Talk:Chernobyl disaster/Archive 13

This is an archive of past discussions about Chernobyl disaster. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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Archive 14

Semi-protected edit request on 9 August 2019

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I want to Change the disaster time from 01:23:40 to 01:23:45, because this is when it really happened, as stated in the 2019 Chernobyl miniseries 2A02:C7F:A200:D400:EC1E:6BDA:6FED:E566 (talk) 14:47, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

 Not done. The time in the article is well-sourced and explained in detail. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:42, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

You shouldn't use the miniseries for this, because it's partly fictionalized drama and also it is also it's much based on Medvedev's book which is also full of wrong details.Alliumnsk (talk) 05:50, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Just for the record, which Medvedev, Gregori or Zhores? SkoreKeep (talk) 08:23, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

He meant Grigori. But Zhores' book is also very inaccurate because it was released while the coverup was still the dominant narrative.67.244.33.136 (talk) 23:31, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

A Better Cite?

There is a statement with a dubious cite Under Accident, Reactor Shutdown and Power Excursion. The statement is: "However, the precise reason why the button was pressed when it was is not certain, as only the deceased Akimov and Toptunov partook in that decision, though the atmosphere in the control room was calm at that moment." The cite is "Chernobyl. How did it happen?" by Anatoly Dyatlov, the deputy chief-engineer at Chernobyl who oversaw the test leading to the disaster and spent time in prison as a result. I have searched for official (translated) testimony from other witnesses or a detailed timeline which shows when the power surge occurred in relation to pressing AZ-5 to corroborate this assessment unsuccessfully; however, I cannot say for certain whether this statement is true. I can, however, say that humans involved in terrible events tend to minimize their involvement and attempt to spread the blame. The quoted statement above is indicative of this: he is saying "I don't know why they pressed it: it was their decision," but he was in charge. We know that he was held criminally responsible for the test, and we know he threatened operators with job terminations if they did not proceed with it despite inadequate test conditions (Higginbotham, Adam (February 12, 2019). Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. pp. 80–82.). As the credibility of Dyatlov is uncertain, I would recommend that any reference to his book have a cross-reference with a more unbiased source or be omitted altogether, lest the credibility of this Wikipedia article also be brought into doubt.

Quietmartialartist (talk) 21:00, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

You bring up a great point. I want to double-check what Higginbotham uses as a source in my copy tomorrow, and I'll expand based on that (in a sense, the whole Chernobyl background is a big clash of two major narratives, something I would like to document in the article as well). For now just a quick cross-reference, though it's a primary source: interview with a witness, Yuriy Tregub, at http://accidont.ru/evid02.html (google translate: "This moment with holding the power was somewhat nervous, but as a whole, as soon as 200 megawatts reached the power and became on the machine, everyone calmed down. ... Again went to the place of SIUT. There was no pre-emergency fuss. ..."). -- Pasky (talk) 19:27, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Let me follow up some more. There are two questions, one of them is whether though the atmosphere in the control room was calm at that moment can be treated as a fact and/or sourced better. To stay with Higginbotham, he says on pp. 85 "The control room was calm and quiet" (and surrounding text is written in a similar spirit). I'm adding that reference to the sentence.

The wider question is, of course, the references in general. To sketch my current understanding and solicit feedback on this - the situation is unfortunately extremely messy; I will be talking about the April 25 evening. There are some purely primary sources such as court testimonies (which may be very unreliable as they were done in a totalitarian regime and an assumption of fair trial, or even fair questioning, cannot be held - as is evident by huge discrepancy of the trial proceedings and judgment with later findings by both INSAG, local institutions and eyewitness accounts even of those who also testified), and first-hand eyewitness accounts as written testimonies or interview transcripts. Then, there are what I'd call primary/secondary sources - these are coherent sources that however have a large danger of bias, and the two I'm concerned about is Dyatlov's book and Medvedev's book. Dyatlov was an actor and undeniably is biased, but I think the book is not just a primary source as it involved heavy later research, includes testimonies and endorsement of others etc. Meanwhile, Medvedev (this book is the main source e.g. for the HBO series) builds mainly on Toptunov's immediate testimony and presents a narrative which is quite at odds with other eyewitnesses and largely uncorroborated; at the same time, Medvedev is not independent source as he is past executive of the plant and has documented negative bias towards executives of the plant incl. Dyatlov. At the same time, Toptunov who "pressed the button" would also be as unreliable a narrator as Dyatlov, but without the benefit of discussions of the events with the rest of the staff at the hospital. Finally, there are the purely secondary sources. The best out there as a factual source is likely INSAG-7, even though there are some controversies there too (covered e.g. by the NEI journal) but it is light on detail on the events in the control room. Other major ones would be probably Shcherbak, Higginbotham and Plokhy. Unfortunately, because of the conflict of Dyatlov's and Medvedev's narratives, they often contradict each other at various points, and neither of them seems to carry an uncontroversial description of the night before the explosion (perhaps the oldest one, Shcherbak, does?).

To give an example of the problems in the secondary sources, I examined "he threatened operators with job terminations if they did not proceed with it despite inadequate test conditions (Higginbotham, pp. 80-82)". He cites Medvedev whose only source was Toptunov's early testimony. He also mentions it is corroborated by Shcherbak's interviews with Kazachkov and Uskov; unfortunately, I don't have the Shcherbak's book, but I asked a friend to check them and he says the quotes are just people speaking in generalities that operators could have been fired for shutting down the reactor due to ORM. And of course, Kazachkov was not even in the room at that time, he was the previous shift supervisor. Meanwhile, you would think such an outrage would be mentioned by the many other narrators describing their eyewitness accounts, but they uniformly (AFAIK) don't. Plokhy, an extremely good source for the immediate post-explosion aftermath apparently, narrates the night in a much flatter and contradictory way.

To sum things up - primary sources are biased, there are clearly biased and controversial semi-secondary sources that are currently used liberally in the article, and secondary sources are contradictory and even the modern ones must be read critically. I think the best long-term strategy for the article is to keep the main narrative simple and uncontroversial and describe the controversy. To implement this, the main narrative should mainly follow INSAG-7 I think; I agree that other statements should have at least two independent references. I'm not yet sure how to well describe the controversy - it would be important for the reader to understand e.g. any contradictions to the series, but there are no great secondary sources about the controversy yet. What do you think? -- Pasky (talk) 22:55, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

It is certainly reasonable to ask for more sources when Dyatlov holds forth on a subject of controversy (although we have no reason to doubt his credibility on many other topics that are not points of contention). In this case there are any number of other eyewitnesses we could cite, in addition to INSAG-7 itself. This may not be germane to the article at this time, but Higginbotham's book is in fact misleading and mistaken when it claims that Dyatlov threatened anyone. If you read the primary sources which are cited in the passage you quoted, you will find that they do not support such a narrative in the least. The original source is an operator musing on whether he himself would have been fired if he had hypothetically shut down the reactor due low ORM. In other words, it has nothing at all to say about what actually happened, but tacitly supports the idea that Akimov agreed with raising the power. There is also testimony from multiple eyewitnesses making it clear that there were no protests. In everything I have read about the disaster, I have only been able to find a single source suggesting that there was any disagreement, and it is thirdhand hearsay (something Toptunov's parents heard from unnamed coworkers). Even that does not mention threats or arguments. For what it's worth, I attempted to engage Higginbotham in a discussion about this, but he wasn't interested. 2604:6000:9F00:6200:88B4:163A:35C3:48D3 (talk) 23:03, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 5 December 2019

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Change Goiana accident => Goiânia accident 93.136.83.43 (talk) 14:30, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

 Done. El_C 14:34, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

'Positive void coefficient' incorrect description

The article currently states that a positive void coefficient means that 'as cooling water boils excessively in the fuel pressure tubes it produces large steam voids in the coolant rather than small bubbles.' - it is in fact a coefficient used to estimate how much the reactivity of a nuclear reactor changes as voids (typically steam bubbles) form in the reactor moderator or coolant - as per Void coefficient.

Spyritdragon (talk) 03:20, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing. This was corrected. --Ita140188 (talk) 03:24, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Lead too long

These are the guidelines. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 04:01, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing this out! You are absolutely correct. The article is quite long (something that would be worth addressing at some point too), therefore the lead section cannot be super-short, but still. This is my first idea on how could we make a well-structured, shorter lead section, by paragraphs:

• Definition. We can keep the current paragraph, I think.
• Description of the accident - background, cause, and progression.
• The immediate impact - radiation, management, evacuation, causalities.
• The long-term aftermath - containment, liquidation, cost, causalities.

This will require significant shortening, but I believe the current summary also gives a very useful level of detail. Therefore, at least for now I'd move these paragraphs at the beginning of the respective sections and then it can be consolidated further in the future. Feedback on this plan is welcome! --Pasky (talk) 23:19, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

---

It is good to see some challenge here, but please note that the lead has seen considerable ediiting in the last 5 months or so to make it more relevant, less wordy and include all the main points that can be easily assimilated. It was very uneven at the beginning of summer and did not cover all the headings above. It even described the disaster as being an energy accident, NOT a nuclear accident. It also had detail such as who did what in the causes of the disaster, yet missed out several aspects of the story.

The MoS says, "The lead serves as an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents". The headings above are nearly all in the lead, except for liquidation, but that's a challenge how to meaningfully explain without detailed explanation of what liquidation means in this context.

I have spent a good deal of time making the lead a concise, coherent, comprehensive, readable summary. Note that the MoS says that "Alexa reports the average Wikipedia user spends 4 minutes 15 seconds on the site." So the average reader is not there long, and the best service is to give them an easily-digested summary. It should also be noted that there were in fact TWO leads until a few months ago, the lead section itself, and an overview. This latter repeated points from the lead and added a random selection of other details. I rationalised this by removing the overview altogether on 24th June, removing duplications, putting some summary points in the lead, and remaining detail in the body text. That meant readers were straight into a description of the accident; which is what people want to know about - how did it happen? Note that Fukushima Daiichi also suffered the same issue of a lead and an overview until recently and was billed as an energy disaster.

I have already defended the lead length with an edit on 26th June "Copyedit of lead reducing words by 39 but keeping key points. Lead represents less than 4% of article size, which is not excessive to produce a good summary". I have also reverted sloppy language such as on the 27th June when I said "Reverted because the sense is changed - "had" means they knew it at the time, which they did. The gap is implicitly time, but "operating" may clarify. The generators, do not "kick in", which is a colloquial non-technical term. They actually start rotating quickly, but have to stabilise speed before the load is thrown on them. This is in body text. Better to clearly say 'provide power'".

This lead is very important, being read by 500,000 people a day when the miniseries came out, and +20k a day at the moment, so each word must be weighed carefully. There is still scope for improvement, probably in the pruning of long term medical effects to give an overall comment, and to simply get across the uncertain statistical nature of long term predictions for stochastic effects. (see sievert). The cost of the cleanup may not be of great interest also; though it's been shortened a lot lately. There is some good editing at the moment going on in the body text under accident, and INSAG, where there were unclear statements. But please, let's keep the lead informative and comprehensive.

Dougsim (talk) 07:26, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed overview, Dougsim! I had no idea about this personally. I still feel that there is room to reduce detail and flesh out section intros instead, but my opinion shifted to a very neutral one now. (I agree that near the end of the lead section, something can be shortened for sure.) --Pasky (talk) 21:37, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I did a bit of that after posting. I didn't edit out the para about the how the accident happened, other than grammar, because it does make a couple of more specific and pertinent points which help with the general picture. The lead is vital, not many people are going to wade the large amounts of text later on. Fukushima Daiichi is a good example of this also. The "four paragraphs" rule of thumb is proscriptive and should be flexible for the context. I shall probably edit that guidance.

Dougsim (talk) 22:40, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm removing the template, as there has been discussion about this here, and no strong argument to say the lead is too long.

Dougsim (talk) 09:16, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 27 March 2020

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The time of Chernobyl is 1:23:45, the time which is current is the time Aleksandr Akimov engaged AZ5 Benstoddard05 (talk) 15:46, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. JTP ^{(talk • contribs)} 16:06, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

cited material being removed again

Having contributed heavily to this article over the years, dropping in from time to time. I'm always perplexed to see the entire article slanted on returning. One of the more egregious deletions is on the dose to the evacuees and all information on the decontamination foam, has just been jettisoned from the arricle.

I have to do this every year, go back through the history, see no convincing rationale, if any, was given  for this materials removal and then re-instate it.

It gets pretty tiresome.

Boundarylayer (talk) 01:58, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

So has it remained around this time Boundarylayer? :) | MK17b | (talk) 03:45, 1 April 2020 (UTC)