Peak Oil News and Message Boards

rushdy wrote:And that is why a simpler life using less energy is the better option.

Specop_007 wrote:And then we would see pictures of starving children, and children dying of diseases that otherwise could be cured.

Specop_007 wrote:
And then we would see pictures of starving children, and children dying of diseases that otherwise could be cured.

The pictures are sad to be sure, but unfortunately thats just the nature of life. There is no easy answer and no easy solution.

UIUCstudent01 wrote:

Specop_007 wrote:And then we would see pictures of starving children, and children dying of diseases that otherwise could be cured.

Of course, your realize, that nuclear power isn't necessary for basic sanitation and healthy, plentiful food. We pretty much achieved all that without nuclear power.

Graeme wrote:More biodiversity at Chernobyl

Some 100 species on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of threatened species, as well as bear and wolf, have been found in the evacuated zone. But adults tend to be healthy, implying that those harmed by radiation die young.
However, with some 40 different radioactive elements -- including strontium-90 and decay products of uranium and plutonium -- released into the exclusion zone, it will be many hundreds of millennia before humans could live in the area again, said Dolin.

http://www.physorg.com/news5774.html

gampy wrote:Some of you may know this story, or know of Elena...

For those not familiar...here is Elena's travelogue through the Chernobyl dead-zone.

Fascinating, and somewhat troubling for those who believe nuclear power is wise for "developing" nations.

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

Enjoy the ride.

They include stories as varied as two headed mutants breeding in the exclusion zone to the blogs of Elena, a mysterious girl on a motorcycle, whose claims about illicit rides through the exclusion zone were taken seriously ndash. Until she was exposed as a hoax by Mary Mycio, a foreign Femdom wives of the Los Angeles Times and author of Wormwood Forest A Natural History of Chernobyl. If the true long term effects of the world’s biggest nuclear accident on the surrounding countryside are ever to be known, it has to be based on science rather than anecdote.

Chernobyl today.
Saturday, March 6th, 2004
A young female Ukranian motorcyclist offers an eerie photographic tour of the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. (*)

Update: 4 April 2004. Removed old link. Current link works.

Update: 7 July 2004. The Los Angeles Times is now reporting that this Chernobyl-themed web site is a hoax. (†) In part, the story reads:

The updated site does not appear to contain any authentic images of “Elena” or a motorcycle in any Chernobyl location. Four pictures on the updated site can be traced to a Ukrainian coffee table book published in 2000, some are aerial shots, and many are anachronisms. One photo is of chemical showers that have not existed for years. In another, the tall ventilation stack of the ruined reactor looms above some saplings. But those trees have since grown so high that only the tip of the stack is visible today.

The purported author of the web site, Elena, nicknaming herself “Kidd of Speed” or “Kid of Speed,” has not responded on her site, now available to kiddofspeed.com. (‡)

A fraud exposed, and a true thing...
This one left me blinking. Not so much because it was a fraud, as why anyone would bother to create such a fraud...

Found this on the infiltrate.org forum - thought you might find it interesting. You'd wonder why somebody would go to the lengths to fake something like this.
dee

Chornobyl "Ghost Town" story is a fabrication TOP
e-POSHTA subscriber Mary Mycio writes:

I am based in Kyiv and writing a book about Chornobyl for the Joseph Henry Press. Several sources have sent me links to the "Ghost Town" photo essay included in the last e-POSHTA mailing. Though it was full of factual errors, I did find the notion of lone young woman riding her motorcycle through the evacuated Zone of Alienation to be intriguing and asked about it when I visited there two days ago.

I am sorry to report that much of Elena's story is not true. She did not travel around the zone by herself on a motorcycle. Motorcycles are banned in the zone, as is wandering around alone, without an escort from the zone administration. She made one trip there with her husband and a friend. They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv.

She did, however, bring a motorcycle helmet. They organized their trip through a Kyiv travel agency and the administration of the Chornobyl zone (and not her father). They were given the same standard excursion that most Chernobyl tourists receive. When the Web site appeared, Zone Administration personnel were in an uproar over who approved a motorcycle trip in the zone. When it turned out that the motorcycle story was an invention, they were even less pleased about this fantasy Web site.

Because of those problems, Elena and her husband have changed the Web site and the story considerably in the last few days. Earlier versions of the narrative lied more blatantly about Elena taking lone motorcycle trips in the zone. That has been changed to merely suggest that she does so, which is still misleading.

I would not normally bother to correct someone's silly Chornobyl fantasy. Indeed, correcting all the factual errors and falsehoods in "Ghost Town" would consume as much space as the Web site itself. But the motorcycle story was such an outrageous fiction that I thought the readers of e-Poshta should know.

Mary Mycio, J.D.

Legal Program Director
IREX U-Media
Shota Rustaveli St. 38b, No. 16
Kyiv 01023, Ukraine
Tel: (380-44) 220-6374, 228-6147
Fax: 227-7543

A frozen Ferris wheel, poisoned forests and paint sloughing off an empty swimming pool; these are the remains of a city devastated by a nuclear disaster nearly 30 years ago.
Pripyat in Ukraine, once home to a population of 50,000, was just a few miles from the Chernobyl power plant which exploded in 1986.
Now, a Devon-based documentary maker, Danny Cooke, has captured the area in decay by flying around the abandoned area using a camera attached to a drone.

Tanada wrote:Pure scare mongering, the power distribution system is no different on a Nuclear reactor from those on CCGT or Coal power plants. Likeliest answer a transformer overheated and had to be replaced.