American Chernobyl Style Disaster Response

Delta Force

Banned
How would the United States respond to a Chernobyl style nuclear meltdown during the 1970s or 1980s? The Soviets initially tried to contain the disaster with modified Luokhod rovers, but the United States had no similar program. While soldiers can be ordered to cleanup the site they likely have no relevant training to the task and it would be politically impossible to order them into such a dangerous environment. Even if soldiers are used there are only so many and drafting people as liquidators would make the anti-Vietnam movement look minor.
 
Not sure, but OTL USA had a partial meltdown at one of the power plants near New York in 1979: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Maybe looking into how it was dealt with will give you some ideas?

The Three Mile Island Incident (which happened in southern Pennsylvania, hours from New York) is not broadly comparable to the Chernobyl disaster. Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown of one core, with virtually negligible amounts of radiation released to the environment. Chernobyl suffered a complete meltdown of core #4, which destroyed the containment building and resulted in large scale release of radioactive material literally thousands (if not millions) of times larger than TMI.
 
How would the United States respond to a Chernobyl style nuclear meltdown during the 1970s or 1980s? The Soviets initially tried to contain the disaster with modified Luokhod rovers, but the United States had no similar program. While soldiers can be ordered to cleanup the site they likely have no relevant training to the task and it would be politically impossible to order them into such a dangerous environment. Even if soldiers are used there are only so many and drafting people as liquidators would make the anti-Vietnam movement look minor.
I'm not sure if we had any reactors in service at the time that could meltdown like Chernobyl did, Chernobyl was a very dangerously designed reactor and lacked a proper containment building from what I recall
 

Archibald

Banned
The short /easy answer is: a Chernobyl-like accident would never happen in the USA in the first place - the reactors are better designed, they have a containment building and much better trained operators.

This said... this is a pretty good question anyway.

Delta Force - for a long time the cynical in me tell me
"we were lucky that Chernobyl happened into an authorian society - a society that did not hesitated sending thousands of soldiers into the inferno to clean the mess"
Fact is, no robot could have done the job.
But of course the world would be better had Chernobyl never happened in the first place.
Had some asshole general not terrorized the reactor operators during the test drill, for example... :mad:

My opinion is, I can't see a democracy sending soldiers (cannon - radiation ? - fodder would be a more adequate term) cleaning up the mess the way USSR did. No way.
Unless of course every single men can be outfitted with a radiation-proof suit. But in turn that would take a lot of time to produce (600 000 liquidators cleaned up the Chernobyl mess !) - and during this time the nuclear volcano would continue to erupt.

Hell, that's a bleak scenario. Kind of putting democracy against a wall.
 
I love this idea: an Alt 80's US meltdown. The butterlies would be huge, (and radioactive).
 

mowque

Banned
I explore this but in the early 40's, in the South. So Jim Crow plays a nasty part of the clean-up.
 
The short /easy answer is: a Chernobyl-like accident would never happen in the USA in the 1980s in the first place - the reactors are better designed, they have a containment building and much better trained operators.

Fixed that for you.
The reactor designs in the 1950s and 1960s weren't THAT safe, especially those designed for a plutonium by-production (as was Chernobyl by the way)
 
I'm not sure if we had any reactors in service at the time that could meltdown like Chernobyl did, Chernobyl was a very dangerously designed reactor and lacked a proper containment building from what I recall

Actually, the scientists decided to remove some of the safety measures for no real reason and then run a test from what I recall. Chernobyl was caused by multiple levels of stupidity, from management down.
 

Archibald

Banned
While soldiers can be ordered to cleanup the site they likely have no relevant training to the task and it would be politically impossible to order them into such a dangerous environment. Even if soldiers are used there are only so many and drafting people as liquidators would make the anti-Vietnam movement look minor.

As I said early - imagine if a democracy had no other choice than to send ill / un protected soliders and voluntaries cleaning the nuclear mess.

That could make an interesting, dystopian TL. Perhaps the Fermi incident could go awry.

Incidentally - I just discovered this recently. Jimmy Carter had an interesting life before peanut farming and the Presidency :eek:
 
What would happen? Probably the first item on the agenda would be the blame game. If it happened recently, it'd be the RNC blaming Obama for letting it happen and the DNC blasting back that it never would have happened if the Republicans hadn't blocked some green power bill or another. You know, business as usually for DC.

The second thing? Ban nuclear power, because getting rid of something magically solves the problem. Well, the DoE or someone would probably want to suspend all the other reactors so they can take their sweet time inspecting them.

Thirdly; public panic about all things with 'nuclear' attached to it. So no more Ford Nucleons.
 
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