Thanks for the review Elina. I hope it shows that I do my homework, and do my best to present an unbiased view of the world's most infamous location.

Kyle Hill's series on nuclear safety and nuclear history has been absolutely amazing, and given his usual slap-stick, humorous approach to science, the somber, serious tone with which he's calmly but deftly handled the realities of it are a HUGE change of character, and exactly what this topic needs. His videos are a wonderful gift to the world as a whole, educating on multiple areas of science in a way that's both real, mathematical, and entertaining which few can achieve. His nuclear series is yet another wonderful gift to the internet community at large! It's so great to hear other professionals in the field saying he's done a good job on this. Science demands we review each other's work to make sure we're consistently accurate, reliable, and didn't miss anything. Thank you Elina for taking up this important, but often thankless job.

I actually told my dad in january this year (2022) that i wanted to visit Chernobyl this year. Sadly those plans were cancelled shortly after

11:36 high energy photons triggering the CCD's "pixels" is actually pretty well known. Video from the ISS or other orbital operations using them, you see the same effect (though not as often!) - and cameras that have been up there for a long duration often develop more dead or hot pixels (stuck fully on or fully off) faster than in normal conditions. I think also, you can find some video footage of inspection of the Elephant's Foot by way of a robot. I'm unsure if the camera was digital or not, but if I remember correctly the amount of visible noise in the recording spikes as soon as there is an open line-of-site to the material.

Thanks for watching! Let me know how you liked this reaction video and if you’d consider visiting Chernobyl yourself. Be sure to check out Kyle Hill’s full video, the link is in the description. ☢️👩🏽‍🔬

The German’s had a documentary on people who return live around Chernobyl. One old guy was a botanist who talked about the plants and animals that could be eaten as they didn’t absorb the radioactive particles or didn’t eat the plants that did. Had a little farm not far from the abandoned city and seemed happy to live in an almost deserted area.

"According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, the main organization of liquidators, "25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled", which makes a total of 60,000 dead (10% of the 600,000 liquidators) and 165,000 disabled" - We should never forget to include this human cost in any overview about the Chernobyl incident. And don't forget the non-recorded, long-term human costs that we will never be able to truly record.

i like that you always make an effort to add on to what video creators talk about in their original pieces. even if your knowledge areas overlap, you're always adding background information, expanding on the point, or reflecting on whether you've encountered an idea before. i think it is the best way to do reaction content :)

Cameras used on the international space station experience the same phenomenon. Because the gamma photons have such high energy, they can permanently damage camera sensors, and any camera that's been in space for any length of time tends to have permanent grainy artefacts from dead pixels on its sensor.

12:58 cleanly filtered air from inside the dome is constantly blown out creating the pressure difference. There is never equilibrium except when there's sudden massive damage.

8:30 Being from America, I'm used to experts sequestering their information behind massive pay walls like colleges. Because of that, I have major respect for this man. He takes his responsibility so seriously that he freely discusses it with others. While we certainly hope to never need this kind of knowledge anywhere else, having that knowledge available worldwide is a great comfort; in the unfortunate event of something like this happening again, the right people will be able to take the right steps far quicker.

I took the trip into the exclusion zone in 2014. Very cool tour! I was stationed in Germany during the accident so it was great to see the area. Part of the tour Was at the construction site of the arch and then the city of Pripyat where the workers lived. We carried dosimeters and there were areas that were off limits from the tour. When we drove through the red forest every dosimeter on our bus started alarming all at once. Scary to experience!

I really enjoyed this video, and I've been following Kyle Hill for years, so it was fun to see his video here. I hope Kyle Hill himself sees this, I'm sure he would love it. :) The two of you should consider doing a collab on something

breath of fresh air to see reviews like yours in an over-saturated youtube. thanks for the review and of congratz to kyle huge fan of his already.

That green colored paint is a government and institutional thing that is ubiquitous across Russia and the Former Soviet Union. It's either that pale green or a light blue paint inside the buildings, utilities (local steam plants etc...) the buildings are usually painted some horrible shade of ocher whereas the physical infrastructure (piping etc...) are usually painted gray. The Russians also paint all of the tree trunks in their major cities white. Great video!

Such a wonderfully genuine and bright smile through your personality and poise. Thank you for this wonderful production!

I was also supposed to have gone visit the Exclusion Zone in April this year but... yeah... I was a child when all this happened and it scared me so much. So, I want to go to confront it in a way

Thank you Elina! It is a pleasure to see more people such as yourself and Kyle explaining that radiation isn't the monster that the media portrays!! Have a great day!

This has to be one of my all time favorite channels! Elina is the best!!! I just love the way you talk. Not just the accent but how you present information… love it !!!

Great value-added reaction video, thank you very much for this!

Thank you, Elina for a great review of Kyle's video.

Thank you for the content Elina. Hoping that by the time the 100 year anniversary roles around we have made more progress into ways to clean this site up.

I loved your reaction ! I like the idea of one day exploring Pripyat and the Reactor Area but I don t think I will. I hope you make it there instead as soon as it becomes possible and safe.

Another great video Elina, thank you for making these.

I love your content and look forward to your next video. I would love see your take on the famous nuclear physicists of the past like Teller, Fermi, Ulam, Sakharov and of course Oppenheimer. Thank you and take care.

Love your assessments, Elina. I've subscribed, and I'll keep watching and listening to your future posts.

Great video, awesome explanation. Thanks

Thanks for introducing me to Elina, Kyle Hill!!! I smashed that subscribe button!

Wow! Brains and beauty! You have it all Elina. Great video.

The gamma radiation pixel artifacts remind me of what I got when I sent my phone recording a video in slowmo mode thru an airport X-ray machine

Kyle Hill has done some interesting and thought-provoking videos.

Thanks for bringing this content from Kyle into your audience. Your well spoken and value-added commentary is the kind of reflection we need to get more nuclear energy into the world. Keep being awesome!

Thank you for this hard work, history in the making.

Your video's are very interesting. Learning lots. Thank you!

Throughout October and November I worked in the local powerplant (the Krško Nuclear Power Plant). Due to the obvious high security no one can approach closer than 500m of the facility. That's why scale was never a thing I really knew before I actually stood under the building. I remember coming in for the first time and just staring because I'd never really been close to a 50+m tall building. And when some people climbed on top to clean the cupola they were so tiny...

Good Day and thank You for your excellent commentary. Very interesting and educational. Best Regards.

Thank you for the explanation of the difference between confinement and containment.

If you check out Rolf-Dieter Klein's channel, the "10 Sievert per Hour Radiation - tested with the RadioactivityCounter App at the Buchler device" video, you see an extreme example of the artifacts caused by gamma radiation hitting the image sensor. And in a lot of footage from Chernobyl at the time of the accident, you see artifacts from the high radiation environment on photographic film, such as it becoming very grainy or darkened/lightened), as well as flashes.

Great video to you and Kyle 💪

I saw a documentry about them working for 1 min at a time, it was unbeliveable. They tried wearing as much lead pieces too - so they carried so much wieght too.

A former CEO of the utility I work at went through containment on a tour and didn't put on the shoe booties. When leaving containment a particle was detected on one of his super-expensive Italian shoes that had to be temporarily taken away from him.

KZfaq recommendations brought me here (probably because I’m one of Kyle’s subscribers). After watching this video, I just subscribed to you as well, Elina.

Most interesting information. 👍 Thanks Elina!❤️☕️☕️☕️🐾🐿🇨🇦

Thanks again!

Elina, you are the best thank you for making all this so understandable. The Kyle Hill presentation was very good. As far as "Would I consider visiting Chernobyl?" No, I am close enough but thanks. Love your shows, Danny

BTW, there's a video of a pair of dudes running around INSIDE the Sarcophagus in mid 2000's. Stepping over the fuel assemblies and even peeking inside the well where the core used to be located. Elena was filmed from a few meters away too.

The channel Dive Talk had some reactions to some videos of people diving with totally inadequate equipment in some buildings they claimed to be in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Maybe that would be interesting for you to have a look at too.

I’ve worked on imaging sensors and can confirm that radiation is visible as white pixels. It are not necessarily photons but electronic interactions. More specific charges. These also affect other electronic circuits and chips. For applications in radioactive regions (space, medical ) or critical circuits radiation hard designs are required. Typically shielding, more robust electronic circuits and redundancy.

The crossover we never knew we needed but always did!

Very interesting. A fascinating insight into what's been going on there.

This was fascinating 😮

13:00 something I think neither you or him mentioned - it also buys you time if the temperature spikes or something begins generating gas. If it wasn't negatively pressurized, you'd shortly be *positively* pressurized in that case. Obviously bad. And if it was a strong and/or fast enough rise, it could rupture (or lift?) the structure. World's biggest spicy pillow?

I really dream about visiting this area as well as Pripyat. It’s obviously part of a tragic history moment but soooooo fascinating! Hope one day you will make a video on that or who knows, dreaming is allowed, meet you there and visiting this with you 😅😍 Thanks again for your content! Keep going! 👌

I think what they need is a Chernobyl visitor center where they can sell Chernobyl merchandise such as Chernobyl the T-shirt, Chernobyl the Coloring Book, Chernobyl the Lunch box, Chernobyl the Breakfast Cereal, Chernobyl the Flame Thrower. The kids will love that one.

Idk if and how you can verify the gamma ray pixels, but it's a known phenomenon from videos taken in space. fascinating indeed to see it on Earth. super interesting to see this video with your commentary.

Probably a video on zaprosia plant situation and precaution people can take if something goes wrong might be great.

Elina and Kyle in the same video, hell yea!!

Unsanctioned safety exercise (Chernobyl), manual rod travel exercise (SL-1), Lights that go off when a signal has been sent to shut a valve (not when it actually shuts - 3 mile island), Reckless ignorance of Wigner energy (Windscale), Tsunami in an earthquake zone (Fukashima), Being the location of a world war ( Zaporizhzhia) ... How may of these things were properly safety assessed when the reactor was built .. None .. That's the problem with above ground nuclear reactors.

I can confirm the artifacting in the video in regards to the pixels being over developed essentially. I spent 9 years working in radioactive fields, and we used the effect as training aid to show to new members in our organization.

Thanks Elina for a fascinating video! The bit about the camera is intriguing... One could put the lens cap on your camera and record some video in a place with relatively low background radiation, then do the same thing holding a calibration source very close to the camera and see if the white specs appear. Once you have established that the white specs are in fact from ionizing radiation, if you recorded video inside the sarcophagus with the lens cap on for a few seconds and if white specs were present, then it would be logical to assume it was from ionizing radiation. I've actually tried this experiment with the video camera in my smart phone, and a radiation source that sets off my Geiger counter, but could not reproduce the effect, so who knows? Maybe my calibration source was not sufficient or maybe it depends on the type of video sensor, the composition and thickness of lens, material surrounding the video sensor, or any number of other factors? Or maybe the white specs on his video were from something else entirely? Anyway, it's interesting!

Elina, In the future if you are able to go please consider a few stops on your journey through Pripyat. 1. Zavodska Street Firehouse (This firehouse not too far from the Yupiter Bldg is where the first engines responding to the fire came from. The flats alongside the firehouse are where Lyudmilla and Vasily Ignatenko along with many other firemen lived. Their living block was attached to the firehouse. Yaniv Rail Station is where Lyudmilla caught the train to Moscow. This walk took her closer to the power plant and she waited at the train station for a few hours before getting a ride to Moscow for Hospital No 6. Would be interested to know if there are radiation readings after the accident at these two locations and the levels. Please be careful and consider a dust mask as during the recent war troops dug holes into the ground allowing these long buried materials to again be caught in the wind. Stay safe.

3:40 "Train rails" was LOL

There's a video uploaded by a channel called "Crazycars81" that's various footage from inside the sarcophagus, it shows these "artifacts" in a much more intense fashion, also showing less depending on location within the sarcophagus.

Thank you for the video! Did you do some research on Chernobyl, or did you just know it? Anyhow, really appreciate the additional commentary :) The only thing i'm left wondering about is how the guy talking at 13:04 sounds almost exactly like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho haha

Hi Elina! new subscriber here. I always liked nuclear physics. I worked at the University of Buenos Aires for 23 years, mostly in teaching physics labs. You channel is very good!

This video got me to subscribe nice work

Great video!

Any possibility you could do a reaction to the movie Threads? Everyone talks about how scary it is, but it would be interesting to get a scientific reaction.

Elina can you please make a video on different kinds of thorium reactors and their advantages and disadvantages and what's preventing us from building a lot of thorium reactors already

Nice reaction, congratz!

We use cameras to identify fuel bundles and their positioning while refueling reactors. The camera distortion from gamma radiation is so bad it can look almost like a whiteout snowstorm on the screen.

There was a 5 ton 16 inch thick steel blast door that was found over a quarter mile from where it was attached in the facility, after the explosion

1:17 What is shown here is not the sarcophagus, but the New Safe Confinement structure that was built over the sarcophagus, much later, and was finished only 5 years ago.

Stuff like Chernobyl is so fascinating to me because I actually live in close proximity to two separate nuclear power plants, one of which, being the infamous Three Mile Island, and despite the fear the world likes to portray, I've always felt so safe around them. Going to school, we could look out in the distance and see the steam rising from the closest plant and admire it. I very specifically remember, due to the proximity to these plants, the lessons they taught us in school about what to do if ever there were an emergency with them. It's something I always like to be conscious of, but never fear. And I love learning about them. So thank you so much for your content!

There has been some research into using CMOS CCDs in smart phones as radiation detectors. Dosage levels require minutes of exposure to be read, but they do work, apparently. There are even apps available for iOS and Android.

4:43 - I got major "Ara Ara..."-vibes from that.

@Elina Charatsidou Could you talk about the subject of LFTReactors? I've spent many hours on the subject but it would be fun to hear an unbiased but still knowledgable opinion on the subject. For me it seems like the future we missed 60 years ago and really should develop. Similar to how batteries were 10-20 years ago.

As a KZfaq channel it is cool topic to cover and to hear directly from a nuclear physicist is just very cool. Thanks

Other photography have shown the same white gamma particles so it's very likely this is the cause. Super interesting video and surprisingly inspirational.

As a fan of Kyle's work who had just discovered your channel a couple of days ago, I was disappointed that you had no reaction to this a video. I thought that maybe I should leave a comment suggesting that you watch this series of videos. Thanks for the pleasant surprise, I am disappointed no more! The final comment you made had me nodding in agreement.

The negative pressure is the same thing that they do in apartment buildings but with a positive pressure to keep smells in apartments not hallways.

Just subscribed! I'd love to see a comparison of waste hazard per unit volume for different methods of power production. Like, if we were to concentrate other plants' emissions and residuals until they were as hazardous as nuke, which would produce more waste to have to manage? In the case of everything non-nuclear, of course, we are just spewing most or all of it into the atmosphere, and it's out of sight, out of mind. Still, I'll bet that nuclear would easily win. When Chernobyl happened I was in high school and had a number of pen pals who were swept by the cloud of raidation. The very next year I would be studying nuclear power plants in the military. I loved that school! Having friends so close to an accident drove home the point of safety and knowing everything about everything regarding my job. It's absolutely incredible when things are going well, which is almost all of the time, but during the rare times when something goes wrong everyone needs to be clear headed and know their stuff. I'm still absolutely in favor of nuclear, and an very excited about the new designs.

The green paint was a surprise to me as well, in the US in the 50's the color was known as Government green or Government mint. It was used in schools, courthouses and just about any government building you went into.

6 months ago I got within 20 miles of the exclusionary boundary making a delivery. I had no desire going any further.

you should look at the thunderfoot video where he placed a camera to record in a testing machine at a nuclear powerplant and record some digital footage while radiation is present. it messes with the image like crasy . pixels/sparks on the footage

11:10 How to verify the Gamma Ray interference? It's a well-known effect. I know for a fact that those artifacts showed up on old VHS footage taken around Chernobyl as well. And I guess you can say with high certainty that this is from radiation when it shows up only inside the NSC or around other radiation sources. Cameras are known to be affected by other high-energy radiation as well, like air traffic search radars. I once watched a documentary about the 1982 Falklands War. A camera team filmed on the flight deck of one of the British carriers and every two seconds or so the picture got all "snowy" from white artifacts - this was from the search beam of the main radar-set sweeping over the camera.

I forgot what year it was but when she hit the scene on her motorcycle and would ride into the radiation zone. Her online name was like racer girl or something but her website gained a lot of followers back in the day.

Well I heard part of NSC are also big Cranes to slovly dismantle both old Contaiment, and #4 reactor...

It is worth to add, that the construction of NSC was even more pressing matter because of two major issues: -First is that because Sarcophagus was constructed over the ruins of the reactor building, some of that still standing parts of the building were use as a part of the Sarcophagus, beam supporting roof was rested upon west wall of the reactor building, both wall and roof are not very structurally stable and could collapse. -Secondly, the Upper Biological Shielding of the reactor core itself weighing 1000 tons was thrown up during the explosion and now rests almost verticly at 105 degree angle supported only by a pile of rubble. A collape of UBS, would not only rise dust, but could cause damage to the Sarcophagus.

Very interesting! I find nuclear videos fascinating and particularly like the post mortem videos by “Plainly Difficult”.

Some say this was not a reactor but a interdimensional doorway that they forced closed to keep it from coming through

It’s crazy that those gamma ray artifacts are present on recording that where taken far far way back before people evacuated the city.

lol i love the disappointed tone about their interior decoration and paint tastes

The negative pressure is the same as in a furnace from a power plant. It's just a few millibar below atmospheric pressure.

The first time I watched it on Kyle’s channel, I was wondering why they painted the walls a similar shade of green to the crystalline parts of uranium ore that I had found in Wyoming.

My dad worked at an oil refinery and they were required to have containment levees around their storage tanks. That would prevent the condense of the tank from entering the environment should the tank be breached.

Can you do a presentation on strengths and weaknesses of Thorium Liquid Salt Reactor technology?

regarding the clothes they wear inside, chances are those never actually leave the facility. my grandpa worked in an east german uranium processing facility, overseen by the soviet military, they had similar protocols, no clothing from outside goes in, no clothing from inside got out. they had one changing room to undress, a shower room to wash themselves and a second changing room to put on the inside clothes. On the way out they had to leave the clothes they wore throughout their work day, which would, depending on how contaminated they were, either be cleaned inside the facility, or contained back in one of the de-commissioned mine shafts, never to be seen again. they also didn't wash themselves, they were hosed down by a soldier to make sure not even a tiny speck of radioactive dust could be carried outside and potentially contaminate a worker and his family.

You create the negative pressure by constantly pumping air out of the space. Typically this is done to prevent odours escaping from processes or or dust contamination as here. The air you pump out is then filtered to remove the material of concern before releasing it into the environment. (In the case of odours you typically use a thermal combustor to destroy the odour, but for dust, you use various types of filter.)

Also another difference between containment and confinement is containment buildings are normally reinforced concrete structures specifically built to withstand overpressure cases inside of the building to not explode and release radioactive contamination like you saw with the Fukushima reactors exploding. Mainly from the zirconium cladding corroding with water into hydrogen gas under high temperatures you find when the fuel melts. Yeah if you watch the footage of Chernobyl right after the accident from film or photos you see the exact same thing but more intense since the radiation was fresh and more powerful at the time. As far as the pressure differential and maintaining it with a hole in the NSC that all depends on the size of the hole and the strength of the air pumps being used to maintain that lower pressure. I'd also imagine they have some temporary patches they could put into place to maintain the pressure differential. Especially when mounted from the outside it wouldn't require any crazy fastening for a temp patch as the pressure differential would also want to hold it in place. The one thing where the passage of time helps is that the longer this stuff sits around the less dangerous it is to humans thus easier to clean up. The so called "elephant's foot" is the prime example of this. Shortly after it was discovered being in it's presences for two minutes was fatal. Now that same fatal time has risen to like two hours or even more. In a hundred years I'd hope they would be well into clean up of this mess instead of looking to replace one confinement facility with another.