Tags: Chernobyl »»»» Fission Nuclear Reactors
The USSR did not publicly disclose the Chernobyl accident until Sweden detected a large increase in radioactivity. The BBC put together this excellent news program within a couple days of the USSR admitting to the accident. This report shows the alarm people had at the time. As one of the interviewees pointed out, for radiation to be detectable 700+ miles away in Sweden, there must have been a considerable release at the Chernobyl site. But it's also clear the people speaking in the report were making best guesses because there was no solid concrete information available at the time this report was made. The last thing said in this report is especially telling -- the speaker guesses that the reactor which exploded is a boiling water reactor, a design that's popular around the world. He goes on to say that even for a reactor with a containment building -- the Chernobyl reactor had no containment building -- the economic consequences of a major meltdown accident would be enormous. The Fukushima nuclear disaster of a few years ago proves that point, as the Japanese Government is spending major megabucks cleaning up the site, and they have a 40 year project ahead of them completing that cleanup. There are whole new technologies that must be develop to do the cleanup. And in the meantime there is an exclusion zone of a hundred of square miles or more in Japan.
