Nuclear Engineer Reacts to HBO's Chernobyl Episode 4: The Happiness of All Mankind
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- You can watch the Chernobyl Series on HBO.
Radiation Dose Chart: www.fastcompany.com/1663509/i...
IAEA Chernobyl Deaths: www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus...
UN Chernobyl Death Study Results: @/dev2539.doc.htm
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0:13: I say “a few”, but I only talk about the burials in this video. I got way more questions about the death toll and I was originally going to put the answers in this video, but I moved that to Episode 5, as that episode talks more about the death toll.
You can watch my reaction to Episode 5 now on my support page: ko-fi.com/tfolsenuclear
You sort of talked about it yourself, but it is not possible to just do a regular currency conversion with inflation for the Ruble of the USSR in 1986. Since prices were fixed by the State, the buying power of 800 Rubles was much greater than the simple currency conversion accounts for.
What do you think about the indie video game "Liquidators" ? Yes its free on steam
@@iKvetch558to put it in perspective, the average salary (at the time) was 200 rubles per month.. 400 would be 2 months worth, every year, for the life of their families.. luckily they lived though and got to work and supposedly enjoy that money.. even though it's hard to say if the ussr honored it after they fell 9 years later
With regards to the 3 men from SL-1 who were buried in lead coffins, it was very much a necessity. It was not due to any contamination concern, it was because their bodies, clothes and, personal effects had themselves become radioactive due to the massive neutron flux exposure during the accident. The bodies were giving off a noticeable dose rate, even after decontamination. Scientists were able to get a fairly accurate estimate of the dose received by each man by measuring just how activated various pieces of their effects had become.
To the best of my limited understanding, the whole "the baby absorbed the radiation" thing was what they actually believed at the time, so it was left in because it was historically accurate, even though it's obviously not scientifically accurate. Same with other outlandish figures, such as the possible "2-4 megaton" explosion if the water tanks weren't drained before the meltdown reached them.
what was the actual explosion potential from the water tanks ?
The pregnant lady story was part of a documented series of stories that came out of Russia. I think you’re right - the explanation for the baby was simplified at the time, but considering that she had been near the blast and had lived in the immediate area for several days after, that most likely contributed.
@@xellestarprobably a couple of tons of TNT. Maybe 100 tons at the most.
They make it sound like there is a chance of a fusion reaction, but the fissile material has around 4000 degrees celcius, which isn't nearly enough to cause a fusion reaction.
The medical stuff, including Khomyuk's thingy about the radiation killing the baby instead of the mother, came from real misinformation and superstition that spread unchecked (and still does). So it's not scientifically accurate, but it is historically accurate in that sense. I assumed Khomyuk would trust what a doctor or nurse says about a medical issue, though it seems like nuclear engineers call this one out in real life, so she should be able to as well. But there was, for example, a survivor of Hiroshima who claimed breastfeeding her baby caused the baby to suck all the radiation out of her.
Yes, he’s finally doing another episode of the Chernobyl series! Can’t wait to see you pick apart episode 5. That will be good fun.
Fun fact, the roofs were named after general Tarakanov’s daughters (or nieces). And these are the actual names used for the three roof sections. The dose rates are quite accurate as well, as are the timespans of the people that were sent up the roof. The guy up on the roof in the scene does have a detector. It was put on him moments before the crew gets sent out the hole. He’s wearing a primitive headset, if you watch closely you can actually see the meter hanging off his side in a leather case. It is a DP-5, the standard military issue meter the Soviets used at the time. The “suit of armour” he is wearing is historically accurate. There are pictures of the real liquidators, and the makers of this series are frighteningly accurate with their depiction of the equipment used. I have a book from Igor Kostin, a photographer that went up on the roof with them multiple times, with very clear and detailed pictures of the cleanup. That’s why I know they depicted it correctly.
The “egg baskets” are actually historically accurate. The liquidators even had a saying; “Cover your balls with lead if you want to be a father…” And helicopter pilots lined their seats with lead sheets to try mitigate the dose coming from below when they flew over the reactor.
The German robot wasn’t borrowed. They bought it at a high price, and it did fail quite fast. It got hung up on debris, humans had to go out on multiple occasions to go and rescue it. Eventually, it succumbed to the radiation field. And yes, the robot’s name was “Joker”. The makers of the series actually built a full-scale replica for this scene from the original blueprints.
There are five podcasts, one for each episode. Craig Mazin goes into great detail about how and why they portrayed certain things the way they did. It has to do with what the people in the Soviet Union knew and believed at the time. For example, one very persistent tale was that vodka would aid in rinsing radionuclides from your body. That’s why you see people drink all the time.
My apologies for the long-winded reply😅
You should react to River Monster’s episode where Jeremy Wade is fishing in the cooling ponds at Chernobyl. He catches a pretty interesting fish
One possible explanation for the "the baby absorbed it instead" issue is that the show consistently conflates radiation and radiological contamination.
Strontium 90 was one of the more significant constituents of the contamination from Chernobyl. It's chemically similar to Calcium, and during pregnancy Calcium is leeched from the mother's body to build the fetus's skeleton.
As I understand it, the health effects of having Sr 90 in your bones tend to be limited to the bones themselves - typically leukemia and bone cancer. So presumably bone is dense enough to reliably stop beta particles emitted by Sr 90.
So, hypothetically, if a pregnant woman received a dangerous dose of Sr 90, it could all be concentrated in the baby's bones rather than her own, with the effects of the radiation confined to the baby's bones. If so, she would be protected at the baby's expense.
Yeah, this was something that I'd been considering as well. Radium is also a 'bone seeker' that the body treats like calcium. And Plutonium is a bone seeker, but not due to calcium similarities. A fetus is of necessity growing bones faster than the mother, so a larger percentage of any unbound bone seekers would get concentrated in the fetus than bind to the mother's skeleton.
About the people that were asked to clean the roof. If I recall correctly they got the choice: 90 seconds of roof cleaning or serving 2 years in the war in Afghanistan.
You remember correctly😊 Since most of them didn't know the first thing about radiation, they thought they'd picked the "easier" job. Little did they know...
Not at all ,the roof cleaners were mostly volunteers
Oh boy...episode 4...this is pretty much the toughest episode to watch for almost everyone.
Something that does not often get mentioned is that many of the men who went out onto those incredibly radioactive roof sections actually volunteered to go back out more than once in order to save others from having to be "biorobots". Also, that huge revelation that the Soviet State knew about the fatal flaw in the shutdown system and both covered it up and did nothing to fix it, all the while lying to even the plant operators about the safety of the RBMK reactors, is something that could only happen in a totalitarian state like the USSR...where there is no free press or free scientific establishment for whistleblowers to talk to when they know about wrongdoing by the State.👍
Also even though many volunteered to go more than once, 40,000 of them died within a decade and about 112000 of them died by 2005..19 years after the accident. Many of those were still young and attributed to radiation. These numbers come from nih.gov and the liquidator unions of Ukraine
this needs more views, considering how many people watched the show and took it at face value with the exaggerations it makes
The RBMK reactor was kept secret in large part because it was a military operation designed to enrich nuclear fuel for use in weaponry. We in the US have similar designs, but the different is we've always had a strict line between our military weapons programs and our civilian power programs. I don't think the scientists working in the cleanup were denied access to information in this way (after all, they did eventually figure out what happened more or less) but in any event, the people actually operating the plants need to have access to accurate information in order to operate the plant without error. Regardless of what you're doing, that has to be true. It wasn't in Chernobyl and that (in a lot of people's opinions) greatly contributed to the accident and to the flaws in the RBMK reactor's design not being corrected earlier.
Regarding the minute and a half on the roof: the workers did have protective clothing and the protective clothing each one used was discarded after use. That would reduce the dose somewhat. There's a persistent rumor that the government forces provided no protection to the roof workers or that the roof workers provided their own, but I don't believe that's true. It was improvised (cut out of building protection material) but it was officially provided and all there was that they could provide. Not like the soldiers, themselves, had significant quantities of lead laying around. It's a little difficult to trust the USSR on this but the liquidators are not believed to have suffered a particularly high casualty rate related to radiation in any event.
While the show glosses over it, they actually sent people out with dosimeters to various areas of the roof to ensure that people cleaning this or that area wouldn't receive too much of a dose. So they were quite careful to make sure that everyone's exposure would be as controlled as they could possibly make it, first measuring the trips and only after confirming the dose levels would they send the soldiers up to do the work.
We have footage of the actual people who cleaned the roof--including their makeshift lead armor--and the show did a pretty good job of replicating that.
Interesting, i didn't have as much to say about this episode. I suspect that'll change for the next one!
I'm really linking your commentary, it's always good to know about the wrong information from someone with knowledge about the subject. Awesome work!
I know it’s not scientific accurate show, but everything you heard in this show was 100% accurate to the time. Everything they say was believed to be true. But this is not about being accurate to reality, this is about the what people went trough in this accident. You are right about the inaccuracies, if you want to know about the choices made in the show, you should watch the podcast about the making and the story they wanted to tell.
Personally, the choice of depicting the world this way makes a lot of sense and stay true to the era and help us understand the fear and terror felt by the people that lived it, their confusion, their doubts, their struggles, as well as some sparks of heroism. These peoples, whoever they were, deserve to be remember as well as what they gave for it.
The scientists did not believe there could have been a 2 megaton explosion at chernobyl. If you read the transcription of Legasov's tapes, he actually states that very clearly. They also didn't believe a fetus could protect a pregnant womman from radiation. And the nurses didnt believe the patients were dangerous to visitors, they knew that the protections were for the patients themselves.
""Everything was believed to be true" maybe by the general population, maybe that's what eventually turned into urban legends. But the scientists and engineers were very aware of what was going on
The one thing that I must say is that, the liquidators on the roof do actually show them having Geiger counters on them specifically a DP-5A or DP-5B
Great reviews, overall and thanks for mentioning again the burrials. I honestly really think that the approach to the radiation poisoning victms in the series was not to further "spread" the rumour that people who were exposed to high doses of radiation are now contagious but that, at the time, this was believed due to the poor understanding of radiation in the general public and secretism of the USSR, and thus that the victims were improperly deemed dangerous to other individuals and the point was to represent this misconception of the time.
Thanks, I appreciate it!
what I liked about this series was the tone of it
Had nightmares of some of your videos. Obviously very relieved when I wake up. It's almost like a rebirth. lol
Hello - Gen X here, I was in junior high when this happened. I’ve since been obsessed with reading about it, because there are so many more elements to the story that we heard here in the U.S. The thing that I liked about HBO’s take was the behind the scenes after each episode, where they kind of did their own mythbusting, explaining what was historically documented and what they fictionalized for pacing and dramatic effect. They go over a lot of what you talk about in these episodes.
I’d be interested in what you thought of Silkwood and the actual story behind it. There’s a react video! 😄
Also Sam O’Nella’s “History of Sushi” video talks about nukes briefly so it seems only responsible for you to fact check it for us lol
12:10 in the scene before where they are gearing up to go onto the roof you can see they actually were giving some device that includes something that goes over their ears which is presumably a geiger muller counter
love your videos
The megaton explosion size is an over estimate and not very important.
but
The toxicity of the fallout from the explosion blasting contaminated shit into the atmosphere..... Will be much much more than the fallout from a megaton bomb
great insights !
Thanks!
The Russians also buried the victims of the K19 sub and the dead from the Misha in incidents were also buried exactly like that. Wood box in a zinc coffin covered in concrete. I also the the dead from the cesium exposure from the junk yard in South America were also buried like this.
Fear is strong
6:29 Even though you might be exposed to more radiation wearing a respirator but wouldn't the prevention of radioactive particles entering the lungs outweigh the initial exposure time limit ?
Yes, but that isn't the issue in his example. That's only a concern if you are in an area with a lot of radionuclides that are in the air, and more-so ones that are bioactive (e.g. iodine-131). You wouldn't be worried about something like that if you were retrieving a small, self-contained source of something like Co-60, or moving a neutron-activated material from a reactor into a cask if you cooked it too long. Alpha sources are the greatest concern because of their potential to ionize atoms. This potential is what makes them more dangerous than beta, gamma, or even neutron sources.
To put that to use: your exposure is limited by factors such as dose for each type of radiation, potential for airborne radionuclides, shielding, ventilation, etc. In a controlled environment like a research or power reactor, there are very few airborne radionuclides (compared to outside) for very good reason. So, you could have dose rate limits for each type of radiation in an air sample, and different limits for contained-sources. It could take you longer to do something wearing a cumbersome respirator than it would without one.
I could do task X in 5m20s without a respirator or 9m55s with one. Let's say that my air sample showed a dose rate that gave me a non-respirator limit of 6 minutes and a respirator time limit of 10 minutes. These times are for both whole body dose and potential absorption of radionuclides: immediate plus long-term whole body doses. I could do the job without a respirator with 40 seconds to spare, compared to the 5 second buffer with a respirator. I've given myself 8 times greater of a buffer without a respirator. I absorbed a smaller immediate whole body dose and traded it for a gradual amount of longer-term doses. In the end, I would have an overall smaller cumulative and/or peak dose because of the trade. I'd take 500 now and 500 more over the next couple of months rather than 1000 now.
... sorry, got hyperfocused on the question cause I've got this fun bout of RSV and can't sleep.
you know what's funny, if the pregnant worker was standing on top of mount Everest (even when an oxygen mask and tank), she and her baby would be more at risk of a higher dose of radiation, then just standing a few feet from dry casks of used fuel rods, so yeah that lady sure is proving a point of how safe those casks are.
Being bit late to party, but living not that far from places in show and having some folk stories from this time I must say that whatever soldiers said and did is how it was understood by general population. It was really popular rumor/belief that alcohol helps to "remove radiation from body" and them having lead on their balls is rooted in some rational source, but they are not professionals. "Radioactive animals" is from same level of understanding. So it is quite realistic to see them talk this way, but as you correctly mentioned, it is not how it precisely works in real life.
Years ago, I actually worked with a guy that at the time of the accident was in Russia. He had friends that were among the 90 seconds liquidators. His friends all died according to him. Assuming he told me the truth, I do not know if they were included in the officially counted deaths. According to him they died few weeks after the roof work. They also were also given large doses of alcohol during the process. Again this is a second hand info so the accuracy is somewhat questionable.
And one more detail. According to him, they were all volunteers, and they were well aware of the danger.
i think you are right, but the baby thing, imagine if you replaced the baby with a lead ball, ignoring its weight and all that, ofc its going to reduce her dose a little bit, so if you are close to a leathal dose it could matter hypothetically, but yeah he was cleaned up so the dose she got was probably not that high anyway. but yeah a tissue that is expendable does act as a shielding for important tissues, like skin with alpha. its cold to call a baby expendable, but you know what i mean i think. maybe its a stretch to say it could have has any effect on the hypothetical here. anyway a dude who has been exposed to radiation like that but then had his clothes removed and his skin washed and so on wont be that radioactive, their clothes still are since they dumped them in the basement and since everyone left nobody ever cleaned them up, but his deathbed probably wasnt such a dangerous source, probably not good for the baby but.
Here is a horrifying human fact about Masha. a lot of the people sent up there were young men. so what a number of the older guys did was go up. do their 2 minutes, and then trade tags with someone that was going to go up there. effectively sacrificing themselves to get the job done and save the lives of many that would have otherwise gone onto that hellish roof...
we know a lot more about nuclear power today than in 1986. in my mind i reconcile the inaccurate stuff in the show as lack of knowledge at that point in time. as for the led coffin's for my own peace of mind i would prefer them even tho you say it is unnecessary.
@14:00
they actually have real footage of the liquidators clearing the roof from a guy with a camera on the roof like this so, that part is realistic. the clicking not so much... but i give that a pass for artistic license.
its on youtube if you look for it
Well m8 its our universe. Think about it, you cant see it, you cant feel it and its killing you. Ofc ppl started makin stuff up.
Day 24 of asking if Mr Folse likes beans even though he already answered
I would say Mr Folse is agnostic on beans. I am his mom, so I would know!!! 😊