tip-c
New member
Many of you have probably already heard about it but know very little of. As an introduction I would simply like to give you a bit of history about the area and what happened. If you’re not a history person, well feel free to move on to the pics!
Chernobyl is a small region/district located about 120km north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in the Kievska Oblast, in other words the province of Kiev. The region is obviously most famous for its Nuclear power plant which is located about 18km from Chernobyl. About 4km away from the plant there is the largest city of the region called Prypiat which was once home to all the workers of the power plant as well as their families.
During the daytime of April 25th 1986, reactor #4 was scheduled to be shut down for maintenance as well as for an experiment which were to take place to test the reactors cooling. During the day the reactor’s output had gradually been reduced to 50% at which point the regional power grid operators requested that the shutdown be postponed to satisfy peak electrical demand of the evening. The crew that was commissioned to work during that time had been instructed in advance and were fairly familiar with the whole procedure. They were the ones who were supposed to conduct most of the experiment and the night crew only had to maintain basic cooling of a reactor which had been shutdown. One thing lead to another and the shutdown and experiment could only resume at 11:04PM. By this time the day shift was long gone, the evening crew was getting ready to leave and the night crew was preparing to take over at 12:00am. No one in the night shift was prepared to conduct this experiment which what pretty much lead to the catastrophe. To give you an idea of how messed up everything was at this point, here is a small transcript of a telephone conversation of one of the operators: “What shall I do? In the programme there are instructions of what to do, and then a lot of things are crossed out. His interlocutor thought for a while and then replied: Follow the crossed out” To make a long story short what happened after this is that they continued with the shutdown of the reactor. For unknown reasons, the operator made a mistake and the reactor almost completely shutdown. First of all this is very unsafe and secondly under these conditions they could not conduct their experiment. They hurried to regain power in the reactor which eventually regained only 1/3 of the power necessary to conduct the experiment yet the crew began their experimental procedure anyway. A part of the experiment was to activate additional water cooling pumps. The extra water lowered the reactors output further so the crew removed even further the control rods used to limit the power of the reactor to compensate for the added water cooling. All this created extremely unstable conditions since the crew was doing everything to compensate for the loss of power, this ended up backfiring in their face as at a point the reactor just gained so much power that they had to hit the panic button. Within 7 seconds after hitting the panic button, the reactor was at 10 times normal output but at this point it was far too late to do anything. Basically, one mistake lead to another and the whole thing ended up blowing up due to massive pressure. This eventually caused more related explosions and a massive fire which is largely responsible for the spread of radiation.
A little about radiation:
It is really very simple, and the device we use for measuring radiation levels is called a Geiger counter . If you flick it on in Kiev, it will measure about 12-16 micro roentgen per hour. In a typical city of Russia and America, it will read 10-12 micro roentgens per hour. In the center of many European cities are 20 microR per hour, the radioactivity of the stone.
1,000 micro roentgens equal one milliroentgen and 1,000 milliroentgens equal 1 roentgen. So one roentgen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roentgens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach.
In the first days after explosion, some places around the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roentgens per hour. Some area of the building had radiation levels of almost 6 roentgens/second. A quick calculation reveals that the workers that would encounter these levels would receive fatal doses within less than a minute and a half. These workers are known as Liquidators. This includes the firefighters who were first dispatched to fight the blaze. No one was told exactly what had happened and what to expect. None were wearing protective gear. Most of them died in the following weeks, months, years of acute radiation symptoms.
Okay, okay, enough talk....let’s get to the pics...
If you're wondering about the clothes and footwear, well you can't really wear sneakers or flippflops. There is alot of glass, nails and sharp broken things laying arround. So i took my grandfathers hunting boots just in case. As for the clothes, well you have to go trough a radiation check apon exiting the zone, if radiation is found on your clothes, they get incinerated, if its on you...well you get a chemical shower! I bought the pants on the way there and the shirt was my grand father's.
Approaching Chernobyl: First line says Chernobyl in Ukrainian.
This is the first checkpoint. It is the start of the Zone of Alienation also know as the 30KM Zone.
Going down the road towards town...
Monument in the center of the town of Chernobyl. It is right in front of the town store....yes there is a town store, roughly 1,500 people live in Chernobyl, within the 30KM Zone.
Old statue of Lenin still stands in Chernobyl
The River Prypiat which crosses right trough the zone.
The Chernobyl power plant as seen from the bridge over the Prypiat River.
Approaching the second zone, the 15KM Zone. This is alot more restricted then the first checkpoint because beyond this point, no one really lives there. Only workers go there to work in the day.
ЧАЭС = Atom Electrical Station of Chernobyl
Unfinished cooling towers for reactor 5 and 6. They were in the process of being built when reactor 4 blew up.
Reactors 5 and 6 under construction...Everything was left as is when the disaster happened. The cranes and everything else are still standing.
Reactor #4. The one that blew up. The water in the picture is for reactor cooling. What lies beneth the surface of the water is quite impressive.
The actual power station part of reactor #4
This is a small bridge for trains that crosses the cooling channel of the reactor....wonder what the people are looking at...lets find out!
This is not my acctual picture, but i shit you not, the catfish are really that size! The pictures i tried taking just came out bad as it was sunny and slightly windy so little ripples in the watter were the only thing visible on the pictures. The reason they are soo big is not radiation apparantly. Catfish can really get to this size if eft alone in nature. The problem is that they usualy dont because people catch them, but here it is very rare that people acctually catch these fish, they just feed them with entire loafs of bread!
Some guy actually caught one...just to show you how big these mother****ers are!
A Monument nearby
Right next to the above monument, a wall with plaques to those who parished
Under the bell, it says: A life for a life
The reactor #4
Notice the direction of the wind, Apparently on the roof of the sarcophagus, the level of radiation is over 20,000 roetgens per hour. Our guide was told us that since the wind is blowing from the reactor towards us we should hurry up to snap a few pics and GTFO!
The road to the city of Prypiat
Arriving in Prypiat! And to think this used to be a city...
Chernobyl is a small region/district located about 120km north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in the Kievska Oblast, in other words the province of Kiev. The region is obviously most famous for its Nuclear power plant which is located about 18km from Chernobyl. About 4km away from the plant there is the largest city of the region called Prypiat which was once home to all the workers of the power plant as well as their families.
During the daytime of April 25th 1986, reactor #4 was scheduled to be shut down for maintenance as well as for an experiment which were to take place to test the reactors cooling. During the day the reactor’s output had gradually been reduced to 50% at which point the regional power grid operators requested that the shutdown be postponed to satisfy peak electrical demand of the evening. The crew that was commissioned to work during that time had been instructed in advance and were fairly familiar with the whole procedure. They were the ones who were supposed to conduct most of the experiment and the night crew only had to maintain basic cooling of a reactor which had been shutdown. One thing lead to another and the shutdown and experiment could only resume at 11:04PM. By this time the day shift was long gone, the evening crew was getting ready to leave and the night crew was preparing to take over at 12:00am. No one in the night shift was prepared to conduct this experiment which what pretty much lead to the catastrophe. To give you an idea of how messed up everything was at this point, here is a small transcript of a telephone conversation of one of the operators: “What shall I do? In the programme there are instructions of what to do, and then a lot of things are crossed out. His interlocutor thought for a while and then replied: Follow the crossed out” To make a long story short what happened after this is that they continued with the shutdown of the reactor. For unknown reasons, the operator made a mistake and the reactor almost completely shutdown. First of all this is very unsafe and secondly under these conditions they could not conduct their experiment. They hurried to regain power in the reactor which eventually regained only 1/3 of the power necessary to conduct the experiment yet the crew began their experimental procedure anyway. A part of the experiment was to activate additional water cooling pumps. The extra water lowered the reactors output further so the crew removed even further the control rods used to limit the power of the reactor to compensate for the added water cooling. All this created extremely unstable conditions since the crew was doing everything to compensate for the loss of power, this ended up backfiring in their face as at a point the reactor just gained so much power that they had to hit the panic button. Within 7 seconds after hitting the panic button, the reactor was at 10 times normal output but at this point it was far too late to do anything. Basically, one mistake lead to another and the whole thing ended up blowing up due to massive pressure. This eventually caused more related explosions and a massive fire which is largely responsible for the spread of radiation.
A little about radiation:
It is really very simple, and the device we use for measuring radiation levels is called a Geiger counter . If you flick it on in Kiev, it will measure about 12-16 micro roentgen per hour. In a typical city of Russia and America, it will read 10-12 micro roentgens per hour. In the center of many European cities are 20 microR per hour, the radioactivity of the stone.
1,000 micro roentgens equal one milliroentgen and 1,000 milliroentgens equal 1 roentgen. So one roentgen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roentgens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach.
In the first days after explosion, some places around the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roentgens per hour. Some area of the building had radiation levels of almost 6 roentgens/second. A quick calculation reveals that the workers that would encounter these levels would receive fatal doses within less than a minute and a half. These workers are known as Liquidators. This includes the firefighters who were first dispatched to fight the blaze. No one was told exactly what had happened and what to expect. None were wearing protective gear. Most of them died in the following weeks, months, years of acute radiation symptoms.
Okay, okay, enough talk....let’s get to the pics...
If you're wondering about the clothes and footwear, well you can't really wear sneakers or flippflops. There is alot of glass, nails and sharp broken things laying arround. So i took my grandfathers hunting boots just in case. As for the clothes, well you have to go trough a radiation check apon exiting the zone, if radiation is found on your clothes, they get incinerated, if its on you...well you get a chemical shower! I bought the pants on the way there and the shirt was my grand father's.
Approaching Chernobyl: First line says Chernobyl in Ukrainian.
This is the first checkpoint. It is the start of the Zone of Alienation also know as the 30KM Zone.
Going down the road towards town...
Monument in the center of the town of Chernobyl. It is right in front of the town store....yes there is a town store, roughly 1,500 people live in Chernobyl, within the 30KM Zone.
Old statue of Lenin still stands in Chernobyl
The River Prypiat which crosses right trough the zone.
The Chernobyl power plant as seen from the bridge over the Prypiat River.
Approaching the second zone, the 15KM Zone. This is alot more restricted then the first checkpoint because beyond this point, no one really lives there. Only workers go there to work in the day.
ЧАЭС = Atom Electrical Station of Chernobyl
Unfinished cooling towers for reactor 5 and 6. They were in the process of being built when reactor 4 blew up.
Reactors 5 and 6 under construction...Everything was left as is when the disaster happened. The cranes and everything else are still standing.
Reactor #4. The one that blew up. The water in the picture is for reactor cooling. What lies beneth the surface of the water is quite impressive.
The actual power station part of reactor #4
This is a small bridge for trains that crosses the cooling channel of the reactor....wonder what the people are looking at...lets find out!
This is not my acctual picture, but i shit you not, the catfish are really that size! The pictures i tried taking just came out bad as it was sunny and slightly windy so little ripples in the watter were the only thing visible on the pictures. The reason they are soo big is not radiation apparantly. Catfish can really get to this size if eft alone in nature. The problem is that they usualy dont because people catch them, but here it is very rare that people acctually catch these fish, they just feed them with entire loafs of bread!
Some guy actually caught one...just to show you how big these mother****ers are!
A Monument nearby
Right next to the above monument, a wall with plaques to those who parished
Under the bell, it says: A life for a life
The reactor #4
Notice the direction of the wind, Apparently on the roof of the sarcophagus, the level of radiation is over 20,000 roetgens per hour. Our guide was told us that since the wind is blowing from the reactor towards us we should hurry up to snap a few pics and GTFO!
The road to the city of Prypiat
Arriving in Prypiat! And to think this used to be a city...
Last edited:
