[Regia-NA] A motorcycle tour of Chernobyl (If You go down to the woods today, wear lead underwear!)

[rmhowe]

mik lawson wrote:
> 
>     I can think of no odder place to take a bike ride...
> 
>     Very eerie stuff...
> 
>     Folks might be interested in a fascinating photographic tour of the
>     ruined landscape about the city of Chernobyl in the Ukraine, with its
>     doomed nuclear power plant which, in 1986, devastated the area with
>     radiation, destroying surrounding cities and towns as living communities
>     and leaving the whole region uninhabitable for, it's claimed, six
>     *hundred* years. A motorcyclist named Elena, her 147-horsepower
>     Kawasaki "Ninja," and scientist's access pass provide us with a
>     troubling and unparalleled view of the disaster.
> 
>     Elena's pictorial diary of her visit is eerily reminiscent of films like
>     The Omega Man and post-apocalypse science fiction wherein one navigates
>     through a radioactive landscape as one would through a minefield, armed
>     lifeline-like with geiger counter and dosimeter. The heavily
>     radioactive "magic woods" that Elena regards -- from a distance -- are
>     horrifying. Much of the rest has the melancholy of a latter day
>     Pompeii. Don't miss it.
> 
>     Link: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/
> 
>     Regards,
> 
>     Mik

My father had a large bomb shelter built back in the 1960's.
It had a hand cranked blower to pull air in through an anything
but adequate filter that whined. The walls were four feet thick.
The ceiling was reinforced concrete covered with four feet of gravel.
Curiously his mother next door was not a designated occupant but
a black servant and his wife who had worked for the family for
60 years were. As the step-son God only knows where I fell in his plans.
It was full of camel crickets and rusting jar lids on old preserves.
A very unpleasant damp place. If one is that necessary then what you
come out to find isn't going to be worth it. Eating a bullet would be
a mercy by comparison.  The U.S. plan [apart from moving whatever
might be left of Congress to a bunker under a resort hotel 60 miles
west of Washington (that is common knowledge now)] has to do with
finding enough quicklime to dispose of the bodies. The Russians
were more responsible towards their populations and built many
large bomb shelters under their cities. We simply tried to find
existing basements that might survive by and large.

The Russians also developed biological warfare aimed at every food
crop we had. It still exists. One american scientist recently visited
it with his Russian colleagues and filmed the collections of vials
held in freezers. One can only hope neither terrorists nor earthquakes
visit them.

There is another Large Area in Russia that one drives through in a car
with the windows up as fast as one can go for about a hundred and fifty 
miles from an unpublicized nuclear accident in the 60's.
Chernobyl was not the first.  Chernobyl did ruin the environments
of many other countries as well, in particular the reindeer herds and
herders to the north of them. Their meat is not particularly safe 
anymore. Chernobyl was the one they could not hide. Putting it out
at all was bravery, self-sacrifice, and luck.

Their nuclear submarines often met similar fates.
K-19 was the last of a long line of accidents on them.
Although the Kursk was destroyed by a torpedo accident.
America lost two subs itself.
The rapid compression raises everything inside to a flamable
temperature as they go down. Not a good way to go.

The Russian Nuclear land tests got so big they were finally scared to 
increase the size of them.

Geologically, and osteologically, our century is very easily dated by
the radiological isotopes everywhere. Including the ice-packs at the
poles. Certain organs, like bones and the thyroid accumulate the
isotopes over time.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are back on line however, regardless of the
birth defects. One does what one can and goes on. Three Mile Island
was sheer luck to get by. Special Robots have been constructed to
deal with that. Previously trainees were given about twenty minutes
of exposure total to try to deal with the cleanup.

There is a whole city, a very secret city in Russia, that no one ever
leaves. The U.S. now pays the salaries and support of the people there.
It is reachable only through about an eight or ten mile tunnel through
the mountains via rail. It is not under a mountain though except for
the nuclear materials processing area. We cannot afford for their
knowledge to go on the world market. They have always had the best of
the consumables in the Soviet Union. Since it is heated and powered
by the same reactors that make the weapons grade materials it was
designed for they cannot be turned off either. Enough material is 
produced and stored each week for three more bombs. Creepy, eh?
I once saw a 60 Minutes video tour of the facility about three
years ago. The CIA was never able to penetrate it.
Amazing where reporters can go.

The French simply blasted an atoll into bits. A chunk at a time.
Even deliberately blew the bottom out of a Greenpeace ship protesting it 
killing some of the crew. That wasn't that long ago.

The U.S. did something similar at Bikini, only they began with a
fleet that had some regular boats with sailors on them in addition
to the confiscated ex-enemy ships closer to the blast they expected
to go down. The sailors were taught to quickly scrub down the
superstructures until they reached more acceptable radiation levels.
The idea was to discover whether or not a fleet could
survive a single bomb attack. Many U.S. soldiers were exposed in
the land tests. So was at least one acting company down plume.
I understand the Brits used the Australian outback in the 1960's
without bothering to tell the local aborigines - who at the time
were regarded rather like livestock on the land.

I have been shown black striped Nike missles aimed at Cuba in
a photograph by a former air force officer. Cuba wasn't the
only one aiming across the 90 mile distance by any means.
I'm glad we got to outlive that lunatic Kruschev and his
shoe that never stayed on in the United Nations. I remember
him pounding it on the desk with "We will bury you!".
Then again he was the political officer at Stalingrad
who survived under Stalin, so was conditionalized crazy.

Curiously our former mainland test sites are visitable by tourists.

Welcome to the 21st century. Interesting times as the Chinese
would say.

Magnus