As long as we have brave and intelligent men like Homer Simpson watching over our nuclear power plants, I think we will be pretty safe.

As a former nuclear operator... what I just listened to blows my mind. So wrong on so many levels. This is not an expert on nuclear physics. Not even close.

The point of the show was not to be afraid of nuclear technology, it was about the corruption of power and troubles with lack of accountability.

Thinking all nuclear energy is unsafe because of Chernobyl is just like saying all air travel is dangerous and horrible because of the Hindenburg.

Since the question wasn't answered properly in the video - the answer is no. A Chernobyl-type accident is not possible in the US because all of our reactors have containment vessels and negative void coefficients. However, this does not mean that nuclear accidents are not possible obviously. Accidents and meltdowns can still occur but the radiation release risk is significantly lower. Containment vessels are why despite suffering THREE meltdowns Fukushima only released about 1/10th the amount of radiation of Chernobyl.

Should have interviewed an actual nuclear engineer.

This woman is in shock, get her out of here.

To answer this question, you should ask the expert who understand the designs of different nuclear plants, not a historian....

She's 36% identical to Legasov not great not terrible

interview a nuclear engineer, not a nuclear historian

The biggest difference between Chernobyl and other nuclear reactors is the fuel composition. The uranium isotopes used in Chernobyl's design had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity. Meaning that as power goes up temperature goes up and as temperature goes up power goes up. This makes the reactor inherently unstable. Reactors now use enriched uranium cores that have a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. Which allows for a more stable reactor design. Wired should have brought on a scientist, not a historian for this discussion

Did she really say "that could make Chernobyl look like a picnic"? Where is the similarity between a nuclear explosion and a picnic? At any scale?

A scientist couldve actually made this video interesting.

Well this is a new low, Wired

In addition to all the other biases in the video, the notion that nuclear waste can just accidentally create a nuclear explosion (2:27) is just ridiculous. You need highly enriched uranium and a very deliberately designed bomb to create a nuclear explosion.

FEAR FEAR FEAR, CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME!

this interview is so extremely biased

and in the next episode we have a scientist look at if the US civil war could have Been avoided

Long time ago... I'M NOT THAT OLD!

Kate Brown says some seriously wrong things in this. Heat does not cause criticality. Moderator does not prevent criticality. She's clearly making stuff up. The nuclear waste in pools losing coolant and heating up would NOT cause criticality! Not at all! Sufficient decay heat would melt the fuel and potentially cause a fission-product release. That's the issue here. Not criticality. Not a Chernobyl-style event.

Why does she look like female version of Legasov, lol? :D

On this topic a good non-fiction book is "The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations" by Dietrich Dorner

When people think of Chernobyl, they think it only affected Ukraine but it affected neighboring Belarus more. After the disaster, everyone living there left and the region became deserted. However, recently President Alexander Lukashenko (aka Europe's last dictator) has been trying to get people to move back there, as if it's now okay to live there. The radiation still has a presence there

"the water acts as a moderator so that you won't have any kind of a criticality accident". Newsflash: Criticality in the type of fuel used in light water reactors REQUIRES a moderator. No moderator, no thermalization of neutrons, no chain reacton, no criticality. The moderator used in US light water reactors is water. This one statement shows that this woman knows nothing about the subject.

Because she's a historian, not a nuclear engineer, I give this interviewee 3.6 out of 15,000!

Only the likelihood of a meltdown mentioned. Nothing mentioned about the reactor exploding and throwing out much of its core. That is because the RBMK is genuinely the only reactor that was (and potentially still is) capable of doing that.

I would have never thought Wired would go this low. :(

This woman is the flat earther version of nuclear scientists .

What exactly will explode, and make Chernobyl look like a picnic, if the water evaporates and the wastes heats up miss nuclear historian?

Short answer: no

What's the half-life of a nuclear historian? Is she living it all out? Half dead at 27?

*Only 3.6 roentgen. Not great, not terrible.*

The nuclear waste storage facility in finland they're talking about is "onkalo", and there was a documentary on it that blew my mind, it's called "into eternity". The documentary points out the problem of time that we're dealing with when talking about nuclear waste and it's so interesting.

I think it's interestingly *crazy* that there is no mention of Fukushima still ongoing. Just plain nuts. Collective amnesia but still recalling Chernobyl. Red Wing MN. There are more but *Fukushima is absolutely EPIC* .

how does nuclear waste go critical or explode? oh wait, it doesn't

Mmmm do you smell that? Fear mongering! Ahhh! Sure smells gooooood. Mmm mm. Get all them views and shares, yeah baby! Fear all the people!

Except for the laws of physics, which by design absolutely prevent a Chernobyl-like disaster! There are also engineered safety systems, like a containment which would prevent any significant release to the environment.

What truly amazes me about the ultra safety conscious Nuclear industry is: 1. In Chernobyl they had graphite tips on the boron control rods ….. the graphite made the runaway reactor skyrocket. This idiocy directly caused the reactor explosion. 2. In Fukushima they put the emergency generators for water cooling pumps in the basement ….. the plant is on the coast in an highly active earthquake area that has experienced many tsunamis. Guess what …. there was a huge earthquake followed by a tsunami and the basement flooded killing the generators. This idiocy directly caused the reactor meltdown. Utter madness.

4 year old boi : Breaks the pencil and takes the led out of it "is that a graphite". Dayatlov: No

I live within a couple miles of a nuclear plant, outside of Cleveland. I personally love it. We did have a few unusual earthquakes in the last week, though. The thought crossed my mind...

Things this woman *_REALLY_* should have known: 1) Nuclear waste once processed isn't going to "overheat and blow up". In reality, the risk is that it will seep into the ground water. 2) Water acting as a moderator does NOT reduce the risk of criticality. Moderators increase the likelihood of criticality. Instead, that risk is taken care of by carefully monitoring the density of nuclear material. 3) Heating up spent fuel rods doesn't increase the likelihood of criticality. Heat reduces reactivity.

You don't need to monitor the deep repository in Finland for 1000 years. Once the spent fuel is deposited you can leave it there

Question her judgment when she lived in the Soviet Union willingly.

ALSO. The moderator inside the reactor used in Russia was graphite and the United States uses water.

the documentary "pandora's promise" should be required viewing after chernobyl

"Only the Soviets could lie so thoroughly and be so incompetent"- I hate communists as much as anyone but that statement is just ridiculous lol

I think the title is just clickbait because of the new series.. She is clearly not talking about the Chernobyl or Chernobyl like (If you only mean meltdown why say chernobyl since that also happened in japan and therefore it sounds as if you especially ment the thing that caused the disaster in chernobyl) disaster

This topic needs to be a hours unchopped documentary or a panel talk with scientists to really give the accuracy necessary to get the greater point across. Instead they made a 6 minute biased cliff note video, its kind of irresponsible. Especially when you can tell they condenced this interview down by how many times it cuts, so they could pander to whoever.

She is making a lot of the issues seem a LOT more severe than they truly are.

She probably wont ever read this but here is a couple of things Dr.Brown; To have a CNPP level of disaster in the US is simply not possible, the reactor was housed in a unprotected building and was using a unsafe reactor design. And as many has pointed out US PWR's have a negative coefficient rather than a positive one. TMI accident was contained in the core itself. Let alone the containment building it was in. It had a meltdown but it was fully contained. Its these kind of differences in western and eastern reactor design that allowed TMI to be a contained melt down with almost no material expunged into the atmosphere (It was a intentonal pipe opening), and on the other end CNPP being the worst nuclear disaster in history. To say a RBMK style of disaster is possible in the United States is quite silly. Now the two MK39 bombs that were dropped outside of Goldsboro NC, The arming sequence of those bombs had not been completed so a detonation would of been impossible. The only way those bombs would of detonated is if it was intentional. This is obviously pandering to the anti nuclear crowd and it is quite frankly intellectually dishonest.

Chernobyl 2: Electric Boogaloo

Chernobl was not a nuclear event aka bomb it was a massive radioactive steam release event. Containment ponds can safely go dry if the materials were stored using a correct layout. They could warm up if the moderator ie water was gone but there is zero chance of a explosion. The bombs that were dropped in the 50s had a far greater chance as the failsafe designs were not designed and the bomb design itself was designed as a marginal critical design. Modern devices being totally different. As soon as they learned how to make them smaller in the 60's those versions on were vastly safer. This is yet more unresearched scare material.

2:50 Just a nit, but the water in spent fuel pools is not a moderator; in fact, there's no fission going on, so you're not using one. It's a neutron absorber and a coolant.

What's the fuss all about ….. the radioactivity at Chernobyl was only the equivalent of one chest x-ray.

This is cut so weirdly: none of the answers seem finished. It's like she's starting to explain something, and then when she comes to something substantial, it's just cut off and next question.

Thorium reactors for the future.

she lost credibility when she said climate change can cause a nuclear accident. try interviewing a nuclear physicist

Spent fuel can't go critical and explode... We have real life experience of what happens to spent fuel if they aren't cooled (Fukushima), they melt and make a mess but NO criticality or nuclear explosions. As for Chernobyl happening outside the Soviet Union, RBMK reactors had numerous flaws (positive void coefficient being a BIG one) that made the disaster not only possible but MUCH worse than it could have been. For one thing most countries have containment vessels for nuclear reactors, greatly reducing the environmental impact of a meltdown. A reactor like at Chernobyl could not be legally built outside the Soviet Union.

Spent fuel rods can't go critical, that's the whole point of them being 'spent'... Unscientific analysis, but the solution to the waste issue is still needed and an important one. The solution is probably to construct actinide burner reactors, along with medium term storage facilities for disposal of the remaining medium lived fission products

We have one near Oceanside. It’s built on catacombs & is always having problems. It has been shut down.

Why didn't you get a person that is an expert in nuclear physics instead of a historian? A nuclear power plants can't explode like a nuke. -.-

Explosions that make Chernobyl look like a picnic? Chernobyl suffered a positive void coefficient during a safety test with cooling turned off, with 8 control rods and in the shut down process pushed graphite moderators into a hot active zone. Next to zero neutron absorbers, only moderators, it’s actually really really close to the most amount of heat that CAN be generated by a nuclear power plant as is physically possible under the laws of thermodynamics. It is the biggest explosion that is possible for a nuclear power plant period. And if the exact same thing happened in a modern power plant with a modern containment vessel, it might not even break the vessel, worse case scenario it releases a fraction of the energy Chernobyl did. Every melt down explosion and natural disaster that has happened since Chernobyl released half as much radiation as Chernobyl (more than 40) have in total between them all released less than half as much energy as Chernobyl. Many have negative void coefficients or even meltable corks that make melt down actually impossible.

I give this video 3.6 thumbs up. Not great, not terrible.

Never knew a fuel rod assembly by itself could just blow up, I always assumed it needed a pressure vessel of some sort. I keep hoping we will find a way that like if you spill an acid you mix a base with it it is neutralized, be nice we could do with this stuff somehow. Seems there would be some chemical process that would slow the decay and make less radioactive or just neutralize it.

How does a Chernobyl-like disaster happen again? WITH LIES

*What did the control rod said to the reactor?* _Just the tip!_

Just read about Three Mile Island Accident.

A historian is not a engineer or physicist. The Chernobyl show was so bloody sensationalized.

My cousin works at a Nuclear plant (very similar to the one that blew up in Chernobyl). His job is basically to make sure something like that never happens. It’s super cool, but I never think of him having that much responsibility considering when we were little he pretended to throw me off of my uncle’s boat when there was a whale shark swimming under us. Good times.

It's almost impossible to occur in any country

We also fail to talk about the Navy's on going nuclear reactor program aboard ships world wide. Other than Russia they have been operated very safely

Why did they not interview a nuclear scientist? Chernobyl was caused directly by the design. Noone outside of USSR ever built anything even resembling RBMK. Just look at Fukushima - there was an earthquake, a tsunami, it was an old design that was about to be shut down - and yet noone has been killed with radiation. Not a single person. Oh, and we HAVE resolved the problem of nuclear waste with IV generation reactors, which a competent nuclear scientist would now. Quaks like this person are responsible for the current CO2 emissions, as without their fearmongering we wpuld have switched to atom a long time ago, saving millions of lives killed by coal and oil every year.

Why do people never mention reactor types like the breeder or molten salt reactors? If they do what they were designed to these can turn nuclear waste into fission elements while still inside the reactor core. Is it because the way more dangerous and cheap method is just using boiling water reactors, which are also the most common in the US?

Goal of video... tell everyone we are going to die in a nuclear disaster without scaring the s*** out of them

Why haven't been any nuclear waste disasters yet? What exactly are the dangers? This feels like a one-sided argument. Why not get an engineer instead of a historian to talk details about the risks? Why did you omit that relative to the amount of energy produced, the number of deaths related to nuclear is the lowest when compared to other kinds of energy?

The sodium reactor experiment (SRE) at Santa Susana field laboratory, was much worse than three mile island in terms of release of radioactivity into the environment.

Now that's comforting, thanks!

Protocol if something goes wrong: Run very fast

This conversation scared me more than the show did.

IF anything happens and I die, I just hope it looks good...

The show does not in any way imply that only the Soviets can lie and screw up. It simply showed that in this case, the Soviets did lie and screw up. Big difference. The man reasons a Chernobyl like event is highly unlikely is explained in the show. One, we have massive containment facilities around our reactors. Two, we don't use graphite moderated reactors. I'm not a nuclear physicist, but even I can tell there is quite a bit wrong here.

You really should have interviewed a nuclear engineer, not a nuclear historian. A Chernobyl-like accident is completely impossible at a commercial reactor in the USA. MIT has a nuclear engineering program, you could have probably reached out to someone a couple offices over and actually talked to someone who knows about PWR and BWR style reactors, containment vessels, negative void coefficients, etc. How could a Chernobyl-like accident happen in a spent fuel pool? There is absolutely no graphite in those pools. Just heavily borated water, both of which slow down nuclear reactions. If by some means the pools did lose all their water through some amazing natural phenomenon, well, there is no means of producing steam then, no means of disassociating oxygen and hydrogen to produce an explosion. Literally everything that Kate Brown is discussing is not possible in a spent fuel pool or any style nuclear reactor built outside of the former soviet union.

_Dude can’t wait to grow another set of arms._

First off, Chernobyl didn't have a melt-down. They had an explosion. Which is way worse...

Unlike the "nuclear historian", I do not claim to any expertise in nuclear engineering, but as soon as I heard her say water is acting as a moderator (2:49) I realised she had no clue about nuclear reactors, and stopped listening.

Why are these people interviewed instead of experts in the actual industry that have a thorough understanding of the technology and procedures to follow? “A Dixie cup of material would poison an auditorium of people” How on earth could you possibly make this statement with certainty without knowing the isotopes that currently exist in the Dixie cup? If the material in the Dixie cup is Uranium 238, which has low gamma, alpha decay and low radioactivity then those people have little to zero risk, as they won’t be affected by the radioactive decay of the material. In order to make a statement like this you NEED TO KNOW: - the isotopes in the waste - the amount of isotopes in the waste - the radioactivity of the isotopes - the Radioactive decay of the isotopes - the environment which the isotopes and people exist - the means of which people are absorbing the radiation - the bioaccumulation of the isotopes - genetic and biological conditions of the affected population “If you polled the people around a nuclear reactor what to do in a nuclear accident they would not know what to do” This may be true because of ignorance, but to act like the USA is similar to the USSR in the aspect is historically and currently wrong. The NRC and EPA have publicly submitted documents of what to do in a nuclear accident. www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/emerg-plan-prep-nuc-power.html www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/emerg-preparedness/in-radiological-emerg.html www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/emerg-preparedness/about-emerg-preparedness/planning-zones.html www.epa.gov/radiation/radiological-emergency-response www.epa.gov/radiation/protective-action-guides-pags www.epa.gov/radiation/radiological-emergency-response-authorities

How can you be a nuclear historian without understanding the technology and physics involved?

Key takeaway: it can't, not like Chernobyl at least. Source: Me (a nuclear physicist)

Yes, Finland has a good plan to deal with the waste, we don't have earthquakes or tornados here :]

"Nuclear waste explodes" (it doesn't), "plane drops nuclear missile" (planes carry nuclear bombs not missiles, but yeah it did happen). For an nuclear historian she sure sucks at understanding the tech she studying.

3mi accident before chernobyl was very similar but they had containment building.

Neither of you mention the the lunacy of building nuclear reactors in earthquake zones.

"It can heat up and overheat" that is so factually incorrect, this person does not know what she is talking about!

boi, that was a fast enlightenment, with no interesting or useful information. congrats.

I think I hadn't been early to a Wired video

"Radioactive contamination is the best pollution for several reasons starting with the fact that the source of nuclear fuel is extremely small in comparison because the quantity required per GW is 1.5 millions smaller than that of the chemical combustion; it's always confined out of the environment (even with the worst case scenario accident the area of dispersion is small in comparison, the counterparts are dispersed on the environment in huge quantities); harmful levels of radiation emitted rapidly decrease over days and months (unlike harmful non-radioactive pollutants which remain forever relatively undetectable); radionuclides are so easily and cheaply detected, to the point of one part per million; last but not least: natural DNA biological adaptive resistance is extremely well designed for Radiation, being not the same case than for chemicals"... and also: more human-free natural areas in our planet like Chernobyl? Welcome! :D

For MIT professor, you have no clue how nuclear power works.

For a fraction of seconds i was convinced that she was Legasov

There is so much wrong information in this interview.

I actually disagree with Brown that the show presents nuclear disaster as something that could only happen in the Soviet Union under a heap of misinformation and incompetence. The point of the final lines of the show is to point out that disaster and suffering that can be caused by the lies of any system or government.