u/maksimkak

We all love a good story, right? I came across this gem on Facebook, and wanted to share it with you. So, yeah, I didn't write it, just sharing it. I'll post my comment I left on that story in the comments here.

https://preview.redd.it/hncq2uvsqqjh1.png?width=1143&format=png&auto=webp&s=f0f430511b96d124a4075d2be352dc139c5539b4

This is Valery Legasov. He was not a soldier, but he walked into the worst nuclear disaster in history anyway.

A brilliant Soviet chemist, deputy director of the famous Kurchatov Institute, Legasov lived a quiet life of science until April 26, 1986. Reactor 4 at Chernobyl exploded.

While others were told to minimize it, Legasov was flown to the site. He stood on the roof of the burning reactor. He knew the radiation was killing him, but he stayed for months, leading the investigation, designing ways to stop the fire, and understanding what went wrong.

Then he did something unthinkable for the Soviet system. In August 1986, in Vienna, in front of the world’s scientists at the IAEA, he told the truth. He revealed the fatal flaws in the RBMK reactor design that the state had hidden for years.

For that honesty, he was punished. He was denied awards, his health was failing from radiation exposure, and his warnings were ignored at home. He felt the system would never learn.

He recorded his truth on 5 audio tapes — The Legasov Tapes — detailing everything they tried to hide.

On April 27, 1988 — one day after the second anniversary of Chernobyl — Valery Legasov passed away at his home in Moscow at just 51. He was found after struggling with his health and the heavy burden of what he had seen.

After his passing, his tapes were released. The world finally listened. The RBMK reactors were fixed because of him. In 1996, he was posthumously named Hero of Russia.

He knew telling the truth would cost him everything. He did it anyway. That’s why today, the world remembers his name.

The man who saved millions by refusing to stay silent.

Respect to Valery Legasov — a true scientist, a true hero, whose courage and honesty saved millions and taught the world that truth is more important than fear. His work will never be forgotten.

Present by RSD ( Real stories daily)

So many people asking for floor plans, dimensions, locations of particular places inside the plant, photos from the inside...

Do you think they might be spies or secret agents, gathering intelligence and information? :-o

Sorry if this has been posted before, but has anyone made a video, or at least a breakdown of flashback scenes from both seasons - in chronological order?

Flashbacks in Season 1 were fairly easy to follow, but the ones in Season 2 are all over the place.

I haven't maked this thread as Soilers, but obviously avoid posting spoilers here.

Thanks.

While looking for articles on the isotope composition of Fuel-containing masses (FCM) aka corium, I randomly came across this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X25000864 published in June 2025 in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

I thought that all of the corium was confined to the sub-reactor levels, and definitely within the confines of the Sarcophagus. But...

>For the first time, a FCM particle was located in and extracted from soil of a former agricultural field 5 km south-southeast of the former nuclear power plant. Using a combination of energy scanning electron microcopy and dispersive x-ray analysis and Secondary Neutral Mass Spectrometry we found that the particle is comprised of a silicon matrix containing evenly distributed amounts of U, Pu and Am. Embedded in that chemically stable matrix are small inclusions of reactor U of varying chemical composition. We could show this particle type to be largely unaffected by weathering under environmental conditions.

https://preview.redd.it/65515hjdcohh1.png?width=1232&format=png&auto=webp&s=9bef42bb9792f50c453cc41675bc9fcd51359511

The particle appears glassy, shimmers and has various inclusions. It was isolated from a soil sample taken in September 2017 near the former village of Kopachi, where the researchers have (or had) a test field for plant uptake of radioactive substances. They were surprised by the relatively large size of the particle located so far away from the power plant.

I wonder how it got all the way there, and if there are more fragments like this in the general area around the plant, hiding in the soil.

The paper concludes:

>It is also important to note that the particle had been in the environment for approximately 30 years prior to sampling and still appears to be largely intact. This leads to the assumption that this type of particle will remain in the CEZ and therefore contribute to the particulate contamination in its soils. [...] this singular FCM particle is of notable significance. Further investigations will be necessary to asses the significance of this finding on the overall contamination situation.

P.S. a couple of possible mechanisms of how it got there has been suggested by a chatty friend of mine: steam or gas-driven ejection, when the lava enountered any pockets of water or gas, and the mechanical fragmentation of cooling lava. Such particles would then be taken up into the hot convective plume, carrying them very high up and away from the immediate power plant area.

Haven't seen this one before. They talk a lot about previously classified KGB reports about CNPP construction and operation. Ironically enough, the KGB were the whistleblowers, but they could only report their findings to the government, nothing more. There's an interview with Nikolai Gorbachenko, who was a dosimentrist at the plant on the night of the disaster, and helped find and carry Shashenok.

There's some pretty funny mistakes, too - Serhii Plokhy seems to think that you can produce weapons-grade Uranium in an RBMK reactor. And the documentary makers seem to think that fuel and water in the reactor are in separate channels. Or that the "graphite tips" were there to help with lubrication.

Placed a base computer and a portal here. Walled off 10 of these "Curious Deposits", they give me 6,439 Runaway Mold, which I then split between two portable refiners standing nearby. Fully-loaded with fuel, they process everything without any remnant, giving me 1,288 Nanites in total.

You can find these "Curious Deposits" on many planets, just look for a yellow icon with three stars.

They respawn every time you travel back to this farm, or even if you enter and exit your spacecraft and reload the save.

https://preview.redd.it/vwd18ceo0lhh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b91d169c3762a79e6711dba6fda196341d44eaf

https://preview.redd.it/gnc5krkeqagh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b94500888216e8e12fe2f9abc8da9fa1a5ea189

Here, we can see five indicators of feedwater regulators of the right side of the Main Cooling Circuit. At the top are the control buttons for the Main Circulation Pumps 21, 22, 23, and 24 (and the keys to operate their gate valves) and buttons controlling their oil pumps. And along the middle of the image (horizontally) are the control keys for the pure condensate pumps.

Photo: REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

(By the way, even though I select "Photo" as the flair for the post, for some reason the photo doesn't show up on the main page of this subreddit, like it used to. But it does for other people, hmm.)

Does anyone else feel like those parts of the book are not The Silmarillion proper, but more like the Appendices to it?

With the last chaper of Quenta Silmarillion, Morgoth is defeated, the silmarils are gone, Beleriand is no more, the First Age has ended. What follows after feels more like a prelude to The Lord of the Rings, and the last part of the book just summarises the plot of LOTR.

Saying that, I'm glad Akallabeth is there, because we would otherwise never know about that part of history and the role it played in setting up the history of the Third Age. But I wonder what was Tolkien's reason behind including Of the Rings of Power, since the readers already know that part of the history of Middle-earth.

Saw this trailer on FB: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1368934101409687

It was aired on Monday. I suspect it has all the usual misconceptions about "operators making errors and breaking the rules" and Dyatlov forcing them to complete the test.

If anyone has a link to where I can watch it (without paying), would be nice.

I kept thinking about the interview Alexander Kupnyi did with Alexey Fatakhov (former Senior Reactor Control Engineer at Chernobyl) and how valuable to me was information I learned from him. Specifically, about ORM, what it exists for, and what were the operators allowed to do with it.

The interview is in Russian, with no subtitles available (sadly), so I decided to translate (and paraphrase) some part of it, hopefully you find it interesting. Link to the interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZJVnvhgFIc

For convenience, I'll mark Kupnyi as "K", and Fatakhov as "F". Operational regulations are called the "reglament" in Russian, so I'll use that word, as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

F - The reglament did not forbid operating the reactor at 200 MW thermal. Different matter is that it was a bad power level. And they knew this.

K - What is your take on what happened in the control room, step by step?

F - A lot of witness accounts, and in the comission report, they say that Dyatlov forced Toptunov to raise the power. I think that the situation was somewhat different. He didn't force him, he told him off for being unable to raise the power on his own, due to lack of experience. As per Tregub's (previous shift supervisor) memories, Tregub stepped up to help and, along with Akimov and Tptunov, they managed to raise the power. Although, according to Dyatlov, he saw that power was already being raised when he got back to the control room from his walkabout. Raising the power was not against the then-existing rules. It was complicated, though.

K - How did they raise the power?

F - By withdrawing control rods, naturally.

K - About the rods. What do the rules say, about the minimum number of control rods?

F - The concept of Operational Reactivity Margin, measured in control rods, as well as the concept of a Xenon pit, is described in the RBMK handbook, written by its constructors. It talks about how, when there's a change in power level, reactivity drops, and in order to compensate for this drop, there needs to be an amount of "spare reactivity" available, before power level change is executed. And then, this spare reactivity can be spent, all the way. By withdrawing all of the control rods, so that the reactor could be kept running at the desired power level, until Xenon poisoning levels out. This concept of [reactivity] margin is there so that it could be used, when needed.

Before the accident at Leningrad NPP in 1975, everyone considered ORM simply as this spare reactivity needed for times when there's a threat of a Xenon pit.

K - So, prior to that even in 1975, it was considered perfectly normal to withdraw all of the control rods.

F - Yes, and that's exactly what they did when there was a power drop - they withdrew all of the control rods. Power started rising rapidly, and that's when positive void coefficient came into play. A fuel channel or two ruptured, also damaging channels around them. They narrowly avoided a major disaster. There was an investigation, the causes were established, and a program was developed to fix this issue. But it was slow, and in these 10 years, it didn't get to Chernobyl Unit 4 in time. And the findings about the cause of the acident were classified, and were not communicated to the operators at CNPP.

That's when the rule about "15 control rods minimum" was introduced. But this parameter was not considered as fast-changing. It was for nominal power level, and whenever a fuel rod was spent and needed changing, ORM would fall below miminum (could be taken all the way down to 0), until that rod was swapped with a fresh one, upon which ORM would go back to normal. After the disaster, a new rule was made to keep ORM at 26 - 30 rods, and in emergency situations, 15.

But, there was no indicator in the control room that would show the current ORM value, when there were fast changes in reactor parameters that could affect ORM. Not just fuel burnup, but also feed water temperature, pressure, etc. There were no instruments to reflect ORM during such fast changes.

When Unit 4 operator raised the power to 200MW, all they had was an ORM printout, made half an hour ago by the SKALA computer, showing ORM of 19 rods - within the acceptable limits.

About 10 seconds before AZ-5 was pressed, ORM returned to its normal value of 15 rods.

It's nice to revisit an old That Chernobyl Guy videos like this.

His book "How It Was" can be read here docs.google.com/document/d/1ZA6SUYBkE_YV0L2EXp9qGWvCqgDGTW3E5bfJubUm2Yw

You wouldn't believe the amount of hate and prejudice that Russians still have for him. For them, he is the criminal, and Legasov the hero, while in reality it was the other way round.

https://preview.redd.it/5d6t0d2y4gdh1.png?width=1268&format=png&auto=webp&s=1a264f51ef8111e393d228cd3475024a79d258f4

Starting with the turbine hall.

Reposted from https://www.facebook.com/Czarnobylcy

Deconstruction project: https://chnpp.gov.ua/en/184-projects/current-projects/591-project-qequipment-dismantlingq591

>As of now, 10,737 tons of equipment has been dismantled. 207 tons of this equipment have been disposed as RAW; 9,303 tons has been decontaminated and released from regulatory control; 1,164 tons are in the process of decontamination and release from regulatory control.

A trip to the FCM (fuel-containing mass) - which resembles pumice or slag and formed when fuel-bearing material fell into water immediately after the explosion of ChNPP Unit 4 - filmed by videographer Sergey Koshelev.

Starring our favourite Sarcophagus explorer Alexander Kupnyi, and one of the most radioactive fuel-containing lava formation - the Heap!

When did the last ship sail to the Undying Lands? When did Cirdan&Co wrap their operation up in the Grey Heavens and said, that's it, no more ships. Did Cirdan and his elves then also sail, leaving Middle-earth forever?

Or was Legolas and Gimli's ship the last one?

When did the last ship sail to the Undying Lands? When did Cirdan&Co wrap their operation up in the Grey Heavens and said, that's it, no more ships. Did Cirdan and his elves then also sail, leaving Middle-earth forever?

Or was Legolas and Gimli's ship the last one?

https://preview.redd.it/q9l6ueq7z1dh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba15750b13b8944cb58ef56a4b4b2128763b4754

Photo by Jeremy Nicholl, taken in October 1995. https://www.jeremynichollarchive.com

This pump hall used to look very different before the disaster. Most of the "mess" and structures you see here are the result of human activity post-disaster. You can see the top of one of the pump motors.

For the record, this is not where Khodemchuk died, that was the northern pump hall.