Bhopal was far from their first rodeo... it's more like the time they gave a master demonstration of bull riding to show the new guys what a pro looks like. And rode the bull until it died of horrible toxic chemicals.
@@gusbailey68 1985 West Virginia gas leak The year after the Bhopal disaster a faulty valve at the UC plant in Institute, WV caused a large cloud of gas that injured six employees and caused almost 200 nearby residents to seek medical treatment for respiratory and skin irritation. Union Carbide blamed the leak of aldicarb oxime (made from MIC but does not contain any MIC itself), the main ingredient in the popular farm pesticide Temik, on a valve failure after a buildup of pressure in a storage tank containing 500 pounds of the chemical. A company spokesman insisted that the aldicarb oxime leak “never was a threat to the community.”[1
@ind0ctr1n3 dunno, I think that Homer Simpson moved to Tokaimura in the late '90's, they had one explosion and fire for waste being treated and encapsulated in '97, then in '99, a criticality event that left coins in homes 350 meters away neutron activated. Last I heard, he moved to near Fukushima, ain't heard anything since then.
There was a Union Carbide plant just 10 minutes from where my parents and I lived when I was a child in the 80s. My mother told me she hated the company and never trusted them. Now I know why.
Luckily, Union Carbide learned its lesson and from then on always made sure its valves and pipes containing dangerous substances were in working order.
Joe Fro Ringhals Nuclear Power Plant. The vacuum cleaner started a fire during a containment test, which resulted in multiple months of downtime for the plant.
I remember when the report about the Bhopal accident came on. My father, who was a chemical engineer and project-manager, started swearing a blue streak at all of Union-Carbide's executives. Even though he never worked for UC, he knew what the execs had done and what had caused the Bhopal disaster. You see, when the engineers design plants that work with dangerous chemicals [or radioactive material], they design in not only Safety-Sytems, but backup-safety-systems, a backup-backup-safety-system, and sometimes even a backup to the backup-backup-safety-system. The CEO and Members of the Board, of course, cut all of those systems, sometimes even getting rid of the Safety-System itself! But those 3 layers of backup behind the main Safety System are there for a reason: if all of them fail, _you will kill every living thing in a 30 mile radius._ Therefore, making sure you have several layers of fallback in case the primary Safety System fails is *_absolutely required._* Except if your a CEO or other corporate executive - and Doubly So if you're a corporate executive for Union Carbide. They don't give a sh1t about anything but 💰💰💰, who cares if a few [hundred] thousand people die.
At this point these videos don't need any other explanation that "Union Carbide". It's like wondering why Wylie Coyote keeps getting hurt by trusting Acme.
My grandfather worked on nuclear reactors and handled a few experiments like these in his time as a chemical, later nuclear, engineer. He was confident in himself that he wouldn't mess up. Because he took safety very, very seriously. He knew the dangers, and knew his family was important. These mishaps are exactly why he was so cautious. Never cut corners, safety above all else.
yay! you finally made one about my town! both my father and my grandfather retired from y-12, my other grandfather worked at k-25, and my mom did some time at ORNL (x-10). Gotta love growing up on a superfund site! Oak Ridge, where we really don't glow in the dark, but everyone gets dementia from all the damn mercury around here.
My step-grandparents both worked at various locations in Oak Rdige as well, and my step-dad grew up there. His dad died of Alzheimer's sometime back, his mom more recently, and quite peacefully, so he's been making visits to get the house cleaned out and ready to sell. That mercury comment might explain why there was a bottle of the stuff just lying around the house, lol.
I'm also from Oak Ridge and just moved back due to COVID. Both of my parents have worked at Y-12 and K-25. My mom still works there and is always complaining about workers not following proper procedures and regulations. I'm assuming it's because she works on the audits.
No way! My father and grandfather also worked at Y-12 in the 60s and 70s. My mom was in the biology division doing research on chemical and radiation mutagenesis. My dad designed machines to build nuclear missiles. I was born in Oak Ridge and lived there until I was 9 (in California now). One of my dad's friends liked to tell a story about the time someone drove a forklift into a steel drum full of mercury, and it went into an open 8" drain in the floor. Yeah. There's a reason nobody's ever been allowed to fish or swim in the Clinch river.
@@annehaight9963 You can fish and swim in the Clinch. They just have signs not to eat the catfish. As they’re bottom dwellers and lord only knows how many drums of nuclear waste was dumped in the river. I remember when they found hundreds of them in the river. That and before K-25 was dismantled, when you drove down Blair Rd. Behind K-25 they had thousands of barrels just sitting there.
My uncle worked at the Oak Ridge National Lab from 1956-1962. He knew a few of these guys. He says it was way worse then they say (naturally). He passed away a few years back now. Also said that it was less of an accident and more of a failed experiment, as in, they did it on purpose but just miscalculated what would happen.
Never ceases to amaze me how avoidable many of the incidents should have been. Considering the possibile ramifications of incidents of this nature it's incredible that so many people seemed to care little for safety procedures.
Each time I hear about serious accidents involving radiation and especially how many of them there have been I keep hearing the part of the episode from Star Trek Voyager in my mind, where Seven of Nine notices that even though the crew comes over as disorganised and chaotic, it's capable of doing great things, and that this seems to be true for the whole of mankind: "You've faced extinction many times yet you always managed to overcome the situation and succeed. I find that remarkable."
I really find your videos about the more unknown incidents interesting, I recently found one in Germany that might be interesting for a video: the AVR Jülich is an experimental gas-cooled, high-temperature pebble-bed reactor which is believed to have suffered several incidents during its life, most of which had been covered up. It is now highly contaminated and apparently it contaminated some of the water table in the area, though it is hard to find out the extent after the fact.
My father worked at Y-12 from 1976 to 2015 and he had told me about various incidents that happened there over the years. I think I remember something about this. Union Carbide lost the contract sometime in the 1980s when Martin Marietta took over and then Lockeed Martin, and so on.
Dude, how many industrial accidents has union carbide been involved with?! Holy cow. At least I know what to look for when I move again; no union carbide facilities anywhere in the nearby area. Lol.
My grandparents worked at ORNL. Their back steps leading into the laundry room where they left their shoes after work still has a higher radiation reading than the rest of the house. Also, two door knobs and the washer and dryer were reading 69 cpm in 1984 when gpa and I did tests when we were looking into his cancer cause and work history possibly being related. Our government still sees no issue denying medical care and treatment for exposed workers. Between all the nuclear facilities, bombed areas in the Marshall Islands and Nevada we have spent billions pretending "everything is just fine" at the expense of our own people. Disgraceful.
Disgraceful indeed! And what I find crazy also is the pseudoscience that sells fake cures to cancer that could'vebeen from all those nuclear bomb tests in the ocean, desert, ect... sick
I live in Oak Ridge. My dad and grandfather worked at the various plants for years. I love learning the history here.. the Manhattan Project/The Secret City. It’s incredible. Thanks for the deep dive on this incident. I learned a lot that I didn’t know before watching. 🖤
Imagine working in an industry where you handle fissile material. Suddenly, the blue flash. You're all like, "God damn it" as you wait to start puking up your 3D sunburn.
Well, if you had a heavy enough beef with that guy who found himself standing in the middle of the shiny blue air ... you might have, er, a unique perspective on this point.
@@andrewrobertson3894 I just heard someone yesterday blame 3rd shift for the Wi-Fi not working LOL! And they were serious... Uhhh ok? ("It was working before they left the day before" so obviously there is a deviant hacker on 3rd shift sent in to shut down their ability to watch cute kitten videos when they should be working!)
This makes me feel better about current safety protocol as a researcher working with radiation producing machines. Watching your videos makes me think the 20th century was the Wild West when it comes to radiation.
love your videos, great job. some ideas: the Lucens / Switzerland partial meltdown 1969, or the accident at Gundremmingen A / Germany 1975 where 2 workers died by radioactive steam
I grew up in Oak Ridge, TN. My dad worked at K-25, Y-12 and X-10(ORNL) He died from cancer when I was 10. He worked there for over 25 years. I still have a clock Union Carbide gave him for 25 years in their Nuclear Division.
Very happy ending story. Not everyone who sees that blue glow in air gets to talk to their spouses, let alone tell their grandchildren of the experience. Vomiting within hours of exposure is a bad sign, but all survived in the short term, and managed to live to old age despite receiving three figure doses of radiation. Quite an adage to the specialized medical care available to them.
You could do a whole playlist of Union Carbide disasters. You should look into the Union Carbide nitrogen asphyxiation incident at Hahnville, Louisiana. There's a few more, too. Might have to dig a bit for details. Might do the Kanawha, West Virginia incident, too. It was the sister plant to their MIC manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. The leak at Kanawha happened just one year after Bhopal.
I grew up within 15 miles of Oak Ridge. Prior to 9/11 you could just drive right through a lot of the areas. There was a HUGE building called the K-25 Gaseous diffusion plant. It was the biggest building in the world at the time with an area of 1,640,000 sq feet. The whole area was littered with insane things like that- most of it built in just a few years during the Manhattan project. The crazy thing is that they actually had 3 totally different huge complexes all built at the same time, all using completely different separation methods since nobody really knew which was the most effective. There was a centrifuge plant, a electromagnetic " Calutron" racetrack plant and then the huge gasseous diffusion plant that used a specialized vacuum and nickel-plated micromesh to separate the U235 from U238.
Prior to 9/11, most of those plants had been decommissioned from the manufacture of nuclear fuels. Back in the day, K-25 was a place where you could get exposed to tritium gas and die without ever seeing or smelling it.
@@annehaight9963 Yup. I never got that close to those buildings. Even back then they were fenced off. But they were so huge you could easily see them from the freeway. They sat there for decades because nobody knew what to do about them seeing as how they were contaminated. I also recall that the Calutron racetrack facility used almost 14,000 pounds of coin silver from the treasury because copper was needed for munitions. I believe all of it was later returned. Hopefully it wasn't radioactive.
How about doing a video on the 1921 Oppau explosion in Germany? In its consequences this was probably even worse than last week's Beirut incident. It wiped out a whole town, left a giant crater and destroyed roofs and windows 75 kms away. It was monstruous...
I live near Y-12, and yes, it still produces enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors, only in small amounts. Still, the idea that some idiot could cause another incident like this is a terrifying reality. We used to have drills in school when I was a kid so we'd know what to do if something "went wrong", and our parents had to sign slips saying the school could give us iodine pills in case there was an "incident". I still remember the sound of them testing the alarms.
When I heard him say "If you like it here and want to help grow the channel...", I was half expecting a foam finger to point to the YT channel home page lol
I am a chemical engineer, when investigating problems it was very often " the night shift left it like that", or "it was like that when we came on", there were regular problems with shift handovers as the finishing shift just wanted to get home. Fortunately, I was not in the nuclear industry and nearly all our problems just resulted in out of spec product which could be reworked. Very difficult to manage.
Love this channel, especially the nuclear stuff. Could you please do the Lucens Reactor in Vaud, Switzerland from Jan 21/69? It is the oldest, largest scale event that you have not yet covered INES lv4 😬
My dad worked there. His dosimetry badge showed exposure a few times. He was instructed to throw it away and get a fresh one...if he wanted to keep his job. He died of cancer.
Notice that many of the safety recommendation statements begin with, "Within the bounds of economic practicability..." or, "where economically feasible..." Show you what priorities were emphasized. 💀
I have to fairly regularly pass by Oak Ridge for work related things and it always gives me a bit of a vibe knowing what goes on in those large metal buildings ... guess the locals never give it a second thought
Y12 may be one the few places that are open to the public that you have done a video on. I visited there in 2018. Periodic video has some good recent footage of Y12
Me as the video starts: How could this happen?! The video: Y-12 was under the management of Union Carbide Me: Ah, say less. Those fuckers can’t be trusted with anything
I worked a "Union Carbide" contract. It wasn't radio active lethal exposure. It was the "cat sized" rats in the service tunnels of the facility that gave me cause for concern. Just saying...
You should do a video talking about Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado. It was a Plutonium trigger plant for nuclear weapons and experienced a number of fires and radiation releases blowing plumes of radiation in to Denver over the course of its operation. Eventually it was raided and shut down by the EPA and FBI and remains (if I remember correctly) to be one of the few government controlled operations to be raided by another government organization.
@@steveducell2158 It would certainly appear so, yes. Don't worry though, according to the article linked below; "[...]the Russian nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom has denied problems related to facilities in Kola and Leningrad, the two nuclear plants operating in the region, according to TASS, a Russian news agency, as reported by the AP." www.livescience.com/spike-in-radioactivity-detected-above-europe.html
Though in all honesty, after what appeared to be some kind of thermonuclear (supercavitating?) torpedo accident in Eastern Siberia last summer and the subsequent clean- and cover-up afterwards, I'm not too worried about a few more radioactive isotopes in our atmosphere at this point. Who knows, we might end up mutating so much that viruses become a thing of the past! :D
Hi. Question... At the end of the video, you say that there was further accidents with more injuries. My question is... Were these accidents all at the same facility.?🤔? Or, spread across a number of different facilities.?🤔? LOVE THE VIDS.🥰🥰... KEEP'EM COMING.🤞🥰... RICH(UK).🥰🥰🥰.!.!.
Would you feel safe working for Union Carbide?
No way dude, they're dodgey as
No... Never again.
I.C.I were not much better.
Oh hell no!
Nah, CEI is better
That’s a hard no. I work in the second most heavily regulated industry behind nuclear and Union Carbide are shocking in every way.
Moral of the story: Never trust union carbide with anything.
agreed
Jimmothy McWickers amen
@@jessekauffman3336 Pretty much spot on there!
sure nut
@@PlainlyDifficult I Lost 7 friends in a UC Arc furnace accident in Quebec back in the 70's
"Union Carbide took over the operation", well I guess we now know Bhopal wasn't their first rodeo.
Some well know companies here,.. well i ques not many corporation had permition to work whit this kind of material
Heck, in the 50's they put Charleston, WV to sleep.
Bhopal was far from their first rodeo... it's more like the time they gave a master demonstration of bull riding to show the new guys what a pro looks like. And rode the bull until it died of horrible toxic chemicals.
Good point. Trust those dudes to piss on everyone's chips
@@gusbailey68 1985 West Virginia gas leak
The year after the Bhopal disaster a faulty valve at the UC plant in Institute, WV caused a large cloud of gas that injured six employees and caused almost 200 nearby residents to seek medical treatment for respiratory and skin irritation. Union Carbide blamed the leak of aldicarb oxime (made from MIC but does not contain any MIC itself), the main ingredient in the popular farm pesticide Temik, on a valve failure after a buildup of pressure in a storage tank containing 500 pounds of the chemical. A company spokesman insisted that the aldicarb oxime leak “never was a threat to the community.”[1
"This relies heavily on the operators and supervisors to not cut corners and make errors."
*Union Carbide has joined the chat*
Ominous words, no matter *what* company is running the circus.
@ind0ctr1n3 dunno, I think that Homer Simpson moved to Tokaimura in the late '90's, they had one explosion and fire for waste being treated and encapsulated in '97, then in '99, a criticality event that left coins in homes 350 meters away neutron activated. Last I heard, he moved to near Fukushima, ain't heard anything since then.
we in the buisness call this forshadowing
Obviously we all saw it coming
Union Carbide: *HOLD MY BEER BRO*
I'm a simple man. I hear "Union Carbide" and I flee for the hills.
You're also a wise man.
I kept wondering if it was supposed to be "Uranium Carbide"
There was a Union Carbide plant just 10 minutes from where my parents and I lived when I was a child in the 80s. My mother told me she hated the company and never trusted them. Now I know why.
But now that you're grown up that third arm must be really useful, you should thank them.
@@johnladuke6475 You're right. I need to look on the bright side of radioactivity.
Luckily, Union Carbide learned its lesson and from then on always made sure its valves and pipes containing dangerous substances were in working order.
bificommander I’ve heard that about them. The paradigm of workplace safety! Especially industrial amounts of nuclear material!
They are truly a role-model for any company and industry-site which produces and distributes dangerous and hazardous materials.
Ooof
They're so good, I think we should just let them write the industrial safety laws and do their own inspections. What could possibly go wrong?
I heard they went on to build a chemical plant in India that was a model for process safety.
"Union Carbbide took over"
"This is were the fun begins"
Anakin, Corporate-Man, Skywalker
Correct criticality controls=screwdriver. Everyone knows that. Duh!
th-cam.com/video/6ZIjbX1gj88/w-d-xo.html
Don’t forget the wooden shim!
@@evelynu3550 What are you? Some kinda safety nut? Next thing you'll tell me is that throwing bricks around is a bad idea.
Here's the Hollywood version: th-cam.com/video/AQ0P7R9CfCY/w-d-xo.html
when did that ever kill anybody?
Fun fact: The worst Swedish "accident" ever (at least publicly) Was when a cleaner forgot a vaccum in the reactor hall
What a tragedy.
What was the name ? I’m curious about the story
Joe Fro Ringhals Nuclear Power Plant. The vacuum cleaner started a fire during a containment test, which resulted in multiple months of downtime for the plant.
@@AdvancedGemini Oh, didnt know about the fire. Thanks for enlightning me! :)
Sweeping up used neutrons.
I remember when the report about the Bhopal accident came on. My father, who was a chemical engineer and project-manager, started swearing a blue streak at all of Union-Carbide's executives. Even though he never worked for UC, he knew what the execs had done and what had caused the Bhopal disaster. You see, when the engineers design plants that work with dangerous chemicals [or radioactive material], they design in not only Safety-Sytems, but backup-safety-systems, a backup-backup-safety-system, and sometimes even a backup to the backup-backup-safety-system.
The CEO and Members of the Board, of course, cut all of those systems, sometimes even getting rid of the Safety-System itself! But those 3 layers of backup behind the main Safety System are there for a reason: if all of them fail, _you will kill every living thing in a 30 mile radius._ Therefore, making sure you have several layers of fallback in case the primary Safety System fails is *_absolutely required._* Except if your a CEO or other corporate executive - and Doubly So if you're a corporate executive for Union Carbide. They don't give a sh1t about anything but 💰💰💰, who cares if a few [hundred] thousand people die.
"Union Carbide took over operations..."
Me: Oh no.
@noxxi knox
Presenting to the Emergency room, a 32-year old man who is known to work for Union Carbide, with nausea and strange skin lesions...
It's like seeing the EA logo at the beginning of a game. Only a lot more deadly.
Anyway...
@@grmpEqweer Chubby Emu reference?
@@TheSaltyExplorer
😁👍
At this point these videos don't need any other explanation that "Union Carbide". It's like wondering why Wylie Coyote keeps getting hurt by trusting Acme.
To be fair, Coyote rarely if ever uses the Acme products he buys in accordance with their instructions.
Every time I see your goofy foam finger pointers, I fall in love with them even more.
I agree. Please don’t ever stop.
Can't agree more.
Get a room
@@mcribeana0119 Just point them the way!
I like how they are just stock foam fingers. No team, just “we’re #1”
Criticality Incident sounds so serious. We prefer the term "An Unrequested Fission Surplus"...
I see you've spent some time in Union Carbide's PR department.
Sounds like something Mr Burns would say! 😂 😊
My grandfather worked on nuclear reactors and handled a few experiments like these in his time as a chemical, later nuclear, engineer. He was confident in himself that he wouldn't mess up. Because he took safety very, very seriously. He knew the dangers, and knew his family was important. These mishaps are exactly why he was so cautious. Never cut corners, safety above all else.
Did he ever have cancer from his job?
@@mattneal4309nope, his health problems are all from our awful family lineage
PD: "Union Carbide took over..."
Me: Oh God, here we go again. How are they going to screw this one up...
Criticality incidents can easily be avoided. Indeed I've avoided them all my life so far
Fingers crossed
yay! you finally made one about my town! both my father and my grandfather retired from y-12, my other grandfather worked at k-25, and my mom did some time at ORNL (x-10). Gotta love growing up on a superfund site! Oak Ridge, where we really don't glow in the dark, but everyone gets dementia from all the damn mercury around here.
My step-grandparents both worked at various locations in Oak Rdige as well, and my step-dad grew up there. His dad died of Alzheimer's sometime back, his mom more recently, and quite peacefully, so he's been making visits to get the house cleaned out and ready to sell. That mercury comment might explain why there was a bottle of the stuff just lying around the house, lol.
I'm also from Oak Ridge and just moved back due to COVID. Both of my parents have worked at Y-12 and K-25. My mom still works there and is always complaining about workers not following proper procedures and regulations. I'm assuming it's because she works on the audits.
No way! My father and grandfather also worked at Y-12 in the 60s and 70s. My mom was in the biology division doing research on chemical and radiation mutagenesis. My dad designed machines to build nuclear missiles. I was born in Oak Ridge and lived there until I was 9 (in California now). One of my dad's friends liked to tell a story about the time someone drove a forklift into a steel drum full of mercury, and it went into an open 8" drain in the floor. Yeah. There's a reason nobody's ever been allowed to fish or swim in the Clinch river.
I grew up in Oak Ridge. Went to Linden, Robertsville and graduated from ORHS. Go wildcats.
@@annehaight9963 You can fish and swim in the Clinch. They just have signs not to eat the catfish. As they’re bottom dwellers and lord only knows how many drums of nuclear waste was dumped in the river. I remember when they found hundreds of them in the river. That and before K-25 was dismantled, when you drove down Blair Rd. Behind K-25 they had thousands of barrels just sitting there.
Union Carbide again?
Mate do a list video of all Union Carbide accidents 😂
Might take multiple list videos to get them all.
That would be a _long_ video. But, it would be one worth the popcorn and soda pop!
"Top 10 Union Carbide accidents"
Whenever I hear "Union Carbide" I always know a massive stuff up is about to occur
Please do a video on them and their accidents
Calling it an “Accidental Radiation Excursion” makes it sound so fun. I have a hunch it wasn’t actually fun
It was fun for the radiation, I guess.
It reminds me when some engineers referred to an explosion in a facility as "the unit underwent rapid disassembly."
@@lewisdoherty7621 we are... expanding the business
@@void8617 Gamma burst: the “bonus electromagnetic distribution.”
@@lewisdoherty7621 rapid unscheduled disassembly.
My uncle worked at the Oak Ridge National Lab from 1956-1962. He knew a few of these guys. He says it was way worse then they say (naturally). He passed away a few years back now. Also said that it was less of an accident and more of a failed experiment, as in, they did it on purpose but just miscalculated what would happen.
The moment I heard Union Carbide I knew this was going to be wild. Another great video as always.
Thank you!
@@PlainlyDifficult yep when I here UC I know it's going too be bad
Never ceases to amaze me how avoidable many of the incidents should have been.
Considering the possibile ramifications of incidents of this nature it's incredible that so many people seemed to care little for safety procedures.
I assure you that behind those brakes of procedures there are overworked employees.
Each time I hear about serious accidents involving radiation and especially how many of them there have been I keep hearing the part of the episode from Star Trek Voyager in my mind, where Seven of Nine notices that even though the crew comes over as disorganised and chaotic, it's capable of doing great things, and that this seems to be true for the whole of mankind: "You've faced extinction many times yet you always managed to overcome the situation and succeed. I find that remarkable."
I really find your videos about the more unknown incidents interesting, I recently found one in Germany that might be interesting for a video: the AVR Jülich is an experimental gas-cooled, high-temperature pebble-bed reactor which is believed to have suffered several incidents during its life, most of which had been covered up. It is now highly contaminated and apparently it contaminated some of the water table in the area, though it is hard to find out the extent after the fact.
I wouldn't worry, water is excellent in blocking radiation.
@@ivangrozny875 Also excellent in picking up radioactive particles. And then makes its way to the ground water. And then into the waterworks.
@@ivangrozny875 unless it’s uranium +6 goes right into the damn water.
My father worked at Y-12 from 1976 to 2015 and he had told me about various incidents that happened there over the years. I think I remember something about this. Union Carbide lost the contract sometime in the 1980s when Martin Marietta took over and then Lockeed Martin, and so on.
Dude, how many industrial accidents has union carbide been involved with?! Holy cow. At least I know what to look for when I move again; no union carbide facilities anywhere in the nearby area. Lol.
Don’t you realize how offensive the expression “holy cow” is to the citizens of Bopal?
😏
@@flapjackson6077 Is tasty cow better?
My grandparents worked at ORNL. Their back steps leading into the laundry room where they left their shoes after work still has a higher radiation reading than the rest of the house. Also, two door knobs and the washer and dryer were reading 69 cpm in 1984 when gpa and I did tests when we were looking into his cancer cause and work history possibly being related.
Our government still sees no issue denying medical care and treatment for exposed workers.
Between all the nuclear facilities, bombed areas in the Marshall Islands and Nevada we have spent billions pretending "everything is just fine" at the expense of our own people. Disgraceful.
Disgraceful indeed! And what I find crazy also is the pseudoscience that sells fake cures to cancer that could'vebeen from all those nuclear bomb tests in the ocean, desert, ect... sick
I live in Oak Ridge. My dad and grandfather worked at the various plants for years. I love learning the history here.. the Manhattan Project/The Secret City. It’s incredible. Thanks for the deep dive on this incident. I learned a lot that I didn’t know before watching. 🖤
6:10
Imagine working in an industry where you handle fissile material.
Suddenly, the blue flash. You're all like, "God damn it" as you wait to start puking up your 3D sunburn.
3D sunburn.
What an amazing term
Well, if you had a heavy enough beef with that guy who found himself standing in the middle of the shiny blue air ... you might have, er, a unique perspective on this point.
“Contamination of personnel” is a very kind way of saying “melted a whole guy”
The moral of this story... Always blame the other shift!
Or Tibor.
As an often blamed shift worker, I can confirm this is true.
@@andrewrobertson3894 I just heard someone yesterday blame 3rd shift for the Wi-Fi not working LOL! And they were serious... Uhhh ok? ("It was working before they left the day before" so obviously there is a deviant hacker on 3rd shift sent in to shut down their ability to watch cute kitten videos when they should be working!)
@@justinkasy7422 Hahaha XD
Sad yet hilarious. I can relate to that finely tuned blame-gaming oh so well.
@@ErickC underrated
This makes me feel better about current safety protocol as a researcher working with radiation producing machines. Watching your videos makes me think the 20th century was the Wild West when it comes to radiation.
radiation and chemistry.
some of the most batshit insane chemical experiments were going on during that time as well.
What an amazing channel analyzing nuclear and chemical disasters, all stuff that fascinates me, I'm amazed and will watch most of your vids now 🥳
Thank you!
love your videos, great job. some ideas: the Lucens / Switzerland partial meltdown 1969, or the accident at Gundremmingen A / Germany 1975 where 2 workers died by radioactive steam
Thanks for the suggestion!
I grew up in Oak Ridge, TN. My dad worked at K-25, Y-12 and X-10(ORNL) He died from cancer when I was 10. He worked there for over 25 years. I still have a clock Union Carbide gave him for 25 years in their Nuclear Division.
11:00 - Yes, yes criticality geometry but check out the dinettes! They have Formica tops!
Even better is the placement of the "Lighter Side of News" column.
ahhh.... every time I see "UNION CARBIDE", I know a catastrophe is coming
3:58 “Today day is going to be long!!!!” is my new favorite phrase.
For anybody wondering...Y refers to prototype. Whereas X means experimental.
Literally one of my favorite channels on TH-cam.
Absolutely love your work!
Thank you for sharing!
Very happy ending story. Not everyone who sees that blue glow in air gets to talk to their spouses, let alone tell their grandchildren of the experience.
Vomiting within hours of exposure is a bad sign, but all survived in the short term, and managed to live to old age despite receiving three figure doses of radiation.
Quite an adage to the specialized medical care available to them.
*Union carbide takes over operation*
The world: "Ah shit, here we go again"
Ey this is one of my favourites, husband works there!
You could do a whole playlist of Union Carbide disasters. You should look into the Union Carbide nitrogen asphyxiation incident at Hahnville, Louisiana. There's a few more, too. Might have to dig a bit for details. Might do the Kanawha, West Virginia incident, too. It was the sister plant to their MIC manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. The leak at Kanawha happened just one year after Bhopal.
As a person who lives in Oak Ridge, we’re screwed if anything melts down or gets attacked
The supervisor's name was Homer Simpson.
Nah he was just the safety inspector
I grew up within 15 miles of Oak Ridge. Prior to 9/11 you could just drive right through a lot of the areas. There was a HUGE building called the K-25 Gaseous diffusion plant. It was the biggest building in the world at the time with an area of 1,640,000 sq feet. The whole area was littered with insane things like that- most of it built in just a few years during the Manhattan project. The crazy thing is that they actually had 3 totally different huge complexes all built at the same time, all using completely different separation methods since nobody really knew which was the most effective. There was a centrifuge plant, a electromagnetic " Calutron" racetrack plant and then the huge gasseous diffusion plant that used a specialized vacuum and nickel-plated micromesh to separate the U235 from U238.
Prior to 9/11, most of those plants had been decommissioned from the manufacture of nuclear fuels. Back in the day, K-25 was a place where you could get exposed to tritium gas and die without ever seeing or smelling it.
@@annehaight9963 Yup. I never got that close to those buildings. Even back then they were fenced off. But they were so huge you could easily see them from the freeway. They sat there for decades because nobody knew what to do about them seeing as how they were contaminated. I also recall that the Calutron racetrack facility used almost 14,000 pounds of coin silver from the treasury because copper was needed for munitions. I believe all of it was later returned. Hopefully it wasn't radioactive.
"Union Carbide took over operations"
Ah shit, here we go again
channel is absolutely top tier. would love some longer form content on occasion, but overall amazing job. very thorough.
Thanks for the concise narration and especially the added humor with the character’s comments.
3:23 I like that "SAFE" sign
When I heard Union Carbide, I already felt like at home. Nothing can go right with them.
How about doing a video on the 1921 Oppau explosion in Germany? In its consequences this was probably even worse than last week's Beirut incident. It wiped out a whole town, left a giant crater and destroyed roofs and windows 75 kms away. It was monstruous...
Nuclear facilities and shift changes... always good material for a video or two.
I live near Y-12, and yes, it still produces enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors, only in small amounts. Still, the idea that some idiot could cause another incident like this is a terrifying reality. We used to have drills in school when I was a kid so we'd know what to do if something "went wrong", and our parents had to sign slips saying the school could give us iodine pills in case there was an "incident". I still remember the sound of them testing the alarms.
When I heard him say "If you like it here and want to help grow the channel...", I was half expecting a foam finger to point to the YT channel home page lol
I am a chemical engineer, when investigating problems it was very often " the night shift left it like that", or "it was like that when we came on", there were regular problems with shift handovers as the finishing shift just wanted to get home.
Fortunately, I was not in the nuclear industry and nearly all our problems just resulted in out of spec product which could be reworked.
Very difficult to manage.
I cant believe I've lived just an hour from that place and never knew of this, I love your channel man.
Love this channel, especially the nuclear stuff. Could you please do the Lucens Reactor in Vaud, Switzerland from Jan 21/69? It is the oldest, largest scale event that you have not yet covered INES lv4 😬
My dad worked there. His dosimetry badge showed exposure a few times. He was instructed to throw it away and get a fresh one...if he wanted to keep his job. He died of cancer.
I love everything about these videos. The music, animations and of course the stories!
Remember that time a group of scientists made a reactor in a orb that constantly goes critical?
You should ALWAYS include the stepping on the foot dude’s. They are my favorite...er favourite characters in your documentaries.
Notice that many of the safety recommendation statements begin with, "Within the bounds of economic practicability..." or, "where economically feasible..." Show you what priorities were emphasized. 💀
Gotta love the "Cha cha cha changes" at 2:36 You truly are a man of culture.
I was looking in the comments for that! Lmao
I have to fairly regularly pass by Oak Ridge for work related things and it always gives me a bit of a vibe knowing what goes on in those large metal buildings ... guess the locals never give it a second thought
loved the video. i live 15 minutes outside of oakridge beautiful place..lots of history in these hills
Ought to do a short stint on the Georgia Aircraft exposed reactor tests. Pretty interesting test
Y12 may be one the few places that are open to the public that you have done a video on. I visited there in 2018.
Periodic video has some good recent footage of Y12
The dangerous stuff has been moved to other locations. :)
The ITV style advert indicator before the adverts was a nice touch.
Since days i've been looking for a this type of channel coz i love nuclear activities and cae study related, and finally i found one.
Love your channel once I start, I can not stop
Great content! Thanks for providing so much detail!
I like the way you keep to the point, some youtubers ramble on for ever.
Me as the video starts: How could this happen?!
The video: Y-12 was under the management of Union Carbide
Me: Ah, say less. Those fuckers can’t be trusted with anything
Love your work!
Consider a video about the Davis-Besse Reactor Vessel Head Degradation? Scariest nuclear near miss....
Yes indeed.
There is SO much material for Ohio. Could do a whole sub-series.
+ check out the giant scandal going on over the bailout of those nuke plants in Ohio.
Can’t believe I missed this one ☝️ must have thought my notification was a text or something plainly brings me joy nice 👍
Thanks for unveiling this information !
I like the channel.
Liked. 👍
Commented. 👍
Subscribed. 👍
0:27 Idk how many of the old checkpoints are still around but I pass by one every day on my way to work at my job in the town of Oak Ridge
Such an excellent channel !
Union Carbide and industrial disasters seem to go hand in hand
“I believe” should never be a statement used in this industry!
I worked a "Union Carbide" contract. It wasn't radio active lethal exposure. It was the "cat sized" rats in the service tunnels of the facility that gave me cause for concern. Just saying...
girls with time machine: oh i wanna meet myself
boys with time machine: you are about to have criticality incident
OMG! I can't believe I missed "Arrow's Biggest Clearance of Dinettes"! It looked awesome!
You should do a video talking about Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado. It was a Plutonium trigger plant for nuclear weapons and experienced a number of fires and radiation releases blowing plumes of radiation in to Denver over the course of its operation. Eventually it was raided and shut down by the EPA and FBI and remains (if I remember correctly) to be one of the few government controlled operations to be raided by another government organization.
Eyyyyy finally a local one. Tennessee boy checking in.
Your videos are very informative. Makes one think. Thanks.
So I finally found the real reason why I am losing my hair I must have received radiation poisoning somewhere!
I just tell everyone it was from all the break dancing and spinnin’ on my head when I was in my youth. 😂
"hmmm yes, this stuff right here is radioactive... well time to clock in for the day"
Anyone found the source of the cesium 137 measured in northern Scandinavia yet?
are the russians fooling around again?
@@steveducell2158 It would certainly appear so, yes. Don't worry though, according to the article linked below; "[...]the Russian nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom has denied problems related to facilities in Kola and Leningrad, the two nuclear plants operating in the region, according to TASS, a Russian news agency, as reported by the AP."
www.livescience.com/spike-in-radioactivity-detected-above-europe.html
Though in all honesty, after what appeared to be some kind of thermonuclear (supercavitating?) torpedo accident in Eastern Siberia last summer and the subsequent clean- and cover-up afterwards, I'm not too worried about a few more radioactive isotopes in our atmosphere at this point. Who knows, we might end up mutating so much that viruses become a thing of the past! :D
Love the magic backwards pointers unpulling the strings 🙂
Union Carbide has pretty good list of disasters under its sleeves .
Hi.
Question...
At the end of the video, you say that there was further accidents with more injuries.
My question is...
Were these accidents all at the same facility.?🤔? Or, spread across a number of different facilities.?🤔?
LOVE THE VIDS.🥰🥰...
KEEP'EM COMING.🤞🥰...
RICH(UK).🥰🥰🥰.!.!.
6:10 See Employee "A"? Don't be Employee "A".
Avoid any situation where you suspect you might later be referred to as "Employee A".
It's like being a Star Trek redshirt.
It’s crazy how I’ve lived my whole life next to the plants and never heard this story before.
I always love the guys in protective gear😂. Get off my foot😅