out. Several countries offered aid that was refused. Armand Hammer, a US businessman who had had dealings with the Soviets, did manage to arrange a group of US doctors to go over and assist with treating some of the injured, but they certainly didn’t see everything there was to see or know anything more than was necessary to do the work they were there to do. Some information about the clean up came from them, from what their patients told them, but it was very spotty stuff.
More information came out with glastnost, and more still after the Soviet Union broke up. Earlier this year I re-visited the information available and found several sources published in the past few years that filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge.
You certainly CANNOT do an independent tour on a motorcycle of the restricted area, as presented in the original Kidd of Speed website. It was Ukrainians that were familiar with the restricted zone that pointed out the various inconsistencies in her story and photos that first pointed out her story was a hoax.
From here as of 2006 there were still ten farms in Scotland under restrictions requiring that animals were tested before being sold to market. I imagine such restrictions were still in force in parts of England and Wales too.
Yeah, I’d heard about people living in parts of the habitable zone – something like 3,000 people refused to evacuate after the incident. I don’t know where they’re all situated, but they must be in areas of relatively low radiation – maybe few hundred millirems. Even then I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of environment. Besides its effects on reproducing cells it can’t make you feel too good.
Those are the bits that concern me most and would be the main reason the area as a whole wouldn’t be habitable for centuries. While you might be able to find places of low enough radiation to be more or less habitable, you’d have to be very aware of where those hot spots are lest you run afoul of them, and there’s no good way to deal with them either.
Plus, I shudder to think what the groundwater is like there.
No it isn’t, but it’s only going to get worse if they don’t get something done about it, and something must be done soon. They reinforced the west end with a huge steel structure a little over a year ago (The DSSS) to take some of the roof load off the axis 50 wall, but that’s just a stop-gap.
