#nuclear disasters

[wouldyourathervisit]

Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, US

Chernobyl, Ukraine

Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan

Would you rather visit

Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania 🇺🇸

Chernobyl, Ukraine 🇺🇦

Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan 🇯🇵

Voting ended onMar 7

[scary-grace]

would you happen to have a favorite nuclear disaster? i know a lot of them but i'm most partial to chernobyl because of how extensively it's been researched

In fact I do! Picking a favorite criticality incident felt a little macabre (look up the demon core if you want a scary story or two), so my favorite larger-scale disaster has to be the story of the Soviet nuclear submarine K-19.

K-19 was the first Soviet sub to be equipped with nuclear missiles, and while it was the pride of the Soviet fleet, it wasn't particularly friendly to Soviet citizens. Multiple people were killed in accidents during the construction of K-19, and at its launching ceremony, the bottle of champagne that was supposed to be smashed on her keel to christen her didn't break. One could say that the omens weren't favorable. One could also say that the construction of K-19 was so rushed that something was bound to go wrong on her maiden voyage. Either way, something did.

A pipe in K-19's nuclear reactor that was meant to funnel coolant to the reactor was damaged during the construction process, and during the submarine's first mission in June 1961, it cracked. This prevented coolant from reaching the reactor, and the reactor overheated, threatening to melt down and take K-19 with it. K-19's captain later said that he was afraid that an explosion on a Soviet nuclear submarine would trigger a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. In order to save the submarine and the people on board (and potentially avert nuclear war) K-19's captain assembled three-man teams of volunteers who would enter the reactor room and make the necessary repair.

If you're familiar with Chernobyl, then you're familiar with acute radiation sickness, and aware that the fatal dose of radiation for an adult human is uncomfortably small. K-19's reactor room would have been dangerous even for a person wearing proper protective clothing, but K-19's crewmembers had only raincoats and gas masks. Each of the men who entered K-19's reactor room received three times the lethal dose of radiation. Within six days of entering the reactor room, all of them were dead.

Of the 139 crewmembers of K-19, 22 ultimately died from radiation poisoning. That being said, the crewmembers who entered the reactor room succeeded in saving the boat. K-19 survived and continued to sail until 1972, at which point a fire onboard killed 28 people. At that point the Soviet navy gave up the ghost and decommissioned the ship -- but not before K-19 had earned the nickname "Hiroshima" from the people who sailed it.

Sources:

Accidents in Nuclear Ships

Nuclear Sub's '61 Tragedy

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Visit Original Link

ℭ𝔶𝔱𝔬𝔱𝔬𝔵𝔦𝔫 - 𝔗𝔥𝔢 ℜ𝔢𝔡 𝔉𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔰𝔱

[annimovsisyan]

Sunflowers, Cleaners of Nuclear Disasters › United Academics Magazine

Since the development of nuclear power, we face the delicate balance between its smart usage and the threat it poses not only to humanity, b

[just-otter-thoughts]

(Not) Fun fact: Brazil has had one of the worst nuclear accidents in history and it happened in my hometown, Goiânia.

It's known as "The Cesium-137 Accident" ("O acidente do Césio-137" in Portuguese), and it's a Level 5 in the nuclear accident scale. For reference, Chernobyl was a 7.

A couple garbage collectors wandered into an abandoned hospital, looking for anything worth collecting and selling. They came across a radiotherapy machine, and tore it apart, looking to sell its parts.

They found a capsule containing a powder that glowed a bright blue, especially in the dark. It was a radioactive isotope of cesium, used in radiotherapy at the time. They took it home to look at, and in a couple days fell ill.

It ended up in a family's home and they broke the capsule to touch the powder, and some of the children even played with it, putting it on their faces and pretending it was makeup.

Soon enough lots of people would visit that home to look at the strange blue powder, until all members of the family became severely ill. One of their children, Leide das Neves, ended up ingesting the powder, because she ate a meal without washing her hands, after playing with it.

Soon enough the local government isolated the area and took everyone they could track as having come into contact with the material to be tested for radiation, except they weren't informed of what was happening. Imagine being taken away from your home with a bunch of other people, taken to a strange place, being scanned with a strange device that if it beeped, would cause you to be isolated. 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination with 249 having significant levels of radioactive material in or on their body.

Leide died within a few days. She was buried in a lead coffin and no one came to her funeral, fearing contamination. Goiânia was known for being the town of "radioactive hillbillys" for many years after, due to how its location was in the center of the country. This happened in 1987.

[barnowl]

if astrology isnt real then why are leo and sagittarius men like that?

[poorreputation]

If you liked HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’, you’ll probably like NOVA’s ‘Building Chernobyl’s Megatomb’. It’s about the construction of this dome that’s placed over the wreckage of the power plant, and the documentary contains a lot of the original footage that’s recreated in the HBO show. It’s on U.S. Netflix, if anyone’s interested.

(Might be your thing, @evvvissticante )

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Visit Original Link

ℭ𝔶𝔱𝔬𝔱𝔬𝔵𝔦𝔫 - ℭ𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔫𝔬𝔭𝔬𝔩𝔦𝔰