I thought I ought to inform You. But after this shortly after this documentary series came out tourism in in Pripyat sky rocketed. Causing more vandalism, artifacts in the exclusion zone to go missing, people taking instagram photos in highly contaminated zones like the inside of one of the claws used to clean up reactor 4, and crazy enough someone stole one of the fire fighters boots that was thrown in to the hospitals basement. A entire sect of Stalkers are left to repair and clean up the mess after all the irresponsible tourists.

that's most unfortunate, very sorry to hear that. Thanks for informing me.

The problem being that the self-delusion and cultural darwinism (that is almost like the Sith from the star wars universe in their willingness to betray one another) is a direct result of communism. A perfect example of this is that scene where Bryukhanov turns on Fomin to ask "Why did director Shcherbina see graphite on the roof?" It happens every time it is implemented. It's happening now in the US. The left "eating itself" if any of them step out of line or say even one thing wrong. unless their power is significant enough to overcome the "wrong think" and force a cultural shift (or more rarely, their reach weak enough that they are simply ignored to the point of ceasing to exist). You cannot dismiss communism as "just an economic policy" because it isn't. It is a socio-political ideology which demands absolute power and authority over anyone and everyone within the system, and cannot abide the existence of an alternate system. Communism is a religion with all the fervor of the Christian Crusades or an Islamic Jihad, but without a god or a sane body of religious law. Instead, what you get, is bureaucrats who have gotten to where they are by being ruthless and willing to throw anyone under the bus to advance themselves or simply not be shot in the head.

Any type of communism is an essay against communism ,has failed and will fail every time including its baby brother socialism

Stalkers... good game.

Good point. I had distant relative, my grandmother's cousin, who worked on the latter parts of the Manhattan project and for years at Oak Ridge. He was well known in the family to have a expressive sense of humor and I suspect he'd have liked this as well. He also taught physics for years at University of Michigan. Why not use "spicy" to communicate? Seems to fit. :)

they wouldn't have been allowed to give an interview like that, would they? telling the whole world which kind of reactor is more effective or which elements to use and that they (might) have been refining plutonium for atomic bombs... xD

@@Nico6th (*read in hardcore Russian accent with soviet athem playing in the background*) Of course they would have. Mother and father russia would have just sent them to gulag after. Lenin would be proud. Stalin would be proud, and paranoid. But most importantly, rbmk reactors don't explode.

Since it wasn't covered like in the U.S., and because those two men saw that core with fire, wouldn't they die pretty quickly? That's close.

@@AmberBootheCat yeah, those two probably didn't live very much longer. Aren't they among those who were later shown in the hospital dying?

true so true

Another quotation which applies in this context, from Sherlock Holmes, is "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

@@Guzunderstrop even if you think the improbable is impossible

Or Samuel Clemens AKA Mark Twain; "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must be credible."

In case you didn't know, this quotation is from the book "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson" and it goes like this "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you"

that's awesome

That's both amazing and super wholesome!

I would need to stop to cry, personally.

I wished I had been able to watch it with the two of you. The discussion must have been wonderful.

​@@Asehpe me, too. It would add so much to the movie.

I have no idea if this actually happened this way, but even just this reenactment gives me some extreme dread deep down. Like looking into Satan's eye.

@@maw4734 It didn't, iirc the workers were blocked by a wall of pyroclastic ash in the hallway and turned back. Looking directly into the core would've been near instantly fatal.

Same. It looks like the gates to hell.

That and the effects of radiation poisoning

The control rods jumping in the explosion scene is terrifying

Indeed. Even when I was a kid and the disaster happened, I remember news reports showing helicopter footage of the burning glowing core from above, and what I thought at the time is: "that's what the gate to Hell looks like".

Great analogy.

An irreversible curse of death, cells shredded and warped to molecular or even atomic extremes. To die days before you lose consciousness.

Brilliant observation. An epic moment indeed.

Right lmao

Facts 😩

Without a doubt, every scene that cuts to a different group of workers, firemen, people on the bridge, etc it was an immediate thought that wow they just died by confronting this monster essentially and at that time many had no idea

Chill

I am Soviet born/now Russian and I can tell you with all responsibility - this movie is literally made of lie. Every aspect, except characters` names, their appearances and the way the reactor was blown - all is wrong and was, as I think, especially painted black to show you how ''terrible'' USSR was.

My background is astrophysics, but that part had me actually yelling at the TV. "Don't pick that up! Get back! NOOO!" I don't care what they told you is going on, if it's a nuclear reactor, you don't just go picking stuff up that's falling from the sky.

I'm a mechanic and science nerd, and seeing him reach for that was a big cringe. Violates rule one of blue collar life. If you're not sure, don't f with it.

It was very interesting to watch all the reactions... I don´t have a science background, only what I learned at school but I have/had an idea how nuclear power plant works... Is it because I am from the Eastern Bloc and this was something Russians were so proud of? Because we were all about "what to do when evil Americans attack us with nuclear bombs"? I had an idea of what exposing a person to radiation does. Many people watching Chernobyl seemed to know... not much. When Dyatlov was walking through the corridor and saw those pieces on the roof below through the windows I knew what those were and I knew he knew. When I saw the firefighters arriving at the plant it was already awful enough because I knew that was a death sentence and the graphite lying around... When he was about to pick it up I was shouting as well, although he was already dead anyway, right. It´s a brilliant series, although when I watched it the first time I was distracted by some acting, didn´t seem like Soviet atmosphere...

I kept wondering why the graphite was shown as the "main bad" thing here, when in reality there were pieces of the fuel rods lying everywhere in the debris, like "has the graphite itself been activated, or what?" Thank goodness he explained it, I figured it has been contaminated by fission products, sure, but I never considered the impurities in the graphite being activated as well.

I annoyed the hell out of my family because I am not usually a vocal person but when he grabbed it I actually yelled out.

Thank you for the info

Jesus how do you replace the blood vessels in your body??

How wonderful and breathtaking it feels for simply sharing this man’s story you can honour him and his sacrifice, I feel so moved every-time I learn something new about this event.

When watching I thought he was bleeding from holding the door open and the door crushing him

that dramatization is also becuse this series was sort of based on the book Voices of Chernobyl, which is more like a series of statements by folk that lived through the incident, either directly or indirectly, and their ideas of the effects of radiation of course differed from what we currently know about it. The medical inacuracies are intentional, because they aim to reflect the perception of people at the time rather than an objective reality

@@mexa_t6534 The problem is that almost everyone watching the series took everything as objective reality, at a time when we should actually be building as many new reactors as possible.

What an incredibly intelligent opportunity! Would that more local communities or even nearby cities had sponsored such Q&A panels.

@@pajander it still made it very clear that radiation is nothing to be joked about and made a lot of people want to understand radiation better. Thats a win in my book.

@@pajander it's still horror. Doesn't matter if the symptoms show after 4 hours or 10 minutes, what difference does it make.

exactly. no idea why he doesnt upload more...its super good

I did this. Always feels so drained after watching an episode.

I must have watched the first 2 episodes 3 times before watching the third because that's how HBO an it. More to it every time.

I have still only watched the first one because it gave me a panic attack.

@@Tobatcie LOL try the second one...the scale is super scary. 3 and 4 get worse and worse...at least emotionally when u can see the crazy consequences of it. 5 is the finale that summarizes the whole thing perfectly.

if you were looking into a split open nuclear reactor core would you shit yourself and run away or stay and look into it for a few minutes?

@@raven4k998 Most people say that they would run away from a disaster if they saw it, but almost nobody does.

I wasn't aware of this podcast, so thank you for mentioning it.

@@raven4k998 Unexpectedly people does stand looking at disasters like tsunamis, explosions, etc. It's freeze response to danger and it's common (I'm one of those who primary response is freezing, but not in life-death situations lol). It can come from ignorance, astonishment, fear, but the magnitud of those disaster is so much bigger than our existence, what we can do to survived may or may not be enough and it's not in our control, it's at most the chances and hope we hold onto.

@@Ari_Mondragon yeah I mean if you freeze in a hurricane your pretty much screwed all it take then if for you to get hit with debris and it's been nice knowing you freezing in that sort of scenario will not save you at all

Had you dying? A curious choice of words.

Appropriately nicknamed the "bridge of death"...

You see the father holding thr baby later in the hospital begging for help

Thank you! I plan to do the rest of the series, maybe not each episode a separate video but I wanna look at it all

@@TheAtomicAgeCM If nothing else, do a video on the roof scene from the fourth episode, but especially on the explanation of what happened in the fifth. It would be really interesting to get your take on both of those scenes.

@@radkonpsygami7634 Like the guy says in the chopper, if you fly over the smoke you'll be wishing you took that bullet, radiation is so cruel and morbidly fascinating the way it can slowly kill people in these ways which I wouldn't wish on most people

The immediate vicinity of the core was estimated as anything between 20 to 30 thousand roentgen. That's a lethal dose in 30 seconds. Those guys would have definitely developed ARS at the least, and if they pulled through that, we're talking years of health problems and eventual death by cancer.

The two guys who went into the reactor hall were trainees and both died. The guy who held the door open took a nasty dose from radioactive dust on the door, but survived.

it exploded..... there is no core it exploded.......

That’s what makes it so insidious. The cellular systems shut down based on rate of mitosis (dividing and multiplying) in order of fastest to slowest. The intestines shut down first, but the nerves and cardiac cells go last, meaning that even as your body is literally falling apart at the cellular level, your heart will keep pumping blood, and you feel every part of the process.

@@Kwatcher100 which translated loosely means you die a slow painful as hell death if you get a good does of radiation

So basically your body is decomposing and you're still alive and able to feel every moment. Not much of a believer in euthanasia but I'd say that's a worthy exception.

Is it? A friend of mine, an operator on Unit 4 was in Pripyat with his family when the reactor exploded. His entire family in the years following the event had on average 8 severe diseases that were a direct result of the radioactive material exposures and radiation exposures they suffered in Pripyat. Now multiply that by a couple of million people exposed to significant levels, and the more than 10,000 and likely less than 100,000 people slowly killed by this catastrophe over the next 15 years.

yes that is insane lol

How is possible for a wall to bend when it's supposed to not be elastic?

​@@Valerio_the_wandering_spriteHeat.

When you imagine, that the rbmk buildstructure was built like a normal officebuilding with no proper reinforced walls, then yeah, those thin walls would buckle like rubber under such tremendous forces. They were built cheap, then they kept cruicual information from the operating staff, like the positive void coefficient or the graphite tipped controlrods and maybe other details. Then let the events unfold like back in the day, with nobody knowing, that the az5 button could act as a detonator and the catastrophe is completely set to go off

@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite The same way how the 9/11 towers fell.

riiiiiiight... that sound more like a story released by the USSR to make them seem like heroes for containing the mistake that was intentionally made. Sorry but any reasonable person is not buying what they are selling.

Fact! Just because their government was at fault for this, The People of Russia can be selfless and admirable.

Yeah, not that it's not impressive what they did, but no, there were no millions of lives on the line. The worst of the accident took place during the initial explosion, and the worst of the side effects were the failure of the government, not distributing KI pills to the nearby population beforehand and not instructing them to avoid fresh milk and vegetables. Thus the I-131 caused excess thyroid exposure leading to cancers. None of this was helped by the liquidation effort, that was solely meant to put the power plant back into operation as fast as possible, and you can say it did its job in that regard because the power plant went back into operation. But it was not "to save millions of lives". There was nothing dramatic left to happen, radiologically speaking. The show is bullcrap in that regard.

@@adamwal4591 you do realize this show is a piece of anti soviet propaganda essentially right. Even though the this was a Russian problem thousands of men put their literal lives on the line to make sure that this didn't turn into a full blown nuclear cataclysm. If they didn't knowingly expose themselves to radiation that could potentially instantly kill them the core could have not only melted down, but also caused a chain reaction in the other 4 reactors at chernobyl creating a chernobyl X 5. You know there is truth to the sacrifices made because a meltdown didn't end up happening.

@@marcushankins8171 yeah yeah... soooo they turn off multiple safety features on the reactor and turn it up to ten times it's operating level but THEY are the heroes for saving the day. Spare me that nonsense.

Also true!

There could also have been smoke and toxic gases in the air which could cause nausea.

That's probably quite accurate TBH......the dose rates were officially registered at about 5.9(6 mSv) rem per SECOND. My opinion is that it was probably much higher, especially for those two who looked directly into the burning graphite in the remnants of the core. I suspect that dose was in the range of 50-100 rem (.5-1 Sv) per second.

The suddenness of ARS is directly proportional to dosage, and an indication of prognosis. That's why the guy who reported the explosion, who saw the channel caps jumping, vomited almost immediately afterward while Dyatlov, who was mostly in the control room, offices, and surrounding areas didn't start feeling the effects until 4 hours later. Dyatolov survived, the guy in the reactor chamber did not.

I honestly can't imagine experiencing something like that and having the intellect to know what was coming for me and then not finding a firearm to put a bullet through my head before it happens. Is it denial? Courage? Irrepressible hope? What keeps somebody alive mentally in order to face that kind of agony and Hell? No if it really takes that long for the symptoms to manifest but I know for an absolute fact what is about to happen why the Hell do I want to stay in this life to experience THAT?

@@user-lp3cf5yn5b Basically yes, alarms triggered in Forsmark, due to fallout carried by the wind, which led to investigation by Swedish authorities. They concluded it was coming from outside of Sweden and came to the conclusion that it probably came from the east. They put pressure on the Soviet regime who finally confessed. It is mentioned in the chernobyl accident Wikipedia page and in a lot of Swedish pages.

@@user-lp3cf5yn5b Yes. The fallout from Chernobyl was such that it was setting off radiation alarms in other countries (which is briefly mention in the show), and Sweden was thd first to ask the USSR what happened, which brought the attention of the rest of the world.

Your English is OK! I'm a nuclear engineer, and I think I can translate this. For a chain reaction to occur 2 things are needed, neutrons need to be moderated from high to low energy (in this type of reactor), and extra neutrons need to be absorbed. Graphite does the moderation, while water does the absorption. When the control rods were inserted, they displaced the water thus removing that absorption for a split second DUE TO a vapor/ gas bubble that is formed in front of the control rod as its being dropped. This delay is just enough for the number of neutrons in the reactor to overwhelm the reactor control rods.

@@1999colebug Yes. But the problem is that people believed that this security mechanism makes violent thermal explosion absolutely impossible - that if things go really wrong all control rods can be dropped at once and that will slow down chain reaction to the level where the energy absorbed by the remaining water evaporation will cool down fuel rods to the level preventing total meltdown. Of course, that was seen as a last resort because after that due to the multiple factors restarting reactor again would be a task compared in complexity to full core rebuild and refueling, but the "RBMK reactor physically can not explode" mantra were so deep in minds of all the engineers and management that they seen no problem doing some serious shortcuts in the safety protocols. Because - what's the worst case scenario? Ok, one energy production block would be offline for couple of years. "Not great, not terrible". And we all know how it ended.

It wasn't a vapor cushion, but it's the same general mechanism. Basically, the control rods were designed to be slightly inserted into the core already, but since this had a poisoning effect on the reactor, the designers added a graphite tip to the bottom of the rods. this meant that if too many are inserted at the same time while there aren't enough rods already inserted, it will cause a brief spike in transmission. However due to multiple mistakes while setting up the reactor for the test they were doing, they ended up only having 14 control rods left deployed, while the other 200-ish were retracted. Now, the original designer of the RMBK had figured out that if less than (I think it was) 17 rods were inserted, an emergency shutdown of the reactor could cause a runaway reaction. There was a second problem which was the RBMKs were huge, so they effectively acted like multiple reactors, but the temperature sensors in the core couldn't read the entire reactor. What happened was the lead engineer in the control room accidentally defaulted the starting power of the reactor to less than the amount to keep a reaction going with a normal amount of control rods inserted. The control room staff basically had to pull this reactor out of a nose-dive by removing control rods. The reaction started heating up, they carried out the test, but the temperature started rising too quickly, so they initiated a shutdown. As the graphite displaced water in the bottom of the core, suddenly there was a spike in reactivity, which displaced the giant steel and concrete cap on top of the reactor.

@@Movingfrag There is also politics involved. The designs being a state secret, and flaws in the design couldn't be openly discussed so anyone who wasn't aware of the flaws would have no idea how to use the safety features correctly without causing a runaway reaction. Took the suicide and memoirs of Dr. Legasov to get that out into the open.

Rods had a graphite water displacer attached to the bottom to ensure water does not fill channel, as water is a neutron poison. The major problem with the RBMK at the time was that this displacer was shorter than the active zone length, and the bottom 1.25 meters of the active zone had no displacer, only water in liquid form, so the axial distribution of neutron flux was thus affected accordingly. When the AZ5 was triggered as part of the test regime, the displacers entered the bottom of the active zone, causing a massive spike to neutron flux right at the bottom of the core, which in turn affected the rest of the core since the coolant flows upwards. The system was already stretched to a dangerous instability due to alterations to the coolant flow rate and the isolation of TG7 and 8. This meant they caused even more voiding to an already heated coolant. This spike in heat was enough to quickly cause destruction of fuel assemblies and consequently resulted in a breach of technological channels. The reactor vessel overpressure signals were triggered, UBS was being at this point pushed upwards, control rods stopped in the halfway point and were unable to be dropped further. At this point, Akimov the shift foreman triggered a release of electric motors, letting rods fall at free fall, this did not work. Recent interviews from the control room survivors claim that the pyatachok walkable floor surface in the reactor hall was slightly elevating, which was spotted on camera. They thought it was an image distortion. The assembly 11 channel caps were not jumping, the whole floor was pushed out by the UBS. This all happened in a mere 11 seconds.

yeah just nope you don't want things to go there just nope not going to let that happen

"You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before." -Legasov

Mmm have you seen the dose rates on the main beam of industrial electron accelerators? like dynamitrons and rhodotrons. They reach levels of thousands of Sv per second! that means you aren't even in the main beam and you are already dead from bremsstrahlung.

The nuclear physics part of studying astrophysics was extremely humbling. When you pause for a moment and take a step back and think about what is being unleashed in a reactor it truly is terrifying. We are an amazing species with a boundless capacity for learning and discovery, but man does that come with some really big mistakes.

@mycroft16 Even more so when one considers the temps and pressures required to achieve fusion, which we've also managed to do.

Heroes? It didn’t solve the problem. They didn’t even use the mine

​@@darbyoharawhat does that matter? They put their lives on the line, end of.

a good example of how different nuclear reactor designs can be

yeah it's going to be one of those situations where someone gets an incomprehensible level of dose

There was also demons core incident

@@TheAtomicAgeCM Looking directly at the exposed fuel, even for a very few seconds, in the way that several men did in 3 or 4 incidence, must be a massive and lethal dose, is it not?

@@dimatha7 yeah, but it took several hours for the demon core exposures to cause radiation sickness. Cecil Kelly was exposed to the highest known whole body dose and his symptoms manifested in minutes through skin burns and unconsciousness. That's what the show is showing here.

@@JKSSubstandard Sort of, yeah. Though the guys at Chernoby managed to duck out from the particle beams just in time to experience Demon Core esque symptoms instead of just melting.

wow that's amazing. thanks for sharing!

yes, that plant was an old RBMK reactor as well. I love that she effectively gave the reactor itself an ominous voice in the show with the ambient sound. brilliant.

I did not know that! What an excellent way to create the soundtrack. That's a really interesting piece of information - which I really appreciate - except that I will have to watch the whole bl00dy thing yet again now. Thanks for that! 🤣

@@PV1230 The noises "music" you hear are actually from the RBMK reactor at Ignalina. If i remember correctly.

@@PV1230 They also used that reactor as the filming location of all shots related to the inside of the facility and most of the external shots as well.

Neil Tyson's quote. Great stuff.

Pretty much nails the problem with what is going on in todays anti science movement.

Soviet? Ask now: why do they all have British accents when everything else was so concerned with hyper-realism? Every work of fiction that takes place in another time -- future and past -- or another place is really an interpretation of the writer's here and now. The lens of distance and time enables them to look at a contemporary problem with a more dispassionate eye. In the US and in Britain, we are in a war of competing truths and the weapons are lies. That's what the Chernobyl series was about. It warns of a looming disaster if we keep at it, without necessarily joining in the fray.

As much as right-wingers just can't stop beating a dead horse over the Soviet Union, lets not forget that while it did eventually collapse, it was also a global superpower with 50000 nuclear weapons and the world's second largest economy for it's 90 year lifespan. It also had at least 20 functioning nuclear reactors at one point and only one of them underwent a meltdown. You can at least try to be nuanced; the reason the USSR failed can't be encapsulated by a Reddit-tier phrase such as "The universe is not obliged to make sense to you", the USSR/Russia has historically had some of the greatest scientists in world history.

@@Hooga89 Lately Ive been returning to the idea that there are different societies that better fit different types of personalities. Myself as an American capitalist love the ideals my society ascribes to but also can see how communism would be apealing to others. I think every nation has the right to form their government as they see fit without interference from others. Lastly citizens should be allowed to migrate to the nation that fits their personality.

Witnesses of the actual event said, the firefighter in question only complained about swelling and a numbness in his hand *days* after that night.

Still made the bottom drop out of my stomach when he picked it up. Blistering and burns only added to it. Exaggeration or not, it still worked on me. This miniseries was the sum of all my fears.

@@vilefly Right? I was like "oh my god! Put that down! You're fucked!"

I watched a video on a nuclear physicist reacting to the show Chernobyl and who was also one of the first responders on scene. She said this scene is fairly accurate but overly dramaticized. She describes how touching the rod is deadly but won't disintegrate your hand like that. You would only feel tingling sensations in that hand, and It would actually take weeks before you started showing any symptoms of nausea and vomiting.

Don't think he would've received 150Gy so quickly though. Hisashi Ouchi, who was standing over a fuel tank as it went critical, received 17Gy. He felt almost instantly nauseous and started vomiting and when he made it to the hospital his skin was swollen and red like it was sun burnt. It took couple of days though before his existing skin started to deteriorate like in this scene.

yeah that is a joke and the bigger joke assuming that the radiation level is 3.6 when the detection maxes out at 3.6 if the detector maxes out never trust the reading for that reason cause it's likely higher to max it out

i can explain it more easily t u when the real chernobyl exploded bcause of faulty and cheap labor of a nuclear power plant that shouldnt have happened on april 26 1986 and thousands of people and people after theyre affected and died bcause of radiation poisoning during and over the years thats why i dont like nuclear power plants and plutonium plants and power plants

@@valeshia385 So you don’t like them because of the incompetence of a government essentially? I wouldn’t say that’s a good reason to hate nuclear power, especially nowadays where we stand on the brink of a climate crisis and need a new powerful and effective power source immediately.

@@ZettyLad ok u want a example of why nuclear energy is dangerous a teenage boy almost destroyed his town by the nuclear energy he got bcause of a book his family gave and if the nuclear dept didnt intercept him that whole town wouldve gotten cancer thats what im talking about is cancer when it comes to nuclear energy and back in the day when it exploded all that radiation went everywhere and to this day chernobyl is still spewing radiation which also causes cancer and the same thing almost in the usa when 3 mile Island almost had a meltdown and thats still spewing radiation and back in 1999 3 asian men was exposed and ones man dna actually melted from their exposure to radiation and even tho what im going to tell u something i lost my aunt to cancer and i watched her die cancer comes in many forms even with nuclear hydrogen plutonium and the russians stole the designs from the usa and made cheap nuclear power plant bcause their was supposed to be a secondary protection over the poles and the chernobyl incident made russians to put another protection on all their nuclear power plants and have u seen the real footage of the real chernobyl maybe u should watch it

@@valeshia385 Yeah? My grandmother died from cancer to, so it ain’t like I don’t have experience dealing with that terrible disease. My point is, it’s raving fear mongering like this that prevents nuclear energy from obtaining the funding it needs to become more safe, efficient, effective, and powerful; applying 21st technology and methods to nuclear energy and making explosive meltdowns like Chernobyl a thing of the past. Also, if this show didn’t make it clear to you, the only reason Chernobyl got as bad as it did was because of Communism and the Soviet Union, and their absolute refusal to believe that they could possibly do something wrong on this scale. The Soviet Union’s blatant disregard for human life and safety is evident throughout all of it’s history, and that culture seeped into that fateful April day. Believe me, if the Soviet Union was different and wasn’t afraid to admit their wrongdoings and treat their nuclear power plants with the respect and care they deserved, the Chernobyl disaster would have NEVER happened. And just for example, in modern times, it took the crust of the Earth moving and sending out a huge tsunami towards Japan at a very badly placed nuclear reactor near a tsunami prone shore to create a nuclear disaster near the levels of Chernobyl, and even then Fukushima was nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. Not to mention, just so you know, tens of thousands of people die every single year from complications resulting from fossil fuels and the pollution it causes. Whether that be from disease resulting form inhalation of the literal shit we’re pumping into the air, or people on things like oil rigs. Either way, that’s thousands of times more deaths in a single year, than all the deaths nuclear energy has caused in its e n t i r e existence. Need I also tell you the precarious situation our planet is in, and how our extensive use of fossil fuels is warming it up at shocking rates. I’ll tell you, the damage our use of fossil fuels is going to cause to this planet will cause m i l l i o n s of deaths, and then affect the lives of billions more and plunge millions into financial hardship and poverty once the shorelines start flooding. But, if we were to put aside our fire of some spicy rocks because of the incompetence of an evil and corrupt government for just a damn minute, we’ll realize that by beginning to utilize nuclear power safely and with modern technologies and research, we will save billions of people across the planet from the effect of climate change, save the planet, and save the lives of millions of people, and even start saving thousands of children and adults in a place in China who could die from health complications resulting from all the smog and pollution in the air. When I argue for all of this, I’m not thinking about now, I’m thinking about the future when our actions today will reflect far more powerfully in the future. I frankly don’t give a shit about people’s irrational fears of nuclear power today, because it will be the future generations of tomorrow who will feel the effects of our fear and inability to put it aside the most.

Ohh ok that would explain a lot with the quite radioactive feed water 😆

@@TheAtomicAgeCM I remember this from school when I was 13-15ish (Sweden around late 1980-ies). For some reason this was emphasized A LOT. The years after the accident the subject of nuclear energy and Chernobyl was not just brought up in physics class, either. It would pop up here and there in other subjects, too. I think it even came up in history class despite the accident being just a couple of years ago. And this difference with single vs dual system was always on the tests. 13ish year old me got the impression that this was the reason for the accident.

Pretty much this, most western reactors are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) with two loops, but there's also some Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) which also feed directly to the turbine without a heat exchanger. Those are mostly older designs though.

true, RBMK was Boiling type,...

@@B20C0 PWR not older nor newer to BWR (at least not by much), its different desighn type, whit both pross and cons,...

I respect what you saying

im just a mechanic..... but have hobbies in weather and Chernobyl.... . and ya..... looking into a burning core.... would just put a person in shock instead of running away..... a person might just look a second longer, because its such a "pretty view" / horrific view

@@kainhall What hobby in weather?

This is why as Nuclear operators (Im a systems operator guy in the field not the control room) our first priority each and every day is the health and safety of the public, second is the plant and last is the people working at the Nuclear plant.

Genuine question: Do you ever run drills where the boss gives psychopathic orders and you only pass if you refuse to drive the reactor off a cliff?

RIP

Dead and retardid, which is a double whammy

@@DudeBro571 The_Kombinator does what alexb3079 retarDON'T.

Thank you for the kind words! I hope I never have to either :) Welcome.

excellent! exactly what I'm going for. thank you!

Yes, I've been listening to it for the latter parts. Thanks for the recommendation.

I think, in reality, there was probably also an element of, "A reactor in general can't explode like an atomic bomb" which is true*. Partially because the government hadn't informed anyone that the control rod tips were made of graphite and would greatly increase heat in the core, I don't think anybody had considered the possibility of runaway boiling/positive void coefficient triggering a steam explosion. *The second explosion in Chernobyl, following the initial steam explosion, may have actually been a nuclear "fizzle". While a full-on explosion wasn't possible with LEU, there's been some research suggesting that the extremity of the event may have been enough to cause a small nuclear blast equivalent to a few tons of TNT thanks to parts of the core undergoing prompt criticality.

@@NyanCatHerder Another possibility (and more likely in my opinion) is a carbon dust explosion graphite is after all mostly carbon and there would be enough graphite dust, oxygen and heat for ignition (the core was after all open to air at this point and very hot).

SampoPaalanen: there is an elephant in the room, but I'm certain the thing we should discuss is the window coverings.

There's the engineering/scientific aspect that's open to conjecture, but the "RMBK's don't explode" thing is almost definitively a specifically Soviet mantra pushing the idea that Soviet nuclear designs are not flawed. They don't fail unless its very public. And even when it IS very public, they tend to blame everything else. Multiple submarine nuclear reactor failures, missile failures, various naval casualties, they tried to downplay everything. Their political reaction to Chernobyl is a perfect example of this. They'll deny any fault until proven otherwise, then continue to downplay it. They had to project an air of competency to the world in order to solidify their role as the US' biggest rival. If the world knew their submarine and commercial reactors were failing left and right, they'd be subjected to significant political pressure to fix it. Suffice it to say, if nobody knows your reactor is garbage, then no one will bitch at you to fix it, and you won't have to spend money to do it!

@@thundercactus yeah there's really no valid against the fact that reactor did explode and did so violently enough to throw around the multi ton lid like it was a child's toy. As for the Soviets not wanting to admit/believe the reactor exploded you got to remember that their whole lifestyle depended on the illusion that USSR was a perfect paradise, so admitting the disaster would mean people might start asking the wrong kind of questions like they did irl, which lead to the fall of the Soviet Union, not sole cause but one of several thing that caused that.

We’re it that high however i might expect to see symptoms like immediate organ destruction and such. Radiation is an odd and difficult to measure thing with many moderating and few exacerbating factors.

I heard about him, literally a dead man walking from that moment. Whats really disturbing about that was the accounts of his skin simply falling off. Basically having to come to terms with the reality you are decaying away.

Read about the Cecil Kelley criticality at Los Alamos. The guy got hit in the face with fast neutrons and gamma, fell down off his ladder, forgot what he was doing (flipped a switch several times) then ran out the door yelling "I'm burning up, I'm burning up". Within 10 minutes he was in shock and showing a pink skin from exposure. Its frightening what a quick high dose can do to someone. Kelley died within 35 hours of his exposure. So his was more radical than those experienced at Chernobyl. Most of the staff made it to Moscow and died within 2 weeks to 2 months. The "skin peel" effect was nonsense though. It takes a few days for your dead skin to not be able to heal itself and cause bleeding wounds.

Ouchi had an Ouchi

"17k millisieverts" or as we in the nuclear world say....ya know.......17 Sieverts

They even address this in the series. That's why they go on to get the "better" tool (wider range) that (as mentioned) immediately burns out the circuitry.

btw. to give some context to this: Measuring radiation is actually quite easy. It becomes a bit more challenging when you want to measure very sensitive but other than that no big deal. However, in all cases you measure single radiation events when measuring electronically (i.e. one single gamma ray). For technical reasons you can't measure much more than around 10.000 events per second - which sounds a lot... However, since you want to measure very sensitive (µSv region) you need one count to mean much less than one µSv - which leads to design choices (sensitive measurement volume) for the measurement device that allow you to measure probably up to several mSv/h. If you now have multiple Sieverts per hour the device will more or less be overloaded with radiation events that it can't count any more, which leads to the measured value in some cases even being lower than the maximum the device would be capable of. This you can more or less only solve by taking a less sensitive device, that is not suitable for detecting low amounts of radiation (that you would see in every day operation of such a plant). So what they needed to get is not an especially sophisticated device but rather the contrary.

Thank you! Hope you like the other stuff 😀 I will indeed be covering the rest of the series

@@TheAtomicAgeCM I don't remember much in 1986 but a power surge and a loud banging noise

@@chornobylreactor4 bro, u ok? did they get you some feedwater?

@@theopdiamond8349 nope they didn't the fools and im not ok I have mental issues because of it

Especially one that reads to 200 Rem or 500 Rem.....

I'm no PhD, but Gen 4 reactors seem pretty darn safe, at least relative to any energy production. I'd rather we be building those than clearing acres of land for solar panels and turbines that can't hold their own without fossil fuel "back-ups". I'd bet money the back-up is pulling most of the weight.

@@logicplague2077 oh for sure when done right and regulated nuclear power can be a good bridge between energy technologies. The problem is getting people to understand how safe it is.

​@@logicplague2077bet away. Who cares where we get electrons from. I know so many people with solar on thier home so no acres cleared, wind turbines can have crops below or better yet be at sea. Yes you need multiple energy sorces nulcear where safe and economic is great. Not so good when not done safely here, fukushima. As more EVs have vehilce to grid most peoples ecosystem will be self contained. Minning industry in Australia is now using heaps of RE as fuel is exceedingly expensive to truck 1000km inland etc. If you are wedded to only one source of electrons your problem is not power its ideology.

It was basically just propaganda. RBMK cores "can't explode", the Titanic is "unsinkable", and hydrogen gas is "perfectly safe" in airships... with plenty of dead every time. Y'see? I'm all about knowledge, science, technological progress and all that= don't get me wrong. It's just oh so costly whenever our reach exceeds our grasp. When the politicians say otherwise it gets even worse.

Like how people had believed the Titanic was "unsinkable".😞

Always gotta pull up the charts ;) It's important, especially as a nuclear engineer, to always consult the charts/tables/regulations for the official numbers. Trying to memorize that stuff is prone to errors. I'm glad I could offer you a different perspective as to what terrified me in the show.

thanks so much! very nice of you to say :)

So I wonder if it wasn't because he was using his hip/body to prop the door open. While he received a 400 Roentgen dose, how localized was that dose? I mean, sure, as a whole body dose, it will do one thing, but if he received a significant portion of that 400 Roentgen localized to his hip, that could explain the rapid tissue breakdown and bleeding. Between what was essentially fallout on the door from the explosion and maybe also neutron activation of the steel in the door, that door had to be "hot" both thermally and radioactively.

That quick bleeding was a liberty taken for effect. Bleeding is an ARS symptom yes but it takes about a week to set in

Radiation sickness causes a drop in platelets (and all blood cells) because it kills the stem cells that produce them so the reduction in clotting occurs later. The symptoms of ARS are all due to the body not being able to replace high turnover cells.

I did also hear of another bloke who's body is still in there today. I thought this character might have been based on him as well.

@@jmaia2 I always thought the bleeding was caused by holding the door open, I mean I thought it was pretty obviously that...

Structures of power at a certain point only exist to perpetuate that power. Western leaders have denied and covered up many disasters and let the guilty go free. It's the same thing. Those in power always abuse it for their own ends

@@anjetto1 You're right. The state is the problem. But comunism is 100% state. Is worse.

Well said sir. Well said.

That's something I'm scared about hearing one day while I'm working or just out and about, hearing someone say "X would never happen here!" Or "X? Nah, that'd never happen, nope." Only for them to be wrong, terribly wrong in the end. I feel that way for things like an invasion or a WW3, and with how things have gone lately, I feel that kinda mentality is gonna bite us in the butt in due time. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but then again, do you really want to anticipate the day that "bite" happens?

Awesome, thank you! and you're welcome

So after searching I’m sure the source I got that from was the log of Volodymyr Pravyk’s radio reports from the scene but I can’t remember where I got access to that. Also the various articles about the firefighters in general say that they began experiencing symptoms after 30 minutes.

Very interesting. Thank you!

Wow 30 minutes. That's crazy. It's also important to distinguish between how someone feels and the physical presentation of symptoms, I didn't really consider how long it takes for someone to feel the effects

@@TheAtomicAgeCM thats why u dont mess with graphite it has more radiation than the explosion and the graphite is the one thing that controls a power plant from exploding

@@TheAtomicAgeCM I read somewhere that the graphite piece was emitting close to a 1000Gy , but again , we would never know what happened behind the iron curtain.

Thank you! And you're welcome :)

A case against any top down organization that squashes critical voices, in favor of happy talk. The Challenger disaster in part because dissenting voices were silenced.

How adorable, you think that this only happens in Communist countries.

What if your speedometer maxed out at 10 000mph? The scale was good by design

@@timothyhouse1622 Multiple events similar in reason, but not in scale, happen in the USA every. Single. Year. Lol the people that used this event to shit on communism, specifically, just aren’t critical people. I don’t care how intelligent you are, if you draw this event down to Stalinism, you’re not that critical of your own preconceptions and biases.

To be competely fair, situations like this have happened in american Nuclear accidents too. Now I am not trying to promote or defend communism in any way, but rather warning that the moment you start thinking this happens with only one ideology or one group of people, is the moment you let your guard down to allow similar incidents to happen in your own group. We are all human, and we all have the same capacity of making those mistakes. Of course this was the very mistake the soviets themselves made, they thought that the soviet union was infallible, that it could not make mistakes, and Chernobyl was just one event out of many that proved that belief wrong. But Americans, Europeans, Asians, ect ect can fall prey to that same kind to thinking, and then fall victim to the same accidents. Just as an example, the reason the RMBK reactor was such a flawed design was because of way to aggressive cost cutting that compromised safety. And as we have seen plenty of times before, many capitalist corporation and companies across many industries have been caught engaging in highly aggressive cost cutting measures at the expense of safety, and many, like the soviet union, tried to pretend that the resulting accidents either didn't happen or they tried to downplay them. It is a pitfall that can affect all nations, cultures, and ideologies.

And mind you, that white inferno was raging at nearly half the temperature of the surface of the Sun.

Yeah it's terrifying haha

>still remember which switches to turn to cause a meltdown 🤨

@@bean108 What? I did it 4 times on the control room simulator. Its in the SGI PSP of target set packages. Its one of the harder ones to get, though.

@@jackstecker5796 That kind of statement is, for me, one that would get my attention no matter the context. Even if you're using that knowledge to stop such things from happening, the idea that anyone has that kind of know-how on hand is a scary thing.

wow, very odd. glad you're ok!

'The Demon Core'.. it happened twice... kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l6ycpdKep5y3nok.html

I think the radiation, from fast neutrons and gamma rays alone, during a brief fission reaction is significantly higher than even from irradiated graphite from a reactor core. Just looking at the estimates, they think he received 10 Gy(n) and 1.14 Gy(γ). Since the weighting factor for 2 MeV neutrons (mean for Pu-239 fission) is about 20, this amounts to 201 Sv in a fraction of a second. Conversely (and I’ll admit this doesn’t allow for surface contamination of the graphite lumps with contaminants from the fuel assemblies, but there is a difference of 5 orders of magnitude between the dose received by Slotin and my calculation for the graphite), I’ve calculated the equivalent dose from activated graphite to be around 10 mSv, which is way low and won’t produce any significant biological effects. I think the bulk of the radiation that firefighters were exposed to was from ejected fuel and fuel assembly material, not graphite. Calculations below, if you want to check. As I said, it’s entirely possible that the amount of radiation was ten or even a hundred times higher than this due to contamination of the graphite from other core ejecta, but it’s still orders of magnitude smaller than Slotin received from almost direct contact with a Pu-239 fission reaction. Analysis of Nitrogen Impurity Impact on C-14 generation in RBMK-1599 Reactor Graphite: total C-14 activity at the point of maximal thermal neutron flux = 6.8x10^5 Bq/g Density of graphite = 2.26 g/cm^3 Hand sized piece of graphite is about 10cm x 10cm x 10cm = 1,000 cm^3 Mass of graphite lump = 2.26 kg Activity = 1.54x10^9 Bq C-14 radioactive decay is by beta emission at 6,353 keV per decay. Assume about half goes into the hand, so 7.7x10^8 Bq or 4.88 keV/s, or 0.782 mJ/s. Assume a human hand weighs about 0.46 kg, so this is 1.7 Gy/s and now assume a firefighter held this chunk of graphite for 5 seconds, so total dose is 8.5 mGy. Beta radiation has a weighting factor of 1, so total equivalent dose is just 8.5 mSv.

What does your last part mean

@@Damo2690 Not that I'm OP, but it sounds like they roughly keep track of that sort of thing to determine when an Astronaut can no longer go to space. Not sure that's true, but that's how I interpret the comment.

Ah, I thought of that story too, while Charlie was speaking at 24:07. And remembered a story in which Buzz Aldrin told Neil Armstrong, on their way to the moon, "when I close my eyes I'm seeing little flashes." Neil told him "Don't report that to the ground." I'm sure they guessed it was the effect of cosmic particles whizzing through their heads and didn't want to make the Flight Surgeon panic.

@@Damo2690 if you receive enough radiation over a certain amount of time your risk of cancer goes up. We have set limits for how much radiation an astronaut can be exposed to over their career before that risk becomes to great. If an astronaut is getting close to that limit they may not be permitted to fly certain missions where the expected dose would put them over that limit.

@@Damo2690 There is a legal class of workers in the United States called 'radiation workers' that entitles the workers to certain things in order to survive doing their jobs long-term, primarily in the form of strictly limiting the time they spend in highly radioactive environments. Many countries have a similar legal class. Astronauts are classified as radiation workers. There is currently a debate about whether or not we should reclassify commercial pilots as radiation workers as well, due to the amount of radiation they are constantly exposed to in the upper atmosphere. The counter-argument to this is that there are too few pilots in the USA to increase their ground time as much as we probably should. People are conflicted.

I think I read somewhere that due to the intense amount of ionizing radiation present the core burned with a ghostly blue fire, but that's not particularly scary so the producers changed it to this off yellow. Can't seem to find the source for that anymore, though. However, the visual of that burning core is utterly terrifying.

I think I read somewhere that due to the intense amount of ionizing radiation present the core burned with a ghostly blue fire, but that's not particularly scary so the producers changed it to this off yellow. Can't seem to find the source for that anymore, though. However, the visual of that burning core is utterly terrifying.

@@mauricedanens1797 it was blue because of Cherenkov radiation yes

I’ve watched another video showing side by side footage of the show, compared to actual surviving film of the events just after the meltdown. Pretty accurate, and the ensuing radiation sickness was also pretty accurately portrayed, in all it’s horrifying reality.

@@allisonfisher9304 I heard they toned the radiation sickness down a notch out of respect to the poor souls that actually succumbed to it. They didn't want the show to become about shock value and thus cut out some of the most horrific bits. Still, seeing Vasily on that table, gray and necrotised... Chilling.

Thank you! I too am most interested in watching experts review relevant videos

It highlights Boris Scherbina's earlier statement from that episode, "No one ever thinks it's going to happen to them." Complacency is a killer no matter how strong or invincible you think you are.

Well its not bad way to live if you think about it, that's not a problem. It was risk assessment, which schould tell you what might happend failed. And thats not unique to Soviet union.

It is very good indeed. You're welcome!

You would be surprised at 35+ years since explosion of the core, there are public tours near Chernobyl. Levels of Gamma Radiation are lower in certain areas, but there are still high levels at area off limits set by government of Ukraine. Tour guides have Dosimeters with them as they guided tourists on specific locations.

Wow. Thanks for sharing.

@@TheAtomicAgeCM Thanks, im not deaf, mute, problem with the larynx , im fine with the hearings. Bad Typo. Cheers and happy new year

@@MelinaHristova Some distant family of me was at holiday in Sweden (parents and kid girl) before, during and just after Chernobyl. They died all 3 that same year of "sudden" cancer.