A Nuclear Disaster's Deadliest Detail
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- Опубликовано: 17 май 2024
- I explored the Fukushima Exclusion Zone for 10 days in the April of 2023. While I was there I learned about the critical similarities and differences between the recent meltdowns in Japan and Chernobyl, and how to identify the deadliest aspect of a large-scale nuclear disaster. This is Part 2 of [EXPEDITION FUKUSHIMA].
Watch the rest of the series here: • [EXPEDITION FUKUSHIMA]
00:00 Intro
00:44 Fuel and Fallout
05:27 Fractioning
11:47 Clean-up
16:38 Was it worth it?
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*Thanks for watching.*
CORRECTION: I may have made it seem like fission was still occurring inside Fukushima's damaged reactors. However, all reactors were successfully shut down. What melted the fuel was the "decay heat" of the fuel and fission products that is normally continuously removed by water on the pathway towards a full "cold shutdown."
This is Part 2 of [EXPEDITION FUKUSHIMA]. Watch the rest of the series here: ruclips.net/p/PLNg1m3Od-GgMPVYirAZxNPxKzug89tBqE
Thank you for your efforts and this content!
You are epic!
Wouldn't jamming control rods into the ground every couple of feet speed up the nuclear decay? If necessary, replace the rods every so often.
@@insanemakaioshin In a word no.. whilst the motivation to do something about the contamination is laudable reactor control rods simply moderate neutrons in nuclear reactions since there is no nuclear reaction going on and the radiation comes from nuclear decay it cannot be ‘moderated’ by neutron capture.
@kylehill When are you gonna cover what Union Carbide did to Bhopal, if ever?
My teacher once told us that half knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge at all. I thank you for filling the knowledge gap of the society about nuclear power and what it brings with it.
I often refer to that phenomenon as knowing just enough to get yourself into trouble
Dunning-Kruger all over again. Read it up if your unfamiliar.
I wonder how many lives have been lost due to things such as environmental activists in Germany... The push to close down nuclear plants, based largely on fear and a lack of knowledge has increased the country's dependency on coal which is iirc the most deadly source of energy by a longshot... This means that green activism in Germany has indirectly caused numerous unnecessary deaths...
Knowledge is half the battle. The other half is understanding.
I’ve never heard it put that way but that’s absolutely right.
As bad as Chernobyl was, the greatest damage it caused was to the public’s perception of nuclear power.
yup, and now germany has gone back to coal wich is extremely polluting even more than nuclear.
And more radioactive, ironically.
@@leschatssuperstars1741don't care. Global warming is a myth anyways so why use something that could make a large portion of the earth uninhabitable for centuries? Germany has the right idea.
@@trielt1 Coal might emit more radioactivity than nuclear when the nuclear plant is intact and contained, but the nature of fallout after a nuclear plant is destroyed is far worse. We don't have exclusion zones for nuclear contamination of the environment around coal plants.
A little before the 16 minute mark in the video, he talks about how and were nuclear contamination concentrates within the environment. He talks about runoff and the composition of the world, both natural and artificial, and how wild animals within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have contamination concentrating within their bodies. and how concrete, through runoff, appears to be a significant sponge for absorbing nuclear contamination. The problem is that this directly contradicts his other assertions about the safety of nuclear power, given that humans tend to be surrounded by the sorts of materials that act as nuclear sponges, and often tend to do things like manipulate the environment for things like gardening and farming.
I can agree with the assertions about the cost of the cleanup, but I don't agree with the premise that a cleanup can be less thorough, particularly for isotopes that the body might end up taking in and integrating into biological functions. This is a cost of nuclear power just as much as the carbon and other products of coal should be costs for coal power. The most troubling part is how few people are required to make mistakes to trigger a nuclear accident even when there isn't a natural disaster.
Humanity learned a lot from Chernobyl, but we didn't learn enough in order to prevent another disaster with another massive exclusion zone. The lessons of the two disasters were obviously not the same and neither were the causes, but how many more similar disasters with area effectively permanently denied to us do we have to suffer through to learn everything we need to know to prevent more of those disasters? I don't really want to find out if I'm honest.
ive watched a chernobyl documentary, and the reason behind it was (you guessed it) stupid decision after stupid decision. the engineers turned off the safety measures THEMSELVES to reach maximum power. surprise the surprise the core meltet the pathway for control rods so that the rods couldnt get in anymore
also the teacher said that powerplants today are missileproof too. yes, you can damage some of the outer stuff, but thats it. critical areas stay intact
"Hot particles in your area" is a notification that merits far more attention than one might assume.
Thank you, I have a cyberpunk RED game that takes place in Night City where the nuke went off and I'm gonna use that joke (even though a briefcase nuke isn't as bad as a nuclear reactor meltdown)
The words: "burning graphite" continue to send shivers down my spine more than 35 years later. It encapsulates just how catastrophic the situation was, having burning chunks of a reactor core scattered throughout the area.
Neutron activation was why the graphite was emitting 20,000 Rads an hour of radiation, enough to kill with a few minutes exposure to it. The burning of this material enabled the spread of radiation far and wide.
The problem was that the Soviets cheapened out by using graphite and by not building containment buildings, and then denied there was a problem even when their badly designed reactor exploded
@@bfth121 They kept the existence of those design flaws from the operators, which led to fatal mistakes on their part.
@@taras3702are you serious?
Lol Russia like, Sucks sucks. The US sucks, but damn…
@@robwilson5238 I am deadly serious, the operators were deliberately kept in the dark about the lurking danger in ALL of those RMBK-1000 reactors. There were incidents and near misses that were hushed up before the explosion at Chernobyl. Had they known about the design flaw in the control rods, they would have avoided the accident in the first place. The frightening aspect of these reactors was that the failure of just a few of the fuel channels was enough to be catastrophic. Five fuel channels rupturing was what caused the first explosion that flung the 1,000 ton reactor top a kilometer into the air along with the control rods, the second explosion was hydrogen igniting when oxygen, hydrogen and white hot graphite came into contact with one another. The blasts tore the building and the reactor apart, but enough nuclear fuel and graphite remained in the reactor vessel for an runaway chain reaction to continue. As the graphite burned, the fuel melted and turned into a 3,300 degree Centigrade blob of molten corium that is now solidified in the bottom levels of the destroyed reactor building. More radioactivity than hundreds of nuclear explosions at ground level escaped into the environment as a result.
Kyle Hill always makes me want to learn more about nuclear stuff whenever he release a a new video
I was always interested in nuclear stuff, and i was really happy when i found him talking so much about it. Most yt channels don't go that indepth or easy for the public to understand.
Like by warching his video for example?
Yeah, but his obsession with his hair is a little much...
As a bald man I'm jealous.
And getting a counter to myself.
The fact that a particule the size of a few grains of salt can max out Geiger counter readings like that is fascinating and terrifying.
Yeah. Fuel is no joke.
Terrifying as shit
Yep…that’s what the fission neutron flux does to the fuel. Brand new fuel rods are much less “hot”
"Off scale" is a a terrifying phrase for a Geiger counter.
For my bathroom scale, it's a daily occurrence.
Depends on the scale of the Geiger counter...
Remember the scene from the Tschernobyl series:
It's not 2 Röntgens/h it's 15000.
The 2 Röntgens/h hour where the maximum the readily available device could measure at the Tschernobyl disaster, only later they took a reading with a device which could measure the real value.
Quick note about something you said at 0:54. A nuclear reactor does not need to be in a critical state to meltdown. In fact, I'm pretty sure the reactors at Fukushima shut themselves down when the earthquake started. However, the fission products (some of which have short half-lives) continue to release energy into the system even after the reactor is make sub-critical by control rods. This extra energy released after shutdown is why emergency cooling systems are needed to keep a core cool even after a reactor shutdown.
I correct this in the pinned comment, thank you
@@kylehill you lied to this dude 😂
I cannot thank you enough for making straightforward, well written, not overly dramatic or clickbait-y videos that thoroughly cover a topic in a way that lets me thoroughly understand them
"Could misunderstanding (...) of a nuclear meltdown be more harmful than the meltdown itself?" As a German, I can answer that very easily. We got completely out of nuclear energy because of it. We practically extended (and for a while maybe even ramped up) electricity production with fossile fuels for decades because of it. Yey.
Probably the deadliest consequence of Fukushima. And it hit far from Japan.
Our politicians refer to it as a "high risk technology"
...the term "high risk" is meaningless if there is no other risk to compare it to.
@@frtzkng Coal is the real high risk technology. At least if you consider body counts.
I tried brushing the hair off my screen that is your avitar, so thanks for that.
Also who funded the antinuclear hysteria? Here in the US it was shell companies like Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, NRDC, Friends of the Earth, etc. They were happy to take cash from Exxon, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.
After I edited this, I tried blowing the same "hair" off my screen.
And the same (neoliberal) politicians stomped the tax investemnts and subsidisations for renewable energies.
According to the 2008 UNSCEAR report available online, a typical Chernobyl hot particle has a diameter of around 6 microns and contains 100-1000 becquerels (decay events per second) of Plutonium isotopes, along with the other usual fission products. The dose from inhaling that much Plutonium could be around 50 mSv, similar to the yearly dose limit for a radiation worker. However, that dose would be spread out over the rest of your natural life, given the long half-lives involved.
However, the speck Kyle's group found is obviously much larger than 6 microns. If we assume that it weight the same as a grain of sand (0.004 grams), then it could contain over 70,000 Bq of Plutonium. Worst case scenario puts the dose from inhaling that speck in the thousands of mSv. Certainly enough to cause localized burns of whatever lung tissue it ends up in contact with.
This is the only real reason that parts of the Zone will be considered uninhabitable for millennia. In 300 years when the Cesium and Strontium is gone, it won't be unsafe to go there, but things like agriculture and excavation will be fraught with risks.
If you inhale one, you can inhale 3 or 10 more in the same day...one can be much larger than average and it will stay forever. Sometimes you can make a mistake and it's ok, sometimes that one mistake can be with you forever. I work in radiation safety
@@rudibaroni88Im under the impression that even a small amount of such material is still more than enough to cause cancer.
@@BriarLeaf00 it's not that obvious, long term events are hard to track but you can increase your chances by few %
@@BriarLeaf00 poison is in the dosis (Parcelsus), that means, it is not I'd want to snort a couple lines of Chernobyl Dust, but would go on a tour of the zone any day, (and that a mask like those for COVID should be enough on most cases)
@@partciudgam8478 Ive got a history of cancer in my family and would feel pretty unsafe without an appropriate mask and suit. And I certainly wouldn't want to live there or anywhere nearby.
I live within what I always was told the "fallout" radius of at least one or two nuclear power plants. I always understood this to mean that if Chernobyl were to happen here or some other catastrophic accident, that'd likely mean my family and I would be goners. While I knew US designs and processes were far safer than Soviet designs, until I watched your videos I didn't quite understand what any of that actually meant. Also, the danger of being near a nuclear power plant is minimal. Living in Metro Detroit, there are far more industrial chemical plants which probably are a far greater threat to my health than our nuclear plants ever could be.
I also grew up in a "fallout" radius, and then later worked at my local plant. It's mostly an emergency planning designation calculated on an observed (Chernobyl) and hypothetical worst-case scenario. In my case, it meant our municipal calendars included evacuation instructions, and the back page was a bright orange "WE HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED" sign we were to put in our front window on the way out in the case an evacuation was needed - so that the emergency teams wouldn't have to waste time searching an empty home and could move on to who needed to be made aware or assisted. Don't be scared; be prepared! :)
The mushrooms and the animals in my region are still radioactive due to Chernobyl. XD
What I almost always take away from these videos is that ignorance is a far more dangerous threat to our well-being than any amount of nuclear waste.
I have seen hot particles many times in Chernobyl and they're everywhere in the soil. That's what happens when you have a strong fire and dense smoke lifting tiny bits of the core into the atmosphere and then rain dumping them down onto the ground, washing them onto the soil off the non porous surfaces. Luckily they are widely spread enough not to be dangerous to humans over a short time but you can easily collect a few of them together in the space of a couple hours and you will see insanely high readings.
And you really don't want hot particles to stick to your clothes.
@@GodlikeIridium Or your skin...
Ask those Russian troops who dug trenches in the area around Chernobyl.
I'm going to idly wave the flag of "this is why US reactors have biological containment vessels".
One of the things people miss is that the design of the RBMK and western reactors is inherently different, with western designs making a Chernobyl like accident almost impossible, and Fukushima is, in fact, proof of that.
All your
Kyle, I love how you get people to think logically about this subject. It’s all too easy to be emotional when dealing with an unseen and potentially deadly monster, and maybe that monster is actually just blown out of proportion sometimes.
Studying this man-made horrors so they are no longer beyond my comprehension.
Whenever someone gripes "You can't see radiation", I reply that I can't see a common industrial pollutant gas, cyanide gas either, but it can be easily enough detected and protected against too.
@@spvillano Or CO2, which is killing people in a completely different way - by accelerating climate change.
I wish people saw the more visible and more easily seen monster that are burning fossil fuels. It's so disproportionate that it baffles me how a majority of people can have such massive misconceptions.
@@Juan_DeSantis Best answer tbh
Now we understand the dangers of radiation. Thanks Aquaman.
Underrated comment
About the porous concrete capturing a lot of irradiated particles - as a fish keeper it reminds me of the filter materials we use that is very porous so microscopic beneficial bacteria clings to it. There is a DIY method where you use several times boiled concrete as a filter medium.
The main reason for people dying in Fukusima wasnt the nuclear plant but rather the Tsunami waves and protectional walls that was too low to be useful.
People drowned in thousands but noone died because of the radiation.
As we will explore in Part 3
I believe it's estimated that about 2000 people died because of the unnecessary evacuation of especially elderly and ill people from hospitals due to essentially fear and misinformation when it comes to the dangers of radioactivity. Instead of sheltering in place, hospitals were evacuated in the middle of a natural disaster and it had a huge cost...
Also I think the japanese government has attributed a single death to radiation from Fukushima, although this is highly contested because the person died of lung cancer and it happened such a short time after the accident... So basically it doesn't really add up that this person would first of all develop lung cancer from radiation (not really the right type of cancer to come from nuclear fallout) and secondly that the cancer would progress so fast, more likely this person already had cancer and the accident had nothing to do with it...
1 worker died from the radiation. The Evacuation killed more people though.
@@kylehillcan you do a video about what properties would be need to make Cap's shield real?
Ok and? The disaster caused $500 billion in damage and ruined 150,000 lives. A disaster like this cannot be allowed to occur whether 0 people died or 10,000 people died.
I love that I know I will learn a great deal without being overwhelmed with terminology that goes over my head when watching these videos. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with all of us in understandable and “digestible” ways!
As someone who lives next too a nuclear power plant this was actually really reassuring.
Kyle has this air of confidence about him that lets you know he's very sure of his ability, (and dashing hair I must say) but he totally earns it by producing not just some of the best RUclips content, but independent scientific journalism overall, available today. Keep getting it done lad, big ups from Australia ✌🇦🇺
I love this video and all of this series. They are informative and so relaxing. No clickbait, no over dramatisation, just relaxing facts. I can watch this all day :)
NPC comment
Along with Chris Broad's video today about Fukushima, the exclusion zone, and its recovery, it's great to see more coverage of this and teach people about the truth of Fukushima, and not the seemingly overinflated fear mongering many western news sources tend to "cover".
14:09 I could have sworn he was going to quote Monsoon from Metal Gear Reveangencer.
I saw an old documentary on the Windscale nuclear reactor fire where one of the plant's nuclear physicists used this exact method to find a hot particle in his back garden prior to the accident, proving that the Windscale reactor was basically spewing radioactive particles across the surrounding area. If anyone is curious the doco is available on RUclips and is called Our Reactor is on Fire.
Most people still don’t know about Windscale which was very much almost Britain's Chernobyl long before Chernobyl was even built. To think that situation was avoided mainly thanks to one of the engineers climbing the coolant stack and manually aiming a hose pipe down it to cool the reactor. Just imagine how much containment he breathed in…
They don’t make ‘em like they used to as my mam would say.
Yes, well worth seeing.
Windscale was crazy.
I thought the filter on the chimney might have helped this problem.
It seems to have certainly helped when the main disaster happened.
The interesting thing I learned from that documentary is the reason for nuclear power is to have nuclear weapons.
It's the left over byproduct of generating nuclear power that makes the fissile material or whatever its called the stuff that makes the bombs go boom in a Nuclear way.
@@geniferteal4178 That may have been the case in the fifties, but today they prefer fuels that do not contribute to nuclear proliferation risks.
Great video! Every time I watch one of your videos it makes me more passionate about getting my degree in Nuclear Engineering
Incredible. Good luck with your studies!
I have something interesting to mention about the Chernobyl radiation radius. I remember from a book and from my parents about when Chernobyl happened, there was a heavy rainstorm in Estonia after a day or two from which a lot of people got sick out of the bloom. At that time news got to Estonia but as something we didn’t have to worry about. Maybe it was a coincidence (haven’t done any research about it) but it’s quite fascinating.
Also back in the day, Estonia was still a player for the CCCP team, cant imagine things there were any more liberal than they were in Finland, which took a ridiculously long time to officially inform their population that hanging out in the rains was a bloody bad idea.
this happened in Hiroshima too. it was part of why the death toll was so tremendous - more people died from contaminated water after the blast than who were caught in the fireball. all the debris that was vaporized into the atmosphere condensed into the clouds & rained back down as acrid, radioactive poison
the saying is "out of the blue" not "out of the bloom". its supposed to evoke the image of something falling from the sky, just, randomly
(/not mad, just wanted to mention 😊)
Thanks Kyle. I appreciate this series so far. I think most of the time you are 'preaching to the choir' for those of us who already follow and helping to further inform us or arm us with knowledge to inform our beloved near peers in our social circles. I hope your videos are discovered by new audience members every day!
man, it is trippy seeing you post this nuclear-related stuff so close to me doing my Radiation Protection Junior tests for my new job lol your information is very accurate and actually extremely closely related to what i'm studying for right now. Raising awareness on the subject is something I give you a lot of credit for and i hope you succeed in it.
Best of luck in your new work! Every rad tech deserves deep respect!
This ist why you're one of my top science youtubers, Kyle! Excellent video. I'm looking forward to see the rest of this series 🙂👍
7:21 Dosimeter has a psychological breakdown, thinks it is an F/A-18 Hornet, and realizes that it is way too close to the ground.
@@wnnaliscioov7376 Are you a bot? That sounds like the kind of thing a bot would say.
Maybe you are reacting to my post including military aircraft; let me trigger you more; AC-130. SR-72. Stealth hypersonic. Transverse subverse reverse. Reticulating splines.
I freaking love these videos! I just wish they came out more frequently. Though I can’t imagine how long it must take to make one of these videos. The quality is alway amazing and I would imagine it takes quite a while to make a video this detailed and informative. Superb job as always!
I wanted to take a moment and thank you for educating us in a manner that’s not “scare tactics” running for the hills levels of panic.
It is because of your videos that I am now in favor of nuclear power as a safe alternative to fossil fuels. I also think that politicians who are elected to power need to be better educated on nuclear power as does the public. The best way to beat fear is to expose the truth.
We shut down the remaining reactor at TMI in 2019, all due to it costing twice as much to run as to produce power by burning natural gas.
I live in Germany. Politicians and especially green party totally agree that nuclear power is bad. Now we use coal power plants...it's so dumb...unbelievable.
So yes, politicians need to be educated
Ditto! (: I grew up in the 80's & had these InSaNe fears of pretty much Everything "nuclear". I've had friends parents get numerous serious health problems & even die while or after working at a now-closed site here in Colorado because of issues this place had (which I learned later was The Problem, NOT just working where nuclear materials were used.) But after watching pretty much every Nuclear-related video of Kyle's & LEARNING LOADS... I am a staunch supporter of nuclear energy & find it maddening we don't use it more here in the U.S. as compared to some of the European countries. 🤨 As I understand it, the benefits would outweigh any 'potential' dangers to the public or environment, when managed correctly & responsibly.
As I learned in Nursing School - "Knowledge Is Power".
I agree we should go nuclear. However, because of the way contracts are awarded, it will always be built by the lowest bidder who will cut the most corners.
@@ferretyluv I can tell that you have zero experience with contract law and contractors.
Yes, some may indeed try to cut corners, which is against the contract and hence, a breach of contract. Get bad enough, it's a fundamental breach, which is not only fully recoverable for funding paid, but with punitive damages awarded as well.
With contracts comes contracting officers, to supervise the work and ensure that the contract is being obeyed.
Kyle, i never enjoyed a series as much as this about nuclear disasters, i really love the calmness and atmosphere of these videos, they are extremely relaxing yet make you think and inform you about a very important matter. I really hope this series is far from being over and i thank you once again for bringing such extraordinary documentaries to my attention
This video was amazing! I always love watching your vids covering nuclear power especially regarding past nuclear incidents. I've learned more about nuclear energy from your channel than I have anywhere else. If ever I have a question that's nuclear-related, I just pull up your channel and start from there!
These videos are what make me so assured about nuclear power.
I can't believe I can watch a video with such high production quality and well researched and presented content for free.
Thank you for your work in dispelling misconceptions surrounding these disasters. I look forward to the next and future episodes.
It's always nice to see how you're expanding your message and your platform. This was really well done.
I love when Science Thor talks nerdy. Today is a good day. 😁
I would argue that ignorance about an event is always more dangerous than the event itself.
Another outstanding video! Keep it up!
It’s impossible for me NOT to click on your thumbnails..
i dont think you understand how amazing it is to sit back and actually learn from your content in a manor that dosent feel so much as a lecture but feels like a questioning of our modern day techniques. i really do love this and truely wish you had a tv show i could binge, i find myself going back and forth on your content watching it over and over i truely love everything you do!
I had never considered that radioactive particulates would migrate and concentrate over time! 😯 Very cool video, you do an excellent job at conveying this information that's easy to understand. Always look forward to your videos, Kyle! 😁
I've thought of it like this on a very basic level - think of a river flood. Once the water flows away, you're left with bits of what was in the water at the location where you are, but it's not always that much overall. Now, go downstream. More and more particulates fall out leaving a tiny layer below the flowing water. Go downstream further where the river connects to a larger body of water, the river delta. All of the particulates that have built up came from upstream and concentrated there. Heavier bits fall out earlier, but the lighter bits fall out at the end and/or when there's a change in flow.
@@bobd2659 Yep, it's something that's obvious after it's pointed out. It reminds me a lot of prospecting for gold and how that moves through the environment
Kyle Hill's nuclear videos are my Roman empire
Bionerd23 found a few hot particles during her Chernobyl trips, and even took a fuel fragment home in a bag for gamma spectroscopy 🤣 I miss her channel... She also visited the basement of the hospital where the firefighters' clothes still are... That was a crazy video. all of their detectors and dosimeters were beeping like crazy, even her radiation detector watch. tens of millisieverts per hour. Still very radioactive many years later. Those firefighters didn't stand a chance.
Man Bionerd23. Now that's a nick name I haven't heard in a while. What's eerie is that her finding particles was her last video.
I'm slowly binging your videos and you are steadily and profoundly changing my perception of nuclear energy. I'm a to-be conservation biologist/resource ecologist but nuclear has been something I've avoided thinking "It could be amazing but the risk is far too high".... That assumption is changing. Thank you.
Another fantastic instalment. There are so many things I never even considered. I can't wait until the next one!
It's almost like knowing wtf you're doing instead of letting panicked regulators, activists and media telling you how things should be done makes things cheaper to deal with, less scary, safer and overall better off!
I have absolutely loved this journey you have been. Thanks for taking us along with you
I'm really happy with this series. More information about nuclear reaction and the historic dangers within is so lacking from public eye. Keep up the good work Kyle!
my understanding of nuclear things as an entire topic was very scarce before I watched these videos on the subject. I'm always glad when there's another one because it's not something that's talked about a lot, unfortunately.
HOW is your channel not at 10 million yet? Another excellent video Kyle.
I did some quick guestimation math based on estimates I found:
The rate(total/years since inception) of actual deaths caused by fossil fuels is 1.8x higher than the rate of harm caused by any nuclear tech ever(number of people ever negatively impacted ever/years since inception). That includes people who got negligible backround radiation from accidents, those who have a higher risk of cancer, and everyone in the cities bombed by nuclear weapons.
Everything this man makes is an educational gem. Thank you for your service, Kyle.
6:20 if you were really fractioning hot cesium particles in soil, you'd damn sure better have a good mask on.
This series is freaking fantastic. My uncle worked at the San Onofre nuclear plant in San Clemente and I've always had a fascination with all things nuclear, in fact my favorite book is Invisible Rays: A History of Radioactivity so this series is just made for me.
Some of the greatest content on RUclips!
Thanks for making.
I appreciate your willingness to actually go out there personally to educate the people on the risks (or lack thereof) regarding nuclear waste and fallout, Kyle.
I love this series Kyle! Keep up your great work educating all of us. You do an amazing job as a science educator!
Back in the day when I was in school (15+ years ago) I wrote and presented a report on the Chernobyl disaster. From how it happened, to its consequences. This report took the whole school year to write and ended up being over 100 pages long. I learned a lot, not just about nuclear energy and the actual happening of the incident but also energy economics and the politics involved since this report wasn't only on the disaster but also on its fallout so to say.
Your half-life series is fascinating and always highly informative. Yet, every time I watch your latest episode, I am surprised by how different the conclusions are that we draw from the information. While you, Kyle, have a positive outlook on nuclear energy and are convinced that it, at the very least, is our best shot at cheap and sustainable energy for decades to come until we figure out a better way. With every episode and every bit that I learn more about the topic I am increasingly convinced that we should shut down every nuclear power plant that is currently running until we figure out a better way. With better I don't mean non-nuclear, at least not necessarily. What I mean, is a better way of getting the energy stored in nuclear fuels. I am convinced that none of the current reactor types are sufficiently safe enough to justify running them. How do I come to that conclusion? What happens if one of the currently active nuclear power plants experiences a catastrophic accident? What would be the worst ->possible
Putting them deep deep underground already in a forever cask might be a good idea if there was no possibility of the radiation leaking into the surrounding areas
Without a magic radiation-be-gone machine I'm very skeptical of the future of nuclear power
That being said, about half the world population will be dead in 50 years of we don't start building more
Unfortunately, for many of the nuclear plant operating countries, there isnt any viable replacements. A lot of places have electricity consumption peaks when its dark, cold, and the winds are calm.
@@juslitor I can't come up with one that has this issue. Norway nearly exclusively is hydro power. Sweden still uses quite a bit nuclear but is quickly decommissioning it, the rest is wind and hydro. Denmark is 80+% wind and has no nuclear power. Finland is similar to Sweden and so is Canada. All of them going for renewable and decommissioning nuclear. Iceland is 100% renewable. Only far north country that doesn't fit the rule is Russia. China is going crazy with solar and wind. Seriously, look at the statistics for China and their expansion into solar and wind power, it's nuts, the graph is nearly vertical on a linear scale. Any country south of these will not run into a situation where wind and solar can't cover the needs. This has been widely researched and technologies are available to cover any low spots.
Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to consider countries as isolated entities here since all of Scandinavia has a connected electricity grid and the same goes for Central Europe and I would imagine that Canada and the US are also connected to each other. I honestly can't imagine a situation where the entirety of Europe is covered in such thick clouds that solar can't produce anything and the entire continent is also experiencing a dead calm. Even if that would happen there are currently major projects going on connecting Europe to North Africa to get better access to the already existing and still being expanded solar farms there. Those solar farms, once fully completed, can produce enough electricity to cover the demand for the entire world.
I urge you to update your knowledge regarding the "dark and calm" argument since that argument used to hold some weight but thanks to technology advancements and increased international cooperation no longer has any value. We have overcome that issue.
Now to the other point here. Beyond the fact that renewable energy production is already capable of covering any power needs that could come up they are also significantly cheaper to run. Nay, not just cheaper, they can be profitable. If you follow the topic of the energy crisis closely you have also seen the reports and studies that were released this year that covered the financial cost of building and running a nuclear power plant. Those reports and studies showed that without massive government subsidization no company would build or run such a plant because they are so prohibitively expensive.
Another issue whose lesson France is painfully learning, is the required cooling. France had to shut down many of their nuclear power plants for the second year in a row because the rivers supplying water for cooling ran dry. Considering that many of the major rivers in Europe are fed by glaciers that are quickly melting off, this issue will only get worse. The first time the Rhine ran dry the news was huge, this year the Rhine ran dry and while it made the news it wasn't "oh my god the Rhine ran dry" but more "as per usual Rhine shipping is at a standstill because the Rhine ran dry".
Beyond that there is also the CO2 footprint of nuclear energy, which is significant. Sure, the plant is clean during production. It's all water vapor after all but it would be disingenuous to only consider the CO2 production during operation. Considering construction, excavation, mining, enrichment, transport, storage etc. nuclear energy is anything but low emission. Sure, renewable energy production isn't CO2 neutral either, but it also doesn't come with a laundry list of issues one of them being a nuclear disaster.
Seriously, apart from Norway and their oil bought hydroelectrics.Neither sweden or Finland realistically can make do without nuclear power, if self sufficiency is the goal. Should there be a proper cold winter, the present day electricity production will prove insufficient, diesel gennies will be running all over scandiavia and fennoscandia. . Importing all electricity from abroad is a fallacy finland already did once with russia, not happening again. Finland presently has the third largest nuclear power plant in europe, and are planning another one, also talk about implementing small scale nuclear heating plants. To boil it down to cold hard facts, Winter = no sun, no wind. Going to be a long time before anything benefitting north european energy markets is built in africa, if ever. Solar and wind is fine for places where there is no real winter.@@ZeroKey92
@ZeroKey92 Every point I have been thinking about why we shouldn’t have nuclear power until we can absolutely 100% make sure an accident doesn’t happen we should shut every single one down. I agree with all of your points I don’t think it’s unreasonable but it’s unpopular with people who activate for nuclear power. We should also shut down any plane carrier ships or submarines that are nuclear power. We can’t know that a major hurricane that would knock out the power wouldn’t also knock out the generators too. What about a tornado happening right over a nuclear plant. Between human error and natural weather emergencies they will never be 100% safe. Thank you for making your post I hope more people see it. I had nightmares last night from watching the series about nuclear accidents he did. I’m thankful I have found atleast one person who sees it the way I do, that way I don’t feel completely alone.
What a great video man. It's rare for a youtube video to keep me completely locked in. That was so interesting and informative. Thank you.
16:36 dude stopping on an intersection with clear view that there are NO moving vehicles on all the intersecting roads just shows how much discipline JP people have and most others outside esp in my country (PH) dont.
Kyle, I would love to do this same survey using a Compton camera, which can allow you to see where the radiation is coming from and the isotopes present in each spot.
Always love a good thought provoking and educational video from RUclips's Science Thor!
This is great series you’re doing Kyle. A lot of the information you’re sharing I have never seen in any documentaries or literature about Chernobyl or Fukushima either. I especially found the part about the Chernobyl fission products being released in gaseous form from the melted fuel rods interesting.
Nuclear fear is like someone hitting you in a friendly way and you later come with a kevlar vest while chanting protective spells
I see Kyle, I click video. Easy, simple.
Educate me, Bearded Millennial Man!
To answer your question Kyle, at the time of the ordered evacuations the authorities most likely had no clue how bad the situation would get so moving everyone out was a massive err on the side of safety. But as always 10 years later hindsight IS 20/20.
Absolutely fascinating! Can't even believe how much interesting episodes you make on the topic.
Excellent work Kyle and let your staff and crew know that they're excellent work is appreciated by myself and the public 👍
Despite all you are doing may seem as an dangerous or dumb hobby, you are actually very important teacher. Teacher of the public, us "likes" , teaching us about the ionizing radioactivity, differentiating between real threats and rumors, and this, my friend, is something you are excellent at! :) Thanks to you, If I ever happened to be near some source, I can imidiately act accordingly without panic, or calm everybdy down if necessary. Yes, chances are small and hopefully close to zero for this happening to me, but still- I feel like it is important, yet often overlooked knowledge. Very well done sir!
Nuclear physicist has always been one of the dumber hobbies. It's like, do something productive with your time...
Dunno, seems there are more dangerous hobbies. Mountain climbing, spelunking, sky diving and scuba diving to name a few.
I think an evacuation in any of these scenarios is always a good idea as a precaution, until you got the scope of the situation? And if it indeed isnt as bad as expected. I mean...
Very interesting video as always. Always fascinated by this "invisible" force, since my radioactivity practical at highschool, where, next to seeing reflectivity and penetration of certain particles. I also got to see a cloud chamber with my own eyes. Absolutely amazing stuff. I think there is a lot of good to be found in this misunderstood world of unstable elements. We just need to be careful with it!
Hey, just wanted to drop a comment to say I really appreciate your video. They make learning interesting and your shows give me the vibe of some PBS shows I would love to watch after school. Keep being awesome!
This series has been so informative. Thank you Kyle.
Hey, Kyle. All of this talk about cleanup and remediation reminds me of something that’s close to home for me. If you haven’t already, you should look up Coldwater Creek in Florissant, MO, and environmental contamination from the Mallinckrodt Corporation’s role in refining uranium for the Manhattan Project. I would love to see your take on that issue.
Check out Hanford, WA and especially the Green Run of you really want to see how the US government feels about its people, too. They literally used my grandparents and their neighbours as lab rats without consent or warnings and purposely released a shitload of radiation to see if their radiation detection systems actually worked.
Hanford is still one of the most nuclear contaminated sites in the country. Probably always will be, considering the other stupid sh** that was done at this site . . .
I love your continued effort to show just how stupid unreasonable fear of nuclear power is. And learning new stuff always makes me happy, so it's a win-win.
Just found this channel today, I’m hooked! Great content 👍
All this documentary stuff you've been doing lately is really cool and very laudable. Thank you.
If a Golden Retriever were a person, it’s Kyle.
Less licking though
I will never get tired of this series
Great production value here and investigative journalism. Well done.
I've worked in the nuclear power industry for more than a decade and I still learn interesting stuff from these videos. These series are some of my favorite on RUclips. Keep up the good work!
Kyle holding it so close to his face at 7:44 genuinely makes me uncomfortable.
It's small chunk of Uranium ore, so it's a low concentration of actual uranium, which itself is actually not that dangerous in small quantities and is an Alpha emitter so the small amount of radiation coming off it would be blocked by skin.
You could hear just how few clicks he was getting from the Geiger Counter, so it's fine.
Corium was created many more times than you listed, especially in the Nuclear Reactor test facilities (mostly in Idaho). They were just much smaller test reactors, and usually did not involve major incidents (but not always, including one vivid incident including a loss of life). i learned about some of those test accidents during school to become a Nuclear Engineer.
Also, presumably less irradiated fuel. A lower burnup means a lower amount of radioactivity.
I find it fascinating that Thor is also so knowledgeable about radiation and fission products.
Once again maintaining the exacting and high standard that I've come to expect from this series. Tons of respect, you take so much care and time to explain everything and to use language that is both informative and logical and never, ever terrifying - and yet you also do not flinch away from how bad these disasters were and are.
Your challenge - I would have to say at least on the face of it, fear made too much impact on the decision making for Fukushima. I can understand why, I certainly don't blame anyone for being afraid of the fallout and all. Especially not with the overall understanding of just what it means for a reactor to fail, and all the partial information that floats around almost like a smog. Folks don't quite understand - just as you pointed out - what really has happened, is happening, will continue to happen, and that very fact frightens them more. Add in terms that they can't quite parse, fear tactics in the media (whether out of genuine misunderstanding and concern, or out of a desire to sell more papers/generate more clicks)... it's a nasty soup where human nature mixes with inconsistent information (and inconsistent quality of that information and its delivery). And there are more results than just fallout in the environment: the public perceptions of "nuclear reactors are super dangerous" has contributed to all manner of less-than-logical decision making. Has the cost of Fukushima been too high? Depends on how you want to do that math. If you count in all the ripple effects within the media, the culture? Then yeah there's still fallout of a whole other sort, isn't there - and the cleanup effort seems to be more about THAT, about repairing public attitude towards nuclear. Whether or not it's working - or worth the financial costs - well, that's highly debatable.
In a simpler world with simpler terms to deal with, I would say - no cost is too much if we're talking about sparing humans from suffering. But it's just not easy to answer that question, is it, not really, when we're dealing with huge complex systems that react to the disaster in huge and complex ways, over time scales that involve decades or even centuries. I've heard an engineer say that you have to draw a line SOMEWHERE on safety - you have to place a price on human life; if you don't, then there's no way anything's getting built, because you'll never be able to afford a 'perfectly safe' bridge or road - or nuclear reactor. You have to set limits on what's "reasonably safe," and unfortunately when media talks nuclear, reason is awful damn scarce.
And so once more I say: thank you, for being reasonable, logical, methodical, careful. You're an amazing explainer, you're doing a wonderful job with this series, and I very much look forward to the next installment.
Alot of people tend to think that Chernobyl was a complicated advanced reactor, it's not, the Soviets essentially made a big pile of radioactive shit, built a concrete (part of which was actually wood because the people building it didn't follow the prints) enclosure and ran some pipes to get steam out and water in.
It's the equivalent of driving a car with half working brakes, a blown head gasket, fuel leak, and backfiring. It's just a matter of time before it blows up.
It was most definitely a complicated reactor. The RBMK was dangerous primarily because it was so big that the Soviets were unable to adequately calculate the reactivity coefficients given the limited computing power available. The responsible choice would have been to start with a smaller, less powerful reactors (like they did with the VVER PWR) and then scale up. But this would have defeated the whole purpose of the RBMK, which was to RAPIDLY deploy nuclear power to free up oil resources for export. As it turned out, the graphite block dimensions were chosen poorly, leading to the positive power coefficient. If only the blocks have been slightly smaller, the reactor would have been unable to explode.
@@MinSredMash Compared to western standards it was not at all a complicated reactor, We spend many years designing precaution after precaution to prevent exactly this sort of scenario, overbuild reactor casings to withstand any external or internal threat. Instead of guestimating sizes because we don't have a computer good enough to calculate them we build a bigger computer. Instead of having a giant pile of poorly "enriched" uranium we build large, complicated centrifugal enrichment setups to produce fuel that's adequate to operate inside a much smaller core.
Yes the RBMK was meant to be a rapidly serviceable design, but that's came from the fact that it was built from the ground up to be as cheap and simple as possible. Building an actually reliable and safe nuclear plant requires an enormous amount of consideration about contingencies that were never even imagined by the soviet engineers, and this certainly wasn't helped by the soviet system that had filled them with propaganda that the RBMK could never melt down.
@@linuxguy1199 You seem to be using 'complicated' as a synonym for 'good,' which is a very non-Russian thing to do. By any number of objective metrics the RBMK was complex, especially when compared to something like a PWR. The RBMK quite was complicated in a bad way.
@@MinSredMash Haha, I'll concede with you, It was complicated but for all the wrong reasons!
Woo! I saw the alert!! And there's only one view on the video according to the app at the moment!
Amazing video as always, Kyle! I'm loving this series!
I adore this series and this video in particular. They are really soothing and educational. Just soothing facts without any dramatization or clickbait. I could watch this nonstop. :)
I’m always glad that I watched these videos after they’re over. They feel so…purely informative, like here are the facts you didn’t know that you were missing, or a side of the story you had never heard before.
Thanks for the video Kyle! :)
Well done. Kyle is so good at his job. I was interested the entire video.
I absolutely LOVED how you made understanding the whole process of discovering and detecting hot particles very easy to understand and the visual examples and demonstrations were very interesting and helpful might even be my favorite half life history yet!!
Hey Kyle. Thank you for your gentle tones you use during these videos. Easy to listen you when i cant watch well due to a corneal abrasion.
Also question. How many years do you reckon you've lost in your studies in nuclear physics from exposure?
Add me to the list of people who didn't know how fission byproducts escape from nuclear disasters. Such a good explanation! Thank you.
Nuclear power is so fascinating, with the correct narrator... Kyle makes the drama and overdramatization, something bearable and realistic.
Thanks for your videos Kyle!
Another great video. You break it down for the simple man and challenge our understanding! Thanks Kyle
First of all, great video as always. I really love this series. Second...killer boots man! But seriously, what boots are you wearing in this video? Been looking for a casual pair of roughout boots like yours appear to be.