Thank you for your efforts and this content!

You are epic!

Wouldn't jamming control rods into the ground every couple of feet speed up the nuclear decay? If necessary, replace the rods every so often.

@@insanemakaioshin In a word no.. whilst the motivation to do something about the contamination is laudable reactor control rods simply moderate neutrons in nuclear reactions since there is no nuclear reaction going on and the radiation comes from nuclear decay it cannot be ‘moderated’ by neutron capture.

@kylehill When are you gonna cover what Union Carbide did to Bhopal, if ever?

I often refer to that phenomenon as knowing just enough to get yourself into trouble

Dunning-Kruger all over again. Read it up if your unfamiliar.

I wonder how many lives have been lost due to things such as environmental activists in Germany... The push to close down nuclear plants, based largely on fear and a lack of knowledge has increased the country's dependency on coal which is iirc the most deadly source of energy by a longshot... This means that green activism in Germany has indirectly caused numerous unnecessary deaths...

Knowledge is half the battle. The other half is understanding.

I’ve never heard it put that way but that’s absolutely right.

Thank you, I have a cyberpunk RED game that takes place in Night City where the nuke went off and I'm gonna use that joke (even though a briefcase nuke isn't as bad as a nuclear reactor meltdown)

yup, and now germany has gone back to coal wich is extremely polluting even more than nuclear.

And more radioactive, ironically.

​@@leschatssuperstars1741don't care. Global warming is a myth anyways so why use something that could make a large portion of the earth uninhabitable for centuries? Germany has the right idea.

@@trielt1 Coal might emit more radioactivity than nuclear when the nuclear plant is intact and contained, but the nature of fallout after a nuclear plant is destroyed is far worse. We don't have exclusion zones for nuclear contamination of the environment around coal plants. A little before the 16 minute mark in the video, he talks about how and were nuclear contamination concentrates within the environment. He talks about runoff and the composition of the world, both natural and artificial, and how wild animals within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have contamination concentrating within their bodies. and how concrete, through runoff, appears to be a significant sponge for absorbing nuclear contamination. The problem is that this directly contradicts his other assertions about the safety of nuclear power, given that humans tend to be surrounded by the sorts of materials that act as nuclear sponges, and often tend to do things like manipulate the environment for things like gardening and farming. I can agree with the assertions about the cost of the cleanup, but I don't agree with the premise that a cleanup can be less thorough, particularly for isotopes that the body might end up taking in and integrating into biological functions. This is a cost of nuclear power just as much as the carbon and other products of coal should be costs for coal power. The most troubling part is how few people are required to make mistakes to trigger a nuclear accident even when there isn't a natural disaster. Humanity learned a lot from Chernobyl, but we didn't learn enough in order to prevent another disaster with another massive exclusion zone. The lessons of the two disasters were obviously not the same and neither were the causes, but how many more similar disasters with area effectively permanently denied to us do we have to suffer through to learn everything we need to know to prevent more of those disasters? I don't really want to find out if I'm honest.

ive watched a chernobyl documentary, and the reason behind it was (you guessed it) stupid decision after stupid decision. the engineers turned off the safety measures THEMSELVES to reach maximum power. surprise the surprise the core meltet the pathway for control rods so that the rods couldnt get in anymore also the teacher said that powerplants today are missileproof too. yes, you can damage some of the outer stuff, but thats it. critical areas stay intact

Neutron activation was why the graphite was emitting 20,000 Rads an hour of radiation, enough to kill with a few minutes exposure to it. The burning of this material enabled the spread of radiation far and wide.

The problem was that the Soviets cheapened out by using graphite and by not building containment buildings, and then denied there was a problem even when their badly designed reactor exploded

@@bfth121 They kept the existence of those design flaws from the operators, which led to fatal mistakes on their part.

@@taras3702are you serious? Lol Russia like, Sucks sucks. The US sucks, but damn…

@@robwilson5238 I am deadly serious, the operators were deliberately kept in the dark about the lurking danger in ALL of those RMBK-1000 reactors. There were incidents and near misses that were hushed up before the explosion at Chernobyl. Had they known about the design flaw in the control rods, they would have avoided the accident in the first place. The frightening aspect of these reactors was that the failure of just a few of the fuel channels was enough to be catastrophic. Five fuel channels rupturing was what caused the first explosion that flung the 1,000 ton reactor top a kilometer into the air along with the control rods, the second explosion was hydrogen igniting when oxygen, hydrogen and white hot graphite came into contact with one another. The blasts tore the building and the reactor apart, but enough nuclear fuel and graphite remained in the reactor vessel for an runaway chain reaction to continue. As the graphite burned, the fuel melted and turned into a 3,300 degree Centigrade blob of molten corium that is now solidified in the bottom levels of the destroyed reactor building. More radioactivity than hundreds of nuclear explosions at ground level escaped into the environment as a result.

I was always interested in nuclear stuff, and i was really happy when i found him talking so much about it. Most yt channels don't go that indepth or easy for the public to understand.

Like by warching his video for example?

Yeah, but his obsession with his hair is a little much...

As a bald man I'm jealous.

And getting a counter to myself.

Yeah. Fuel is no joke.

Terrifying as shit

Yep…that’s what the fission neutron flux does to the fuel. Brand new fuel rods are much less “hot”

"Off scale" is a a terrifying phrase for a Geiger counter. For my bathroom scale, it's a daily occurrence.

Depends on the scale of the Geiger counter... Remember the scene from the Tschernobyl series: It's not 2 Röntgens/h it's 15000. The 2 Röntgens/h hour where the maximum the readily available device could measure at the Tschernobyl disaster, only later they took a reading with a device which could measure the real value.

I correct this in the pinned comment, thank you

​@@kylehill you lied to this dude 😂

And you really don't want hot particles to stick to your clothes.

​@@GodlikeIridium Or your skin...

Ask those Russian troops who dug trenches in the area around Chernobyl.

I'm going to idly wave the flag of "this is why US reactors have biological containment vessels". One of the things people miss is that the design of the RBMK and western reactors is inherently different, with western designs making a Chernobyl like accident almost impossible, and Fukushima is, in fact, proof of that.

All your

If you inhale one, you can inhale 3 or 10 more in the same day...one can be much larger than average and it will stay forever. Sometimes you can make a mistake and it's ok, sometimes that one mistake can be with you forever. I work in radiation safety

​@@rudibaroni88Im under the impression that even a small amount of such material is still more than enough to cause cancer.

@@BriarLeaf00 it's not that obvious, long term events are hard to track but you can increase your chances by few %

@@BriarLeaf00 poison is in the dosis (Parcelsus), that means, it is not I'd want to snort a couple lines of Chernobyl Dust, but would go on a tour of the zone any day, (and that a mask like those for COVID should be enough on most cases)

@@partciudgam8478 Ive got a history of cancer in my family and would feel pretty unsafe without an appropriate mask and suit. And I certainly wouldn't want to live there or anywhere nearby.

I also grew up in a "fallout" radius, and then later worked at my local plant. It's mostly an emergency planning designation calculated on an observed (Chernobyl) and hypothetical worst-case scenario. In my case, it meant our municipal calendars included evacuation instructions, and the back page was a bright orange "WE HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED" sign we were to put in our front window on the way out in the case an evacuation was needed - so that the emergency teams wouldn't have to waste time searching an empty home and could move on to who needed to be made aware or assisted. Don't be scared; be prepared! :)

The mushrooms and the animals in my region are still radioactive due to Chernobyl. XD

Studying this man-made horrors so they are no longer beyond my comprehension.

Whenever someone gripes "You can't see radiation", I reply that I can't see a common industrial pollutant gas, cyanide gas either, but it can be easily enough detected and protected against too.

@@spvillano Or CO2, which is killing people in a completely different way - by accelerating climate change.

I wish people saw the more visible and more easily seen monster that are burning fossil fuels. It's so disproportionate that it baffles me how a majority of people can have such massive misconceptions.

@@Juan_DeSantis Best answer tbh

Probably the deadliest consequence of Fukushima. And it hit far from Japan.

Our politicians refer to it as a "high risk technology" ...the term "high risk" is meaningless if there is no other risk to compare it to.

@@frtzkng Coal is the real high risk technology. At least if you consider body counts.

I tried brushing the hair off my screen that is your avitar, so thanks for that. Also who funded the antinuclear hysteria? Here in the US it was shell companies like Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, NRDC, Friends of the Earth, etc. They were happy to take cash from Exxon, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, etc. After I edited this, I tried blowing the same "hair" off my screen.

And the same (neoliberal) politicians stomped the tax investemnts and subsidisations for renewable energies.

Underrated comment

As we will explore in Part 3

I believe it's estimated that about 2000 people died because of the unnecessary evacuation of especially elderly and ill people from hospitals due to essentially fear and misinformation when it comes to the dangers of radioactivity. Instead of sheltering in place, hospitals were evacuated in the middle of a natural disaster and it had a huge cost... Also I think the japanese government has attributed a single death to radiation from Fukushima, although this is highly contested because the person died of lung cancer and it happened such a short time after the accident... So basically it doesn't really add up that this person would first of all develop lung cancer from radiation (not really the right type of cancer to come from nuclear fallout) and secondly that the cancer would progress so fast, more likely this person already had cancer and the accident had nothing to do with it...

1 worker died from the radiation. The Evacuation killed more people though.

​@@kylehillcan you do a video about what properties would be need to make Cap's shield real?

Ok and? The disaster caused $500 billion in damage and ruined 150,000 lives. A disaster like this cannot be allowed to occur whether 0 people died or 10,000 people died.

NPC comment

Most people still don’t know about Windscale which was very much almost Britain's Chernobyl long before Chernobyl was even built. To think that situation was avoided mainly thanks to one of the engineers climbing the coolant stack and manually aiming a hose pipe down it to cool the reactor. Just imagine how much containment he breathed in… They don’t make ‘em like they used to as my mam would say.

Yes, well worth seeing. Windscale was crazy.

I thought the filter on the chimney might have helped this problem. It seems to have certainly helped when the main disaster happened.

The interesting thing I learned from that documentary is the reason for nuclear power is to have nuclear weapons. It's the left over byproduct of generating nuclear power that makes the fissile material or whatever its called the stuff that makes the bombs go boom in a Nuclear way.

@@geniferteal4178 That may have been the case in the fifties, but today they prefer fuels that do not contribute to nuclear proliferation risks.

Also back in the day, Estonia was still a player for the CCCP team, cant imagine things there were any more liberal than they were in Finland, which took a ridiculously long time to officially inform their population that hanging out in the rains was a bloody bad idea.

this happened in Hiroshima too. it was part of why the death toll was so tremendous - more people died from contaminated water after the blast than who were caught in the fireball. all the debris that was vaporized into the atmosphere condensed into the clouds & rained back down as acrid, radioactive poison

the saying is "out of the blue" not "out of the bloom". its supposed to evoke the image of something falling from the sky, just, randomly (/not mad, just wanted to mention 😊)

Incredible. Good luck with your studies!

Best of luck in your new work! Every rad tech deserves deep respect!

@@wnnaliscioov7376 Are you a bot? That sounds like the kind of thing a bot would say. Maybe you are reacting to my post including military aircraft; let me trigger you more; AC-130. SR-72. Stealth hypersonic. Transverse subverse reverse. Reticulating splines.

Man Bionerd23. Now that's a nick name I haven't heard in a while. What's eerie is that her finding particles was her last video.

I've thought of it like this on a very basic level - think of a river flood. Once the water flows away, you're left with bits of what was in the water at the location where you are, but it's not always that much overall. Now, go downstream. More and more particulates fall out leaving a tiny layer below the flowing water. Go downstream further where the river connects to a larger body of water, the river delta. All of the particulates that have built up came from upstream and concentrated there. Heavier bits fall out earlier, but the lighter bits fall out at the end and/or when there's a change in flow.

@@bobd2659 Yep, it's something that's obvious after it's pointed out. It reminds me a lot of prospecting for gold and how that moves through the environment

We shut down the remaining reactor at TMI in 2019, all due to it costing twice as much to run as to produce power by burning natural gas.

I live in Germany. Politicians and especially green party totally agree that nuclear power is bad. Now we use coal power plants...it's so dumb...unbelievable. So yes, politicians need to be educated

Ditto! (: I grew up in the 80's & had these InSaNe fears of pretty much Everything "nuclear". I've had friends parents get numerous serious health problems & even die while or after working at a now-closed site here in Colorado because of issues this place had (which I learned later was The Problem, NOT just working where nuclear materials were used.) But after watching pretty much every Nuclear-related video of Kyle's & LEARNING LOADS... I am a staunch supporter of nuclear energy & find it maddening we don't use it more here in the U.S. as compared to some of the European countries. 🤨 As I understand it, the benefits would outweigh any 'potential' dangers to the public or environment, when managed correctly & responsibly. As I learned in Nursing School - "Knowledge Is Power".

I agree we should go nuclear. However, because of the way contracts are awarded, it will always be built by the lowest bidder who will cut the most corners.

@@ferretyluv I can tell that you have zero experience with contract law and contractors. Yes, some may indeed try to cut corners, which is against the contract and hence, a breach of contract. Get bad enough, it's a fundamental breach, which is not only fully recoverable for funding paid, but with punitive damages awarded as well. With contracts comes contracting officers, to supervise the work and ensure that the contract is being obeyed.

Also question. How many years do you reckon you've lost in your studies in nuclear physics from exposure?

Putting them deep deep underground already in a forever cask might be a good idea if there was no possibility of the radiation leaking into the surrounding areas Without a magic radiation-be-gone machine I'm very skeptical of the future of nuclear power That being said, about half the world population will be dead in 50 years of we don't start building more

Unfortunately, for many of the nuclear plant operating countries, there isnt any viable replacements. A lot of places have electricity consumption peaks when its dark, cold, and the winds are calm.

@@juslitor I can't come up with one that has this issue. Norway nearly exclusively is hydro power. Sweden still uses quite a bit nuclear but is quickly decommissioning it, the rest is wind and hydro. Denmark is 80+% wind and has no nuclear power. Finland is similar to Sweden and so is Canada. All of them going for renewable and decommissioning nuclear. Iceland is 100% renewable. Only far north country that doesn't fit the rule is Russia. China is going crazy with solar and wind. Seriously, look at the statistics for China and their expansion into solar and wind power, it's nuts, the graph is nearly vertical on a linear scale. Any country south of these will not run into a situation where wind and solar can't cover the needs. This has been widely researched and technologies are available to cover any low spots. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to consider countries as isolated entities here since all of Scandinavia has a connected electricity grid and the same goes for Central Europe and I would imagine that Canada and the US are also connected to each other. I honestly can't imagine a situation where the entirety of Europe is covered in such thick clouds that solar can't produce anything and the entire continent is also experiencing a dead calm. Even if that would happen there are currently major projects going on connecting Europe to North Africa to get better access to the already existing and still being expanded solar farms there. Those solar farms, once fully completed, can produce enough electricity to cover the demand for the entire world. I urge you to update your knowledge regarding the "dark and calm" argument since that argument used to hold some weight but thanks to technology advancements and increased international cooperation no longer has any value. We have overcome that issue. Now to the other point here. Beyond the fact that renewable energy production is already capable of covering any power needs that could come up they are also significantly cheaper to run. Nay, not just cheaper, they can be profitable. If you follow the topic of the energy crisis closely you have also seen the reports and studies that were released this year that covered the financial cost of building and running a nuclear power plant. Those reports and studies showed that without massive government subsidization no company would build or run such a plant because they are so prohibitively expensive. Another issue whose lesson France is painfully learning, is the required cooling. France had to shut down many of their nuclear power plants for the second year in a row because the rivers supplying water for cooling ran dry. Considering that many of the major rivers in Europe are fed by glaciers that are quickly melting off, this issue will only get worse. The first time the Rhine ran dry the news was huge, this year the Rhine ran dry and while it made the news it wasn't "oh my god the Rhine ran dry" but more "as per usual Rhine shipping is at a standstill because the Rhine ran dry". Beyond that there is also the CO2 footprint of nuclear energy, which is significant. Sure, the plant is clean during production. It's all water vapor after all but it would be disingenuous to only consider the CO2 production during operation. Considering construction, excavation, mining, enrichment, transport, storage etc. nuclear energy is anything but low emission. Sure, renewable energy production isn't CO2 neutral either, but it also doesn't come with a laundry list of issues one of them being a nuclear disaster.

Seriously, apart from Norway and their oil bought hydroelectrics.Neither sweden or Finland realistically can make do without nuclear power, if self sufficiency is the goal. Should there be a proper cold winter, the present day electricity production will prove insufficient, diesel gennies will be running all over scandiavia and fennoscandia. . Importing all electricity from abroad is a fallacy finland already did once with russia, not happening again. Finland presently has the third largest nuclear power plant in europe, and are planning another one, also talk about implementing small scale nuclear heating plants. To boil it down to cold hard facts, Winter = no sun, no wind. Going to be a long time before anything benefitting north european energy markets is built in africa, if ever. Solar and wind is fine for places where there is no real winter.@@ZeroKey92

@ZeroKey92 Every point I have been thinking about why we shouldn’t have nuclear power until we can absolutely 100% make sure an accident doesn’t happen we should shut every single one down. I agree with all of your points I don’t think it’s unreasonable but it’s unpopular with people who activate for nuclear power. We should also shut down any plane carrier ships or submarines that are nuclear power. We can’t know that a major hurricane that would knock out the power wouldn’t also knock out the generators too. What about a tornado happening right over a nuclear plant. Between human error and natural weather emergencies they will never be 100% safe. Thank you for making your post I hope more people see it. I had nightmares last night from watching the series about nuclear accidents he did. I’m thankful I have found atleast one person who sees it the way I do, that way I don’t feel completely alone.

Nuclear physicist has always been one of the dumber hobbies. It's like, do something productive with your time...

Dunno, seems there are more dangerous hobbies. Mountain climbing, spelunking, sky diving and scuba diving to name a few.

Check out Hanford, WA and especially the Green Run of you really want to see how the US government feels about its people, too. They literally used my grandparents and their neighbours as lab rats without consent or warnings and purposely released a shitload of radiation to see if their radiation detection systems actually worked. Hanford is still one of the most nuclear contaminated sites in the country. Probably always will be, considering the other stupid sh** that was done at this site . . .

Educate me, Bearded Millennial Man!

Also, presumably less irradiated fuel. A lower burnup means a lower amount of radioactivity.

It was most definitely a complicated reactor. The RBMK was dangerous primarily because it was so big that the Soviets were unable to adequately calculate the reactivity coefficients given the limited computing power available. The responsible choice would have been to start with a smaller, less powerful reactors (like they did with the VVER PWR) and then scale up. But this would have defeated the whole purpose of the RBMK, which was to RAPIDLY deploy nuclear power to free up oil resources for export. As it turned out, the graphite block dimensions were chosen poorly, leading to the positive power coefficient. If only the blocks have been slightly smaller, the reactor would have been unable to explode.

@@MinSredMash Compared to western standards it was not at all a complicated reactor, We spend many years designing precaution after precaution to prevent exactly this sort of scenario, overbuild reactor casings to withstand any external or internal threat. Instead of guestimating sizes because we don't have a computer good enough to calculate them we build a bigger computer. Instead of having a giant pile of poorly "enriched" uranium we build large, complicated centrifugal enrichment setups to produce fuel that's adequate to operate inside a much smaller core. Yes the RBMK was meant to be a rapidly serviceable design, but that's came from the fact that it was built from the ground up to be as cheap and simple as possible. Building an actually reliable and safe nuclear plant requires an enormous amount of consideration about contingencies that were never even imagined by the soviet engineers, and this certainly wasn't helped by the soviet system that had filled them with propaganda that the RBMK could never melt down.

@@linuxguy1199 You seem to be using 'complicated' as a synonym for 'good,' which is a very non-Russian thing to do. By any number of objective metrics the RBMK was complex, especially when compared to something like a PWR. The RBMK quite was complicated in a bad way.

@@MinSredMash Haha, I'll concede with you, It was complicated but for all the wrong reasons!

Less licking though

It's small chunk of Uranium ore, so it's a low concentration of actual uranium, which itself is actually not that dangerous in small quantities and is an Alpha emitter so the small amount of radiation coming off it would be blocked by skin. You could hear just how few clicks he was getting from the Geiger Counter, so it's fine.