THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT: The building that houses destroyed reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Credit: Charles Q. Choi
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CHERNOBYL, Ukraine—The disaster at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, is currently ranked as the worst nuclear accident in history. Officially, tourism has opened up here, but areas remain that are too dangerous for tours. On the eve of the event's 25th anniversary, Scientific American frequent contributor Charles Q. Choi traveled to Chernobyl and nearby Kiev to explore the site as well as report on research going on there via a series of stories, along with these images.
View a slide show of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site.
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22 Comments
Add CommentThe horrible tragedies in Japan should be responded to by every nation on Earth which has the expertise and resources to do so. The fact is, no place on Earth is immune to natural disasters of that magnitude or greater. Americans must band together to make sure that greedy dirty energy companies can't keep us vulnerable to added threats to our lives and health in order to maximize their windfall profits.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nuclear emergencies and natural gas and oil fires in Japan should be an object lesson, and dire warning, to every nation. This is why it is of utmost urgency to convert the world's energy systems to TRULY clean, safe, abundant, inexhaustible and FREE energy sources, such as Wind, Sunshine, Geothermal Heat, Tidal/River Flows and Hydrogen/Oxygen extracted from Water using electricity from those sources.
If you think massive conversion to clean energy would be "too expensive", I have 2 questions for you:
1) In your cost/benefit analysis, how do you value the lives of nuclear plant radiation victims, coal miners, drilling rig workers, billions of sea creatures and the millions of people who die from pollution-caused illnesses?
2) If we fail to restore and protect the ONLY known natural life-support system in the Universe, how will you justify that failure to your gasping, wheezing Great-Grandchildren, and what do you think the money saved will be worth to THEM?
If Japan's energy came from self-renewing energy sources, there would be no oil and gas fires or nuclear emergencies adding to the other crises they are facing.
After reviewing the photos, I thought the story was quite well told, and several of the images were quite haunting. These photos and the news from Fukushima Daiichi are firm reminders of our ability to foresee all possible dangers to nuclear power plants, and by extension to all science. That said, I fully support scientific research and I support the continued use of nuclear power, but I feel it necessary to continue to ask questions such as "what if the tsunami wall does NOT protect the backup diesel power generators" and "what do we do if the water pumps fail to keep up water levels in the storage pools." Nothing is foolproof, because fools (and nature) are so ingenious.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne would think one could come up with a better pictorial of the Year 25 aftermath of the worst nuclear accident of all time! These aren't even good tourist pictures. Quite lame...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI more interested in what Mr. Choi's badge showed. Having been to Russia, I didn't find the pictures any more poignant than hundreds I took from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In 1997, the whole country was pretty poignant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe blatant fact is that we need low carbon energy sources, and modern, properly sited nuclear reactors should be a significant portion of the mix. Scaring people because of local disasters at old style reactors is certainly not helpful.
Gary L Wade, MD
Radiologist
Congratulations SciAm for Chernobyl slide show.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe timing is exquisite in this week of extended crisis at Fukushima.
The slides are a powerful reminder of the long make-safe time period, huge cleanup costs, and long term global human impact from such serious reactor accidents. Likely we'll be looking at similar images from Fukushima in another 25 years, as by my judgement for cleanup there are several reactor-loads of 'spent' fuel which in fact contains large amounts of radioactive elements from Uranium fission some with a long half-life.
There will likely be also some Plutonium in the 'spent' fuel generated by neutron absorption, and lots of Plutonium from Reactor No3 which used Uranium/Plutonium fuel.
We need US/Japan know-how and cooperation and joint planning to implement the make-safe.
That mask is a joke if they are seriously worried about aerosols and other airborne contaminates
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurrently there is NO safe nuclear technology. Local carbon derived systems may be implemented before antimatter control has been achieved. Look at: https://communities.acs.org/docs/DOC-3412
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Wade,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a radiologist you should know the effect of radiation on human health. Don't be silly! Even, lets assume that we have safe reactors, what the heck you gonna do with the waste fuel? Send it in the cosmos? How do you know it is not going to fail like the carbon shuttle did, How do you know another earthquake and/or Tsunami will not hit us again? It is time that we run for new technology that is safe in a long term. Stop being selfish!
Well, that was a waste of time...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Haunting", you say?
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((I did like the maps, though.))
‘Haunting’ is hardly the word to describe the slideshow. Surely there were more poignant images that could have been shown. For decades we have read how scientists have to be better about putting their message across. What of the horrendous scenes immediately following the meltdown and the anguish and despair of those affected? Twenty-five years later they are still in the memories of the living. Given the societal decisions about energy we are presently making, the human dimension is of paramount importance – the lives lost or ruined, the continuing fears, lessons learned or not learned - not to mention nature bent and disfigured. Where was this in your photos? We ignore at our peril the social and emotional costs of technological breakdowns. Your bland slides more resembled an abandoned auto plant than the scene of a nuclear disaster. SciAm missed the boat here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismay be you should go there and take some pictures
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor a really good exposure read this site. I wonder why SA and others don't use her stuff.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/index.html
I think I just found a spot for Ann Coulter's next vacation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe thing that I find most interesting is that I can find nothing in the main stream press about the design problems with the Japanese reactor that it has in common with many reactors in the U.S. I heard a report on Harry Shear's Le Show podcast that a nuclear scientist had resigned due to his concerns going unheeded. This timely reporting is a reminder, indeed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with the comments about the pictures being lame, especially given the urgency of the pictures coming from Japan recently. The real poignancy after 25 years is the town that is not habitable even now. However an abandoned town is not particularly photogenic.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmall radiation doses can be even good for your health?
Dose-response curve is often like a J-curve.
1-2 doses of aspirin and vitamins are good for your health, but 100-1000 kill you....
See more..
Chernobyl and LNT theory:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889503
Radiobiological Basis of Low-Dose Irradiation in Prevention and Therapy of Cancer:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477707/citedby/
more about Cherbyl:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/ppmc/articles/PMC2889503/#b56-drp-08-148
"…. The most nonsensical, expensive and harmful action, however, was the evacuation of 336,000 people from contaminated regions of the former Soviet Union, where the radiation dose from Chernobyl fallout was about twice the natural dose. Later this limit was decreased to even below the natural level and was some five times lower than a radiation dose rate of 5.25 mSv/year at Grand Central Station in New York City (Benenson et al 2006).
The evacuation caused great harm to the populations of Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine. It led to mass psychosomatic disturbances, great economic loss and traumatic social consequences... The really dangerous air radiation dose rate of 1 Gy/h on 26 April 1986 (0.01 Gy/h 2 days later) covered an uninhabited area of only about 0.5 km2 in two patches reaching up to a distance of 1.8 km southwest of the Chernobyl reactor (UNSCEAR 2000b).
.. Thus with a steadily decreasing radioactivity fallout the dose rate was not dangerous at all.
However, according to L.A. Ilyin, one of the leaders of the Chernobyl rescue team, there was a danger that the “corium” (the melted core of the reactor, with a total volume of ?200 m3, a mass of ?540 tons and a temperature of about 2000°C, ) might penetrate down through the concrete floor and spread to rooms below. The team suspected that in these rooms there could have been a great volume of water with which the corium could come into contact. This would have led to a much more powerful explosion than the initial one and caused a vastly greater emission of radioactivity that could have covered Prypyat and Yanow with lethal fallout.
Therefore, the evacuation of the whole population of these localities was a correct precautionary measure that was carried out in an orderly manner in only two hours.
But the evacuation and relocation of the remaining approximately 286,000 people, of which there were about 220,000 after 1986 (UNSCEAR 2000b), was an irrational overreaction induced in part by the influence of the ICRP and IAEA recommendations based on the LNT (Ilyin 1995). The current reluctance of the Ukrainian authorities to resettle the residents back to Prypyat (now a slowly decaying ghost town and tourist attraction) does not seem rational. The radiation dose rate measured on April 10, 2008 in the streets of this city ranged from 2.5 to 8.4 mSv/year, i.e., more than 10 times lower than natural radiation in many regions of the world ... "
In science, as elsewhere, it is tough to say "always" or "never." You state there is "no" safe nuclear technology. However, the US Navy has been using safe nuclear technology since launching the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) in 1954, the year after Eisenhower gave his "Atoms for Peace" speech, and only three years after electricity was first generated by nuclear power. Nuclear power has been safely powering submarines and aircraft carriers ever since, without a single mishap - thanks to the foresight of Hyman Rickover, who started the Navy's nuclear program. In fact, there are at least 150 Navy vessels afloat today that run on nuclear power; an aircraft carrier can run for 25 years before refueling - and that's environmentally friendly compared to the previously used diesel power. This is a remarkable safety record which is fortunatley mimicked by the vast majority of civilian nuclear power plants. Even the incident at Three-Mile Island (unfortunately initially due to human factors including fatigue) was contained rapidly and resulted in no deaths or illness. Unfortunately, the safety program at Chernobyl was far inferior to that in the US, and apparently not all contingencies were considered in site selection and construction of Fukushima Daiichi (one of the most active tectonic areas on the planet), but this is no reason to condemn the entire industry by making a statement that there is "no" safe nuclear power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you want to see some really haunting and poignant images of the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster go to www.kiddofspeed.com. Those images should make anyone think twice about the use of nuclear power for energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like the SciAm approach, as it is far more meticulous than the usual press write-ups. Here we can actually learn something.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRadiation has an image problem, to coin a phrase.
Radiophobia is easily caught. But most people are very ignorant of the amount of natural radiation in the environment. The seas alone contain huge quantities of potassium isotopes, not to mention an enormous quantity of Uranium. The layman's knowledge of natural background radiation is very scant and superficial.
These remarks leave the public unfazed, though, in view of an unfolding disaster. Many will say that nothing more than zero radioactive releases is ever tolerable.
One reason for radiophobia is that radiation is undetected by the senses. Another reason is that its biological effects are insidious, though not more so than many another poison.
Because explaining the complexities of a particular reactor accident in lay terms is not easy, and new revelations cause reappraisals of the accident, the public is easily incited to accuse scientists and technicians of mendacity, deviousness and deception, though there is really no basis for these suspicions. None of this helps the image of the nuclear industry.
How dangerous is the power industry then? How much harm from nuclear power stations is acceptable?
One worthwhile yardstick to retain is the number of people killed from electrocution every year. I estimate there would be a few hundred in both the USA and Europe. Maybe a hundred or so in Japan. Do you blame the power stations for generating the electricity that killed them? Electricity itself is also a silent, invisible killer, and not directly detected by the senses under normal conditions. But it ia a hazard we got used to. Many more persons have been electrocuted than ever died form radiation poisoning.
Using deadly nuclear energy to heat water to create steam to drive the turbines is the stupidest most expensive not to mention dangerous way of heating water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe already have boiling water and steam under our feet in great abundance;plenty for base load power. It is called
geothermal energy , inexhaustable , clean, and available
most areas of the world.New Zealand among others has been
utilizing it for generations. So lets get busy start
developing it and say good-bye to the nukes.
This pictures are very interesting, but also sad. Radiation from the explosion basically wiped out everything from the nearby area and nothing is recovered yet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow the pictures were taken? Did you wear an anti-radiation suit?