It was interesting that there were firm denials at the time, yet everyone was used to propaganda (yes, fake news) so it wasn't at first clear if there was a coverup or the claim of a problem was western misdirection!<p>But reports from neighboring countries pretty quickly put that to rest, and then the narrative switched to the heroics of the emergency workers (who were indeed heroic and, sadly, literally self-sacrificing.<p>The plume traveled over northern Western Europe, but West Germany, at least, didn't take any immediate action. 15-20 years later there appeared to be a slew of unusual cancers (e.g. my mother in law's tear duct; my friend's mother salivary gland...unusual ones in accretive tissue. But I don't know if there's been any systematic survey to see if there was an assignable increase in the death rate, or if I am just divining a signal from what's actually small-n noise.
> It is concluded that the two explosions in the reactor that many witnesses recognized were thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions at the bottom of a few fuel channels and then some 2.7 s later a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor vessel. The nuclear explosions formed a plasma jet that shot upward through the still intact refueling tubes, rammed the 350-kg plugs, and continued through the quite thin roof and then some 2.5 to 3 km into the atmosphere where the meteorological situation provided a route to Cherepovets.<p>That's pretty crazy. It ended up as a nuclear canon firing 350kg (700lbs) projectiles straight up into the atmosphere, right through the roof. Even more odd is that some lab, for a completely unrelated reason (building a liquid oxygen and nitrogen facility) was sampling noble gases from the atmosphere. And then someone could go back and draw these conclusions more than 30 years later.
Previously theorized by Charlie Stross in a significantly more fanciful, but riveting take: <a href="https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/</a>
<i>We decided to analyze this scenario in detail, but the project was postponed at the time [1987] due to the lack of high-quality, high-resolution gridded weather data covering April-May 1986 for driving the dispersion model. When in 2016 the high-resolution regional reanalysis for Europe was published and extended back in time to 1980, it became possible for us to perform good-quality dispersion modeling.</i><p>Wow.
And there is a large new release of Ru-106 somewhere in Russia... what's going on?<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac...</a><p>Posted on its own:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746240</a>
"<i>Russia reports radioactivity 986 times the norm after nuclear accident claim</i>"<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioactivity-986-times-norm-nuclear-accident-claim" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/russia-radioac...</a><p>"Russia’s meteorological service has confirmed “extremely high” concentrations of the radioactive isotope ruthenium-106 were found in several parts of the country in late September, confirming European reports about the contamination this month."<p>Events repeat, denial at first for a month and than downplaying the accident and the contamination of larger part two continents.
There was a documentary some years ago on TV where a guy who repeatedly had gone inside the Chernobyl power plant came to the same conclusion. He based his theory on the amount of core material that was found, and which was less than expected, meaning that some of it must have been consumed in a nuclear explosion.<p>Thats all I remember, and I can't find the source anymore.
I can see how voids in the water cause an increase in neutron flux, but I thought water was needed to slow the neutrons, and that fast neutrons result in reduced reaction.
Chernobyl journal by a Elena Filatova, who biked around the ghostly place a few years later, is worth reading: <a href="https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-volume-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.elenafilatova.net/post/the-chernobyl-journal-vol...</a>
I still remember the reports on TV from there at the time. Initially there was a flat out denial that anything happened at all, but once the scale of the catastrophe became clear (within about a day), and it became clear that it can’t be swept under the rug, we started seeing the coverage of unbelievable heroics that people would demonstrate. I mean literally firefighters pouring water into the molten reactor core by standing at the edge of it, and then dying the same day from radiation poisoning. The radiation was so strong that the TV helicopter filming the reactor from above (which in itself was heroic given the kinds of shit suspended in the air) would show the most radioactive part with sort of a haze. Endless streams of trucks pouring concrete, etc, etc. It was 30 years ago so I don’t remember much, but man to get the Secretary General to admit such a bad fuckup — that was something truly extraordinary.