"Why did we created them?" - Nuclear reactors are the most clean and sustainable form of energy available... if done correctly! I love this show, Chernobyl was terrible (and the show is very realistic, most character are based in real characters), it should be a lesson to never make the same mistakes again. But don't put the blame in nuclear energy, a Dam full of water can kill millions too if is built by a moron without safety measures. The problem with Chernobyl wasn't the fact it was nuclear.
@retronomix7392 My point is that nuclear energy is relatively safe. Nuclear reactor accidents are rare and they aren't that harmful nowadays. While fossil fuel power stations release harmful gas that is killing many people each year. It will be really effective if we replace fossil fuel with nuclear power until the only power source is renewable energy.
As much as people don’t want to admit it, nuclear energy is the closest thing we have to a clean constant sustainable power source. How a nuclear plant works, basically, is that you are controller a nuclear fission reaction to generate heat, to boil water, to create pressurized steam, to turn electric generators. We don’t get electricity from a nuclear reaction. This movie shows what happens when you don’t respect that power. Anti-nuclear people will go on and on about Chernobyl, and 3 Mile Island in the US and use that as their reason my nuclear should be banned. However, given the number of reactors operating around the world today, and the hundreds of nuclear power naval ship from countries all around the World, nuclear power is relatively safe. The amount of energy that can be released from a grapefruit size piece of nuclear material is astronomical compared to the energy in the same amount of coal. There have been FAR more deaths related to coal and coal mining than with nuclear power. And , if you gathered ALL the nuclear waste the US has created since the invention of nuclear power, you wouldn’t even fill a football (American football) field size area up. Nuclear reactors can run for decades without having to replace the fuel.
While I agree that nuclear power was the cleanest, most efficient power source when it was created. There has been a lot of advancement in wind, solar, and other clean energy sources in the past 70 years which has made nuclear power and the associated risks obsolete. It is entirely possible to power the entire world with green energy.
@@KngOfTheBlind Nuclear power is very much so green energy. Solar, wind, and hydro are better, but you need a LOT of those to match the capacity of a single nuclear plant, because nuclear reactors produce a huge amount of power in a relatively tiny footprint. I remember doing the math and figuring that you'd essentially need to replace the city of Chicago with a huge solar farm to make up for the power of a particular nuclear plant. Nuclear power is also a lot more reliable (It scales to demand, not to what the weather allows), so you need less overcapacity to ensure you always have enough to fit what you need, and you don't need to buffer power in front of it (Solar power needs help to run the grid at night, wind needs help on calm days, nuclear just keeps running). It's also much safer than is commonly perceived - Even counting Chernobyl and other disasters, nuclear power results in a very low number of deaths compared to other methods of generating power (closer to solar and wind than gas or coal). In addition, reactor design has improved tremendously - If you gave a modern reactor design the exact situation of the Chernobyl disaster, it'd just power off without much issue and never make international news or have its own Wikipedia article. In addition, some designs are made to be inherently safe - Even if the reactor is being controlled by absolute morons, the laws of physics prevent it from having a catastrophic failure (There is nothing you could do with the controls to cause the reactor to do anything worse than shut down). The biggest problems with nuclear power are the high cost of building a plant (thanks to all those safety measures and advanced design features that make it so safe) and the politics behind the word "nuclear".
@@ryanhodin5014 As a small edition to your excellent comment; the reactor used at Chernobyl is a uniquely Soviet design that would have never been able to get a licence outside the Soviet Union due to having no containment, a positive void coefficient (which becomes more pronounced at low power), the lack of redundancy in safety systems etc, not to mention being an inherently unstable design that was never designed to run at anything below half power. We have to have nuclear as a clean base-load backbone, solar/wind alone are not going to cut it because of their intermittency. And in Northern European countries the sun doesn't shine for months on end. How are they going to keep the lights on during these months? That's something a lot of people tend to forget. We simply do not have the battery capacity (nor can we build them due to simply not having enough rare minerals) to carry them through the winter without having something that provides a reliable base-load. Like you said, the current reactor generations are passively safe and extremely stable and reliable. They are a far cry from the reactor technology of yesteryear.
People who orate on this subject tend to take extreme positions, unfortunately. When considering a technology, you have to consider both the risk of something bad happening *and* the severity of what "something bad" means. People speaking out in opposition to nuclear power tend to emphasize the severity of what can happen without considering the low risk of it happening. You're guilty of the opposite extreme: emphasizing the low risk without giving enough attention to how bad an accident can be. *Both* of these variables must be considered for a reasoned perspective.
@@KngOfTheBlind wind and solar and good, but not realistic for the whole world. They are too dependent on their surroundings. They need to be supported by a stable baseline of electricity and the other green energy sources rise and dip depending on the demands needed from the grid.
Nuclear energy is actually very safe and when done properly virtually no one who lives near a nuclear plant will know its there. Its just this particular design of reactors in the show, as you'll learn later on in the show, was rather poor. Don't be scared away from nuclear energy because of this show, it's actually quite cool! Nevertheless this tragedy was still horrifying and completely avoidable.
Even when done properly, things can go wrong, natural disasters can take the most cautious and respected plant out causing a meltdown, they have done so, and there's still nuclear waste produced.
@@tobydion3009 nuclear reactors are still a way better future than any other form of energy production. If the planet wants to “go green” then the way forward is nuclear. Not solar or wind or hydro.
I mean except for the plants in japan after the earthquake. Sure it is rare but rare does not mean impossible and when the rare event happens that makes the plant fail that land is permanently unusable. Nuclear fission is not the cure to our energy problems. It is extremely volatile even under the most absurdly strict safety protocols there are.
@@jackdaniels9133 Agreed. We could just do wind power and it would be just as good of a solution without any of the potential catastrophic drawbacks of nuclear. But the rich NIMBYs don't want it because it obstructs the view from the back porch of their third vacation home, and the conspiracy nuts don't want it because of made-up illnesses that wind turbines supposedly cause.
@@jackdaniels9133 Including Chernobyl, nuclear power has killed multiple orders of magnitude fewer people per TWhr of energy generated than most fossil fuel sources, and is on the same level as hydro, solar, and wind but with much less land area needed
6:57 E=mc^2 is why we created them. The energy (E) contained within atoms is equal to their mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared. The speed of light is huge number (300000000 m/s^2) and squaring it is even bigger (90000000000000000 m^2/s^4). So multiply that by how much the reactor core weighs and you can power cities, counties, or even states - all without polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses. This show explains why this accident happened at Chernobyl. It wasn’t anything inherently wrong with nuclear energy, which is generally pretty safe as long as the engineering and science is sound.
Boron is a non metallic element and the only non-metal of the group 13 of the periodic table the elements. Boron is electron-deficient, possessing a vacant p-orbital. It has several forms, the most common of which is amorphous boron, a dark powder, unreactive to oxygen, water, acids and alkalis.
Nice video. I love how blissfully unaware you seem to be about what went on in the USSR overall. It was not too much unlike current day Russia or the Nazi regime in Germany during WWII. Anyone opposing the government or questioning its decisions will get arrested and exiled or killed (after some potentially gruesome interrogation takes place). In many cases this included their friends and family. KGB personnel and their informants were always monitoring such situations doing their best to stop any information leaks to the public and especially foreign countries. That's also why they spoke in code over the phone. I was born in an Eastern Bloc country, couple months after the disaster occurred. The first time "slight radiation increase" was mentioned in my country was one week before I was born. For roughly 7 weeks the people in my country were not told that this happened. Even after the media reported it, it was significantly downplayed. In fact my Mom heard about it few days after the explosion from radio Free Europe (American-backed station) listening to which was highly illegal and could get you in jail. If she waited for the official media to issue a statement, I might not have been born or might have had cancer or some other mutation...
I was born in probably the same country as you and around the same time (early July). I wouldn't say there was really a danger of us not being born, as most of the radiation cloud went in the direction of Scandinavia and we received relatively smaller doses here. Though it's indeed true that we're high on the list of affected countries, for the simple reason that our communist regime was the USSR's closest ally/puppet and there were indeed no precautions taken to protect the population until long after the notorious May manifestations and radioactive salads our parents ate in early May. The accent, of course, being on "protect the population" - otherwise, the regime did take measures to protect the party elites and the army, with food and water being bought from as far as South America specifically for them, while the people weren't even informed. We are lucky, though, that there were not only "subversive" stations like radio Free Europe, but also that word of mouth spread quickly and rumours of the accident and the necessary precautions appeared long before the official confirmation. Funny, considering how "commie-nostalgics" are usually the type of people who want (nay, demand) the state to take absolute care of their lives, yet it was exactly this incident under communism that showed it's really "the state takes care only of itself, everyone else is on their own".
Great reaction Liv! Fun fact: Nuclear power is in theory one of the safest and cheapest energy sources we have access to. It would make us independent from fossil fuel completely. Things is tho, it doesn't handle natural disasters or human error very well which lead to scenarios like Chernobyl and Fukushima unfortunately. Chernobyl thought us a lot but people and governments still shiver at the thought of building a nuclear power plant because of it.
Nuclear reactors were and still are built because they produce an absurd amount of electrical power with no greenhouse gasses created while running. When they are properly designed built and maintained they are pretty safe. The US Navy has around 80 or so ships and submarines that are solely powered by nuclear reactors. The plus side besides all power they create is the fact that they can run for decades without refueling. The biggest downsides are you have to operate them flawlessly and when you do change out the nuclear fuel the waste is highly radioactive for a gigantic amount of time. For example during disasters US nuclear aircraft carriers have docked in ports of cities that have lost power, hooked themselves into the electrical grid and powered the city until normal electrical service was restored. (this is also how they will have enough power to run anti aircraft/missile defense systems that will use lasers)
When the Ukrainian war started, Russian soldiers dug up the ground near the chernobyl power plant in the forest. They ONLY dug up old ground and several were sent to hospital due to radiation sickness(most likely). So this thing is still very very very active over there.
A purpose of some non civilian nuclear reactors was purely to generate the material for nuclear weapons, such as the nuclear pile at Windscale, however a failure to get detailed enough temperature readings led to high spots in the core, resulting in it catching fire and causing a very significant release of radiation in the 1950s. Even the 1st UK civilian energy generating nuclear reactor at Calder Hall had the additional secret task of generating material for nuclear weapons.
The short story why no one believed it was split open. A USSR made reactor doesn't explode, that's not possible in the USSR. PS the helicopter crash happened months after the event and the rotor blades hit a crane cable.
All those fireman clothes are still locked away where they left them. And are still to this day highly contaminated. And to know that one stupid person stole a firemans helmet is beyond me. People are idiots.
I appreciate your reaction, the rage and fear and horror. This show is fundamentally about heroes--many thousands and thousands of them who sacrificed so much to save tens of millions of lives. Even Boris--you may well grow to love Boris, as he genuinely goes through all you're feeling and does so much to help save others. And yeah, he lived less than five years after arriving at Chernobyl.
Despite the accidents that have happened Nuclear power is one of the cleanest most safe forms of power production we have and we still use them but they have become safer in design because of accidents like this and 3 Mile island.
Why did the scientist go to Chernobyl? Because there are a few heroes who put their own lives as naught to do the right thing for the sake of humankind
The fireman's clothes have radioactive dust and smoke stuck to them from the reactor fire. Then this layer of dirt and grime keeps "shining" radiation at their bodies continuously until they are washed(decontaminated). Also while they were at the scene, the rubble was highly radioactive, and it kept shining at the firemen. That is direct radiation. Apart from the smoke and grime on their clothes, the firemen have also breathed in radioactive smoke, and that is in their lungs. Radioactivity there is 1000 times more potent, since you can't remove it and it's a vulnerable part of the body.
Looking at the Ukraine map, I see that Chernobyl is basically next to the Russian border. Scary that Russia actually had troops dug in (February March of this year) right next to (and I mean NEXT TO) the plant. I mean, these soldiers were laying on that contaminated soil. YIKES!! When that was realized, they were evacuated.
A woman by the name of Adi Roche in Ireland, who is an old friend of Bono's wife, founded a charity called The Chernobyl Children's Project in the wake of the 1986 disaster, and every summer since the early 90s they bring children who lived in areas affected by the radiation, to Ireland for holidays to spend time in a cleaner, healthier environment and they also train nurses and doctors in Russia and Ukraine who are still treating people affected by the radiation, to better take care of the cancers and birth defects that resulted for years after the disaster. Adi Roche also ran in the presidential election in Ireland in 1997, but she was not successful.
@@liivreacts The show does a good job of building tension, and denying you the satisfaction of answers until the end. There is a good amount of effort put in to portraying things accurately, but it is still a "Hollywood" produced TV show, so the overall rating is about 70 percent for historical truthfulness. There is an excellent article on Chernobyl on the History vs Hollywood website that gives a very easy to read overview of the major things the show got right, and wrong. After you have watched the last episode, and won't have anything spoiled for you, you should definitely check out the article. 🖖💯✌
Thanks for a good review. As a Nuclear Engineer I can say they "mostly" got this event correct. Some things are "simplified" of course. Some things have been dramatized. For instance...the 3 men at the end of this episode all lived (and I believe 2 are still alive today). The crashing helicopter DID crash...but it was caused by hitting wires, not the radiation (which would have been terrible for sure).The lady scientist is not a real person (most of the characters in this show are), but is a compilation of many people. So ALL of what "she" discovers did happen...just not by a single individual. There are around 8 operational RBMK reactors today. The RBMK reactor is vastly different that the designs used in the rest of the world (and before someone cry Fukushima...that was a perfect storm of exceeded design parameters). For a great video by someone who visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, check out Kyle Hill's TH-cam channel. He also makes science a lot of fun. One thing beautifully illustrated in this series is the consequences of Governments trying to "downplay or coverup" bad things that happen. You will get a "lot" of answers in the final episode. It's episode 4 that I found the most gut wrenching to watch. Thanks again.
The facts of Chernobyl are so horrifying that the mind can't comprehend the whole thing - it is the grim details that impact on us. The noise of a Geiger counter, the dying flashlight, the "sunburned" flesh of a firefighter, the panic of a wife, the flapping of a dying bird. That's the fearsome power of this series, to take the tragedy of millions and show it to you in a single frame.
First off, that was a different time, and in the communist Soviet Union there were repercussions for not following the orders of those above you. Thus prohibiting people from speaking up. Also, The reactor in Chernobyl used graphite as a moderator, which is an exclusive Soviet design (which was incorporated in some 16 reactors total or so). The western based designs use water as the moderator. There are benefits and drawbacks to using either, but suffice to say that after Chernobyl graphite is pretty much axed as a moderator globally.
"they're four hundred kilometers away" - "but how far has it reached, I want to know where those guys are" bless your heart (I'm joshing, the show is very information dense if you come at it blind and it's easy to miss something like that when you're still thinking about how the presence of iodine 131 indicates the use of uranium 235 - it was still funny though)
Back then yes it was dangerous to be around the area but nowadays I assume only close to the plant would you get stronger radiation. In the town of Pripyat the radiation is hardly higher than what you'd find anywhere else, most of the radioactive dust that settled on everything was probably washed away and absorbed by the ground through rain and water cycles. I wouldn't want to live so close to a relic of a nuclear disaster though but it wouldn't be as dangerous as people think.
I really enoyed this series and now i'm enjoying even more your reaction videos on it. Fantastic job as always Liv so proud for you. The story is slowly unfolding
Nuclear reactors are safe as long as the workers know their abcs, but the cover ups, secrecy, and misinformation made people so confident that they looked down the barrel because they were told it the safety was on
Yep that area is still not able to be settled by Humans anyway. Mother Nature has taken control there though. I saw a documentary where they were observing Animals that have moved back into the area. Wolves, Moose etc. They seem to be doing pretty good.
the professor is going there because the leader of the entire Soviet Union, the guy with the big birthmark on his forehead playing Mikhail Gorbachev, ordered him to. that's not a command you can turn down.
I like your reactions! 🥰 This series are my first on your channel..Just like you I love these historical events and analysis Chernobyl reactor destruction was the end for Soviet Union.. Some of them are still in denial like Dyatlov.. They believed that USSR was in God mode and nothing wrong can happen.. and that's why some people who spoke the truth were prosecuted by KGB.. "Madness" Like Legasov says
This event occurred in communist Soviet Russia (USSR). Most of the questions asked by most reactors to this series relative to why the people in charge acted the way they did could be summed up in some understanding of what communism is, and how it controlled that entire country. It was entirely possible, and very probable that by speaking against the state in any way you would not just be socially and economically cancelled, but had a bullet placed into your brain. This is not history that should be ignored.
What is it with Russian and radiation, better said what's with Russian and nuclear power plants...Even now there still playing with that as if it's a toy.
Really enjoyed this reaction liv your outro was great and one of my favourites to date indeed that ending really does make one feel a sense of blind panic and desperation I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been for those three guys . Your frustration at parts of this show are spot on how we all feel watching but the helicopter falling out the sky was a harsh reality check to how bad it was Valery knows all to well the extent of things and Boris too now I'm sure . Don't blame you not binging it Liv I didn't either as hard a watch it is though I can't help but be glued to the screen watching it's so well done . Cheers as always Liv until the next one TC and will catch you on twitch for more Zelda 🥳
You ask why these men put their lives in danger by going to Chernobyl, well, you'd have to understand that they had no choice. This was communist Russia: the Soviet Union. Information was very limited and only specific people were privy to it in order to preserve the appearance of having control over the situation.
#LiivReacts, you are so sweet. Thanks so much for uploading this awesome reaction. Your content is absolutely amazing, and I love watching you react to different shows and movies.
New subscriber here (from Kentucky). CHERNOBYL is easily one of the best bits of television in the last twenty years, in a very strong field. Looking forward to your reactions to the remainder of the series.
You must remember that these events took place in the Soviet Union, that was a Communist dictatorship, where human life mattered nothing. All the government cared about was maintaining its power and delusional image of the superiority of the Communist Party and system. Citizens were concidered to be nothing more than mere slaves to the almighty Communist Party and State. So when state officials gave and order, it was by your own peril if you decided to oppose. Sometimes not just your own, but also your family might have been targeted, as well.
![ละลาย (LALALYE) - DAOU PITTAYA ต้าห์อู๋ พิทยา [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wo6r9TgausI/mqdefault.jpg)
"Why did we created them?" - Nuclear reactors are the most clean and sustainable form of energy available... if done correctly!
I love this show, Chernobyl was terrible (and the show is very realistic, most character are based in real characters), it should be a lesson to never make the same mistakes again. But don't put the blame in nuclear energy, a Dam full of water can kill millions too if is built by a moron without safety measures. The problem with Chernobyl wasn't the fact it was nuclear.
@Retro Nomix I don't have any problem with fossil fuels either.
@retronomix7392 You know that fossil fuels kill more people than nuclear reactors?
@retronomix7392 My point is that nuclear energy is relatively safe. Nuclear reactor accidents are rare and they aren't that harmful nowadays. While fossil fuel power stations release harmful gas that is killing many people each year. It will be really effective if we replace fossil fuel with nuclear power until the only power source is renewable energy.
As much as people don’t want to admit it, nuclear energy is the closest thing we have to a clean constant sustainable power source. How a nuclear plant works, basically, is that you are controller a nuclear fission reaction to generate heat, to boil water, to create pressurized steam, to turn electric generators. We don’t get electricity from a nuclear reaction. This movie shows what happens when you don’t respect that power. Anti-nuclear people will go on and on about Chernobyl, and 3 Mile Island in the US and use that as their reason my nuclear should be banned. However, given the number of reactors operating around the world today, and the hundreds of nuclear power naval ship from countries all around the World, nuclear power is relatively safe. The amount of energy that can be released from a grapefruit size piece of nuclear material is astronomical compared to the energy in the same amount of coal. There have been FAR more deaths related to coal and coal mining than with nuclear power. And , if you gathered ALL the nuclear waste the US has created since the invention of nuclear power, you wouldn’t even fill a football (American football) field size area up. Nuclear reactors can run for decades without having to replace the fuel.
While I agree that nuclear power was the cleanest, most efficient power source when it was created. There has been a lot of advancement in wind, solar, and other clean energy sources in the past 70 years which has made nuclear power and the associated risks obsolete. It is entirely possible to power the entire world with green energy.
@@KngOfTheBlind Nuclear power is very much so green energy. Solar, wind, and hydro are better, but you need a LOT of those to match the capacity of a single nuclear plant, because nuclear reactors produce a huge amount of power in a relatively tiny footprint. I remember doing the math and figuring that you'd essentially need to replace the city of Chicago with a huge solar farm to make up for the power of a particular nuclear plant.
Nuclear power is also a lot more reliable (It scales to demand, not to what the weather allows), so you need less overcapacity to ensure you always have enough to fit what you need, and you don't need to buffer power in front of it (Solar power needs help to run the grid at night, wind needs help on calm days, nuclear just keeps running).
It's also much safer than is commonly perceived - Even counting Chernobyl and other disasters, nuclear power results in a very low number of deaths compared to other methods of generating power (closer to solar and wind than gas or coal). In addition, reactor design has improved tremendously - If you gave a modern reactor design the exact situation of the Chernobyl disaster, it'd just power off without much issue and never make international news or have its own Wikipedia article.
In addition, some designs are made to be inherently safe - Even if the reactor is being controlled by absolute morons, the laws of physics prevent it from having a catastrophic failure (There is nothing you could do with the controls to cause the reactor to do anything worse than shut down).
The biggest problems with nuclear power are the high cost of building a plant (thanks to all those safety measures and advanced design features that make it so safe) and the politics behind the word "nuclear".
@@ryanhodin5014
As a small edition to your excellent comment; the reactor used at Chernobyl is a uniquely Soviet design that would have never been able to get a licence outside the Soviet Union due to having no containment, a positive void coefficient (which becomes more pronounced at low power), the lack of redundancy in safety systems etc, not to mention being an inherently unstable design that was never designed to run at anything below half power.
We have to have nuclear as a clean base-load backbone, solar/wind alone are not going to cut it because of their intermittency. And in Northern European countries the sun doesn't shine for months on end. How are they going to keep the lights on during these months? That's something a lot of people tend to forget. We simply do not have the battery capacity (nor can we build them due to simply not having enough rare minerals) to carry them through the winter without having something that provides a reliable base-load.
Like you said, the current reactor generations are passively safe and extremely stable and reliable. They are a far cry from the reactor technology of yesteryear.
People who orate on this subject tend to take extreme positions, unfortunately. When considering a technology, you have to consider both the risk of something bad happening *and* the severity of what "something bad" means. People speaking out in opposition to nuclear power tend to emphasize the severity of what can happen without considering the low risk of it happening. You're guilty of the opposite extreme: emphasizing the low risk without giving enough attention to how bad an accident can be. *Both* of these variables must be considered for a reasoned perspective.
@@KngOfTheBlind wind and solar and good, but not realistic for the whole world. They are too dependent on their surroundings. They need to be supported by a stable baseline of electricity and the other green energy sources rise and dip depending on the demands needed from the grid.
Nuclear energy is actually very safe and when done properly virtually no one who lives near a nuclear plant will know its there. Its just this particular design of reactors in the show, as you'll learn later on in the show, was rather poor. Don't be scared away from nuclear energy because of this show, it's actually quite cool! Nevertheless this tragedy was still horrifying and completely avoidable.
Even when done properly, things can go wrong, natural disasters can take the most cautious and respected plant out causing a meltdown, they have done so, and there's still nuclear waste produced.
@@tobydion3009 nuclear reactors are still a way better future than any other form of energy production. If the planet wants to “go green” then the way forward is nuclear. Not solar or wind or hydro.
I mean except for the plants in japan after the earthquake. Sure it is rare but rare does not mean impossible and when the rare event happens that makes the plant fail that land is permanently unusable. Nuclear fission is not the cure to our energy problems. It is extremely volatile even under the most absurdly strict safety protocols there are.
@@jackdaniels9133 Agreed. We could just do wind power and it would be just as good of a solution without any of the potential catastrophic drawbacks of nuclear. But the rich NIMBYs don't want it because it obstructs the view from the back porch of their third vacation home, and the conspiracy nuts don't want it because of made-up illnesses that wind turbines supposedly cause.
@@jackdaniels9133 Including Chernobyl, nuclear power has killed multiple orders of magnitude fewer people per TWhr of energy generated than most fossil fuel sources, and is on the same level as hydro, solar, and wind but with much less land area needed
6:57 E=mc^2 is why we created them. The energy (E) contained within atoms is equal to their mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared. The speed of light is huge number (300000000 m/s^2) and squaring it is even bigger (90000000000000000 m^2/s^4). So multiply that by how much the reactor core weighs and you can power cities, counties, or even states - all without polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses. This show explains why this accident happened at Chernobyl. It wasn’t anything inherently wrong with nuclear energy, which is generally pretty safe as long as the engineering and science is sound.
"It can't get any worse.".....wait for it.
Boron is a non metallic element and the only non-metal of the group 13 of the periodic table the elements. Boron is electron-deficient, possessing a vacant p-orbital. It has several forms, the most common of which is amorphous boron, a dark powder, unreactive to oxygen, water, acids and alkalis.
So many words and you still failed to say why it was important in this case. Utterly useless comment.
Nice video. I love how blissfully unaware you seem to be about what went on in the USSR overall. It was not too much unlike current day Russia or the Nazi regime in Germany during WWII. Anyone opposing the government or questioning its decisions will get arrested and exiled or killed (after some potentially gruesome interrogation takes place). In many cases this included their friends and family. KGB personnel and their informants were always monitoring such situations doing their best to stop any information leaks to the public and especially foreign countries. That's also why they spoke in code over the phone.
I was born in an Eastern Bloc country, couple months after the disaster occurred. The first time "slight radiation increase" was mentioned in my country was one week before I was born. For roughly 7 weeks the people in my country were not told that this happened. Even after the media reported it, it was significantly downplayed. In fact my Mom heard about it few days after the explosion from radio Free Europe (American-backed station) listening to which was highly illegal and could get you in jail. If she waited for the official media to issue a statement, I might not have been born or might have had cancer or some other mutation...
I was born in probably the same country as you and around the same time (early July). I wouldn't say there was really a danger of us not being born, as most of the radiation cloud went in the direction of Scandinavia and we received relatively smaller doses here. Though it's indeed true that we're high on the list of affected countries, for the simple reason that our communist regime was the USSR's closest ally/puppet and there were indeed no precautions taken to protect the population until long after the notorious May manifestations and radioactive salads our parents ate in early May. The accent, of course, being on "protect the population" - otherwise, the regime did take measures to protect the party elites and the army, with food and water being bought from as far as South America specifically for them, while the people weren't even informed. We are lucky, though, that there were not only "subversive" stations like radio Free Europe, but also that word of mouth spread quickly and rumours of the accident and the necessary precautions appeared long before the official confirmation. Funny, considering how "commie-nostalgics" are usually the type of people who want (nay, demand) the state to take absolute care of their lives, yet it was exactly this incident under communism that showed it's really "the state takes care only of itself, everyone else is on their own".
Great reaction Liv! Fun fact: Nuclear power is in theory one of the safest and cheapest energy sources we have access to. It would make us independent from fossil fuel completely. Things is tho, it doesn't handle natural disasters or human error very well which lead to scenarios like Chernobyl and Fukushima unfortunately.
Chernobyl thought us a lot but people and governments still shiver at the thought of building a nuclear power plant because of it.
Now imagine today there would be a war around this and other multiple nuclear power plants and no one wants a diplomatic end. very fun fact...
Space facts are slowly turning into science facts😂
Nuclear reactors were and still are built because they produce an absurd amount of electrical power with no greenhouse gasses created while running.
When they are properly designed built and maintained they are pretty safe. The US Navy has around 80 or so ships and submarines that are solely powered by nuclear reactors. The plus side besides all power they create is the fact that they can run for decades without refueling.
The biggest downsides are you have to operate them flawlessly and when you do change out the nuclear fuel the waste is highly radioactive for a gigantic amount of time.
For example during disasters US nuclear aircraft carriers have docked in ports of cities that have lost power, hooked themselves into the electrical grid and powered the city until normal electrical service was restored. (this is also how they will have enough power to run anti aircraft/missile defense systems that will use lasers)
Those contaminated firefighters clothes are still in the abandoned hospital basement to this day
When the Ukrainian war started, Russian soldiers dug up the ground near the chernobyl power plant in the forest. They ONLY dug up old ground and several were sent to hospital due to radiation sickness(most likely). So this thing is still very very very active over there.
A purpose of some non civilian nuclear reactors was purely to generate the material for nuclear weapons, such as the nuclear pile at Windscale, however a failure to get detailed enough temperature readings led to high spots in the core, resulting in it catching fire and causing a very significant release of radiation in the 1950s. Even the 1st UK civilian energy generating nuclear reactor at Calder Hall had the additional secret task of generating material for nuclear weapons.
The short story why no one believed it was split open. A USSR made reactor doesn't explode, that's not possible in the USSR. PS the helicopter crash happened months after the event and the rotor blades hit a crane cable.
"Willingly" in Soviet Union, oh you...
All those fireman clothes are still locked away where they left them. And are still to this day highly contaminated.
And to know that one stupid person stole a firemans helmet is beyond me. People are idiots.
I appreciate your reaction, the rage and fear and horror.
This show is fundamentally about heroes--many thousands and thousands of them who sacrificed so much to save tens of millions of lives. Even Boris--you may well grow to love Boris, as he genuinely goes through all you're feeling and does so much to help save others. And yeah, he lived less than five years after arriving at Chernobyl.
Despite the accidents that have happened Nuclear power is one of the cleanest most safe forms of power production we have and we still use them but they have become safer in design because of accidents like this and 3 Mile island.
Why did the scientist go to Chernobyl? Because there are a few heroes who put their own lives as naught to do the right thing for the sake of humankind
The fireman's clothes have radioactive dust and smoke stuck to them from the reactor fire.
Then this layer of dirt and grime keeps "shining" radiation at their bodies continuously until they are washed(decontaminated).
Also while they were at the scene, the rubble was highly radioactive, and it kept shining at the firemen. That is direct radiation.
Apart from the smoke and grime on their clothes, the firemen have also breathed in radioactive smoke, and that is in their lungs. Radioactivity there is 1000 times more potent, since you can't remove it and it's a vulnerable part of the body.
5:55 😮 appropriate
Something crazy, if you were to go there today, the firefighters clothes are still in the basement and still radioactive at a lethal level
Looking at the Ukraine map, I see that Chernobyl is basically next to the Russian border. Scary that Russia actually had troops dug in (February March of this year) right next to (and I mean NEXT TO) the plant. I mean, these soldiers were laying on that contaminated soil. YIKES!! When that was realized, they were evacuated.
that is a yikes! its so scary how long the radiation hangs around
A woman by the name of Adi Roche in Ireland, who is an old friend of Bono's wife, founded a charity called The Chernobyl Children's Project in the wake of the 1986 disaster, and every summer since the early 90s they bring children who lived in areas affected by the radiation, to Ireland for holidays to spend time in a cleaner, healthier environment and they also train nurses and doctors in Russia and Ukraine who are still treating people affected by the radiation, to better take care of the cancers and birth defects that resulted for years after the disaster. Adi Roche also ran in the presidential election in Ireland in 1997, but she was not successful.
It gets even more stressful in the next 2 episodes.
oh gosh... bracing myself then!
@@liivreacts The show does a good job of building tension, and denying you the satisfaction of answers until the end. There is a good amount of effort put in to portraying things accurately, but it is still a "Hollywood" produced TV show, so the overall rating is about 70 percent for historical truthfulness. There is an excellent article on Chernobyl on the History vs Hollywood website that gives a very easy to read overview of the major things the show got right, and wrong. After you have watched the last episode, and won't have anything spoiled for you, you should definitely check out the article. 🖖💯✌
Thanks for a good review. As a Nuclear Engineer I can say they "mostly" got this event correct. Some things are "simplified" of course. Some things have been dramatized. For instance...the 3 men at the end of this episode all lived (and I believe 2 are still alive today). The crashing helicopter DID crash...but it was caused by hitting wires, not the radiation (which would have been terrible for sure).The lady scientist is not a real person (most of the characters in this show are), but is a compilation of many people. So ALL of what "she" discovers did happen...just not by a single individual. There are around 8 operational RBMK reactors today. The RBMK reactor is vastly different that the designs used in the rest of the world (and before someone cry Fukushima...that was a perfect storm of exceeded design parameters). For a great video by someone who visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, check out Kyle Hill's TH-cam channel. He also makes science a lot of fun. One thing beautifully illustrated in this series is the consequences of Governments trying to "downplay or coverup" bad things that happen. You will get a "lot" of answers in the final episode. It's episode 4 that I found the most gut wrenching to watch. Thanks again.
10:31 Liv, knock on wood!
The facts of Chernobyl are so horrifying that the mind can't comprehend the whole thing - it is the grim details that impact on us. The noise of a Geiger counter, the dying flashlight, the "sunburned" flesh of a firefighter, the panic of a wife, the flapping of a dying bird. That's the fearsome power of this series, to take the tragedy of millions and show it to you in a single frame.
First off, that was a different time, and in the communist Soviet Union there were repercussions for not following the orders of those above you. Thus prohibiting people from speaking up. Also, The reactor in Chernobyl used graphite as a moderator, which is an exclusive Soviet design (which was incorporated in some 16 reactors total or so). The western based designs use water as the moderator. There are benefits and drawbacks to using either, but suffice to say that after Chernobyl graphite is pretty much axed as a moderator globally.
"they're four hundred kilometers away" - "but how far has it reached, I want to know where those guys are" bless your heart (I'm joshing, the show is very information dense if you come at it blind and it's easy to miss something like that when you're still thinking about how the presence of iodine 131 indicates the use of uranium 235 - it was still funny though)
8:35 50.000 people live on same home
Back then yes it was dangerous to be around the area but nowadays I assume only close to the plant would you get stronger radiation. In the town of Pripyat the radiation is hardly higher than what you'd find anywhere else, most of the radioactive dust that settled on everything was probably washed away and absorbed by the ground through rain and water cycles. I wouldn't want to live so close to a relic of a nuclear disaster though but it wouldn't be as dangerous as people think.
I really enoyed this series and now i'm enjoying even more your reaction videos on it. Fantastic job as always Liv so proud for you. The story is slowly unfolding
Thank you as always fotiss, head bish and mod
Fotis, Liv enjoys death … her BotW playing is always going to portray nuclear holocaust…
How dare you leave us hanging with only these two episodes, time to get cracking 🙂
The things is that it’s something that had to be done in order for it not to get worse
Nuclear reactors are safe as long as the workers know their abcs, but the cover ups, secrecy, and misinformation made people so confident that they looked down the barrel because they were told it the safety was on
Yep that area is still not able to be settled by Humans anyway. Mother Nature has taken control there though. I saw a documentary where they were observing Animals that have moved back into the area. Wolves, Moose etc. They seem to be doing pretty good.
the professor is going there because the leader of the entire Soviet Union, the guy with the big birthmark on his forehead playing Mikhail Gorbachev, ordered him to. that's not a command you can turn down.
I like your reactions! 🥰
This series are my first on your channel..Just like you I love these historical events and analysis
Chernobyl reactor destruction was the end for Soviet Union.. Some of them are still in denial like Dyatlov.. They believed that USSR was in God mode and nothing wrong can happen.. and that's why some people who spoke the truth were prosecuted by KGB.. "Madness" Like Legasov says
Actually people still live near chernobyl, and even some never left there who were stubborn and old.
“Why is he not taking iodine pills with him?” LOL
This event occurred in communist Soviet Russia (USSR). Most of the questions asked by most reactors to this series relative to why the people in charge acted the way they did could be summed up in some understanding of what communism is, and how it controlled that entire country. It was entirely possible, and very probable that by speaking against the state in any way you would not just be socially and economically cancelled, but had a bullet placed into your brain. This is not history that should be ignored.
those piles of discarded radioactive clothing are still where they were dropped decades ago.
Always enjoy your reactions and this series is quite an historic journey.
What is it with Russian and radiation, better said what's with Russian and nuclear power plants...Even now there still playing with that as if it's a toy.
He can't fix Chernobyl from Moscow. He has to go there to have any chance of fixing it.
Really enjoyed this reaction liv your outro was great and one of my favourites to date indeed that ending really does make one feel a sense of blind panic and desperation I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been for those three guys . Your frustration at parts of this show are spot on how we all feel watching but the helicopter falling out the sky was a harsh reality check to how bad it was Valery knows all to well the extent of things and Boris too now I'm sure . Don't blame you not binging it Liv I didn't either as hard a watch it is though I can't help but be glued to the screen watching it's so well done . Cheers as always Liv until the next one TC and will catch you on twitch for more Zelda 🥳
You ask why these men put their lives in danger by going to Chernobyl, well, you'd have to understand that they had no choice. This was communist Russia: the Soviet Union. Information was very limited and only specific people were privy to it in order to preserve the appearance of having control over the situation.
The next few episodes are rough to watch.
Great reaction though.
#LiivReacts, you are so sweet. Thanks so much for uploading this awesome reaction. Your content is absolutely amazing, and I love watching you react to different shows and movies.
awwh Brian thank you, your comment means alot. tysm for watch and so happy you enjoy the reactions
second episode and well done. can see this show is heavy. but you doing great, and im so proud of you, keep doing your great work
tusen takk aioth
@@liivreacts who are you? never seen you type
Luv you exhibit such intelligence that I really appreciate your reactions thank you very much you are very entertaining
New subscriber here (from Kentucky). CHERNOBYL is easily one of the best bits of television in the last twenty years, in a very strong field. Looking forward to your reactions to the remainder of the series.
"why we make nuclar reactors" so we can produce enough energy so you can make this videos babe 😉
You must remember that these events took place in the Soviet Union, that was a Communist dictatorship, where human life mattered nothing. All the government cared about was maintaining its power and delusional image of the superiority of the Communist Party and system. Citizens were concidered to be nothing more than mere slaves to the almighty Communist Party and State. So when state officials gave and order, it was by your own peril if you decided to oppose. Sometimes not just your own, but also your family might have been targeted, as well.
Somebody has to go or Europe would have been destroyed if they don’t fix it
Utterly horrific watch. Episode 2. Uh-huh.