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June 27 - July 7, 2023
Tsar Bomba,
This name is so sickening
The town of Chernobyl had been established in the twelfth century. For the next eight hundred years, it was home to peasants who fished in the rivers, grazed cows in the meadows, and foraged for mushrooms in the dense woods of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus.
Steel and zirconium—essential for the miles of tubing and hundreds of fuel assemblies that would be plumbed through the heart of the giant reactors—were both in short supply; pipework and reinforced concrete intended for nuclear use often turned out to be so poorly made it had to be thrown away. The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.”
The USSR, hopelessly backward in developing computer technology, lacked simulators with which to train its nuclear engineers, so the young engineers’ work at Chernobyl would be their first practical experience in atomic power.
It existed in an economic bubble; an oasis of plenty in a desert of shortages and deprivation.
When the building materials specified by the architects of the Chernobyl station had proved unavailable, Brukhanov was forced to improvise: the plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could.
When the Ministry of Energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plant’s turbine hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumen, they ordered him to replace it. But the flame-retardant material specified for reroofing the structure—fifty meters wide and almost a kilometer long—was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted him an exception, and the bitumen remained.
full twenty-four hours on coffee and cigarettes.
His name? His name waz bella hadid
The USSR’s economic utopianism did not recognize the existence of unemployment, and overstaffing and absenteeism were chronic problems.
In the meantime, Viktor Brukhanov had given his blessing to a memorial to more ancient gods: a massive realist statue, in front of the city’s cinema, six meters tall and cast in bronze. It depicted a Titan, naked beneath the swooping folds of his cloak, holding aloft leaping tongues of flame. This was Prometheus, who had descended from Olympus with the stolen gift of fire. With it, he brought light, warmth, and civilization to mankind—just as the torchbearers of the Red Atom had illuminated the benighted households of the USSR. But the ancient Greek myth had a dark side: Zeus was so enraged by
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The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium
underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some seventy-eight thousand people died instantly, or immediately afterward—vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the firestorm that followed the blast wave. But by the end of the year, another twenty-five thousand men, women, and children would also sicken and die from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first atom bomb attack.
The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium
of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.
Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets.
“I have seen my own death!”
Edison’s experiments required an assistant to place his hands repeatedly on top of a box, where they were exposed to X-rays. When he sustained burns on one hand, the assistant simply switched to using the other. But the burns wouldn’t heal. Eventually surgeons amputated the assistant’s left arm and four fingers from his right hand. When cancer spread up his right arm, the doctors took that, too. The disease traveled to his chest, and in October 1904 he died, the first known victim of man-made radiation. Even
More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.
Sredmash—would
shred mash? sickening (comp) name for a nuclear initiative lol
But the little reactor in Obninsk was not all that it seemed. The principles of its design had not originated with the imperatives of electricity generation but with the need to manufacture plutonium bomb fuel quickly and cheaply.
On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire.
i wanna read more about this
Chelyabinsk-40
than late spring.
the first day of summer is june 22. this was not late spring at all
Most important, he’d heard that married couples moving to Pripyat could expect to be allocated an apartment in the city.
samizdat
egalitarian Soviet Union, it was always a man—who,
lol
under some circumstances—accelerate reactivity instead of slowing it down.
On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit One of the Leningrad nuclear power plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance when it began to run out of control. The AZ-5 emergency protection system was tripped, but before the chain reaction could be stopped, a partial meltdown occurred, destroying or damaging thirty-two fuel assemblies and releasing radiation into the atmosphere over the Gulf of Finland.
By daybreak on Saturday, the men of the militsia had sealed off the entire area with roadblocks, and the KGB then cut off the city’s long-distance telephone lines.
By nightfall, the local lines were dead, too, and there had still been no radio broadcast to notify the citizens of Pripyat of the accident, let alone warn them to stay indoors or close their windows. Even so, in the event of an evacuation, Scherbina knew there would be no way of concealing the exodus of the fifty thousand residents of an entire atomgrad.
“He’s a panicker!” he yelled at Scherbitsky. “How are you going to evacuate all these people? We’ll be humiliated in front of the whole world!”
Vladimir Shashenok, rescued from the wreckage of compartment 604 by his colleagues, had been one of the first to arrive. Burns and blisters covered his body, his rib cage was caved in, and his back appeared to be broken. And yet, as he was carried in, the nurse could see his lips moving; he was trying to speak. She leaned closer. “Get away from me—I’m from the reactor compartment,” he said. The nurses cut the shreds of filthy clothing from his skin and found him a bed in intensive care, but there was little they could do. By 6:00 a.m., Shashenok was dead.
By 9:00 a.m., hundreds of members of the militsia had been mobilized on the streets of Pripyat, and all roads into the town had been cut off by police roadblocks.
But at the plant, the nuclear engineers on the morning shift recognized all too clearly the danger the city was facing and tried to warn their families. Some managed to reach them by telephone and told them to stay indoors. Knowing that the KGB was monitoring the calls, one tried to use coded language to prepare his wife to escape the city. Another persuaded Director Brukhanov to let him go home for lunch and then packed his family into the car to take them to safety, only to be turned back at the end of Lenina Prospekt by an armed militsia officer manning a
roadblock. The city had been sealed off. No one would be permitted to leave without official clearance.
Volodin threw the yoke forward. The nose of the helicopter dipped down and to the left. The treetops flashed beneath them, a smear of green. He pushed the machine to its maximum speed, away from the railway station and toward Pripyat. Then the cockpit door flew open, framing the terrified civil defense major, his own radiometer in his hand. “What have you done?” the officer screamed against the howl of the engines. “You’ve killed us all!”
Masha picked up the phone to call her mother and father in Odessa. But the line had been cut off.
that they realized the floor was covered with thousands of dozing flies, apparently intoxicated by radiation. Unspooling
“If you want to be a dad, cover your balls in lead.” Even as the bombardment continued, Academician
and soon geysers of hot radioactive cement leapt into the air.
Among the proposed architectural solutions, there were some of soaring ambition, including a single arch with a span of 230 meters, and the suggestion to roll a series of prefabricated vaults across the entire width of the reactor hall; another was a massive single-span roof suspended from a row of inclined steel arms, raised into the air at six-meter intervals, a design the engineers referred to sardonically as “Heil Hitler.”
On June 5 Gorbachev gave Slavsky and his men until September to complete the new building: less than four months to accomplish one of the most dangerous and ambitious civil engineering feats in history. Work began at the site even before the engineers and architects in Moscow had agreed on a viable design.
These men caught their maximum dose in a matter of hours—or minutes—before being sent home and replaced with more cannon fodder.
The scientists responded with another ingenious yet thrifty solution, using rags produced as waste in the textile industry to make large mats, soaked in a cheap water-soluble glue and lowered onto the rooftops, where they stuck to the pieces of wreckage. When the glue dried, these “blotters” could be lifted away, bringing the radioactive debris with them, and then removed to be buried. The scientists’ early tests proved successful: with a single square meter of blotter, they could retrieve two hundred kilos of wreckage from a height of seventy meters.
to use the giant Demag cranes to carry the blotters up to the roof of Unit Three, the commission refused. The cranes were needed twenty-four hours a day for the construction of the Sarcophagus and could not be spared. The NIKIMT team conducted a second successful experiment, deploying its invention from helicopters, but was then denied permission to fly—because the rotor downdraft recirculated too much toxic dust.
Sheathed in his hood, lead apron, respirator, and pieces of lead sheet torn from the walls of government offices in Chernobyl, the radiologist sprinted across the roof, glanced around quickly, and then tossed five shovelfuls of graphite over the precipice into the ruin of Unit Four. In one minute and thirteen seconds, he absorbed a dose of 15 rem and won the Order of the Red Star. His outfit had reduced his exposure by slightly more than a third, but the gamma field was so powerful that the lead made little practical difference. To the soldiers who followed him, speed remained the best
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To prepare his troops for the battlefield, Tarakanov built a full-scale mockup of the rooftops: a new postapocalyptic training ground, this time drawn from life, modeled on aerial photographs of the plant, and scattered with dummy graphite blocks, fuel assemblies, and pieces of zirconium tubing.
But if they didn’t do it, who else would?
The radiation was so intense that afterward it became visible on film, seeping into Kostin’s cameras, rising through the sprockets, leaving ghostly traces at the foot of his pictures, like high-water marks after a flood.
3,828 men in all, each of them eventually given a printed certificate and a small cash bonus, admitted for decontamination, and sent home.
