Reddit mentions of Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe

This photo could not possibly be more severely mislabeled. This photo is from an expedition into the reactor long, long after the accident. What you see is once-molten (now solidified) corium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_(nuclear_reactor))

This particular photo is NOT taken in or near the core, but rather in the basement of the reactor. The core of an RBMK is a cylindrical arrangement of graphite blocks with channels drilled through them for water (coolant) and uranium fuel. On top of and below the core are massive (nearly 2000 tons) concrete shields and during the accident, the lower one was displaced about a meter, allowing aforementioned corium to flow from inside the reactor into the lower levels of the reactor building.

Edit: If you want to see what the core really looked like immediately after the accident, here are some shots taken from helicopter the morning of the accident.

http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/chernobyl_25th_anniversary/bp2.jpg
http://www.globaltruth.net/chernobyl_reactor4_disaster__03_05_86_1.jpg

Edit 2: Copying this from another comment to which I replied so more people see them.

Unit 4 control room: http://s.ngm.com/2006/04/inside-chernobyl/img/control-panel-615.jpg

Upper biological shield with deranged coolant channels, tipped up 5 degrees from vertical. Think of the power of the explosion that caused this: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/rert/chernobyltour/images/blast_02.jpg

Looking down into Unit 4's reactor hall: http://econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/NatIdentity/images/chernobyl_site.gif

More corium: http://www.houseoffoust.com/fukushima/corium/65813_cropped.jpg
http://dalje.com/slike/slike_3/r1/g2011/m04/ox281264633029795697.jpg

Cleaning graphite from the core off the roof: http://ukrmap.su/program2009/uh11/11_11/65.jpg

Edit 3: Another quick edit, since people really seem to be interested in this topic. The best print resource on this accident is, in my opinion, R.F. Mould's "Chernobyl Record" (amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Chernobyl-Record-Definitive-History-Catastrophe/dp/075030670X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371155025&sr=8-1&keywords=chernobyl+record) but it's relatively heavy on the science and engineering at times. I highly recommend it if the technical nature of it isn't daunting to you. It's also available on the Google Play book store, I believe.

Edit 4: Wow! To whoever gave me a month of Gold, you have my thanks. In return, here's some more of what I can dig up with some annotations.

Here's another of the UBS (Upper Biological Shield): http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/c/chernobyl/chernobyl_reactorhead.jpg

Graphite brick ejected from the core: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Ejected_graphite_from_Chernobyl_core.jpg

Despite the History Channel watermark, this film is ancient and it's been shown in many documentaries. The orange mass you're seeing is graphite burning. Most or all of the metallic fuel had, by this time, flowed under the reactor. the ~1700 tons of graphite in the core took about ten days to burn itself out: http://a4.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/116/d4c81fa2472a4bafbc1869cd2420369d/l.jpg

Elephant's Foot won't kill you instantaneously; here's a guy snapping a pic of it up close and personal: http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/UKRAINE-CHERNOBYL_001.jpg

Reactor hall of Unit 4. You can see firefighting hoses draped down into the room in a hasty, and ultimately futile attempt to quench the blaze. The very top of the UBS is just barely visible in the bottom of the frame: http://images.dailykos.com/images/user/14898/17Interno3.jpg

And finally, since I'm something of a perfectionist, here's a MUCH better version of one of the pictures I posted earlier. Reactor hall and roof after accident: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/4/20/1303312630479/Chernobyl---The-Aftermath-028.jpg

>In late 1945, along the banks of the Techa River in the Soviet Union, a dozen labor camps sent 70,000 inmates to begin construction of a secret city. The clandestine military-industrial community was to be operated by Russia’s Mayak Chemical Combine, and it would come to be known as Chelyabinsk-40. Chelyabinsk-40 was absent from all official maps, and it would be over forty years before the Soviet government would even acknowledge its existence.
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>In their haste to begin production, Soviet engineers lacked the time to establish proper waste-handling procedures, so most of the byproducts were dealt with by diluting them in water and squirting the effluent into the Techa River. Rather than the typical “background” gamma radiation of about 0.21 Röntgens per year, the edge of the Techa River was emanating 5 Röntgens per hour. Such elevated levels were rather distressing since that the river was the primary source of water for the 1,200 residents there. In an effort to avoid serious radiological health effects among the populace, the Soviet government relocated about 7,500 villagers from the most heavily contaminated areas, fenced off the floodplain, and dug wells to provide an alternate water source for the remaining villages. Engineers were brought in to erect earthen dams along the Techa River to prevent radioactive sediments from migrating further downstream. The Soviet scientists at Chelyabinsk-40 also revised their waste disposal strategy, halting the practice of dumping effluent directly into the river. Instead, they constructed a set of “intermediate storage tanks” where waste water could spend some time bleeding off radioactivity. The row of waste vats sat in a concrete canal a few kilometers outside the main complex, submerged in a constant flow of water to carry away the heat generated by radioactive decay. Their evaporation calculations were in error, however, and the water inside the defective tanks gradually boiled away. Unable to shed much heat, the concentrated radioactive slurry continued to increase in temperature within the defective 80,000 gallon containers.
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>On 29 September 1957, one tank reached an estimated 660 degrees Fahrenheit. At 4:20pm local time, the explosive salt deposits in the bottom of the vat detonated. The blast ignited the contents of the other dried-out tanks, producing a combined explosive force equivalent to about 85 tons of TNT. While investigators probed the blast site in protective suits, a mile-high column of radionuclides dragged across the landscape. Over twenty megacuries (MCi) of radioactivity were released, almost half of that expelled by the Chernobyl incident. After the customary ten-day period of hand-sitting, the government ordered the evacuation of many villages where skin-sloughers and blood-vomiters had appeared. This mass migration left the landscape littered with radioactive ghost towns. The facilities at Chelyabinsk-40 were swiftly decontaminated with hoses, mops, and squeegees, and soon plutonium production was underway again. Within two years, the radiation killed all of the pine trees within a twelve mile radius of Chelyabinsk-40.
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>Ten years later, in 1967, a severe drought struck the Chelyabinsk Province. Much to the Russian scientists’ alarm, shallow Lake Karachay gradually began to shrink from its shores. Over several months the water dwindled considerably, leaving the lake about half-empty (or half-full, if you’re more upbeat). This exposed the radioactive sediment in the lake basin, and fifteen years’ worth of radionuclides took to the breeze. About 900 square miles of land was peppered with Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and other unhealthy elements. Almost half a million residents were in the path of this latest dust cloud of doom, many of them the same people who had been affected by the 1957 waste-tank explosion. Soviet engineers hastily enacted a program to help prevent further sediment from leaving Lake Karachay. For a dozen or so years they dumped rocks, soil, and large concrete blocks into the tainted basin. The Mayak Chemical Combine conceded that the lake was an inadequate long-term storage system, and ordered that Karachay be slowly sealed in a shell of earth and concrete.
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>In 1990, as the Soviet Union teetered at the brink of collapse, government officials finally acknowledged the existence of the secret city of Chelyabinsk-40 (soon renamed to Chelyabinsk-65, then later changed to Ozersk). They also acknowledged its tragic parade of radiological disasters. At that time Lake Karachay remained as the principal waste-dumping site for for the plutonium plant, but the effort to fill the lake with soil and concrete had halved its surface area.
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>TLDR
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>Thirty-nine years of effluent had saturated the lake with nasty isotopes, including an estimated 120 megacuries of long-lived radiation. In contrast, the Chernobyl incident released roughly 100 megacuries of radiation into the environment, but only about 3 megacuries of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137.

https://www.damninteresting.com/in-soviet-russia-lake-contaminates-you/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident

EDIT :

Kyshtym in 1957 measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, making it the 3rd most serious nuclear accident ever recorded, behind the Fukushima disaster and the Chernobyl disaster, decades later. This picture has only become clear in the half-century following the events, though, as both KGB and CIA were extremely successful in keeping the events a top secret for decades. There was an overriding military imperative to keep it as quiet as possible and downplay the severity of any events there for both sides. It’s amazing how no one really knows about it still and how it was covered up. Fukushima and Chernobyl were public power generation facilities - Kyshtym was a plutonium production facility akin to Hanford Works in Washington. Yet that series of events necessitated the removal of almost 30,000 individuals, caused the creation of one of the most radioactively contaminated spot on the planet, and utterly destroyed the Techa river and lake Karachai. One can watch the City-40 documentary here, this youtube video, and here are a few more sources in English, Russian and German, now everything so far basically boils down to this book:

>During the period 1949-1956 liquid radioactive wastes, some 76 x 10\^6 m3, were dumped into the open river system Techa-Iset-Tobol, with a total activity of -.1 EBq (2.75 MCi). The average contents were 90Sr and 89Sr (20.4%), 137Cs (12.2%). The residents of the riverside villages suffered both internal and external exposure, due in part to their irrigated kitchen gardens, and in all 124000 villagers were exposed. The highest radiation doses were received by 28000 villagers for whom the river was their main, and sometimes only, source of water supply for drinking and for other domestic purposes. The river water was given to cattle to drink, was used for watering vegetation, breeding waterfowl, fishing and bathing.
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>The Kyshtym explosion occured on 29 September 1957 in a liquid high-level radioactive waste storage tank that contained 20 MCi (.74 EBq); 90% of the release settled near the site but 2 MCi formed a radioactive cloud that drifted toward the provinces of Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen. This is the so-called East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT). The radionuclides released during this accident consisted mainly of 144 Ce and 144 Pr (66.0%), 90Sr (5.5%), 95Zr and 95Nb (24.9%) and 106Ru and 106Rh (3.7%). The Maximum length of the EURT, figure 4.11, was 300 km and in terms of 90Sr contamination the deposition was greater than 0.1 Ci/km2 (3700 Bq/m2) was 23000km2, greater than 2 Ci/km2 was 1000 km2 and greater than 100 Ci/km2 was 117 km2. Approximately 10200 people were evacuated from the contaminated areas at different times after the accident.
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>In 1951, when large discharges into the Techa river ended, this lake was used for radioactive waste disposal and is currently believed to contain 120MCi (4.44 EBq) which is primarily 90Sr and 137Cs. In 1967, winds carried about 600 Ci of radioactive particles, mostly associated with dust from the dried exposed shoreline of the lake, up to a distance of 75 km from the site.

Also no picture. Most ground picture posted on the internet are probably not from Lake Karachai: grist.org, onetravel.com, helpsavenature.com, Google Earth user

For the "yes" side:

Chernobyl: The End of the Nuclear Dream
The Legacy of Chernobyl
The Truth About Chernobyl
Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl
Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth
Voices from Chernobyl
Chernobyl Record: The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe
Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter
Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry
Chernobyl 01:23:40

I'd be interested in any reputable publications for "the other side".