Chernobyl and Herishima, are they different?

Question

Ive heard on the news that Chernobyl still has a lot of nuclear activity, and that radiation "pockets" have been opening and closing. I'm just wondering why that happening in Russia, but not Japan.

I know that Chernobyl was an accidental explosion.

Answer 1

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, workers at the plant ran a test on Reactor Number Four to check how long it could run without electrical power.

When power generation fell to less than one percent of capacity, operators tried to compensate by manually removing the rods that slow and control the nuclear reaction, the BBC reported.

The reactor reached the planned test power levels, but workers could not re-insert the control rods. The reaction accelerated, building pressure that blasted a 1,000-ton containment lid off the reactor’s core. Air rushed in, setting off a second explosion.

The explosive power of the blasts was about 200 times that of the combined atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radioactive plumes traveled all over Europe, but present-day Belarus and Ukraine bore the brunt.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 41 years earlier than the Chernobyl accident.  

All the Chernobyl reactors were of a design that the Russians call the RBMK--natural uranium-fueled, water-cooled, graphite-moderated--a design that American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe has called "fundamentally faulty, having a built-in instability." Because of the instability, an RBMK reactor that loses its coolant can under certain circumstances increase in reactivity and run progressively faster and hotter rather than shut itself down. Nor were the Chernobyl reactors protected by containment structures like those required for U.S. reactors, though they were shielded with heavy concrete covers.

The half-life of. uranium-235 is. 713000000 years ...

This would seem to indicate that the major difference between the Chernobyl incident still emitting radiation and the Atomic bombs doing it would be the amount that was released was so much more than wih the Atomic bombs

Answer 2

The Chernobyl explosion released more than a hundred times more radiation than the Hiroshima bomb.

Another factor is that a lot of the radiation from Chernobyl was in the form of isotopes like Caesium 137 from the reactor core which can become concentrated in plants and animals.

The amazing thing is that less than 100 peopled died as a result of Chernobyl, which suggests that the human body is better able to cope with long term low level radiation than was previously thought.

Answer 3

They are very much different.

In Hirosima, it was a nuclear explosion resulting in killing of large number of persons and also scattering of radioactive waste.

Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion, but an ordinary explosion in a nuclear plant resulting in scattering of radioactive waste. Killing of persons was far less as compared to Hirosima.

Answer 4

Chernobyl's firefighters probably account for most of the deaths there -- professionals. The 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers, and nine children with thyroid cancer) to the meltdown.  

About 80,000 people were killed directly by the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Conversely, after the fact the city of Hiroshima has been fully rebuilt and repopulated, but the exclusion zones around Chernobyl will probably remain in place for a long time into the future.