#fukushima is nothing compared to chernobyl | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

youzicha · 5 years

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could the Chernobyl disaster have happened outside the Soviet Union or the communist bloc? was there anything socialist or autocratic about it? or could it have happened in any similarly-dangerous and similarly-complex engineering project?

My immediate reaction is to group the Chernobyl accident with other high-tech accidents like plane crashes, industrial fires, or radiation incidents in the west, but maybe that’s because I like to read step-by-step accident descriptions which focus on the technical aspects! It was definitely the case that Soviet nuclear power plants were much less safe than the western ones, although it’s not obvious if that is due to authoritarianism…

From an outside view, I think the various western incidents should make us less comfortable that it couldn’t have happened here.

• The radiation releases from the Fukushima accident were ten times smaller than at Chernobyl, but it still represents a failure of reactor containment. Apparently quite a lot of Cs-137 was in fact released from Fukushima (like a third of the Chernobyl release), but most of it went into the Pacific ocean rather than the atmosphere.

• The Three Mile Island accident showed that U.S. reactor operators can make mistakes too. I used to dismiss it—in the end there were no big radioactivity releases, so no big deal, right?—but after the Fukushima accident maybe we should re-evaluate it. TMI had a core meltdown and a hydrogen explosion, much like Fukushima, so I guess it could have gone badly.

• The Windscale reactor was also graphite moderated, so the 1957 Windscale fire might have developed into a miniature version of the Chernobyl accident. (The physical size of the reactors were similar—180 tonnes uranium and 2000 tonnes graphite at Windscale, versus 190 tonnes uranium and 1700 tonnes graphite at Chernobyl 4—but the Chernobyl burnup was 10.9 MW-d/kg while a typical value for making weapons plutonium is 0.5 MW-d/kg, so the Chernobyl reactor contained 20 times more radioactivity.)

At Chernobyl the core was scattered and caught fire, and then over the course of a few days almost all the graphite burned and the radioactive material was dispersed in the smoke. At Windscale, the graphite caught fire inside the reactor and there were no plans for how to extinguish it. According to the post-accident report,

[After the fire had been going on for about a day] the use of water was first considered. Two hazards had to be examined: first the danger of a hydrogen-oxygen explosion which would blow out the filters, second a possible criticality hazard due to the replacement of air by water. The Management were informed, however, of the danger of releasing high temperature Wigner energy if the graphite temperatures were to rise much higher than 1200°C. It was thought that this might well ignite the whole pile.

Happily the water worked well and the fire was put out before it spread to the rest of the core, but the filters in the air stack basically did nothing, so a large fire would have created a major radiological disaster.

Chernobyl was much bigger than all western accidents, but to me it feels like an extreme point on a spectrum.

If we take an inside view, the Chernobyl accident happened because of a combination of operator error and poor design, and we could try to trace either of these to Soviet authoritarianism.

As for the operator errors, there were three fateful decisions. First, the Chernobyl chief engineer Nikolai Fomin approved the plan for the turbine draw-down experiment, classifying it as an “electrical” experiment which could be signed off locally. In hindsight, because the experiment involved manipulating the power level of the reactor and the flow-rate of the cooling loop, it affected the dynamics of the reactor and should have been referred to physicists at Scientific Research Institute of Power Engineering (NIKIET) and the Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear Power Safety (Gosatomenergonadzor) for analysis and approval. It’s unclear if that would have changed matters, because the experiment would have been safe if executed according to the plan, but the physicists could perhaps have drawn attention to the safety aspects. As it were, the Chernobyl staff were quite complacent—perhaps because they had already tried it several times before, making various adjustments to the turbine control logic each time. On the day of the accident they seem to have treated it as a routine matter, and Fomin did not even notify plant director Brukhanov.

Maybe you can see the Soviet penchant for centralization here. I don’t know how it works in America, but Swedish nuclear power stations employ staff physicists who carry out calculations about how the plant will respond to various abnormal scenarios. That seems like it may be helpful for ensuring that the operating staff has easy access to physics expertise, compared to the Soviet system where those calculations where done far off in another city, and under a separate bureaucracy (NIKIET was under the Ministry of Medium-sized Machinery, while the reactor staff was employed by the Ministry of Energy).

Then in the reactor control room, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov gave two crucial bad orders. First, he had the operators deviate from the plan and start the experiment from a 200 MW power level instead of 700 MW. It’s unclear why he would do that—at the trial it was suggested that he might have thought a lower level would be safer, although it actually made the reactor dangerously unstable. Then, when the reactor was inadvertently shut down, he insisted that the operators violate regulations and start it up again, which created the conditions for the explosion. Interestingly, Dyatlov’s position was administrative, outside the operational chain of command, so formally he had no authority to give orders to the operators on duty, but he still expected to be obeyed and threatened to have them fired if they didn’t comply.

The Chernobyl tv-series tries to sell this as part of Soviet authoritarianism too—they insert a fictional scene where plant director Brukhanov pressures Dyatlov to complete the test so that Brukhanov can get a promotion—but that still would not explain the 200MW order. Perhaps some of the blame should go to Dyatlov’s personality: his coworkers say he was knowledgeable but stubborn and intolerant of dissent. Either way, it’s hard to believe that that overconfident, authoritarian managers were unique to the Soviet Union. I don’t have any examples from the nuclear industry, but maybe you could look at e.g. ship captains—it is easy to find examples of captains making bad decisions, either because of pressure from their bosses or because they are just being stupid.

Meanwhile, the reactor design also suffered from several problems that contributed to the disaster. On paper, this should not have happened. The Soviet nuclear energy industry was monitored by the USSR State Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear Power Safety (Gosatomenergonadzor), who produced a set of Nuclear Safety Regulations for Nuclear Power Plants (NSR), and then approved the technical safety report of a reactor design. The Chernobyl plant was approved in May 1975.

It shouldn’t have been. A 1991 report points out that the regulations include NSR Article 3.2.2, the total power coefficient of reactivity is not positive under any operating condition, and NSR Article 3.3.26, the reactor’s emergency protection system must ensure that the chain reaction is automatically, quickly and reliably terminated—which point to the two major flaws which caused the accident. At the time of the approval, Gosatomenergonadzor was part of the Ministry of Medium-sized Machinery, and the same ministry also controlled the NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, the two main designers of the reactors. In this way, there was very little external checks of what the (notoriously secretive) Ministry was doing. Former Chernobyl physicist Vladimir Chernousenko writes:

How could a reactor with so many defects be built and put into operation? Firstly, no-one analyzed the RBMK plans at the design stage (that is, there was no independent, external scrutiny). Secondly, the designers themselves did carry out an analysis, but on a very superficial level (because of the poor experimental facilities, the chronic backwardness of the available computer technology, etc.).

Thirdly, thanks to the monopoly that exists in Soviet nuclear science, the RBMK reactors, unlike airplanes, automobiles, etc., were not subjected to any serious tests or trials of their durability. That is why 16 reactors were brought on line without even a Technical Basis of Safety of Reactor Installation (TBSRI) or a TBS of Nuclear Power Stations (TBSNPS) certificate.However, with these obligatory parts of the project missing, it is illegal to not only operate a nuclear power station, but even to build it (GSG §§1.2.3, 2.1.14). It was only in 1988 that the chief designer made an attempt to officially certify the safety of the second- and third-generation RBMK stations.

As for why the design had these flaws in the first place, both of them can be traced to schedule pressures and cost-cutting. First, the choice of a water cooled/graphite moderated reactor is inherently risky, because a disruption of the water supply can cause a power surge. When drawing up the plans for civilian nuclear power the Ministry of Power had considered three possible designs named RMBK-1000 (water-cooled/graphite-moderated), RK-1000 (gas-cooled/graphite-moderated) and WWER-1000 (water-cooled/water-moderated), and in September 1967 they announced that the RK-1000 had been selected. However, this was too technically ambitious to meet the schedule, and one year later they instead opted for the RBMK-1000, which was similar to the reactors already used to produce weapons plutonium.

A graphite moderated reactor has a positive void coefficient, and as it turned out, when the control rods were fully withdrawn this could get big enough to overwhelm the thermal coefficient and make the overall power coefficient positive. This effect had not been anticipated ahead of time, but was noticed experimentally when the reactors were taken in use:

Neither the designers, nor the plant operators, nor the regulatory body attached proper importance to the large positive coefficients of reactivity which became apparent from experiments, and they did not attempt to find acceptable theoretical explanations. The obvious discrepancy between the actual core characteristics and the projected design values was not adequately analysed and consequently it was not known how the RBMK reactor would behave in accident situations.There are a number of explanations for the poor quality of the calculational analysis of the safety of the design. These include the fact that, until recently, Soviet computer techniques were chronically outdated and the standard of computer codes was very low. Three dimensional non-stationary neutron-thermal-hydraulic models are required in order to calculate the physical parameters of an RBMK reactor under different operating conditions. Such models first became available only shortly before the Chernobyl accident and were not really developed until after the accident.

Second, the scram rods were poorly designed. In addition to the too-short graphite tips (which makes the reactor explode instead of stopping), the system was much too slow—the rods were forced through a water-filled channel and took 18 seconds to fully deploy. Actually, the 1969 technical drawings had neither of these problems, because the scram rod tubes were water-film cooled, so the rods could be inserted in 2.5 seconds and did not displace water. Film-cooled channels are more difficult to construct and more expensive, and the final design reused the water-filled channels for control rods for the scram rods as well.

In addition to the above two flaws, western publications after the accident generally pointed at a difference in design philosophy. Western power plants follow a “Defense in Depth” philosophy, with redundant systems designed to handle multiple simultaneous failures. The USSR took a “different” approach:

The Soviet philosophy of safety with both breeder and conventional reactors places heavy emphasis on excellence of design, reliability of equipment, and careful operating procedures to prevent any releases of radioactivity to the environment. Special containment structures are not thought to be justified because of the improbability of any serious accident, and such domes are therefore judged to be costly and superfluous precautions. The design-basis accident also does not include loss of coolant in the core, and thus the reactors do not have a special emergency core cooling system. Soviet writers question the philosophy of designing redundant systems, for:

“An excess of such backup systems, where the need or the reliability is not clearly assured, introduces operational complexity and reduces over-all safety.”

It is acknowledged that some types of accidents might release radiation accumulated in the coolant, or possibly even some of the activity from unsealed fuel cans, but such releases are not projected as exceeding the daily permissible releases from power stations (1,000-10,000 Curies or less).

The Soviet equipment reliability was far from excellent, so I guess this difference in outlook was mainly due to a more relaxed attitude to radiation leaks. In the 1957 Kyshtym disaster the USSR had suffered what was then the worst radiation accident in history, and successfully kept the whole thing secret.

Indeed, the first six RBMK reactors (Leningrad 1&2, Chernobyl 1&2, and Kursk 1&2) had no structures at all to contain water/steam leaks, so any break in the cooling circuit would lead to a radioactivity release. (A 1991 report about post-Chernobyl safety improvements comments, “The main aim in these units must be to reduce the probability of large diameter pipe breaks to a point where such accidents may be termed hypothetical. With this in mind, some computerized and experimental research was carried out into the processes which cause cracks to appear.”)

Later RBMK reactors, including Chernobyl-4, added some containment structures more similar to Western reactors, by enclosing parts of the cooling circuit in pressure-tight concrete rooms that vented into a pressure-suppression (bubbler) pool. However, the reactor itself was too big to contain in this way. It was given pressure relief pipes, but they were only dimensioned to handle breaks in at most two of the 1661 fuel channels—the pressure from more extensive breaks could tear apart the entire core. NIKIET estimated the probability of a simultaneous two-channel break as 1e-8 per reactor-year, and three or more as negligibly improbable.

Although a lot of western publications after the accident highlighted the lack of containment, it is not known if a western-style containment building would have prevented the disaster—it’s impossible to say for sure, since it is not even known exactly what caused the explosion or how big it was. But in any case, it clearly shows the higher Soviet risk tolerance.

The risk tolerance is even more visible in the way that accidents were treated. The positive power coefficient was noted soon after the first RMBK reactor (Leningrad-1) was started, but never properly investigated. There were about 10 major accidents at Soviet nuclear reactors between 1970-85, killing at least 17 reactor workers and leading to multiple radiation releases to the environment. RBMK reactors suffered partial core meltdowns at Leningrad-1 in 1975 and Chernobyl-1 in 1982, proving that the supposedly unlikely simultaneous fuel channel rupture could happen quite often. And in 1983, the positive reactivity effect of the scram rods were noticed at both Ignalina-1 and Chernobyl-4. These accidents were more serious than Three Mile Island, and in the west any one of them would had prompted big efforts, but in the USSR they were kept secret.

The reactor designers at NIKIET were notified of the scram anomaly, and started to consider improvement to the rods to eliminate it, but it was not treated as a priority; the Chernobyl-4 reactor was to be upgraded after the next shutdown in 1986. They sent out a short and inconspicuous notice to the reactor operators. NIKIET also revised the operating instructions for the RBMK-1000, specifying a new minimum “operational reactivity margin” (ORM), i.e. a limit on how far the control rods may be retracted. In 1980 the ORM limit was set to 10, and then in 1983 it was increased to 15. (After the disaster, it was increased again to 30.) If this limit had been respected, it would have kept the power reactivity coefficient negative and prevented situations where the scram-rod could cause a reactivity increase, so the NIKIET engineers might have considered the two main flaws of the reactor solved. But the updated manual only stated a number for the ORM; it didn’t flag it as a safety-critical limit. The RBMK reactors were plagued by shoddy workmanship and the operators were in the habit of constantly improvising to work around issues.

So the safety standard of the Soviet reactors was low. But are these failings particular to east bloc authoritarianism? For each cause I listed above, it seems one can find examples of the same thing happening in the west.The RBMK designers assumed there would be no safety issue as long as the reactor operators followed the ORM in the manual; this seems very similar to how Boeing reasoned about the 737 MAX. Very low failure probabilities were invented out of thin air; much like in Feynman’s description of the space shuttle program. Equipment was in disrepair forcing the operators to improvise; much like in the U.S. Navy. Reports of safety incidents were ignored; when the crew was evacuated off the Deepwater Horizon, the installation manager was heard shouting “Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen” into a satellite phone.

And there was trouble even in the western nuclear program. The 1944 Hanford B reactor was also water cooled/graphite moderated, and it was placed in remote location since the core might explode. In the 1950s there was several core meltdowns in small American research reactors. And as we saw above, the Windscale reactor was rushed into service with no containment at all. Instead of asking why Soviet reactors were shoddy, perhaps we should ask how the western reactors became safe.

Part of the credit must go to the open society. From 1954 onwards, the U.S. government invited commercial companies to build nuclear power plants. Unlike secret military reactors, the application to build such plants were public, as was the Atomic Energy Commission’s decisions to judge them safe or not. And the first serious study of a worst-case nuclear accident, WASH-740, was done because Congress was considering a law to indemnify nuclear power companies.

But the nuclear industry is not unique in being regulated in this way, and nuclear power plants still seem safer than, e.g., oil rigs. Perhaps the other part of the credit belongs to the anti-nuclear movement. The very first commercial nuclear power plant was planned to be built at Bodega Bay near San Francisco—local activist started to organize against it already in 1958, and in 1964 the public pressure forced the AEC to reject the plant. In other words, from the very beginning, America has had a third party which reviews the government/industry decisions and pressure them to take safety seriously. And reading the Wikipedia historical description,

By the early 1970s, anti-nuclear activity had increased dramatically in conjunction with concerns about nuclear safety and criticisms of a policy-making process that allowed little voice for these concerns. Initially scattered and organized at the local level, opposition to nuclear power became a national movement by the mid-1970s when such groups as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Critical Mass became involved.[43] With the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s, the anti-nuclear movement grew substantially:[42]

In 1975–76, ballot initiatives to control or halt the growth of nuclear power were introduced in eight western states. Although they enjoyed little success at the polls, the controls they sought to impose were sometimes adopted in part by state legislature, most notably in California. Interventions in plant licensing proceedings increased, often focusing on technical issues related to safety. This widespread popular ferment kept the issue before the public and contributed to growing public skepticism about nuclear power.[42]

In 1976, four nuclear engineers -three from GE and one from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission- resigned, stating that nuclear power was not as safe as their superiors were claiming.[47][48] These men were engineers who had spent most of their working life building reactors, and their defection galvanized anti-nuclear groups across the country.[49][50] […] These issues, together with a series of other environmental, technical, and public health questions, made nuclear power the source of acute controversy.

it is striking that every single aspect here—the grassroots organizing, the ballot initiatives, the whistleblowers—would be impossible in the Soviet Union. So according to this story, democracy is not sufficient to create a safe industry, but it is a necessary condition; without it, you can’t get the environmentalist movement.

The U.S. environmentalists got things done. Starting in the mid-1970 there was a dramatic increase in construction costs of nuclear power plants in the U.S., with the capital costs increasing several times over, and in the 1980s companies basically stopped building plants. (You can’t get any safer than that!) Although there are several reasons for the cost increase, the most commonly cited factor is increased safety regulations. Lovering et al. show the following graph, and analyze it as follows:

Between 1967 and 1972, the 48 reactors that were completed before the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 began construction. Their OCC rise from a range of $600–$900/kW to approximately $1800–$2500/kW. These reactors follow a trend of increasing costs by 187%, or an annualized rate of 23%. Phung (1985) attributed these pre-TMI cost increases to emerging safety requirements resulting from pre-TMI incidents at Browns Ferry and Rancho Seco. Two outliers, Diablo Canyon 1 and 2, cost about $4100/kW in overnight construction cost, and were completed 17 and 15 years later, in 1984 and 1985.

A break in construction starts is visible around 1971 and 1972,which is likely attributable to a confluence of events affecting nuclear power construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1971, and the AEC’s gradual loss in public trust and its eventual replacement by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 1975. Golay et al. (1977) determined that 88 reactors in various stages of permitting, construction, and licensing were affected by the 1971 Calvert Cliffs court decision resulting in revised AEC regulations that included back-fit requirements.Finally, the last 51 completed reactors represent a set that began their construction between 1968 and 1978 and were under construction at the time of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. For these reactors, OCC varies from $1800/kW to $11,000/kW. Thirty-eight of these reactors fall within a mid-range of $3000/kW to $6000/kW, with 11 between $1800 and $3000/kW and 10 between $6000 and $11,000/kW. From the OCC of about $2,000/kW for reactors beginning construction in 1970, OCC increases another 50–200%, or an annual increase of 5–15% between 1970 and 1978.

In particular, the safety factors Phung (1985) highlight for the mid-1970s cost increase were as follows.

Phung also notes that due to new safety regulations, power plants that had already been completed in 1978 then had to be back-fitted to fix issues that had been discovered during the 70s, which increased the cost by 28% on average compared to the original construction cost. This is a rather glaring contrast to the Soviet experience, where reactors were notably not back-fitted to fix the multitude of issues that were discovered. As late as 1983, one Soviet offical boasted that “the evolution in capital cost of Soviet WWERs has no comparison with the increase of pressurized-water reactor costs in the West during the same period.”

Anyway, the environmentalist story seems convincing as long as you only consider the the U.S. and the USSR, but I still kindof doubt it. Environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement came to the U.S. first, and didn’t really emerge in Europe and Japan until in the first half of the 1970s (with a strong inspiration from America), when it would be too late to have a big effect on the main nuclear build-up. In Sweden, the reactor fleet was designed in the 1960s, by experts who knew best and didn’t particularly talk to outsiders. (Holmberg and Hedberg describe an Edenic state of affairs: “In the beginning of the 1970s all parties in the parliament supported a plan to build eleven nuclear reactors in Sweden. No debate, no conflict, everything calm. At the time energy policies were the topic for experts and a very limited number of politicians. Mass media were silent and the general public ignorant. In this atmosphere, the first Swedish reactor started operations in 1972.”)

Similarly, Lovering et al. notes that the pattern of construction cost increases in the U.S. is somewhat unique, and in other countries you either see more moderate increases (France, Canada), or no clear pattern of increases (Japan). You can see a small increase in French construction costs after the Chernobyl accident, but nothing like the huge jump in American costs after Three Miles Island, so does that mean that the reactor designs also didn’t benefit from the additional democratic scrutiny? By the above logic we would expect the Swedish reactors to be as crappy as the Soviet ones, but as far as I know they are actually perfectly fine…

#xhxhxhx #chernobyl #nuclear power

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oosteven-universe · 4 years

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Disaster Inc. #1

Disaster Inc. #1 Aftershock Comics 2020 Created & Written by Joe Harris Illustrated by Sebastian Piriz Lterrered by Carlos M. Mangual In 2011, the worst earthquake in Japan’s history breached the coastal Fukushima Daiichi power plant, causing three of its four nuclear reactors to melt down. Forced evacuations followed as the event released enough radioactive material into the air, ground and water to force officials to set up an “Exclusion Zone”, effectively sealing off the land for what may well be the rest of human histo-ry. But that’s only if you don’t have the right connections and the desire to experience catastrophe, failure and misery as it really is! Enter DISASTER INC., an underground tourism outfit intent on helping people of means, secrets and agendas explore the dark corners and off-map attractions typ-ical tour groups won't go to (and various laws don’t allow). Only Fukushima, known for its famed warrior class and their protection of the land and people dating back to ancient times, is full of deadly surprises and old ghosts. I do not believe I have seen a book like this come out, like EVER! There is something about this that takes the idea of Urban Exploration to a different level. It has this Chernobyl Diaries and The Depraved mixed into its DNA and with the mood, tone and feel of the book. Also those are two very underrated films in my humble opinion. What I see because of this and having been a fan of Joe’s writing is that while you feel you may know what is going to happen, in reality you don’t. Nothing here is what it appears to be on the surface and as the layers begin to be peeled, much like a Bloomin’ Onion, we’ll be treated to some really thought provoking events. I am thoroughly enjoying the way that this is being told. The opening is eye catching and creepy as all get out while it captures the readers’ imagination. It is the perfect opening for a story like this one and well I can’t way much more. The story & plot development we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented to the reader beautifully. I like how the flow of the story feels and how much it makes sense on a few levels including but not limited to the real life way things occur. The character development is nicely handled though I am looking forward to how their introductions compare to who they really are. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages introducing us to the characters and setting up the plot is a create way to showcase the ebb & flow of the book. The interiors are more traditionally comic book than I was expecting but give the man his due because the pages look absolutely brilliant! There is magic that happens and you see this in the Butterfly’s and the mysterious figure when it appears because of the atmosphere that Sebastian manages to convey. It kind of gives me the shivers and I love that feeling. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show such a masterful eye for storytelling. More often than not we see backgrounds here, which makes my heart sing, and they give the reader that depth perception, a sense of scale and the overall feeling of size and scope for the story. The colour work is beautifully rendered. I am enamoured with the way we see the hues and tones being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work. The work provides this unique sense of mood, tone and feel which adds to the story in some truly interesting ways. You are never truly prepared for the Aftershock and it will shake you up and make you want to live, and read, dangerously. This is a prime example of what a creative team can do when they unleash their own charisma, uniqueness, never and talent, we get a freakin phenomenal story from the new home for today’s highest quality comics.

#comic books #comics reviews #Aftershock comics #joe harris #sebastian piriz #carlos m mangual

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observantfindings · 2 years

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Independent Research 2.0

Thinking about the topic of my independent research essay I felt somewhat conflicted about what to pick as my topic.

Although my initial idea was Pachinko (gambling and addiction) had ended up being changed since the photograph I had chosen was from after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Due to the nature of the photograph, it ended up taking me on a different route in looking and exploring more about disasters that have happened around the world and the impact that they had on the area

Title:

Photographic nature of conflicts & disasters

Themes:

Conflict

Nature disasters / Man-made disasters

Fukushima disasters

Looking at other disasters/conflicts for example Ukraine and the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster.

How similar these disasters are although they are different from each other

The impact that it has on the land - and how it's not going back to normal (its just dead and nothing has grown back)

Fukushima is present right now, perhaps looking at interviews from survivors on how they had felt after the disaster.

For my essay, I have decided to take a different route and look at disaster photography from the Fukushima disaster and more. -

Seeing the nature of this photography, the impact that it has had in these places, trying to show awareness of these disasters and comparing them to man-made disasters such as the current war going in Ukraine.

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nowandthenbeyond · 2 years

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Day 24…..

Goooood moooorning Vietnam!!!

No, it should read: "доброе утро Украина!!!" (which means good morning Ukraine) is how Robin Williams would host his radio show today.

Hey ho, it's war again on Europe's borders.

After the Gulf, Kosovo and Afghanistan, nothing shocks us so easily. It was already part of everyday life, attacks, drone wars, stream of refugees.

Then a small pandemic, the whole world coughed, was long overdue. The poor are dying and the affluent society is turning the wheel, followed by general renunciation thanks to globalization.

The gap between the rich and poorer countries is wide, in terms of prosperity, so to speak.

First of all, fight the virus for your own well-being. Boundaries and barriers not only in front of one's own face but everywhere in public life and in one's head. Then suddenly borders where there weren't any more. Everyone resists restrictions and personal loss of freedom.

Then Putin comes and Corona is practically off the table.

Now the Cold War and the Iron Curtain had already disappeared from our minds, and after Chernobyl and Fukushima the Germany-wide ban on nuclear power.

Steady disarmament and austerity measures climate catastrophe etc…. Call me arrogant, but I saw these things coming a long time ago. Now we are where we never wanted to see each other.

Shit happens!

Well I think for a moment it's a shame that Merkel is gone and luckily Trump. I don't want to imagine how things would be under different circumstances.

The same philosophical question as what if Hitler had had the atomic bomb?

Well, the fact is, the Russian bear has been danced on, discredited and paraded for too long. It was only a matter of time before Putin reacted in this way and Ukraine was a pawn. You can even understand Putin to a certain extent. Only Ukraine is relatively innocent, perhaps not entirely its government.

And despite everything, this reaction is unjustified and in no way acceptable. Civilians, old people, mothers, children die - innocent. Nothing like WWII. Why are cities and civilian facilities being destroyed?

Not acceptable for me.

Absolutely not!

Most people only know the Cold War from Hollywood films and a few lessons at school. World War II was always kept small. The persecution of the Jews rightly emphasized. But after the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, that was quickly forgotten.

CIA in Afghanistan.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Annoy the Russians and keep trying to destabilize them.

The older semesters still have deep impressions and a bad feeling when they think about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the USSR. How crushing this phase was.

Nevertheless it was forgotten.

was no longer present.

If it's not present, it disappears.

Yes, now the cold war isn't that cold anymore and the Russian bear is mighty angry. Above all, still powerful. Certainly in Russia we still see the [rudimentary remnant of] communism and, from our point of view, a little backward country of peasants. Well, it's a different mentality, not comparable to the West.

Now when I look at America I get sick of decadence, poverty and ignorance. The land of unlimited stupidity. And Trump was the figurehead. Biden does not have an easy game, and he is nothing as "the most important man in the world".

Well America has always been a warmonger to defend its supremacy and interests. an aggressor. What would you expect from a country of refugees and criminals? Sorry it should be called emigrant.

Perhaps a little too generalized, but most of the Founding Fathers' hands have blood on them. Native Americans and Afro-American slaves, both have been robbed of their land and their rights to this day. None other than the Spanish, Portuguese and British fleets since the time of Christopher Columbus. And all in the name of the Catholic Church.

Yes, while the Europeans have been expanding and annexing around the world, Russia has actually stayed the way it was. A communist doctrine paired with the dictatorship so frowned upon in the West.

Power, money and greed drives people. It has always been like this.

Today we live dependent on electricity for heat and food and comfort. Above all comfort. Very few today are willing to get their hands dirty or able to take care of themselves independently, that too was simply unlearned and given up and forgotten. It's mainstream at most if you grow microgreens in the apartment or have a raised bed, or boil something down.

We want it convenient, cheap and 24/7, our comfort. our prosperity.

Why are we complaining, and at the same time we are glad that so many low-wage workers come from the neighboring eastern states. Why now the insight that outsourcing can threaten the existence of our economy? And of course our prosperity.

Filling up becomes torture.

In the meantime, I think that people whose countries are considered backwards have a lot ahead of us in some respects. independence, and improvisation. Unfortunately, that's no longer welcomed today, and we try to impose our stamp of dependency and control on everyone. That starts with seed and vaccine. The main thing is that the ruble rolls. You can still make a lot of money with it and you keep the upper hand and control. What we ourselves reject is propagated worldwide in the emerging countries.

It's nothing new that this causes great desire in third or fourth world countries. Germany and Europe the promised land. Civil wars do the rest. Everyone wants to come to us, we show how nice and great it is. We are really social, if not over-social. But woe betide us. Then there is lamentation, and and….

What bothers or rather surprises me as I write these lines at the moment is this change of heart in relation to Ukraine.

People shy away from refugees from Africa and Syria.

Now Ukraine is much closer to us, no Muslim mentality. Same and at the same time not the same. We live in a strange world.

Well, the cold war is really hot, and I'm starting to think that Mother Russia will put her cold stranglehold on us. I expected first strike targets at Ramstein Air Base and NATO Headquarters in Brussels. But that doesn't bother me anymore.

Besides, I'm still waiting for a long-forgotten player, when China throws its cards on the table and shows us its true colors.

Then I think it doesn't matter who you point your guns at. Then everyone shoots everyone down.

As long as NATO and the USA stay out of Ukraine, there is actually no need for Russian brothers and sisters to take each other's children

The only question is whether I can watch with a clear conscience for that long.

I can't take this absolutely pointless killing of women and children and those who can't run away anymore. Good luck to those who can escape. Where's the soldiers honor? Why against civilian targets and hospitals, kindergartens and private property? Didn't we learn absolutely nothing from the Second World War? It won't be long before I take up arms myself out of necessity to protect what's important to me and face the idiocy and the Russian invader. Because before this reaches my home and my family and friends, and the state is not able to do what the Geneva Convention and common sense require me to do, I will do it myself.

I would rather die for a righteous cause of my own free will than spend the rest of my life blaming myself for not acting. Because not acting kills the innocent and the freedom of every individual.

"De oppresso liber"

#ukraine

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blamehumanerrorpub · 5 years

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2011 Fukushima

11th March 2011, 2:46pm, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake hits the coast of Japan, 70km east of Tohoku. 50 minutes later, a 13m high tsunami wave crashes into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, beginning the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

In the aftermath, the NAIIC found that the causes of the accident had been foreseeable and that basic safety requirements had not been met by the plant operator. These include: risk assessment, worst case preparation and evacuation plans.

Earthquakes and tsunami’s are nothing new to japan; they experience over 1500 of them each year, and minor tremors are a daily occurrence. Given this history, they are the most well prepared and equipped country in the world against these disasters - national alarm systems, monthly drills in schools, stringent building regulations (including deep foundations and massive shock absorbers), seawalls, bunkers, emergency kits in all offices and many private houses, the list goes on. So what went wrong here?

First up, the magnitude of this earthquake and the resulting tsunami. It was the largest Japan had ever experienced and the 4th largest since records began. The tsunami was 13m high when it made it to shore, compared to an unfortunately lacking 10m tall seawall protecting the nuclear facility. “Fukushima was designed for a tsunami smaller than the one we saw”. Considering the catastrophic impact of any disaster involving the word “nuclear”, this should have had a much higher safety margin.

Next, the cooling systems failed and not enough backups were present. As soon as that tsunami made it over the seawall, Fukushima was already good as gone. When the initial earthquake happened, mandatory safety procedures automatically shut down all active fission reactions. BUT, since the reactors where no longer generating power, they were unable to run their own coolant pumps. Why was this in a single system? It’s the story of getting free international calls with a children’s toy all over again. It’s true that emergency diesel generators came online to power the coolants, but these were destroyed immediately after the tsunami breached the seawall, and the battery powered back up ran out after a day. This is deeply concerning. Having a “kill switch” to prepare for absolute worst case scenario and catastrophic disaster avoidance, regardless of cost, should be essential in such a facility. I imagine something like a ‘liquid helium flooding system’ which quickly cools down reactors in the case of emergencies could fill this role (although very, very expensive). Since batteries were already successfully used as a backup, why not also have emergency power cables running deep underneath the surface to supply these batteries even longer?

Then, the culture. Within the plants’ operators and owners, there was a culture of coverups, saving face, promoting nuclear power, the fear of lawsuits and the belief in “technological infallibility”. Like Deepwater Horizon, these all slowly add onto the already catastrophic impact of the (granted low probability) worst case disaster.

Finally, the response. There were delays and communication issues between the government and those in the affected areas. Also, the frozen soil barrier they tried to erect around the plant was ineffective in stopping radioactive leakages. Stronger measures should be in place and ready to ‘drop in’ at a moments notice in the future.

The disaster was tragic and continues to have an affect on people today, and we must continue to learn from it.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Gamma Sense. Open, fast and free gamma radiation monitoring for citizens

The explosion of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on 26 April 1986 was the most terrible nuclear accident the world had ever known. Soviet authorities, however, stayed silent on the disaster. Two days later and over 1,000 km away, an employee at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden detected unusually high radiation, forcing the Soviet government to publicly acknowledge the tragedy.

Hopefully nothing remotely as catastrophic as the Chernobyl or the Fukushima disaster will ever happen again. However, if you live in the proximity of a nuclear power plant, you might want to have access to reliable data about any variation of radiation levels in your neighbourhood.

Making Sense: Measuring radiation together workshop in Bergen op Zoom. Image Waag Society

The developers of GammaSense believe that citizens should have at home the tools and means to monitor radiation levels. Immediately, inexpensively and with a fair level of accuracy.

The team found out that it is possible to use devices with a CCD or CMOS-based camera as gamma-detectors. Research by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has indeed demonstrated a correlation between the amount of gamma radiation and the number of white spots and streaks that appear in photos taken by phone which cameras have been covered with black tape.

The aim of the GammaSense project is to develop an open emergency-infrastructure that can be deployed within minutes, using only your laptop or smartphone and a piece of black tape.

When you cover your camera with a piece of aluminum foil, which is covered with black tape, you can start measuring. Cameras and webcams can thus capture the Gammas radiation and convert them into one unit per minute. This allows large increases to be captured and plotted on a map.

Making Sense: Measuring radiation together workshop in Bergen op Zoom. Image Waag Society

The experimental platform is still in development and being tested through a series of workshops with citizens, experts and policy officers who live in the vicinity of a nuclear plant. The workshops are also organized in cooperation with municipalities, RIVM (The Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), WISE International (a NGO that is campaigning for cleaner energy since 1978) and Waag Society (the motor behind the project.)

GammaSense is the third Amsterdam-based pilot of Making Sense, a CAPS project with participating pilots in Barcelona, Pristina and Amsterdam. Making Sense’s key objective is to empower people with technology that allows them to get a more hands-on understanding of their immediate environment. Next to awareness on the topic, it will show the potential of citizen-driven data collection, which eventually leads to people making more informed decisions on behavior in their environment.

The pilot version of the radiation monitoring tool is available at www.gammasense.org

Making Sense: Measuring radiation together workshop in Bergen op Zoom. Image Waag Society

I asked René Post and Ivonne Jansen-Dings from the Waag Society in Amsterdam to tell us more about GammaSense:

Hi Ivonne and René! I’m surprised at how simple measuring gamma radiation is. I just open the GammaSense page, put black tape on my webcam and that’s it. Or did i miss something? Is it magic? How can it be that simple? Where do you get the data for the measurements?

No, you are completely right, that is it. It is known since 5-6 years that gamma rays produce white dots on CMOS-based cameras. By completely covering the eye of the camera with black tape, all visible light is blacked out. The remaining light that is registered by the camera, is a combination of faulty pixels (degeneration over time) and background noise. This background noise normally consists of a very low level of natural gamma radiation. Since you can look at gamma rays as supercharged light particles, anything less then centimeters of lead will not stop them. So the black tape means nothing to the gamma rays, and functions like a filter to block out all other forms of light.

With a base-measurement, it is possible to measure the combination of the degradation of the camera and the background noise. When we have that value, and we see sharp increases of white dots, we know it must be due to what we call ‘man-made radiation’.

What the gammasense-platform is doing, is counting the white dots per image from the video- stream, and from that we calculate a ‘counts per minute’: the number of occurrences per minute. This is exactly what the traditional measuring device for gamma radiation, a Geiger-Müller tube, is doing. So by a completely different (digital) route, we have measured something that could only be done before by the analogue Geiger-Müller tubes.

The advantages of this method are that the sensors are already in our homes on the day that they might be useful. The disadvantages, are that the sensitivity of the webcam is lower compared to standard measuring devices. Several labs have performed comparative research and they showed that the usefulness of the mechanism is actually quite good, and seems to be more dependent on the quality of the formulas that are implemented to analyze the stills.

In the project, we aim for a long-term collaborative strategy, by open innovation on Github. We have compiled a first version that runs on Chrome and are in the process now of releasing the formula that comes out of analyzing the results from data-dumps we have performed at the nuclear lab of the RIVM in Bilthoven, the Dutch official institute for environmental research.

Gammasense.org is the first website on the Internet that makes it possible to measure gamma radiation directly, without installing an app. As underlying protocol, we rely on WebRTC.

Another unique feature is that apart from the site and formula, the data is open as well. The idea is that when something happens in say France in 2021, people can instantly copy the files and begin to mobilize their local environment to join in the measurements. Institutions can jump in, and do calibrations for certain types of phones, which will make it very easy to interpret sections of the data because they all used gammasense.org to upload their data.

Making Sense: Measuring radiation together workshop in Bergen op Zoom. Image Waag Society

In one of the blog posts you write “Information about incidents concerning nuclear radiation usually takes around 3 days to reach citizens.”I had no idea it took such a long time. Do you know why citizens are not informed faster?

It is an combination of bureaucracy, fear of causing panic, unavailability of facts, cross-border communication etc.

Won’t people obsess and worry too much whenever they notice small discrepancies in measurements from one day to another or from on street to another? Aren’t you afraid of spreading paranoia? Of seeing people desert certain areas of a city?

We do have a responsibility to deliver a useful tool. So the relatively large measurement error forces us to be really careful with statements. If ‘1’ is OK, then ’10’ means something could be happening, ‘100’ something is surely happening and ‘1000’ please leave the area. That is why we need to do this together with the institutions that are already responsible for delivering the kind of data on a daily basis to the authorities and the public.

Making Sense: Measuring radiation together workshop in Bergen op Zoom. Image Waag Society

By now, i think you’ve done workshops in the cities of Bergen op Zoom, Eindhoven and Maastricht. Are these events just about demo-ing the technology and showing people to use it? Could you describe what happens during the workshops?

The workshops were intended as co-creation sessions, and to some extend they functioned that way. We quickly learned though that at first we assumed way too much knowledge: in the first workshop we had an audience that for a large part didn’t have the faintest idea what gamma radiation could be. Something to do with wifi or smartphones, was the general feeling. What a nuclear power plant was, what it produced and why, most people in the room had no idea. So we did get some usable feedback, but the phrase co-creation was not at all times completely justified. But in another way, it made it very clear to us that this is the level of knowledge that we need to adapt the tool to.

Making Sense: Measuring radiation together workshop in Bergen op Zoom. Image Waag Society

How do people react? Do you feel that citizens have different concerns from one city to another? Different levels of awareness?

In some cities, like Bergen op Zoom (in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant in Doel) and Maastricht (not too far from the plant in Tihange), there was much more awareness compared to Eindhoven, which is a bit further away.

Since the tool was still in its infancy, we had more theoretical discussions. The fact that the RIVM and WISE International were there as well to present their take on the matter greatly helped the trust people had in the project that Waag Society was carrying out.

What can people do with the knowledge acquired through the workshops? What happens after the workshop?

We hope the workshops strengthen a DIY-mentality and raise awareness of the fact that when we need data, we can quickly organize ourselves and generate it together. People are being kept informed through our newsletter on the progress of the tool. For instance, with the incorporation of WebRTC into iOS coming september, all iPhones will be able to run the tool as well.

Urban AirQ

This project is the third Amsterdam-based pilot of the Making Sense program, could you sum up briefly what the previous pilots were about?

The first pilot was aimed at DIY air-quality measurement with civilians who lived on certain streets in Amsterdam that were among the most polluted in the Netherlands.

The second pilot was called Smart Kids Lab, where schoolchildren where shown how to measure their environment with very simple means. Examples where the acid in water-meter and the particulates meter for fine dust particles in the air.

Thanks Ivonne and René!

Related stories: The Nuclear Culture Source Book, Anecdotal radiations, the stories surrounding nuclear armament and testing programs, La Cosa Radiactiva / The Radioactive Thing, Sounds From Dangerous Places: Sonic Journalism and After The Flash. Photography from the Atomic Archive.

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