Chernobyl Misbehaving Again

Scuttlebutt
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Not a maritime issue, but troubling…

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Russian hackers?

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There goes my summer vacation plans.

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Get that internal tan in the wintertime. . . .

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Total misinformation from someone who doesn’t have a clue about how nuclear fission works.

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If you want to understand how routine this is, this is a great thread to explain that:

Nuclear Operator on Twitter: “INCREASE IN FISSION REACTIONS IN CHERNOBYL A well-known process in nuclear physics, already identified in Chernobyl back in 1990, has become tabloid news creating unwarranted alarm. I’ll try to explain it in a short THREAD. https://t.co/7Vc3DrprnX” / Twitter

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Shouldn’t be a problem for too long; the half-life of U235 is only 700 million years.

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“midnight at Chernobyl” is a good book i recently read about this. I think they said about 4 tons were initially missing but most has since been accounted for. I think ultimately the biggest fear is if the ‘blob’ of radioactive matter (since morphed into a pile) were to make it thru the last of the concrete bottom or spread in the underground chambers into the water table it would become largely unstoppable. certainly a huge fear but perhaps at this juncture not as bad as fushikayama or the ‘place’ in Japan where this is evidently happening now with huge efforts at a sort of cover up or ‘quieting’.

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Absolute codswallop! There was no meltdown there. People still work in the reactor.

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Yes people still work there, but they are limited on how long they can stay there due to the radiation levels that still exist.

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I don’t know about Japanese nuclear power plants but in the US most workers are given badges that monitors the radiation levels exposed to the badge & worker & once a certain threshold is meet the worker can’t go back into the area for a certain amount of time. X-RAY technicians & other medical professionals are required to wear such badges too.

I do know about operating distillers/evaporators that makes fresh water from seawater & ours get turned off way before going near Fukushima.

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Here’s a good story…
Friend of my sisters who worked in Radiology loaned her pilot husband her badge
in 10 days of flying in OZ it went off.

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You get a lot of cosmic rays at high altitudes. If memory serves, pregnant aircrew are not sent on some polar routes that get the most radiation.
This is also why a flight to Mars would be fairly unhealthy in the current generation of spacecraft.