HBO: Chernobyl

@carl669 I think you are going to love the first episode. I won’t say much to spoil it, even though you probably have a good idea of what happens.

Looking forward to the rest of the series. Curious to see if they really show the rest of what’s fucked.

@RiotDemon i’m curious about that as well. i think the second episode aired tonight. so, i’ve got 2 episodes of Chernobyl and 2 eps of GoT to watch this weekend. i’m on call this weekend, so keeping my fingers crossed no one’s system decides to blow up.

@cinoclav how many iodine pills do you have at home? How many at the hospital?

What else is necessary for decontamination at the hospital? The first episode showed Acute Radiation Sickness. Not nice.

@cinoclav So you had glowing reviews?

@RiotDemon I don’t have any at home, I’m outside of the zone for it. We do have them in our kits at work. Every kit includes two 65mg tablets. Recommended dose is 65mg for kids and 130mg for adults. I actually live in PA but work in NJ so I’m about 45 miles away from the plant near work.

Typically decon is begun in the field. If the patient isn’t actually injured, it should technically all be performed in the field. We practice at the hospital in case a patient should need further medical treatment. There’s a consultant that comes in for our drills and he usually mocks up some sort of injury, anything from abrasions to compound fractures. He tries to keep it reasonably simple when it’s a FEMA year but likes to have fun on the alternate years. The non-FEMA years are still graded by the State Police Office of Emergency Management. The short version of what happens is: We get the call from the ambulance company alerting us of incoming and the announcement goes out over the PA system. We have designated personnel to set up our major treatment room in our ER. A floor covering made of Herculite goes down over any area where the patient and staff will be. We have a plastic platform that sits on a stretcher for the patient to lay on. It has a drain tube which empties into a large drum. If need be, there’s an underground storage tank in that room where everything can be dumped into. The patient is brought in, clothing is (not actually in a drill) removed and the medical assessment is performed. From there we have to survey the patient from head to toe with a Geiger meter looking for contamination areas. It’s agonizingly slow to do. We use water and soap pads to decontaminate the areas of interest. Essentially it’s survey, rinse, wash, rinse, dry, repeat… It continues until the contaminated area radiation level is brought down to within 300 counts per minute within normal room background levels. If the patient needs emergency medical care before they can be fully decontaminated, so be it. Lifesaving comes first. In the end, whatever entity actually caused the contamination is responsible for the entire cleanup and disposal of anything radioactive.

@cinoclav thank you. That was very in-depth.

@PooltoyWolf We used to go on field trips to the Ginna nuclear power plant in school. Good times.

@PooltoyWolf Hi neighbor, i’m much closer to that plant than you are.

@PooltoyWolf aww, no more College of Turtle Knowledge.

@RiotDemon Yes, that was it!!

@jaybird Heh, awesome. We used to keep the boat in the Harbortown Marina in Fort Pierce. I volunteered at the FEC 253 railroad museum too, when that was a thing.

POKER! JOKER! NOT MEDIOCRE! AWESOME!

@medz damn I love that movie

@ThatsHeadly interesting. Never thought much about it since I’ve never been living around one. My grandma lived in a city with one, but I didn’t even know until recently.

Just looked at a list of proposed coal plants. The nuclear plant is on the list. Why is coal still a thing? Especially in Florida with all this damn sun?

@RiotDemon @ThatsHeadly Solar is very expensive, inefficient, without battery storage doesn’t work when the sun isn’t shining, becomes less efficient with age and weather, and takes up a lot of space. There are probably other reasons, but those are the main ones I remember.

@Al_Coholic @RiotDemon @ThatsHeadly Yeah, energy storage in particular is a huge issue. With coal, it’s already been stored in an efficient medium.
Batteries are inefficient, expensive, and their manufacture and disposal are bad for the environment.
Some areas will pump water into elevated reservoirs during periods of low energy consumption, so that it can then flow back down and be used to generate power during periods of high demand. This is not particularly practical in Florida.

@RiotDemon @ThatsHeadly Coal is still thing because they lobby Washington to stay in business. It’s the Golden Rule in the USA—he who has the Gold makes the rules. Capitalism at its finest—eff the planet when money can be made. Also, eff the people who get poisoned from the byproducts and spills when we’re making tons of money. Capitalism=money above all else. Golden Rule=he who has the gold makes the rules. Welcome to ‘Merica

@Al_Coholic @RiotDemon

While those are true to a certain extent, wind is now cheaper than coal. Baseload (which is argument always made about coal and nuclear) is, basically, a crock. Baseload exists because of how coal and nuclear plants work, not the other way around. Most solar panels still produce 80% of their rated output after 25 years. Storage remains a problem but lots of progress has been made in the last 10 years.

If all the externalities of coal were included in the cost - illness, pollution, cleanup, etc, coal would be the most expensive fuel, by a large margin.

Also, coal in the ground typically contains a bit of u238 or thorium. That goes up the stack as particulate matter. Your average coal plant spits out way more radioactivity than a nuke plant that is working correctly. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

The Chernobyl design was just… stupid. No sane person would ever design a reactor like that.

"a distinctive feature of the Chernobyl design, which sets it apart from conventional nuclear power plants in most of the world, is its tendency to generate a sudden and uncontrollable burst of power if large steam bubbles, or “voids,” are allowed to form in the reactor core, as they did before the accident.

This peculiarity of the Chernobyl type of graphite reactor, called a positive void effect, is now seen as a decisive factor in the accident, one that transformed successive blunders on the part of Soviet operators over a period of hours into a catastrophe."

@Al_Coholic @RiotDemon @ThatsHeadly Can you clarify what you mean when you say that baseload is a crock? Because that sounds crazy to me.
Baseload is the minimum power demand a grid can expect, based upon things that will be using electricity at any given time.
I don’t know how you can argue that that isn’t a thing that exists.
Or do you mean something else?

@Al_Coholic @Limewater @RiotDemon It’s a crock the way some power companies use it, because it’s not a requirement of the grid - it’s a requirement of large scale plants like coal and nuclear - they can’t make money and aren’t efficient below a specific operating output, and because they are slow to start up. The grid needs enough power to power everything hooked up to it, and drawing current at that point in time.

This is why power companies push the baseload idea:

“While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants* to meet the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to be so.”

*coal and nuclear, which may take several days to start up and shut down

@Al_Coholic @RiotDemon @ThatsHeadly Your quote doesn’t deny the existence of base load. It just says that the base load could conceivably be supported by means other than large-scale power plants.
Yes, the grid needs enough power to power everything hooked up to it at a single point in time, but, realistically, there is a minimum load that will always be on the grid except in very strange circumstances such as power outages. There will always be someone running climate control, data centers, medical equipment, lights, etc.
If the power company knows they need to be producing a specific amount, it makes sense to generate that amount as cheaply as possible and handle deviations using more agile methods.

@aetris As opposed to my story above where I work now, I used to work at Phoenixville Hospital. We had a similar drill there in case of an accident at Limerick. It’s funny, one of my friends is an MRI tech. He chose that particular field as he’s a bit of a radiation-phobe. He and his wife bought a house by Raven’s Claw Golf Course, a stones throw from the plant. She obviously won that battle.

@aetris @cinoclav Hi Neighbors! I see those Limerick towers from my house and job and everywhere else I go.

@callow @cinoclav - When we decided to move out of the city we looked at a lot of houses in and around Phoenixville, including one where you could see the cooling towers from anywhere OUTside the house, but from inside there was no window that gave a view of them. Neither of us were interested in the place, but it was actually one of the cleverer examples of architectural work we saw.

(The house compared favorably to the house where the garage was OVER the bedrooms and the one where you exited from the garage INto the master bedroom, though!)

If the fuel rods still have their compression springs and end caps you could try using one for a pogo stick. They are usually about 12 feet long, though.

@Kabn I spent more time reading historical stuff after watching the second episode. Seems pretty legit. I think that’s why it’s so chilling.

In the “After the Episode” things they do point out some of the changes they’ve made.

@RiotDemon I liked the simple explainations from the trial.

@sammydog01 I did too.
I got very emotional when Legasov and Boris were sitting outside.

Then the end credits.