Half-Life's City 17 & Chernobyl
 

When I played HL2, i kept thinking that City 17 was "Chernobyl-Like" wow - did they nail that environment. So i did some research and looked up what happened almost 20 years ago. I was in the 6th grade then, and i remember it being on the news for weeks.
The pics are from a woman who rode her motorcycle through Chernobyl and documented it. Its a terrifying read. Its amazing how much we in the US dont know about this disaster.

take a look:
<a target=new href="http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html"><b>Ghost Town - story & Pics {Link}</b></a>

<a target=new href="http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=41507&highlight=chernobyl"><b>Chernobyl (Ghost Town) lots of photos{Link}</b></a>



And for fun: "Gmod" HL2 comic
<a target=new href="http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=276899"><b>"APOSTASY" - Issue #1 {Link}</b></a>

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/367img/image5.2.jpg

Anybody care to guess who those people remind you of in HL2?

Man, there is a striking resembence. I wonder what HL2 developers imaged City 17 after...

Well, City 17 is supposed to be a city in Eastern Europe. It could be more than coincidence.

Thanks for the links - very very interesting photos.

And as far as HL2 goes, kinda makes me think Ravenholm.

This ones interesting - does 'stop' look the same in cyrillic?

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dmcmill...ge/Sarco-l.jpg

According to babelfish, stop in Russian reads thusly:

стоп

If this was indeed their goal, boy did they nail it. Nearly every single one of those photos could have been a scene in the game.

Wow, that ghost town by motorcycle website is really interesting...

Today in History:

NUCLEAR DISASTER AT CHERNOBYL:
April 26, 1986

On April 26, 1986, the world's worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

The Chernobyl station was situated at the settlement of Pripyat, about 65 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Built in the late 1970s on the banks of the Pripyat River, Chernobyl had four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power. On the evening of April 25, 1986, a group of engineers began an electrical-engineering experiment on the Number 4 reactor. The engineers, who had little knowledge of reactor physics, wanted to see if the reactor's turbine could run emergency water pumps on inertial power.

As part of their poorly designed experiment, the engineers disconnected the reactor's emergency safety systems and its power-regulating system. Next, they compounded this recklessness with a series of mistakes: They ran the reactor at a power level so low that the reaction became unstable, and then removed too many of the reactor's control rods in an attempt to power it up again. The reactor's output rose to more than 200 megawatts but was proving increasingly difficult to control. Nevertheless, at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, the engineers continued with their experiment and shut down the turbine engine to see if its inertial spinning would power the reactor's water pumps. In fact, it did not adequately power the water pumps, and without cooling water the power level in the reactor surged.

To prevent meltdown, the operators reinserted all the 200-some control rods into the reactor at once. The control rods were meant to reduce the reaction but had a design flaw: graphite tips. So, before the control rod's five meters of absorbent material could penetrate the core, 200 graphite tips simultaneously entered, thus facilitating the reaction and causing an explosion that blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. It was not a nuclear explosion, as nuclear power plants are incapable of producing such a reaction, but was chemical, driven by the ignition of gases and steam that were generated by the runaway reaction. In the explosion and ensuing fire, more than 50 tons of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere, where it was carried by air currents.

On April 27, Soviet authorities began an evacuation of the 30,000 inhabitants of Pripyat. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish radiation monitoring stations, more than 800 miles to the northwest of Chernobyl, reported radiation levels 40 percent higher than normal. Later that day, the Soviet news agency acknowledged that a major nuclear accident had occurred at Chernobyl.

In the opening days of the crisis, 32 people died at Chernobyl and dozens more suffered radiation burns. The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, which was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens eventually died from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses caused by their exposure to the Chernobyl radiation, and millions more had their health adversely affected. In 2000, the last working reactors at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was officially closed.

I don't really get how this entire region according to the motorcycle rider could be vacant of most human life and they were still running other reactors at chernobyl until 2000? If that is so, then who would be maintaining the facility?

Maybe I am missing something? If I am totally in the dark on this please explain it to me.

The motorcycle rider thing is a hoax. She was part of a bus tour. Chernobyl is now safe to visit; it's been twenty years and the background radiation has subsided to the point where it's not dangerous to visit anymore (although you still wouldn't want to live there).

Well like the second link say's. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is based on that area near Chernobyl and the aftermath. It's gonna be a great game.

I didn’t even think of it being a hoax. Where did you see that?
I saw some special on HBO about birth defects the people in the area still have, very scary.