Image: Chernobyl lava flow

Description: English:  This is an iconic picture of the fuel lava (FCM, Corium) flowing out of a Parosbrosnoy valve from within the Chernobyl plant. The Parosbrosnoy valve (Клапан аварийного паросброса) is the pipe node to dump extremely high pressure steam out of the hot reactor core ("Parosbrosnoy" in Russian means "steam relief"). 1. No free alternative exists. It remains impossible to manually rephotograph the scene without placing a person in mortal danger. Given an uneconomically large budget, it would in principle be possible to build a robot that could enter the plant and retake the photo. 2. The use of the picture here is unlikely to damage the copyright holder's ability to make any money out of the picture. 3. A small amount of the media is being used. 4. The photo has been shown on TV in the UK (back in about 1991) 5. The material is encyclopedic 6. The material will be used on more than one page 7. The material is not decorative 8. The material is to be only used in an article. 9. The picture of the lava flow explains what happens to nuclear fuel under very bad accident conditions. Rather than using the 'Elephant's Foot' I have chosen to use the picture of the lava coming out of a pipe as it shows that that it did slow. The understanding of the lava is critical to understanding the likely release of much of the activity still within the plant which will occur potentially in the future. 10. The picture is used on the Chernobyl page to show what happened in the basement under the reactor and also it is used on the page devoted to how nuclear fuel behaves during an accident to show what can occur if a reactor core melts and then escapes out of the pressure vessel. So I say that it should stay rather than being removed.
Title: Chernobyl lava flow
Credit: downloaded from the INSP digital library insp.pnl.gov/photobook/UK_CH/picturefiles/161.html (link to a web.archive copy of the original insp.pnl.gov page UK_CH_362) a web.archive version of the original image photo UK-CH-362 on Ukraine, Chornobyl Photos, page 5 at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL pnl.gov) INSP Digital Library. Historical data from the International Nuclear Safety Program (INSP project) caption UK-CH-362 from the INSP Captions list here reproduced in the Additional information section
Author: unknown
Permission: see the use rationale described above as well as down below
License: Fair use