Whats left of a Russian Duga-3 radar site - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Homer J Simpson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 01:01:52 am
content: Interesting to watch.10 MW output power !Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga-3

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 01:51:23 am
content: Wow, working until 1989 and it's inthatstate now?

author: Alexei.Polkhanov
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 02:56:47 am
content: I remember back around 1985 or so every time I used my farther's VEF 201 radio receiver I always stumble on this "woodpecker" signal on one of channels and wondered what it was.

author: Vgkid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 03:31:06 am
content: Thanks for the video. Looks like a tornado was inside. Strange to see piles of circuit boards, especially the ones with the power to-3's on them.

author: wagon
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 03:58:04 am
content: Looks like it's been raided for scrap metal.

author: Artlav
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 08:52:39 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on July 05, 2015, 01:51:23 amWell, when the USSR collapsed a lot of the stuff was just abandoned without locks or guards or even closed doors.Factories, spaceships, military bases, radar sites, and so on.In many places it just stays like that.There used to be a "make-anything" experimental electronics manufacturing complex behind my previous working place, which by 2010 was essentially empty for a decade or so, with some dressing covers placed in front, and desolation inside.Only the PCB manufacturing facility survived, probably because it's the only thing that could still turn up a profit.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 09:25:07 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on July 05, 2015, 01:51:23 amCopper strippers. I see this kind of ruin a lot, even here in Oz. Once security goes, every ounce of copper leaves the building soon after. It was sad to hear her wondering what all the in-floor ducts were for. Despite them still having cable brackets. Just no cables. The cut-off connectors and sections of stripped cable sheathing were a dead giveaway too.Should have looked more like this. A very rare case of a building being demolished with a lot of cables still present:

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 10:40:36 am
content: It was interesting to notice the electronics rooms that were set up as Faraday cages, with all-metal walls, ceiling, etc, and contact fingers all around the doors. Obviously, a good idea for electronics right next to a 10 MW phased array transmitter antenna.I wonder what maximum volts per meter field strength that thing could fire?And what that would have reduced to, about 8Km away along the beam axis?Could the power line running almost directly between Chernobyl and Duga-3 have had some unexpected beam-focussing effect?The reason I wonder, is because I bet the Chernobyl nuclear power plant wasn't build with full Faraday cage rooms for any of the control systems. And it's only 8.5 Km away. And appears to be in the arc of potential beam fire from Duga-3.When that accident happened, there was a lot of uncertainty about why it happened. Eventually if I recall correctly, all the blame was put on the operators, for running some tests carelessly. But I do seem to recall a few reports of instrumentation at the power plant doing weird things that night. No I don't have references. The possible significance only occurred to me long after. At that time I didn't even know Duga-3 existed.So I wonder... did someone screw up at Duga-3, and point the beam directly at it's own power station? Or due to a hardware error?Could it have been that EM interference alone that caused the accident by messing with the reactor control systems?Or some combination of reactor testing and the EM-field messing up the electronics?It would be a fair bet that if Duga-3 had anything to do with the accident (or not-so-accident), we'd *never* hear of it.I wish someone had records of whether Woodpecker was transmitting that night.Of all the nuclear plants in Russia, it had to be the one right next to the world's most powerful phased array radar site, that went boom.Here's a diagram...

author: Radio Tech
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 01:28:28 pm
content: Interesting,I do remember hearing this thing across the bands.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 01:37:31 pm
content: You could even receive it in the Southern hemisphere, as they would merrily run into the shortwave broadcast bands if the conditions allowed it, and would often deliberately use the frequencies the transmitters that broadcast deliberately to the USSR used ( BBC and VOA) as both jamming and as a use of the return path to the transmitter for a calibration point.

author: Artlav
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 01:57:05 pm
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on July 05, 2015, 10:40:36 amInteresting idea, but i don't think the dates add up.The reactor that blew up was finished in 1983, while Duga-3 was working since 1980.I would also be surprised if things like nuclear reactors weren't built with failing safely during EMP events in mind, especially in the middle of the cold war.But then again, it wasn't even designed with simple safety features in mind...Quote from: SeanB on July 05, 2015, 01:37:31 pmAnd the fun part was that regular amateur radio people fought back successfully, forming the Russian Woodpecker hunting club:http://www.qsl.net/n1irz/woodpeck.html

author: Hypernova
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 02:23:28 pm
content: That place has realllly seen better days. Would be great if the Russian government declassify some photos of the control room during the glory days eventually.And somebody should go grab those core memory modules and put them up on ebay. They deserve a better end then rotting out in the elements.

author: xrunner
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 02:25:18 pm
content: Trashed!Wish they would have got a lot closer to the antennas.

author: Andy Watson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 02:49:46 pm
content: Quote from: xrunner on July 05, 2015, 02:25:18 pmhttps://youtu.be/0l_4fzJv_i0That's a really weird antenna construction! Head over to youtube and search for "duga3" - lots more stuff.

author: German_EE
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 02:52:42 pm
content: Everything you see, everything you touch, everywhere you walk in that area is radioactive because of the incident at Chernobyl. Even if given the chance (and I've been a radio geek for decades) there is no way I would go anywhere near that place. One Alpha emitter drawn deep into the lungs when I breath in and it could all be over.THIS is why the installation was abandoned so quickly and left to rot

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 03:05:47 pm
content: Over the Horizon Radar is highly classified even to this day. It would not surprise me if the more sensitive elements of the installation were stripped out upon closure. The rest would be just scrap and likely too costly to remove, just like the aerial array. The building would just be left to return to nature.I witnessed a 'woodpecker' OHR first hand whilst serving in Darwin N.T. The Australians were carrying out military 'Exercise Kangaroo 92' in March 1992. My 24 HF receivers were on different frequencies across the HF spectrum. I listened as the Woodpecker worked its way up the HF band knocking out each and every one of my encrypted links. It was close as it even got into our telephone system and was flashing the extension LEDs in time with its pulses. It was a bit spooky as I was on my own at the station and it was around 10pm. The woodpecker got into anything electronic with some weird effects. That interference on the HF spectrum shut down our operations for that evening, so I got to go home early for a changeThere were soldiers in Black out kit all over the place during that Exercise. There is something a bit surreal about driving down bush roads in the day and seeing soldiers dug in at the side of the road and blacked out soldiers sneaking around at night ..... great fun to witness the exercises though.So the Aussies have an OHR tooThe OHR is by no means limited to Russia alone. That is why its in-depth signal processing detail will remain sensitive for many years to come.Aurora

author: G7PSK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 03:49:36 pm
content: Duga 3 was first heard in 1976. But I remember hearing woodpecker like sounds on HF radio in the mid 1960's so who was that the US or the Russians.

author: xrunner
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 04:38:50 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Watson on July 05, 2015, 02:49:46 pmThanks, found another good one, all the way to the top. Can you imagine the poor slob who might have had to go all the way to the top in the dead of winter to repair a connection?https://youtu.be/YeLjJXvtmxo

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 05:48:01 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Watson on July 05, 2015, 02:49:46 pmNot so -- they are simple dipoles. The cage structure widens bandwidth (compare to a conical dipole which has several octaves of bandwidth), so that they were probably able to cover most of the SW band without clunky antenna tuners. The impulse response is also pretty good (not as good as a well made exponential horn, but that would be prohibitively large at this frequency; and much better than a spiral or conical helix, which is heavily dispersive), an important feature for wideband radar purposes.The dipole array, obviously, is mounted in front of a huge ground plane -- which reflects the energy back (at some compromise to bandwidth -- it will only be a (2n+1)/4 wave distance over particular ranges), enforcing the directivity of the array.Tim

author: Alexei.Polkhanov
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 08:49:21 pm
content: I don't think construction of these antennas are really of any secret to radio engineers. "Everyone cooks with water" - I like to repeat that old German proverb. Perhaps some particular details such as actual bandwidth kept secret.Important stuff is in algorithms and code that processes data to sift through the tonnes of noise returned. I can imagine that every high altitude airline flight every weather balloon - everything shows up unless you filter it out. Vyacheslav Tuzlukov - who is now a professor in Korea somewhere wrote a book on subject - interesting read if anyone interested. I think he could have been involved in designing this antenna because he was working in USSR at that time.

author: PA0PBZ
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 09:30:42 pm
content: Is there any documentation about what they could actually see with this radar, like what size of objects at what distance? I remember the sound when they were transmitting in one of the ham radio bands and I always wondered how effective these things are.

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 09:37:59 pm
content: The transmitters and aerial are no Secret as has been stated. They are just physics at work.The processing and capabilities of the complete system are highly classified as they form part of a technical countermeasure. Disclosing such information in Russia would likely be treated as treason and a foreign national asking too much about it..... spyingAurora

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 10:05:30 pm
content: Stop confusing people. Chernobyl and the area is Ukraine, not Russia.

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 10:05:53 pm
content: Wiki on Australian OHR system.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_NetworkI wonder why it points northWiki also provides a half decent overview of the worlds systems. They are not that rare.Aurora

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 10:10:47 pm
content: @Bud,Check your facts please, this was a RUSSIAN OHR system ! No confusion there at all.Its location does not indicate its ownership and where the data wenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga-3If you acted against it, or its capabilities, you acted against Mother RussiaAurora

author: Artlav
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 10:38:19 pm
content: Quote from: Bud on July 05, 2015, 10:05:30 pmBack then it was all USSR, also known as Russia. Ukraine didn't exist as a separate country in any meaningful sense.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2015, 10:46:50 pm
content: Quote from: German_EE on July 05, 2015, 02:52:42 pmTo me it seems the place has been declassified (=trash or take away anything sensitive) in a hurry and then the looters came in.I'm wondering whether they used the ducts in the floor for cooling as well. In the bigger server rooms I've been in they always had a raised floor for cabling and distributing cold air which is blown into the cabinets through holes in the floor.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 02:08:55 am
content: Quote from: Artlav on July 05, 2015, 01:57:05 pmHow does that not fit? I wasn't saying Duga-3 would affect the power station whenever it was turned on. It's a phased array transmitter - it creates a steerable and quite narrow beam of radio waves. Otherwise it would be useless as a radar system. The bigger the antenna (larger 'aperture') the narrower the beam. Which is why Duga-3 is so big.One would assume that normally they'd avoid pointing the beam at a nuclear power plant only 8.5 Km away. So long as they kept it pointed elsewhere, everything would be fine. The key idea is that maybe something went wrong/stupid at Duga-3 that night, and for the first time ever the beam ended up pointed at the power station.Duga-3 was also running for some time after the Chernobyl accident, but remember there was more that one reactor at Chernobyl, and the station kept producing power for some years. Also power may have been brought from other sources.Perhaps Duga-3 was eventually shut down and abandoned due to the radioactive contamination of the site? Does anyone know if there was a stated reason? It was quite a high importance military asset.QuoteHa ha ha... you're kidding, right?In all the walk-throughs of nuclear plants I've ever seen, including views of the interior of Chernobyl, I've never seen any sign of efforts to EMP harden anything. And it does show, when it's there.As for failing safely in the face of massive control system disruption... no. They're designed to fail safely in the event of _some_few_ control system faults. And faults the designers thought of, at that.Incidentally, another question about Chernobyl and Woodpecker: The reactor core was made of graphite blocks, and I seem to recall (have not researched it now, so could be wrong) that one criticism of the design was the absence of any steel pressure containment or secondary containment vessel. So... I wonder if the building structure around the graphite core was enough to act as a Faraday cage? Or was it just girders, concrete, fibro sheeting, and stuff like that?Because graphite is electrically conductive and absorbs EM energy very well. The absorbent pieces in waveguide dummy loads are made of graphite. If a 10MW radio beam was pointed at the Chernobyl building, how much of that energy would end up as heating in the graphite reactor core?If the answer is anything like "above zero percent", then maybe it would not take much simultaneous control system failure to produce the accident.Anyway, just speculation. The historical record of the accident is generally like this:QuoteNote the phrase 'uncontrollable power surge'. Other sources say 'uncontrolled power surge' and similar phrases. Some go into detail about how that happened due to reactor operating conditions. But I _still_ wonder about Woodpecker. I so wish someone had a log of Woodpecker's operations that night. If it wasn't running that would eliminate that possibility. If it was running, that would merely leave the possibility, not prove it. And we'd almost certainly never know for sure.I just think it's a fascinating potential connection.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 02:29:42 am
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on July 05, 2015, 05:48:01 pmDid you also notice the vertical banks are driven individually? You can see the drive lines running up, connected to the pointy ends of those teardrop cage shapes. So by varying the phases of the vertical banks, gives steerable horizontal angle of the beam.What I can't work out, is whether there was any ability to steer the vertical beam angle.Added:Quote from: Aurora on July 05, 2015, 03:05:47 pmIt wasn't 'close'.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Network(Oh I see you posted that link later)Would be interesting to know which transmitter that was. The one(s) near Alice Springs perhaps?Anyway, I hope you see my point about high power OHR systems being able to interfere with electronics, even a long way away.Quote from: Artlav on July 05, 2015, 10:38:19 pmStill doesn't. Just different paymaster holding the leash.I guess Bud is young, and doesn't know any of that history.

author: ludzinc
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 02:44:01 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on July 06, 2015, 02:29:42 amBy varying the frequency you operate at. Path lengths are different for each frequency, as they refract in the ionosphere. As the ionosphere is time variant, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow so you need to calibrate out ionosphere effects.

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 04:06:23 am
content: @TerraHertz,You are right. 'Close' was not that closeAs this happened in 1992 I suspect that the only operational OHR was Alice Springs just down the road from usOur Receiving Station was at '20 Mile', South of Darwin, and we operated large HF Rhombic aerials. These would have brought the OHR HF signals into the Receiver hall at a decent level and may explain the weird effect on the telephone system. Darwin, 20 miles up the road was not suffering issues, or at least I never saw them reported. My Manager was a fellow Radio Amateur and was monitoring the Radars operation from his location in Central Darwin. It was bending the S Meter needle on his receiver as well. We were likely 'in the beam' as the Exercise was simulating an invasion from the North With Darwin at the centre of activities.As Alice Springs was a research station for OHR they would likely have learnt about some of its capabilities by 'watching' the invasion simulation play out. Lots of sea and air activity.It is interesting to note that the Australian OHR was operating in a 'scanning' mode on that occasion. In an effort to find some 'clear air' I had all 24 of my HF Receivers (type Plessey PR2250) set to frequencies that segmented the HF spectrum from around 3MHz up to around 28MHz. You could hear the OHR stepping up through the HF spectrum and then return to the bottom before repeating. It did not stop scanning in the whole of the time that I was monitoring it.Like DUGA, the Darwin transmitter and receiver stations that I worked in have been decommissioned. We were the last tour and closed them down in late 1992. HF was dropped in favour of PSTN and Satellite links. I did a quick search on Google Maps and was pleased to see that the transmitter and receiver sites are still in existence. They are used by the Australians these days.It is nice to reminisce, those were happy days in DarwinAurora

author: Fraser
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 04:55:58 am
content: Oh dear, I got it wrong....OHR is in fact a mind control systemTake a look at the page of this conspiracy theory fruit bat :http://www.zengardner.com/was-chernobyl-revenge-for-the-russian-woodpecker/Definitely a .......One from the foil hat brigade presumably ?Aurora

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 09:10:44 am
content: Quote from: Aurora on July 06, 2015, 04:55:58 amIt's a blurry line between nutcases and paid well-poisoners. Also good to bear in mind that both 'conspiracy theorist' and 'tin foil hat' were derogatory terms coined by the CIA. 'Conspiracy theorist' was introduced specifically to smear those trying to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination(s). I avoid the terms myself, as they cloud thought.Nothing wrong with deciding rubbish is rubbish, but it's a mistake to assume it is so _always_ due to pure stupidity and ignorance. You won't learn anything from idiots and their noise, but when you can identify a definite paid disinformationist, one can learn a great deal from identifying the intended effect for their rubbish.I agree that site is crap. Couldn't be bothered putting in the time to decide if it's stupid crap or deliberate crap.Nice pic from the top of Steelyard in the snow though.Anyway, that idea made for a good video game.http://stalker.wikia.com/wiki/Brain_Scorcher

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 09:37:00 am
content: QuoteSome years after the Chernobyl incident the USSR collapsed - lots of facilities - military and civilian just ceased operating. For reasons such as lack of finaces, will to operate, people to operate, motivation, etc. There's a LOT of stuff like this scattered through out the former USSR. I'm guessing that operating a facility like that in a contaminated area is not exactly cheap.As for the reactor running, yup, the power plant stayed in operation for quite some time even after the incident.

author: Artlav
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 10:29:44 am
content: Quote from: Hypernova on July 05, 2015, 02:23:28 pmI actually tried to decode the punched card she shown, hoping for something curious...20 90 81 90 C0 00 00 00 00 C0 00 00 00 00 81 80 88 A0 00 40 02 C0 20 40 02 C0 81 80 88 82 00Which is not particularly meaningful - these are sequences of 3 russian letters in the code page 866 encoding, followed by 8 or 10 numbers. Does not make much sense to me.Quote from: TerraHertz on July 06, 2015, 02:08:55 amI was thinking in term of the station's builders being aware of the radar next to it, and thus taking precautions. Maybe even testing what would happen if the beam is pointed at it.Assuming a beam wide enough to cover whole USA, that would be about 300mW at the station.About as much as a cellphone up close, which is known to screw up with badly designed stuff.However, no idea how bad would it be for the station, and what could be sensitive in there - it would all boil down to what the control systems looked like.Quote from: TerraHertz on July 06, 2015, 02:08:55 amAFAIK, Chernobyl was still running and producing power up to late 90s, and is still manned today. Nuclear reactors aren't that easy to decommission, it would seem.Quote from: TerraHertz on July 06, 2015, 02:08:55 amIt wasn't publicly acknowledged at the time, but people around the area say that all the civilians were evacuated from the site in 1986 (the site was a town with a population of about 5000), while the military personnel continued working up to 1988, before leaving.About the same time the whole OTH system got shut down, so it might or might not be due to radiation.Quote from: TerraHertz on July 06, 2015, 02:08:55 amJust exercising common sense.One would expect such objects to be hardened against nuclear bombs going off above them and so on.But like i said, that plant didn't even have a containment building around it, or any fast reactor shutdown mechanisms, so it doesn't take much imagination to complete the pattern.I also know someone working at a PWR reactor of similar vintage in USA, and he said they were having problems with interference from nearby HAM operators and cellphones/walkie-talkies on site.Which is rather worrying, come to think of it.Quote from: TerraHertz on July 06, 2015, 02:08:55 amThe problem with lack of a containment vessel is that should the reactor blow up, everything would go straight into the atmosphere, instead of staying inside (or at least being slowed down by) a more or less intact pressure vessel.As for radiant heating, we are talking about the temperature increase on the order of 1 degree per 10 secondsIFthe whole 10MW of power were focused on the reactor core and perfectly absorbed (assuming 100 tons of graphite).Running with the estimate above of 300mW per m2, we get no meaningful heating at all.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2015, 06:52:50 pm
content: Power spikes were a "normal' part of the PWR reactor control system, as the control loops had massive inertia both mechanically and in nuclear terms, which meant they had regions where you really did not want to operate because of instability. Unfortunately the test they were doing dropped them into the unstable area, and they had disabled the warning systems that normally would have prevented the system approaching this area.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 12:47:21 am
content: Quote from: Artlav on July 06, 2015, 10:29:44 amWhat? I have no idea how you get that. Do you understand the concept of a phased array radar? It works about as well as a parabolic dish of the same size as the array, hence the term 'synthetic aperture'. At only 8 Km distance, the beam width is going to be not much larger than at the source. So the Volts/meter will be in the same magnitude too. Plus there are receiving-antenna induced concentrations of the field, such as by that powerline running nearly linearly between the radar and nuke plant. It wouldn't surprise me if that arrangement was capable of causing arcs between cables, continuously. Not just a few clicks and buzzes in audio circuits.QuoteNo, you're exercising wishful thinking. It took a long time even in the west for plants to be designed to resist even stuff like a plane flying into the reactor building. EMP/nukes - forget it. They are not built to resist such things.Look what happened at Fukushima - backup diesel generators in the basement of the turbine hall, with nothing between them and the sea but roller doors and a few meters height. Also, the diesel fuel tanks were right on the dock, at water's edge. The tanks both washed away.QuoteIt seems to be a matter you've never considered before? You should. Disasters both natural (solar EMP, meteor strike (ocean or land), earthquake, tsunami) and man made (war conventional or nuclear, social upheavals and industrial collapse, religious zealots, etc) all can happen. These are some of the reasons why we should not build and run nuke plants. The results of failure are too awful and long lasting to be worth the risk.QuoteYes, exactly. As happened. What point are you making here?And what do you mean "slowed down by"? Containment either holds or it fails.There was some kind of structure around the pile, but with a radiation shielding 'lid' that was just resting on top. That was thrown upwards by the explosion, and fell back into the wreckage. Apparently the structure was all for mass shielding, not pressure containment.QuoteYou seem to consistently make unrealistic assumptions, in order to minimize risk effects. Do you do that in real life too?In considerations of risks, it's customary to make worst case assumptions, not best case.As above, the beam wouldn't be much diverged at the plant. IF we assume some of its power could reach the graphite core, the heating effect wouldn't be distributed evenly through the graphite pile. Skin effects, plus the core has lots of metal tubes threaded through it. Heating would be localized, and difficult (impossible!) to predict the pattern.Anyway, it was just a related thought. That came from games playing with bits of graphite in a microwave oven.

author: John Coloccia
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 12:53:12 am
content: Quote from: Homer J Simpson on July 05, 2015, 01:01:52 amThat's very cool, Homer! It's amazing how quickly nature seeks to destroy what we build without regular maintenance. Entropy always increase. It takes a lot of of work to keep things from slowly decaying into dust.

author: Alexei.Polkhanov
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 05:44:00 am
content: I think there are plenty of videos and docs describing exactly how and why t happened in all languages with names and places. Dissected second by second.My military specialty that I studied in university as a substitution for a draft is "chemical and radiological protection of troops". All of professors at the military department, all of whom were also active officers, were working on that disaster, one was a Commandant of that city, for 10 days or so till his radiation counter run out. I lost most of my radiofobic fears after meeting these people and more so when I found that some families refused to move out from the area and still live there NOW. Radiation is not as dangerous as it is often painted by all sorts of "environmentalists" and. Also I think that adaptability of human body to high levels of radiation is also greatly underestimated.Nuclear energy is the feature. I bet those humans that first tried to use fire 65000 years ago also burned their fingers few times

author: German_EE
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 08:20:05 am
content: OK, so as you have been trained in this subject how risky is the environment aroung Duga-3? Three years ago I was given a chance to visit both the reactor site and the antenna and I said no.

author: Alexei.Polkhanov
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 09:29:38 am
content: Trained as in given a table in a book and calculator I should be able to estimate how long people can sit in a tank or in open air in given area. There was nothing about long-term effects of radiation, like beyond few months of exposure as far as I remember at least. I don't think good, unbiased, data are available even now - it seems to be always just extremes one way or another heavily biased due to "researchers" agenda. Look at wild life there, fish in super contaminated water tank and other places - it is alive and looks healthy. Personally I am curious. I want to know what are the hard facts - how much radiation humans can tolerate?

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 04:01:34 pm
content: Quote from: Alexei.Polkhanov on July 07, 2015, 05:44:00 amAh yes, something about control rods with a positive coefficient on starting reinsertion.I couldn't remember what it was about reinserting that that caused the final sudden surge.I was enjoying that video, until at 42:01 "The Chernobyl death toll though horrifying has turned out to be smaller than many first feared. The scientific consensus is that it will cause some ten thousand cancers in Russia and 25000 world wide, over a 70 year period. As yet the only proven rise in disease is in thyroid cancers in children."Oh? Consider:http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov_Chernobyl_book.pdfChernobyl - Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the EnvironmentPublished by the New York Academy of Sciences 2009New York, April 26, 2010 (ENS) - Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility.The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus.The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English.Or this:http://agreenroad.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/chernobyl-legacy-different-race-of.htmlLinks to:Chernobyl legacy Paul FuscoAlso that oft-repeated dramatic scene of the tiles jumping with steam pressure... wait, what? But that's absurd.OK, so time to hunt up the actual records. Here's a more accurate technical description:http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr79/kr79pdf/Malko1.pdfThe Chernobyl Reactor: Design Features and Reasons for AccidentMikhail V. MALKOJoint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research, National Academy of Sciences of BelarusKrasin Str.99, Minsk, Sosny, 220109, Republic of Belarus: mvmalko@malkom.belpak.minsk.byHmm, the discovery channel version is vaguely correct, apart from leaving out key details and having diagrams stupidly oversimplified to the point of being completely meaningless.QuoteOld people. Nothing much to lose, and that's an entirely reasonable choice.But show me ONE young woman about to raise a family there.Incidentally, I'd jump at a chance to visit now. But carry a counter, avoid hot spots, don't kick up dust, don't ingest anything from the area.QuoteTypically human nature doesn't provide us an intuitive grasp of very complicated risk factors. To understand 'radiation' risks requires solid understanding of nuclear physics, cellular biology/metabolic chemistry, genetics, environmental food chain factors and epigenetics. It's impossible to summarize accurately in a few paragraphs.But anyway:There's three main exposure effects:1. Ionizing radiation from sources external to the body. Principally Alpha (He4 nuclei), Beta (electrons or positrons), and Gamma (very high energy photons) but there are many other kinds too, eg neutrons. All of these will have a statistical energy spectra determined by their source. Their kind and energy determines their penetrating power and types of damage they do to molecular/nuclear structures they impact. Due to this complexity, units of radiation measurement are confusing since some are absolute measures of particle flux or decays per area or unit volume, while others are weighted to give indications of their degree of danger/damage to human tissue.Some external radiation sources are quite harmless; for eg low energy Alpha particles are almost all completely stopped by the dead layer of skin cells. Others can do a lot of damage to all cell structures including DNA.Humans can take quite high doses of external radiation and recover in the short term, also maybe suffer no long term effects. Destruction of bone marrow tissue is the most critical factor governing survival of brief high doses.At low levels, the effects are mostly variations in the statistics of development of cancers, ultimately due to damage to the DNA of a single cell resulting in that cell losing replication controls and turning on the telomerase system, giving that line of freely replicating cells immortality (till the body dies due to the cancer.)Also for reasons of inherited genetic differences some people are more susceptible to radiation induced illnesses than others. As for being 'adaptable', that Chernobyl - Consequences ... doc mentions work indicating (based on animal studies) that a human population could develop some increased radiation tolerance after several dozen generations of selection. Bear in mind that means hundreds of years of deformed babies, cancers at a young age, etc. Not really a desirable path.2. OTOH, ingested emitters are really horrible. Even Alpha emitters can kill you this way by causing cancer, for instance by a single speck of hot dust lodged in the lungs. Also many of the elements that don't exist much (or at all) in the environment due to short half-lives (they've all decayed away since the Earth was formed from highly radioactive star-stuff) are also highly chemically toxic. The LD50 for Plutonium has a range of figures quoted, from 3ng/kg to 5 ?g/kg (cumulated chemical and radiological effects.) There's also metabolic concentration to consider - some isotopes get stored by the body in particular organs due to their having no chemical difference to the usual stable isotopes. Iodine-131, barium-140, cobalt-60, cesium-134, cesium-136, cesium-137, etc. So these cause very greatly increased cancer risks in the organs where they concentrate.You could also ask Mr Litvinenko about human adaptability to high rad loads. They're not his cup of tea. (An Alpha emitter only, btw.)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_LitvinenkoAnd for ALL those effects, the susceptibility is much higher during fertilization, embryo development and childhood, due to high rates of cellular division (when things can go really wrong due to even single base DNA damage since the DNA repair mechanisms are either off or don't have time to act. Plus the cascade effect - a fault in any of the cells of the first few cell generations WILL have disastrous consequences.3. Then there's Epigenetics - the way in which DNA changes descend through generations of populations. Evolution is a fine balance between rates of DNA error accumulation, and weeding out of the less viable results of changes via natural selection. This is a cruel process if you are sentient, and one of the ones due to be weeded out since you inherited some newly induced genetic flaw. But the main point is, there is likely to be a level of continuous DNA damage which results in a continual decline of fitness species-wide over multiple generations, unable to be compensated for by natural selection. (Not that as a species we really have natural selection any more.)What is that epigenetic radiation level for human populations? We have no clue at all.Bacteria and others with very short replication periods can tolerate higher radiation backgrounds, because a. They are much simpler, and b. fast replication means they can adapt faster (and don't care about all the failures.) More complex organisms like vertebrates, not so much. And you try explaining to a mother of a deformed child that this is just a coincidental side effect of higher radiation levels, and in a few hundred years (or thousand, depending on the half-lives of contamination isotopes) this might not happen so much.When you see horses and stuff in Chernobyl, don't forget you are not seeing the ones that died. And even bacteria and fungus have radiation limits:http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/?no-istForests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying ProperlyYou can google a lot of stuff on wildlife decline around Fukushima too. And how have you not read of the decline of ocean ecosystems in the Nth Pacific, including US west coast?QuoteI think you meant future?Surprisingly, I agree. Just not with the 'fission' part, and fuel cycles that result in ongoing accumulation of huge amounts long half-life radioisotopes in waste dumps that require constant hi-tech maintenance, and dotting the planet with hundreds of reactors each containing hundreds of tons of poisons that would completely wipe out life on Earth if even just a dozen of those plants 'had an accident'. (Quotes because of the wide range of possible causes of such events, some not being all that accidental.)QuoteDo you see the glaring logical flaw in that analogy?

author: Alexei.Polkhanov
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2015, 06:55:33 pm
content: I don't see any flaw in my analogy - accidents are more likely to happen when technology being used is less mature. With time and experience it will be more reliable.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2015, 01:19:57 am
content: Quote from: Alexei.Polkhanov on July 07, 2015, 06:55:33 pmAlmost all the deaths and silly accidents associated with nuclear development occurred early on (40s to 60s). Partly due to ignorance and ongoing research, but mostly due to military work and pressure. Since then, the major accidents have been at commercial operating or reprocessing facilities, and due to the complex, human-error type situations typical of all great disasters. Only some of which comes down to poor design (e.g., Chernobyl having a positive void coefficient, TMI having some weird plumbing and display features, Fukushima being poorly laid out in defense of tsunamis, and other things), not major things (like having people climbing over the freaking reactor to perform adjustments on SL-1).Fusion is nice, but for the entirety of its past history, it's been nothing but a pipe dream -- perpetually "twenty years out". Perhaps in the 2060s when we finally do have it (maybe), it'll be great -- but until then, we need an intermediate generation of power stations to carry our load, and our electrical load is only going to increase, much more rapidly than total energy use, as fossil fuels die out and automotive and household loads shift to electric.Tim

author: Red Squirrel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2015, 01:31:29 am
content: Wow that's really cool, and eerie. Always been fascinated with stuff like this. Imagine how advanced that was for it's time too. There's lot of other videos on youtube about this site too.