Let's assume that the Soviet response to the Chernobyl meltdown/crisis was as bad as possible. Realistically, how bad could it have gotten for Ukraine, the USSR, and Europe as a whole? What would be the societal, economical, ecological, and political ramifications of a worst case scenario of Chernobyl?
How bad could Chernobyl have gotten?
- Thread starter GuildedAgeNostalgia
- Start date
I actually think that the Soviet response was pretty bad, but the true death toll was probably < 100. This contrasts with the 171,000 who died in the Banqiao Dam Failure. The main preventable problem was thyroid cancer. Iodine is the only chemical element in nuclear waste where humans & other tetrapods have specific mechanisms to absorb. Some Cs will be mixed with K, & some Sr will be mixed with Ca, but there are specific enzymes that seek out the element. The absorption of 131I can be completely prevented by taking I tablets, which saturates the body with I. As I understand it, scientists said this was the most important thing but it was only done in Poland.
Notwithstanding the nonsense from the anti-nuclear groups, the damage that can be done with radionuclides is limited by the fact that the Earth contains a trillion times more radionuclides naturally. So if I had a ton of nuclear waste, that's about 2.5 x 10e27 nuclei. If I wait a million years, virtually none of the 94% which is 238U or 235U or 236U or 237Np will decay. About 2% will have decayed almost instantly on creation. The other 4% will mainly decay once. So I get 1 x 10e26 decays in a million years, or about 3 x 10e12 decays per second. The natural radioactivity of the top metre of Ukrainian soil is 3 x 10e15 Bq or decays per second. The decay rate is faster at the beginning, so it's a little more complex than that. Probably if you wanted an incident where 1000s die, you'd have to presume that it started a fire that was responded to totally inadequately, leading to a wildfire. But any nuclear accident only has a specific number of decays within it, & that number is actually rather small compared with natural environmental radioactivity, so the event being worse, can't actually change the number of decays, that's fixed by the physics.
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If the underground reservoir wasn't filled with concrete in time, there'd be another explosion. The sarcophagus may be a lot harder to build (it was already too radioctive for robots; humans had to be irradiated in shifts to shovel). Radiation clouds made it as far as France and northern Italy, though there are parts of European Russia further away than that. If they had to abandon the cleanup and containment and the other reactors failed, most of Europe might be within The Zone. It'd be a huge refugee crisis, and I suspect that the iron curtain would be replaced by the largest demilitarized zone in human history
This is actually complete bollocks. Anti-nukes seem to imagine that somehow vast amounts of radioactivity appear magically from nowhere. But we live on a radioactive planet where garden soil is 500,000 to 1,000,000 Becquerels/m3. There are only a finite number of nuclei in any mass. A ton of Uranium or Plutonium is 2.4x10e27 atoms, no more. 2.4x10e27 decays over 250,000 years is 3x10e14 decays/second = to the natural radioactivity of the top 0.1mm of European soil. Spread some waste over a few km2 & the area becomes more radioactive but nowhere near as much radioactivity as Ramsar in Iran. If it spreads over a million km2, it's a scientific curiosity, but only a tiny fraction of background. 1 million km2 actually contains 12 million tons of Uranium in the top metre, & 12 billion tons in the top 1000 metres. And Uranium is only a small proportion of soil radioactivity, Radiopotassium being a far larger contributor. In addition, each of us is struck by a cosmic muon every second with the energy of 4 GeV = 1000 decays of 238U.
There is simply no way Chernobyl could have killed 1000th of the number of people who died in the Banqiao Dam Failure. As the present Russian invasion of Ukraine shows, dams are a military target, nuclear power plants are not.
Could the party establishment doubled down on their early denialism and completely refused to evacuate nearby settlements? At least for a longer time than OTL.
People can debate the physical effects until the last nucleotide decays, but IMVH it could be worse.
Weather can send the plume in bad directions, or rain could precipitate a lot out.
The political/social effects could me messy, especially if a lot of Europeans are thinking "We're all gonna DIE!" Panic can kill a LOT of people, or, even if they aren't killed, really screw up Europe.
Weather can send the plume in bad directions, or rain could precipitate a lot out.
The political/social effects could me messy, especially if a lot of Europeans are thinking "We're all gonna DIE!" Panic can kill a LOT of people, or, even if they aren't killed, really screw up Europe.
To really get deaths from radiation you need nuclear weapons going off. Even if Chernobyl exploded as per Hiroshima it would be on the order of 150,000 killed, something virtually impossible as nuclear reactors are designed not to do that.
With much worse damage control and adverse weather conditions the radioactive plume could cause an increase in cancers in the affected areas - probably something that would be negative should everyone in the affected area give up smoking.
With much worse damage control and adverse weather conditions the radioactive plume could cause an increase in cancers in the affected areas - probably something that would be negative should everyone in the affected area give up smoking.
hazy memory of the TV show wasn't there a threat of the core hitting a large volume of water that would have explosively vaporized ejecting the radioactive material present into a much larger area rather than leaving a lot of it within what was left of the building. So it's not that there would have been more radiation in total, but more radiation where you don't want it
(and yes the planet is radioactive, radon and ventilation hole on basement spaces and so on)
(and yes the planet is radioactive, radon and ventilation hole on basement spaces and so on)
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Realistically, the worst case scenario is that the bubbler tank overflow in the basement isn’t able to be successfully drained. The HBO series is wrong by several orders of magnitude about how big the steam explosion would be as they claim it would have been several megatons.
The realistic estimates are not nearly so bad, more on the order of high sub-kiloton, but that would still be sufficient to destroy or damage the other reactors in the complex. The really devastating consequence would be that the corium would keep producing steam for many days or weeks afterwards and that radioactive steam would enter the atmosphere and be carried over a long distance, eventually falling as radioactive rain.
exactly a combination of what is by then effectively a tactical nuke and a BLEVE ... and if that takes out other reactors at the site
Even for that there is limited evidence, aside from thyroid cancer. The fact is that there might be 2 tons of Uranium enriched to 4% of which 5% has fissioned in 2 years. So the debris will be 92% U, 2% Pu, 1% other Actinides & 5% fission products. 90% or more of the fission products have already decayed away. For example, the reactor might have produced 3 Kg of 131I over 2 years but 98.5% of that will already have decayed away. so there might be 40gms of 131I. It doesn't matter whether you scatter it over a small area a large area, the number of nuclei are fixed by the physics & they're a tiny proportion of natural radioactivity if scattered over a large area.
I don't think it's a realistic estimate; they might have said it on the TV but it would utterly defy the physics to release sub kilotons of energy.
This is utterly absurd. To make a tactical nuke, you have to enrich the Uranium to > 80% or use Plutonium > 93%.
CAN'T do actually because it's a reactor, not a bomb
People have been making the bomb/reactor conflation since before either existed but while a reactor can melt, (with temperatures that can disassociate water into hydrogen and oxygen (which is where you DO get "booms" in a nuclear accident) the reactor actually stops reacting once the core matrix starts to melt. (Another misconception is that once they melt down they keep getting hotter)Don't know about a TV show but the movie "China Syndrome" was based on that concept with one of the "anti-nuclear experts" stating that the melted core would continue to burrow down through the soil and rock till it hit ground water which would then blast out as a huge cloud or radioactive steam contaminating the whole state of California. Which was actually bull anyway since it has to burn it's way through a thick concrete containment vessel which is designed to contain a maxim temperature core long enough for it to cool down. (Chernobyl of course didn't have this type of containment)
In reality reaching ground water will release some steam but your bigger problem is ground water is pretty extensive and connected so you now have an large amount of ground water contaminated with radioactive debris.
Then there's always the other scenario's of "Atomic Tornado", "Atomic Train" and radioactive Sharknado
A common problem here in the Western US due to the amount of granite we have. My last home on the 'benches' of the local mountains had to have a radon mitigation system in the basement. Hilariously when shopping around for a house before we bought that one we looked at one with a Bomb Shelter ("not unusual for this neighborhood" the ad said
) that was required to have a Radon Mitigation system installed in it Randy
Don't know about a TV show but the movie "China Syndrome" was based on that concept with one of the "anti-nuclear experts" stating that the melted core would continue to burrow down through the soil and rock till it hit ground water which would then blast out as a huge cloud or radioactive steam contaminating the whole state of California. Which was actually bull anyway since it has to burn it's way through a thick concrete containment vessel which is designed to contain a maxim temperature core long enough for it to cool down. (Chernobyl of course didn't have this type of containment)
In reality reaching ground water will release some steam but your bigger problem is ground water is pretty extensive and connected so you now have an large amount of ground water contaminated with radioactive debris.
Then there's always the other scenario's of "Atomic Tornado", "Atomic Train" and radioactive Sharknado
In teh show it wasn't ground water but rather a large amount of water that had pooled within the facility
A common problem here in the Western US due to the amount of granite we have. My last home on the 'benches' of the local mountains had to have a radon mitigation system in the basement. Hilariously when shopping around for a house before we bought that one we looked at one with a Bomb Shelter ("not unusual for this neighborhood" the ad said
Randy
Yep get it in place here too (UK)
"Technically" a sub-kiloton is exactly that, something LESS than a "kiloton" yield
A hand grenade is a "sub-kiloton" explosion, which if we're honest DOES make it sound pretty damn impressive Not at all it's more on par with very high explosive yield and no where near a 'nuclear' level. The 'danger' was enough damage to the other reactors and they too could have had issues.
We've had "tactical nuclear" levels of conventional explosions which is what I think he meant not an 'actual' tactical nuke.
Probably something on TMI then as that was a concern early on but really they were worried it would expand the hydrogen bubble (and be hot enough to set OFF the already existing hydrogen bubble at the top of the containment shell) the press and anti-nuclear advocates were screaming it would spread radioactive steam over the whole mid-west if it got to the water. The thing was the water WAS on the floor and by that point the core was a little bit below the floor cooling in the support basin of the reactor shell.
IIRC there's a couple places on the Continent too...
Randy
Worst case: the other reactors also catch fire and burn out of control, causing a huge irradiated zone and an earlier breakup of the USSR, resulting in a nuclear civil war between the former SSRs that escalates into WWIII. Everyone dies, O the embarrassment.
Was there also a possibility that if the wind was blowing a different way the radiation could spread over a massive city
Yes but the city already has a huge amount of natural radioactivity. There is still no sensible, scientific case that it can cause anything except a handful of thyroid cancers & only then if you don't distribute the Iodine tablets. It's a very, very safe technology & vastly safer than hydro. Ten million could die with a well-placed dam attack.
It's a very simple scientific calculation. We have 2.4 x 10e27 nuclei, less than 3% will decay in the next 1000 years, so that maybe 7 x 10e24 decays, which is = to the number of decays in the upper Earth's crust in a an hour or so.
If the radioactivity spread over a huge zone, it would be so diluted to be trivial. There's a certain amount of material, it has a well-defined & easily understood amount of radioactivity. If there's a massive Hydrogen explosion, that doesn't increase the amount of radioactivity merely spreads it out over a wider area.
who is 'He' ?"Technically" a sub-kiloton is exactly that, something LESS than a "kiloton" yield
Not at all it's more on par with very high explosive yield and no where near a 'nuclear' level. The 'danger' was enough damage to the other reactors and they too could have had issues.
We've had "tactical nuclear" levels of conventional explosions which is what I think he meant not an 'actual' tactical nuke.
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Randy
if you are referring to my case of the explosion where you have a BLEVE which then showers the entire site in radioactive material and damages / starts fires in/on the other units which then aren't shut down safely