I could go for another video or three. You make some proper yet simple videos that have answered a lot of unknowns on a lot of events. Very good work here.
perhaps when you learn the algebra?! Chernobil was 600 MW, Fukushima was 2 GW... so mother of all,,, why not make a video about Sellafield, when British decided to EJECT NUCLEAR MATERIAL INTO ATMOSPHERE
The Soviet bureaucracy is so depressing. Like, "Oh hey, what if something goes wrong?" "Good point, comrade. Let's just not think about that because THE STATE IS INFALLIBLE."
I don't remember anything like that being an aspect of the late Stagnation Era Soviet bureaucracy. Everyone knew just how fallible the state was and took advantage of it, by slacking off in their leather-clad offices and stealing as much as possible, before it all rotted away. By that time, all that was left of revolutionary spirit and fervor, and war-time heroism, were portraits of Lenin and empty slogans on propaganda posters. BTW, the word "comrade" was only used in official state media and mandatory Party meet-ups. Even at those, if you said something like "the state is infallible", you'd develop a reputation as a mental case. It was very much depressing though.
"It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber's. I'm preparing lunch when my husband comes back. "There's some sort of fire at the nuclear plant," he says. "They're saying we are not to turn off the radio." I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn't any ordinary fire, it was some sort of shining. It was pretty. I'd never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn't have them went to friends' houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, "Look! Remember!" And these were people who worked at the reactor -- engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn't know that death could be so beautiful. " -*Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya, evacuee from the town of Pripyat* I get chills whenever I think of that quote.
Cherenkov radiation... that "shiny" strange glow... is... particles and... non-particles... that shoot clean thru steel and zirconium and on the way... excite electron orbits enough to emit energetic photons... ...which means you have light... going THRU metal... ...which is pretty rare, and, in my case... the kewlest thing I've ever seen, hands down. Second place was a plasma torch cutting two foot radius quarter circles... out of ten by ten foot, two inch thick stainless steel blanks, so that Fermilab could wrap four of them with huge cables, in banks of who knows how many... ... to make a particle beam shoot oit the end of the "block." A lightning bolt one inch across... cutting two inch steel. But that was a DISTANT second place. :-)
@@alexcrouse Yeah, I get it. We've all watched/read the same stuff. But I think that you underestimate Soviet secrecy. Your assumption feels very... Western millenial?
@@Fighterpilot555 - The guys that went in to scrape the bits of reactor core back into the reactor hall and other insanely dangerous things. They essentially know they would die - which is why it is amazing his grandfather is still alive. Some died within hours.
I was born just mere months before this tragedy. My father says he was meant to be sent to the plant by authorities to be one of the liquidators. But my birth gave him the opportunity to dismiss the order. He often says I am his savior. I love my dad. I am glad he could avoid being exposed to the radiation.
@@davelowets Because there was a reward for going, doesn't mean there wasn't punishment for not going. It was still Soviet Russia, even if they got rid of the name, the population was expendable, and if they didn't do their jobs, they were punished
How does a Soviet RBMK reactor explode? A: It doesn’t B: It was the hydrogen tank C: 3.6 Roentgens; not great, not terrible D: He’s in shock, get him out of here
I appreciate the fact that you didn't simplify the displacement rods as "graphite tips on the control rods." I HATE that simplification because it leads to all sorts of bizarre ideas of why they would be designed that way.
@@tjzambonischwartz I wasn't referring to you with that comment. The extent of my knowledge about Chernobyl was pretty much limited to the show up until today lol.
And thank you for pointing this out, too! I've read extensively about this disaster and have watched many videos, and Plainly's is the first one to actually explain what the control rods are clearly and not just describe them as "graphite tipped" with no reason as to WHY they were made that way.
My uncle was one of the liquidators, his daughter. Born after the accident couldn't grow hair until she turned 8. He ended up dying from leukaemia when he was in his 50's. It's always been speculated by doctors that the work at Chernobyl caused it.
He must have been in a dangerous job, most likely clearing radioactive debris from the roofs, or pumping water from under the reactor, do you know if he was in the fire brigade at all? To pass away at 50, he must have received a really high dose. If he was on the roof, he may have been unlucky enough to stand on a tiny fragment of a fuel pellet which were extremely radioactive. What was so scary about these tiny pellets were that they emitted 100's of sieverts (5 sieverts is a lethal dose), and if you accidentally stood on one with out realising, you would most likely lose your foot or leg. I have a huge respect for your uncle.
I've been told he was just a soldier in the army. You have to remember how hard the Soviet union tried to cover it up. Enough that they ruined a lot of lives. He never would speak about his time there and was always sick. I don't know to much about logistics of radiation exposure. All I know it's growing up if I questioned why he was wheelchair bound and often too sick to lift his own spoon. I'd get carted out of the room by my mother and reminded that we weren't allowed to talk about him being forced to clean up Chernobyl.
If he was one of the men who was on the roof of the building where 20,000 rads an hour of gamma and neutron radiation was present, I have no doubt his exposure was the cause of his leukemia.
It's impossible to tell. This is 1980s Ukraine remember. How many of them smoked? Where they even filtered? Did they live near a coal fired power plant? Did they heat their houses with coal? In the West we tend to build power plants on brownfield sites, so people correlate an uptick in cancer rates with the power plant if it's nuclear. Thing is, brownfield industrial sites are generally soaked in poison from decades of not having any environmental regulations. You'll get cancer living near it regardless
Having spent my entire life living around and working in nuclear power plants, it is so incredibly painful to learn about the failures of Chernobyl. There are so many ways that the disaster could have been avoided, and even a simple containment dome would have either completely negated, or largely mitigated, the effects of the explosion. It breaks my heart that so many people view this disaster as a reason to vilify nuclear power. Thank for taking the time to research and produce this video!
I am not sure if the explosion could have been contained, not when the reactor top, control rods, and a third of the fuel were hurled a kilometer into the sky.
@@OrdinaryEXP I saw a movie where a hurricane hit a nuclear plant and got irradiated. Saw another one where it happened with a tornado. Those 2 documentaries scared me.
In April 1986 I was at University in London. Two of my social group were taking Degrees in Nuclear Engineering. On day after the accident they explained how the RBMK design had been studied on their course as the ultimate example of 'How not to design a Reactor'. There were so many good Teaching Points, practically every aspect of the design (or every aspect then known in the West) allowed the lecturer to say 'This is bad because ...'
We all know about Chernobyl, but I love how deep you get into disasters like this. The technical aspects, the buildup and causes, the aftermath and everything in between. Thanks again for another thoroughly interesting video. I look forward to the next one(s).
Despite watching a zillion videos on this tragedy, as well as articles, and even movies, I still managed to learn several new things today. Love the depth and clarity!
My grandfather was a liquidator. He wasn't directly at the unit, but he was a part of a cleanup, as he was a soldier, and then he has, for the rest of his service, been a part of a guard that was controlling the exclusion zone He was my icon of what a man should be, very organized, with strong will, always calm and collected He didn't die from his radiation-connected diseases, but from coronavirus... I couldn't believe that the virus was what took him, and I miss him every day Rest in peace, Viktor, we will always remember you
You must have stolen this from somewhere else in the comments. I've seen the same thing posted over a dozen times already, and you were not the first one.. Don't steal and plagiarize someone else's work, get creative and come up your own if you want attention.
@@cjwiffle4714 i still am sure not , if that picture is "real" . I have run across mentions that say it is a double exposure, or two pictures semi-imposed on each other some other way. Never investigated it fully myself yet. Doing that , especially at that time, should have been fatal in days/hours.
@@chrisperrien7055 the man on that picture (that he made btw) is Artur Korneev. He is still alive at 71 years old and worked at chernobyl site since the accident and while the second sorcophagus was being built, teaching and instructing new workers. Times interviewed him in 2014 (if im not mistaken) and he is still mentioned here and there in our russian news.
@@PlainlyDifficultAs a navy nuke who was taught about chernobyl and had to learn reactor physics for my job as reactor operator, I really appreciate the research that was done to produce this video. I couldn't find anything inaccurate about the explanation of the physics even though it was put in semi-laymans terms. The only thing I caught that was missing was the fact that the xenon burnout also contributed heavily to the reactor power excursion. As soon as the reactor was brought critical again, the xenon burned away adding positive reactivity and it essentially created its own feedback loop in addition to the ones you discussed. Fantastic video and well informed which is why I enjoy your channel.
Kinda hard to cover it deeper... This was both comprehensive and concise. Outside of actual observed environmental impact, I think this is pretty much the entire story.
As someone who lives near a large nuclear power plant ( I live in the US ) the story of Pripyat and the Chernobyl plant has always captured me. God bless the firefighters and cleanup crews who lost their lives.
In the mid 1990's our company (in the US) employed a few contract electrical engineers to do a controls system upgrade. I was supervising the team and one of the engineers (his name was Igor) was a former Chernobyl electrical engineer (not involved with the incident in any way). He had emigrated to the US a few years later and we picked him up for a few months to do some PLC (industrial controller) programming. His approach to process control safety was horrifying; I had to say NO! NO! NO! to so many of his ideas that would of put on systems in a perilous state of functionality. Even after saying NO! I would have to to back and check his programming and many times I found that we went ahead and did these crazy-unsafe things anyway. I was not in a position of removing him from the project (my manager has that authority) but yet I was responsible for his work. It gave me a low level of PTSD from dealing with him constantly. I was not surprised that dangerous and catastrophic things happened in the USSR with this being the quality of the safety culture there at that time.
I had an older Russian software engineer on the team. He got fired for exactly this kind of stuff. Younger Russians aren't much better, though. I've caught one uploading internal documents to Google Docs - he wasn't stealing them, just going around safety measures.
I can tell that your low level PTSD has caused you to consume high levels of alcohol, the terrible grammar was a dead give away. I hope you recover. By the way, cool story.
Good explaination of this insane tragedy. Some notes from Dyatlov's book on it (take those with a grain of salt, he himself even said that): -Nowhere in the documentation was it stated that the violation of the ORM would turn the scram system into an explosion initiator. -There was no instrument in the control room to monitor the ORM as it wasn't just a sum of lengths of the control rods and depended on the shape of the neutron field. It was calculated both periodically and on demand by a (rather slow) computer installed in another room, which took about 10 minutes, and its output was only printed on paper and had to be hand delivered to the control room. -The shutdown wasn't a response to the power increase, rather was a delayed by a few seconds part of the testing procedure. While the opposite is stated in the verdict of the USSR court, he claims that even on the graphs taken from the control room said increase could only be noticed using a magnifying glass. -The method by which the void coefficient was calculated by the plant's department was cooked and post explosion investigations came up with a dramatically different number. Not only that, but the reactor as installed was in the configuration that its chief designer called "uncontrollable" in one memo.This relates to percentage of uranium enrichment (lower than recommended) and absence of those short control rods at the bottom. Worse still, the ORM limit (at the time of the disaster only 15, not 28) was put in space only after the Leningrad incident, further demonstrating the issues with the design. -The reactor had to be built in accordance with rules about safety and Dyatlov argues that dozens of those rules were broken. Of course, he wasn't given the chance to prove that during his trial.
It's not just his book either, if I remember rightly one of the later IAEA reports said that the USSR had lied to them about the existence of operating procedures that were meant to stop an incident like this, that in fact those supposed operating procedures were made up after the fact, and that misleading information had made it into earlier reports in the series. I think it may have taken the fall of the USSR for this information to come out as well.
Moreover, according to Dyatlov, the RBMK reactros were already working, unknowingly for their operators, in conditions that the same RBMK Chief Designer, N A Dollezha, considered incontrollable. Infact, with 2% enrichment of the fuel, special absorbers should have been inserted into the channels to contrast positive void coefficient at low power levels. In reality the commercial RBMK worked with 2% fuel enrichment, no special absorbers, and none of the operators even knew that those absorbers should have been present. It's typically Soviet. The chief designer states that, if made in a certain way, the reactor is safe and can rise power from any energy level. The designers of the plant remove safety measures (maybe simply implying that low enrichment fuel would not have been used), but mantain the statement that the reactor is safe and can rise power from any energy level. The operators only know that the reactor is safe and can rise power from any energy level.
As far as I know there are short control rods at the bottom, but they weren't connected with the AZ system back then. Fun fact: the reactor was supposed to undergo maintance after the test and the shutdown, and one part of it was connecting those short control rods to the AZ system, which as I read somewhere, would have probably prevented the disaster.
Please don't get that feeling of smugness because you don't live in Russia. Your government doesn't give a shit about you, whatever country you live in. CIA testing LSD on citizens, our own UK government testing chemical & biological weapons on army "volunteers". And lets not even get started on how companies are willing to kill people for a quick buck.
@@MadScientist267 IIRC, there's a twitter account with regular updates as to how much cleanup is left at Chernobyl. Last time I checked, I think they had gotten it down to something like only 99.999994782% cleanup left to go.
@@FilosophicalPharmer And tepco started off by saying 20 years they would have it all cleaned up. Yeah right good luck with that one. And they have the ocean to deal with and all the cooling water flowing into It since 2011. Too bad GE didn’t listen to those 3 engineers. We’ll to be fair they did but said we’ll if we do x then that’ll kill the nuclear side of GE. Profit over life once again wonder how many 10s of thousands of cases of cancer will come out of this one?
Even this video omits that it was in fact a proficiency test, a prerequisite for officially considering the 4th reactor (and entire plant), complete with staff, ready for use.
I remember back when the history channel provided content for actual learning.. They went in on the liquidators and the man chosen to lead those poor heroic bastards in the rooftop cleanup. Mad respect for their sacrifice.
There are stories that some of the liquidators would trade tags that had been on the roof with those that had not yet gone up there. men sacrificing themselves willingly to save others. they are heros.
@@trinalgalaxy5943 there's also stories that there were people who "forgot" to check tags to let people serious about reducing risk to others, too! Those guys are honestly the first people we should remember when we hear "Chernobyl". They knew it was probably going to be lethal, and they were willing to do this so others wouldn't.
@@trinalgalaxy5943 Reminds me of a scene in the Battlestar Galactica episode "The Passage" (I think): a pilot secretly swapped radiation monitor tags from another pilot, absorbing a lethal dose.
I remember a party in Östersund just a week or so before the disaster. There was a sami girl who was included in a family clan owning a lot of reindeers, she was kind of rich. After the accident these reindeers meat was forbidden to sell for human consumtion because och the cesium downfall that occured on the area the animals feeded on.
Theres a breed of dogs that live in that area. They're really pretty dogs actually, they're all okay though they've been there the whole time nothing weird happened to them, I'm not Chinese so I wouldn't eat one but I'd pet one for sure. They're call pupyats. I'd like to adopt one maybe but they don't have really long life spans but I think that's because they're wild dogs and just hangout in the abandoned buildings
One of the interesting stories about the world learning of the disaster was at a nuclear power plant in Norway (Forsmark). It was standard procedure for employees leaving the plant to walk through radiation detectors to ensure they weren't contaminated with radioactive material on them. The alarms began to go off during a shift change, so they immediately began tracking down the source of contamination within the plant. Eventually, they realized there was no leak at the plant, but they still had employees leaving the plant who were contaminated. So, they tested employees _entering_ the plant and found they were contaminated as well. It was one of the first indications somewhere in the world, there has been a major release of radioactive material.
I remember that the USSR didn't say a word for days what happened there and that Westerners recognized a lot of radioactivity in the air and assumed it must be an ultimate MCU somewhere in the East. Scary times. Didn't know it was at another nuclear power plant in Sweden.
I was in high school when this happened. I remember it being a big deal, but because the Soviets kept so much from the western press it was only after the fall of the Soviet did the true scale of the disaster became known.
@@AshenTechDotCom I doubt this will help, but I was surprised at how recent this disaster was (born in 2003). It always seemed like it was one of those things that happened forever ago, maybe in the 60s or 70s
I’m sure you'll never see this but I wanted to thank you for supporting those with OCD. I came across this video solely out of curiosity surrounding disasters when I saw the fundraiser. A lot of people don’t view OCD as the debilitating mental illness it is. I’ve even had people tell me I should be thankful I have OCD since it’s a “productive” mental illness, as if there’s even such a thing. It’s exhausting and stressful constantly tracking obsessions and always performing compulsions for fear of having a panic attack if you don’t. Excellent video, you’ve definitely gained a subscriber!
+1 for this. I don't have OCD but I do know something of debilitating mental illnesses and their mischaracterisation and it's so sad how people don't understand just how badly they can affect people. Whenever I hear someone say that something "messes with my OCD" I gently correct them; they're usually referring to something not being tidy or something trivial like that, so I remind them that *actual* OCD is way worse than just getting irritated at mess.
I've been FASCINATED by the Chernobyl disaster for years. My father worked on some of the first nuclear powered subs & I distinctly remember hearing the broadcast of the disaster as a child. I had a basic idea of what happened but when i attempted to research more it all went over my head. Your video is the first time I could truly understand the mechanics behind what happened! Thanks so much for the animations & well written explanation of the mechanics behind the core criticality...subscribed & eagerly waiting for the next in series. (Also, I think it's amazing you're doing a deep dive into the people that put themselves at risk & possibly faced a slow, painful death due to radiation poisoning.)
23:37 "And as such, the blatant evidence to the opposite was ignored." If ever anyone wondered why mental gymnastics such as doublespeak and doublethink are so dangerous
@@sintheemptyone8108 This is beyond hypocrisy. A hypocrite would see you imprisoned for smoking weed while halfway through a blunt. This is next level, an emotional wall ringfencing a set of beliefs (regardless of evidence). The basis of all ideologies, of which organised religions have historically been the most egregious examples.
@@233kosta so like the people rioting for years on end, being encouraged, even during a pandemic, burning, looting and murdering people, and the media saying its "peaceful protest" and safe, to be encouraged, but, peaceful anti-lockdown or gun-rights protesters, standing around talking and being...genuinely peaceful... thats a danger to society... the people i know who believe and back those views..are.... genuinely worrying if not frightening... like a friend of ours whos sister went off the deep end after 2 years away at uni... from a nice, normal, happy girl, to having half her head shaved, and hating all white people, shes white and her family is white... lecturing them about white privilage and how its wrong for their family to own land and a home when so many people cannot own land or a home. she started to lecture me about biological sex being a lie, but then couldnt actually justify that with science, just emotion... the whole family had a meeting when she was away for the day over thanks giving and... she wasnt going back, if she did, it would be her own back the debt would fall on... she tried to go back but, was smart enough to recognize that getting a degree that wouldnt let her pay off the loan sshe would need to get it, would be really fucking stupid...rather then admit this she went crazy on her parents with "friends" encouragement... shes better now... last time he took me to their place for a visit, her hair is growing back in on her head, and, she started shaving her legs again..(admitted the itching hadnt stopped the whole time she had stopped but she was assured it would... and she would be much healthier and happier as a harry woman... shes realized how insane she was for getting sucked into that culture... has no intent to go back, infact shes loving taking classes locally and online, says part of what let them get their claws into her so easy was the fact she moved like 6+hrs from home(her dad drives fast...so for most of us add a couple hours...), no local support and all these people pushing her to join their cult... she keeps having to block people on fb because the crazies who were the core/leaders/dictators of that group keep using alts to harass her on facebook, when they found out she mostly used minds they started calling her a nazi.. she was upset at first..but.. well.. when i read the shit they were saying and rather then what she expected, started laughing and "wow, talk about desprate, attacking a woman for leaving your cult and finding, shes much happier not hating herself and everybody else..." (more...but she took her laptop and typed out a modified version... i told her.. "want to post a video of me saying it?" she loved that idea... i said it my own way... omg the fuckers tried to get me kicked off SSI over it.. thankfully the gal at SSI did a quick review, got a few medical records, then when i mentioned they said they would get me kicked off ssi, and told them who to look for..the gal was able to find them fast... and... the best part... the idiots had posted screenshots of their reports against me.... AND AUDIO OF THEM CALLING, then talking about how screwed i was... so.. yeah... my acct now has to have a note warning of facebook fgts making false reports that im not a gimpy mofo... i genuinely hate this world/society we live in...
I keep coming back to this episode because it's so well made. It's an absolute joy to watch. Your entire channel is amazing, so much effort put into research and explaining the little details.
I have watched a lot of videos on Chernobyl, but this one is simply a level above the rest. The explanation of the causes of the incident is so clear but also detailed. Very well done.
This video series has been fantastically detailed about the Chernobyl disaster. You've been going much more in depth than a lot of other channels have done and it's fantastic.
My family was involved in a relief effort for the long term sufferers of the chernobyl disaster, I was around 10 or 11 years old at the time. In around 2006/2007, people living in the still irradiated parts of Ukraine would come and spend a few weeks of time living in the UK and other parts of Europe. Just a few weeks of clean air, food and better living conditions was said to increase their expected lifespan by several years. I still remember the family that came to live with us, a mother and 2 kids, one a little younger than me and one was closer to 5 or 6. I became good friends with the kids despite them not speaking a word of english and the mother would cook and clean for us every day to help say thank you. It's been around 15 years since they came and went and I dont remember their names or really their faces, but I still think about them sometimes and wonder what happened to them. They may have even returned to the UK in the wake of the war with Russia, but I doubt I'll ever see them again.
@@PlainlyDifficult You give hints, that this will be 2 parts, if not 3 or 4 . I see 3 at least. This disaster has been with us 40 years or so, and is still going on.
One needs to understand, that the RBMK is a military reactor as well, as it can produce weapon grade plutonium which is why the whole refueling during operation is for really.
Thanks John! Your Plainly Difficult series on this disaster is excellent. I lived only 45 miles from Three Mile Island at the time of it's meltdown. Scary stuff indeed!
Really glad to see another update on Chernobyl and RBMK. It's a personal topic of interest and I'm so glad I can support a channel that expands on why these events happened while also teaching me new things in other topics. Do you think you'll be diving into the more detailed information on the Liquidators and recovery efforts as part of the series? While the basics of the efforts are often covered briefly I feel like there are a lot more details about the actions taken I'd love to know more about in regards to the construction of the sarcophagus and debris cleanup as well as the ultimately un-needed tunnel digging that were only glossed over in older documentaries.
One key thing that is rarely mentioned in any of these documentaries is that in the USSR/Russia (unlike in the West) nuclear reactors do not have a containment vessel. The reactor has shielding around it but no concrete containment vessel. This meant that the explosion, once it occurred, allowed radioactive material and gasses to immediately escape into the open air. The arrogant Russians thought their RBMK reactor flawless - no accident could happen. The Three Mile Island reactor did have a containment vessel and therefore there was extremely limited release of radioactivity.
I only reason I waited an hour after upload was because I had to ride a motorbike to work... And I seriously considered watching while riding. That how much I've been looking forward to this.
What happened at Chernobyl was pretty much multiple iterations of what always happens in any totalitarian structure (from families all the way to Governments): - Something is run a certain, well tested way - Someone with some sort (but not full) knowledge of the stuff he is talking about, has an idea on how to make the thing more efficient - The leader (with no knowledge of said stuff) is absolutely in favor, because more efficiency means more profit - The people who have full knowledge of the topic are to scared to speak out against it, because the leader already chose the direction and disagreement would lead to being fired. In Chernobyl we had it with the RBMK Reactor itself (suggestion to use "badly" enriched Uranium, and to balance it out, use a massive graphite block and regular water), with the always postponed safety test, with the running the reactor critically low for hours to fulfill energy quotas, and finally with the decision to not shutdown the reactor for 24h, when the energy output fell.
It's funny, I've been obsessed with Chernobyl, I've always heard they were doing a test on the reactor but never heard exactly what the test was test was trying to prove a theory about the reactor in a total power failure thus putting it in a dangerous power failure situation.
Hey man I just wanna say I’ve been following your videos for years now, and that you’ve kinda worked your way up to Chernobyl and produced such a great video, alongside crossing over 1/4 million subs is like a landmark for your channel I think. Thanks for all the videos man!
The rush to get snacks and a cuppa upon discovering how long this beauty is, was well faster than that reactor cover plate expulsion (no need for the infirmary, Comrades👌🏻)
I've watched dozens of different documentaries on Chernobyl and watched the HBO mini-series but I will never refuse a new video about Chernobyl -- it is just that fascinating. Thanks for making!
When you go to shut down an automobile, you typically release the accelerator, brake to a stop, take the transmission out of gear, actuate the emergency brake, and turn off the keys. If you then need to move it a few feet, the safest way is to reverse the above process. If you're feeling bold... and in a hurry... and you aren't an engineer, qualified properly... (just like Dyatlov)...you might leave the emergency brake on... ...rev the engine to redline rpms... ...and use the footbrake, on top of the parking brake, to control forward speed. The iodine well was the emergency brake. Those simply do not go away today, period. Removing almost all control rods was like flooring the gas. The few remaining control rods were the footbrake. The operators had a tiger by the tail, and they knew it. This was not a 1000 MW core at 30 MW. This was a big hot rod, screaming thunder, barely held in check, and they KNEW the tachometer was "lying" to them. The instant it got away from them, they knew the core was gone. The knew the refuelling blocks were jumpIng up and down in the channels BEFORE it blew. Those detonations were the speedometer hitting 150, after the brakes were ripped clean off the wheels. Dyatlov ordered them to cool the core, and they did, even though the core was now a crater. Dyatlov was the kind of guy who rose to mediocrity by ignoring rules, and gettting boxes checked... till a box he didn't really understand enforced simple math upon him. He did not believe the core was undamaged, or even still in place. He HOPED it was, and gave commensurate orders, because he knew those huge explosions had his name on them, in an unforgiving empire. The rest kept quiet, followed orders, and counted minutes till they could escape the invisible... giant... they had let out of its cage. They all had watched, earlier this same shift, when Dyatov fired the chief operator for voicing exactly these objections.
This video is fantastic. I searched for a long time for a detailed amd longer than 10 minutes video of the chernobyl reactors like this one. Thank you so much. 🖖
Bad designs and bad management are dangerous, nuclear power as a whole is very safe. As is evident from the many active plants in America(like the Limerick plant in Pennsylvania)
Nuclear power is only dangerous when flawed designs are used and/or are put in the hands of bad management (especially with the culture of the soviets where you were better off to cover things up instead of being safe and reporting faults) And unsurprisingly most if not all major disasters can be traced back to flawed designs, proceedure or safety advice being ignored, cheap shortcuts being taken, and/or bad management (though even in the major disasters it killed suprisingly few people for the size of the areas that were effected and left abandoned, like it gets a lot of attention because of the massive areas of land that get marked as exclusion zones due to radiation risk in the aftermath but honestly there are other things that i think are much worse) Otherwise nuclear power and in particular modern designs are actually quite safe and far cleaner than coal could ever hope to be
And even more important, incompetence and unquestionable authority, in the way that communism worked, is dangerous! It leads not only to deaths, but also to mega-disasters like this, that distroy the planet and keep on killing!
What is often missed in describing this accident is that the experiment was performed only because they *knew* that the station design was not robust to station blackout. The reactor design was bad, but the over-all systems design of the power station was criminal. It should never have been permitted to operate at all.
the reactor design was risky, but i wouldnt call it bad. they built lots of them and they ultimately worked fine, once the bugs were cleared out. the problem is when you get bureaucrats and bureaucracies to manage complex machines. like the space shuttle, for example. when the accident happened, most people on site were inexperienced, they did what they were told to do.
Thanks for covering this John. I was in Europe at the time as a young boy, to you and everyone else believe you me that we were very afraid of the outcome and the dangers after the incident. Remember this is before the internet era, zero to no access to scientific research, not to mention mother USSR was very suspect and hush hush so we didn’t know what to expect in the Mediterranean. Picture millions in fear, we had no clue what to expect in the aftermath.
I don't think anyone living in the nearby settlements at the time will forget how ridiculously long it took the Soviet bureaucracy to let people in the nearby areas know that there was a nuclear disaster. Even Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, that's less than a hundred kilometers away was not informed despite its sizable population. Even nearly four decades later, I doubt anyone will forget how those in charge put their personal pride ahead of basic decency and the safety of so many.
Despite my having watched many hours of documentaries, films and TV programs about this incident in the past, there was quite a bit of new detail here for me, thanks!
That's gonna be interesting! Especially considering two big Ukrainian channels also published their videos on Chornobyl today, so I'm fascinated to see the differences in perspective.
@@rustyshackleford3649 ruclips.net/video/MUoo0BSGjjg/видео.html and ruclips.net/video/_QzmI4GiMDo/видео.html Both are only in Ukrainian. Update: I see Chaplynsky added English subtitles, so those are available, if you're interested.
@@PlainlyDifficult still watching it lol...fantastic work! i wish i could donate and not be a leech but i have a disabled elderly mom to take care of and im perpetually broke. :(
If you're born 1986 in Europe, you have this healthy green glow in the dark! Who needs lamps and flashlights? @PD thanks mate, I've been waiting so long for this one!
My cousins in Germany and Austria told me the playgrounds were closed for some time, mushrooms and some sensitive plants couldn't be eaten anymore.. Stuff like that happened. In fact wild game and mushrooms were cjecked for radiation until the early 90s. What measures were taken in your place?
@@astroboy3291 I’m born in 1985 and here in the north of Sweden we “emergency” slaughtered over 100.000 reindeers due to high levels of radiation. It was a huge blow to our natives the Sami people who many makes a living owning and selling reindeer meat.
To be honest, I usually blame it all on "because Communism"--mainly because of the paranoid working environment fostered by the Soviet culture. But as the video shows, there was a whole chain of bad decisions that led to the disaster.
@@kdarkwynde That was a tongue in cheek joke. Anyway he prefers shorter videos with extreme focus on the causes of the accidents (which is fine, too) but I really enjoyed how this video went really deep into the details of this particular case in a way you will have a hard time finding more detailed accounts. Of course this case deserves all the special attention it got.
Off topic from the video, but, I really appreciate fundraiser for OCD. As someone who struggles with it I am relieved that it’s not entirely forgotten/ignored by everyone and that people believe it’s a serious problem. I appreciate and respect this RUclipsr and what he’s doing.
There is nothing like testing on production :D. Also very good video, many details I have not heard anywhere before. Waiting for next parts! Keep up the good work!
Yes, it's an essential point to keep in mind. Without the moderator the neutrons are "too fast" to be caught by the fissionable nuclei, and just fly by them so to speak. The moderator slows them down, which allows them to be absorbed and initiate fission.
One thing that was truly highlighted by this entire channel is not that people shouldn't prioritise cost over safety but that things that are mandatory to ensure safety shouldn't be as costly.
Fancy another Nuclear video? ruclips.net/video/o0xNzLp5b3c/видео.html
Looking forward to the next video ;)
Edit: He made the next video finally.
PD love the videos my man. !
Without a doubt!
I could go for another video or three. You make some proper yet simple videos that have answered a lot of unknowns on a lot of events. Very good work here.
perhaps when you learn the algebra?! Chernobil was 600 MW, Fukushima was 2 GW... so mother of all,,, why not make a video about Sellafield, when British decided to EJECT NUCLEAR MATERIAL INTO ATMOSPHERE
The Soviet bureaucracy is so depressing. Like, "Oh hey, what if something goes wrong?" "Good point, comrade. Let's just not think about that because THE STATE IS INFALLIBLE."
In western capitalism: if something goes wrong: just trust the market
@@henrimessinghausen5185 at least in capitalism they put a bit of security because there's insurance companies forcing regulation.
*Somewhere, the soviet anthem plays LOUDLY COMRADE*
@@henrimessinghausen5185 the difference being that the thing that went wrong is not censored for decades.
I don't remember anything like that being an aspect of the late Stagnation Era Soviet bureaucracy. Everyone knew just how fallible the state was and took advantage of it, by slacking off in their leather-clad offices and stealing as much as possible, before it all rotted away. By that time, all that was left of revolutionary spirit and fervor, and war-time heroism, were portraits of Lenin and empty slogans on propaganda posters. BTW, the word "comrade" was only used in official state media and mandatory Party meet-ups. Even at those, if you said something like "the state is infallible", you'd develop a reputation as a mental case. It was very much depressing though.
"It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber's. I'm preparing lunch when my husband comes back. "There's some sort of fire at the nuclear plant," he says. "They're saying we are not to turn off the radio." I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn't any ordinary fire, it was some sort of shining. It was pretty. I'd never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn't have them went to friends' houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, "Look! Remember!" And these were people who worked at the reactor -- engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn't know that death could be so beautiful. "
-*Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya, evacuee from the town of Pripyat*
I get chills whenever I think of that quote.
Cherenkov radiation... that "shiny" strange glow... is... particles and... non-particles... that shoot clean thru steel and zirconium and on the way... excite electron orbits enough to emit energetic photons...
...which means you have light... going THRU metal...
...which is pretty rare, and, in my case... the kewlest thing I've ever seen, hands down.
Second place was a plasma torch cutting two foot radius quarter circles... out of ten by ten foot, two inch thick stainless steel blanks, so that Fermilab could wrap four of them with huge cables, in banks of who knows how many...
... to make a particle beam shoot oit the end of the "block."
A lightning bolt one inch across... cutting two inch steel.
But that was a DISTANT second place.
:-)
I haven't seen cherenkov radiation, but I have seen red and green lightning. Both were in the same storm... Said storm was a hum-dinger from memory.
@@sball1990rack Oh I've seen *images* of it, just not in person :P
(Which, upon reflection, is probably a good thing)
@@malusignatius oh I understand. It’s absolutely beautiful. I mean more beautiful than anything.
Waiting an extra week for a 40 minute video about chernobyl is definitely worthwhile.
Feels almost cliche for him of all people to do Chernobyl
@@THICCTHICCTHICC I know nearly everything there is to know about Chernobyl, and i still watched this because his presentation is fantastic.
@@alexcrouse Unless you were high-ranking Soviet communist in the 1980s... no, you don't.
@@Mgunner7623 90% chance i know more about it than them. Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about it.
@@alexcrouse Yeah, I get it. We've all watched/read the same stuff. But I think that you underestimate Soviet secrecy. Your assumption feels very... Western millenial?
My grandfather is one of the liquidators and I am proud of him. I say IS because he is still alive to this day!
If it's my place to ask, what was his responsibility as a liquidator?
the f**** a living legend
@@Fighterpilot555 - The guys that went in to scrape the bits of reactor core back into the reactor hall and other insanely dangerous things.
They essentially know they would die - which is why it is amazing his grandfather is still alive. Some died within hours.
Yeah ok mutant
Legend !!!!!!
I was born just mere months before this tragedy. My father says he was meant to be sent to the plant by authorities to be one of the liquidators. But my birth gave him the opportunity to dismiss the order. He often says I am his savior. I love my dad. I am glad he could avoid being exposed to the radiation.
That's so sweet, what a miracle!
The liquidators were volunteers. They werent forced..
@@davelowets 1980's Soviet Union: volunteering=forced to do it or face severe punishment
@@coltongraves9331 It was the other way... The guys who volunteered to do it were rewarded with early discharge from the military.
@@davelowets Because there was a reward for going, doesn't mean there wasn't punishment for not going. It was still Soviet Russia, even if they got rid of the name, the population was expendable, and if they didn't do their jobs, they were punished
How does a Soviet RBMK reactor explode?
A: It doesn’t
B: It was the hydrogen tank
C: 3.6 Roentgens; not great, not terrible
D: He’s in shock, get him out of here
E:
F: Human stupidity
G: Taliban
H. COVID-19
I: You didn't see graphite because it's not there..... Excuse me.....
I appreciate the fact that you didn't simplify the displacement rods as "graphite tips on the control rods." I HATE that simplification because it leads to all sorts of bizarre ideas of why they would be designed that way.
One TV show and all of a sudden everyone is a nuclear engineer
@@masonmunkey6136 ain't even seen the show. Been a nuclear history buff since the nineties.
@@tjzambonischwartz I wasn't referring to you with that comment. The extent of my knowledge about Chernobyl was pretty much limited to the show up until today lol.
And thank you for pointing this out, too! I've read extensively about this disaster and have watched many videos, and Plainly's is the first one to actually explain what the control rods are clearly and not just describe them as "graphite tipped" with no reason as to WHY they were made that way.
@@CobaltThunder267 Scott Manley's video also explains these properly. He really did a good job ruclips.net/video/q3d3rzFTrLg/видео.html
My uncle was one of the liquidators, his daughter. Born after the accident couldn't grow hair until she turned 8. He ended up dying from leukaemia when he was in his 50's. It's always been speculated by doctors that the work at Chernobyl caused it.
He must have been in a dangerous job, most likely clearing radioactive debris from the roofs, or pumping water from under the reactor, do you know if he was in the fire brigade at all? To pass away at 50, he must have received a really high dose. If he was on the roof, he may have been unlucky enough to stand on a tiny fragment of a fuel pellet which were extremely radioactive. What was so scary about these tiny pellets were that they emitted 100's of sieverts (5 sieverts is a lethal dose), and if you accidentally stood on one with out realising, you would most likely lose your foot or leg. I have a huge respect for your uncle.
I've been told he was just a soldier in the army. You have to remember how hard the Soviet union tried to cover it up. Enough that they ruined a lot of lives. He never would speak about his time there and was always sick. I don't know to much about logistics of radiation exposure. All I know it's growing up if I questioned why he was wheelchair bound and often too sick to lift his own spoon. I'd get carted out of the room by my mother and reminded that we weren't allowed to talk about him being forced to clean up Chernobyl.
If he was one of the men who was on the roof of the building where 20,000 rads an hour of gamma and neutron radiation was present, I have no doubt his exposure was the cause of his leukemia.
@@fin29864 He was a LIQUIDATOR... Liquidators shoveled radioactive debris off of the roof top, all of them did.
It's impossible to tell.
This is 1980s Ukraine remember.
How many of them smoked?
Where they even filtered?
Did they live near a coal fired power plant?
Did they heat their houses with coal?
In the West we tend to build power plants on brownfield sites, so people correlate an uptick in cancer rates with the power plant if it's nuclear.
Thing is, brownfield industrial sites are generally soaked in poison from decades of not having any environmental regulations.
You'll get cancer living near it regardless
Having spent my entire life living around and working in nuclear power plants, it is so incredibly painful to learn about the failures of Chernobyl. There are so many ways that the disaster could have been avoided, and even a simple containment dome would have either completely negated, or largely mitigated, the effects of the explosion.
It breaks my heart that so many people view this disaster as a reason to vilify nuclear power.
Thank for taking the time to research and produce this video!
I am not sure if the explosion could have been contained, not when the reactor top, control rods, and a third of the fuel were hurled a kilometer into the sky.
@@taraswertelecki9886 that’s what an actual containment building would have prevented or reduced
Give these guys any types of power plants other than boiling water on a pile of burning wood and they will doom it one way or another.
@@OrdinaryEXP never doubt a fool's ability to fuck something up
@@OrdinaryEXP I saw a movie where a hurricane hit a nuclear plant and got irradiated. Saw another one where it happened with a tornado. Those 2 documentaries scared me.
In April 1986 I was at University in London. Two of my social group were taking Degrees in Nuclear Engineering. On day after the accident they explained how the RBMK design had been studied on their course as the ultimate example of 'How not to design a Reactor'. There were so many good Teaching Points, practically every aspect of the design (or every aspect then known in the West) allowed the lecturer to say 'This is bad because ...'
"What if it explodes ?"
"It won't because comrade Stalin spirit is protecting us"
Yeah... There is more advanced reactor designs, like PWR in Three Mile Island, or BWR in Fukushima. That's how you build reactors.
@@ДикинШмули reactor design doesn't really matter when the plant gets tsunami'd
@@Snipurss Sure... And placing emergency generators for powering cooling system in a basement under sea level is ingenious engineering decision.
@@ДикинШмули they put a 10 meter wall to protect the power plant
but the wave was 15 m high *sad engineer with budget restriction noises*
We all know about Chernobyl, but I love how deep you get into disasters like this. The technical aspects, the buildup and causes, the aftermath and everything in between. Thanks again for another thoroughly interesting video. I look forward to the next one(s).
Absolutely. I've watched many Chernobyl documentaries, this is the best one from a technical perspective.
Operator: "Anatoly, what do we do now?"
Dyatlov: "Pass..."
I'll get my lead lined rubber coat...
😂👍
Beautiful
I'd been trying to think of a Dyatlov Pass joke for some minutes, glad I wasn't the only one.
Blyatiful!
Why don't you buy your underpants from Ukraine? Because chernobyl fall off
Despite watching a zillion videos on this tragedy, as well as articles, and even movies, I still managed to learn several new things today. Love the depth and clarity!
thank you!
Me too, I’ve seen and read so much and it turns out I have a lot to still learn :)
My grandfather was a liquidator. He wasn't directly at the unit, but he was a part of a cleanup, as he was a soldier, and then he has, for the rest of his service, been a part of a guard that was controlling the exclusion zone
He was my icon of what a man should be, very organized, with strong will, always calm and collected
He didn't die from his radiation-connected diseases, but from coronavirus... I couldn't believe that the virus was what took him, and I miss him every day
Rest in peace, Viktor, we will always remember you
alternate title: how cutting costs in reactor design yeeted the lid of a reactor through the roof.
And it ain't even clickbait
Not shown: that lid weighed about 1000 tons
You must have stolen this from somewhere else in the comments. I've seen the same thing posted over a dozen times already, and you were not the first one.. Don't steal and plagiarize someone else's work, get creative and come up your own if you want attention.
@@davelowets no i thought of it on my own, didn't know other people had the same idea, sorry
The yeeted madr me laugh more than it should have.
What's crazy is that divers who went in after the meltdown are still alive and just live normal lives...
Correction: 2 are still alive
One of them died from a heart attack a few years ago..........
One of them works as a CEO of Energoatom, nuclear energy generating company
also the man who took the photo with the Elephant foot is still alive
@@cjwiffle4714 i still am sure not , if that picture is "real" . I have run across mentions that say it is a double exposure, or two pictures semi-imposed on each other some other way. Never investigated it fully myself yet.
Doing that , especially at that time, should have been fatal in days/hours.
@@chrisperrien7055 the man on that picture (that he made btw) is Artur Korneev. He is still alive at 71 years old and worked at chernobyl site since the accident and while the second sorcophagus was being built, teaching and instructing new workers. Times interviewed him in 2014 (if im not mistaken) and he is still mentioned here and there in our russian news.
I've probably watched 7 dozen Chernobyl docs over the years, but I am so very down for another if it's a Plainly Difficult doc.
Thank you!
@@PlainlyDifficultAs a navy nuke who was taught about chernobyl and had to learn reactor physics for my job as reactor operator, I really appreciate the research that was done to produce this video. I couldn't find anything inaccurate about the explanation of the physics even though it was put in semi-laymans terms. The only thing I caught that was missing was the fact that the xenon burnout also contributed heavily to the reactor power excursion. As soon as the reactor was brought critical again, the xenon burned away adding positive reactivity and it essentially created its own feedback loop in addition to the ones you discussed. Fantastic video and well informed which is why I enjoy your channel.
Kinda hard to cover it deeper... This was both comprehensive and concise. Outside of actual observed environmental impact, I think this is pretty much the entire story.
There are* only 81 documentaries about Chernobyl in existence (including this video) so I doubt it.
@@LoLFilmStudios are*
As someone who lives near a large nuclear power plant ( I live in the US ) the story of Pripyat and the Chernobyl plant has always captured me. God bless the firefighters and cleanup crews who lost their lives.
Just one? I guess you don't live in Charlotte, NC then!
Ours are a lot safer lol. This one is the nuclear equivalent of a trashcan fire.
@@RobinTheBot I’m from PA, where the 3 mile island plant is located, so while safer yes, my grandma got cancer because of the meltdown there
@@FilosophicalPharmer well my state had a reactor meltdown so state legislation is super iffy about it
@@stuglife5514 Understood! I was only a kid but I can remember talking about it in church that Sunday! It was a scary time.
It's insane that they kept operating Unit 3 until 2000.
To be fair, it was upgraded significantly.
Yea, rbmk is save... Unfortunlly after non soviet upgrade xD
@@zerghydralisk1837 The bad capitalists disabled the explode mode.
@@u.v.s.5583 true
Greedy (USSR)...
In the mid 1990's our company (in the US) employed a few contract electrical engineers to do a controls system upgrade. I was supervising the team and one of the engineers (his name was Igor) was a former Chernobyl electrical engineer (not involved with the incident in any way). He had emigrated to the US a few years later and we picked him up for a few months to do some PLC (industrial controller) programming. His approach to process control safety was horrifying; I had to say NO! NO! NO! to so many of his ideas that would of put on systems in a perilous state of functionality. Even after saying NO! I would have to to back and check his programming and many times I found that we went ahead and did these crazy-unsafe things anyway. I was not in a position of removing him from the project (my manager has that authority) but yet I was responsible for his work. It gave me a low level of PTSD from dealing with him constantly. I was not surprised that dangerous and catastrophic things happened in the USSR with this being the quality of the safety culture there at that time.
Your grammar tells me you've never held any position of authority... unless of course English is not your first language. Please clarify.
@@paulcunnane4 Their grammar is more then acceptable, Fuck are you on about ya weirdo?
@@paulcunnane4 Maybe the issue is on your end, that was an entirely comprehensible paragraph.
I had an older Russian software engineer on the team. He got fired for exactly this kind of stuff.
Younger Russians aren't much better, though. I've caught one uploading internal documents to Google Docs - he wasn't stealing them, just going around safety measures.
I can tell that your low level PTSD has caused you to consume high levels of alcohol, the terrible grammar was a dead give away. I hope you recover. By the way, cool story.
Good explaination of this insane tragedy.
Some notes from Dyatlov's book on it (take those with a grain of salt, he himself even said that):
-Nowhere in the documentation was it stated that the violation of the ORM would turn the scram system into an explosion initiator.
-There was no instrument in the control room to monitor the ORM as it wasn't just a sum of lengths of the control rods and depended on the shape of the neutron field. It was calculated both periodically and on demand by a (rather slow) computer installed in another room, which took about 10 minutes, and its output was only printed on paper and had to be hand delivered to the control room.
-The shutdown wasn't a response to the power increase, rather was a delayed by a few seconds part of the testing procedure. While the opposite is stated in the verdict of the USSR court, he claims that even on the graphs taken from the control room said increase could only be noticed using a magnifying glass.
-The method by which the void coefficient was calculated by the plant's department was cooked and post explosion investigations came up with a dramatically different number. Not only that, but the reactor as installed was in the configuration that its chief designer called "uncontrollable" in one memo.This relates to percentage of uranium enrichment (lower than recommended) and absence of those short control rods at the bottom. Worse still, the ORM limit (at the time of the disaster only 15, not 28) was put in space only after the Leningrad incident, further demonstrating the issues with the design.
-The reactor had to be built in accordance with rules about safety and Dyatlov argues that dozens of those rules were broken. Of course, he wasn't given the chance to prove that during his trial.
Thank you!
There is a long interview to Dyatlov on YT
It's not just his book either, if I remember rightly one of the later IAEA reports said that the USSR had lied to them about the existence of operating procedures that were meant to stop an incident like this, that in fact those supposed operating procedures were made up after the fact, and that misleading information had made it into earlier reports in the series. I think it may have taken the fall of the USSR for this information to come out as well.
Moreover, according to Dyatlov, the RBMK reactros were already working, unknowingly for their operators, in conditions that the same RBMK Chief Designer, N A Dollezha, considered incontrollable. Infact, with 2% enrichment of the fuel, special absorbers should have been inserted into the channels to contrast positive void coefficient at low power levels. In reality the commercial RBMK worked with 2% fuel enrichment, no special absorbers, and none of the operators even knew that those absorbers should have been present.
It's typically Soviet. The chief designer states that, if made in a certain way, the reactor is safe and can rise power from any energy level.
The designers of the plant remove safety measures (maybe simply implying that low enrichment fuel would not have been used), but mantain the statement that the reactor is safe and can rise power from any energy level.
The operators only know that the reactor is safe and can rise power from any energy level.
As far as I know there are short control rods at the bottom, but they weren't connected with the AZ system back then. Fun fact: the reactor was supposed to undergo maintance after the test and the shutdown, and one part of it was connecting those short control rods to the AZ system, which as I read somewhere, would have probably prevented the disaster.
"Put the new RBMK reactors in Chernobyl comrade."
"We aren't going to build a prototype first to make sure it works?"
"We'll do it LIVE!"
"It'll be fine, just don't build it in Russia I hear Ukraine is expendable"
@@Jabarri74 they built the first one in leningrad, which has literally been russia's capitol at various points in history.
A fellow Christian
@@gingernutpreacher :)
Please don't get that feeling of smugness because you don't live in Russia. Your government doesn't give a shit about you, whatever country you live in. CIA testing LSD on citizens, our own UK government testing chemical & biological weapons on army "volunteers". And lets not even get started on how companies are willing to kill people for a quick buck.
"A brief history of"
40 minute video
props to you
Thank you!
In fairness, given the decades long (with no end in sight) run its had as a storyline in history... 40 minutes is damn concise 🤣
@@MadScientist267 IIRC, there's a twitter account with regular updates as to how much cleanup is left at Chernobyl. Last time I checked, I think they had gotten it down to something like only 99.999994782% cleanup left to go.
Trust me, this vid is a masterpiece of clear explanation of a very complex failure
@@FilosophicalPharmer And tepco started off by saying 20 years they would have it all cleaned up. Yeah right good luck with that one. And they have the ocean to deal with and all the cooling water flowing into It since 2011. Too bad GE didn’t listen to those 3 engineers. We’ll to be fair they did but said we’ll if we do x then that’ll kill the nuclear side of GE. Profit over life once again wonder how many 10s of thousands of cases of cancer will come out of this one?
It is quite impressive how you take a difficult and complicated issue like this and explain it so clearly! Appreciate you doing this.
I've watched a lot of documentaries about this and this is the first time I've ever heard what the test actually was and why they were doing it.
Then you haven't watched any good ones.
Even this video omits that it was in fact a proficiency test, a prerequisite for officially considering the 4th reactor (and entire plant), complete with staff, ready for use.
Plainly difficult uploads 40 min vid with a disaster rating of 10
My brain: click it. Click it now.
😬😬
@PlainlyDifficult isn't this like the only 10 you've done so far?
@@Rammstein0963. I'm pretty sure that Fukushima scored a 10 as well. I was kind of expecting this one to be an 11.
@Mp Cops Fukushima was worse? The total radiation released was a fraction of that released from Chernobyl.
That just means your brain is operating properly.
I remember back when the history channel provided content for actual learning.. They went in on the liquidators and the man chosen to lead those poor heroic bastards in the rooftop cleanup. Mad respect for their sacrifice.
Well, gotta pay the bills. So they put on the content that brings in viewers. Which can be...less than educational.
There are stories that some of the liquidators would trade tags that had been on the roof with those that had not yet gone up there. men sacrificing themselves willingly to save others. they are heros.
@@trinalgalaxy5943 there's also stories that there were people who "forgot" to check tags to let people serious about reducing risk to others, too! Those guys are honestly the first people we should remember when we hear "Chernobyl". They knew it was probably going to be lethal, and they were willing to do this so others wouldn't.
@@trinalgalaxy5943 Reminds me of a scene in the Battlestar Galactica episode "The Passage" (I think): a pilot secretly swapped radiation monitor tags from another pilot, absorbing a lethal dose.
@@ironhead2008 disasters have a way of boiling everything away and leaving us with the best and the worst of humanity.
I went to the store this morning and bought snacks because i knew this was coming and here we go!
I hope you enjoy it!
@@PlainlyDifficult I indeed did enjoy! Thank you for making these, your channel is excellent!
So did I!
I remember a party in Östersund just a week or so before the disaster. There was a sami girl who was included in a family clan owning a lot of reindeers, she was kind of rich. After the accident these reindeers meat was forbidden to sell for human consumtion because och the cesium downfall that occured on the area the animals feeded on.
Free reindeer meat all around!!!! 🤣
@@yankees29 I think it's actually called Rudolph meat because "you would even say it glows".
I remember that whole herds of reindeers were clubbed. It was horrible.
Theres a breed of dogs that live in that area. They're really pretty dogs actually, they're all okay though they've been there the whole time nothing weird happened to them, I'm not Chinese so I wouldn't eat one but I'd pet one for sure. They're call pupyats. I'd like to adopt one maybe but they don't have really long life spans but I think that's because they're wild dogs and just hangout in the abandoned buildings
One of the interesting stories about the world learning of the disaster was at a nuclear power plant in Norway (Forsmark).
It was standard procedure for employees leaving the plant to walk through radiation detectors to ensure they weren't contaminated with radioactive material on them. The alarms began to go off during a shift change, so they immediately began tracking down the source of contamination within the plant.
Eventually, they realized there was no leak at the plant, but they still had employees leaving the plant who were contaminated. So, they tested employees _entering_ the plant and found they were contaminated as well. It was one of the first indications somewhere in the world, there has been a major release of radioactive material.
Forsmark is in Sweden, not Norway but we are close neigbours.
Thank you for being a decent human being and not calling him all sorts of things about being wrong and just letting him know he was so!
I remember that the USSR didn't say a word for days what happened there and that Westerners recognized a lot of radioactivity in the air and assumed it must be an ultimate MCU somewhere in the East. Scary times. Didn't know it was at another nuclear power plant in Sweden.
That is one of the worst ways to find out!
"Um,Jimmy,you seem to have a bunch of radio active materials on you,where have you been going lately?"🫤
I was in high school when this happened. I remember it being a big deal, but because the Soviets kept so much from the western press it was only after the fall of the Soviet did the true scale of the disaster became known.
Damn you're old
@@keepmymindpreoccupied2892 youll be too
@@keepmymindpreoccupied2892 That's not "old". Your just a young puppy, that's all.
@@davelowets no no no sir i am the big bad dog 😎💪
“There is no war in ba sing se”
Soviet government: *there is no radiation in Prypyat*
Half this comment section: "there is naught to regulate as human decency exists"
Was wondering when you'd finally have an event with a rating of 10. No surprise it's Chernobyl. I can't believe it's been 35 years!
Oh, this madlad DID go ahead and release it one day ahead of the 35-year anniversary, didn’t he?
gods...im old...
@@AshenTechDotCom I doubt this will help, but I was surprised at how recent this disaster was (born in 2003). It always seemed like it was one of those things that happened forever ago, maybe in the 60s or 70s
I’m sure you'll never see this but I wanted to thank you for supporting those with OCD. I came across this video solely out of curiosity surrounding disasters when I saw the fundraiser.
A lot of people don’t view OCD as the debilitating mental illness it is. I’ve even had people tell me I should be thankful I have OCD since it’s a “productive” mental illness, as if there’s even such a thing. It’s exhausting and stressful constantly tracking obsessions and always performing compulsions for fear of having a panic attack if you don’t.
Excellent video, you’ve definitely gained a subscriber!
+1 for this. I don't have OCD but I do know something of debilitating mental illnesses and their mischaracterisation and it's so sad how people don't understand just how badly they can affect people. Whenever I hear someone say that something "messes with my OCD" I gently correct them; they're usually referring to something not being tidy or something trivial like that, so I remind them that *actual* OCD is way worse than just getting irritated at mess.
I've been FASCINATED by the Chernobyl disaster for years. My father worked on some of the first nuclear powered subs & I distinctly remember hearing the broadcast of the disaster as a child. I had a basic idea of what happened but when i attempted to research more it all went over my head. Your video is the first time I could truly understand the mechanics behind what happened! Thanks so much for the animations & well written explanation of the mechanics behind the core criticality...subscribed & eagerly waiting for the next in series. (Also, I think it's amazing you're doing a deep dive into the people that put themselves at risk & possibly faced a slow, painful death due to radiation poisoning.)
"I saw a playlist with other videos."
"No you didn't."
You're delusional. Go to the infirmary.
YOU DIDN'T BECAUSE IT'S NOT THERE!
YOU DIDDANT! Because it's not there.
b e c a u s e i t ' s n o t t h e r e
you DIDN'T, BECAUSE IT'S NOT THERE!
23:37 "And as such, the blatant evidence to the opposite was ignored."
If ever anyone wondered why mental gymnastics such as doublespeak and doublethink are so dangerous
Or as any ordinary man would call it, hypocrisy.
@@sintheemptyone8108 This is beyond hypocrisy. A hypocrite would see you imprisoned for smoking weed while halfway through a blunt. This is next level, an emotional wall ringfencing a set of beliefs (regardless of evidence). The basis of all ideologies, of which organised religions have historically been the most egregious examples.
As such, the time stamp is probably referring to something else, you might want to fix it.
@@233kosta so like the people rioting for years on end, being encouraged, even during a pandemic, burning, looting and murdering people, and the media saying its "peaceful protest" and safe, to be encouraged, but, peaceful anti-lockdown or gun-rights protesters, standing around talking and being...genuinely peaceful... thats a danger to society...
the people i know who believe and back those views..are.... genuinely worrying if not frightening...
like a friend of ours whos sister went off the deep end after 2 years away at uni... from a nice, normal, happy girl, to having half her head shaved, and hating all white people, shes white and her family is white... lecturing them about white privilage and how its wrong for their family to own land and a home when so many people cannot own land or a home.
she started to lecture me about biological sex being a lie, but then couldnt actually justify that with science, just emotion... the whole family had a meeting when she was away for the day over thanks giving and... she wasnt going back, if she did, it would be her own back the debt would fall on... she tried to go back but, was smart enough to recognize that getting a degree that wouldnt let her pay off the loan sshe would need to get it, would be really fucking stupid...rather then admit this she went crazy on her parents with "friends" encouragement... shes better now... last time he took me to their place for a visit, her hair is growing back in on her head, and, she started shaving her legs again..(admitted the itching hadnt stopped the whole time she had stopped but she was assured it would... and she would be much healthier and happier as a harry woman... shes realized how insane she was for getting sucked into that culture... has no intent to go back, infact shes loving taking classes locally and online, says part of what let them get their claws into her so easy was the fact she moved like 6+hrs from home(her dad drives fast...so for most of us add a couple hours...), no local support and all these people pushing her to join their cult...
she keeps having to block people on fb because the crazies who were the core/leaders/dictators of that group keep using alts to harass her on facebook, when they found out she mostly used minds they started calling her a nazi.. she was upset at first..but.. well.. when i read the shit they were saying and rather then what she expected, started laughing and "wow, talk about desprate, attacking a woman for leaving your cult and finding, shes much happier not hating herself and everybody else..." (more...but she took her laptop and typed out a modified version... i told her.. "want to post a video of me saying it?" she loved that idea... i said it my own way... omg the fuckers tried to get me kicked off SSI over it.. thankfully the gal at SSI did a quick review, got a few medical records, then when i mentioned they said they would get me kicked off ssi, and told them who to look for..the gal was able to find them fast... and... the best part... the idiots had posted screenshots of their reports against me.... AND AUDIO OF THEM CALLING, then talking about how screwed i was... so.. yeah... my acct now has to have a note warning of facebook fgts making false reports that im not a gimpy mofo...
i genuinely hate this world/society we live in...
@@sintheemptyone8108 I call it deception (which includes self-deception)
THIS IS THE BIG ONE FOLKS WE"VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!!!
I keep coming back to this episode because it's so well made. It's an absolute joy to watch. Your entire channel is amazing, so much effort put into research and explaining the little details.
I have watched a lot of videos on Chernobyl, but this one is simply a level above the rest. The explanation of the causes of the incident is so clear but also detailed. Very well done.
Last time I was this early, Anatoly Dyatlov was still working on submarines.
And he still had a son
No he was still on the toilet
Interestingly, the Chernobyl plant continued to run the other reactors after the disaster, with the last one being shut down in 2000.
Ukraine needed power, and the other reactors had safe, post soviet uppgrades
They operated the older units (1&2) for a few years' more but they kept the significantly upgraded unit 3 rolling until 2000.
This video series has been fantastically detailed about the Chernobyl disaster. You've been going much more in depth than a lot of other channels have done and it's fantastic.
I just love that you posted this on the 35th anniversary of the disaster. Excellent video, as usual! Possibly your best so far.
My family was involved in a relief effort for the long term sufferers of the chernobyl disaster, I was around 10 or 11 years old at the time. In around 2006/2007, people living in the still irradiated parts of Ukraine would come and spend a few weeks of time living in the UK and other parts of Europe. Just a few weeks of clean air, food and better living conditions was said to increase their expected lifespan by several years.
I still remember the family that came to live with us, a mother and 2 kids, one a little younger than me and one was closer to 5 or 6. I became good friends with the kids despite them not speaking a word of english and the mother would cook and clean for us every day to help say thank you.
It's been around 15 years since they came and went and I dont remember their names or really their faces, but I still think about them sometimes and wonder what happened to them. They may have even returned to the UK in the wake of the war with Russia, but I doubt I'll ever see them again.
Contact the charity/whoever ran the relief effort? It would be fantastic to get back in touch.
Or they got blowed up by a missile attack or a fab 500 or a drunk driver.
13:15 I thought you weren't going to mention xenon poisoning. I'm glad I was wrong!
😬
Anatoly Dyatlov? If he’s related to the Dyatlov pass guy... *begins to craft tin foil hat*
😂😂
Wrong Dyatlov, the hiker got *[REDACTED]*
Ominous Russian Introduction: "Meet your new team leader, Mr. Dyatlov".
@@Tindometari yea if that happened I’d just quit whatever job; it would end in disaster for sure 🤣
But seriously, are they related or is Dyatlov just a common last name in Russia?
It was inevitable that you would cover chernobyl
😂😂
It had to be done!
@@PlainlyDifficult
A real sarcophagus of a video.
@@PlainlyDifficult You give hints, that this will be 2 parts, if not 3 or 4 . I see 3 at least. This disaster has been with us 40 years or so, and is still going on.
@@chrisperrien7055 No, you didn't see three. You didn't see three BECAUSE IT'S NOT THERE!
@@thedungeondelver Love your Avatar , D&D/TSR in 1978, I remember it well .
Imagine this guy talks about the meteor that ends the dinosaurs.
"I'll rate this 11 on my disaster scale."
as someone who suffers from severe ocd, i am so happy you are bringing awareness through this channel! thank you
40 minutes and it's a 10 on the disaster scale!! Omg I am a pretty early commenter and so glad to see this one!!!
I hope you enjoy it!
@@PlainlyDifficult ITS AWESOME
@@PlainlyDifficult loved it thanks
Moral of the story: Don't let chefs operate your nuclear power plant.
Or operate on your body!
One needs to understand, that the RBMK is a military reactor as well, as it can produce weapon grade plutonium which is why the whole refueling during operation is for really.
No wonder they fucked up
Thanks John! Your Plainly Difficult series on this disaster is excellent. I lived only 45 miles from Three Mile Island at the time of it's meltdown. Scary stuff indeed!
I'm also super grateful you gave a full description of a full system cycle and the total theory of its operation. Fantastic video.
"This thing cannot blow up!"
_Thing blows up_
*Surprised Pikachu management face*
😂
Really glad to see another update on Chernobyl and RBMK. It's a personal topic of interest and I'm so glad I can support a channel that expands on why these events happened while also teaching me new things in other topics. Do you think you'll be diving into the more detailed information on the Liquidators and recovery efforts as part of the series? While the basics of the efforts are often covered briefly I feel like there are a lot more details about the actions taken I'd love to know more about in regards to the construction of the sarcophagus and debris cleanup as well as the ultimately un-needed tunnel digging that were only glossed over in older documentaries.
when I first found this channel I was like, “Where’s Chernobyl!?!” my life is now complete.
I like the history of the day I was born, yep, I was literally born the day it happened.
@@monad_tcp As is the nature of the world we live in, even in death. There is life
"...and 800 tons of Dolomite."
Fuck yeah, Rudy Ray Moore is going to kick the shit out of that radiation!
Ha ha ha 😂
One key thing that is rarely mentioned in any of these documentaries is that in the USSR/Russia (unlike in the West) nuclear reactors do not have a containment vessel. The reactor has shielding around it but no concrete containment vessel. This meant that the explosion, once it occurred, allowed radioactive material and gasses to immediately escape into the open air. The arrogant Russians thought their RBMK reactor flawless - no accident could happen. The Three Mile Island reactor did have a containment vessel and therefore there was extremely limited release of radioactivity.
Also, the TMI wasn't nearly as bad as the media made it out to be. And a far *_far_* cry from Chernobyl.
I can’t believe it... you finally delivered! And it’s 40 minutes! Brilliant 😄
I only reason I waited an hour after upload was because I had to ride a motorbike to work... And I seriously considered watching while riding. That how much I've been looking forward to this.
Glad you opted for the safer option! 😬
We wouldn't want Mr. Difficult to have to do a short documentary on you! 😬
Stay safe out there!
Vroom vroom
Interesting Comrade, very interesting
Not great, not terrible.
There. I said it.
How did I know someone would be acting like a Russia
What happened at Chernobyl was pretty much multiple iterations of what always happens in any totalitarian structure (from families all the way to Governments):
- Something is run a certain, well tested way
- Someone with some sort (but not full) knowledge of the stuff he is talking about, has an idea on how to make the thing more efficient
- The leader (with no knowledge of said stuff) is absolutely in favor, because more efficiency means more profit
- The people who have full knowledge of the topic are to scared to speak out against it, because the leader already chose the direction and disagreement would lead to being fired.
In Chernobyl we had it with the RBMK Reactor itself (suggestion to use "badly" enriched Uranium, and to balance it out, use a massive graphite block and regular water), with the always postponed safety test, with the running the reactor critically low for hours to fulfill energy quotas, and finally with the decision to not shutdown the reactor for 24h, when the energy output fell.
It's funny, I've been obsessed with Chernobyl, I've always heard they were doing a test on the reactor but never heard exactly what the test was test was trying to prove a theory about the reactor in a total power failure thus putting it in a dangerous power failure situation.
Hey man I just wanna say I’ve been following your videos for years now, and that you’ve kinda worked your way up to Chernobyl and produced such a great video, alongside crossing over 1/4 million subs is like a landmark for your channel I think. Thanks for all the videos man!
The rush to get snacks and a cuppa upon discovering how long this beauty is, was well faster than that reactor cover plate expulsion (no need for the infirmary, Comrades👌🏻)
I've watched dozens of different documentaries on Chernobyl and watched the HBO mini-series but I will never refuse a new video about Chernobyl -- it is just that fascinating. Thanks for making!
what’s the title name of the HBO mini series?
When you go to shut down an automobile, you typically release the accelerator, brake to a stop, take the transmission out of gear, actuate the emergency brake, and turn off the keys.
If you then need to move it a few feet, the safest way is to reverse the above process.
If you're feeling bold... and in a hurry... and you aren't an engineer, qualified properly... (just like Dyatlov)...you might leave the emergency brake on...
...rev the engine to redline rpms...
...and use the footbrake, on top of the parking brake, to control forward speed.
The iodine well was the emergency brake. Those simply do not go away today, period.
Removing almost all control rods was like flooring the gas.
The few remaining control rods were the footbrake.
The operators had a tiger by the tail, and they knew it. This was not a 1000 MW core at 30 MW. This was a big hot rod, screaming thunder, barely held in check, and they KNEW the tachometer was "lying" to them.
The instant it got away from them, they knew the core was gone. The knew the refuelling blocks were jumpIng up and down in the channels BEFORE it blew. Those detonations were the speedometer hitting 150, after the brakes were ripped clean off the wheels.
Dyatlov ordered them to cool the core, and they did, even though the core was now a crater.
Dyatlov was the kind of guy who rose to mediocrity by ignoring rules, and gettting boxes checked... till a box he didn't really understand enforced simple math upon him.
He did not believe the core was undamaged, or even still in place. He HOPED it was, and gave commensurate orders, because he knew those huge explosions had his name on them, in an unforgiving empire.
The rest kept quiet, followed orders, and counted minutes till they could escape the invisible... giant... they had let out of its cage.
They all had watched, earlier this same shift, when Dyatov fired the chief operator for voicing exactly these objections.
Worst consequence of Chernobyl for humanity : rejection of nuclear power in general.
This has been the best balanced documentary on the technical reasons for the accident and the aftermath.
Been looking forward to this video for a long time. Thank you Plainlydifficult
Same
Hope you enjoyed it!
@@PlainlyDifficult I certainly did enjoy it. I’ve been enjoying the videos you do. Keep up the fantastic work
By far the best video about Chernobyl you can find on You Tube
Hats off to you my friend- this is a wonderfully well-researched and well-produced video. I will do a deep dive on your stuff, i will!
Thank you!!
This video is fantastic. I searched for a long time for a detailed amd longer than 10 minutes video of the chernobyl reactors like this one. Thank you so much. 🖖
Giving a whole new meaning to "Raise the roof".
People: Chernobyl is proof that nuclear power is dangerous
no, it is proof that designs like RBMK are dangerous
Bad designs and bad management are dangerous, nuclear power as a whole is very safe. As is evident from the many active plants in America(like the Limerick plant in Pennsylvania)
Nuclear power is only dangerous when flawed designs are used and/or are put in the hands of bad management (especially with the culture of the soviets where you were better off to cover things up instead of being safe and reporting faults)
And unsurprisingly most if not all major disasters can be traced back to flawed designs, proceedure or safety advice being ignored, cheap shortcuts being taken, and/or bad management (though even in the major disasters it killed suprisingly few people for the size of the areas that were effected and left abandoned, like it gets a lot of attention because of the massive areas of land that get marked as exclusion zones due to radiation risk in the aftermath but honestly there are other things that i think are much worse)
Otherwise nuclear power and in particular modern designs are actually quite safe and far cleaner than coal could ever hope to be
And even more important, incompetence and unquestionable authority, in the way that communism worked, is dangerous! It leads not only to deaths, but also to mega-disasters like this, that distroy the planet and keep on killing!
@@purpleldv966 that’s true. A mature leadership that is willing to accept criticism is also important for vital infrastructure such as this.
@@dustinm2717 Or when the insane is just so unlikely that it can never happen... Until it does.
Fukushima has a glowing beer for you...
What is often missed in describing this accident is that the experiment was performed only because they *knew* that the station design was not robust to station blackout. The reactor design was bad, but the over-all systems design of the power station was criminal. It should never have been permitted to operate at all.
the reactor design was risky, but i wouldnt call it bad. they built lots of them and they ultimately worked fine, once the bugs were cleared out. the problem is when you get bureaucrats and bureaucracies to manage complex machines. like the space shuttle, for example. when the accident happened, most people on site were inexperienced, they did what they were told to do.
Thanks for covering this John. I was in Europe at the time as a young boy, to you and everyone else believe you me that we were very afraid of the outcome and the dangers after the incident. Remember this is before the internet era, zero to no access to scientific research, not to mention mother USSR was very suspect and hush hush so we didn’t know what to expect in the Mediterranean. Picture millions in fear, we had no clue what to expect in the aftermath.
may everyone who died trying to control this situation rest in peace.
THE MAGIC 10!
I've only heard Legends of such a thing
Should have waited for 2 days to publish on the 35th anniversary.
Awesome video!
Last time I was this early, it was reported as only 3.6 Roentgen
Please...no more...I can't endure these dead memes.
3.6 roentgen? Mmh. Not great, not terrible. Call the fire brigade, comrade
@@Dany94256 Stop! It's already dead!
I was having fun for once... Sure, no problem.
The equivalent of a Chest X-ray
Thanks. Fascinating. I am recovering from a stroke. Anything that I can follow/ understand is wonderful.
Thank you! I hope you get well soon!
Hope you’re recovering quick and staying safe. :)
I don't think anyone living in the nearby settlements at the time will forget how ridiculously long it took the Soviet bureaucracy to let people in the nearby areas know that there was a nuclear disaster. Even Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, that's less than a hundred kilometers away was not informed despite its sizable population. Even nearly four decades later, I doubt anyone will forget how those in charge put their personal pride ahead of basic decency and the safety of so many.
Despite my having watched many hours of documentaries, films and TV programs about this incident in the past, there was quite a bit of new detail here for me, thanks!
That's gonna be interesting!
Especially considering two big Ukrainian channels also published their videos on Chornobyl today, so I'm fascinated to see the differences in perspective.
Can you put up a link?
@@rustyshackleford3649 ruclips.net/video/MUoo0BSGjjg/видео.html and
ruclips.net/video/_QzmI4GiMDo/видео.html
Both are only in Ukrainian.
Update: I see Chaplynsky added English subtitles, so those are available, if you're interested.
ah, i love when a GREAT channel that thinks BRIEF is 40 minutes.
time to relax :)
Glad you enjoy it!
@@PlainlyDifficult still watching it lol...fantastic work! i wish i could donate and not be a leech but i have a disabled elderly mom to take care of and im perpetually broke. :(
one of the most interesting topics I have ever come across in my lifetime. Glad you did a video over this
Superb video, John. And it being part of a series, I can only look forward to the upcoming follow-ups.
If you're born 1986 in Europe, you have this healthy green glow in the dark!
Who needs lamps and flashlights?
@PD thanks mate, I've been waiting so long for this one!
I was born in 1982, I was just about old enough to remember the news at the time talking about the radioactive dust cloud blowing towards the UK.
My cousins in Germany and Austria told me the playgrounds were closed for some time, mushrooms and some sensitive plants couldn't be eaten anymore..
Stuff like that happened.
In fact wild game and mushrooms were cjecked for radiation until the early 90s.
What measures were taken in your place?
@@astroboy3291 I’m born in 1985 and here in the north of Sweden we “emergency” slaughtered over 100.000 reindeers due to high levels of radiation. It was a huge blow to our natives the Sami people who many makes a living owning and selling reindeer meat.
@@astroboy3291 I’m pretty sure that sheep were slaughtered and milk was disposed of. There was probably more going on that I can’t remember.
I was born 1979 in Hungary, this disaster was the (final) reason for my family to emigrate to Germany.
Really looking forward to the ‘well there’s your problem’ crew to tackle this one,
To be honest, I usually blame it all on "because Communism"--mainly because of the paranoid working environment fostered by the Soviet culture.
But as the video shows, there was a whole chain of bad decisions that led to the disaster.
And with this we learned that longer videos are fine.
More than fine
Isaac Arthur has been doing 30+ minute videos for a couple of years now, with no loss of viewership
@@kdarkwynde That was a tongue in cheek joke. Anyway he prefers shorter videos with extreme focus on the causes of the accidents (which is fine, too) but I really enjoyed how this video went really deep into the details of this particular case in a way you will have a hard time finding more detailed accounts. Of course this case deserves all the special attention it got.
Off topic from the video, but, I really appreciate fundraiser for OCD. As someone who struggles with it I am relieved that it’s not entirely forgotten/ignored by everyone and that people believe it’s a serious problem. I appreciate and respect this RUclipsr and what he’s doing.
There is nothing like testing on production :D. Also very good video, many details I have not heard anywhere before. Waiting for next parts! Keep up the good work!
40 minutes of Plainly Difficult and Glowing Head RBMK and I am here for it!
I hope you enjoy it!
Big key thing to understand why it went wrong is to realise that a moderator makes the reaction increase .
Yes, it's an essential point to keep in mind. Without the moderator the neutrons are "too fast" to be caught by the fissionable nuclei, and just fly by them so to speak. The moderator slows them down, which allows them to be absorbed and initiate fission.
"Oh man God you know nuclear waste is in there!?! Why would you want to visit it??"
Me "thats hot"
YES MATE! it's on my bucket list (close to the top actually). Slightly pissed off with the NSC though, it ruins the view. :(
@@EscapeMCP kinda important so we don't have another disaster or radiation leak tho
I visited Chernobyl in February 2020, unforgettable experience I recommend highly
One thing that was truly highlighted by this entire channel is not that people shouldn't prioritise cost over safety but that things that are mandatory to ensure safety shouldn't be as costly.