In case you cared, I took time to type this out for another comment 😁 Jaslovské: First off, the "J" is the same as "Y" in "yes". "Jas" rhymes with "pass", but with short "a" "lo" is pronounced pretty much exactly the same as "lo" in "lock" The "v" in "lov" is pronounced like an "f" in "f*ck" "s" as in "snake" "k" same as in "lock" or "lok" "é" is long e, closest to the "eeeeh" sound Bohunice "B" as in "battle" "o" as in "lock" "h" as in "hungry" "u" is the short "oo" from "boot" "n" as in "no" "i" is the same as english "e" sound "c" is pretty much a "ts" sound "e" is again from "eeeeh", but short this time It would be so much easier if any of the syllables rhymed, but the sounds are just too different.
It looks like the best option if you have a choice between eating silica gel (from something non-radioactive) and leaving it attached to a nuclear fuel rod you should definitely choose to eat the silica gel (which could cause choking or impaction if you aren't careful or are a child, but usually is just an uncomfortable ER trip at worst for most adults). Follow that by breathing silica gel dust or any form of silica-based dust really (which can cause silicosis), then handling but but eating the silica gel from around the fuel rods, then you get into a bit of a toss-up based on how you determine worst - if almost but not fully causing a meltdown is the worst case scenario that goes at the end of the list, if your bigger concern is for your own safety only then eating the nuclear fuel rod is at the end of the list... eating the irradiated silica gel packet is hard to place on the list as I don't know how much radiation it may or may not pick up - if it is a small amount and might cause cancer in the future but might not it is just after silicosis, if it is a lot and will cause acute radiation sickness and slow painful death it is debatable with just eating the fuel rod which would at least be faster most likely. Nothing on this list is a good idea and the only not awful idea is eating the silica gel. Don't do any of these, obviously, but that is the only one that probably won't kill you and won't cause lasting damage (though breathing silica dust only one time and only a little bit *probably* won't do lasting damage). So my recommendation in a situation like this is to lick the wrapper of a non-irradiated silica gel packet and play with the beads, but don't eat them unless you are in some situation where you have no better options.
3:51 "Yes that Skoda" : Just to clarify, not "that car company Skoda" but the original one famous for its guns, turbines and locomotives. The car company, originally Laurin and Klement, was bought in 1925 by Emil Skoda and given its name. The research was transfered to Pilsen and HQ to Prague. After the communist coup the operations of the car company were separated and from then on shared practically only the name. EDIT: A little adition to the two suffocations. The alarms in their area were not working as the lightbulbs from detectors were stolen. When they noticed something is terribly wrong they ran to the nearest emergency exit, which was locked to reduce theft...
Thank you. I thought only of that car Skoda. I come from one of the countries that border Czech Republic and there are many Skodas on the streets, so that was the one I thought of.
@pavelsovicka5292 pretty much, on paper I love communism, but in practice you wind up with a hellscape like the USSR or CCP, maybe Communist Cuba if you're lucky
@@nlwilson4892Wow, I can only imagine. This is not a safe technology and with the high level of risk involved it makes very little sense to me. One mistake and you can irradiate an area the size of a major city or even the size of a country like Luxembourg and make it uninhabitable for a thousand years.
@@williamp6800 That's strictly a matter of opinion. Coal, hydroelectric, wind turbines, and other sources are every bit as safe if not safer and don't have the risk of losing a portion of land for thousands of years and thousands of fatalities and birth defects if something unknown and unpredicted happens or a mistake is made. Have you ever heard of a coal plant exploding and destroying a town for a thousand years? You can't even say it's cleaner for real. Not when you consider the storage and disposal of waste byproducts and the removal of a plant when decommissioned. That's all just hype and false narratives.
"Hey guys, out of curiosity do we have a vacuum cleaner?" "Yeah, why? Aren't you supposed to be refueling the reactor?" "No reason, hey can we borrow that real quick?"
@@NinoJoel fresh fuel rods can be hold in hands and they are. In that particular reactor those rods had even unenriched uranium. That was the main feature of the A1 and the possibility to change the fuel during operation.
@@Petriiik while my comment pretty obviously was ment as a joke I still don't agree with your comment and the one above. Yes it's not highly radioactive. That still does not make it "safe" To handle for longer periods of time. There is a big difference between having a fixed source of said radiation or potentially sucking in small fragments of said source and spreading it in the air. The used material is highly toxic and the radiation while not posing a threat directly will have a much worse effect if breathed in.
I genuinely love plainly difficult, he talks about disasters without overdramatizing them or adding needless scary music its just a guy talkin bout stuff
As a long time patron and someone who lives right next to this powerplant .. I was waiting for this episode for so long.. I mean I know already so much about this stuff as half of the town somehow works with the powerplant or it's subsidiaries even my family and friends. But now at least rest of the TH-cam can hear about our little nuclear disaster
I heard an anecdode that building of the A1 was already a bit of a disaster regarding security and many houses around the NPP have stainless steel fences build from material meant for the plant... is that true? 😁
Ah yes. Jaslovské Bohunice. Ppl in our country have old joke about the place and it goes something like this: Q: Are apples harvested near Jaslovské Bohunice good to eat? A: Yes, however be advised that apple core must be liquidated by the means of disposal in 11 feet deep hole, which must be then filled up and must be located at least half mile away from nearest surface water source. Conversion from metric to imperial units is approximate...
I'm Czech and it always cracks me up when an English speaker tries to pronounce words like Škoda or Jaslovské Bohunice :D BTW there was a popular joke in the 90s, that Siemens started growing lentil around Jaslovské Bohunice to be sold later as watch batteries.
I live about 5 km from NPS Jaslovske Bohunice, where both my father and my grandfather have worked their whole lives. They would tell me stories about the doomed A1 plant. I was particularly disgusted with how workers couldn't flee from the reactor hall following the CO2 burst, because the exit door was locked. Welcome to communist Czechoslovakia! On the other hand, both more modern V1 & V2 plants were very safe, featuring the well-known VVER440 reactors, which were later upgraded to 500 MW. V1 had to undergo early decommissioning, because our neighbors didn't like it didn't feature the containment building. EU paid a lot of money for that decom. V2 is gonna stay for many years to come.
Ahh, the sweet familiarity of the Saturday morning radiological disaster narrative, framing our lives like a Norman Rockwell painting--let us all give thanks for this cherished respite our host so graciously provides.
"What happens when Jaslovské Bohunice explode?" "Czechia and Slovakia switch anthems: The former will sing 'Lightning over Tatra' and the latter 'Where Is My Home?'"
Hardly anyone will understand this one... but yes i remember that joke. For others - CSSR anthem had two parts, czech one and slowak one. They are grossly that what Vaclav says...
Je mi líto, ale myslím že tenhle vtip pochopí jen Češi a Slováci Translation: I am sorry, but I think that only Czechs and Slovaks will understand that joke
@@cyrdas You're underestimating human intelligence. "Jaslovské Bohunice" is known from the video, and the punchline clearly states what are the names of the anthems. Previously ignorant people might not find it as funny, but they will still get it.
Hi, nice video! During the first accident, the compressors that were pumping the CO2 through the core were turned off (some were turned off, some were just slowed by lowering their RPMs) by the operators. They thought that it would decrease the CO2 pressure and slow down the leak. That worked, but after some time they realized that a meltdown could occur from not sufficient cooling, co they tried to turn them back on. That didn´t work because the temperature of the copper coils on the electromotors was too high and the system blocades didnt let them start up. They managed maybe on a 4rd try. The shift engineer decided that the leak can be stopped by blocking the hole by the refueling machine, so 2 brave guys went to the main hall in a protection gear and a gas masks and managed to block it manually. The guy who did it said that it was a hard task , since he couldn´t see shit through the leaking gas. Also the top of the reactor was frozen because of the cold CO2, but after some time the machine reached its place, the guys did a really good job. The two guys that suffocated were unfortunately somewhere they shouldn´t have been. They were mechanical workers who didn´t have much to do during their shifts so apparently they had a little place a couple floors under the main hall where they could rest and sleep. It was against the rules, but tolerated. This accident caught them off guard. The emergency exit which they managed to reach was locked to prevent stealing...something not imaginable nowadays. Good that the standards changed drastically since those days. The mistakes they did back then are unimaginable nowadays and the nuclear power plants are safe and reliable. Let´s hope not that many Austrians will see this video and think that it´s still done the same way these days! :D
Sometimes it seems futile to have alarms. I worked with an accountant who had worked at a chemical plant decades ago. They had evacuation drills. One day, in conversation with the operations engineer, he was told that if the alarms sounded, just call your family and say goodbye because you *_are_* dead. You can't outrun or outdrive the gases. I think they made urethane foam, 1960s.
The first disaster was handled very professionally, everyone did thier jobs and no radiation was released. Its unfortunate that those 2 unrelated workers lost thier lives despite it.
@@PlainlyDifficult You know that it takes 10s for google translate to read the name of that village for you so you can learn to pronounce it, and TG is pretty spot on with pronunciation on this one
@@lukasverner1246 Considering he didn't even say "Czechoslovakia" correctly, I don't think the other names ever had a chance. 🙃 I kid, but I can hear my Slovak grandmother turning over in her grave.
I was thinking about this NPP recently! Thank you for making this video! One detail you didn't mention - the 1976 disaster and subsequent CO2 release killed three people, two workers and a janitor. Btw you did butcher the name, but at least it was the funny kind! Then again, the Bohunice disasters are rather obscure, and the only TV documentary I saw about the 1976 disaster got some details wrong, worst one being the statement that Jaslovské Bohunice used RMBK reactors. How did they come to this conclusion, I have no idea. Once again, thank you.
@@SYNtemp this is clear for most people with basic knowledge about nuclear reactor types. However, I know one nuclear physics professor (!) that said similar blasphemies multiple times.
@@CZpersi Bollocks, much was "known" among those who were interrested even during socialist times, let alone after their fall... not detailed minute-by-minute description, but really most facts. If you're interrested at all, that is.
As there was no real effect to the outside western observers did not notice it. Thus it was not published in the west. If the winds from Chernobyl 86 would have blown from West to East like normal it would have only noticed by the CIA. By the way the nuclear accident in Chernobyl was first noticed by the Swedes later by gamma spectral analysis. Some years earlier it might have not detected at all.
Please consider making a video explaining the various units used to describe quantities of radiation. It would be great to understand what the quantities actually mean and why there seem to be so many units. Rads, becquerels, grays, curies, sieverts, etc.
Channel plug seals have been problematic on many reactors, the design I have worked on uses the pressure of the reactor to lock it in place, surprisingly simple and hence reliable. To take the fuel out whilst the reactor is running the refuelling machine is connected to the channel stand pipe.The pressure in the charge machine is then increased so it is the same as the reactor and the channel plug seal drops down slightly under its own weight and unlocks, a crane inside the charge machine then connects to the channel plug seal and lifts it and the connected fuel assembly into the refuelling machine. The fresh fuel and a new channel lock seal is then lowered into the reactor. The refuelling machine is then depressurised slightly and a careful measurement made of how much the channel plug has risen indicating that it has locked into place. If this measurement is not made or you just rely on the channel plug not sticking... well... the whole assembly can pop out sometime later like the cork from a bottle.
Yes that's all correct, but the basic problem is WHY to use all this bollock... channel type reactor has only one advantage (that prevailed to these days) and that is less downtime. Everything else speaks against it... those things that were once advantages (online refuelling served among other things production of weaponizable Plutonium, only Kim needs that these days) (low/unenriched uranium was nice feature when the enrichment preces(es) were complicated, not much of a problem novadays) are gone so this reactor type has gone the way of British Magnox type...
That first accident sounds like they managed to make the world's most terrifying, toxic blow-gun. Thanks for the vid, John. I'm really enjoying the recent radiation accident series. Anyone got any good books they recommend on radiation accidents? I enjoyed reading "Atomic Accidents" (Mahaffey) and "Midnight in Chernobyl" (Higginbotham).
@@JimmyMatis-h9y honestly as a czech person this was the only video on this chanel I had to put on subtitles because I had trouble with the names and had no idea what was talked about (I agree that czehc language is difficult but there was zero effort made to make czech names sound at least vaugley similar to what are they supposed to)
A Czech workmate of mine (and totally the right age group) had never heard of the A1 reactor let alone the disaster. I’m pointing him to this video as I’m not even going to attempt the pronunciation of the plant name 😂
I am Czech and it's pretty common knowledge to anyone from the field. These cases are being studied and explained in detail at our technical universities.
Two workers suffocated from CO2 leak were unable to escape through emergency exit, because the emergency exit was locked. Why it was locked then? Because people were stealing material from the plant. Whom to blame? Maybe we shall check even today who has welded his backyard fence of neutron-flow-resistant nuclear-grade stainless steel in villages surrounding Jaslovske Bohunice.
Nuclear power plants are still by far the safest, cleanest, most efficient energy we have right now, but man it's terrifying how often people will cut corners while building and operating them.
That why we phasing them out, Nuclear power is the most dangerous as it need just a little push to create consequence that will last century and human corruption know no limit so yeah nah lets not try to see how far can we go in our own stupidity and just move away from that pandora box.
@@Jabarri74 "We Almost Lost Detroit", a non-fiction book worth reading. Then there's "some Channel" named 'Plainly Difficult' with its plentiful stories of nuclear accidents inside the USA.
Im sorry, Im Slovak, I understand it's hard to pronounce for foreigners, but the little hesitation I hear every time with the name is so damn funny xD Yas-low-skie Bo-hu-nee-cie :DDDD I don't mean it in a bad way, but it's hilarious and a little cute xD
The company building nuclear power plants in Czech and Slovak republic is called "Škoda nuclear machines contruction" and it is owned by CEZ Group. They have build all NPPs in Czech and Slovak republic. The company was also producing the VVER440 and VVER1000 pressure vessels and exported them to Hungary and Bulgaria. Some western journalists are still saying that those NPPs ,and even the currently being built Mochovce 4, are built by Rosatom.
There should be an interesting note, that Jaslovske Bohunice A1 is very similar by the story, reactor type and fate to Swiss Lucens reactor. Both were mostly domestic designs, both were CO2 gas cooled heavy water moderated, both were designed to use natural or barely enriched fuel to achieve some independence for a country lacking uranium enrichment facility, both failed soon due to partial meltdown.
Most of the contamination was caused by gross negligence during later cleanup, where the contaminated water and other stuff from the building was simply released to the environment by the demolition workers. This eventually led to appearance of moster mushrooms and ferns around the plant.
I had a Subaru Impreza I put 3 motors in over 5 years I should have cut my losses much earlier. When the 4th motor blew I pushed it out of the barn it rolled across the field into the ditch I took a cab to dealership bought a Nissan truck and when I came back to barn 2 days later the car had been stolen.
i appreciate them giving up when it was apparent it was just going to be problematic. surprised about that. i’m also surprised i had never heard about this or the cleanup efforts despite being czech. also props to PD for knowing we’re not czechoslovakia anymore, it’s a common mistake. thank you for the vid!
Currently studying in Belgium, not even 1000km from home, yet a lot of people, here, in the "heart of European union" don't know that it's not Czechoslovakia anymore...
A Skoda reactor? Well yeah... They built cars, tanks, machineguns, fieldguns,... Skoda also supplied a lot of countries all the way from Austria-Hungary onwards.
I would love a video on the Oklo fossil reactors! Aka nature's own "attempt" at a nuclear reactor. Nothing went wrong with it, but it baffled some scientists for a while! Though it does allude to that there is a very very minuscule change that nuclear explosion could happen out of no where :P
The two workers who suffocated in the CO2 cloud is extremely sad. Unlike other gases, you know when you're suffocating in CO2. It burns and your body recognizes it as not being oxygen. If you've ever tried to hold your breath, the buildup of CO2 is why your body fights you to take a breath. So those workers most likely died gasping and panicked.
They seriously picked the worst, most finicky, most expensive reactor they could have chosen, with the least reliable kind of cooling system. Whole thing isn't robust, nor easily made failsafe.
@@300guy the point was becoming independent on USSR with nuclear fuel, all the kinks and quirks were considered necessary evil to not have Kremlin knife on neck in regards of electricity self sufficiency (which is pretty big deal in national security, especially in context they already invaded us in '68 and were occupying us till nineties).
@depressedTrent The RBMK reactors had their own booby traps obviously. They could have specialized in PWR as well, but not as cheap and fast and not able to continue running during fueling cycles.
@@depressedTrent Please cut that "high" from enriched fuel for pwr... common enrichment for pwr is around 4% but you could work even with something like 2.5% if absolutelly necessary. Unless ofcourse you are speaking about pwr reactors for military use (ships, submarines) where size is extremelly important, THERE you could have something like 30-40% enrichment... but even that is usually called MEDIUM enrichment (nothing like 90% HEU for nuclear weapons)...
@SYNtemp high in context of reactors, not in absolute numbers. The fuel enrichment process in any capacity is the core of the issue here. Also, submarines and other nuclear powered vessels don't really do it for size but rather to prolong periods between refueling, often calculated for not refueling it at all for entire service life.
Wow, I have never heard about this before! Thanks a lot for covering this. That being said, I had to first google it to see what the hell you were trying to pronounce, lol. 😂 Just a tip for the future: simply type the name to google translate and have it read aloud in the respective language. it works perfectly for czech and slovak and probably most other languages too.
Well, not *quite* that Skoda if you mean the car company. Skoda Auto (originally Laurin & Klement) was a post WWI addition to the Skoda industrial conglomerate and apparently always somewhat separate from the rest.
Could you propably do a vid on the Elbmarsch Leukemia Cluster? There is some very interesting stuff to know about, especially a nuclear spill that apparently never happened, yet there were findings of manufactured radioactive material in roof gutters and so on, decades afterwards and a rise in leukemia cases in birth years 1990-2003 in the area.
Jaslovské Bohunice are pronounced differently as you did, but a great video and thank you for doing it about my home country Slovakia ❤ I have a relative who works with this reactors and is currently helping to deactive it. If you’d be interested in having more information about it contact me please.
"We, the reactor design group of the USSR, give to the CSSR a new nuclear reactor design. While we have never built & tested one before, we are sure it will function perfectly!"
Hi, the reactor was designed by CSSR engineers. However, they had limited knowledge about the core physics, so they were schooled on that in the USSR. Back then, there were 3 main "schools" on reactors in USSR, graphite moderated, water moderated and gas cooled. Czech engineers decided to go with the gas cooled heavy water moderated one because of the natural uranium.
In this case, this is inaccurate. I would suggest "kurva!". Or: do prdele! Of course Balls = míčky, but there are more than 10 other exact translations like "koule" yet still not spot on! The vocabulary in Czech language can be very rich and wide variety of meanings.
Me and my sister are fans of this channel. So you can understand my confusion when she announced you had released a video titled "The Beyonce meltdown".
Hmm I live couple of 10s km away and first time hearing about it. Also I laughed hard at pronunciation of Jaslovské Bohunice 😂😂 but great job as ever 🫡
Weird I thought Czechoslovakia had good safety reputation compared to eastern European standards. Actually I'm not really sure "eastern Europe" is the right description. Czechoslovakian, Germany, Austrian, Hungary and Poland seem more "central Europe" than "eastern Europe" to me, but I guess that's arbitrary.
This was actually a very impressive and ambitious project, but the technology itself was found to be a dead end. The idea was solid, but difficult to implement in practice. Even larger and more experienced countries would struggle to keep such an unpredictable reactor safe.
They got called Eastern after the separation of East and West after WWII. Nowadays they're back to being central Europe again, at least thew ay I see it.
@@CZpersi Some things that appeared to be advantageous around this concept of nuclear reactor later lost its importance, and it would been plain stupid to invest much into development of something that would be about as "good" as Magnox was/is... dead end. Working, but worse than other types...
@mjouwbuis Agreed. Inclusion of Central Europe into "East" Europe was to a large extent an ideological invention of the Soviets to outline their zone of interests/influence.
I panicked when I didn’t get my 8 a.m. Plainly Difficult fix. Just remembered y’all’s time went back last week, so it wasn’t your 2 o’clock posting time yet. Whew! Ours goes back tomorrow.
I live near the Jaslovské Bohunice power plant and I have heard about the accidents, but not much is known about them - at the time they happened, they were strictly kept secret from the public. The stream into which radioactive waste was discharged (supposedly several times even after the shutdown of A1) is called Manivier, and I want to go there to measure radiation - I have a geiger counter at home, but I haven't tried it yet.
Suggestion for another video: How it happened that the Hubble Space Telescope mirror got ground incorrectly. (A perfect example of how something can be made precisely inaccurate.) Nobody was injured or killed but it was a very expensive and embarrassing mistake. Especially ironic was that because the launch was delayed, Perkin Elmer had several years to discover and fix the problem. Luckily, corrective optics could be installed in a later mission to fix the problem,.
@@maxshep2829 Primary mirror had geometric fault(s) but would be extremelly costly to exchange. So they computed, created and installed corrected secondary mirror... that was still costly and delaying but less so.
I'm Czech... The pronunciation is so bad that I have to admire the herculean effort. Btw, there are rumors that the second accident was a sabotage by the KGB so that Czechoslovakia couldn't get nukes on their own. Prague spring and so on...
Finally someone made a video about it! It's such a fascinating history about it, yet it is not really known, unlike a lot of other, even smaller incidents. I remember reading about it a few years ago in Czechoslovak Journal of Physics. P.S. pronunciations :D
14:46 That llama is saying, "Less than 3 deaths? You see what happens when you don't hire that silly constantly goofy Safety Director with his long-sleeved green shirt and orange vest? Minusculely localized devastation."
Who in their right mind thought designing a system to change out reactor rods - while the reactor was producing Megawatts power? I mean, what could possibly go wrong? 😱
There is a rescue operation at this moment of a ten story building collapse in villa Gesell, Argentina. It was an apart hotel. It's been recently sold and the new owners were making some restorations, including the construction of a new elevator. It collapsed at around 1a.m. landing the adjacent building. Among the casualties are the previous owner, who was helping with the restorations, her nephew, his girlfriend and a handful of construction workers. Some were able to scape seconds prior to the disaster
WOW! John has found yet another radioactive incident … well two. As always, well presented and with real photos as well as the very informative drawings. Reminds me a bit of Qxir who makes a rather diffrunt kind of vids. Thumbs up!
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Sauces:
inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/42/105/42105680.pdf?r=1
large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/urban1/
large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/urban1/docs/38059373.pdf
inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/38/059/38059373.pdf
english.radio.cz/europes-narrow-escape-czechoslovak-chernobyl-8600479
inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/07/263/7263429.pdf?r=1
web.archive.org/web/20111003002052/www.javys.sk/en/index.php?page=vyradovanie-jadrovoenergetickych-zariadeni%2Fvyradovanie-jadrovej-elektrarne-a1%2Fhistoria
shs.cairn.info/revue-annales-historiques-de-l-electricite-2011-1-page-59?lang=fr
th-cam.com/video/smVCQkNTLx0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=frhpes7uOvyk9297
What is Bo-ni-ci-ya? Yas-lov-ske Bo-hu-ni-tse
@@_general_error Yeslow Bounc
Congrats on 1M subscribers John!!!🎉
In case you cared, I took time to type this out for another comment 😁
Jaslovské:
First off, the "J" is the same as "Y" in "yes".
"Jas" rhymes with "pass", but with short "a"
"lo" is pronounced pretty much exactly the same as "lo" in "lock"
The "v" in "lov" is pronounced like an "f" in "f*ck"
"s" as in "snake"
"k" same as in "lock" or "lok"
"é" is long e, closest to the "eeeeh" sound
Bohunice
"B" as in "battle"
"o" as in "lock"
"h" as in "hungry"
"u" is the short "oo" from "boot"
"n" as in "no"
"i" is the same as english "e" sound
"c" is pretty much a "ts" sound
"e" is again from "eeeeh", but short this time
It would be so much easier if any of the syllables rhymed, but the sounds are just too different.
@@kubauhlir1730 Thanks.
'Silica Gel-Do Not Eat...and do not leave attached to Nuclear Fuel Rods'
I always wondered why electronics ship with little bags of candy. It's cool though, nice little touch. They are clearly sugar-free.
Me: "Nobody's gonna tell me what not to eat!"
@@markh.6687 Melted fuel rods - do not eat
You: "Looks delicious!"
It looks like the best option if you have a choice between eating silica gel (from something non-radioactive) and leaving it attached to a nuclear fuel rod you should definitely choose to eat the silica gel (which could cause choking or impaction if you aren't careful or are a child, but usually is just an uncomfortable ER trip at worst for most adults). Follow that by breathing silica gel dust or any form of silica-based dust really (which can cause silicosis), then handling but but eating the silica gel from around the fuel rods, then you get into a bit of a toss-up based on how you determine worst - if almost but not fully causing a meltdown is the worst case scenario that goes at the end of the list, if your bigger concern is for your own safety only then eating the nuclear fuel rod is at the end of the list... eating the irradiated silica gel packet is hard to place on the list as I don't know how much radiation it may or may not pick up - if it is a small amount and might cause cancer in the future but might not it is just after silicosis, if it is a lot and will cause acute radiation sickness and slow painful death it is debatable with just eating the fuel rod which would at least be faster most likely. Nothing on this list is a good idea and the only not awful idea is eating the silica gel. Don't do any of these, obviously, but that is the only one that probably won't kill you and won't cause lasting damage (though breathing silica dust only one time and only a little bit *probably* won't do lasting damage).
So my recommendation in a situation like this is to lick the wrapper of a non-irradiated silica gel packet and play with the beads, but don't eat them unless you are in some situation where you have no better options.
that would definitely be on the label in California if it happened there
3:51 "Yes that Skoda" : Just to clarify, not "that car company Skoda" but the original one famous for its guns, turbines and locomotives. The car company, originally Laurin and Klement, was bought in 1925 by Emil Skoda and given its name. The research was transfered to Pilsen and HQ to Prague. After the communist coup the operations of the car company were separated and from then on shared practically only the name.
EDIT: A little adition to the two suffocations. The alarms in their area were not working as the lightbulbs from detectors were stolen. When they noticed something is terribly wrong they ran to the nearest emergency exit, which was locked to reduce theft...
I feel bad for laughing but that is the most stereotypical eastern European story I've ever heard.
@@diapysik It is one of those stories from the "Communism in a nutshell" category.
Thank you. I thought only of that car Skoda. I come from one of the countries that border Czech Republic and there are many Skodas on the streets, so that was the one I thought of.
@pavelsovicka5292 pretty much, on paper I love communism, but in practice you wind up with a hellscape like the USSR or CCP, maybe Communist Cuba if you're lucky
how can you have a locked emergency exit. come on that's so stupid
Nuclear rod literally launches out of the reactor.
"Gosh, I hope that doesn't happen again." *continues operating reactor without figuring it out*
"darn, that was CRAZY! anyway..."
There was at least one sodium cooled reactor that was restarted after a malfunction, without finding out the cause first.
That famous communist safety culture
Yet we still don't know how anesthesia works.
I heard of one such incident decades ago, where such a rod actually speared an employee, and pinned him to the ceiling of the facility! Poor bastard 😢
"Nuclear reactor" and "kept having accidents" is such a terrifying string to put togheter...
I live near Sellafield, this is just a normal state of affairs, what is terrifying is knowing some of the people they employ.
@@nlwilson4892Wow, I can only imagine. This is not a safe technology and with the high level of risk involved it makes very little sense to me. One mistake and you can irradiate an area the size of a major city or even the size of a country like Luxembourg and make it uninhabitable for a thousand years.
@@nlwilson4892Thats the way it always worked there in anything that was a large and expensive project
@@The_Prince_Of_Crows and yet it’s the safest way to generate electricity
@@williamp6800 That's strictly a matter of opinion. Coal, hydroelectric, wind turbines, and other sources are every bit as safe if not safer and don't have the risk of losing a portion of land for thousands of years and thousands of fatalities and birth defects if something unknown and unpredicted happens or a mistake is made. Have you ever heard of a coal plant exploding and destroying a town for a thousand years? You can't even say it's cleaner for real. Not when you consider the storage and disposal of waste byproducts and the removal of a plant when decommissioned. That's all just hype and false narratives.
"Hey guys, out of curiosity do we have a vacuum cleaner?" "Yeah, why? Aren't you supposed to be refueling the reactor?" "No reason, hey can we borrow that real quick?"
At that time it would be "ETA 418"
The clearing staff using the same contaminated vacuum cleaner in the office a day later 😂
@@NinoJoel The vacuum cleaner wouldn't be contaminated. Those fresh fuel rods would be producing a negligible amount of radiation.
@@NinoJoel fresh fuel rods can be hold in hands and they are. In that particular reactor those rods had even unenriched uranium. That was the main feature of the A1 and the possibility to change the fuel during operation.
@@Petriiik while my comment pretty obviously was ment as a joke I still don't agree with your comment and the one above.
Yes it's not highly radioactive.
That still does not make it "safe" To handle for longer periods of time.
There is a big difference between having a fixed source of said radiation or potentially sucking in small fragments of said source and spreading it in the air.
The used material is highly toxic and the radiation while not posing a threat directly will have a much worse effect if breathed in.
I genuinely love plainly difficult, he talks about disasters without overdramatizing them or adding needless scary music its just a guy talkin bout stuff
He has scary music on his "Scandal" series. There's a second channel with all his music. It's pretty good.
If only I could understand what he is saying…probably chewing hot potatoe at the same time as he speaks…!
As a long time patron and someone who lives right next to this powerplant .. I was waiting for this episode for so long.. I mean I know already so much about this stuff as half of the town somehow works with the powerplant or it's subsidiaries even my family and friends. But now at least rest of the TH-cam can hear about our little nuclear disaster
It would be interesting to test the soil with a radiacode and see if there's enough Cesium for it to detect it today.
@@Calliber50It no doubt is still there .
I heard an anecdode that building of the A1 was already a bit of a disaster regarding security and many houses around the NPP have stainless steel fences build from material meant for the plant... is that true? 😁
@@Papinak2 As I live near Sellafield, I find this hilarious. There's a lot of stuff goes missing from that site.
Do they have an estimation of how long it will take to decommission? They estimated Sellafeild at 100 years.
"A little bit glowey"
Very descriptive.
I hate it when that happens!
Congrats on cracking the one million mark❤
Ah yes. Jaslovské Bohunice.
Ppl in our country have old joke about the place and it goes something like this:
Q: Are apples harvested near Jaslovské Bohunice good to eat?
A: Yes, however be advised that apple core must be liquidated by the means of disposal in 11 feet deep hole, which must be then filled up and must be located at least half mile away from nearest surface water source.
Conversion from metric to imperial units is approximate...
😂 Didn't hear that one yet
Ovociu sa nám tu pri Bohuniciach darí!
Asi jako pampeliškám s dvěma nebo třemi stonky, A těch ctyřlístků a pětilístků co se tam dá najít...
I'm Czech and it always cracks me up when an English speaker tries to pronounce words like Škoda or Jaslovské Bohunice :D
BTW there was a popular joke in the 90s, that Siemens started growing lentil around Jaslovské Bohunice to be sold later as watch batteries.
Sounds the same as Czechs trying to speak English..
is it pronounced "Shkoda"? off to look it up
lol
Being a firearms enthusiast, CZ is my favorite make by far. Pronounce the whole name? Not gonna happen.
What does lentil have to do with watch batteries?
@@philip2.2.12 Yeah you're right, they're clearly ceramic capacitors
I live about 5 km from NPS Jaslovske Bohunice, where both my father and my grandfather have worked their whole lives. They would tell me stories about the doomed A1 plant. I was particularly disgusted with how workers couldn't flee from the reactor hall following the CO2 burst, because the exit door was locked. Welcome to communist Czechoslovakia!
On the other hand, both more modern V1 & V2 plants were very safe, featuring the well-known VVER440 reactors, which were later upgraded to 500 MW. V1 had to undergo early decommissioning, because our neighbors didn't like it didn't feature the containment building. EU paid a lot of money for that decom. V2 is gonna stay for many years to come.
I believe there is talks about a complete reactor refurbishment/replacement.
Ahh, the sweet familiarity of the Saturday morning radiological disaster narrative, framing our lives like a Norman Rockwell painting--let us all give thanks for this cherished respite our host so graciously provides.
I like to sit around the radio and listen to the presentation. :)
"What happens when Jaslovské Bohunice explode?"
"Czechia and Slovakia switch anthems: The former will sing 'Lightning over Tatra' and the latter 'Where Is My Home?'"
Hardly anyone will understand this one... but yes i remember that joke.
For others - CSSR anthem had two parts, czech one and slowak one. They are grossly that what Vaclav says...
Je mi líto, ale myslím že tenhle vtip pochopí jen Češi a Slováci
Translation: I am sorry, but I think that only Czechs and Slovaks will understand that joke
@@cyrdas You're underestimating human intelligence. "Jaslovské Bohunice" is known from the video, and the punchline clearly states what are the names of the anthems. Previously ignorant people might not find it as funny, but they will still get it.
@@cyrdas You might be wrong…!
Apparently“Don’t eat silica gel” also applies to Nuclear reactors.
Hi, nice video!
During the first accident, the compressors that were pumping the CO2 through the core were turned off (some were turned off, some were just slowed by lowering their RPMs) by the operators. They thought that it would decrease the CO2 pressure and slow down the leak. That worked, but after some time they realized that a meltdown could occur from not sufficient cooling, co they tried to turn them back on. That didn´t work because the temperature of the copper coils on the electromotors was too high and the system blocades didnt let them start up. They managed maybe on a 4rd try. The shift engineer decided that the leak can be stopped by blocking the hole by the refueling machine, so 2 brave guys went to the main hall in a protection gear and a gas masks and managed to block it manually. The guy who did it said that it was a hard task , since he couldn´t see shit through the leaking gas. Also the top of the reactor was frozen because of the cold CO2, but after some time the machine reached its place, the guys did a really good job.
The two guys that suffocated were unfortunately somewhere they shouldn´t have been. They were mechanical workers who didn´t have much to do during their shifts so apparently they had a little place a couple floors under the main hall where they could rest and sleep. It was against the rules, but tolerated. This accident caught them off guard. The emergency exit which they managed to reach was locked to prevent stealing...something not imaginable nowadays.
Good that the standards changed drastically since those days. The mistakes they did back then are unimaginable nowadays and the nuclear power plants are safe and reliable.
Let´s hope not that many Austrians will see this video and think that it´s still done the same way these days! :D
Great ,first multi disaster video and i living 8 miles from it
Same here, I grew up about 15 km from this power plant (Piestany). I still remember the evacuation "drills" we did at school.
@@Qu1atu5 "drills" You had to eat the real iodine pills? 😅
Sometimes it seems futile to have alarms.
I worked with an accountant who had worked at a chemical plant decades ago. They had evacuation drills. One day, in conversation with the operations engineer, he was told that if the alarms sounded, just call your family and say goodbye because you *_are_* dead. You can't outrun or outdrive the gases.
I think they made urethane foam, 1960s.
We need this video redone from a Slovak perspective. This doesn't have enough sarcastic self-deprecation
@@gargoyle7863 Well we were all issued a iodine pills from the municipality and were told to pop them when the alarm goes off:).
The first disaster was handled very professionally, everyone did thier jobs and no radiation was released. Its unfortunate that those 2 unrelated workers lost thier lives despite it.
Not that Skoda. There are two Skodas in Czech republic. One is car manufacturer, other is heavy industry dating back to Austro-Hungary.
Your struggle with the name made me smile :)
Thank you!
@@PlainlyDifficult You know that it takes 10s for google translate to read the name of that village for you so you can learn to pronounce it, and TG is pretty spot on with pronunciation on this one
@@lukasverner1246 Considering he didn't even say "Czechoslovakia" correctly, I don't think the other names ever had a chance. 🙃 I kid, but I can hear my Slovak grandmother turning over in her grave.
@@WobblesandBean What is wrong with his pronounciation of "Czechoslovakia"?
he's being facetious about the czechoslovakia pronunciation
I know there's not too many nuclear accidents left to cover but I love when you go back to the classics😊
I hate to tell you this but there are still a few. He hasn't started on the military ones yet.....
I was thinking about this NPP recently! Thank you for making this video!
One detail you didn't mention - the 1976 disaster and subsequent CO2 release killed three people, two workers and a janitor.
Btw you did butcher the name, but at least it was the funny kind!
Then again, the Bohunice disasters are rather obscure, and the only TV documentary I saw about the 1976 disaster got some details wrong, worst one being the statement that Jaslovské Bohunice used RMBK reactors. How did they come to this conclusion, I have no idea.
Once again, thank you.
it is common misconception. If reactor has cooling channels it will be named RBMK by some journalists.
@@michawisniewski4654 Ah, yeah that's about the only simillarity... because coolant, moderator, pressure vesel, size&power are all quite different...
@@SYNtemp this is clear for most people with basic knowledge about nuclear reactor types. However, I know one nuclear physics professor (!) that said similar blasphemies multiple times.
Thanks!
Thank you
I'am from czech republic and I had no idea about this !
@@J0nik few years back web of ČT24 (or was it Český rozhlas? Don't remember) published article about it, if you want more detailed version.
Same here!
There is quite a lot of secrecy around it and some documents were not declassified to this day.
@@CZpersi Bollocks, much was "known" among those who were interrested even during socialist times, let alone after their fall... not detailed minute-by-minute description, but really most facts. If you're interrested at all, that is.
I think that Československý časopis pro fyziku published an article about it a few years ago, but prominently about the A1 reactor
I’m so happy that you keep finding new incidents to report on. You’re my favorite channel for my favorite obsession.
I subbed when you were under 100k,now to see you pass a million is great stuff.congrats
Thank you, awesome video. I have been a nuclear engineer for 30 years in the US and I never heard of this or many of the events you report.
As there was no real effect to the outside western observers did not notice it. Thus it was not published in the west. If the winds from Chernobyl 86 would have blown from West to East like normal it would have only noticed by the CIA.
By the way the nuclear accident in Chernobyl was first noticed by the Swedes later by gamma spectral analysis. Some years earlier it might have not detected at all.
When did you get a million subs? That's plainly awesome! Congratulations, and well-earned!
Please consider making a video explaining the various units used to describe quantities of radiation. It would be great to understand what the quantities actually mean and why there seem to be so many units. Rads, becquerels, grays, curies, sieverts, etc.
Channel plug seals have been problematic on many reactors, the design I have worked on uses the pressure of the reactor to lock it in place, surprisingly simple and hence reliable. To take the fuel out whilst the reactor is running the refuelling machine is connected to the channel stand pipe.The pressure in the charge machine is then increased so it is the same as the reactor and the channel plug seal drops down slightly under its own weight and unlocks, a crane inside the charge machine then connects to the channel plug seal and lifts it and the connected fuel assembly into the refuelling machine. The fresh fuel and a new channel lock seal is then lowered into the reactor. The refuelling machine is then depressurised slightly and a careful measurement made of how much the channel plug has risen indicating that it has locked into place. If this measurement is not made or you just rely on the channel plug not sticking... well... the whole assembly can pop out sometime later like the cork from a bottle.
Yes that's all correct, but the basic problem is WHY to use all this bollock... channel type reactor has only one advantage (that prevailed to these days) and that is less downtime. Everything else speaks against it... those things that were once advantages (online refuelling served among other things production of weaponizable Plutonium, only Kim needs that these days) (low/unenriched uranium was nice feature when the enrichment preces(es) were complicated, not much of a problem novadays) are gone so this reactor type has gone the way of British Magnox type...
Thank you for the recent uptic in nuclear accident vids!
Indeed. I get so tired of renewed efforts to push (HEAVILY Taxpayer subsidized) nuclear energy on the poorly informed public.
Is this growth because John is increasing his rate of storytelling, or has the nuclear industry, globally, become more sloppy and careless? 🤔
Hi, from Trnava :) I live like 12 Km from Jaslovské Bohunice nuclear powerplant. Nice video thanks.
I’m sure you know all the insiders information about this 😊
Thanks
Thank you so much!!
That first accident sounds like they managed to make the world's most terrifying, toxic blow-gun. Thanks for the vid, John. I'm really enjoying the recent radiation accident series. Anyone got any good books they recommend on radiation accidents? I enjoyed reading "Atomic Accidents" (Mahaffey) and "Midnight in Chernobyl" (Higginbotham).
That pronunciation deserves its own accident rating.
idle criticisms suck
what're the right pronunciations?
@@JimmyMatis-h9y [Yaslowskey Bouhoonitzeh]
@@JimmyMatis-h9y honestly as a czech person this was the only video on this chanel I had to put on subtitles because I had trouble with the names and had no idea what was talked about (I agree that czehc language is difficult but there was zero effort made to make czech names sound at least vaugley similar to what are they supposed to)
Plainly's mispronunciations of (sometimes) even English words are one of the endearing things about this channel. Keep it up Plainly!
Lots of things get mispronounced daily, get over it
13:40 John, you have square meters, not cubic, displayed on the screen.
Thank you for your awesome video productions that you make each week.
Since they're measuring area of river bank, square meter is probably correct and cubic meter was a misspeak
@@KhanaHatake That's an incisive response.
As I'm not a riverologist, I don't know the correct terminology.
Thank you for your great reply.
A Czech workmate of mine (and totally the right age group) had never heard of the A1 reactor let alone the disaster. I’m pointing him to this video as I’m not even going to attempt the pronunciation of the plant name 😂
I am Czech and it's pretty common knowledge to anyone from the field. These cases are being studied and explained in detail at our technical universities.
I am from Slovakia and knew about this one, it's awesome you made a video about it
Two workers suffocated from CO2 leak were unable to escape through emergency exit, because the emergency exit was locked. Why it was locked then? Because people were stealing material from the plant. Whom to blame? Maybe we shall check even today who has welded his backyard fence of neutron-flow-resistant nuclear-grade stainless steel in villages surrounding Jaslovske Bohunice.
Yep, and light bulbs from signaling lights in CO2 detectors were also reported stolen that time...
Nuclear power plants are still by far the safest, cleanest, most efficient energy we have right now, but man it's terrifying how often people will cut corners while building and operating them.
That why we phasing them out, Nuclear power is the most dangerous as it need just a little push to create consequence that will last century and human corruption know no limit so yeah nah lets not try to see how far can we go in our own stupidity and just move away from that pandora box.
If ran properly and of modern construction. This one sounds more like a test rig even the russians didnt want on their soil
@@Jabarri74 "We Almost Lost Detroit", a non-fiction book worth reading. Then there's "some Channel" named 'Plainly Difficult' with its plentiful stories of nuclear accidents inside the USA.
@@arcanondrum6543 "The Warning" is another non-fiction book worth reading.
@@arcanondrum6543 No. The book is clearly fiction.
Im sorry, Im Slovak, I understand it's hard to pronounce for foreigners, but the little hesitation I hear every time with the name is so damn funny xD Yas-low-skie Bo-hu-nee-cie :DDDD I don't mean it in a bad way, but it's hilarious and a little cute xD
As a Slovak myself, I totally agree. Slovak is really hard, especially for foreigners XD
Man, just think, those guys were weeks away from getting their “1 year no incidents” shirts
The company building nuclear power plants in Czech and Slovak republic is called "Škoda nuclear machines contruction" and it is owned by CEZ Group. They have build all NPPs in Czech and Slovak republic. The company was also producing the VVER440 and VVER1000 pressure vessels and exported them to Hungary and Bulgaria.
Some western journalists are still saying that those NPPs ,and even the currently being built Mochovce 4, are built by Rosatom.
There should be an interesting note, that Jaslovske Bohunice A1 is very similar by the story, reactor type and fate to Swiss Lucens reactor.
Both were mostly domestic designs, both were CO2 gas cooled heavy water moderated, both were designed to use natural or barely enriched fuel to achieve some independence for a country lacking uranium enrichment facility, both failed soon due to partial meltdown.
" B A L L S !!! "
You Made 1M 'Subs!!!' Outstanding!!!
"Call the front desk. Get housekeeping up here quick."
Its amazing silica gel grandules can do that much damage.
Sloppy work, one little thing made a big difference
I had to check the description to find out, what city are you trying to mention here :D
Most of the contamination was caused by gross negligence during later cleanup, where the contaminated water and other stuff from the building was simply released to the environment by the demolition workers. This eventually led to appearance of moster mushrooms and ferns around the plant.
nuclear accidents are my favorites on this channel.
I had a Subaru Impreza I put 3 motors in over 5 years I should have cut my losses much earlier. When the 4th motor blew I pushed it out of the barn it rolled across the field into the ditch I took a cab to dealership bought a Nissan truck and when I came back to barn 2 days later the car had been stolen.
i appreciate them giving up when it was apparent it was just going to be problematic. surprised about that. i’m also surprised i had never heard about this or the cleanup efforts despite being czech. also props to PD for knowing we’re not czechoslovakia anymore, it’s a common mistake. thank you for the vid!
Currently studying in Belgium, not even 1000km from home, yet a lot of people, here, in the "heart of European union" don't know that it's not Czechoslovakia anymore...
A Skoda reactor? Well yeah... They built cars, tanks, machineguns, fieldguns,... Skoda also supplied a lot of countries all the way from Austria-Hungary onwards.
Ohh yess... .a nucleair accident VIDEO. My favorite kind of Plainly Difficult video!
I would love to see more "Doomed" multi-disaster videos.
I love the animation texture on the Fuel Rods! Like a green laser in a foggy dance floor
I would love a video on the Oklo fossil reactors! Aka nature's own "attempt" at a nuclear reactor. Nothing went wrong with it, but it baffled some scientists for a while!
Though it does allude to that there is a very very minuscule change that nuclear explosion could happen out of no where :P
The two workers who suffocated in the CO2 cloud is extremely sad. Unlike other gases, you know when you're suffocating in CO2. It burns and your body recognizes it as not being oxygen. If you've ever tried to hold your breath, the buildup of CO2 is why your body fights you to take a breath. So those workers most likely died gasping and panicked.
They seriously picked the worst, most finicky, most expensive reactor they could have chosen, with the least reliable kind of cooling system. Whole thing isn't robust, nor easily made failsafe.
@@300guy the point was becoming independent on USSR with nuclear fuel, all the kinks and quirks were considered necessary evil to not have Kremlin knife on neck in regards of electricity self sufficiency (which is pretty big deal in national security, especially in context they already invaded us in '68 and were occupying us till nineties).
@depressedTrent The RBMK reactors had their own booby traps obviously. They could have specialized in PWR as well, but not as cheap and fast and not able to continue running during fueling cycles.
@300guy pwr needs high enriched fuel which we weren't able to produce domestically, that was the core issue.
@@depressedTrent Please cut that "high" from enriched fuel for pwr... common enrichment for pwr is around 4% but you could work even with something like 2.5% if absolutelly necessary. Unless ofcourse you are speaking about pwr reactors for military use (ships, submarines) where size is extremelly important, THERE you could have something like 30-40% enrichment... but even that is usually called MEDIUM enrichment (nothing like 90% HEU for nuclear weapons)...
@SYNtemp high in context of reactors, not in absolute numbers. The fuel enrichment process in any capacity is the core of the issue here. Also, submarines and other nuclear powered vessels don't really do it for size but rather to prolong periods between refueling, often calculated for not refueling it at all for entire service life.
Love these reactor stories.
I hoped youll make video on Silica gel induced disaster. 8) peak dark humor, czech(oslovak) staple.
Wow, I have never heard about this before! Thanks a lot for covering this. That being said, I had to first google it to see what the hell you were trying to pronounce, lol. 😂
Just a tip for the future: simply type the name to google translate and have it read aloud in the respective language. it works perfectly for czech and slovak and probably most other languages too.
Thank you Jon!
I can't believe a silica packet did all that. 😂
Well, not *quite* that Skoda if you mean the car company. Skoda Auto (originally Laurin & Klement) was a post WWI addition to the Skoda industrial conglomerate and apparently always somewhat separate from the rest.
John, I just noticed you broke through the million mark. Well done mate. From a fellow Londoner....Jakob....Plumstead, SE18....
Could you propably do a vid on the Elbmarsch Leukemia Cluster? There is some very interesting stuff to know about, especially a nuclear spill that apparently never happened, yet there were findings of manufactured radioactive material in roof gutters and so on, decades afterwards and a rise in leukemia cases in birth years 1990-2003 in the area.
Jaslovské Bohunice are pronounced differently as you did, but a great video and thank you for doing it about my home country Slovakia ❤ I have a relative who works with this reactors and is currently helping to deactive it. If you’d be interested in having more information about it contact me please.
"We, the reactor design group of the USSR, give to the CSSR a new nuclear reactor design. While we have never built & tested one before, we are sure it will function perfectly!"
Can you please test it so we know if it is worth something? 🙂
We have studied and learned from our mistakes, and we're quite confident we can replicate them 😮
Hi, the reactor was designed by CSSR engineers. However, they had limited knowledge about the core physics, so they were schooled on that in the USSR. Back then, there were 3 main "schools" on reactors in USSR, graphite moderated, water moderated and gas cooled. Czech engineers decided to go with the gas cooled heavy water moderated one because of the natural uranium.
7:42: _"Míčky!"_
In this case, this is inaccurate. I would suggest "kurva!". Or: do prdele! Of course Balls = míčky, but there are more than 10 other exact translations like "koule" yet still not spot on! The vocabulary in Czech language can be very rich and wide variety of meanings.
I'm actually quite interested in nuclear accidents but this one was new to me, thanks!
Me and my sister are fans of this channel. So you can understand my confusion when she announced you had released a video titled "The Beyonce meltdown".
Hmm I live couple of 10s km away and first time hearing about it. Also I laughed hard at pronunciation of Jaslovské Bohunice 😂😂 but great job as ever 🫡
8:37 man thats really scary now that you think about it
Congrats on a million John! Well deserved
Weird I thought Czechoslovakia had good safety reputation compared to eastern European standards. Actually I'm not really sure "eastern Europe" is the right description. Czechoslovakian, Germany, Austrian, Hungary and Poland seem more "central Europe" than "eastern Europe" to me, but I guess that's arbitrary.
This was actually a very impressive and ambitious project, but the technology itself was found to be a dead end. The idea was solid, but difficult to implement in practice. Even larger and more experienced countries would struggle to keep such an unpredictable reactor safe.
They got called Eastern after the separation of East and West after WWII. Nowadays they're back to being central Europe again, at least thew ay I see it.
@@CZpersi Some things that appeared to be advantageous around this concept of nuclear reactor later lost its importance, and it would been plain stupid to invest much into development of something that would be about as "good" as Magnox was/is... dead end. Working, but worse than other types...
@@SYNtemp Yes. We know that today. Our experiences and safety standards are written in the blood of past tragedies.
@mjouwbuis Agreed. Inclusion of Central Europe into "East" Europe was to a large extent an ideological invention of the Soviets to outline their zone of interests/influence.
I panicked when I didn’t get my 8 a.m. Plainly Difficult fix. Just remembered y’all’s time went back last week, so it wasn’t your 2 o’clock posting time yet. Whew! Ours goes back tomorrow.
Thank you. I was waiting for this to be covered. Good work!
I tought it must be Jaslovske Bohunice but man you murdered that so much I coudlnt recognize for the world of me. :D
2:15 🎼 Uranium fever has done and got me down! 🎶
You should make a video about the "Grote Mandrenke" :)
I live near the Jaslovské Bohunice power plant and I have heard about the accidents, but not much is known about them - at the time they happened, they were strictly kept secret from the public. The stream into which radioactive waste was discharged (supposedly several times even after the shutdown of A1) is called Manivier, and I want to go there to measure radiation - I have a geiger counter at home, but I haven't tried it yet.
Suggestion for another video: How it happened that the Hubble Space Telescope mirror got ground incorrectly. (A perfect example of how something can be made precisely inaccurate.) Nobody was injured or killed but it was a very expensive and embarrassing mistake. Especially ironic was that because the launch was delayed, Perkin Elmer had several years to discover and fix the problem. Luckily, corrective optics could be installed in a later mission to fix the problem,.
Corrective optics? Sooo, basically the Hubble Telescope wears glasses? 😂
@@maxshep2829yup! That’s basically what they did to fix the incorrectly ground mirror
@@maxshep2829 Primary mirror had geometric fault(s) but would be extremelly costly to exchange. So they computed, created and installed corrected secondary mirror... that was still costly and delaying but less so.
And I'm glad Specsavers fixed it: some of the photos taken are extraordinary.
I remember that! It was so exciting to have a telescope in space-and then the news broke. The fact that they were able to fix it is pretty amazing.
I'm Czech... The pronunciation is so bad that I have to admire the herculean effort.
Btw, there are rumors that the second accident was a sabotage by the KGB so that Czechoslovakia couldn't get nukes on their own. Prague spring and so on...
Silica Gel, do not eat.... or insert into reactor.
Finally someone made a video about it!
It's such a fascinating history about it, yet it is not really known, unlike a lot of other, even smaller incidents.
I remember reading about it a few years ago in Czechoslovak Journal of Physics.
P.S. pronunciations :D
14:46 That llama is saying, "Less than 3 deaths? You see what happens when you don't hire that silly constantly goofy Safety Director with his long-sleeved green shirt and orange vest? Minusculely localized devastation."
Who in their right mind thought designing a system to change out reactor rods - while the reactor was producing Megawatts power? I mean, what could possibly go wrong? 😱
Another episode of Plainly Difficult always makes me glow with happiness!
Hopefully not a Cherenkov glow.
We all see what you did there. We're putting on protective gear.
Holy crap the bot comments are hilarious in the context of this. I love the one that wants to "repeat the trick from this video."
@@ConstantlyDamaged what do you know, maybe they DO want to try shoot fuel rod out of reactor! 😂
@@depressedTrent The machine uprising-literally. The machines up-rise the reactor rods!
@@ConstantlyDamaged new party game idea: "who can shoot fuel rod higher"
@@depressedTrent That sounds.....somewhat......lewd.
Bots looking at nuclear disasters costing lives: "I found this inspiring and it made my day! [heart][heart][heart]".
SkyNET is waking up, isn't it?
Plainly is back in his natural habitat, nuclear stuff ups... this makes me so happy :)
Llama does not take nuts from strangers.
Looking forward to Saturday morning for my plainly difficult video😊
There is a rescue operation at this moment of a ten story building collapse in villa Gesell, Argentina. It was an apart hotel. It's been recently sold and the new owners were making some restorations, including the construction of a new elevator. It collapsed at around 1a.m. landing the adjacent building. Among the casualties are the previous owner, who was helping with the restorations, her nephew, his girlfriend and a handful of construction workers. Some were able to scape seconds prior to the disaster
Man, I totally forgot that today is upload day :) Thank you so much, and it's about nuclear stuff as well! The best kind of Plainly Difficult videos!
You made my morning John, thank you again! Csnt wait to listen!!!!
I'm not sure if you said 'extra checks during refueling' or extra Czechs during refueling'
good afternoon from Manchester England :-)
WOW! John has found yet another radioactive incident … well two. As always, well presented and with real photos as well as the very informative drawings. Reminds me a bit of Qxir who makes a rather diffrunt kind of vids.
Thumbs up!