With the present situation in the F-D nuclear plant there are heroic technicians and workers laboring under stiflingly dangerous conditions to control the reactors and cooling pools and draw this chapter to a close safely. I salute them for their bravery, dedication and perseverance under difficult conditions. They deserve high acclaim ... but this thread isn't about them.

This is about another nuclear reactor and the brave men who risked and lost their lives 25 years ago at Chernobyl. The F-D reactor situation is a shadow of the Chernobyl situation. Worse case, everything going wrong, F-D could end up like Chernobyl. But Chernobyl could have been worse, much worse.

A tale of two sets of heroes:

http://news.scotsman.com/17871/Chernobyl-Suicide-squad-who-saved.6735350.jp?articlepage=1

Two sets of heroes who climbed into highly radioactive water to do a job. One pair mistakenly doing a job that would do no good. Another three who would don scuba gear and swim through the water under the burning reactor to open a valve to prevent the already bad situation from getting much, much worse.

This site is about survival. But it is also about heroes and what situations demand that you risk your life to save others. It is also about having others risk their lives for you. Can you justify asking people to risk their lives. And what about when it isn't just some off chance they won't be coming home. None of those five men had any reasonable expectation of living long after their missions. Successful or not, they were all-in even as they knew they would die.

What would it take to get you to step forward and volunteer to do the job? How much do you owe to your fellow man, society, the nation, the wider world? Where does duty stop and gullibility begin?

I picture myself taking off so fast they would feel the wind of my passing. I also picture myself putting on scuba gear and getting to work. Hard to say how it would have gone if I was there. The Ukrainians and Russians seem to sometimes share a laconic fatalism that biases them toward heroic gestures and lost causes. Their history is ripe with both. If you really accept that life sucks and is often tragic then going down heroically for a good cause may be as good as it gets. It isn't quite to cut and dried for me.

How do you feel about these two sets of heroes? Does the first group get any less credit for a futile attempt? How do you square off the issues raised?

In both situations the workers going in knew they had virtually no chance of surviving but did so because someone had to. To me that's the very definition of heroism, regardless of success or failure.

None of knows how we would react until the occasion presents itself. I would like to think that I would step forward - not heroism, just simple logic. I could take the place of someone with much more of their life before them.