“Chernobyl” and the press; the real Chernobyl and the public
In a recent article in The New Yorker about the very popular HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” the author writes:
The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.
Sound familiar? In the US, however, the left hasn’t yet achieved a monopoly—although not for lack of trying in recent years.
I previously wrote a long post on the subject of the Chernobyl disaster itself; please see this. One thing of which I’m pretty sure is that the series “Chernobyl” will probably replace the history of the actual event in most people’s eyes, because all most people know about it these days (if they knew about it at all, that is, prior to watching the series) is that it was a big nuclear disaster. And the conclusion they have drawn, for the most part, is that nuclear power is bad.
The HBO series—which I haven’t seen, and I welcome comments from anyone who has—seems to blame the Soviet system (true) as well as individuals who worked at the plant:
So far Breus [an engineer working at the plant at the time of the disaster] has watched only three episodes of the HBO series. “All details of people’s clothes, furniture, dishes, equipment look real, but none of the characters,” he told The Daily Beast. “The series portrays Anatoly Dyatlov, the supervising engineer of that tragic night shift, as an evil and even stupid person—that is not true. He was sometimes tough, but never demonic; it was not his fault the reactor was bad.”
Breus continued to list the issues: “Two out of the three ‘scuba-divers’ who die in the movie, Bespalov and Ananenko, are still alive; also, the engineers working with Dyatlov that night were not cowards terrified by the threat of punishment like they are portrayed in the movie, but brave and responsible professionals… My concern is that many of the survivors, families of the personnel, will feel hurt watching this series.”
The Soviets blamed the engineer Dyatlov, and he served four years in prison. But he said, “If they [the Soviet regime] built the reactor according to the rules, the disaster would not have happened.”
Let’s just say that evidence points to problems with the execution of the test itself and problems in the design of the reactor. You can find a lot of information about it at this Wiki page, as well as here. A summary from the latter source [emphasis mine]:
The April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyla Anchor nuclear power plant in Ukraine was the product of a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture…
The Chernobyl disaster was a unique event and the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power where radiation-related fatalities occurred. The design of the reactor is unique and in that respect the accident is thus of little relevance to the rest of the nuclear industry outside the then Eastern Bloc. However, it led to major changes in safety culture and in industry cooperation, particularly between East and West before the end of the Soviet Union.
More details from that article [emphasis mine]:
A series of operator actions, including the disabling of automatic shutdown mechanisms, preceded the attempted test early on 26 April. By the time that the operator moved to shut down the reactor, the reactor was in an extremely unstable condition. A peculiarity of the design of the control rods caused a dramatic power surge as they were inserted into the reactor…
The interaction of very hot fuel with the cooling water led to fuel fragmentation along with rapid steam production and an increase in pressure. The design characteristics of the reactor were such that substantial damage to even three or four fuel assemblies would – and did – result in the destruction of the reactor.…
The 1991 report by the State Committee on the Supervision of Safety in Industry and Nuclear Power on the root cause of the accident looked past the operator actions. It said that while it was certainly true the operators placed their reactor in a dangerously unstable condition (in fact in a condition which virtually guaranteed an accident) it was also true that in doing so they had not in fact violated a number of vital operating policies and principles, since no such policies and principles had been articulated. Additionally, the operating organisation had not been made aware either of the specific vital safety significance of maintaining a minimum operating reactivity margin, or the general reactivity characteristics of the RBMK which made low power operation extremely hazardous.
The accident not only weakened the Soviets, it also had the effect of putting the kibosh on nuclear power plant construction worldwide because of widespread fear of a similar accident, although—as those quotes indicate—the situation wasn’t especially relevant to Western-designed and operated power plants, nor (as my previous post indicates) did the Chernobyl disaster itself cause anything like the loss of life most people think it caused.
I’m a proponent of nuclear energy. But I understand the unease about it. Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”) is a bitch, and the fear that Murphy’s Law will come into play in the future in a nuclear power plant—with even more disastrous consequences than before—isn’t going to go away.
People I knew at the time, who were very knowledgeable in reactor design, said that a Chernobyl style reactor was illegal in the US as early as 1952 since it was known to be unstable to runaway reactions even then.
Opponents of nuclear power consistently ignore the safety record of the USN over the decades. I have lost track of how many nuclear powered ships are now in our fleet, carriers and submarines, but it is a significant number. These ships operate around the world, under arduous conditions, and their engineers, operators and technicians are, for the most part, intelligent and highly trained enlisted personnel. There is no reason to believe that private power companies could not duplicate the same level of expertise–and would, no doubt, draw on military trained personnel.
I appreciated this post. I will not watch HBO, and it’s informative to read an expose of Soviet Style Media describing Soviet Era Activity.
You can tell how “serious” and/or “educated” a tree hugger is by whether or not they support nuclear power. Want to stop energy pollution, go to electric cars, blah blah blah? Nuclear is the ONLY viable option for the foreseable future!
I have watched the series, and I’ve done a LOT of reading and watching of videos since. They do not portray the plant operators as being at fault. They place a lot of the blame on the reactor design, and the secrecy in the USSR at the time. They place some of the blame on the plant operators, but they mostly excuse it by saying that the personnel who were on shift had not really been trained on how to perform the test. They also talk about how the test was delayed for 12 hours and that would cause some instability to develop in the core leading up to the actual test. The people who came on shift were unaware that they would be performing the test until they got to work and were told they’d be doing it. All of this is mostly factual from the reading that I’ve done. It’s difficult to determine which deaths might have happened as a result of the accident, and which ones are directly related, so there’s a GIANT fudge factor on the numbers of dead and injured. They plainly state at the end of the show that this was not intended to be negative about nuclear energy, but that it was meant to portray how keeping secrets by the soviet government lead in large part to the disaster. It IS a mostly fictional account based on real events, so there is a lot of romantic license taken throughout the show. Again, at the end of the series they plainly state that. Now, all of that said, I have read opinion pieces that have taken the series and used it to say “nuclear energy bad”. I’m pretty sure that at the end of the show they make sure to point out that US reactors have a containment shell built around them to prevent radiation escaping. I enjoyed the show, but for me it inspired me to look for other info and do a lot of studying.
“I’m a proponent of nuclear energy. But I understand the unease about it.” [Neo]
Likewise.
Furthermore as a result of our increasing distrust of governmental bureaucracies we are not made any more comfortable with nuclear power oversight. If the IRS, FBI, and CIA can be weaponized and then its directors are caught in lies to save their own skin and unpunished, how is it possible to trust any nuclear regulatory body to be doing its job without suspecting that it, too, has been politicized? If it looks like the Kremlin, walks like the Kremlin, and sounds like the Kremlin, well then . . . .
A direct consequence of Chernobyl in the US was the shutting down of the 105 N Reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Dept. of Energy). 105N was also a graphite-moderated reactor. It was used to produce plutonium (for weapons) and electricity for the grid. It had an essential difference in that power and reactivity decreased as temperature increased, but had no containment dome; it had a contamination confinement system, but not containment dome. 105N had just gone through extensive and expensive safety upgrades, but no matter, it was shut down anyway. There were other environmental issues with the 105N reactor but they were not Chernobyl-type inherently unsafe design characteristics. I worked on the project that cleaned out the spent fuel storage basin at 105N approximately 15 years after it was shut down.
I think one can amplify Oldflyer’s comment by noting the absence of disasters in the French and German nuke power industries. The German one was relatively substantial and purportedly the most advanced, when A. Merkel lost some seats in parliament and had to ally with the Green party, resulting in its destruction.
Long ago, Nova (on PBS) had a fascinating and truthful story of the Chernobyl disaster. It followed scientists who put their lives at risk working to find out what the reactor looked like, and they got film of what they called “the elephant’s foot”, which was melted reactor fuel that had flowed and puddled after the top blew off. I wonder if any of them are still alive.
Those of you who have had MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) probably do not realize that it started out being called NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), but the term was modified to remove “nuclear” as people were so spooked by it. I recall a junior physics lab back in 1963 in which we were tasked to excite a nucleus in a strong magnetic field, causing its spin to flip. From that, and computational advances, MRI sprung.
In 1986 I was I both Moscow and Tashkent. It was brief, as I was only there in transit. I was in the Moskow transit hotel for a day and a half. I did get a nice bus tour of the city with an English speaking guide who was gracious enough to keep the Soviet propaganda down below a low roar.
As for the general look and ambiance of the USSR, based on my recollections, I would say that the Chernobyl producers nailed it.
Somehow France has withstood anti-nuclear movements over the years — nuclear power is huge there — it has 58 nuclear reactors that supply 75% of the country’s electricity.
Why is there a “documentary” about Chernobyl produced for HBO?
IOW, what leftist agenda is being propped up? Environmentalist (red-green environmentalist) urgency to talk about developing alternative energy sources without having to seriously consider nuclear energy.
So desperate to support this agenda that they were willing to throw some of their own under the bus. Sad!
Oldflyer, Robert A Heinlein made that argument all the time, to naught..
Then you should know the reason is not the reason…
it sits isolated like everything else discussed… which means nothing connects to nothing
when in the real world, when your mind isn’t mush, everything connects to everything
Soviet influence on the peace movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_influence_on_the_peace_movement
At that time, having a nuclear reactor was having the ability to ‘breed’…
In fact, there are many designs for nuclear reactors, but the ones that dominated back then all were the kind that made other materials, and so, were also dual used..
the peace movement, and the anti nuke movement were not all that separate..
and it had importance on MANY levels ranging from war or not being ready for war
to the most important… preventing the USA advantage in how much nuclear material it has, from using it… and so, keep the US and other western states needing things Russia has a lot of… (and Africa, but they keep that from producing, don’t they?)…
you can even note how we represent that data makes a difference..
Uranium resources by country in 2017 the US has 47,200 tones which is 1%
the next part is edited for space
Uranium production over the period 1945-2016 can be divided into four distinct phases:
1) A military era, from 1945 to the mid-1960s. The generation of electricity from nuclear fuel was incidental to the nuclear arms race.
2) Mid-1960s to mid-1980s. A period of rapidly expanding civil nuclear power saw uranium production pick up as reactor orders expanded. Western production peaked in 1980 and stayed above annual reactor requirements until 1985.
anyone want to compare this timeline to nuclear reactors supplying Russia? how far behind the USA would Russia fear being if it couldnt stop us from using nuclear materials, and reserving the oil for cheap travel, machines, and chemicals for things like plastics and medicines?
and chernobyl brought in, step three…
3) Mid-1980s to about 2002. By 1985, the nuclear construction programme had been cut back severely. Many utilities had signed uranium contracts in anticipation of building more plants. Honouring these created a significant overhang. / The supply overhang was extended due to the arrival on the Western market of uranium from the former Soviet Union starting in 1993.
4) is about the attempt nuclear renaissance…
and we are pushing, air? with recent politicians still saying things like replacing ALL Coal with such…
Over the years 1980 to 2008 the electricity generated by nuclear power increased 3.6-fold while uranium used increased by a factor of only 2.5
one Uranium Pellet creates as much energy as
one ton of coal
149 gallons of oil
17,000 cubic feet of natural gas
Now that Hillary screwed up the Los Alamo program for fingerprinting sources of nuclear bomb explosions… oh well. war is another reason than economics, but beyond the scope
Today the times has a piece on “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”
Quoting:
[snip part on gene editing and ignoring all the warnings about why not super people]
oh, if your wondering why not france? they had to buy their nuclear material from whom? or use whose gas or oil?
November 14, 2013
https://www.energy.gov/articles/us-russia-twenty-year-partnership-completes-final-milestone-converting-20000-russian
did they down blend? or?
and hillary deal? gives them lots of Kazak supply!!!
but not so good for us..
but the point is that when coal is damaged and oil too
and the waste economically of green goes where that will
what will remain is nuclear, and who will dominate?
The new, safer nuclear reactors that might help stop climate change
From sodium-cooled fission to advanced fusion, a fresh generation of projects hopes to rekindle trust in nuclear energy.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612940/the-new-safer-nuclear-reactors-that-might-help-stop-climate-change/
Fail-Safe Nuclear Power
Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602051/fail-safe-nuclear-power/
“Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics in China”
and for neo and others
Today uranium is the only fuel supplied for nuclear reactors. However, thorium can also be utilised as a fuel for CANDU reactors or in reactors specially designed for this purpose. Neutron efficient reactors, such as CANDU, are capable of operating on a thorium fuel cycle, once they are started using a fissile material such as U-235 or Pu-239. Then the thorium (Th-232) atom captures a neutron in the reactor to become fissile uranium (U-233), which continues the reaction. Some advanced reactor designs are likely to be able to make use of thorium on a substantial scale.
The thorium fuel cycle has some attractive features, though it is not yet in commercial use. Thorium is reported to be about three times as abundant in the Earth’s crust as uranium. The 2009 IAEA-NEA Red Book listed 3.6 million tonnes of known and estimated resources as reported, but points out that this excludes data from much of the world, and estimates about 6 million tonnes overall
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx
Oh… i would be remiss if i didnt point out what tech will win out in the longest run…
Geothermal…
forget the sun… we now have more than excellent drilling technology
Edward…”Those of you who have had MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) probably do not realize that it started out being called NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), but the term was modified to remove “nuclear” as people were so spooked by it.”
Yes, I have thought about this…people probably would not have accepted MRI scans under their previous name. The smart marketing person, or whoever did this change, saved a lot of lives.
Also, further back in the past: Thomas Edison engaged in very sleazy fear tactics in an attempt to protect his DC-based technology against the AC-based approach being promoted by Westinghouse and Tesla. If today’s political & social climate had existed back then, he probably would have gotten away with it.
The design of the reactor is unique and in that respect the accident is thus of little relevance to the rest of the nuclear industry outside the then Eastern Bloc.
NO. The accident is of NO relevance to the nuclear industry anywhere outside the Soviet states.
The reactor design — a graphite-moderated reactor — was the type basically used in the very first such reactor, in Chicago, in the 40s, which led to the Manhattan Project.
It was deemed “unsafe” in the 50s and 60s — you remember, back when radiation was good for you — In fact, there were only about 10 reactors in the West which were ever built using graphite moderation… and every one of them was out of service before 1970.
Think about it. You’re going to moderate a HOT nuclear reaction using CHARCOAL BRIQUETTES.
Sound stupid? Yes, it does.
David Foster, Good point.
Thomas Edison referred to execution in his electric chair as “getting Westinghoused.” After the very first execution took multiple tries and a total of 8 minutes, George Westinghouse said, “They would have done better using an axe.”
_____
I watched an anti-nuke documentary once. The chicken-little “expert” said that all it takes is for one ray or particle of radiation to cause one ionizing event in one human cell, and you can get cancer.
Yes, that’s possible. But if it were a likely occurrence then no one would ever be an airline pilot, or flight attendant, or work or live in or near a building made with granite stone; or live at higher altitude, or get an X-ray or cat scan.
An ionizing event might kill the cell, but turning it cancerous is very unlikely. And if a few cells are turned cancerous, it is likely that the immune system can take it out. Lots of ionizing events creating lots of cancerous cells in a short time period, is where it all gets dangerous.
Naturally I was anti-nuke when I was a young, progressive activist. But after 9/11 and my big reassessment, I became pro-nuke.
John McCarthy, the computer scientist who invented the influential programming language Lisp, is one of my patron saints. His web page on Energy, recommending nuclear power, turned me around:
With the development of nuclear energy, it became possible to show that there are no apparent obstacles even to billion year sustainability. A billion years is unimaginably far in the future.
…
Slogan: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/energy.html
It was such a relief not to worry that civilization was going to run out of energy and crash.
The problem with nukes today is that fracking and natural gas make nuclear too expensive, given the heavy regulatory burden. If we need, we can change that.
I’m not a big climate change guy, but I would rather we shift away from fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases and to save petroleum for feedstocks.
The anti-nuclears are Luddite rabbits, twits incapable of reason who operate only on instinct and fear.
They are not cute little bunnies.
OldBloodyHell:
105N Reactor operated from 1963 until shortly after Chernobyl on the Columbia River, producing plutonium and later electricity for the Washington Public Power Supply System. It was the last of the graphite-moderated nuclear reactors built for the US Government (AEC then DOE). The reactors were 105B, 105C, 105KE, 105KW, 105D, 105DR, 105H, 105F, and the last 105N. All were graphite-moderated. Where did most of the Pu for Fat Man (Nagasaki) come from? Look it up or just continue in your ignorance about charcoal and briquettes.
After 30 years as a radiation safety officer at Duane Arnold, I would normally weigh in on this subject, but enough said, the future belongs to thorium salt reactors. The watermelons will never understand the actual negative energy costs of ‘renewables’.
Low cost oil & gas (thanks fracking!) means nukes remain uneconomical for now, in the US. But China, and even more India, are building more.
My second son is about to graduate as a nuclear engineer in Slovakia, which itself generates a high proportion of its electricity from it’s four nuclear reactors, with two more being built but two in a controversial shut down situation (with the EU).
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/slovakia.aspx While specific to Slovakia, lots of relevant industry info, as well as the HUGE impact of politics and political decisions.
Geothermal systems are already a quietly-growing reality. In my hardly-progressive rural corner of the world, the public school and the homes of several of my friends are heated and cooled by geothermal energy.
Artfldgr on June 11, 2019 at 7:24 pm said:
Oh… i would be remiss if i didnt point out what tech will win out in the longest run…
Geothermal…
forget the sun… we now have more than excellent drilling technology
That is correct.
Deepest hole they had ever drilled was about 8 miles. Not even close to the Earth’s radius, supposed by the academic drill heads.
It always gets too hot down there. Nuclear power is just a big steam engine. All they need is another type of fluid than water, to transmit the heat up to heat water which generates force for a steam turbine generator.
Lots of ionizing events creating lots of cancerous cells in a short time period, is where it all gets dangerous.
That is also correct. To create that many cancerous cells via mutation and energetic bombardment, one would need to sleep/eat under 5g and 4g radiation transmitters.
Thanks for all the information — very interesting and useful.
and
Three cheers for Slovakia!
OBloodyHell seems not to understand basic radiation physics.
The ignorant are always with us, even here.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-smithsonian-whats-deepest-hole-ever-dug-180954349/
Science textbooks give you this slice chart of the Earth itself. But they don’t “know” anything about even the crust. Geoscience at its magnificent arrogant best in STEM!
The world is predicted to get a lot colder from my Source.
As a result, solar power will get weird and low output, forcing us to either go nuclear, dig up more coal/fossil fuels, or go geothermal.
That’s about it, really. Tides are not enough. Wind kills too many birds and also takes up too much land that needs to be used to grow crops in the Ever Growing Cold of Winter. Eternal winter? Heh. Look forwards to it, humanity. Let’s see how many Survive.
Also, I looked up this so called North Pole magnetic shift. Apparently it has already happened. Doom is here!! Haha.
For those that have an inkling of how this system works, the fact that the NORTH POLE location has changed should be… interesting.
A brief history of the first nuclear reactor. It used graphite as a moderator. Keep in mind that graphite is carbon and carbon burns. Building a reactor out of graphite is like building a stove out of charcoal briquettes.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/chicago-pile-1
Keep in mind that diamonds are carbon, and diamonds are just like graphite, and just like charcoal briquettes, and just like … Well you get the picture, keep the stupid coming.
Just to shed some sweetness and light on the charcoal briquettes theme that has popped up:
“NUCLEAR GRAPHITE DEVELOPMENT, OPERATIONAL PROBLEMS,
AND RESOLUTION OF THESE PROBLEMS AT THE HANFORD
PRODUCTION REACTORS”
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/008/28008806.pdf?r=1&r=1
A canny reader will notice that charcoal briquettes (Kingsford or whatever brand of choice) are not mentioned in the iaea.org document. Although they do mention the use of a helium and carbon dioxide “gas blanket” over the graphite moderator (reactor core). Be careful there is math and graphs and data and stuff in the document.
Gee, I wonder if there were different engineering and nuclear physics design assumptions used in the Soviet reactors? Inconceivable.
The position of the actual North Pole, the one defined as the axis upon which the Earth spins, has not changed. However, the *magnetic* North Pole, the one magnetic compasses point to, has changed a lot.
Roy:
Don’t bother trying to explain polarity reversals or the other observed phenomenon (geophysics) of the magnetic poles to Yammer. He believes in astrology after all.
NMR, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, is the phenomena whereby the nucleus of particular elements spin in resonance with a magnetic field. (The higher the field strength, the faster the spin.) NMR is still used today in many research and applicable technologies in spectroscopic analysis. It is also the phenomena at the basis of MRI.
NMRI, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, came about when several researchers including Dr Raymond Damadian discovered that the NMR relaxation times of cancerous cells was different than normal cells, and Dr. Paul Lauterbur discovered that the use of a high power gradient device would allow scanning in 2D & 3D space. (If you have ever had an MRI exam, that loud knocking and buzzing sound is caused by the gradient.)
Most of this research was conducted in the late 60′ and 70’s. The “N” in NMRI was dropped because of it’s negative connotations at that time.
A lot of additional research has been conducted since those early days in higher strength magnets and gradients, and in specialized protocols and techniques. MRI systems have come a long way since those days and the research is still ongoing.
Roy – Who retired on May 31st after over 30 years in the field of MRI.
Hello. I sorta-kinda watched the HBO series, enough to get the gist and many of the critical moments and whatnot. I thought it quite fascinating in a morbid sort of way. I’ve seen enough comments from survivors of the real thing to have the impression that the show took a number of liberties for the sake of drama, but on the other hand, I didn’t come away from it with the feeling that it was any sort of anti-nuclear-power screed.
Yes, there were dramatic exaggerations; yes, some of the main characters were either ‘repainted’ or, in at least one case, just invented for the sake of the story; and yes, there was exaggeration of certain effects of radiation and certain aspects of the physics. But it didn’t get everything wrong. And on the whole, it did stimulate me to inform myself much more than I had done about nuclear energy. I’ve been binge-watching various documentaries, other more hard-science clips and articles.
I still feel nervous about radiation – would never see myself ever visiting Pripyat, for example, even though intellectually, the math tells me it’s quite doable. But on the other hand, I’ve never particularly hated or feared nuclear power generally. I don’t, for example, get the heebie-jeebies looking at a cooling tower or something. (Kind of ironic that only a few days after watching all this stuff, I got more X-rays done in one day than I’d had in my entire life combined up to that point.)
Thus, I have this irritating conflict within myself between my overly emotional outlook on nuclear energy and what my head tells me about it. I do chemistry, after all, so it’s not as if science is foreign territory. Did the show help to resolve that? For me, not yet sure. One thing that is clear is that, when it’s done right, nuclear power is an amazing invention; and when done wrong, it’s still amazing, just in a very different direction.
I’m grateful for the contributions of those of you who can talk about nuclear power from professional experience.
Roy on June 12, 2019 at 2:57 pm said:
The position of the actual North Pole, the one defined as the axis upon which the Earth spins, has not changed. However, the *magnetic* North Pole, the one magnetic compasses point to, has changed a lot.
That’s the geographic North Pole. There’s also the magnetic North Pole and then the geomagnetic North Pole.
This concerns Flat Earth theory though and not much to do with astrology. That’s because if there is a North pole, then compasses should be able to navigate by the South pole as well. And GPS should ideally not have to use any magnetic sources except as cross verification.
There’s all kinds of holes and weirdness going on. Because science should be absolute, especially with how much airplanes and navigation relies upon the magnetic compass system and direction. If it is not correct, then lives are at risk.
Yet they don’t actually understand why it keeps moving or when it speeds up or slows down. And talk about polarity shift between North and South pole just sounds like another scientific cop out or Armageddon theory. If that had came from me, people here would freak out and try to make fun of it. When it comes from their scientific priesthoods, then it suddenly is taken as Gospel.
Currently, many people say science is right whether you believe in it or not (or whether it is accurate or not, it is true because scientists believe it to be true). Anthropomorphic global warming is a result of this type of scientific orthodoxy based upon “consensus rules” rather than the scientific methodology of experiments testing theories using data.
Apparently the geo magnetic model and the geo science model can’t even predict magnetic changes, even though it has been changing since magnetism has been measured on Earth (in this civilization) one hundred years ago.
I find that somewhat… rather lacking in the scientific “accuracy” department. Like I said about the cross section of the Earth’s core and mantle, they don’t know much about the crust, let alone the rest of the Earth. They just have pet theories that sound good, but do not have sufficient data. Yes, I know about sonar and other things traveling through the Earth. It is entirely insufficient given how many variables are uncontrolled.
Also, no engineering firm has reproduced a scaled down model of a magnetic Earth core using molten iron and the other metals. The only magnetic “liquid” we have is closer to a liquid battery made out of sodium.
Hello Neo, I have watched the whole series. The whole show amounts to a sharp critique of USSR authoritarianism, particularly with regards to how they controlled their citizens by supressing information. Chernobyl is interpreted as a natural consequence of USSR authoritarianism. Every episode focuses on the suffering of the people affected by the disaster, and the suffering the government causes attempting to halt the catastrophe.