I'm very pro-nuclear but that doesn't stop me from having a healthy respect for nuclear energy's destructive potential. The following article is an interview with a Chernobyl reactor number 4 operator. Through a combination of miracles, he survived. Here's a very spooky quote:

"The place where I was told he'd been standing was in ruins. The huge turbines were still standing, but everything around them was rubble. He must have been buried under that. From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot because of gamma rays and neutrons and everything else that was spewing out. But Tregub yanked me around the corner to get me out the way. He was older and more experienced."

Sounds like a scene from "Ghostbusters". I think he's wrong about it being ionization of the air. I suspect he was looking at Cherenkov radiation from the neutron flux coming up from the melted reactor core. A friend of mine was a reactor operator for a swimming pool research reactor. He once commented that the Cherenkov radiation in the swimming pool was quite pretty (it looked like blue fire). The water provided adequate shielding for my friend. However seeing Cherenkov radiation in the air with no shielding between me and it would be my worst nightmare. Very scary stuff....

Gary

Gary