no they didnt admit they made it up, they said her baby died, and the husband died, and thats true. she had a son after this i think is the implication and the doctors were wrong about her being sterile.
the lie was that the show said the radiation would have killed the mother but the baby absorbed it instead, that part is pure fiction, radiation doesn't work like that
@@Klaevin the lie was that the show said the radiation would have killed the mother but the baby absorbed it instead, that part is pure fiction, radiation doesn't work like that
I suspect the 90,000 comes from things like liquidator deaths due to "Chernobyl syndrome," miscarriages, fatal birth defects, things like that, assuming all of them in the area are due to the accident (like how people assume cancer deaths in the Three Mile Island area are due to the nuclear accident there). I agree about being pickier about sources, but it is definitely worth talking about the potential deaths that weren't due to cancer specifically. Most of the series was based on a book full of anecdotes from survivors. It's tricky, because in writing fiction, one has to keep in mind their message and themes, and this series was created to be anti-climate-change (leaders having their heads in the sand under a looming threat)--and yet, inadvertently, it stoked nuclear fears, which actively works against the outcome Craig Mazin was trying for. Brilliantly written, acted, and directed, certainly, and I'm glad it's gotten so many physicists, medical professionals, and engineers to talk about the event in a way a bunch of actual (usually even less accurate) documentaries have not. I've only looked at it from an historical perspective before, so analyses like yours have really broken open for me the assumptions that were pretty pervasive throughout media before. Thank you.
I found a bit about the high numbers. Basically it is hard to measure, since most deaths (non natural) are from cancer in europe, so if you just come to a number of 0.01 % of higher deaths due to cancer due to Chernobyl, it wouldn't be statistical significantly measureable, but still in the 10 thousands. So basically it is plausable with some evidence, that it could be that way, but mostly scientific error, so just uncertainty. Edit: Also it is still way to early to see the full effects of that
@@emmata98 Based on when I looked at those numbers yes, that is basically what was done. Compare expected rates for anything that could potentially be attributed to radiation exposure to their expected rates. While not the most accurate number, I personally really like to use it in argumentation because the highest estimates of deaths resulting from the biggest nuclear disaster of all time (which is accounting for long term impacts over many years) still pale in comparison to yearly deaths resulting from fossil fuel usage.
The most reputable studies indicate that between 20k and 40k people were "killed by or had their lives significantly reduced by" the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster. The studies that predict higher death tolls than that do not take account of the incredibly poor response of the USSR in dealing with the disaster...for example not distributing stable iodine to the people down wind to prevent damage to their thyroids. It would be more accurate to say that between 20k and 40k were killed/had lives shortened by the radiation, while another as many as 50k had their lives shortened by the negligence of the USSR in their response. At least that is what appears to be the approximate reality.
A lot of those "anecdotes from survivors" (lost tapes?) were found to be fabrications and lies. Maybe HBO should've vetted their sources better before pushing this drivel to market. Such a waste of good actors and a good lesson to be told.
I genuinely don’t think their numbers are low at all. They had an open reactor core 3.5 miles away from Pripyat which they did not evacuate for 3 1/2 days. There were 49,480 people living right there alone. Now I’m not implying at all that they all died. I am just making a point that the exclusion zone is EXTREMELY large, Pripyat is just one city, there were towns of people emptied out, farms, individual houses. Then after everyone left. 750,000 people were drafted to go into the area and execute the animals, dig up the top layer of dirt and bury it 1 foot down, and remove all radioactive materials from the roofs of the buildings. When everything was said and done over 800,000 people were exposed to extreme amounts of radiation for extended lengths of time. This doesn’t mean they die instantly, but cancer rates went up, a lot died in their 50s, that is the reason it is hard to track. It is even harder due to the fact that it was in the Soviet Union. They only took blame for those who died in the explosion, the employees that died, and the immediate first responders that died.
I think of it this way, when talking about a nuclear bomb, an ordinary person in court understands that the only end result was a big explosion. When talking about a nuclear bomb, an ordinary person can more easily understand the seriousness of the matter.
About Ludmylla and her baby, you misunderstood the end epilogue. She did lose her baby like its show in the series, meaning the baby died few hours after birth. Obviously the whole baby absorbed radiation think is nonsense and drama, but in real life the baby died as well. What is written in epilogue is that doctors said she has permanent illnes preventing her from beoming pregnant or safely deliver a kid. And those doctors were wrong since she managed to give birth to a son later, and they live in Kyjev. The show was playing on the fact again that radiation destroyed her life, and then magically she still managed to have a kid and she is happy. This is pure emotional misleading. First there is no way of telling that she became sick due to radiation, and damage from radiation actually lead to her dead baby in some way. I dont think it is correct to take individuals and suggest they had sickness or cancer from chernobyl in general. You cant prove that an individual is getting cancer from chernobyl or would have got cancer anyway. Yes it increases the risk but you cant prove indivudually. Statistically you can prove numbers. You can look surronding areas and see that lets say from 10 million 100k has cancer. Near chernobyl 150k , that can statistically prove an ESTIMATE. BUt you cant say, hey i got this from chernobyl. The other thing the show forgets to mention is that Ludmylla's kid is seriously sick since his birth. I dont remember what sickness he has, but he needs full superviosion and care for him. The show didnt mention it because it would ruin, the effect they wanted to have reading that. When i watched it first i was crying at that line, and then became inmediately happy that she actually had a kid and she is happy with him after the trauma of her husbands painful death. I assume that was the goal to feel like this. But reality ius much more sad for Her. She got thousands of threat latters saying he killed his children with disobeying the nurses, and that se deserves her fate and so on. I found it absolutely disghusting to do such thing. And i am embarassed just as a human, that my fellow humans can sink so low.
I personally never took the the line "They [the doctors] said the radiation would have killed the mother but the baby absorbed it instead" as a fact. It's not even the scientist's opinion but a recounting what someone said to her. I assumed it was based on same real Soviet doctor's opinion from back then. Obviously it's wrong but even real Ludmila has said "We did not know anything about radiation then". Chernobyl was something completely new so it's easy to imagine some uninformed doctor's diagnosis would be as wrong and as confidently stated as Dyatlov's diagnosis about the reactor explosion.
Yes, he has finally finished the series. Really liked how you explain the way things ought to be done with a test like this. I learn something new every time when watching your videos. The red/ blue card way of showing the physics was a really clever aid in explaining it to the non-nuclear nerdy folks. I can actually read Cyrillic, and your translations through Google weren't bad at all. The one red card was missing "positive", but the rest was pretty much bang on. As to the control rods. If they would have been only boron, there would have been an issue. Water in an RBMK only functions as a neutron poison because the reactor is so heavily over-moderated with graphite. When fully withdrawing the control rods, and water now filling the space where the control rod used to be, you replace one poison (boron) with another (water). This will make the reactor run really inefficient because of the low enrichment, and also make for an uneven fuel burnup. So, by hanging the graphite displacers under the boron part, they would smooth out the neutron flux and theoretically make the control rods a much more powerful control. In all my reading through dusty reports, I came across a little known fact. In order to save on concrete (yes, really!), in 1983, they secretly shortened the graphite displacers by 1.25 meter so they could keep the under-reactor spaces smaller. No testing was ever done to see how this would affect the behaviour of the reactor, nor was it ever discussed with the various scientific institutes. Before this "improvement", the displacers actually reached all the way to the bottom of the core, and there was no initial insertion of positive reactivity. Only after the accident did the scientists find out what they had done. This "improvement" was later reversed for obvious reasons. They also added an additional fast-acting scram system called БАЗ (Быстродействующая Аварийная Защита = fast-acting emergency protection) which would insert 24 boron-only control rods into the full length of the core in under 2.5 seconds, pulling the reactivity down by at least -2 b-eff.
Valery Legasov's statement about the Chernobyl disaster being "a nuclear bomb" was a metaphorical expression used to convey the severity and magnitude of the situation. It was not meant to be taken literally, but rather as a vivid way to emphasize the catastrophic consequences and the potential for widespread harm resulting from the explosion.
Honestly it's arguably worse than a nuke. Those can be cleaned up relatively quickly and the damage is mostly localized to whichever town gets annihilated. They are still to this day dealing with Chernobyl and its side effects, and nobody has a better idea to unfuck the reactor besides building progressively larger concrete shells around it to lock in the Hell it wants to unleash. It will rip any robot you send in to take a look at it apart still within hours. That is a burden no single nuke we have devised can replicate.
The way the makers of the show added the notes at the end to cover some of the things they got wrong, simplified, or made more dramatic is a really good thing...I just wish they had done more of that, or been more honest. For example, related to your note, they say that "it has been reported" that everyone on the "Bridge of Death" died...but those reports are very much NOT true....so technically, they are being truthful, bur not quite. Other things they do not admit to, I can understand...such as the fact that Legasov was not even at the trial of Dyatlov and company...but it is kind of necessary to turn him into a kind of hero figure and have him do much more than he really did so that the story can be simplified enough for most folks to keep track of. I assume by now you have read the History vs Hollywood article, so you know most of the truth...at least I hope that is the case.
We will never truly know if the reports about 'the bridge of death' are true or not, thanks to the soviet unions proclivity for covering things up and lying. No reliable written record plus the unreliability of human memories, especially with trauma means we will never really know for sure
"They are better off reading the analog gauges at this point" < yeeeah, the only problem is that in the case of that reactor, about.. err.. 90% of the entire control room displays were outputs from the computer(s).
I think you underestimate soviets, first, Dose limit per liqidator 25 REM was just a number, often broken. There is no systematic medical oversight over former Liquidators. Thus aftereffects cannot be studiet in population studies and comparisons. Iodine tablets were not distributed(Poland was only exception in soviet controled Europe) and there was spike in Thyroid Cancer cases in central and Eastern Europe as result. Falout hit about thirt of Belarus, and significant portion of population still lives in contaminated areas. Photos from 1st May parade in Kyev 1896 wer granulated from increased radiation, and all were confiscated by KGB.
From what I understood (may be wrong here) but the show is based off the info they had at the time. Not the info they have now. Like they did actually bury the people in metal coffins and then poured concrete on them. That sound ridiculous now but back then it may have made sense.
Same thing with the possible explosion if tanks weren't drained. We now know that it wouldn't have happened like that, but at the time that were the possibilities they were dealing with, so they of course had to cover that possibility.
Keep in mind that this was soviet russia (im from mid east europe so i know whats up), not that anything changed over there. The chaos and ignorance is always present there and this series got it spot on you can trust me on that one. Its still the same. You are viewing this issue from your point of view but it was exactly like the series is portrating it. And i mean spot on.
In Belarus huge % of the country is contaminated still to this day and millions of people are suffering from Chernobyl. Millions of children's born with health problems died. One of the researchers was Yury Bandazhevsky, former director of the Medical Institute in Gomel, a scientist working on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. He says "we recorded serious pathologies of internal organs - brain, heart, and endocrine system - that could be assessed as a result of direct radiotoxic exposure. But [Belarusian] officials didn't want to connect cause and effect. Meanwhile, in the Vetka district of Belarus, many of the children we observed in 1993-1995 have died. "
I'm from Bulgaria and I was born in Sept 86. I have 3 of my classmates (29 People) died from cancer. Also I have 2 older relatives that died from cancer one of them Husband and life - the man died from cancer in the 90s his life still alive but with cut breasts) And I remember she is very pessimistic because from when I remember her she thinks and beliefs the next day will be her last. In Bulgaria we did not know nothing, may be month after the disaster (we were part of the USSR) And People ate nuclear lettuce while the politics ate selected foods. But what about Belarus ? Reports from Soviet and Western scientists indicate that Belarus received about 60% of the contamination that fell on the former Soviet Union. This is 10m people. Today, more than 2,000 populated areas are located in radioactive contamination zones, with approximately 930,000 people (185,000 of whom are children) living in them.
You don't understand diesel generators very well then. Yes, the diesel generators will start within 1 second but a diesel generator takes 30-60 seconds to turn over, start and rev up enough to reach operating speed and produce enough power to take on a power load. I've worked with emergency backup diesel generators and we always give 60 seconds margin for the diesel to take the load. Anything that can't tolerate a 60 second outage is provided with uninterruptible battery power for at least 5 minutes.
If you've ever driven a manual transmission car, you can inherently understand the issue with running at low power. It's quite difficult to "Bunny-hop" a car by accident at speed, because the car can't produce an acceleration quick enough to move your clutch foot, nor do you have to balance the clutch and accelerator because you will stall otherwise. Oh, and I like the term "Nuclear-powered steam-gas bomb"
There were 2 computer systems in the RBMK. A slow one, that calculated every parameter (SKALA) and a faster one which only had a minimum - but instant- input of parameters (DREG). You basically had 2 readouts. A fast and crude one and a slow and precise one. None of those systems acted fast enough to show the transient power surge in the core. It happened too fast. But since the SKALA and DREG were notorious for crashes and restarts, it was more used as a documentation device, not to base actual decisions off of it. They used the analog readouts to control the reactor. But even this was not really accurate since for example the ionisation chambers to measure neutron flux were not very accurate.
Also, thanks to the guy from the Chornobyl Family channel, the mainframe that processed data at Chornobyl site was preserved and not scrapped. It's probably still there, though I'm not sure if tours still are happening or not
I highly doubt the IAEA numbers. Not saying 100 000 people died but I would say a few thousands are more than possible. Count in all the work during clean up, thousands upon thousands people went there to help and they could die for reasons other than direct radiation exposure. There could be a lot of accidents, diseases etc..
The long delay concerning diesel generators is due to old technology. Like they start in few seconds but as the engine is cold you can stall it when put under load. Thou i am sure the engine and fuel is kept at room temperature true the whole year but even at scorching summer heat it take few seconds to heat up. Modern heaters, forced induction and direct injection combined with fuel additives negates most of the downsides using diesel concerning start up. You can also start up diesel using compressed air but its more complicated and used mostly at large marine engines. Usually when the engine have ladder you use air or smaller engine to start up.
What i remember about Chernobyl on the news is that fallout from the accident had spread north and west across Europe, affecting crops that year. I don't know if that may have increased the risk of cancer, from eating the crops that year.
Apparently, in the trial, Diatlov would have said those words, « I will say that I am guilty, but I cannot say that I am not… » the closest thing we have of a confession from him.
Dyatlov, despite being the rather rough results kind of supervisor did have some recorded encounters where employees found him irritable. But that is unrelated, according to about some foreign sources he is partly, maybe even less then a quarter (0.5/4) responsible. Same goes for Fomin and Bryukhenov. But yes faulty engineering was the main problem here.@@elric5371
btw, my man you can show longer clips of the hearing, just make sure what you are showing is directly relevant to the point you are making as integral to your content and you cant be taken down for copy write violations, they probably wont try either as long as its completely impossible to watch their series through your series.
RUclips doesn't care about the actual laws regarding copyright. They use a content-detecting algorithm to automatically take down anything that might contain copyrighted material, which they created to avoid a huge lawsuit. It has nothing to do with the law, and RUclips doesn't consider fair use much at all. Fighting against these (illegal) restrictions is more difficult than it's worth.
To add to many correct hypotheses , the 90k deaths probably weren't wrong because within the soviet union there was so much corruption that they didn't report correct numbers when it comes to that. Living myself in "eastern" europe and having older people tell us how it was, i can see that they would've said some ridiculously low number and left it at that (see current events in eastern ukraine and the soldiers) but when someone more competent starts to count and calculate based on the given numbers (in this case ukraine) you do get the high amounts
You mean to tell me the Ukrainians are lying about their war death toll? Say it ain’t so…. They’ll be claiming they’re winning right up until they wave the white flag.
Just because the official soviet numbers might be false doesn't mean that any other random number must be true. We need science to back up any numerical claim, not just feelings of how it must have been back then. I can think of so many different factors leading to increased mortality of all people involved and affected by this distaster. Just look at Valery Legasov, who was portrayed as the protagonist in the show: Yes, he was in the exposed area, and yes he died only two years later... but it was a self-inflicted death. Does that mean radiation killed him? The radiation exposure he suffered MIGHT have caused cancer later in life, but that will only be guesswork. Making up a number saying 90,000 based on feelings is as worthless as the USSR propaganda number.
I've already posted this comment on another video but I'll post it again with some other stuff because it fits here more. One thing I really hate about HBO and this miniseries is how inaccurate it is. It portrays the shift supervisor Anatoly Dyatlov very inaccurately. It shows him in denial even tho he was one of the first people to know that the reactor had exploded, he was never in denial and he knew the dangers and tried to save as many lives as possible. This series shows him as a harsh and angry man and he was never like that, he was very calm that night and he only raised his voice once and it was after the explosion when he demanded workers to leave the 4th block. The series also shows him demanding the operators to raise the power and one of the workers Akimov going against his order, that never happened. Akimov was the one who suggested raising the power and Dyatlov agreed because the reactor power had no effect on the test iself. The series shows him to also threaten the jobs of the workers which also never happened. When Dyatlov arrived at the 4th Reactors Control Room they were preparing for the test and then Dyatlov went to inspect parts of the 4th block which required repairs or maintenance and when he returned to the Control Room the reactor power had dropped as the reactor had been poisoned. Akimov approached and suggested to raise the power to 200 MW and Dyatlov approved as the Reactor Power had no effect on the test itself. Then the deputy head of the Turbine workshop approached and told Dyatlov that the program would have to be aborted if the power was not raised and Dyatlov calmly told him that there was nothing to worry about and that the power was being raised. Dyatlov then went and discussed the program with others and invited more and more people to the control room to observe the test. When they were ready to begin the test Dyatlov joined other in watching the test. He then saw one of the reactor control operators Toptunov pressing the A3-5 or AZ-5 button to end the test at 01:23:39 and 1 second after that the command was registered and a power surge began and multiple bangs were heard at 01:23:48 and then the power went out. Dyatlov had thought that the tanks above had blown and that hot boiling water was about to come down the ceiling and he ordered everyone to the Reserve Control Room but counted the order seconds later when this didn't happen. Everyone was in shock and confused and Dyatlov wasn't aware of the situation at first but later on realised what had happened and tried to save as many people as possible and he wasn't in denial. The HBO Show was mostly based on Medvedev's book which is a very inaccurate book and Medvedev actually hated Dyatlov so the book was mostly against him and the book became so popular and now because of the HBO Show some people hate Dyatlov and his reputation is ruined even tho he was innocent. If the reactor control operators had survived then they would have also been sent to court as in the Soviet Union machine never is the reason, it is always people. Dyatlov had a pretty hard life as he had been born a peasant and later on left his home and eventually when he was an adult one of his sons died. Bryukhanov also had a pretty hard career as he was always under pressure and constructing of the power station was also a nightmare. The power station was built in the middle nowhere next to a river on purpose and delivering equipment and resources by train wasn't that efficient and they had to build workshops but that still wasn't that helpful. Another problem was that the construction workers lacked good skills. He had to build a power station and a town and run both of them and at the same time he was under pressure as new stuff was always demanded but there were lack of materials. Bryukhanov just wanted to make living in Pripyat as enjoyable as possible and he kind of achived that as he managed to increase foods supplies and have mutliple types of foods which was rare in the Soviet Union and also there were Hydrofoils Raketa and Meteor on the river side of Pripyat which were like fast passenger ships which basically glide on the water so Pripyat was kind of like paradise in the Soviet Union. All these innocent men were blamed and framed and their careers and reputation ruined by media and the Soviet Union.
HBO did something similar to Lt. Dike in Band of Brothers, total character assassination, imagine being a family member of his and seeing how they portrayed him...
@@Bulbman123 Both the objection over Dike's portrayal and the objections over Dyatlov's portrayal have been propogated in the media by their immediate family rather than by anyone present in their respective incidents, and are therefore highly suspect.
How do you know all of this exactly? No one knows how these people actually reacted that night… what conversations they had in the control room. Here are no videos or records, only what they reported later. So neither HBO nor you know who did what when
I already posted about it, but I'm going to make it more clear. You're thinking about this all wrong. You're thinking about this coming from how *WE* do things. That's not a bad thing, but when reacting to what people in a foreign country in a different era are doing, you have to think about how THEY did things. This show does a great job of showing the horrors of the Soviet government and how the people had to live under such a system. And those attitudes and behaviors are as much part of the problem with what happened at Chernobyl as the economy and lack of safety measures were to blame. And by ignoring the human side of things you end up, despite being very well trained in the field and quite knowledgeable, being if not wrong then looking rather ignorant.
Even if the term nuclear bomb that he used was not accurate, but the importance was the effect of that sentence to show the gravity of the incident and the danger it has become to a number of people that wasn’t very keen about nuclear, as well as convincing them into action. I’m not hear to criticize you or your knowledge, in fact lots of nuclear physicist and operator who reacted to this show said the same things that you did and still recommended this show. I just want the people to understand the logic behind the words and choices made in this show. Even if radiation isn’t contagious, the people of that era didn’t know better, it also explain very well the fear that everyone has towards it as well as the lack of any real knowledge about it by the civilians as the government wasn’t telling them anything. Even if the thermal explosion wasn’t going to do much, doing nothing to solve it would be to risky with what was at stake if it was to really happen. It also doesn’t change the bravery of the man that volunteered to do it. Update: if you wanna know more about the decision made for the show you can watch the podcast of the show, a more deep dive into the making and the story behind the show.
No, her first child died right around the time of this story. She had a second child later after this event. As for number of deaths, nobody really knows. That's the point. There's no way of really knowing because no official death toll history was conducted. As for the series, it was brilliant. It's not meant to be a documentary. It's a drama. If you want 100% accuracy, you might as well not watching anything other than documentaries.
The higher enriched uranium was a safety thing in its way(and maybe the main one), because of that they could have changed the fuel/control rods geometry and mostly get rid of the the graphite portion of some control rods which increased the reactivity when rods were pulled out(because the very low enriched uranium made it impossible to operate with safe amount of control rods in the reactor, although some operators obiviously though that safe amount was a bit lower than the designers intended).
@@madjack1748how about actually providing something different then. Generally people know that bombs blow up, the mechanic and physics of nuclear reactors is complex and the technical language for the events will be presented so it’s accessible to the average non nuclear reactor viewer. So, it’s laid out in engineering terms and to make the conclusion completely understood is to use a term everyone can picture. Just like at chemical plants and refineries that have explosions, even employees say later “so X y and X happened so it the result was like a bomb going off”.
@@madjack1748 - The term "dirty bomb" didn't really exits yet at that time and the judges in the Soviet courts were not exactly nuclear physicists. Most of them got their jobs just by being loyal to the party, not because of any inherent skill or talent at their jobs. Handholding them with terms they could understand is the only way to get the severity of the situation through their thick skulls
The problem is that people are already quite confused about this. Using the established term "nuclear bomb" to describe what was basically a steam explosion and a hydrogen/oxygen explosion is extremely wrong. I remember when the buildings at Fukushima started exploding due to hydrogen build-up and plenty of people thought it was "nuclear explosions". Dumbing something down for lay people is fine, but not if you dumb it down to a level where you are spreading misinformation.
29:05 As someone involved with the medical field in the DC-Metro area, I can assure you that there isn't such a widespread awareness of ARS. It's cursory teaching and then most people forget. They do know a lot about organophosphates (chemical category of nerve agents; including insecticides) given the farming industry around here. My volunteer rescue squad (part of the county fire and rescue services) carries DuoDote for first responders, and very few people know about ARS. I would say radiation awareness is more localized to areas where the threat of exposure is higher. Where I live, it's only going to be from a nuclear weapon. If that happened, then we'd be dead because one would hit DC and another three miles from where I live; we'd be dead instantly.
Objectively they did a terrible job at making a dirty bomb. Given the materials on hand they could have made something MUCH more potent. The world is very lucky their failures weren’t even more egregious.
That 90,000 Probably also includes all the people from other countries in Europe who suffered from Radiation Poisoning and so on. As the 4,000 only includes the USSR/Ukraine and not the other 15-20+ Countries Effected.
Nobody outside USSR suffered from radiation poisoning. What we had was an increase in radioactivity, especially in certain plants being eaten by livestock like sheep and reindeer. These animals had to be fed a particular diet for a while to reduce the accumulated contaminants in their meat before being slaughtered for food. That increase in radioactivity might have cause a slight increase in risk for certain diseases for those people exposed, but radiation poisoning is something else entirely. The firefighters, power plant technicians and some of the clean-up crews suffered this. While I could agree that 50 seems a bit optimistic, I have never seen any credible source claim 90,000 deaths.
on a side note: the Chernobyl disaster had played a pretty significant role in the collapse of the USSR, so yeah if there were rumors of it's destruction, even before the disaster, it might've accelerated it.
I don't know if it was mentioned here yet but, while watching Chernobyl: Secrets, Lies, and the Untold Stories, at 1:16:55, it is mentioned that "...an estimate from Greenpeace says more than 90,000 fatal cancers. The Who says maybe 4,000."
I would like to know how Greenpeace made that estimate. Considering they are fanatically and ideologically opposed to nuclear power, I would like to see some actual and unbiased science-based measurements and calculations to believe their numbers. If they are the source, then HBO should be embarrassed for including it as it is most likely just an invention to promote their politics.
You misunderstood the information you were given about the fireman's wife and her 2 pregnancies and timing and outcomes of those. She actually wrote a book, I understand which explains more. Dyatlov did a long interview also which can be found on youtube. Wouldn't the 93,000 come from people exposed in Pripyat, people who got cancer later on and many of the 600,000 who took part in the clean up.
To the list of questions around 8:20, all this sounds like reasonable information for a foreman or manager to know before any sort of large technical job. Less critical fields will go ahead with more "no" answers, but knowing which you're dealing with in advance is just due diligence.
at first i thought you were thinking the tips of the control rods were just sloppily made out of a random material. but no after a listening again i get that you knew. but yeah the design is such that from operating to shut down state you replace a moderator with a controlrod, instead of filling either a void or displacing some weak moderator like water or something. so their point is that the difference between the state where the bottom section that is moderating is in the core, and when the control rod akak absorber is in the core is larger, so goign from operational to shutdown gets you a larger change in reactivity, and they are completely right, when the core is operating in steady state the moderator is already all the way into the core and any downward movement will remove some moderator and bring in some absorber, which is really good, so far so good for their design philosophy, and if that was the two states the reactor could be in then its a great design choice, but when you remove the control rods completely and then you suddenly have to put the rods in at shutdown level, then you first have to put the moderator in before the absorber, thats the issue really, as you said. but yeah as long as the rod never goes further out of the reactor than operational or shutdown states then its totally fine, but in practice that is probably just going to create a bunch of necessary situations where the control rods is a problem to be solved rather than a tool to manipulate the reactors state, which is the kind of stuff you have to start saying if you pick a bad design. lol
The way I understand is that the ends of the control rods were too short. If you pull the rod enough that the absorber part is completely out, there is not enough graphite on the end, so water goes into the channel at the bottom. Now when you insert the rod back in, the graphite end displaces the water and reactivity goes up. Kind-of like stepping on the brake in a car, but the car starts accelerating first and only then starts decelerating. The reason why the rods were too short? To save space, RBMK reactor is really big (something like 7 meters) and, I guess, it would have been more expensive to make space for normal length rod when it is fully inserted, so they shortened the graphite end. This effect was noticed before at another power plant (with no damage) and the government made it secret, instead of informing all the operators about it and how to avoid it. The way I understand, the conditions for this effect were not common, pulling the rods out that much was probably only done when the fuel is almost completely used and such situations were probably rare, since the reactor can be refueled while operating at full power.
Thanks for this and other interesting videos. Can you let texts to be on a screen longer? I am too slow reader and I am not native speaker so I had to stop video to read the texts. But keep up good work! 👍
I wanted to add that comment but took the time to look if it wasn't already there. Pretty sure the texts do not stay long enough even for a native speaker to read them completely until they disappear :D
Greetings, I’ve recently found your channel via the “reacting to the Roblox Nuclear Disaster” video, and I just wanted to mention that I’ve found a much more realistic reactor simulator on Roblox, where you actually have to meet grid demands and fix machinery within the power plant. The game’s name is Realistic Boiling Water Reactor, and I do believe it could make for an interesting video subject, maybe not just reacting to a video, but maybe even playing the game, as its purpose is to show accurate nuclear power plant operations. Definitely one of the most realistic reactor simulator I’ve seen on the Internet!
So I'm gonna do something...a bit controversial? And offer a different perspective on the parts in episodes 2 and 3 where they were treating the dying Vasily Ignateanko. It isnt realistic in terms of nuclear radiation, or even necessarily medicine: but I'd argue it is accurate to the cultural history and reaction to Chernobyl. And that is an angle I dont see considered very often in discussions of this show. Accounts from Chernobyl survivors are filled with stories of the wider public treating them as being inherently contaminated and contagious. This is wrong but the average person didn't know that...hell I wonder how much most medical professionals would have known. Given that the previous experiences with a mass casualty nuclear event was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those are very different kinds of radiation exposure to a powerplant meltdown Just an angle I haven't seen people consider. I'd add that in my experience if I was in charge of a ward of people who suddenly arrived in the wake of a nuclear disaster and me, knowing nothing about how to handle it, was faced with somebody begging to see their husband? I'd probably refuse for similar reasons. I wouldnt know if he was still dangerous to be around so I'd act to limit both his contact with outside contagions and the possibility of a spread to others (even if that isnt how it works it is still probably good practice if you don't know what you're dealing with)
I posted this before I got to the part in your video where you mentioned that medical professionals know the effects of radiation 🙃 ope Well none the less I stand by my offering entirely because I dont see people talking about that cultural response element in discussions about this show which I do think is a shame
What do you make of the potential levels of exposure from the Russian invasion where they were digging trenches in and around Pripyat/Chernobyl and using the soil for sandbags?
First off, I would take any anecdote from an ongoing conflict with a pretty big grain of salt. We might not know for decades what really happened there. Secondly, the worst contaminants are the short-lived radioisotopes initally released. Like iodine-131 which is highly radioactive, but has a half-life of only about eight days. None of it will remain today as it will all have decayed. Others, like caesium-137 and strontium-90 have half-lives around 30 years, meaning about half of them are gone by now. That doesn't mean I would like to dig in the dirt in that area, but you would need to make measurements to see how bad it really is. There are still some very dangerous hotspots of radiation, but a lot of the surrounding area is quite safe these days, at least just for walking through. It all depends on the actual location this supposed digging of trenches took place in relation to the location of the reactor building.
As I read the tables for the RBMK-1000 reactors, it seems like the void coefficient actually starts out negative at the beginning of the fuel cycle (-1,25), and then rises as the fuel is burned up, to a value of +5,2. Can you shed some light on _that?_ I imagine it has to do with how there are fewer and fewer neutrons to go around over time, so the distribution of _voids_ becomes more critical at the control levels required to keep the thermal output stable and constant.
Yea there are definitely some scientific inaccuracies that can frustrate the knowledgeable throughout the show… but you got to give it to the actors. The main characters specifically were top notch. The sound effects and smaller pieces of music played during some of the more sad scenes were also impressive and I felt they were perfect for evoking appropriate emotion from to the viewer (at least in my case). By the way thanks for the series! I hadn’t actually watched the show until I started seeing your reactions. It made me watch the show and then come back and watch all of your reactions. I felt like I learned a ton about the history of the incident and the science around it between the show and your assessment of it. Thanks! Awesome content!
Lagosiv (again sp.) Was not at the trial. The reason the test was put off was it was the end of the month and they needed the power from all 4 reactors so they could meet there production quota.
"Those are really bad diesels." The Soviets really took "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to an extreme. They would keep designs in production for decades after they were obsolete because the design still did the job and retooling for a better design would mess with the Five Year Plan production quotas. Plus workers knew how to cut corners on those designs to meet quota if they fell behind. Case in point, the Russian T-90 tank uses an upgrade of the Karkiv V-2 diesel called the V-92 today. There's a reason "made in Russia" or "made in the Soviet Union" was never a thing. There stuff was mostly poorly manufactured and obsolete. I think the reason the 60 seconds was a problem was because there wasn't enough water in the narrow pressure tubes and there wasn't any heavy water to act as a heat sink like in CANDU reactors.
They always get queezy when he says nuclear bomb….. remember he was trying to illustrate the danger in a lay man’s terms to the politicians. They wouldn’t know the difference even after you explained it to them. It is just an illustration of the explosive state the reactor was in. Sometimes we over analyze things too much.
I'm an engineer but anyone can notice this. The beginning of the episode Bryukhanov asked if there's no danger in keeping the power low for that long. The simple answer would've been yes and the simple solution: bring the power back up to nominal levels, from 1800 MWh to 3200 and then we're fine to carry on the test after midnight, then Chernobyl would've never had happened. Or it would've happened at a later time or another reactor.
3:53 I don't know how old you are, but I remember the Cold War. I was a kid in the 1980's and I remember Chernobyl being in the news. The Soviet Union was all about the government and its power, and it's economy suffered from issues related to it being a socialist economy. Because it was such a poor economy they always cut corners. They used the cheapest materials, eliminated expensive safety equipment/measures, and more. One such way they cut corners was they used vacuum tubes in their aviation electronics into the 1970s. We know this because a soviet pilot flew a MIG 25 to Japan to defect. He was flying a brand new version of that plane. Their radar for that aircraft was powerful enough to cook a rabbit dead at 100 meters so pilots were restricted from turning on their radars until there were airborne. Yet for all its power it was still a vacuum tube unit and not using silicon processors, transistors, or other forms of semi-conductors that were in wide usage in the west at the time. The airframe of that MIG was rumored to have been titanium, but was proven to be a nickel-steel alloy and was much weaker than originally thought. It was rated for only a maximum of 4.5 g, which doing so would require inspection to insure the airframe hadn't been damaged. One MIG 25 pulled 11.5 g in an exercise and the airframe was damaged beyond repair. For a jet that was reportedly able to fly at Mach 3, doing so would cause the engines to melt and become destroyed and unusable. That is the type of government, economy, and level of technology we were up against in the Cold War. Now that I've spewed all that out, I'll get back to my original point. It wasn't that they didn't have better diesel engines, it was that they didn't bother with the more expensive models which would give them better performance. Add to that a casual abuse of power, using untrained personnel for jobs they're not meant to do, and a willingness to push on for "the good of the party" beyond what was considered safe, and you end up with what happened that fateful April night.
And here we are at the end. I wrote a bunch of stuff on the previous ones, i fear this will grow out of control. I'm going to try to not repeat myself and try to keep it brief. Further, i'll again say that i am not a nuclear engineer or scientist. I work in IT (Information Security). I'm just someone with a, let's say, personal special interest in the Chernobyl disaster and some degree of professional interest in understanding how to prevent disasters. First, the trial. This was a show trial, but the series films it as if this were one of Stalin's highly choreographed show trials from which they allowed no deviation. In reality, the trial was something of a farce with the accused challenging the prosecutors openly and even criticizing the state and the designers of the reactor. The show only includes Fomin, Dyatlov, and Bryukhanov but the actual trial included a large number of the lower level staff as well. Legasov did not participate in the trial at all, and furthermore unlike in this show he did not challenge the official narrative that it was operator error that resulted in the disaster. (Not at this time, anyway.) To get a sense for the tone of the trial, here's an exchange between the prosecution and one of the witnesses: Prosecutor: "Did the regulations state that if the reactivity margin fell below 15 rods, the reactor should be shut down?" Witness: "I have forgotten the old regulations. There are new ones now, after the accident." Consider that the state was alleging that the disaster was entirely caused by operator error and that the RBMK design was fundamentally sound and had no flaws. This is one of the biggest middle fingers I've ever seen in a courtroom! Anyway that kind of back and forth (though not quite that intense) was typical in this trial. Another important note: the graphite tip reactivity spike only really came out as a part of the trial. The scientists didn't figure it out (or, well, probably at least some of them had but they didn't say anything about it). The operators did spoke about it at the trial, and while their testimony was considered invalid (literally just ignored) they were right. It was hard for people to ignore that forever. Dyatlov, too, expressed real criticisms during the trial and he continued to criticize the design of the reactor afterwards. Most of the blame was pinned on him, specifically, but the USSR but it's hard to say whether he deserved it. It's disappointing that this show simply reproduced so much of the USSR's story about him uncritically, again especially when it claims to be so concerned about the truth. It's hard to say what he was really like, but unlike in the show his subordinates seemed to trust him in reality even if he was kind of a jerk. I have been mostly just saying things without providing sources in these comments, but i want to take a moment and link Datlov's response to the INSAG-7 report here: www.neimagazine.com/features/featurewhy-insag-has-still-got-it-wrong I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the technical claims, but his claims about the operating design and how it was presented to the operators makes a lot of sense to me. To me, they boil down to: 1. Under certain conditions, the controls of the reactor (including the reactor SCRAM) worked differently and sometimes opposite of the way they usually worked. I understand that a nuclear reactor is not a simple piece of equipment and these people are paid to understand how to run it properly but at the same time if i bought a new car, brought it home to my garage, and then when i was pressing the brake the car accelerated at full power into my house i would not be willing to accept that i was at fault. Especially if the owner manual made no mention of this possibility. Which brings me to 2. 2. There were flaws in the RBMK design and they were not made available to the operators. There was no understanding that the reactor was in a dangerous and unstable state at very low levels of because that was not a part of the manuals or information that the operators were allowed to see. This is a fucking insane way to run a nuclear power plant, and again down to the fact that the RBMK design was considered a military secret while the operators (and use for power generation) were civilians. This is partly down to the USSR being a mess, but honestly that's just an excuse. They eventually fixed this stuff. They could do it right. They chose not to because they weren't afraid of the consequences until those consequences became very, very real. I see behavior like this constantly. 3. Regardless of the design, even if these issues were disclosed to the operators, you just shouldn't do this! It should not work that way! Not even if you design it that way on purpose!
(Continuing) Regarding the test: "That's actually a pretty easy scenario to do in real life" -- the concern they had was that the plant would be attacked by an outside force (bombed) and the normal controls, including potentially access to outside water, would become inaccessible. The RBMK was supposed to be fail-safe, but they wanted to test it to be sure that was the case. It, uh, turned out to not quite be that. In their defense, other RBMK reactors had completed this test. Why Chernobyl specifically had so much trouble i do not know. It may have been a specific quirk of this plant. (Legasov comments in his tapes that, upon review, corners had been cut in the construction everywhere. There may have been something done or not done with reactor 4 that made it more difficult or dangerous. Or maybe not. Hell if i know.) "One minute [...] that's not much margin" -- it was believed that the RBMK reactor actually had as much time as you like because of its inherent design. They believed there was no rush, and in a sense that was true. Whether it was 10 seconds or one minute probably wouldn't have made a difference. They believed RBMK reactors were, in fact, a safer design than those used in the west. Safety was one of the reasons this design was chosen over alternatives. That was even true... with one or two small exceptions. (That resulted in the disaster. So, in the end, not small.) In any event, there was no concern because as far as they knew there was no reason for concern. (My guess as to why their generators were so bad was probably that the fuel they were using was really low quality.) Tyler at several points mentions how this stuff would be impossible, against policy, or otherwise really unusual in the modern world of nuclear power. I don't know how much, but some of that safety is down to the lessons learned from Chernobyl. We should be thankful that people took hard looks at their own operations and designs in the aftermath and improved things. In fact, there are still RBMK reactors in operation today--retrofitted to protect from the positive void coefficient, to prevent the power spike on control rod insertion, and so on. They are, in my unscientific opinion, still actually a good design with a number of benefits! I wouldn't want to build more of them, i don't think, but there are tradeoffs with all these different designs. "Probably one of the worst design flaws of all time" -- i want to disagree here. The graphite tips provided increased control over the reactor, particularly given the fact that it was designed to work with very low quality fuel (one of its benefits--you didn't need to enrich the fuel before using it in the RBMK). The problem was that they allowed the rods to be withdrawn to the point where they were past the point the graphite tips were providing positive reactivity. That's the change they made to the other RBMK reactors: they redesigned the control rods so that they would not temporarily increase reactivity when they were inserted again from full withdrawal. They also fixed the flaw that resulted in them taking too long to insert on reactor SCRAM, down to 2 seconds. (I think? Not 12? Might be wrong.) Those two changes--in fact, perhaps either of those by itself--would have prevented the Chernobyl accident. The reactor could have been changed before the accident, but it was not. This also fixed the fact that the reactivity was stronger at the bottom of the reactor and that the control rods came from the top, that flaw exacerbated the power surge from the graphite tips. One critique of the RBMK that doesn't really come up in the show but that the West got really upset about is that a significant amount of plumbing exists inside the core of the reactor. This means there's a lot that can go wrong in there and it cannot be inspected in any reasonable manner. That's a big problem with the fundamental design that I can't imagine a way to fix. I think ultimately they gave up on trying. I've heard the story about the guy who jumped/fell off the bridge and died, hence the bridge being called the "bridge of death". I like the chart about deaths from different energy production methods. I wish we actually believed in numbers in this country so it might have a hope of informing our policy decisions. The "fear" model of assigning deaths to Chernobyl is pretty funny. Regarding Legasov: Legasov was a great man and very influential in getting the RBMK reactors improved in the wake of the disaster. He was far from perfect. Before the accident he was critical of the safety of the RBMK reactor design, but then after the accident he adopted the party line and blamed the operators just like others. At the same time, he DID do a big tell-all in Vienna. Well, not a tell-ALL but he shared a lot more information than the West was expecting and was quite honest about what had happened. It's funny because, unlike in the show, he wasn't even the one who was going to do the presentation. Originally i think it was actually Gorbachev who was supposed to give that presentation! However, Gorbachev (and several others higher up the ranks) backed out because they were afraid of looking bad and getting shouted at. Legasov was willing to go. It's true that the KGB wanted to go after him for what he said but it's thought that they couldn't because of his political allies. Actually i want to talk about the portrayal of the KGB here. It's ridiculous. This idea that they chased him into this tiny apartment and drove him to take his own life or whatever is infantile. The KGB were a terror, absolute terror. We can see how the remnants of the KGB are doing in Russia's current leadership right up to Putin. These are not subtle people, they would just kill you. They didn't care. The show's portrayal is ridiculous both in that there's no way they were as "present" in reality as they are in this story but it's also ridiculous in that it presents them as a foe you can argue with, defeat, bargain with, and be defeated by. Legasov, in reality, lived in what we would consider a luxurious mansion until his death. He had a wife and kids. He had a maid! He was sidelined, but he was not relegated to some dismal apartment. (The maid found the tapes after his death, incidentally--he didn't secret them away like they show in the series.) And then the tapes themselves. The things we hear Legasov committing to the tapes are not present in the tapes we have. Now the show is clever about this: It shows six tapes, whereas the number of tapes we actually have is four. Is it possible there were two more (presumably swiped by the supposedly omniscient KGB)? Sure. I don't think there's any reason to believe that, however. We also, in fairness, have no idea how they were distributed. Once they started circulating among the scientific community, however, there was no stopping it. The KGB is one thing, but good luck stopping scientists from learning things. Some very nice people actually transcribed the tapes and put their transcription up online for free. You can read them! legasovtapetranslation.blogspot.com/ I've gone through the whole records multiple times. I found it a very interesting read, but it's pretty dry. Finally, i'll close with the comment i made a couple times before: They got the little things right and the big things wrong. They did so well with the outfits, the scenery, much of the technical detail, some of the politics, and so on but also did so poorly with other technical details, much of the politics, and so on. There's a reason Russia called the show propaganda. The Chernobyl miniseries is great... but it has some major errors. I feel like i can't recommend people to watch it because i feel like it needs a huge amount of information presented alongside it to counteract the misinformation. Unfortunately, this is the modern docu-drama style. In one of the earlier videos, Tyler asked if this isn't actually WORSE than a show that's all dramatized or all documentary. I don't know for sure, but i would have preferred a more documentary style. You're making a show about the biggest nuclear accident in history, it's already dramatic! This is made even worse by the moralizing the show does about the truth. The show fails to live up to its own moral standards, replicating the same errors it blames for causing the Chernobyl disaster. This feels extremely cynical and self-serving to me. Like they're just saying things, they don't actually believe them. I suppose that's a characteristic of media created under capitalism, however.
Oh and one more thing: Thank you for going over this show! I really appreciate your review. I am not a subscriber but i kind of want to see your response to the whole thing, now.
I always see YT reactors to this who have a scientific background get hung up on that "nuclear bomb" part of Jared's monologue. I've always took what he said to be meaning like a "dirty" bomb...which effectively, it WAS. I never thought he was trying to describe it as a fission bomb. So in an otherwise clear and accurate with the science script...why would they make that ridiculous a mistake??
I'm not sure the term "dirty bomb" existed back then. He was trying to convey a sense of magnitude to a bunch of party loyalists who have no clue how this explosion happened. He was just talking to people in a way they would understand without confusing them.
@@Hoeech Oh I agree with that as far as for the show, but I was specifically referring to the modern-day RUclips reactors who get hung up on that one line of dialogue in script. I've watched a few reactions to this miniseries and more than a couple of usually nuclear engineers or scientists...who feel the need to correct him at that point...and I just wish that they looked at it the way you actually described it just now. :)
3:05 I wonder what would happen to reactors after something like a nuclear war. If the reactor was initially undamaged, but the workers had been killed and there was no one to monitor a reactor, what would happen if it was just left? Does it have failsafe measures built into the design, so it would stop reacting and very slowly cool down? Or would they all just eventually go into meltdown?
While I’m sure an expert could pick apart the technical aspects, I thought the show was invaluable in helping the majority of the world understand the basics. But the purpose of the show was to emphasize the implications of authoritarian governments lying to their people and from that perspective, it was perfect. I thought this was the best series I’ve seen in years.
It's amazing the difference you pointed out to a bomb. The time it takes to reach criticality is more important than I realized. Milliseconds to go critical(bomb) vs. a few seconds to go critical(Chernobyl) makes all the difference in the world, it seems. But to the layperson, a few seconds is very "prompt".
But it is factually wrong. Making things understandable is fine, but not by using terms that mean something completely else. For example, you could say that the Hindenburg disaster was a "hydrogen bomb" because it exploded and contained hydrogen, but the term "hydrogen bomb" specifically refers to thermonuclear weapons using a combination of nuclear fission and fusion. So using that term will only serve to confuse the layman even more. If he needed to relate it to something, then use some kind of pressure cooker or steam engine analogy instead of the highly established (and emotionally charged) term "nuclear bomb".
While the show did Dyatlov somewhat dirty, its important to note that he was one of the designers of the RBMK, he designed the test that was run. he was scheduled for promotion and wanted to have this succeed before that and so pushed to have the test run that night no matter the danger. also having graphite tips on the ends of the control rods wasnt a completely stupid idea for a graphite moderated reactor. essentially it was to increase the difference between control rods being in vs being out thanks to water not being as good thanks to the graphite. RBMK is the very definition of cheapskate with all the corners it cut. also the reality is those "tips" were a stretch almost 2/3s of the reactor in height with a small offset from the beryllium. the issue likely arose when the upper control rods had their tips hit the very active bottom of the reactor before the bottom rods could do anything, causing the power in that section to spike uncontrollably as had happened before... unlike before though, the rest of the reactor was out of control and allowed to explode into life.
THANK YOU! I thought you wouldn't get back to the series, and I knew that you would (kinda) like the finale. VERY interesting take in the end, with the deaths caused by nuclear fearmongering. We live next to Germany, and their decision to cut off nuclear power plants during an energy crisis is beyond my understanding. Our energy prices have sky-rocketed because we are part of the same market (and Germany is no longer self-sufficient). But, good news, Poland is building its first nuclear power plant, and we're expanding ours, yay! I didn't understand your comment about Mrs. Ignatenko; it did say that she lost the baby, but thankfully, she had another one later on, in spite of the doctors' predictions. The thing Watson's character says in the previous episode about the baby "absorbing" the mother's radiation is total BS, but her story is [sort of] right.
I don't think Hormesis theory should be ignored. I think it does a wonderful job of showing how and why people who are subject to significantly more BKG radiation as a contribution from terrestrial sources like Radium are seemingly unharmed. In Ramsar you have people getting anywhere from 20mSv to 260mSV a year, from the very high levels of Radium226 and subsequent decay products. So in terms of measurement used here in the U.S. that's 2 Rem all the way to 26 Rem. The area and it's people have been studied extensively and they have found almost no measurable side effects related to exposure. I think it's almost foolish to believe there isn't threshold for almost all complications related to exposure. The Stochastic approach is just what we resign ourselves to because of liability, insurance cost, and fear of worker health and protection claims.
Appreciate your insights into the scientific side of this, but I gotta say, it's also a big argument as to why it should be STEAM and not STEM. This ain't a documentary - and much like the character of Legasov provides dumbed down explanations for the party members, the show is providing simplified explanations through him so that the audience has a basic grasp of it all. It's also showing a historical story from a different country, so it's providing a look at a completely different system than the audience is used to, from a time that had less knowledge of what they were dealing with (due to the secrecy of the USSR) - a lot of the public knowledge now is BECAUSE this occurred. But it has been decades since it happened, and there's a lot of people who know nothing about it - hence the opportunity to craft a series that presents the story in a way for general audiences to be interested in watching. And I think it succeeded in this, even if there was some poetic license taken to make it work.
This miniseries was a fun fiction of the Chernobyl disaster. It shouldn't be taken as a documentary a lot of people and creators get confused with, especially AI. With that in mind, just sit back and enjoy it. I do get that experts may be uncomfortable with it.
The most funny and sad part at the same time about the number of chernobyl victims is that we would not expect the number to keep increasing almost 40 years later, but when russians invaded ukraine in 2022 they completely ignored the danger around chernobyl and dug themselves in right in the middle of the Red forrest where contamination is still extremely high and will be for centuries, and quite a lot of russian soldiers got severely iradiated and died as a result of hat. Imagine bravely fighting for your country and be ready to sacrifice yourself for "the greater good" (not really in russia but whatever), only to get injured or die completely needlesly because the same country doesnt give 2 sh*ts about you and sends you straight into the middle of one of the most contaminated places on earth.
There's a lot of comments talking about this video downplaying the disaster. Where is the supposed downplaying? Is it him questioning the figures presented at the end?
i think its just a bomb with a nuclear fuse. words. yeah the goal of a nuclear bomb is to go supercritical as fast as possible, you want to have an unstable situation, the time from the fuse going of to reaching the peak of the reaction should be as short as you can get it to be, and if you cant make it short enough you want to try and hold the density together as much as you can. its pretty much the exact opposite goal from a reactor lol :P.
Why are you blatantly ignoring the fact that most of the stuff they say that “isn’t true” is simply the people who know what’s really happening “the nuclear physicists” to be able to lay it out in layman’s terms for the people who don’t know “the Soviet generals judges ETC” when he says thing like reactor number 4 is a nuclear bomb, he doesn’t literally mean it’s a atomic bomb like little boy but simply something that is going to explode and is going to spread its nuclear contaminants. And when the Soviet officials are told that the water explosion would be megatons, it is to scare them into action.
Dyatalov was utterly incompetent at his job, chernobyl was actually the third nuclear meltdown he had caused (the other two involved soviet nuclear submarines). Anywhere else in the world amd he would have been sweeping floors in a dollar store, but because he had connections in the party and was sufficiently loyal they kept him around and even rewarded his ineptitude with promotion and special privileges.
@@jasonrichardson1999 No. There was no supercriticality of fissionable materials that caused any of the explosions. The first explosion was a overpressure explosion from all the remaining coolant water flashing into steam in an instant. The second one was a chemical explosion from the hydrogen mixing with air and igniting. A nuclear fizzle is when a nuclear bomb fails to produce the expected chain-reaction and either gets no nuclear explosion, or a very reduced explosion compared to what it was designed to do. It is a failed nuclear explosion, and there was no nuclear explosion at Chernobyl.
@@jasonrichardson1999 "high attitudes"? What are you actually trying to say? High altitudes? latitudes? When the reactor core was broken open by the blast and the graphite caught fire, a lot of different radioisotopes were carried away from the site as part of the dust and smoke. Any nuclear rector will contain short-lived isotopes like iodine-131, for example, which have a very high radioactivity and short half-life of about 8 days. So just saying that short-lived isotopes were found doesn't really prove anything. All reactors have them, and if you break one apart, those isotopes will be ejected into the environment along with everything else. I've seen a mention of some excess xenon-133 pointing towards an unusual spike of this fission product at or just before the steam explosion tore the roof off the reactor. Is this what you refer to? Ofcourse, xenon also happens to be a very common fission product of uranium. It is constantly being produced in any reactor (Xenon poisoning was a major factor in the accident in the first place). The problem also comes down to definition. Yes, the core did experience a very massive neutron flux once the chain-reaction got out of hand just before it popped the roof off the building, but is this really a "nuclear explosion" as we understand it in the context of nuclear weapons? I personally don't think so. Depending on your definition, you might also call other criticality accidents, like Cecil Kelley's fatal accident at Los Alamos in 1958 a "nuclear fizzle". But I don't think most people would agree with this definition, despite it being a 200 microsecond criticality excursion in plutonium. Even if you can argue that there were supercritical conditions for a moment before the steam explosion turned the core subcritical by dispersing it, I still wouldn't consider that a nuclear fizzle. The main cause of all the damage was the steam, hydrogen and subsequent fire. The fact is that the core was not built of the proper materials nor geometric configuration to ever function as a real nuclear bomb. It was built as a reactor containing hundreds of tons of very slightly enriched uranium arranged into fuel rods. Compare this to the design of even an old-school uranium "gun type" bomb using almost fully enriched uranium and configured to ensure supercriticality once the two fissionable parts are explosively brought together. So, I will stick to my original point. This was not a nuclear bomb. It was a reactor tearing itself apart.
So the physics of the show was accurate right? Its just that the entire way they went about testing the plant was criminally negligent I wanna know if any of the physics in the show was inaccurate. I don't care about historical and procedural inaccuracies as much
Do you think you're perhaps viewing the medical stuff from a modern lens as opposed to (what i interpret it as) the show showing how people reacted at the time, with the knowledge or lack there of they had at that time, in that country. It's possible they did think there was a danger of those men being contaminated and we know better now? Hence it's not the show being wrong, it just paints a picture of what it was like. I have no idea where they got all their info from but I'm assuming they had experts informing them. I also never got the impression this show was anti nuclear power, just pro safety and anti soviet union secrecy and intimidation
Your death from fear makes me think of some studies that were done after 9/11. Where, people were fearful of flying, and so then drove, which is statistically more dangerous than flying. So the idea is 9/11 caused additional deaths from people opting for riskier transportation.
yeah LNT is silly, there is no threshold, or accumilative damage wouldnt make sense, one neutron does add to your risk of cancer even its its so tiny nobody will ever care, but i think it is like this, you have some amount of added change to genes and damage to tissues from some incirment or radiation, and the damage per amount is indeed entirely linear, it sort of has to be lol for obvious reasons. but then you have a background risk of cancer, and an amount of accumilative genetic damage or tissue damage that can lead to health issues, and the function for health risk is not a linear function of how much radiation you take in, the added risk from radiation is linear in a sense, but not in practice because this kind of risk doesnt add staight forwardly if you add a dose to yourself it increase the overall dose you get, the result is some genetic deterioration, added to random flaws, selective mutations inside already abnormal cells and so on, cancer is not as easy as saying it happens after a certain amount of dna damage, but anyway, you develop a measure for the potential of a certain random level of damage to the dna leading to cancer, you translate that into added dose and you should see that with almost no added dose the added risk is almost 0 and in proportion to your existing risk its very very low and so it will matter less until you get to a level where you are starting to double or tripple your dose and at that point it becomes pretty linear because the dose in this situation becomes the main source of genetic and tissue damage that could be related to cancer risk and of the cancer risk itself, so the added risk pretty much has to start of quite flat if not horizontal, and settle into a linear function. the transition form being secondary to being primary risk is the place the graph should curve the most. that is if the risk of cancer per risk of cancer is linear lolxd.
Guy displays all the fundamental errors that caused Chernobyl. Most clearly, the blind over-confidence that it could never happen under today's conditions. in 1986, they said, "RBMK reactors don't explode." Today, the guy says, "modern reactors don't explode."
What makes you think his confidence is "blind"? He is a nuclear scientist who has personally worked with reactors. If he has a high confidence in modern reactors and their safety systems as well as regulations, then I would like to hear your explanation for why they are NOT safe. Now, obviously, if you placed a bunch of explosives inside a reactor, it would explode, but that is kinda cheating. Besides, RBMK reactors didn't usually explode. Only this one. And that was only after the crew did some massive errors AND disabled the automatic safeties which would be illegal in most countries today. Yes, the RBMK had a lot of design flaws. Flaws we are fully aware of today. Such mistakes aren't made anymore and safety is a lot higher. And for the quote "modern reactors don't explode", that is so far quite true. Even in the triple meltdown of the Fukushima plant and with the outer shells of the reactor buildings blowing up from hydrogen build-up, the reactors themselves never exploded. In general, even if you include Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island and the other minor accidents over the years, nuclear energy is one of the absolutely safest forms of energy.
I watched some other RUclipsrs react to this series and it was really frustrating to see all the stuff you pointed out was wrong being taken as historically accurate.
There is one core element that is misunderstood that makes this way more understandable: There were no graphite tips on the rods There were graphite rods inserted when the control rods were retracted.
29:10 probably they had the right advisors for the specific stuff and hadn't one for the others parts. Otherwise it really would be wired to be that accurate for that much, and that inaccurate for still a significant bit
Nuclear engineer with the reading comprehension of a toddler.. The woman lost her child and was told shed never bear another, the drs were wrong about that.. its not hard to grasp
this is something i really dislike about 'insert person who works in the field today reacts to topic', you're looking at this from your very much American bubble, and through a modern lense, you clearly are clueless when it comes to the time period, as well as the general geography of the region, not only that but you're very ignorant of the history of the USSR, as a general 'rule' the soviets were ~10 years behind the rest of the world in terms of technology, so while this disaster happened in 1986, the level of technology and general knowledge was around mid 1970's, it's precisely because of that fact that this disaster turned out the way it did, they lacked some of the most basic stuff that the outside world had easy access to, it's very well shown in this show (primarily because the show is focused entirely on the disaster itself), but the USSR at this time was exceedingly paranoid and ANY breaches of data security were dealt with as harshly as the Stalin gulag days. while you're free to watch and react to whatever you want, I would suggest for future reference to do some research on the subject matter so you don't come off as an ignorant individual.
"Prompt neutrons show up almost instantaneously, we're talking 10^-15 seconds" 2 seconds seems incredibly long when you're talking about that kind of time scale. It's amazing the kind of safety systems you need to maintain to avoid these kinds of issues. Love the focus on safety and the detail in your videos!
Prehaps the 90,000 comes from people displaced due to the accident? Like essentially their lives we ruined or up rooted. But calling them deaths is a huge stretch... The accident certainly effected the world long term in a very negative way due to the shift away from Nuclear energy and back on to fossil fuels. Germany came out pretty badly on this, Britain not much better, though we are getting there. France famously ignored it and has ended up doing very well in the long run in terms of relatively clean power.
Both ways are correct. In british english it is commonly pronounced /ˈtɜː.baɪn/ while US english is /ˈtɝː.bɪn/ And this guy speaking is american. Yes it sounds similar to "turban", but it isn't the same word.
I don’t wanna be one of those people. I appreciate you explaining everything in much more detail but to be 100% perfectly honest, you kind of waffle on a bit I appreciate the detail but try to cut it down a bit
He didn’t mean an actual nuclear bomb. I don’t think HBO thought they were going to be ripped apart by geniuses. I wonder how much you actually know about this man, and this actual event. The power plant you worked at was built after this incident, I truly don’t think any nuclear scientist today can step back and realize what occurred here changed things world wide. The first explosion was massive, but after that the meltdown was much worse, had they not done what they displayed in this show- the explosion would’ve killed almost 8 million people. Now as for the bomb part, this was an RBMK reactor, the testing, in their mindset, had no risks, because they could easily turn the reactor off. There was always a failsafe. When they pulled that slingshot back and the test failed, the radioactivity spiked, they cancelled the test, hit the button to insert all rods. Nobody knew, nobody. That the tips were made of graphite. Graphite took the already spiked reaction, and exponentially increased the strength- causing the explosion. Was it a nuclear explosion. Yes- because it split the core. It was emitting a ton of radiation, and still is today. This disaster taught everyone what NOT to do, and what to do. Everyone needs to be trained for everything, all of the time. You also can’t- can not- use items based on cost. Quality out requires quality in. The Soviet Union had to fix 35 RBMK reactors, all of which had graphite tips on their control rods. 35- that number is mind boggling. I work in auditing- I can’t imagine something like this happening today.
Actually on 19:05 when he says it’s a nuclear bomb their is a type of nuclear bomb known as “dirty bomb” it was never used in war but it involves surrounding expanding hydrogen gas with uranium or plutonium and is meant to make a wasteland similar to Chornobyl Kyle hill made a video about why Fukushima isn’t a nuclear wasteland dirty bomb was meant to induce a wasteland in Chornobyl they basically made a dirty bomb but not a fission bomb no
The "now a nuclear bomb" statement is almost as laughably wrong as the multi-megaton steam explosion bit in an earlier episode, as if a steam explosion from the melted core would be so powerful as to basically vaporize the whole plant and most of it's surroundings.
no they didnt admit they made it up, they said her baby died, and the husband died, and thats true. she had a son after this i think is the implication and the doctors were wrong about her being sterile.
yeah, I don't get how he misunderstood that...
the lie was that the show said the radiation would have killed the mother but the baby absorbed it instead, that part is pure fiction, radiation doesn't work like that
@@Klaevin the lie was that the show said the radiation would have killed the mother but the baby absorbed it instead, that part is pure fiction, radiation doesn't work like that
I suspect the 90,000 comes from things like liquidator deaths due to "Chernobyl syndrome," miscarriages, fatal birth defects, things like that, assuming all of them in the area are due to the accident (like how people assume cancer deaths in the Three Mile Island area are due to the nuclear accident there). I agree about being pickier about sources, but it is definitely worth talking about the potential deaths that weren't due to cancer specifically. Most of the series was based on a book full of anecdotes from survivors. It's tricky, because in writing fiction, one has to keep in mind their message and themes, and this series was created to be anti-climate-change (leaders having their heads in the sand under a looming threat)--and yet, inadvertently, it stoked nuclear fears, which actively works against the outcome Craig Mazin was trying for. Brilliantly written, acted, and directed, certainly, and I'm glad it's gotten so many physicists, medical professionals, and engineers to talk about the event in a way a bunch of actual (usually even less accurate) documentaries have not. I've only looked at it from an historical perspective before, so analyses like yours have really broken open for me the assumptions that were pretty pervasive throughout media before. Thank you.
I found a bit about the high numbers.
Basically it is hard to measure, since most deaths (non natural) are from cancer in europe, so if you just come to a number of 0.01 % of higher deaths due to cancer due to Chernobyl, it wouldn't be statistical significantly measureable, but still in the 10 thousands.
So basically it is plausable with some evidence, that it could be that way, but mostly scientific error, so just uncertainty.
Edit: Also it is still way to early to see the full effects of that
@@emmata98 Based on when I looked at those numbers yes, that is basically what was done. Compare expected rates for anything that could potentially be attributed to radiation exposure to their expected rates. While not the most accurate number, I personally really like to use it in argumentation because the highest estimates of deaths resulting from the biggest nuclear disaster of all time (which is accounting for long term impacts over many years) still pale in comparison to yearly deaths resulting from fossil fuel usage.
The most reputable studies indicate that between 20k and 40k people were "killed by or had their lives significantly reduced by" the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster. The studies that predict higher death tolls than that do not take account of the incredibly poor response of the USSR in dealing with the disaster...for example not distributing stable iodine to the people down wind to prevent damage to their thyroids. It would be more accurate to say that between 20k and 40k were killed/had lives shortened by the radiation, while another as many as 50k had their lives shortened by the negligence of the USSR in their response. At least that is what appears to be the approximate reality.
A lot of those "anecdotes from survivors" (lost tapes?) were found to be fabrications and lies. Maybe HBO should've vetted their sources better before pushing this drivel to market. Such a waste of good actors and a good lesson to be told.
I genuinely don’t think their numbers are low at all. They had an open reactor core 3.5 miles away from Pripyat which they did not evacuate for 3 1/2 days. There were 49,480 people living right there alone. Now I’m not implying at all that they all died. I am just making a point that the exclusion zone is EXTREMELY large, Pripyat is just one city, there were towns of people emptied out, farms, individual houses. Then after everyone left. 750,000 people were drafted to go into the area and execute the animals, dig up the top layer of dirt and bury it 1 foot down, and remove all radioactive materials from the roofs of the buildings. When everything was said and done over 800,000 people were exposed to extreme amounts of radiation for extended lengths of time. This doesn’t mean they die instantly, but cancer rates went up, a lot died in their 50s, that is the reason it is hard to track. It is even harder due to the fact that it was in the Soviet Union. They only took blame for those who died in the explosion, the employees that died, and the immediate first responders that died.
I think of it this way, when talking about a nuclear bomb, an ordinary person in court understands that the only end result was a big explosion. When talking about a nuclear bomb, an ordinary person can more easily understand the seriousness of the matter.
About Ludmylla and her baby, you misunderstood the end epilogue. She did lose her baby like its show in the series, meaning the baby died few hours after birth. Obviously the whole baby absorbed radiation think is nonsense and drama, but in real life the baby died as well. What is written in epilogue is that doctors said she has permanent illnes preventing her from beoming pregnant or safely deliver a kid. And those doctors were wrong since she managed to give birth to a son later, and they live in Kyjev. The show was playing on the fact again that radiation destroyed her life, and then magically she still managed to have a kid and she is happy. This is pure emotional misleading. First there is no way of telling that she became sick due to radiation, and damage from radiation actually lead to her dead baby in some way. I dont think it is correct to take individuals and suggest they had sickness or cancer from chernobyl in general. You cant prove that an individual is getting cancer from chernobyl or would have got cancer anyway. Yes it increases the risk but you cant prove indivudually. Statistically you can prove numbers. You can look surronding areas and see that lets say from 10 million 100k has cancer. Near chernobyl 150k , that can statistically prove an ESTIMATE. BUt you cant say, hey i got this from chernobyl. The other thing the show forgets to mention is that Ludmylla's kid is seriously sick since his birth. I dont remember what sickness he has, but he needs full superviosion and care for him. The show didnt mention it because it would ruin, the effect they wanted to have reading that. When i watched it first i was crying at that line, and then became inmediately happy that she actually had a kid and she is happy with him after the trauma of her husbands painful death. I assume that was the goal to feel like this. But reality ius much more sad for Her. She got thousands of threat latters saying he killed his children with disobeying the nurses, and that se deserves her fate and so on. I found it absolutely disghusting to do such thing. And i am embarassed just as a human, that my fellow humans can sink so low.
I personally never took the the line "They [the doctors] said the radiation would have killed the mother but the baby absorbed it instead" as a fact. It's not even the scientist's opinion but a recounting what someone said to her. I assumed it was based on same real Soviet doctor's opinion from back then. Obviously it's wrong but even real Ludmila has said "We did not know anything about radiation then". Chernobyl was something completely new so it's easy to imagine some uninformed doctor's diagnosis would be as wrong and as confidently stated as Dyatlov's diagnosis about the reactor explosion.
The baby died from natural causes, not radiation related.
Yes, he has finally finished the series. Really liked how you explain the way things ought to be done with a test like this. I learn something new every time when watching your videos.
The red/ blue card way of showing the physics was a really clever aid in explaining it to the non-nuclear nerdy folks. I can actually read Cyrillic, and your translations through Google weren't bad at all. The one red card was missing "positive", but the rest was pretty much bang on.
As to the control rods. If they would have been only boron, there would have been an issue. Water in an RBMK only functions as a neutron poison because the reactor is so heavily over-moderated with graphite. When fully withdrawing the control rods, and water now filling the space where the control rod used to be, you replace one poison (boron) with another (water). This will make the reactor run really inefficient because of the low enrichment, and also make for an uneven fuel burnup. So, by hanging the graphite displacers under the boron part, they would smooth out the neutron flux and theoretically make the control rods a much more powerful control. In all my reading through dusty reports, I came across a little known fact. In order to save on concrete (yes, really!), in 1983, they secretly shortened the graphite displacers by 1.25 meter so they could keep the under-reactor spaces smaller. No testing was ever done to see how this would affect the behaviour of the reactor, nor was it ever discussed with the various scientific institutes. Before this "improvement", the displacers actually reached all the way to the bottom of the core, and there was no initial insertion of positive reactivity. Only after the accident did the scientists find out what they had done. This "improvement" was later reversed for obvious reasons.
They also added an additional fast-acting scram system called БАЗ (Быстродействующая Аварийная Защита = fast-acting emergency protection) which would insert 24 boron-only control rods into the full length of the core in under 2.5 seconds, pulling the reactivity down by at least -2 b-eff.
Valery Legasov's statement about the Chernobyl disaster being "a nuclear bomb" was a metaphorical expression used to convey the severity and magnitude of the situation. It was not meant to be taken literally, but rather as a vivid way to emphasize the catastrophic consequences and the potential for widespread harm resulting from the explosion.
A way to shock them into realizing it's not to be swept under the table, I agree.
Honestly it's arguably worse than a nuke. Those can be cleaned up relatively quickly and the damage is mostly localized to whichever town gets annihilated. They are still to this day dealing with Chernobyl and its side effects, and nobody has a better idea to unfuck the reactor besides building progressively larger concrete shells around it to lock in the Hell it wants to unleash. It will rip any robot you send in to take a look at it apart still within hours. That is a burden no single nuke we have devised can replicate.
The way the makers of the show added the notes at the end to cover some of the things they got wrong, simplified, or made more dramatic is a really good thing...I just wish they had done more of that, or been more honest. For example, related to your note, they say that "it has been reported" that everyone on the "Bridge of Death" died...but those reports are very much NOT true....so technically, they are being truthful, bur not quite. Other things they do not admit to, I can understand...such as the fact that Legasov was not even at the trial of Dyatlov and company...but it is kind of necessary to turn him into a kind of hero figure and have him do much more than he really did so that the story can be simplified enough for most folks to keep track of. I assume by now you have read the History vs Hollywood article, so you know most of the truth...at least I hope that is the case.
"No, no we haven't actually seen it Tom we're just reporting it." -- South Park
We will never truly know if the reports about 'the bridge of death' are true or not, thanks to the soviet unions proclivity for covering things up and lying. No reliable written record plus the unreliability of human memories, especially with trauma means we will never really know for sure
"They are better off reading the analog gauges at this point" < yeeeah, the only problem is that in the case of that reactor, about.. err.. 90% of the entire control room displays were outputs from the computer(s).
I think you underestimate soviets, first, Dose limit per liqidator 25 REM was just a number, often broken. There is no systematic medical oversight over former Liquidators. Thus aftereffects cannot be studiet in population studies and comparisons. Iodine tablets were not distributed(Poland was only exception in soviet controled Europe) and there was spike in Thyroid Cancer cases in central and Eastern Europe as result. Falout hit about thirt of Belarus, and significant portion of population still lives in contaminated areas.
Photos from 1st May parade in Kyev 1896 wer granulated from increased radiation, and all were confiscated by KGB.
From what I understood (may be wrong here) but the show is based off the info they had at the time. Not the info they have now. Like they did actually bury the people in metal coffins and then poured concrete on them. That sound ridiculous now but back then it may have made sense.
Same thing with the possible explosion if tanks weren't drained. We now know that it wouldn't have happened like that, but at the time that were the possibilities they were dealing with, so they of course had to cover that possibility.
Keep in mind that this was soviet russia (im from mid east europe so i know whats up), not that anything changed over there. The chaos and ignorance is always present there and this series got it spot on you can trust me on that one. Its still the same. You are viewing this issue from your point of view but it was exactly like the series is portrating it. And i mean spot on.
In Belarus huge % of the country is contaminated still to this day and millions of people are suffering from Chernobyl. Millions of children's born with health problems died. One of the researchers was Yury Bandazhevsky, former director of the Medical Institute in Gomel, a scientist working on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. He says "we recorded serious pathologies of internal organs - brain, heart, and endocrine system - that could be assessed as a result of direct radiotoxic exposure. But [Belarusian] officials didn't want to connect cause and effect. Meanwhile, in the Vetka district of Belarus, many of the children we observed in 1993-1995 have died. "
I'm from Bulgaria and I was born in Sept 86. I have 3 of my classmates (29 People) died from cancer. Also I have 2 older relatives that died from cancer one of them Husband and life - the man died from cancer in the 90s his life still alive but with cut breasts) And I remember she is very pessimistic because from when I remember her she thinks and beliefs the next day will be her last. In Bulgaria we did not know nothing, may be month after the disaster (we were part of the USSR) And People ate nuclear lettuce while the politics ate selected foods. But what about Belarus ? Reports from Soviet and Western scientists indicate that Belarus received about 60% of the contamination that fell on the former Soviet Union. This is 10m people. Today, more than 2,000 populated areas are located in radioactive contamination zones, with approximately 930,000 people (185,000 of whom are children) living in them.
You don't understand diesel generators very well then. Yes, the diesel generators will start within 1 second but a diesel generator takes 30-60 seconds to turn over, start and rev up enough to reach operating speed and produce enough power to take on a power load. I've worked with emergency backup diesel generators and we always give 60 seconds margin for the diesel to take the load. Anything that can't tolerate a 60 second outage is provided with uninterruptible battery power for at least 5 minutes.
If you've ever driven a manual transmission car, you can inherently understand the issue with running at low power. It's quite difficult to "Bunny-hop" a car by accident at speed, because the car can't produce an acceleration quick enough to move your clutch foot, nor do you have to balance the clutch and accelerator because you will stall otherwise. Oh, and I like the term "Nuclear-powered steam-gas bomb"
There were 2 computer systems in the RBMK. A slow one, that calculated every parameter (SKALA) and a faster one which only had a minimum - but instant- input of parameters (DREG).
You basically had 2 readouts. A fast and crude one and a slow and precise one.
None of those systems acted fast enough to show the transient power surge in the core. It happened too fast.
But since the SKALA and DREG were notorious for crashes and restarts, it was more used as a documentation device, not to base actual decisions off of it. They used the analog readouts to control the reactor. But even this was not really accurate since for example the ionisation chambers to measure neutron flux were not very accurate.
Also, thanks to the guy from the Chornobyl Family channel, the mainframe that processed data at Chornobyl site was preserved and not scrapped. It's probably still there, though I'm not sure if tours still are happening or not
I highly doubt the IAEA numbers. Not saying 100 000 people died but I would say a few thousands are more than possible. Count in all the work during clean up, thousands upon thousands people went there to help and they could die for reasons other than direct radiation exposure. There could be a lot of accidents, diseases etc..
The long delay concerning diesel generators is due to old technology. Like they start in few seconds but as the engine is cold you can stall it when put under load. Thou i am sure the engine and fuel is kept at room temperature true the whole year but even at scorching summer heat it take few seconds to heat up.
Modern heaters, forced induction and direct injection combined with fuel additives negates most of the downsides using diesel concerning start up. You can also start up diesel using compressed air but its more complicated and used mostly at large marine engines. Usually when the engine have ladder you use air or smaller engine to start up.
What i remember about Chernobyl on the news is that fallout from the accident had spread north and west across Europe, affecting crops that year. I don't know if that may have increased the risk of cancer, from eating the crops that year.
Apparently, in the trial, Diatlov would have said those words, « I will say that I am guilty, but I cannot say that I am not… » the closest thing we have of a confession from him.
In reality Dyatlov was more of a hero, a scapegoat they pinned the blame on to protect the true cause… faulty soviet engineering.
Dyatlov, despite being the rather rough results kind of supervisor did have some recorded encounters where employees found him irritable.
But that is unrelated, according to about some foreign sources he is partly, maybe even less then a quarter (0.5/4) responsible. Same goes for Fomin and Bryukhenov.
But yes faulty engineering was the main problem here.@@elric5371
btw, my man you can show longer clips of the hearing, just make sure what you are showing is directly relevant to the point you are making as integral to your content and you cant be taken down for copy write violations, they probably wont try either as long as its completely impossible to watch their series through your series.
RUclips doesn't care about the actual laws regarding copyright. They use a content-detecting algorithm to automatically take down anything that might contain copyrighted material, which they created to avoid a huge lawsuit. It has nothing to do with the law, and RUclips doesn't consider fair use much at all.
Fighting against these (illegal) restrictions is more difficult than it's worth.
To add to many correct hypotheses , the 90k deaths probably weren't wrong because within the soviet union there was so much corruption that they didn't report correct numbers when it comes to that. Living myself in "eastern" europe and having older people tell us how it was, i can see that they would've said some ridiculously low number and left it at that (see current events in eastern ukraine and the soldiers) but when someone more competent starts to count and calculate based on the given numbers (in this case ukraine) you do get the high amounts
You mean to tell me the Ukrainians are lying about their war death toll? Say it ain’t so….
They’ll be claiming they’re winning right up until they wave the white flag.
90k is as good as your hypothesis.
Just because the official soviet numbers might be false doesn't mean that any other random number must be true.
We need science to back up any numerical claim, not just feelings of how it must have been back then.
I can think of so many different factors leading to increased mortality of all people involved and affected by this distaster.
Just look at Valery Legasov, who was portrayed as the protagonist in the show: Yes, he was in the exposed area, and yes he died only two years later... but it was a self-inflicted death.
Does that mean radiation killed him? The radiation exposure he suffered MIGHT have caused cancer later in life, but that will only be guesswork. Making up a number saying 90,000 based on feelings is as worthless as the USSR propaganda number.
I've already posted this comment on another video but I'll post it again with some other stuff because it fits here more. One thing I really hate about HBO and this miniseries is how inaccurate it is. It portrays the shift supervisor Anatoly Dyatlov very inaccurately. It shows him in denial even tho he was one of the first people to know that the reactor had exploded, he was never in denial and he knew the dangers and tried to save as many lives as possible. This series shows him as a harsh and angry man and he was never like that, he was very calm that night and he only raised his voice once and it was after the explosion when he demanded workers to leave the 4th block. The series also shows him demanding the operators to raise the power and one of the workers Akimov going against his order, that never happened. Akimov was the one who suggested raising the power and Dyatlov agreed because the reactor power had no effect on the test iself. The series shows him to also threaten the jobs of the workers which also never happened. When Dyatlov arrived at the 4th Reactors Control Room they were preparing for the test and then Dyatlov went to inspect parts of the 4th block which required repairs or maintenance and when he returned to the Control Room the reactor power had dropped as the reactor had been poisoned. Akimov approached and suggested to raise the power to 200 MW and Dyatlov approved as the Reactor Power had no effect on the test itself. Then the deputy head of the Turbine workshop approached and told Dyatlov that the program would have to be aborted if the power was not raised and Dyatlov calmly told him that there was nothing to worry about and that the power was being raised. Dyatlov then went and discussed the program with others and invited more and more people to the control room to observe the test. When they were ready to begin the test Dyatlov joined other in watching the test. He then saw one of the reactor control operators Toptunov pressing the A3-5 or AZ-5 button to end the test at 01:23:39 and 1 second after that the command was registered and a power surge began and multiple bangs were heard at 01:23:48 and then the power went out. Dyatlov had thought that the tanks above had blown and that hot boiling water was about to come down the ceiling and he ordered everyone to the Reserve Control Room but counted the order seconds later when this didn't happen. Everyone was in shock and confused and Dyatlov wasn't aware of the situation at first but later on realised what had happened and tried to save as many people as possible and he wasn't in denial. The HBO Show was mostly based on Medvedev's book which is a very inaccurate book and Medvedev actually hated Dyatlov so the book was mostly against him and the book became so popular and now because of the HBO Show some people hate Dyatlov and his reputation is ruined even tho he was innocent. If the reactor control operators had survived then they would have also been sent to court as in the Soviet Union machine never is the reason, it is always people. Dyatlov had a pretty hard life as he had been born a peasant and later on left his home and eventually when he was an adult one of his sons died. Bryukhanov also had a pretty hard career as he was always under pressure and constructing of the power station was also a nightmare. The power station was built in the middle nowhere next to a river on purpose and delivering equipment and resources by train wasn't that efficient and they had to build workshops but that still wasn't that helpful. Another problem was that the construction workers lacked good skills. He had to build a power station and a town and run both of them and at the same time he was under pressure as new stuff was always demanded but there were lack of materials. Bryukhanov just wanted to make living in Pripyat as enjoyable as possible and he kind of achived that as he managed to increase foods supplies and have mutliple types of foods which was rare in the Soviet Union and also there were Hydrofoils Raketa and Meteor on the river side of Pripyat which were like fast passenger ships which basically glide on the water so Pripyat was kind of like paradise in the Soviet Union. All these innocent men were blamed and framed and their careers and reputation ruined by media and the Soviet Union.
HBO did something similar to Lt. Dike in Band of Brothers, total character assassination, imagine being a family member of his and seeing how they portrayed him...
@@Bulbman123 Both the objection over Dike's portrayal and the objections over Dyatlov's portrayal have been propogated in the media by their immediate family rather than by anyone present in their respective incidents, and are therefore highly suspect.
How do you know all of this exactly? No one knows how these people actually reacted that night… what conversations they had in the control room. Here are no videos or records, only what they reported later.
So neither HBO nor you know who did what when
I already posted about it, but I'm going to make it more clear. You're thinking about this all wrong. You're thinking about this coming from how *WE* do things. That's not a bad thing, but when reacting to what people in a foreign country in a different era are doing, you have to think about how THEY did things. This show does a great job of showing the horrors of the Soviet government and how the people had to live under such a system. And those attitudes and behaviors are as much part of the problem with what happened at Chernobyl as the economy and lack of safety measures were to blame. And by ignoring the human side of things you end up, despite being very well trained in the field and quite knowledgeable, being if not wrong then looking rather ignorant.
Even if the term nuclear bomb that he used was not accurate, but the importance was the effect of that sentence to show the gravity of the incident and the danger it has become to a number of people that wasn’t very keen about nuclear, as well as convincing them into action.
I’m not hear to criticize you or your knowledge, in fact lots of nuclear physicist and operator who reacted to this show said the same things that you did and still recommended this show. I just want the people to understand the logic behind the words and choices made in this show. Even if radiation isn’t contagious, the people of that era didn’t know better, it also explain very well the fear that everyone has towards it as well as the lack of any real knowledge about it by the civilians as the government wasn’t telling them anything.
Even if the thermal explosion wasn’t going to do much, doing nothing to solve it would be to risky with what was at stake if it was to really happen. It also doesn’t change the bravery of the man that volunteered to do it.
Update: if you wanna know more about the decision made for the show you can watch the podcast of the show, a more deep dive into the making and the story behind the show.
No, her first child died right around the time of this story. She had a second child later after this event. As for number of deaths, nobody really knows. That's the point. There's no way of really knowing because no official death toll history was conducted.
As for the series, it was brilliant. It's not meant to be a documentary. It's a drama. If you want 100% accuracy, you might as well not watching anything other than documentaries.
The higher enriched uranium was a safety thing in its way(and maybe the main one), because of that they could have changed the fuel/control rods geometry and mostly get rid of the the graphite portion of some control rods which increased the reactivity when rods were pulled out(because the very low enriched uranium made it impossible to operate with safe amount of control rods in the reactor, although some operators obiviously though that safe amount was a bit lower than the designers intended).
Ok so no, it isn't a nuclear bomb, but it is a way to describe it to lay people.
it's still a dumb way to describe it.
@@madjack1748how about actually providing something different then. Generally people know that bombs blow up, the mechanic and physics of nuclear reactors is complex and the technical language for the events will be presented so it’s accessible to the average non nuclear reactor viewer. So, it’s laid out in engineering terms and to make the conclusion completely understood is to use a term everyone can picture. Just like at chemical plants and refineries that have explosions, even employees say later “so X y and X happened so it the result was like a bomb going off”.
@@madjack1748 - The term "dirty bomb" didn't really exits yet at that time and the judges in the Soviet courts were not exactly nuclear physicists. Most of them got their jobs just by being loyal to the party, not because of any inherent skill or talent at their jobs. Handholding them with terms they could understand is the only way to get the severity of the situation through their thick skulls
The problem is that people are already quite confused about this. Using the established term "nuclear bomb" to describe what was basically a steam explosion and a hydrogen/oxygen explosion is extremely wrong.
I remember when the buildings at Fukushima started exploding due to hydrogen build-up and plenty of people thought it was "nuclear explosions".
Dumbing something down for lay people is fine, but not if you dumb it down to a level where you are spreading misinformation.
29:05 As someone involved with the medical field in the DC-Metro area, I can assure you that there isn't such a widespread awareness of ARS. It's cursory teaching and then most people forget. They do know a lot about organophosphates (chemical category of nerve agents; including insecticides) given the farming industry around here. My volunteer rescue squad (part of the county fire and rescue services) carries DuoDote for first responders, and very few people know about ARS. I would say radiation awareness is more localized to areas where the threat of exposure is higher.
Where I live, it's only going to be from a nuclear weapon. If that happened, then we'd be dead because one would hit DC and another three miles from where I live; we'd be dead instantly.
ok they didn't create a full-blown nuclear bomb.
but they did create a pretty successful dirty bomb.
Objectively they did a terrible job at making a dirty bomb. Given the materials on hand they could have made something MUCH more potent. The world is very lucky their failures weren’t even more egregious.
That 90,000 Probably also includes all the people from other countries in Europe who suffered from Radiation Poisoning and so on.
As the 4,000 only includes the USSR/Ukraine and not the other 15-20+ Countries Effected.
Nobody outside USSR suffered from radiation poisoning. What we had was an increase in radioactivity, especially in certain plants being eaten by livestock like sheep and reindeer. These animals had to be fed a particular diet for a while to reduce the accumulated contaminants in their meat before being slaughtered for food.
That increase in radioactivity might have cause a slight increase in risk for certain diseases for those people exposed, but radiation poisoning is something else entirely. The firefighters, power plant technicians and some of the clean-up crews suffered this.
While I could agree that 50 seems a bit optimistic, I have never seen any credible source claim 90,000 deaths.
on a side note: the Chernobyl disaster had played a pretty significant role in the collapse of the USSR, so yeah if there were rumors of it's destruction, even before the disaster, it might've accelerated it.
I don't know if it was mentioned here yet but, while watching Chernobyl: Secrets, Lies, and the Untold Stories, at 1:16:55, it is mentioned that "...an estimate from Greenpeace says more than 90,000 fatal cancers. The Who says maybe 4,000."
I would like to know how Greenpeace made that estimate. Considering they are fanatically and ideologically opposed to nuclear power, I would like to see some actual and unbiased science-based measurements and calculations to believe their numbers.
If they are the source, then HBO should be embarrassed for including it as it is most likely just an invention to promote their politics.
You misunderstood the information you were given about the fireman's wife and her 2 pregnancies and timing and outcomes of those. She actually wrote a book, I understand which explains more. Dyatlov did a long interview also which can be found on youtube. Wouldn't the 93,000 come from people exposed in Pripyat, people who got cancer later on and many of the 600,000 who took part in the clean up.
To the list of questions around 8:20, all this sounds like reasonable information for a foreman or manager to know before any sort of large technical job. Less critical fields will go ahead with more "no" answers, but knowing which you're dealing with in advance is just due diligence.
at first i thought you were thinking the tips of the control rods were just sloppily made out of a random material. but no after a listening again i get that you knew. but yeah the design is such that from operating to shut down state you replace a moderator with a controlrod, instead of filling either a void or displacing some weak moderator like water or something. so their point is that the difference between the state where the bottom section that is moderating is in the core, and when the control rod akak absorber is in the core is larger, so goign from operational to shutdown gets you a larger change in reactivity, and they are completely right, when the core is operating in steady state the moderator is already all the way into the core and any downward movement will remove some moderator and bring in some absorber, which is really good, so far so good for their design philosophy, and if that was the two states the reactor could be in then its a great design choice, but when you remove the control rods completely and then you suddenly have to put the rods in at shutdown level, then you first have to put the moderator in before the absorber, thats the issue really, as you said. but yeah as long as the rod never goes further out of the reactor than operational or shutdown states then its totally fine, but in practice that is probably just going to create a bunch of necessary situations where the control rods is a problem to be solved rather than a tool to manipulate the reactors state, which is the kind of stuff you have to start saying if you pick a bad design. lol
The way I understand is that the ends of the control rods were too short. If you pull the rod enough that the absorber part is completely out, there is not enough graphite on the end, so water goes into the channel at the bottom. Now when you insert the rod back in, the graphite end displaces the water and reactivity goes up. Kind-of like stepping on the brake in a car, but the car starts accelerating first and only then starts decelerating. The reason why the rods were too short? To save space, RBMK reactor is really big (something like 7 meters) and, I guess, it would have been more expensive to make space for normal length rod when it is fully inserted, so they shortened the graphite end.
This effect was noticed before at another power plant (with no damage) and the government made it secret, instead of informing all the operators about it and how to avoid it.
The way I understand, the conditions for this effect were not common, pulling the rods out that much was probably only done when the fuel is almost completely used and such situations were probably rare, since the reactor can be refueled while operating at full power.
Thanks for this and other interesting videos. Can you let texts to be on a screen longer? I am too slow reader and I am not native speaker so I had to stop video to read the texts. But keep up good work! 👍
I wanted to add that comment but took the time to look if it wasn't already there. Pretty sure the texts do not stay long enough even for a native speaker to read them completely until they disappear :D
Greetings, I’ve recently found your channel via the “reacting to the Roblox Nuclear Disaster” video, and I just wanted to mention that I’ve found a much more realistic reactor simulator on Roblox, where you actually have to meet grid demands and fix machinery within the power plant.
The game’s name is Realistic Boiling Water Reactor, and I do believe it could make for an interesting video subject, maybe not just reacting to a video, but maybe even playing the game, as its purpose is to show accurate nuclear power plant operations.
Definitely one of the most realistic reactor simulator I’ve seen on the Internet!
So I'm gonna do something...a bit controversial? And offer a different perspective on the parts in episodes 2 and 3 where they were treating the dying Vasily Ignateanko.
It isnt realistic in terms of nuclear radiation, or even necessarily medicine: but I'd argue it is accurate to the cultural history and reaction to Chernobyl. And that is an angle I dont see considered very often in discussions of this show. Accounts from Chernobyl survivors are filled with stories of the wider public treating them as being inherently contaminated and contagious. This is wrong but the average person didn't know that...hell I wonder how much most medical professionals would have known. Given that the previous experiences with a mass casualty nuclear event was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those are very different kinds of radiation exposure to a powerplant meltdown
Just an angle I haven't seen people consider. I'd add that in my experience if I was in charge of a ward of people who suddenly arrived in the wake of a nuclear disaster and me, knowing nothing about how to handle it, was faced with somebody begging to see their husband? I'd probably refuse for similar reasons. I wouldnt know if he was still dangerous to be around so I'd act to limit both his contact with outside contagions and the possibility of a spread to others (even if that isnt how it works it is still probably good practice if you don't know what you're dealing with)
I posted this before I got to the part in your video where you mentioned that medical professionals know the effects of radiation 🙃 ope
Well none the less I stand by my offering entirely because I dont see people talking about that cultural response element in discussions about this show which I do think is a shame
They were radioactive to a degree but not the extent that it creates a danger to others.
@@elric5371 I'm aware
What do you make of the potential levels of exposure from the Russian invasion where they were digging trenches in and around Pripyat/Chernobyl and using the soil for sandbags?
That’s fake lol it was made up,they never did that,they actually was chilling a little in Chernobyl and then they retreated
@@valdito_2123they did dig in the dirt though
@@jasonrichardson1999that was zaporizhia not techernobyl. ut yeah
First off, I would take any anecdote from an ongoing conflict with a pretty big grain of salt. We might not know for decades what really happened there.
Secondly, the worst contaminants are the short-lived radioisotopes initally released. Like iodine-131 which is highly radioactive, but has a half-life of only about eight days. None of it will remain today as it will all have decayed.
Others, like caesium-137 and strontium-90 have half-lives around 30 years, meaning about half of them are gone by now.
That doesn't mean I would like to dig in the dirt in that area, but you would need to make measurements to see how bad it really is. There are still some very dangerous hotspots of radiation, but a lot of the surrounding area is quite safe these days, at least just for walking through. It all depends on the actual location this supposed digging of trenches took place in relation to the location of the reactor building.
No, her baby did really die. As others have stated, she was believed to not able to have more children, but she did have a son.
As I read the tables for the RBMK-1000 reactors, it seems like the void coefficient actually starts out negative at the beginning of the fuel cycle (-1,25), and then rises as the fuel is burned up, to a value of +5,2. Can you shed some light on _that?_ I imagine it has to do with how there are fewer and fewer neutrons to go around over time, so the distribution of _voids_ becomes more critical at the control levels required to keep the thermal output stable and constant.
Yea there are definitely some scientific inaccuracies that can frustrate the knowledgeable throughout the show… but you got to give it to the actors. The main characters specifically were top notch.
The sound effects and smaller pieces of music played during some of the more sad scenes were also impressive and I felt they were perfect for evoking appropriate emotion from to the viewer (at least in my case).
By the way thanks for the series! I hadn’t actually watched the show until I started seeing your reactions. It made me watch the show and then come back and watch all of your reactions. I felt like I learned a ton about the history of the incident and the science around it between the show and your assessment of it. Thanks! Awesome content!
Lagosiv (again sp.) Was not at the trial. The reason the test was put off was it was the end of the month and they needed the power from all 4 reactors so they could meet there production quota.
"Those are really bad diesels."
The Soviets really took "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to an extreme. They would keep designs in production for decades after they were obsolete because the design still did the job and retooling for a better design would mess with the Five Year Plan production quotas. Plus workers knew how to cut corners on those designs to meet quota if they fell behind. Case in point, the Russian T-90 tank uses an upgrade of the Karkiv V-2 diesel called the V-92 today. There's a reason "made in Russia" or "made in the Soviet Union" was never a thing. There stuff was mostly poorly manufactured and obsolete.
I think the reason the 60 seconds was a problem was because there wasn't enough water in the narrow pressure tubes and there wasn't any heavy water to act as a heat sink like in CANDU reactors.
They always get queezy when he says nuclear bomb….. remember he was trying to illustrate the danger in a lay man’s terms to the politicians. They wouldn’t know the difference even after you explained it to them. It is just an illustration of the explosive state the reactor was in. Sometimes we over analyze things too much.
I'm an engineer but anyone can notice this. The beginning of the episode Bryukhanov asked if there's no danger in keeping the power low for that long. The simple answer would've been yes and the simple solution: bring the power back up to nominal levels, from 1800 MWh to 3200 and then we're fine to carry on the test after midnight, then Chernobyl would've never had happened. Or it would've happened at a later time or another reactor.
3:53 I don't know how old you are, but I remember the Cold War. I was a kid in the 1980's and I remember Chernobyl being in the news. The Soviet Union was all about the government and its power, and it's economy suffered from issues related to it being a socialist economy. Because it was such a poor economy they always cut corners. They used the cheapest materials, eliminated expensive safety equipment/measures, and more. One such way they cut corners was they used vacuum tubes in their aviation electronics into the 1970s. We know this because a soviet pilot flew a MIG 25 to Japan to defect. He was flying a brand new version of that plane. Their radar for that aircraft was powerful enough to cook a rabbit dead at 100 meters so pilots were restricted from turning on their radars until there were airborne. Yet for all its power it was still a vacuum tube unit and not using silicon processors, transistors, or other forms of semi-conductors that were in wide usage in the west at the time. The airframe of that MIG was rumored to have been titanium, but was proven to be a nickel-steel alloy and was much weaker than originally thought. It was rated for only a maximum of 4.5 g, which doing so would require inspection to insure the airframe hadn't been damaged. One MIG 25 pulled 11.5 g in an exercise and the airframe was damaged beyond repair. For a jet that was reportedly able to fly at Mach 3, doing so would cause the engines to melt and become destroyed and unusable. That is the type of government, economy, and level of technology we were up against in the Cold War.
Now that I've spewed all that out, I'll get back to my original point. It wasn't that they didn't have better diesel engines, it was that they didn't bother with the more expensive models which would give them better performance. Add to that a casual abuse of power, using untrained personnel for jobs they're not meant to do, and a willingness to push on for "the good of the party" beyond what was considered safe, and you end up with what happened that fateful April night.
And here we are at the end. I wrote a bunch of stuff on the previous ones, i fear this will grow out of control. I'm going to try to not repeat myself and try to keep it brief. Further, i'll again say that i am not a nuclear engineer or scientist. I work in IT (Information Security). I'm just someone with a, let's say, personal special interest in the Chernobyl disaster and some degree of professional interest in understanding how to prevent disasters.
First, the trial. This was a show trial, but the series films it as if this were one of Stalin's highly choreographed show trials from which they allowed no deviation. In reality, the trial was something of a farce with the accused challenging the prosecutors openly and even criticizing the state and the designers of the reactor. The show only includes Fomin, Dyatlov, and Bryukhanov but the actual trial included a large number of the lower level staff as well. Legasov did not participate in the trial at all, and furthermore unlike in this show he did not challenge the official narrative that it was operator error that resulted in the disaster. (Not at this time, anyway.)
To get a sense for the tone of the trial, here's an exchange between the prosecution and one of the witnesses:
Prosecutor: "Did the regulations state that if the reactivity margin fell below 15 rods, the reactor should be shut down?"
Witness: "I have forgotten the old regulations. There are new ones now, after the accident."
Consider that the state was alleging that the disaster was entirely caused by operator error and that the RBMK design was fundamentally sound and had no flaws. This is one of the biggest middle fingers I've ever seen in a courtroom! Anyway that kind of back and forth (though not quite that intense) was typical in this trial.
Another important note: the graphite tip reactivity spike only really came out as a part of the trial. The scientists didn't figure it out (or, well, probably at least some of them had but they didn't say anything about it). The operators did spoke about it at the trial, and while their testimony was considered invalid (literally just ignored) they were right. It was hard for people to ignore that forever.
Dyatlov, too, expressed real criticisms during the trial and he continued to criticize the design of the reactor afterwards. Most of the blame was pinned on him, specifically, but the USSR but it's hard to say whether he deserved it. It's disappointing that this show simply reproduced so much of the USSR's story about him uncritically, again especially when it claims to be so concerned about the truth. It's hard to say what he was really like, but unlike in the show his subordinates seemed to trust him in reality even if he was kind of a jerk.
I have been mostly just saying things without providing sources in these comments, but i want to take a moment and link Datlov's response to the INSAG-7 report here:
www.neimagazine.com/features/featurewhy-insag-has-still-got-it-wrong
I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the technical claims, but his claims about the operating design and how it was presented to the operators makes a lot of sense to me. To me, they boil down to:
1. Under certain conditions, the controls of the reactor (including the reactor SCRAM) worked differently and sometimes opposite of the way they usually worked. I understand that a nuclear reactor is not a simple piece of equipment and these people are paid to understand how to run it properly but at the same time if i bought a new car, brought it home to my garage, and then when i was pressing the brake the car accelerated at full power into my house i would not be willing to accept that i was at fault. Especially if the owner manual made no mention of this possibility. Which brings me to 2.
2. There were flaws in the RBMK design and they were not made available to the operators. There was no understanding that the reactor was in a dangerous and unstable state at very low levels of because that was not a part of the manuals or information that the operators were allowed to see. This is a fucking insane way to run a nuclear power plant, and again down to the fact that the RBMK design was considered a military secret while the operators (and use for power generation) were civilians. This is partly down to the USSR being a mess, but honestly that's just an excuse. They eventually fixed this stuff. They could do it right. They chose not to because they weren't afraid of the consequences until those consequences became very, very real. I see behavior like this constantly.
3. Regardless of the design, even if these issues were disclosed to the operators, you just shouldn't do this! It should not work that way! Not even if you design it that way on purpose!
(Continuing)
Regarding the test:
"That's actually a pretty easy scenario to do in real life" -- the concern they had was that the plant would be attacked by an outside force (bombed) and the normal controls, including potentially access to outside water, would become inaccessible. The RBMK was supposed to be fail-safe, but they wanted to test it to be sure that was the case. It, uh, turned out to not quite be that. In their defense, other RBMK reactors had completed this test. Why Chernobyl specifically had so much trouble i do not know. It may have been a specific quirk of this plant. (Legasov comments in his tapes that, upon review, corners had been cut in the construction everywhere. There may have been something done or not done with reactor 4 that made it more difficult or dangerous. Or maybe not. Hell if i know.)
"One minute [...] that's not much margin" -- it was believed that the RBMK reactor actually had as much time as you like because of its inherent design. They believed there was no rush, and in a sense that was true. Whether it was 10 seconds or one minute probably wouldn't have made a difference. They believed RBMK reactors were, in fact, a safer design than those used in the west. Safety was one of the reasons this design was chosen over alternatives. That was even true... with one or two small exceptions. (That resulted in the disaster. So, in the end, not small.) In any event, there was no concern because as far as they knew there was no reason for concern.
(My guess as to why their generators were so bad was probably that the fuel they were using was really low quality.)
Tyler at several points mentions how this stuff would be impossible, against policy, or otherwise really unusual in the modern world of nuclear power. I don't know how much, but some of that safety is down to the lessons learned from Chernobyl. We should be thankful that people took hard looks at their own operations and designs in the aftermath and improved things. In fact, there are still RBMK reactors in operation today--retrofitted to protect from the positive void coefficient, to prevent the power spike on control rod insertion, and so on. They are, in my unscientific opinion, still actually a good design with a number of benefits! I wouldn't want to build more of them, i don't think, but there are tradeoffs with all these different designs.
"Probably one of the worst design flaws of all time" -- i want to disagree here. The graphite tips provided increased control over the reactor, particularly given the fact that it was designed to work with very low quality fuel (one of its benefits--you didn't need to enrich the fuel before using it in the RBMK). The problem was that they allowed the rods to be withdrawn to the point where they were past the point the graphite tips were providing positive reactivity. That's the change they made to the other RBMK reactors: they redesigned the control rods so that they would not temporarily increase reactivity when they were inserted again from full withdrawal. They also fixed the flaw that resulted in them taking too long to insert on reactor SCRAM, down to 2 seconds. (I think? Not 12? Might be wrong.) Those two changes--in fact, perhaps either of those by itself--would have prevented the Chernobyl accident. The reactor could have been changed before the accident, but it was not.
This also fixed the fact that the reactivity was stronger at the bottom of the reactor and that the control rods came from the top, that flaw exacerbated the power surge from the graphite tips.
One critique of the RBMK that doesn't really come up in the show but that the West got really upset about is that a significant amount of plumbing exists inside the core of the reactor. This means there's a lot that can go wrong in there and it cannot be inspected in any reasonable manner. That's a big problem with the fundamental design that I can't imagine a way to fix. I think ultimately they gave up on trying.
I've heard the story about the guy who jumped/fell off the bridge and died, hence the bridge being called the "bridge of death".
I like the chart about deaths from different energy production methods. I wish we actually believed in numbers in this country so it might have a hope of informing our policy decisions. The "fear" model of assigning deaths to Chernobyl is pretty funny.
Regarding Legasov: Legasov was a great man and very influential in getting the RBMK reactors improved in the wake of the disaster. He was far from perfect. Before the accident he was critical of the safety of the RBMK reactor design, but then after the accident he adopted the party line and blamed the operators just like others. At the same time, he DID do a big tell-all in Vienna. Well, not a tell-ALL but he shared a lot more information than the West was expecting and was quite honest about what had happened. It's funny because, unlike in the show, he wasn't even the one who was going to do the presentation. Originally i think it was actually Gorbachev who was supposed to give that presentation! However, Gorbachev (and several others higher up the ranks) backed out because they were afraid of looking bad and getting shouted at. Legasov was willing to go. It's true that the KGB wanted to go after him for what he said but it's thought that they couldn't because of his political allies.
Actually i want to talk about the portrayal of the KGB here. It's ridiculous. This idea that they chased him into this tiny apartment and drove him to take his own life or whatever is infantile. The KGB were a terror, absolute terror. We can see how the remnants of the KGB are doing in Russia's current leadership right up to Putin. These are not subtle people, they would just kill you. They didn't care. The show's portrayal is ridiculous both in that there's no way they were as "present" in reality as they are in this story but it's also ridiculous in that it presents them as a foe you can argue with, defeat, bargain with, and be defeated by.
Legasov, in reality, lived in what we would consider a luxurious mansion until his death. He had a wife and kids. He had a maid! He was sidelined, but he was not relegated to some dismal apartment. (The maid found the tapes after his death, incidentally--he didn't secret them away like they show in the series.)
And then the tapes themselves. The things we hear Legasov committing to the tapes are not present in the tapes we have. Now the show is clever about this: It shows six tapes, whereas the number of tapes we actually have is four. Is it possible there were two more (presumably swiped by the supposedly omniscient KGB)? Sure. I don't think there's any reason to believe that, however. We also, in fairness, have no idea how they were distributed. Once they started circulating among the scientific community, however, there was no stopping it. The KGB is one thing, but good luck stopping scientists from learning things.
Some very nice people actually transcribed the tapes and put their transcription up online for free. You can read them!
legasovtapetranslation.blogspot.com/
I've gone through the whole records multiple times. I found it a very interesting read, but it's pretty dry.
Finally, i'll close with the comment i made a couple times before: They got the little things right and the big things wrong. They did so well with the outfits, the scenery, much of the technical detail, some of the politics, and so on but also did so poorly with other technical details, much of the politics, and so on. There's a reason Russia called the show propaganda. The Chernobyl miniseries is great... but it has some major errors. I feel like i can't recommend people to watch it because i feel like it needs a huge amount of information presented alongside it to counteract the misinformation. Unfortunately, this is the modern docu-drama style. In one of the earlier videos, Tyler asked if this isn't actually WORSE than a show that's all dramatized or all documentary. I don't know for sure, but i would have preferred a more documentary style. You're making a show about the biggest nuclear accident in history, it's already dramatic!
This is made even worse by the moralizing the show does about the truth. The show fails to live up to its own moral standards, replicating the same errors it blames for causing the Chernobyl disaster. This feels extremely cynical and self-serving to me. Like they're just saying things, they don't actually believe them. I suppose that's a characteristic of media created under capitalism, however.
Oh and one more thing: Thank you for going over this show! I really appreciate your review. I am not a subscriber but i kind of want to see your response to the whole thing, now.
I always see YT reactors to this who have a scientific background get hung up on that "nuclear bomb" part of Jared's monologue. I've always took what he said to be meaning like a "dirty" bomb...which effectively, it WAS. I never thought he was trying to describe it as a fission bomb. So in an otherwise clear and accurate with the science script...why would they make that ridiculous a mistake??
I'm not sure the term "dirty bomb" existed back then. He was trying to convey a sense of magnitude to a bunch of party loyalists who have no clue how this explosion happened. He was just talking to people in a way they would understand without confusing them.
@@Hoeech Oh I agree with that as far as for the show, but I was specifically referring to the modern-day RUclips reactors who get hung up on that one line of dialogue in script. I've watched a few reactions to this miniseries and more than a couple of usually nuclear engineers or scientists...who feel the need to correct him at that point...and I just wish that they looked at it the way you actually described it just now. :)
3:05 I wonder what would happen to reactors after something like a nuclear war. If the reactor was initially undamaged, but the workers had been killed and there was no one to monitor a reactor, what would happen if it was just left? Does it have failsafe measures built into the design, so it would stop reacting and very slowly cool down? Or would they all just eventually go into meltdown?
Interesting thought!
While I’m sure an expert could pick apart the technical aspects, I thought the show was invaluable in helping the majority of the world understand the basics. But the purpose of the show was to emphasize the implications of authoritarian governments lying to their people and from that perspective, it was perfect. I thought this was the best series I’ve seen in years.
It's amazing the difference you pointed out to a bomb. The time it takes to reach criticality is more important than I realized. Milliseconds to go critical(bomb) vs. a few seconds to go critical(Chernobyl) makes all the difference in the world, it seems. But to the layperson, a few seconds is very "prompt".
calling it a “nuclear bomb” is probably an expression of severity for layman to understand rather than a literal nuclear bomb.
But it is factually wrong. Making things understandable is fine, but not by using terms that mean something completely else.
For example, you could say that the Hindenburg disaster was a "hydrogen bomb" because it exploded and contained hydrogen, but the term "hydrogen bomb" specifically refers to thermonuclear weapons using a combination of nuclear fission and fusion. So using that term will only serve to confuse the layman even more.
If he needed to relate it to something, then use some kind of pressure cooker or steam engine analogy instead of the highly established (and emotionally charged) term "nuclear bomb".
23:00 I mean, any hypothetical idiot motorcycle incident would absolutely have happened before 1986.
What could go wrong with this test?
The reactor could explode.
OK, proceed.
While the show did Dyatlov somewhat dirty, its important to note that he was one of the designers of the RBMK, he designed the test that was run. he was scheduled for promotion and wanted to have this succeed before that and so pushed to have the test run that night no matter the danger.
also having graphite tips on the ends of the control rods wasnt a completely stupid idea for a graphite moderated reactor. essentially it was to increase the difference between control rods being in vs being out thanks to water not being as good thanks to the graphite. RBMK is the very definition of cheapskate with all the corners it cut. also the reality is those "tips" were a stretch almost 2/3s of the reactor in height with a small offset from the beryllium. the issue likely arose when the upper control rods had their tips hit the very active bottom of the reactor before the bottom rods could do anything, causing the power in that section to spike uncontrollably as had happened before... unlike before though, the rest of the reactor was out of control and allowed to explode into life.
There are podcasts at the end of each episode detailing what's drama and what's fact.
19:31 in this context I think he’s more referring to a “dirty” nuclear bomb.
I came here to say the exact same thing, but checked to see how many others beat me to it first
THANK YOU! I thought you wouldn't get back to the series, and I knew that you would (kinda) like the finale.
VERY interesting take in the end, with the deaths caused by nuclear fearmongering. We live next to Germany, and their decision to cut off nuclear power plants during an energy crisis is beyond my understanding. Our energy prices have sky-rocketed because we are part of the same market (and Germany is no longer self-sufficient). But, good news, Poland is building its first nuclear power plant, and we're expanding ours, yay!
I didn't understand your comment about Mrs. Ignatenko; it did say that she lost the baby, but thankfully, she had another one later on, in spite of the doctors' predictions. The thing Watson's character says in the previous episode about the baby "absorbing" the mother's radiation is total BS, but her story is [sort of] right.
I don't think Hormesis theory should be ignored. I think it does a wonderful job of showing how and why people who are subject to significantly more BKG radiation as a contribution from terrestrial sources like Radium are seemingly unharmed. In Ramsar you have people getting anywhere from 20mSv to 260mSV a year, from the very high levels of Radium226 and subsequent decay products. So in terms of measurement used here in the U.S. that's 2 Rem all the way to 26 Rem. The area and it's people have been studied extensively and they have found almost no measurable side effects related to exposure. I think it's almost foolish to believe there isn't threshold for almost all complications related to exposure. The Stochastic approach is just what we resign ourselves to because of liability, insurance cost, and fear of worker health and protection claims.
Appreciate your insights into the scientific side of this, but I gotta say, it's also a big argument as to why it should be STEAM and not STEM. This ain't a documentary - and much like the character of Legasov provides dumbed down explanations for the party members, the show is providing simplified explanations through him so that the audience has a basic grasp of it all. It's also showing a historical story from a different country, so it's providing a look at a completely different system than the audience is used to, from a time that had less knowledge of what they were dealing with (due to the secrecy of the USSR) - a lot of the public knowledge now is BECAUSE this occurred. But it has been decades since it happened, and there's a lot of people who know nothing about it - hence the opportunity to craft a series that presents the story in a way for general audiences to be interested in watching. And I think it succeeded in this, even if there was some poetic license taken to make it work.
Germany burning lignite (I'm not sure how it is called, in Dutch it's bruinkool) and coal instead of using the already built nuclear powerplants
This miniseries was a fun fiction of the Chernobyl disaster. It shouldn't be taken as a documentary a lot of people and creators get confused with, especially AI. With that in mind, just sit back and enjoy it. I do get that experts may be uncomfortable with it.
The most funny and sad part at the same time about the number of chernobyl victims is that we would not expect the number to keep increasing almost 40 years later, but when russians invaded ukraine in 2022 they completely ignored the danger around chernobyl and dug themselves in right in the middle of the Red forrest where contamination is still extremely high and will be for centuries, and quite a lot of russian soldiers got severely iradiated and died as a result of hat.
Imagine bravely fighting for your country and be ready to sacrifice yourself for "the greater good" (not really in russia but whatever), only to get injured or die completely needlesly because the same country doesnt give 2 sh*ts about you and sends you straight into the middle of one of the most contaminated places on earth.
There's a lot of comments talking about this video downplaying the disaster. Where is the supposed downplaying? Is it him questioning the figures presented at the end?
yes
i think its just a bomb with a nuclear fuse. words. yeah the goal of a nuclear bomb is to go supercritical as fast as possible, you want to have an unstable situation, the time from the fuse going of to reaching the peak of the reaction should be as short as you can get it to be, and if you cant make it short enough you want to try and hold the density together as much as you can. its pretty much the exact opposite goal from a reactor lol :P.
Love your commentary throughout the series. Great work!
Why are you blatantly ignoring the fact that most of the stuff they say that “isn’t true” is simply the people who know what’s really happening “the nuclear physicists” to be able to lay it out in layman’s terms for the people who don’t know “the Soviet generals judges ETC” when he says thing like reactor number 4 is a nuclear bomb, he doesn’t literally mean it’s a atomic bomb like little boy but simply something that is going to explode and is going to spread its nuclear contaminants. And when the Soviet officials are told that the water explosion would be megatons, it is to scare them into action.
Dyatalov was utterly incompetent at his job, chernobyl was actually the third nuclear meltdown he had caused (the other two involved soviet nuclear submarines).
Anywhere else in the world amd he would have been sweeping floors in a dollar store, but because he had connections in the party and was sufficiently loyal they kept him around and even rewarded his ineptitude with promotion and special privileges.
Petition for a reaction to HBM'S Nuclear Tech Mod
96000 is from a greenpeace study if I rember correctly
21:10 So you're saying it was a hydrogen bomb? /s
Nuclear fizzle for the first explosion yes
@@jasonrichardson1999 No. There was no supercriticality of fissionable materials that caused any of the explosions. The first explosion was a overpressure explosion from all the remaining coolant water flashing into steam in an instant. The second one was a chemical explosion from the hydrogen mixing with air and igniting.
A nuclear fizzle is when a nuclear bomb fails to produce the expected chain-reaction and either gets no nuclear explosion, or a very reduced explosion compared to what it was designed to do. It is a failed nuclear explosion, and there was no nuclear explosion at Chernobyl.
@@Antares2lars-Erik de Greer, Yuri V dubasov and a expert at Harvard University,Richard Wilson disagree with you about the nuclear fizzle blast so
Short-lived isotopes were found at high attitudes also,so?
@@jasonrichardson1999 "high attitudes"? What are you actually trying to say? High altitudes? latitudes?
When the reactor core was broken open by the blast and the graphite caught fire, a lot of different radioisotopes were carried away from the site as part of the dust and smoke. Any nuclear rector will contain short-lived isotopes like iodine-131, for example, which have a very high radioactivity and short half-life of about 8 days.
So just saying that short-lived isotopes were found doesn't really prove anything. All reactors have them, and if you break one apart, those isotopes will be ejected into the environment along with everything else.
I've seen a mention of some excess xenon-133 pointing towards an unusual spike of this fission product at or just before the steam explosion tore the roof off the reactor. Is this what you refer to?
Ofcourse, xenon also happens to be a very common fission product of uranium. It is constantly being produced in any reactor (Xenon poisoning was a major factor in the accident in the first place).
The problem also comes down to definition. Yes, the core did experience a very massive neutron flux once the chain-reaction got out of hand just before it popped the roof off the building, but is this really a "nuclear explosion" as we understand it in the context of nuclear weapons? I personally don't think so.
Depending on your definition, you might also call other criticality accidents, like Cecil Kelley's fatal accident at Los Alamos in 1958 a "nuclear fizzle". But I don't think most people would agree with this definition, despite it being a 200 microsecond criticality excursion in plutonium.
Even if you can argue that there were supercritical conditions for a moment before the steam explosion turned the core subcritical by dispersing it, I still wouldn't consider that a nuclear fizzle. The main cause of all the damage was the steam, hydrogen and subsequent fire.
The fact is that the core was not built of the proper materials nor geometric configuration to ever function as a real nuclear bomb.
It was built as a reactor containing hundreds of tons of very slightly enriched uranium arranged into fuel rods. Compare this to the design of even an old-school uranium "gun type" bomb using almost fully enriched uranium and configured to ensure supercriticality once the two fissionable parts are explosively brought together.
So, I will stick to my original point. This was not a nuclear bomb. It was a reactor tearing itself apart.
So the physics of the show was accurate right? Its just that the entire way they went about testing the plant was criminally negligent
I wanna know if any of the physics in the show was inaccurate. I don't care about historical and procedural inaccuracies as much
Do you think you're perhaps viewing the medical stuff from a modern lens as opposed to (what i interpret it as) the show showing how people reacted at the time, with the knowledge or lack there of they had at that time, in that country. It's possible they did think there was a danger of those men being contaminated and we know better now? Hence it's not the show being wrong, it just paints a picture of what it was like.
I have no idea where they got all their info from but I'm assuming they had experts informing them. I also never got the impression this show was anti nuclear power, just pro safety and anti soviet union secrecy and intimidation
Your death from fear makes me think of some studies that were done after 9/11. Where, people were fearful of flying, and so then drove, which is statistically more dangerous than flying. So the idea is 9/11 caused additional deaths from people opting for riskier transportation.
isn't the enrichment increase necessary to be able to lower the void coefficient?
yeah LNT is silly, there is no threshold, or accumilative damage wouldnt make sense, one neutron does add to your risk of cancer even its its so tiny nobody will ever care, but i think it is like this, you have some amount of added change to genes and damage to tissues from some incirment or radiation, and the damage per amount is indeed entirely linear, it sort of has to be lol for obvious reasons. but then you have a background risk of cancer, and an amount of accumilative genetic damage or tissue damage that can lead to health issues, and the function for health risk is not a linear function of how much radiation you take in, the added risk from radiation is linear in a sense, but not in practice because this kind of risk doesnt add staight forwardly if you add a dose to yourself it increase the overall dose you get, the result is some genetic deterioration, added to random flaws, selective mutations inside already abnormal cells and so on, cancer is not as easy as saying it happens after a certain amount of dna damage, but anyway, you develop a measure for the potential of a certain random level of damage to the dna leading to cancer, you translate that into added dose and you should see that with almost no added dose the added risk is almost 0 and in proportion to your existing risk its very very low and so it will matter less until you get to a level where you are starting to double or tripple your dose and at that point it becomes pretty linear because the dose in this situation becomes the main source of genetic and tissue damage that could be related to cancer risk and of the cancer risk itself, so the added risk pretty much has to start of quite flat if not horizontal, and settle into a linear function. the transition form being secondary to being primary risk is the place the graph should curve the most. that is if the risk of cancer per risk of cancer is linear lolxd.
Guy displays all the fundamental errors that caused Chernobyl. Most clearly, the blind over-confidence that it could never happen under today's conditions. in 1986, they said, "RBMK reactors don't explode." Today, the guy says, "modern reactors don't explode."
What makes you think his confidence is "blind"? He is a nuclear scientist who has personally worked with reactors. If he has a high confidence in modern reactors and their safety systems as well as regulations, then I would like to hear your explanation for why they are NOT safe. Now, obviously, if you placed a bunch of explosives inside a reactor, it would explode, but that is kinda cheating.
Besides, RBMK reactors didn't usually explode. Only this one. And that was only after the crew did some massive errors AND disabled the automatic safeties which would be illegal in most countries today. Yes, the RBMK had a lot of design flaws. Flaws we are fully aware of today. Such mistakes aren't made anymore and safety is a lot higher.
And for the quote "modern reactors don't explode", that is so far quite true. Even in the triple meltdown of the Fukushima plant and with the outer shells of the reactor buildings blowing up from hydrogen build-up, the reactors themselves never exploded.
In general, even if you include Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island and the other minor accidents over the years, nuclear energy is one of the absolutely safest forms of energy.
THORIUM: World's CHEAPEST Energy! [Science Unveiled]. I would love a reaction to this video! I have no idea if it is based in reality or Fantasy.
I watched some other RUclipsrs react to this series and it was really frustrating to see all the stuff you pointed out was wrong being taken as historically accurate.
There is one core element that is misunderstood that makes this way more understandable:
There were no graphite tips on the rods There were graphite rods inserted when the control rods were retracted.
29:10 probably they had the right advisors for the specific stuff and hadn't one for the others parts. Otherwise it really would be wired to be that accurate for that much, and that inaccurate for still a significant bit
The bridge is a myth? I was taught about it in school
Nuclear engineer with the reading comprehension of a toddler.. The woman lost her child and was told shed never bear another, the drs were wrong about that.. its not hard to grasp
this is something i really dislike about 'insert person who works in the field today reacts to topic', you're looking at this from your very much American bubble, and through a modern lense, you clearly are clueless when it comes to the time period, as well as the general geography of the region, not only that but you're very ignorant of the history of the USSR, as a general 'rule' the soviets were ~10 years behind the rest of the world in terms of technology, so while this disaster happened in 1986, the level of technology and general knowledge was around mid 1970's, it's precisely because of that fact that this disaster turned out the way it did, they lacked some of the most basic stuff that the outside world had easy access to, it's very well shown in this show (primarily because the show is focused entirely on the disaster itself), but the USSR at this time was exceedingly paranoid and ANY breaches of data security were dealt with as harshly as the Stalin gulag days.
while you're free to watch and react to whatever you want, I would suggest for future reference to do some research on the subject matter so you don't come off as an ignorant individual.
Very good video, very informative and help us to understand the science of nuclear and the how it is to work in a nuclear plant.
"Prompt neutrons show up almost instantaneously, we're talking 10^-15 seconds"
2 seconds seems incredibly long when you're talking about that kind of time scale. It's amazing the kind of safety systems you need to maintain to avoid these kinds of issues. Love the focus on safety and the detail in your videos!
Thanks so much!
Prehaps the 90,000 comes from people displaced due to the accident? Like essentially their lives we ruined or up rooted. But calling them deaths is a huge stretch... The accident certainly effected the world long term in a very negative way due to the shift away from Nuclear energy and back on to fossil fuels. Germany came out pretty badly on this, Britain not much better, though we are getting there. France famously ignored it and has ended up doing very well in the long run in terms of relatively clean power.
Stop saying turban. A turban is a Sikh head dress. A turbine is a piece of rotating turbo machinery.
Both ways are correct.
In british english it is commonly pronounced /ˈtɜː.baɪn/ while US english is /ˈtɝː.bɪn/
And this guy speaking is american. Yes it sounds similar to "turban", but it isn't the same word.
1:43, excuse me WHAT!!!
Scott Manley did a good video from a physics point of view.
Maybe do a comparison there or show your views from your point of view?
I don’t wanna be one of those people. I appreciate you explaining everything in much more detail but to be 100% perfectly honest, you kind of waffle on a bit I appreciate the detail but try to cut it down a bit
No disrespect but did you immerse yourself in the lore?
Scientists dont need lore.
The "lore"? This was a real event that actually happened. With real facts. The show only pushes myths and lies.
He didn’t mean an actual nuclear bomb. I don’t think HBO thought they were going to be ripped apart by geniuses. I wonder how much you actually know about this man, and this actual event. The power plant you worked at was built after this incident, I truly don’t think any nuclear scientist today can step back and realize what occurred here changed things world wide. The first explosion was massive, but after that the meltdown was much worse, had they not done what they displayed in this show- the explosion would’ve killed almost 8 million people. Now as for the bomb part, this was an RBMK reactor, the testing, in their mindset, had no risks, because they could easily turn the reactor off. There was always a failsafe. When they pulled that slingshot back and the test failed, the radioactivity spiked, they cancelled the test, hit the button to insert all rods. Nobody knew, nobody. That the tips were made of graphite. Graphite took the already spiked reaction, and exponentially increased the strength- causing the explosion. Was it a nuclear explosion. Yes- because it split the core. It was emitting a ton of radiation, and still is today. This disaster taught everyone what NOT to do, and what to do. Everyone needs to be trained for everything, all of the time. You also can’t- can not- use items based on cost. Quality out requires quality in. The Soviet Union had to fix 35 RBMK reactors, all of which had graphite tips on their control rods. 35- that number is mind boggling. I work in auditing- I can’t imagine something like this happening today.
Actually on 19:05 when he says it’s a nuclear bomb their is a type of nuclear bomb known as “dirty bomb” it was never used in war but it involves surrounding expanding hydrogen gas with uranium or plutonium and is meant to make a wasteland similar to Chornobyl Kyle hill made a video about why Fukushima isn’t a nuclear wasteland dirty bomb was meant to induce a wasteland in Chornobyl they basically made a dirty bomb but not a fission bomb no
The "now a nuclear bomb" statement is almost as laughably wrong as the multi-megaton steam explosion bit in an earlier episode, as if a steam explosion from the melted core would be so powerful as to basically vaporize the whole plant and most of it's surroundings.
Series is based on Alexievich's (not a nuclear expert of any kind) book of rumours about Chernobyl sponsored by Westinghouse (guess why)
Great Video.
The essence of drama is conflict. It is more interesting if the stakes are higher. That’s why they get the medical stuff wrong.