Touring the Exclusion Zone
I've always thought that photos of the ferris wheel in Pripyat were particularly haunting. I suppose everything about Pripyat - the young, exciting city built to house those who worked at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant - is a little haunting. Something about a thriving city being completely abandoned in a matter of days is just terrifying to me. Probably because I feel like it could happen to any of us, at any time, really. Anyway, I read something this morning that made this Pripyat contraption even creepier: it was never used. According to this article in the Washington Post, it was set to open on May Day 1986. By May Day there weren't really any citizens of Pripyat there to celebrate. That article, by the way, is quite like most articles written by those who've paid for tours of the exclusion zone. It's still an interesting read, though. And, please, don't tell me how much more efficiently we could run our ferris wheels with nuclear power...or how much faster it would turn.
posted by Sara Ch. at 7:49 AM
4 Comments:
Good post.
Mr. Morris
Ask Morris
>>Something about a thriving city being completely abandoned in a matter of days is just terrifying to me. Probably because I feel like it could happen to any of us, at any time, really.
Nuclear power plants that are not case studies in how to not build nuclear power plants, are not built off-spec on top of it, and do not have tests run on them while they're operating do not have steam explosions that eject parts of the core into the atmosphere. If you would like me to elaborate, I will.
Actually, had they abandoned Pripyat 6 days earlier, instead of acting like lying Russian political hacks,
and saying all was well, a lot of thyroid cancer would have been averted.
But Russia will always be Russia.
Every single business and agency in Russia is, to some extent, fatally corrupt.
Even the exclusion zone authorities, who now have a thriving Western-European tourist trade, in Pripyat visits,
mostly by anti-nuclear tourists.
(boggles the mind, doesn't it?)
The design agency that put Chernobyl together, without any containment, with a positive void coefficient, and delayed a startup test four four years--until the core had become self-irradiated enough to make the test criminally dangerous to do, was just about as inept, smug, corrupt, and doomed as any other Dostoyevskian member of the Rus has ever been.
The lesson to us??
Don't be born in Russia.
The lesson about nuclear power?
None.
Harrydog.
Ask Mike Marriotte, of NIRS, what is his relation to WISE Amsterdam.
Ask him to show you his list of donations, and see if any large family interests of any super-wealthy oil family more or less pays NIRS' way in the world.
Then compare his answer ,
to the bio presented on http://activistcash.com,
and draw your own conclusions on these matters.
have a nice green day today
Harry, dog on the River!
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