(Zero Hour: Disaster at Chernobyl Discovery Channel)
Ah yes, something about control rods with a positive coefficient on starting reinsertion.
I couldn't remember what it was about reinserting that that caused the final sudden surge.
I was enjoying that video, until at 42:01 "The Chernobyl death toll though horrifying has turned out to be smaller than many first feared. The scientific consensus is that it will cause some ten thousand cancers in Russia and 25000 world wide, over a 70 year period. As yet the only proven rise in disease is in thyroid cancers in children."
Oh? Consider:
http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov_Chernobyl_book.pdfChernobyl - Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment
Published by the New York Academy of Sciences 2009
New York, April 26, 2010 (ENS) - Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility.
The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus.
The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English.
Or this:
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/chernobyl-legacy-different-race-of.html Links to:
Chernobyl legacy Paul Fusco
Also that oft-repeated dramatic scene of the tiles jumping with steam pressure... wait, what? But that's absurd.
OK, so time to hunt up the actual records. Here's a more accurate technical description:
http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr79/kr79pdf/Malko1.pdfThe Chernobyl Reactor: Design Features and Reasons for Accident
Mikhail V. MALKO
Joint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus
Krasin Str.99, Minsk, Sosny, 220109, Republic of Belarus: mvmalko@malkom.belpak.minsk.by
Hmm, the discovery channel version is vaguely correct, apart from leaving out key details and having diagrams stupidly oversimplified to the point of being completely meaningless.
My military specialty that I studied in university as a substitution for a draft is "chemical and radiological protection of troops". All of professors at the military department, all of whom were also active officers, were working on that disaster, one was a Commandant of that city, for 10 days or so till his radiation counter run out. I lost most of my radiofobic fears after meeting these people and more so when I found that some families refused to move out from the area and still live there NOW.
Old people. Nothing much to lose, and that's an entirely reasonable choice.
But show me ONE young woman about to raise a family there.
Incidentally, I'd jump at a chance to visit now. But carry a counter, avoid hot spots, don't kick up dust, don't ingest anything from the area.
Radiation is not as dangerous as it is often painted by all sorts of "environmentalists" and. Also I think that adaptability of human body to high levels of radiation is also greatly underestimated.
Typically human nature doesn't provide us an intuitive grasp of very complicated risk factors. To understand 'radiation' risks requires solid understanding of nuclear physics, cellular biology/metabolic chemistry, genetics, environmental food chain factors and epigenetics. It's impossible to summarize accurately in a few paragraphs.
But anyway:
There's three main exposure effects:
1. Ionizing radiation from sources external to the body. Principally Alpha (He4 nuclei), Beta (electrons or positrons), and Gamma (very high energy photons) but there are many other kinds too, eg neutrons. All of these will have a statistical energy spectra determined by their source. Their kind and energy determines their penetrating power and types of damage they do to molecular/nuclear structures they impact. Due to this complexity, units of radiation measurement are confusing since some are absolute measures of particle flux or decays per area or unit volume, while others are weighted to give indications of their degree of danger/damage to human tissue.
Some external radiation sources are quite harmless; for eg low energy Alpha particles are almost all completely stopped by the dead layer of skin cells. Others can do a lot of damage to all cell structures including DNA.
Humans can take quite high doses of external radiation and recover in the short term, also maybe suffer no long term effects. Destruction of bone marrow tissue is the most critical factor governing survival of brief high doses.
At low levels, the effects are mostly variations in the statistics of development of cancers, ultimately due to damage to the DNA of a single cell resulting in that cell losing replication controls and turning on the telomerase system, giving that line of freely replicating cells immortality (till the body dies due to the cancer.)
Also for reasons of inherited genetic differences some people are more susceptible to radiation induced illnesses than others. As for being 'adaptable', that Chernobyl - Consequences ... doc mentions work indicating (based on animal studies) that a human population could develop some increased radiation tolerance after several dozen generations of selection. Bear in mind that means hundreds of years of deformed babies, cancers at a young age, etc. Not really a desirable path.
2. OTOH, ingested emitters are really horrible. Even Alpha emitters can kill you this way by causing cancer, for instance by a single speck of hot dust lodged in the lungs. Also many of the elements that don't exist much (or at all) in the environment due to short half-lives (they've all decayed away since the Earth was formed from highly radioactive star-stuff) are also highly chemically toxic. The LD50 for Plutonium has a range of figures quoted, from 3ng/kg to 5 ?g/kg (cumulated chemical and radiological effects.) There's also metabolic concentration to consider - some isotopes get stored by the body in particular organs due to their having no chemical difference to the usual stable isotopes. Iodine-131, barium-140, cobalt-60, cesium-134, cesium-136, cesium-137, etc. So these cause very greatly increased cancer risks in the organs where they concentrate.
You could also ask Mr Litvinenko about human adaptability to high rad loads. They're not his cup of tea. (An Alpha emitter only, btw.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_LitvinenkoAnd for ALL those effects, the susceptibility is much higher during fertilization, embryo development and childhood, due to high rates of cellular division (when things can go really wrong due to even single base DNA damage since the DNA repair mechanisms are either off or don't have time to act. Plus the cascade effect - a fault in any of the cells of the first few cell generations WILL have disastrous consequences.
3. Then there's Epigenetics - the way in which DNA changes descend through generations of populations. Evolution is a fine balance between rates of DNA error accumulation, and weeding out of the less viable results of changes via natural selection. This is a cruel process if you are sentient, and one of the ones due to be weeded out since you inherited some newly induced genetic flaw. But the main point is, there is likely to be a level of continuous DNA damage which results in a continual decline of fitness species-wide over multiple generations, unable to be compensated for by natural selection. (Not that as a species we really have natural selection any more.)
What is that epigenetic radiation level for human populations? We have no clue at all.
Bacteria and others with very short replication periods can tolerate higher radiation backgrounds, because a. They are much simpler, and b. fast replication means they can adapt faster (and don't care about all the failures.) More complex organisms like vertebrates, not so much. And you try explaining to a mother of a deformed child that this is just a coincidental side effect of higher radiation levels, and in a few hundred years (or thousand, depending on the half-lives of contamination isotopes) this might not happen so much.
When you see horses and stuff in Chernobyl, don't forget you are not seeing the ones that died. And even bacteria and fungus have radiation limits:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/?no-istForests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly
You can google a lot of stuff on wildlife decline around Fukushima too. And how have you not read of the decline of ocean ecosystems in the Nth Pacific, including US west coast?
Nuclear energy is the feature.
I think you meant future?
Surprisingly, I agree. Just not with the 'fission' part, and fuel cycles that result in ongoing accumulation of huge amounts long half-life radioisotopes in waste dumps that require constant hi-tech maintenance, and dotting the planet with hundreds of reactors each containing hundreds of tons of poisons that would completely wipe out life on Earth if even just a dozen of those plants 'had an accident'. (Quotes because of the wide range of possible causes of such events, some not being all that accidental.)
I bet those humans that first tried to use fire 65000 years ago also burned their fingers few times 
Do you see the glaring logical flaw in that analogy?
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