A ride through Chernobyl on motorbike - pics & write-up

[speculative]

Words cannot describe this, you must check this out:

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

-spec

[dicki]

yeah i saw that... i get the suspicion that she's slightly strange...

[Player0]

Wait, the whole city is evacuated? I gotta read this.

[DCMan]

thats a little more than scary....

[Player0]

Wow, that is friggin scary. The amusement park thing? Wow.

She should make this a book, she'd make some serious dough...before her skin falls off.

[speculative]

I can't even imagine there was so much radiation that the reactor actually glowed... And also that fires sprang up from just the level of radiation. :eek:

-spec

[sparK]

that was a good read, eerie, had to finish it tho...

[Denovin]

its too bad her english wasnt that great, could use more background info, and a much better lay out on the site, maybe thumbnails with the story and click to enlarge.. oh well.

Very good anyways

[ATF_Syris]

I never read this article for the topic name didnt seem to interesting. But now that i have read this story im very curious of this place....

[Synthohol]

i was 18 when this went down, i recall thinking aah, thats on the other side of the world...no big deal.
after reading that and being a parent of 3 it scares the hell out of me.
all this nuclear power shit, is it really worth the risk? i would rather go back to candles.
thank you for sharing that as spooky as it was. brrr, i got a shiver down my spine~

[ATF_Syris]

Following i read some more stuff about this place. There happens to be a movie on it called Chernobyl Heart, there is alot of stuff on this place.

[dicki]

there was a thing on telly about it over here...

apparently they didn't tell any of the soldiers, police, or firefighters what had happened so they treated it like a normal fire! there were photos of blokes on ladders up the side of the reactor sprinkling water on it from a hose! needless to say they all died, as did the workers who opened the door to see what was happening. all the equipment just got dumped because it was so "hot".

and it all stemed from human error, and idiotic middle managers not listening to the people at ground level :(

=====

going slightly off topic. what are the *realistic* alternatives to nuclear power? fossil fuels are running out and people are allready squabbling about where the next barrel is coming from (*cough* BUSH! *cough*) supply lines run through the most dangerous and unstable places in the world and places who will start putting a handling fee on everything they transport and ensuring they have enough for themselves before it goes anywhere else.

*renewable* energy isn't really renewable, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch after all, *renewable* simply means we havn't found the problem yet. on top of that this type of system is so far woefully inadequate to supply our needs. and with the third world countries progressing so quickly because of the advances we have allready made we will be adding rapidly to our energy requirements.

any ideas?

dicki

[illmatik]

The only thing I could remotely thing of is using solar, wind, and hydroelectric power to power hydrogen bottling/distributing plants for fuel cells. The whole problem w/ photovoltaic cells is that the byproducts of manufacturing them is almost as bad a pollutant as fossil fuels. I doubt I'd be alive to see such a thing happen, although it would be nice.

[dicki]

the other problem with solar cells is they take more energy to make than they generally produce in thier lives!

solar power is the least useless / damaging of the "renewable" energy sources if the power is focussed on a reactor to heat water and drive a turbine you can get very usable power. however you do need a large amount of space in a hot area to really make good use of it.

solar *assisted* systems are good and can even help in terminally miserable places like the UK. you cover your roof in mini green houses filled with black copper pipes just to take the chill off the water. this vastly reduces the power needed to heat it.

ground loop cooling / heating is good too where you run huge lengths of pipe under your garden to heat and cool your house (the ground is a very steady temperature, so when its hot out side the ground is cool and when its cold the ground is warm, either way it takes the edge off your fuel bill) other sensible things like insulation and glazing are all good too.

cars? tricky one... modern engines are really good. i'm staggered by my little diesel's performance, all right its not going to win any awards but commuting to work is fantastic. public transport? in its current incarnation unless you live and work in a single city it doesn't work.

dicki

[speculative]

Originally posted by dicki public transport? in its current incarnation unless you live and work in a single city it doesn't work.

dicki

And remember, public transportation is different in different parts of the world. It wouldn't be feasible in my state, for example, because my state is larger than many countries. :mg:

Also, hydrogen fuel cells harm the environment too - I don't remember how but I read an article on it. And if we went back to horses? Well, horses were fine when the population was 10 million... But 230 million horses? (That's how many cars are on teh road according to AAA.) If 200,000 horses flowed in and out of LA every day for example, who would clean the sh!t! :lol:

-speculative

[Synthohol]

[kind of kidding but kind of not]
I say we build a huge generator like a hamster wheel and make prisoners run in it all day.
remove the death penelty to get them to do it.
heck, convicts clean our highways here in n.j. lets take it a step further!
[/k o k b k o n]

[Gabriel]

Cow farts, the wave of the future.

[Snowman]

I think realistic alternatives to nuclear power are wind, solar or if a way could be found Cold Fusion, have a read.......

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion.html

[nitan]

cold fusion is not all that safe either is it? I yeilds vast amounts of power but as i understand it if something goes wrong the effects would be pretty significant.

Anyway i saw a link to that story on [H]

Looks crazy.

[evilmatt]

I saw the chernobyl thing at work, very haunting images all that area just abandoned. Theres a fps game coming out called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is set in the chernobyl wasteland somewhat in bad taste if you ask me.

Car fuels, saw something a while ago about using fermented coconut oil to run diesel engines on with a few mods. It was ages ago so I can't remeber all the details but It was on this island that had been a war with the mainland for something like 20 years or so somewhere in africa and they had no fuel they just made do with what they had which was coconuts.
Amazing really, I guess its true what they say Necessity is the mother of invention. Course an old style diesel will run on practically anything, new ones are much more picky (as someone my dad knows found out in the last fuel crisis by topping their fancy new bmw with oil from their house central heating and clogged all the injectors in the engine ;) )

Power wise maybe they'll crack fusion sometime soon, from what I remeber that gets round a lot of the nasty sides of nuclear power only the structure of the reactor becomes radioactive and that can be made to be safe in 50-100 years by carefully selecting the materials. Supposedly it can't go as badly wrong as fision n'all.
Maybe JET or one of the others will get it going, they can achieve it (I remeber watching a video from inside the jet Tokamak showing the moment of fusion big flash of light/plasma) but not sustain it for long.

[nitan]

Originally posted by evilmatt
I saw the chernobyl thing at work, very haunting images all that area just abandoned. Theres a fps game coming out called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is set in the chernobyl wasteland somewhat in bad taste if you ask me.


I understand where you are coming from but then you have to question the making of games that are based on wars, such as medal of honour etc...i think games like all other forms of entertainment need to be taken with a pinch of salt...

On a totally off topic and side note...seeing as yourself and dicki are in here...i called a Spheracote about Flurinert...£30 a litre...min amount of 6litres...no thanks :(

[evilmatt]

Yeah I think the war games (BF1942 BFv moh etc.) are somewhat in bad taste too.

Course doesn't stop me playing them ;)

I'm a man of principles :D

Ouch thats pricey, think the midel stuff we used is quite a bit cheaper can't remeber how much cheaper I'll see if I can invoke minty to give our last quote.

[DCMan]

you cover your roof in mini green houses filled with black copper pipes just to take the chill off the water. this vastly reduces the power needed to heat it.

I spent two weeks touring Bosnia and Croatia with the band last year. We stayed for a week in a city called Mostar in Bosnia - Its supposed to be the hottest city in Europe. On the last day we we were there the temps hit 50/C. A lot of the big buildings had this stuff installed on their roofs and they used no other power to heat the water for the building.. clever...!

[Denovin]

I heard some more info on what happened.
They were running a "test" on the reactor shutting it down, and were trying to draw power from it while doing this. Alarms went off and they ignored them knowing they would happen and continued till it went out of control and they couldnt cool it enough where it breached the shell. Once it was breached I believe it was something like 7000 people firefighters rescue workers etc knowing that they were going to there death rushed in to put radiation absorbant material around the area.

The strongest source of energy is from all the possibilitys; natural gas created from plants. Wind would be good but it kills more birds including eagles and that sort then its really worth. Ocean waves would be good. Microwave is even better (solar energy collected from space orbiter beemed back as a microwave which is at a frequency that doesnt get deflected by the O-zone layer)

[minty_altoid]

Originally posted by evilmatt

Ouch thats pricey, think the midel stuff we used is quite a bit cheaper can't remeber how much cheaper I'll see if I can invoke minty to give our last quote.

Bah, you invoke me in a thread you hijacked?

The last quote we got was £2.89/litre, which works out £75 per drum... that's including delivery.

minty

[minty_altoid]

One minute editing limit? :confused:

hmm.

And all I wanted to say is that's Ex. VAT

Oh well,

minty

[dicki]

Necessity is the mother of invention

for some reason i read that as "Necessity is the monkey of invention"

i really need some sleep...

[evilmatt]

Bah sleep is over rated what you need is more coffee ;)

[nitan]

lol...monkeys on the brain eh?

[nitan]

Originally posted by evilmatt
Bah sleep is over rated what you need is more coffee ;)

I agree...sleeping wastes sooooo much time...

[Denovin]

NEED is the ultimate monkey

LAZINESS is the creation of invention

first quote from somewhere.. second prolly the same, but more along the lines of something a guy at work said after making a rod so he could push buttons on a vcr easier since it doesnt have a remote (one of those 16 channel VCR's for viewing security tape)