The International Uranium Film Festival makes a stop at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona this December 2nd through the 4th, bringing three days of insightful documentaries that reveal stories of many First Nations and aboriginal peoples worldwide whose historical lands have been used for radioactive minerals mining and nuclear waste disposal - often with little regard for the health, safety, and security of the communities involved. The Southwestern United States was an epicenter of wartime and peacetime uranium mining from the Cold War onwards; the Navajo Nation only one of sadly many who have suffered its lasting ill consequences.
The [International Uranium Film Festival] is the world's only traveling film festival devoted to the entire Nuclear Fuel Chain, from uranium mining to uranium tailings and nuclear waste, from Hiroshima to Fukushima and Fallujah.
The festival will make its way from Albuquerque (Nov. 27-28) to Santa Fe (Nov. 30-Dec. 1), to Window Rock and finally to Washington D.C. and New York City in early 2014. The founder of the IUFF, Norbert G. Suchanek of Germany, will be present at each screening along with Executive Director Marcia Gomes de Oliveira of Brazil and various producers and directors of the films. Each screening is organized by a diverse group of volunteers to bring these films to the wide screen.
Because of the tremendous impact uranium mining has had on Diné peoples, while these films are playing in the theatre of the Navajo Nation Museum, there will be several organizations coming together on the side to dialogue about the uranium legacy issues still plaguing the Navajo Nation and the new uranium mining permit applications threatening nearby communities and Sacred Sites. Community groups, residents and allies will meet for the two and a half days at the museum and in the local area. Online video streaming will be available via ustream.com during selected hours of the event.
We're holding a party tomorrow to welcome the ring. If you plan to come, you should read this. Rain and thunderstorms are forecasted for tomorrow evening. The indoor portion of the muon g-2 event will occur regardless of the weather including hands-on science activities in Wilson Hall and scientists available to answer your questions (beginning at 5:30). The ring will move rain or shine and would be delayed only in the event of lightning. Check back here for updates and if you're planning to come out, bring your rain gear.
Here's a fascinating time-lapse video from Fermilab showing the July 24-25 overnight move in Illinois:
While I haven't yet had the chance to attend one of the touring festivals since their start in 2011, as a former media person with a life-long fascination in all things nuclear, the international Uranium Film Festival holds a very special interest for me. This past Sunday, May 26th capped nine days of film and documentary showings in Rio with the "Yellow Oscar" awards, celebrating offerings of exceptional merit. From the Uranium Film Festival's "Art and Awareness" website section,
[The festival] was founded in 2011 in Santa Teresa, the famous artist quarter in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. The aim of the festival is to inform the public, from a neutral position, about nuclear power, uranium mining, nuclear weapons and the health effects of radioactivity. The horror of atomic bombs and those who suffered from them, and nuclear accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima should never be forgotten - nor repeated. The correlation between nuclear energy and weapons must be openly discussed. The festival inspires discourse about the health and environmental risks of radioactive materials and waste. We seek to educate and activate the public on these issues. The dynamic media of film is an important tool to bring that information to a diverse international public.
Among this year's Yellow Oscar winners is Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1, a documentary by Adam Jonas Horowitz on the devastating effects of U.S. Cold-War nuclear testing on residents of the Marshall Islands, including government footage of nuclear tests and interviews with residents of nearby Rongelap Atoll,which was never evacuated before the March 1954 "Bravo" test - America's largest-ever atomic test explosion, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima.
Other winners this year include Atomic Ivan (Russia), for best feature fiction movie; Curiosity Kills (Estonia), for best short comedy; High Power (India), for best short documentary; Abita (Germany), for best animated film, and No to a Nuclear Jordan (Jordan), for the best student film.
I'm a big fan of TEDTalks, and as you can imagine this session holds a special appeal for me. It's a remarkable synthesis of science, art, mathematics, and the mysterious allure of radioactivity as Kollektivet Livet's Radioactive Orchestra turns half-lives into half-notes (among others) live at TEDx in Göteborg, Sweden. Enjoy.
Mitubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. of Japan announced it will begin marketing early next year the Astrocam 7000 HS, a new type of video camera that can show a superimposed display of radioactivity on its wide-angle 180-degree image, allowing cleanup crews and emergency responders to see "hot spots" in real time. The Asahi Shimbun reports,
"The portable camera, which will apply technology jointly developed with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is designed to allow for more efficient clean-up of radioactive contamination, an issue of great concern in Japan because of the nuclear disaster last year. The camera will use technology now in place on observation equipment aboard the ASTRO-H X-ray astronomy satellite operated by JAXA.
Tadayuki Takahashi, a professor of space physics at JAXA and project manager of the ASTRO-X, said, "The camera can measure radiation in high places, such as on roofs, and will lead to more efficient decontamination of radiation." Using two types of semiconductor sensors, the direction and strength of gamma rays emitted by radioactive materials such as cesium are measured and brought to light as a superimposed image on the visible landscape."
The seat material, including body armor parts (shoulders, arms, chest/abdominal area, thighs, neck), consists mainly of tungsten sheet, which offers excellent radiation shielding capability. Although the seat weighs a considerable 130 kilograms (kg), individual parts weigh less than 20kg and most of their weight is integrally supported by the seat, so the burden on the operator is minimal.
In addition, the operator can put on and remove the armor-like parts easily by opening/closing the front like a vest...these features provide a high rate of radiation shielding while simultaneously minimizing fatigue during continuous work and inconvenience to machine operation from wearing such shielding.
Here, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries demonstrates the Astrocam and explains its technology in this one-hour press conference video (in Japanese, no subtitles).
[Image of demonstration camera view courtesy of Asahi Shimbun Online] More on the Mitsubishi Astrocam 7000HS camera:
If I could snap my fingers and be in Berlin this October 4th through the 12th, I'd love to attend this remarkable Brazil-based international event:
The International Uranium Film Festival is dedicated to films about atomic bombs the whole nuclear fuel chain and radioactivity: Uranium mining, nuclear power plants, atomic bombs, nuclear waste, radioactive risks, nuclear medicine. The festival wants to stimulate the production of independent documentaries, movies and animated films about any nuclear or radioactive issue.
Uranium Film Festival is a project of the Yellow Archives, a cultural and educational organization that hopes to increase public information about nuclear power, nuclear waste, uranium mining and radioactivity in general. Yellow Archives is the first-ever film library in Brazil and Latin America dedicated to non-profit, educational and research films about the nuclear fuel chain and radioactivity, and makes its archives open to schools, universities and other non-profit organizations. Among the films to be screened are Roberto Pires' riveting Cesio-137: El Pesadelo de Goiânia (Cesium-137: The Nightmare of Goiânia), the 2011 Audience Award winner for Best Feature Film, and Bill Kiesling's 2012 "Yellow Oscar"-winning documentary, "Not for Public Release: a Nuclear Incident in Lock Haven."
Didn't get a chance to visit Argonne National Laboratory's 2012 Energy Showcase in the Chicago suburbs this past September 15th? Don't worry: we're very happy to share our video and photo highlights from this rare opportunity to peek inside the birthplace of modern nuclear science, and see first-hand some of the amazing research being done in America's heartland.
According to an on-site event organizer, this year's open house was the first one held in five years, after tighter security restrictions post-9/11 put National Laboratory open houses on hold. This year's Energy Showcase was also the first to require visitors to pre-register online. While past events had as many as 20,000 visitors each, Energy Showcase 2012 hosted a more modest registered attendance of approximately 2,000* - not necessarily a downside if you were seeking a good, close look at the dozens of fascinating exhibits on hand. [*According to another person I spoke to later, the registration attendance was capped at 10,000, so I may have misheard the original attendance estimate. If any readers out there have more solid attendance stats, please let us know in the comments! - LR]
First, let's stop in at the Physics building to have a look at the Gammasphere, the world's most powerful spectrometer for nuclear structure research. If the Gammasphere looks familiar, you may remember that the device had a 'guest starring role' in the 2003 feature film "Hulk," as the contraption that triggered Bruce Banner's verdant transformation - back then, it was physically located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read more at http://www.phy.anl.gov/gammasphere/index.html
Next, let's take a short drive south to the nearby Advanced Photon Source complex, a facility which provides the brightest x-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere to more than 5,000 scientists from around the United States and the world. Here's a panned view from the APS observation gallery, as a researcher gives a basic explanation of its workings in the final 30 seconds or so of the video. In person, the building and equipment are remarkably large; what you see here on the video is only a tiny fraction of the APS accelerator "ring." More at http://aps.anl.gov/About/APS_Overview/
Here is a live demonstration of a technique called "acoustic levitation" that uses high-frequency (~22kHz) sound waves to suspend small objects like liquid droplets, plastic spheres, and popcorn in mid-air. Bystanders could manipulate and rearrange the plastic beads within the sound column using a metal spoon, creating intriguing patterns. As you can see from the video, the column behaves as though the beads are 'magnetically' attracted along an invisible vertical line running between the upper and lower sound generators. The demonstrators explain that the beads are spaced at wavelength node intervals of about one-third inch, allowing visualization of the standing wave. More at http://www.anl.gov/articles/no-magic-show-real-world-levitation-inspire-better-pharmaceuticals
Down the hall, we stopped by to see an X-ray diffraction demonstration, which provides a simulation of how the APS' powerful X-ray beam can reveal the before-unseen inner structures of nanoparticles, proteins, crystalline structures, organic molecules, and many other materials. More at http://aps.anl.gov/
Much has been said here and elsewhere on the longstanding tragedy of Chernobyl, so I'm always pleasantly surprised to find a fresh look at the topic. Today I discovered a documentary by Adrian Musto, a photographer and filmmaker who also posts under the nom de WebArkitekture. What's he's created here "on no budget" (in his words) using footage from a recent visit to Ukraine and Pripyat, is remarkable. Beginning with some archival videoclips from the first days of the 1986 accident, the film captures the haunting air of present-day Pripyat, the soon-to-be "New Safe Confined" Sarcophagus, interviews with residents, and some on-the-spot radiation meter readings of objects and structures. I'm sure you'll find "Inside Chernobyl" fascinating. [Note: some of the images may be disturbing to sensitive viewers.]
Musto's photos from Chernobyl, viewable in a gallery on his website, are also stunning. You can listen to some of his Chernobyl trip backstory at Deep Inside Podcast from July 10, 2011, which features very nice atmospheric IDM music from Kiev-based producer Queensway.
Yesterday, in the Nevada desert, demolition crews from New York and Maryland felled a legendary piece of America's atomic history.
At 1,527 feet tall, the former Nevada Test Site's BREN tower was the "tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River," and also the "tallest structure of its kind ever demolished," according to the National Nuclear Safety Administration. Originally built in 1962 in Yucca Flats, from fifty-one 30-foot sections of steel and two and a half miles of steel cable, the tower was moved to its latest location in Jackass Flats in 1966 after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty banned open-air nuclear testing.
From CNN: The tower stood taller than the Empire State Building (1,454 feet) and the Eiffel Tower (1,063 feet). It was also taller than the iconic Stratosphere (1,148 feet) on the Las Vegas strip...[T]he BREN Tower took its name from the nuclear radiation experiment for which it was built: Bare Reactor Experiment - Nevada. BREN Tower was designed to provide a way for scientists to accurately estimate radiation doses received by survivors of the atomic bombs detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The tower stood 1,527 feet tall because that was the height at which "Little Boy," the first atomic bomb used in warfare, was detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
This story from Japan illustrates how radioactive contamination can be dispersed by animal vectors, as well as weather, water, and human intervention: NHK News reports cesium has been found in the brains of wild rats in the forested area about 30km from the beleaguered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Apodemus speciosus is actually a species called the Large Japanese Field Mouse, so I'm uncertain if the article is referring to both rats and mice, or just the Large Japanese Field Mice. The linked NHK News article contains a 1:37 video (in Japanese) which may provide a more detailed explanation. Judging from size alone, the rodents shown captured in the video look to be A. speciosus, not the typical species of domestic rat common in Japan.
[English text via Google Translate]
Highly Radioactive Cesium from Rat Cortex
Radioactive cesium in the 3100 Becquerels [range] was detected in rats in the wild, captured in the forest approximately 30 km from [the] nuclear power plants. An expert at Fukushima Daiichi Tokyo Electric Power Company [said] there is a need to examine continuously the impact on wildlife.
...Apodemus speciosus was captured wild in October and December last year in the forest. As a result of examining the concentration of radioactive cesium accumulated in the body of 12 mice...on average, per kilogram, from rats captured in the village of Kawauchi [measured at] 3,100 becquerels, in Kitaibaraki 790 becquerels has been detected.
Radiation dose in the air of the capture location, Kawauchi village, is in the [range of] 0.2 μSv - 3.11 μSv per hour, and [in] Kitaibaraki, where radiation dose is high, [there was a tendency to find] higher concentrations of radioactive materials in the rat[s]. The results of the survey, Yoshihisa Kubota, Sub-Leader of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, [indicate] "There is a need to examine ... rats to study the effects of radiation to the same extent as human animals, continue to impact on wildlife of radioactive material."
Linked below are a few studies that may give an idea of how radiation spread by animal vectors like rats contributes to environmental contamination: when contaminated vectors are consumed by predators, if vector and subsequent predator wastes contain appreciable radioactive contamination, and also, if vectors die naturally, how much contamination is left in the soil, landfills, etc. According to one of the articles linked below, larger wildlife like deer pose a greater risk due to their larger body size, wider habitat range, and longer lifespan. Rats in particular would be a particularly important vector to study, given their affinity for human dwellings and garbage dumps. Please note that academic or library access may be needed to access the linked journal papers.
On May 25th, Warner Brothers will release a science fiction/supernatural horror film set in Pripyat, the abandoned "ghost town" adjacent to the ruins of Chernobyl's reactor complex. The crumbling town, seen for years on sites like "Kidd of Speed," seems a perfect backdrop for fright flicks. Let me say at the outset that I'm a huge movie fan: cheesy, gory horror flicks are some of my favorites. That said, as someone who was profoundly affected as a college freshman by live unfolding news accounts of Chernobyl (in fact, those memories are one of the main reasons I started this blog back in 2004) I have to admit I find the film's concept a bit troubling and distasteful.
I suspect the primary target audience, if not the filmmakers themselves, probably view the Chernobyl tragedy as just another creepy historical footnote, something awful that happened a long time ago in a country far away. With popular video games like "Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl," and the film's central premise of "extreme tourism" into the Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl's legacy has mushroomed (if you'll forgive the expression) into a booming cottage industry of curiosities for the "zombie apocalypse" crowd.
Since the nuclear strikes on Japan in World War II, popular culture from 50's Pulp and Godzilla to the Hulk and Spiderman have conflated nuclear mishaps with Bug Eyed Monsters. But I wonder: would movie executives and audiences respond favorably to a zombie apocalypse tale set in a different contemporary locale - say, the Japanese Tsunami of 2011 and the Fukushima Disaster? The Union Carbide Disaster in Bhopal, India? Hurricane Katrina? The terrorist attacks of 9/11?
The passage of time always seems to be an insulator against troubling memories; the human race couldn't survive otherwise. What's sad is that if nothing else, "Chernobyl Diaries" highlights how a mere two-and-a-half decades can generate cultural amnesia of the immense sacrifice and suffering that occurred in Europe and that continues to this day. Thinking charitably, maybe any kind of attention to the Chernobyl tragedy could generate a resurgence of interest in the continuing human need there; after all, they say there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Perhaps the least the makers of "Chernobyl Diaries" could do is donate a portion of their profits to one of the many charitable organizations that provide ongoing support to Chernobyl's victims, many born decades later. Those who were there and survived live with scarred minds, hearts, and/or bodies: every living being born in the afflicted region since April 26, 1986 will carry Chernobyl's memory into the far distant future.
Recently, we took a field trip [with a SPER Scientific portable radiation monitor in tow] to Red Gate Woods near Willow Springs, IL, home of the Plot M nuclear disposal site. The area is open to the public but a bit hard to find, located off a small side trail in the forest preserve. While radiation readings at the Plot M stone monument were essentially background-level, one of the numerous test well caps (kept padlocked) did appear to have higher than normal radiation counts, averaging about 0.1-0.3 mR/hr as seen from this short video clip.
Were there any other kind? This striking film footage (taken by the late Vladimir Shevchenko, who died of radiation exposure soon after this film was made) was posted to YouTube several years ago, but as we approach the anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, these images show the stunning disregard for radiation protection given to the first responders and "liquidators." They dig, film, and cart away searingly radioactive debris using only conventional work gloves, cloth facemasks, and construction respirators, seemingly unaware or dismissive of the immediate danger they face. Some later web versions of Shevchenko's film have background music added, but I think this silent version with supertitles conveys its potent message best.
[Originally Posted May 15, 2004] My search for information on Chernobyl has taken me to some very strange places.
This morning, I found this image on a fascinating Italian Chernobyl website, The Humus Project, or Progetto Humus, at http://www.progettohumus.it [the page this image appears on is here]. Look closely.
I can't verify its authenticity (unfortunately, many of the images lack captions or explanations) but it appears to be a shot of the glowing core of Chernobyl Reactor 4 shortly after the explosion. The timestamp on the image reads 01:23:59. But is it 1:23:59 AM on April 26th, 1986?
Recording of the shift supervisor: "Strong impacts, the shutdown systems stop before reaching the lower end position ..." Reactor excursion with more than 100 times of the nominal power. Explosion and destruction of the reactor core. The upper plate of the reactor is hurled up, all pressure tubes break off. Core material and burninggraphite parts are ejected. The reactor is burning, further fires start in the surrounding. Massive release of radioactive fission products.
If this photo is genuine, then it would be the first time I've been able to track down an image of the reactor in the earliest stages of the accident. I have not yet found an image of this type anywhere in Chernobyl literature, either on video, in books or and other source. Where did this come from, considering that the former Soviet Union did not inform the outside world of the explosion until days later? Was there a camera trained on the reactor? Did the image come from a flight over the reactor later than the timestamp indicates?
A little while back, I received an email from Kathy Ryan of the Chernobyl Children's Project International, with news about the organization's special web series, "20 Years, 20 Lives":
"...I've been reading your Radioactive blog with interest, and I wanted to call to your attention a series that we recently started running on our website. It is called "Chernobyl: 20 Years 20 Lives" and it is a series of eyewitness accounts in words and interviews of people whose lives continue to be affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster...."
Thank you for your message, Kathy - I'm very happy to pass on the word, and thank you for all the good work your organization provides to help those affected by the disaster.
Chernobyl – Twenty Years, Twenty Lives is EarthVision's photo journalistic journey through the countries of the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Sweden, France, and UK. It follows twenty people in their daily lives nowadays and reflects on how they changed after the events of April 1986. The goal of the project is to learn from the history and look at the accident from the present perspective at different levels, both locally and globally. Almost 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster, controversy continues about the true effects of the disaster. Chernobyl Children's Project International believes that the story of Chernobyl can be best told through the eyes of the variety of people who have been affected by the disaster. ... A photo exhibition with the twenty life stories will tour the world beginning at April 2006. EarthVision is currently seeking exhibition hosts. You can reach EarthVision and learn more about the project at 20lives.info.
From New Scientist: "Alexander Yuvchenko was on duty at Chernobyl's reactor number 4 the night it exploded on 26 April 1986. He is one of the few working there that night to have survived. He suffered serious burns and went through many operations to save his life, and he is still ill from the radiation. He recently broke his silence for a documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel. Here he speaks to Michael Bond about what happened that night:"
To get a clearer idea of what had happened we walked outside. What we saw was terrifying. Everything that could be destroyed had been. The entire water coolant system was gone. The right-hand side of the reactor hall had been completely destroyed, and on the left the pipes were just hanging. That was when I realised that Khodemchuk was definitely dead. The place where I was told he'd been standing was in ruins. The huge turbines were still standing, but everything around them was rubble. He must have been buried under that.
From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot because of gamma rays and neutrons and everything else that was spewing out. But Tregub yanked me around the corner to get me out the way. He was older and more experienced.
While dozens of documentaries (and at least one computer video game) are set in the ruins of Chernobyl, no one has shot a feature film in the Forbidden Zone near Pripyat - until now, that is. Night of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis begins filming soon:
Ukrainian-born producer Anatoly Fradis is proud -- despite the obstacles and the cost. "Up to a couple of days before we began shooting, it was touch-and-go whether they would let us in, and I had to pay more than I had budgeted to secure the permission," Fradis says, standing inside Chernobyl's first checkpoint inside the zone.
"Chernobyl is very spooky and serves our purpose -- we are shooting in all these abandoned towns and villages, with rusting equipment lying around everywhere," Fradis says. The sense of a post-apocalyptic world dawns as we follow the Chaika around the Chernobyl district.
Grass and shrubs sprout from holes in the sides of crumbling cottages. A graveyard for helicopters, fire trucks and other equipment used in the cleanup operation in 1986 stretches beside a road. In Pripyat, the deserted town that once housed the reactor's work force and their families, children's toys still litter the rubbish-strewn kindergarten, and fading Soviet slogans adorn the sides of gaunt concrete apartment blocks.
Dr. Alexander Borovoi is one of the people interviewed (his segment starts at 32:40) in this astounding BBC documentary from 1991, "Inside Chernobyl's Sarcophagus." Borovoi and his colleagues Viktor Popov, Yuri Buzulukov, and other "Stalkers" speak with western journalists for the first time since the accident. The scientists and BBC crew enter the Reactor 4 building taking measurements and video footage of its wreckage, in extreme haste (due to the radiation levels) and incredibly dangerous conditions. Footage had to be shot by actual cameramen working quickly, as the searing radiation and rough ground caused robotic camera rigs to mire or fail within minutes. In one segment we see a clever improvisation: the team jerry-rigged a small videocamera onto a wire remote-controlled child's toy tank. The end of the documentary is an interview with Borovoi and Popov five years later, where we revisit their dire predictions, and the surviving members of the "bio-robot" team.
The line between hero and victim was thin in the first frantic weeks after the accident. Firemen fought the flames but lacked instruments to tell them they faced lethal doses of radiation. Military helicopter pilots hovered in the radioactive smoke plume to smother the burning reactor with tons of sand and lead, but their bombing runs missed the mark.
Yet the catastrophe–and the chance for heroism–did not end when the fire burned out. In the months and years that followed, a band of scientists led by physicist Alexander Borovoi explored the reactor's corpse to make sure it could not reawaken. Working in a hot, dark labyrinth where lingering radiation could kill within minutes, they mapped and analyzed tons of reactor fuel remaining. It was heroism of a quieter and more effective order than had come before. "Borovoi knew what he was doing," says Harvard University nuclear physicist Richard Wilson, "and he had the imagination and common sense" to succeed.
To find the remnants, Borovoi and his men had to venture into the heart of the destroyed reactor. Robots were not up to the job; they got stuck in debris or ran amok, circuits scrambled by radiation. "We had only one kind of robots [that worked]," says Borovoi. "Biorobots–ourselves." They called themselves "stalkers." Coveralls, gloves, and a respirator were their protection–lead suits were too bulky for dashes through the reactor. A fall or wrong turn could be fatal.
Late in 1986, beyond a gantlet of highly radioactive rooms and narrow passages, the stalkers discovered a glassy, black formation resembling a giant elephant's foot. Getting a piece to analyze was not easy. It was so fiercely radioactive that the scientists could spend only seconds near it, and its surface shrugged off a drilling machine and an ax. Finally a marksman took aim with a Kalashnikov rifle. The shards gave the first clues to what had happened to the nuclear fuel and the chance of a future catastrophe.
My search for information on Chernobyl has taken me to some very strange places.
This morning, I found this image on a fascinating Italian Chernobyl website, The Humus Project, or Progetto Humus, at http://www.progettohumus.it [the page this image appears on is here]. Look closely.
I can't verify its authenticity (unfortunately, many of the images lack captions or explanations) but it appears to be a shot of the glowing core of Chernobyl Reactor 4 shortly after the explosion. The timestamp on the image reads 01:23:59. But is it 1:23:59 AM on April 26th, 1986?
Recording of the shift supervisor: "Strong impacts, the shutdown systems stop before reaching the lower end position ..." Reactor excursion with more than 100 times of the nominal power. Explosion and destruction of the reactor core. The upper plate of the reactor is hurled up, all pressure tubes break off. Core material and burninggraphite parts are ejected. The reactor is burning, further fires start in the surrounding. Massive release of radioactive fission products.
If this photo is genuine, then it would be the first time I've been able to track down an image of the reactor in the earliest stages of the accident. I have not yet found an image of this type anywhere in Chernobyl literature, either on video, in books or and other source. Where did this come from, considering that the former Soviet Union did not inform the outside world of the explosion until days later? Was there a camera trained on the reactor? Did the image come from a flight over the reactor later than the timestamp indicates?
