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Friday, October 24, 2008

Inside the sarcophagus

I've found a documentary on YouTube about the sarcophagus. The picture quality is pretty inferior, as I have the feeling that it was ripped from a VHS tape. Most of the time its dark, but you can see some very creepy and chilling pictures as the scientists take readings inside the Chernobyl containment - known as the sarcophagus.
The commentary comes again with the old scare tale: "[...] under the right conditions this missing fuel could unleash a chain reaction [...]". The key phrase here is under the right circumstances, since I believe the chance of that is infinitesimal.
It is pretty funny how the commenter refers to the film crew wearing "western respiratory equipment". Yes, the far superior western respirators will shield you from gamma radiation. Probably the paper masks worn by the Russian scientists filters out the dust just as well... Another gross error in the commentary is "[...] Roentgens or Rads". Well these units are different and their definitions are not identical. Rad is obsolete anyways, its use is discouraged in scientific community. Sometimes I really have the feeling that journalists as other humanities graduates feel that science is complicated, so they have the right not to understand it and misreport things. See the health scares, reports on homeopathy and other funny stuff: Bad science...
Well, if you have not been put off by this introduction, here are the short movies. Note that the documentary has been split into two parts, due to the ten minutes limit on YouTube videos:

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