i want youtube to start automatically linking the full video from which a short was extracted. EDIT: i know they've added this feature in since i made this comment. thank you
That would require the uploader to link it. Someone actually edits it down from the original. Its actually tedious. You have to export sections of a video and change the resolution from 1920x1080(or higher) to 1080×1920. I do agree though people should link the full video most times.
@@TritonTv69420 Silly thing about the resolution is that it does not need even to be a vertical video, square videos are also allowed, which is many cases would be easier and preferable but basically no one knows or cares...
@@utha2665 if we let evolution run normaly probably different but not to different from other animals. But if you mean with bioengeneering and enhanced by technology. Probably unimaginable.
@@NoName-rc9qhFrom just my common sense, I'm guessing the fact that it has a long half-life means that the rate of radioactive decay is lower, this means that you'll be exposed to less radiation thus it's less dangerous.
I believe you'll write people get defensive right away instead of trying to be understanding of other people's thoughts Just because they don't think like you doesn't mean that wrong all the time. It's healthy to see the good the bad and the ugly the complete picture🧐 p🌬✌️💪❤️
@@jerrydegennaro273 Not talking about people with different opinions, that's well and good, I was referring to the ones who tell others to "go die in fire" or something even more lovely because they have different opinions.
U238 may have an obscenely long half life, but that also means it has an extremely low level of radioactivity (it'll kill you faster by chemical toxicity!) The actual problem with the Chernobyl reactor are all the stuff in it that has a much shorter half life, and therefore is outputting much more powerful radiation. Think of it like a lightbulb: if you have a set number of kilowatt hours, you can shine a little bit for a long time or a lot for a short time. U238 is a tiny LED, some of the stuff in the Elephant's Foot is a floodlight.
what's saddest it's that U238 its only a portion of the radioactive blob that emerge from the Chernobyl reactor, many different isotopes are cohabitating there like iodine or plutonium isotopes
They weren't told. The Firefighters who responded weren't even aware it was a power plant, much less a failing nuclear reactor. Many reported asking why there was hot (what they assumed was) graphite on site. That's the real tragedy.
@@dearboy05Graphite was in the reactor to slow down the neutrons and recover their kinetic energy. When the reactor overheated and exploded from the steam overpressure, the graphite still in the reactor caught fire.
This dude sounds & stares into my eyes like my uncle who'd scare me that I'd end up homeless, eating out of trash at 21 without a job because i got a B+ on a surprise math test.
This is extremely misleading. Uranium-238 is extremely weakly radioactive, and is non-fissile material, meaning it is generally unwanted in nuclear fuel. A subtance's radioactivity is directly an inverse function of its half-life. If you radiate all your energy, you dont have any energy left to radiate. The candle that's twice as bright burns half as long. Even fissile uranium is fairly weakly radioactive, with U-235--the enriched fissile fuel in reactors--having a half-life of over 700 million years. It actually poses a greater danger of chemical toxicity than radiation damage. Most of the concern for radioactive contamination comes from internal exposure to alpha radiation from ingestion of Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. These isotopes have half-lives of ~30 years. The disaster happened in 1986, so 38 years have passed, meaning ~46% of these isotopes remains in the environment. In 100 years, only 4% will remain. There are significant concerns regarding dispersal of particulate and aerosol contaminants, as well as accumulation in the water systems and food chain, but these threats can only last as long as the contaminants. It is also worth noting that there are plans for a cleanup effort, where the remaining reactor corium will be safely stored away in a brand-new long-term nuclear waste storage facility. Low-level radiation poses no discernable health effects below doses of 100 mSv per year. Official estimates regarding the long-term health impacts of remaining radioactive contamination are based on the highly conservative Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model, which supposes that there is no such threshold below which radiation damage is reparable by the body. As a matter of fact, it has been shown that the psychological and psychosomatic effects of *_fear_* of radiation are--in many cases that don't involve direct exposure to a catastrophic nuclear event--far more damaging than the radiation itself. The public is literally worrying themselves sick due to anti-nuclear fearmongering. TL;DR - This video sucks ngl lol. Uninformed fearmongering.
@@kurtlikesoldmilwaukee9087 That's correct. Some of the material will take that long... but not all of it. The most dangerous material has shorter half-lives. You can think of it like two machine guns... each gun has a million bullets... one gun shoots all of the bullets in all directions within a week... the other one takes a million years to shoot them all. The fast gun is very dangerous for a week. The slow gun is far less dangerous for a million years cuz it would only shoot one bullet per year. Likewise, not much danger from the radiation from long half-life material. Short half-life material is extremely dangerous... but for not as long.
⚠⚠⚠This is a VERY MISLEADING VIDEO. ⚠⚠⚠ It tends to let you think that Chernobyl will be a problem for billions of years. That is not the case! Uranium 238 is not the problem here, just remember it exists in nature and it is weakly radioactive. The problem of Chernobyl is the highly radioactive material that makes up the corium, not U238. It was extremely radioactive indeed after the explosion but its half life is a lot shorter: decades, maybe centuries, but certainly not billions of years. Chernobyl has already lost a significant part of its radioactivity. Remember: If the half life is long, the radioactivity is weak. If the radioactivity is strong, the half life is short. It is very misleading to mix both and this video is as close to a lie as it can be without actually being a lie.
This is the right answer! It's sad that such misleading content is posted by Derek, this just spreads more non-sensical fear around nuclear energy leaving us stuck with coal and gas for decades to come...
Doesn't matter, still not good, still cannot fix it. Still totally stupidly futile, and governments and people will still not do what is right. 50 years from now, do you really think anything will have changed for the better?
This is from Derek's documentary series _Uranium - Twisting the Dragon's Tail_ from 2015. The construction of the New Safe Confinement was officially completed in July 2019.
Uranium 238's half-life is not a problem. U238 is not highly radioactive and is not difficult to manage. The problems are the plutonium and the fission products. For instance, strontium-89 and strontium-90 are produced in similar quantities in fission, and each nucleus decays by beta emission. But 90Sr has a 30-year half-life, and 89Sr a 50.5-day half-life.
@@AlbertTao It would have partially decayed away, but not enough to not be dangerous. If you think of radiation as tiny bullets, then after ~50 years, 90Sr is firing about half as many bullets as it was initially. And in another ~50 years, it will be another half as many again (so a quarter as many as initially after ~100 years). Unfortunately, the amount of 90Sr (analog of number of bullets fired) started so high that it will take a long time for it to decay away enough that it is no longer dangerous (or in the bullets analogy, it will take a long time for the amount of 90Sr that was initially there to run low enough on ammunition that we can stop worrying about the bullets).
@@AlbertTao The rule of thumb is ten half-lives to make it completely safe. The two I listed are just two of lots of fission products. Sr is considered especially dangerous because it is chemically similar to calcium, so it tends to get in your bones and stay there. Whereas, even if you ate U238, it would pass mostly pass through you in a few days.
Accidents with nuclear power plants don't happen often, but when they do, I feel like they make up for their infrequency with their destructiveness. They're nearly planet wide catastrophes.
@@MrTrevortxeartxe they are not planet wide catastropies. Just look at how big the no go zone in ukraine is and thats the amount of area you can expect. If nuclear accidents were world wide nuclear bombs which are far worse, would have extreme conseqenses for the whole world.
Its not going to take that long. I assume the reason for that large of a dome is so they can dig up and process the remaining uranium. They will need to pump in salts to react with it so it can be processed bit by bit but it can be done.
@@xtremewaianae We already figured it out Mr smarty-pants, its the new housing for the pudding factory. Btw, this video is from 2014. So you dont have to make wild guesses that arent based on any facts. You can just look up what they did in the last decade. (No salt was pumped anywhere)
This is mostly correct. One issue you can come across is half lives that are 100-200 years. As they decay they make other materials that have short half lives but that decay into others that can be long or short. So these chains become a constant and still makes some products very dangerous.
People don’t seem to grasp that a half-life of 4.5 billion years means that it’s extremely not radioactive. The bigger problem is the fission products, which have half-lives of 100-ish years, which means they will put out nearly all of their radioactivity in a few hundred years.
Also Uranium 238 is not the material used for nuclear fission in a reactor, for this exact reason. You need U235 for that, which has a half-life of "only" 703 Million years.
No you ate not right. This isnt necessary the case. Just because something has really long half life doesnt mean it is less radioactive than something with short half life. Educate yourself first before spreading out wrong facts
@@timsagichnicht could you explain more? By my honestly pretty limited knowledge of chemistry. Having a long half-life means that the element is more stable than one that decays rapidly (shorter half life), so less radioactive...
@@timsagichnichtHi there. I think you need to educate yourself friend. A longer half life by definition means that it is less radioactive. I would know. I'm a nuclear engineering student and an intern at a nuclear reactor. U238 is absolutely not the concern in Chernobyl.
@@sayantanpal1769 because it wasn't even produced in the reactor. Instead they dug it out of the ground in the first place. It's a naturally occurring element, and it's only very weakly radioactive.
@Black_Drako U-238 has a very long half-life, which is the time it takes for half of the material to decay into an inert element. That's important because when a radioactive isotope decays, it sheds neutrons and electrons in order to achieve its lowest stable energy state. This shedding of subatomic particles is what's called radiation, specifically ionizing radiation. A long half life like U-238 means that fewer of these particles are emitted at once, meaning living organisms can tolerate their presence for longer periods of time. An isotope with a very short half life emits these particles vigorously, like tritium or radium.
This is rather overstated. The radiation danger mostly resides in the fission bi-products and the danger is because they produce lots of radiation by decaying quickly. That means the danger does not persist for billions of years, but it does persist for hundreds of years. I find this sort of hyperbole very annoying because it obscures and confuses the substance, and in this case the substance is very, very serious.
For the record, longer half-life nuclides aren't a bad thing necessarily. It means the activity is going to be lower than a nuclide with a much shorter half-life.
The real danger is not even the uranium. Rather its isotopes of cesium, strontium or other radioactive daughter elements that were created during the operation of the reactor and now make up the corium. Those are also responsible for the decay heat that causes all nuclear accidents.
maybe not more dangerous to be around, but really difficult to store. To be fair, anything with a half-life of more than a hundred years or so is pretty hard to store safely for its lifetime.
@@vahidmirkhani nuke a hurricane and you just a ton of radiation to it. Yea, I like that idea. As far as removing something you can’t stand next to for five seconds and getting a lethal dose? That girl can go do it herself.
If Derek were being serious, he'd stop pretending to panic over U-238. U-238 is harmless if you don't eat it or crush it up and snort lines of it. And if you do eat it, you die because it's a heavy metal with chemical toxicity before you even notice the radioactivity.
@@09gosha Radioactivity is proportional to the number of decayed nucleus per unit of time, hence inversely proportional to the half-life period. Is it incorrect for rough comparison in general?
@@avengersendgame9706 I also watch PBS Space Time, although I think I see a lot of interesting stuff but not necessarily dread inducing. If I remember any others I'll reply again
@@avengersendgame9706 Sci-show, action lab, aperture, hanks channel, journey to the microcosms, minute earth, minute physics, nilered, pbs eons, star talk These are some channels that came to my mind. Hope they will be as interesting to you as they're to me in this gerne.
Except in this case veritaserum is peddling click bait nonsense - shame on him. The U238 is irrelevant - it's U235 and other radioisotopes that are the problem.
Fun fact: the quantity of wildlife living in tchernobyl is nearly one of the highest in the world. Because radiation isn't that high in the perimeter, and humans don't bother
@@Hellsing12002there's no sharp line between dangerous and not dangerous. The boundaries of the exclusion Zone include safe peripheral areas many miles from the actual contaminated Zone. This allows a neutral buffer zone.
@@joshroi8610, no they don't. the zone is off limits because it is contaminated. The outer areas that got missed by the blast debris are not considered contaminated, them people came back. There are also other villages that are still abandon, and others buried, which tend to be closer to the contaminated locations. And no one came back to Pripyat. So no one is living in the zone like they use to before the blowout. The spill fall is spread out far, with areas worst than others, starting from NPP4 out..
No one is living there anymore because it is forbidden. The current radiation levels are at most 40-100 mSv (millisieverts) per year which have no consequence on human health (of course excluding the reactor and surroundings, ~1km area). For reference, the world average is of 3 mSv a year. Some people live in regions where they receive up to 100 mSv a year and have a longer average lifespan.
For those who dont know, this project is called Chernobyl New Safe Containment. It was built by Novarka. The project started in 2011 and was finished in 2017.
Yes the half life of U238 is 4.5B years, it gives off radiation very slowly and therefore is very weak. It is the isotope that makes up over 99% of naturally occurring Uranium.
If the uraniam-238 is decaying so incredibly slowly it must be emitting an infinitesimally small amount of radiation... Also, most people are grossly ignorant about Chernobyl - yes, reactor #4 was destroyed in 1986, but reactors #1, #2, and #3 were kept in operation for 5, 10,and 15 years. Power generation at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant only ceased in December 2000, and thousands of people still work on site there today.
@@raj6913 If historic records didn't exist. We know a lot from over 2000 years ago and things and we document way more than ever before in all sorts of ways. Additionally this was one of the most reported most historically relevant events in our time. Let alone if modern technology doesent completely vanish they could detect radiation. Even with way less advanced technology. For your theory to be true humanity would have to devolve back into cavemen without history or writing or technology or anything really. Nobody knows what's going to happen over the next 2000 years but if the past is any indication of the future that's HIGHLY unlikely. Even humans going completely extinct seems a lot more plausible than that. It's still an interesting comment.
This is counting on the loss of a tonne of information. It would require the collapse of civilization, no records to survive and technology to not be able to detect radiation. It’s highly unlikely that will happen. What’s more likely is we develop a way to clean it up. Possibly even recovering the radioactive materials and using them in the future.
All kinds of misinformation here. First of all, U238 is the naturally occurring variant-99.9% of all Uranium in nature is U238. He meant U235, with a half-life of 700M years. But the fact that the half life of U235 is so long is exactly what makes it less dangerous than the short-lived isotopes like strontium and cesium.
137 is what you get in the cloud after an explosion. From this or testing. It goes into the soil and plants take it up as it’s similar to potassium. Your find it in honey in America and many food crops in Eastern Europe. Many areas are no go for crops as once you heat enough of it it breaks down organic tissue
@@darshanjoshi8803Well , I've done some study and to make the initial reactor they must separate the U235 out ( only one half of one percent ) of the total Uranium in the ore because U238 is not fissile. But with a breeder tractor running on U235 they can make a man-made element called Plutonium which is highly fissile fuel.
U238 is not the problematic isotope, U238 is the primary isotope in depleted uranium used in tank armor and Warthog projectiles. U235 is the problematic isotope, and has a much shorter half life.
Big difference between weapons grade uranium and what a reactor makes.. You should definitely look into Mayak and Tomsk. Have a look-see what U-238 can amount to in danger
Not only that but it is non fissile and an alpha emitter with a low decay rate. Box it up properly and U-238 is not a problem. It's all the other nasties that are tied up in the corium and elsewhere that I'd be worried about.
Exactly. It’s the fission products that make the levels high, not the fuel. It’s misinformation like this that is contributing to irrational fear of nuclear power.
@@justpaulo Exactly. Both short- and long-lived isotopes are unproblematic, it's the medium ones that are the problem with high activity levels on the order of ~100 years.
Man ive always likes this guy, but he ain't a true scientist by my standards. (Or anyone from Newrons day, unfortunately) This was complete misinformation at best. You probably eat things weekly with a more dangerous half life than that. The issue is that the length of something's half life is *_perfectly reverse correlated_* with the radiation risk or danger something poses. It's the short half life that concentrates the radiation emissions. It just concentrates them into a shorter span of time, as opposed to how, say a light sourxe gets more dangerous when you concentrate the beam spread into a smaller spatial angle....i.e make a 10 watt light into a 10 watt laser. Shorter half life is basically concentrating the energy release into smaller time chunk rather than a smaller chunk of space like with a laser
U238 is not what’s in the reactor. That isotope is extracted to get U235 which is what’s in the reactor as well as byproducts like CS-137, PU-239 that are the cause of the radiation and meltdown. FYI
You can literally hold uranium 238 in your hand, you just told us yourself that it is not that radioactive. It's other elements that are worth worrying about within the corium.
It's amazing how the smile is gone from his eyes. He normally emits *some* level of joy from his face, so if you are a fan but also a dummy like me that needs stuff put into perspective to even get close to understanding the concept... Rewatch.
Now they need to make a movie about Fukushima and have that scene when the old people from the local village volunteered to march into the intensely radioactive site to try to manually operate controls. They marched in KNOWING they'd die from radiation while inside. But they did it to try to save everyone else.
@@int_pro Yeah, that would be a typical movie, turning no deaths or diseases into a horror story with heroes who get green from radiation until their skin fall off.
The one with the solitary guy in the suit as the cover? Yes it was very well done. A beautiful example of how relatively sound science can be completely upended by cheaparsery and incompetence.
Mentioned uranium 238 is consider one of most stable uranium isotopes and main ingredients in uranium ore. It is not nuclear hazard - if it would be all uranium mines would not exists and miners would die in seconds. U238 is not problem here but fission products. Having new confinement allow us to start cleanup project similar that happens at TMI melted reactor. They need structure because RBMK reactors used there did not have confinement structure like TMI had and cleanup cannot be performed in safe way.
I was told when I was younger that nobody could go and visit that area for at least 100 to 200 years because the radiation would be too bad. It was taught in schools it was on the news it was all over TV talk shows.For well over 10 years they pumped out the stories of nuclear radiation. For the last 15 years they’ve been doing guided tours there, and you’re stood right in front of it in a T-shirt…
@@iverson7x so that why you have tours there? & advertised trips to see the reactor? Is this was as deadly as it was marketed… people visiting would suffer immeasurably. Thats not the environment to take people on tours. Its all a scam.
It is not a scam. It appears you may not know how radiation exposure and distance are related. The farther you stand away from the source, the less radiation you get. But the relationship or more dramatic that you might think. Radiation exposure (or dose) is inversely proportional to the SQUARE of the distance. In other words: if you stand 2 tiles farther from a source, you get 4 times less radiation. So where he was standing would be completely safe. Right over the reactor? Deadly and cancer causing.
the problem isn't U-238. It does decay into some nasty isotopes but that happens over a VERY long time....the problem is it's 15% enriched with U-235 that can spontaneously fission as well as alpha decay to TH-231
No, U-235 isn't the issue either, nor is the decay chain of U-238 an issue. Also the RBMK fuel was NOT enriched to 15%. The issue nowadays are the fission products with intermediate half lives like Cs-137 and Sr-90, or transuranics like Am-241. Uranium was never, and will never be the issue
Or they could've just let the old one keep running as units 1-3 weren't effected by the famous accident. FYI this power station only shutdown in 1999. And was only due to political pressure from other countries. Ukraine quite likes their nuclear power plants.
This is misleading. U238 is the stable depleted stuff, the other radisotopes decay significantly faster. In human terms it's still ridiculously long of course but the hottest stuff there won't be the Uranium. Remember humans dug that Uranium up, drove it around in trucks, enriched it to make it more radioactive then piled it together to encourage fission. If it was just Uranium it'd be manageable. That's the thing about long half lives. They're inherently less radioactive. It's the Strontium, Cobalt and other fissile products that need to cool and that will happen "relatively" quickly. But there's also an unmanaged poorly charted fissile mass under there somewhere that will change over time and be a continuous source of hot elements and toxic contamination. It'll be centuries or longer before this problem fades, but not billions of years.
By the definition of "stable" in nuclear physics, U238 isn't stable. Then again, ones that are "stable" might just have half lives way higher than any known.
Cesium 137 is the concern. And the fact they have to keep the spent rods from units 1-3 cool in the onsite pools they made for them. Unit 4 has an ongoing reaction continuously melting its way down into the earth, there is no solution, only covering it up as long as they can.
how fast is it melting the earth I wonder? Maybe it will get to the other side of the earth in eastern Russia that would be funny since it was their fault
No, they did not. It's still as it was before the sarcophagus. Starting to dismantle it would be a terrible idea, as it would kick up and disturbe a lot of radiation. You should watch the video Kyle Hill made where he got to go inside it just a few months before the Russian invation
As many pointed out already U-238 is not the problem but other way more radioactive isotopes. This short is kinda cringeworthy in my opinion because I’m sure he knows U238 isn’t the problem but just wants to make it seem like a big deal or some kind of sales tactic for TH-cam
He is getting a payoff from the nuclear industry I'd bet. They downplay everything. And they steal billions when they build a plant and double it with cost overruns. One American nuke plant was given an inspection and they found that over 100 items like gauges, valves, piping , and many other crucial items were replaced with untested to nuclear standards off the shelf parts! Even the nuts and bolts have to be the highest quality, and they were found lacking! It's an industry that doesn't care about killing people, destroying water supplies, poisoning millions of fish, it is all about killing. For profit. Totally satanic, destroying the very building blocks of our bodies, and our world! Radioactive high level waste dumped everywhere. EVERYWHERE!
U238 Isn't the problem. It's the elements with much shorter half lifes. It's only been 37 years since the explosion and already the radiation is exponentially less dangerous than what it was in the first few years.
I suspect they're already considering ways to recover and use it (the fuel). Such as robotically drilling the elephant's foot and re-processing the drill chips. It's actually a large source of fuel, and you don't have to go prospecting for it.
Just to mention, Uranium-238 is VERY common. If you dig a hole 100x100x1m then you have dug up 50-200kg Uranium. You can hold Uranium-238 right in your hand with very little danger. The really dangerous materials are shorter lived isotopes but then we are still talking about 10.000 years. At least the shortest lived isotopes have all completely decayed meanwhile, today the reactor radiates at around 0,01% of its 1990 rates. The rest though... 10.000 years.
I used to work at a facility that had pure uranium ingots stacked all over the place just sitting out under shelter. This guy needs to get his facts straight.
Just so people know, such a long half-life doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. You can think of it as a measure of how long it takes to use its energy. Something with a smaller half-life releases it’s energy in a shorter burst and has a much more dangerous amount of radiation. U-238 produces so little radiation at a time that it’s basically inert. U-235 is much more dangerous because it has a shorter half-life of 700 million years and can sustain a fission chain reaction
The uranium 238 left in the core is not the dangerous stuff. There is U238 in the ground everywhere. What’s dangerous is the other fission products from when the reactor was operating normally and those created in the runaway prompt criticality.
in 5 billion years, when all life has ceased on this planet... ... and the sun is engulfing the earth... ... Derek will be just about ready to start the next sentence
Most of the radiation dose from nuclear reactors comes from the fact that fission products have excess neutrons. The fission products have short half-lives, so the material is quickly turning into some other element. The uranium, because it has a long half-life, is not doing much. It emits radiation very slowly. (The U-238 is the material that was removed from the ground at the uranium mine. That radiation is part of the natural background radiation that life is evolved to contend with. (There are repair mechanisms in organisms to deal with radiation damage.)
It's interesting that when we build a shell to cover something very dangerous it lasts a hundred years, but there are megastructures still intact after thousands of years.
While both the things you mentioned are correct, it's not correct in this context since the structure that will be put here will suffer damage from the inside from the radioactivity
@@SolarWebsitePower plants are literally the most secure building on the planet, and are all built with the capability of withstanding extreme military damage, including carpet bombing. Chernobyl is a weird example, as it's a power plant that was intentionally built with safety flaws, and the whole incident is a sum of so many layers of incompetence that it's genuinely absurd to think about. Thankfully, any of the currently operative nuclear power plants are a lot safer, and not built as military-grade plutonium producers, and not ran by the USSR.
It WAS a warzone… briefly. Russians tried to dig in around the area earlier in their invasion, only to be driven off when the ambient radiation proved too much to bare.
I swear horror movie producers/writers can make such a cool movie where it can look found footage like this and there are mutated animals possibly even people turned monster and they need to escape Chernobyl
The 238 isn't the problem though, unless you're eating it its radioactivity is so minimal it's unlikely to do any damage. It's the 235 and various radioactive byproducts of the disaster you gotta watch out for.
U235 isn’t the problem, as the amount is less than natural uranium mined from the earth. U236 is worse, and of course plutonium, strontium etc. Soviet reactors use non-enriched uranium and graphite moderators. Therefore, Soviet nuclear fuel/waste is different.
Actually U238 is not the problem (if nuclear waste was 100% uranium you could touch it with your bare hands). The problem is the other radionuclides produced while the reactor was in operation. The longest living have a half life of 100.000 years. A lot, but certainly not 4.5 billions.
The 2 main elements of concern here are Strontium 90, a half life of 28 years, and Cesium 137, half life of 30 years. In the last 38 years, the "Elephant's Foot" has lost at least half of it's radioactivity.
Which means there'll be nowhere for the radiation to go except straight down into the ground, and the watertable. You can't just cover it, you have to envelope it.
The casing is around the reactor, so let’s just hope that, when it was built they put a solid concrete layer under it…..which they had to have done. That’s an extreme amount of radiation, so if it was leaking into a water table, we would know.
@@tommyd4325Are you kidding? The Russians have 160 nuclear subs with the reactors still in them, beached in the north sea. Russia dumped millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the Techa River in Central Russia. AND the chernobyl reactor is vented into the air; and the air particles rain out, all over Europe and Russia, even China! Some elements like xenon133 are gases, but then when it decays in 5 days( ten halflives, 50 days) into cesium, an active metal, often in the lungs of some creature; and people too! Cesium attacks the muscles, and especially the heart muscle
@@tommyd4325 The elephant's foot already burned through several layers of concrete. Upon meltdown, it literally liquified the floor under it and then continued to melt through other layers beneath.
i want youtube to start automatically linking the full video from which a short was extracted. EDIT: i know they've added this feature in since i made this comment. thank you
Fr
Despite the arguments of the nuclear lobbyist there are topics I often see deflected quite well. But never really addressed. Like the two I mentioned.
That would require the uploader to link it. Someone actually edits it down from the original. Its actually tedious. You have to export sections of a video and change the resolution from 1920x1080(or higher) to 1080×1920. I do agree though people should link the full video most times.
@@TV-xm4ps i’d think that nuclear energy is still better for the environment than coal
@@TritonTv69420 Silly thing about the resolution is that it does not need even to be a vertical video, square videos are also allowed, which is many cases would be easier and preferable but basically no one knows or cares...
FYI, they moved that shell into place in November 2016. Yes, this video is over 6 years old.
So he's had 6 years to pull his foot out of his mouth about that braindead U238 comment? Yikes
He does look 6 years younger too
and then russia shot at it
Thank you for doing this math for me.
You're telling me Derek didn't go to Ukraine in the middle of a war?
"Mistakes don't last forever"
My mistakes:
Four and a half billion years isn't forever. It's mighty long and feels like it, but...
@@SeanFlesch Atleast forever for mankind
@@SeanFlesch 4.5.. not great, not terrible..
@@kuphaman8737 Imagine what man would look like if we were still around in 4.5 billion years.
@@utha2665 if we let evolution run normaly probably different but not to different from other animals. But if you mean with bioengeneering and enhanced by technology. Probably unimaginable.
Quick chemistry lesson.
Long half life= low danger.
Short half life= high danger.
Yes, but facts like that would prevent a huge percentage of stupid videos. And the profits from clicking on them.
Chemistry Lesson?
No, it's more Physics!
why Is it more dangerous?
not chemistry...physics.
@@NoName-rc9qhFrom just my common sense, I'm guessing the fact that it has a long half-life means that the rate of radioactive decay is lower, this means that you'll be exposed to less radiation thus it's less dangerous.
To this day, Chernobyl's reactor 4 is nowhere near as toxic as Twitter.
I believe you'll write people get defensive right away instead of trying to be understanding of other people's thoughts Just because they don't think like you doesn't mean that wrong all the time. It's healthy to see the good the bad and the ugly the complete picture🧐 p🌬✌️💪❤️
@@jerrydegennaro273 Not talking about people with different opinions, that's well and good, I was referring to the ones who tell others to "go die in fire" or something even more lovely because they have different opinions.
Godamn comments are always the best. No matter the video or the content ppl will says funny stuff
I like twitter ever since Elon musk took i over
@@ashtondanesh2418 Definitely.
U238 may have an obscenely long half life, but that also means it has an extremely low level of radioactivity (it'll kill you faster by chemical toxicity!) The actual problem with the Chernobyl reactor are all the stuff in it that has a much shorter half life, and therefore is outputting much more powerful radiation. Think of it like a lightbulb: if you have a set number of kilowatt hours, you can shine a little bit for a long time or a lot for a short time. U238 is a tiny LED, some of the stuff in the Elephant's Foot is a floodlight.
This makes a lot more sense to me now
what's saddest it's that U238 its only a portion of the radioactive blob that emerge from the Chernobyl reactor, many different isotopes are cohabitating there like iodine or plutonium isotopes
@@MattyPizarro12 And those are the dangerous ones!
You learn more about this tragedy every day now. It’s terrifying
This short seemed incredibly pretentious and kinda pissed me off for that exact reason, thanks
In 5 billion years they’ll still be trying to reach me about my car’s extended warranty.
😂😂😂😂😂
Well your fly saucer's extended warranty ...
Just tell 'em your car is like 5,000,000,025 years old!
😂😂😂
@@donaldberger9163😂
RIP the brave souls who gave their lives trying to contain the leak knowing they had no chance of survival.
They weren't told.
The Firefighters who responded weren't even aware it was a power plant, much less a failing nuclear reactor.
Many reported asking why there was hot (what they assumed was) graphite on site.
That's the real tragedy.
Hmm yes but yes one cares about about Europeans
@@subtlename2873, sorry, I'm dumb. What exactly appeared to be graphite?
@@dearboy05Graphite was in the reactor to slow down the neutrons and recover their kinetic energy.
When the reactor overheated and exploded from the steam overpressure, the graphite still in the reactor caught fire.
They will order to it was suicide
That got way too intimate at the end 😂
😂
I wet my pants.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 oh man brilliant comment
😂😂fr
It got weird there 😅
This dude sounds & stares into my eyes like my uncle who'd scare me that I'd end up homeless, eating out of trash at 21 without a job because i got a B+ on a surprise math test.
And living in a van down by the river.
Classic South Asian parenting hack 😂
Veritasium is great & brilliant. Check out his full gallery.
thats your dad's job not your uncle's .. you needed to tell him to stay in his lane man
Are you asian?
Dude melted right after this shoot.
But the camera operator lived.
@@jenniferbmendezful He had a selfie stick taped to his foot.
Its a fake video
The dude started glowing in the dark after his visit.
@@brucekent1841 Word on the street is that he now sleeps in a freezer.
This is extremely misleading. Uranium-238 is extremely weakly radioactive, and is non-fissile material, meaning it is generally unwanted in nuclear fuel. A subtance's radioactivity is directly an inverse function of its half-life. If you radiate all your energy, you dont have any energy left to radiate. The candle that's twice as bright burns half as long.
Even fissile uranium is fairly weakly radioactive, with U-235--the enriched fissile fuel in reactors--having a half-life of over 700 million years. It actually poses a greater danger of chemical toxicity than radiation damage.
Most of the concern for radioactive contamination comes from internal exposure to alpha radiation from ingestion of Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. These isotopes have half-lives of ~30 years. The disaster happened in 1986, so 38 years have passed, meaning ~46% of these isotopes remains in the environment. In 100 years, only 4% will remain. There are significant concerns regarding dispersal of particulate and aerosol contaminants, as well as accumulation in the water systems and food chain, but these threats can only last as long as the contaminants. It is also worth noting that there are plans for a cleanup effort, where the remaining reactor corium will be safely stored away in a brand-new long-term nuclear waste storage facility.
Low-level radiation poses no discernable health effects below doses of 100 mSv per year. Official estimates regarding the long-term health impacts of remaining radioactive contamination are based on the highly conservative Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model, which supposes that there is no such threshold below which radiation damage is reparable by the body.
As a matter of fact, it has been shown that the psychological and psychosomatic effects of *_fear_* of radiation are--in many cases that don't involve direct exposure to a catastrophic nuclear event--far more damaging than the radiation itself. The public is literally worrying themselves sick due to anti-nuclear fearmongering.
TL;DR - This video sucks ngl lol. Uninformed fearmongering.
same with his recent iq video tbh xD
a lot of these TH-camrs are paid by energy companies to spread misinformation. Friendly reminder almost nobody is immune to the power of money
Precisely what I was going to say. Nice.
I read that the radiation at Chernobyl has a life of 50,000 years.
@@kurtlikesoldmilwaukee9087 That's correct. Some of the material will take that long... but not all of it. The most dangerous material has shorter half-lives. You can think of it like two machine guns... each gun has a million bullets... one gun shoots all of the bullets in all directions within a week... the other one takes a million years to shoot them all. The fast gun is very dangerous for a week. The slow gun is far less dangerous for a million years cuz it would only shoot one bullet per year. Likewise, not much danger from the radiation from long half-life material. Short half-life material is extremely dangerous... but for not as long.
⚠⚠⚠This is a VERY MISLEADING VIDEO. ⚠⚠⚠
It tends to let you think that Chernobyl will be a problem for billions of years. That is not the case! Uranium 238 is not the problem here, just remember it exists in nature and it is weakly radioactive.
The problem of Chernobyl is the highly radioactive material that makes up the corium, not U238. It was extremely radioactive indeed after the explosion but its half life is a lot shorter: decades, maybe centuries, but certainly not billions of years. Chernobyl has already lost a significant part of its radioactivity.
Remember:
If the half life is long, the radioactivity is weak.
If the radioactivity is strong, the half life is short.
It is very misleading to mix both and this video is as close to a lie as it can be without actually being a lie.
Will the real answer, please stand up!
Why dont YOU do youtube bro? Srs question.
This is the right answer! It's sad that such misleading content is posted by Derek, this just spreads more non-sensical fear around nuclear energy leaving us stuck with coal and gas for decades to come...
Doesn't matter, still not good, still cannot fix it. Still totally stupidly futile, and governments and people will still not do what is right. 50 years from now, do you really think anything will have changed for the better?
@@keithtidy186 Nope, I already lost hope, just can't comprehend how even intelligent people keep pushing this stupid propaganda.
This is from Derek's documentary series _Uranium - Twisting the Dragon's Tail_ from 2015. The construction of the New Safe Confinement was officially completed in July 2019.
Thanks for the info. He did sound a little different than normal and it was also hard to believe that he travelled there recently considering the war.
@@remcon559 That, and he looks oddly younger. 😅
And thankfully the Russians didn’t destroy it after they started the war and moved to Tschernobyl. It is now again under Ukrainian control.
Russian shelling it began 2022
Thanks for the confirmation.
In about 4000 years some Archaeologists will talk about the curse of this tomb.
They say the pharaohs bodies are still there to this very day
Don't tell them!!
I'm pretty sure in 4000 years they would be smart enough to know what went down there.
not likely by our archeologist looking at the pyramids today @@alexander1989x
TBH It really is a "curse" that is fully backed by science. Stay in the dangerous places there and you're basically signing your own death warrant.
"That is the damaged Chernobyl Nuclear reactor" famous last word
Uranium 238's half-life is not a problem. U238 is not highly radioactive and is not difficult to manage. The problems are the plutonium and the fission products. For instance, strontium-89 and strontium-90 are produced in similar quantities in fission, and each nucleus decays by beta emission. But 90Sr has a 30-year half-life, and 89Sr a 50.5-day half-life.
Was about to say that.
Uranium 238 is used for shielding against radiation.
So wouldn't 89Sr have decayed away by now? Does it decay into a stable isotope?
@@AlbertTao It would have partially decayed away, but not enough to not be dangerous. If you think of radiation as tiny bullets, then after ~50 years, 90Sr is firing about half as many bullets as it was initially. And in another ~50 years, it will be another half as many again (so a quarter as many as initially after ~100 years). Unfortunately, the amount of 90Sr (analog of number of bullets fired) started so high that it will take a long time for it to decay away enough that it is no longer dangerous (or in the bullets analogy, it will take a long time for the amount of 90Sr that was initially there to run low enough on ammunition that we can stop worrying about the bullets).
@@AlbertTao The rule of thumb is ten half-lives to make it completely safe. The two I listed are just two of lots of fission products. Sr is considered especially dangerous because it is chemically similar to calcium, so it tends to get in your bones and stay there. Whereas, even if you ate U238, it would pass mostly pass through you in a few days.
Cesium 137 36 year 1/2 life is the majority of nuclides released.
Others decaying off long ago.
this man really said im giving you an existential crisis today
"NuClEaR iS oNe oF tHe mOsT eNviOrMentAlLy FrieNdLy"
Was looking for this exact comment
And none of you know what youre talking about
Accidents with nuclear power plants don't happen often, but when they do, I feel like they make up for their infrequency with their destructiveness. They're nearly planet wide catastrophes.
@@MrTrevortxeartxe they are not planet wide catastropies. Just look at how big the no go zone in ukraine is and thats the amount of area you can expect. If nuclear accidents were world wide nuclear bombs which are far worse, would have extreme conseqenses for the whole world.
Yet in 100 years, robots will dig up the radio active material and use it for pudding.
you should be a researcher for derek, how could he have missed that?
Eeeeeeve!
Its not going to take that long. I assume the reason for that large of a dome is so they can dig up and process the remaining uranium. They will need to pump in salts to react with it so it can be processed bit by bit but it can be done.
@@xtremewaianae We already figured it out Mr smarty-pants, its the new housing for the pudding factory. Btw, this video is from 2014. So you dont have to make wild guesses that arent based on any facts. You can just look up what they did in the last decade. (No salt was pumped anywhere)
Completely normal phenomenon
*My mom, presenting my room to the guests:*
OK, one more time. Listen up. Radioactivity 101: Long half-life material is low danger. Short half-life is high danger.
Correct, this really annoys me to ear stupid numbers being throwed like that...
Indeed , he's talking 👄 shite
And what about the radiation eating fungus?
Yup, long halflife = highly stable. Short halflife = unstable and dangerous.
This is mostly correct. One issue you can come across is half lives that are 100-200 years. As they decay they make other materials that have short half lives but that decay into others that can be long or short. So these chains become a constant and still makes some products very dangerous.
People don’t seem to grasp that a half-life of 4.5 billion years means that it’s extremely not radioactive. The bigger problem is the fission products, which have half-lives of 100-ish years, which means they will put out nearly all of their radioactivity in a few hundred years.
Thought the same. The problem here is not U-238 😂
Also Uranium 238 is not the material used for nuclear fission in a reactor, for this exact reason. You need U235 for that, which has a half-life of "only" 703 Million years.
No you ate not right. This isnt necessary the case. Just because something has really long half life doesnt mean it is less radioactive than something with short half life. Educate yourself first before spreading out wrong facts
@@timsagichnicht could you explain more? By my honestly pretty limited knowledge of chemistry. Having a long half-life means that the element is more stable than one that decays rapidly (shorter half life), so less radioactive...
@@timsagichnichtHi there. I think you need to educate yourself friend. A longer half life by definition means that it is less radioactive. I would know. I'm a nuclear engineering student and an intern at a nuclear reactor. U238 is absolutely not the concern in Chernobyl.
Uranium-238 is the least concerning element in that building.
Why??
@@sayantanpal1769elephants foot(idk what it's made of but it's one of the most toxic radiation chemicals in the world)
@@sayantanpal1769 because it wasn't even produced in the reactor. Instead they dug it out of the ground in the first place. It's a naturally occurring element, and it's only very weakly radioactive.
Why?
@Black_Drako U-238 has a very long half-life, which is the time it takes for half of the material to decay into an inert element. That's important because when a radioactive isotope decays, it sheds neutrons and electrons in order to achieve its lowest stable energy state. This shedding of subatomic particles is what's called radiation, specifically ionizing radiation.
A long half life like U-238 means that fewer of these particles are emitted at once, meaning living organisms can tolerate their presence for longer periods of time. An isotope with a very short half life emits these particles vigorously, like tritium or radium.
This is rather overstated. The radiation danger mostly resides in the fission bi-products and the danger is because they produce lots of radiation by decaying quickly. That means the danger does not persist for billions of years, but it does persist for hundreds of years.
I find this sort of hyperbole very annoying because it obscures and confuses the substance, and in this case the substance is very, very serious.
For the record, longer half-life nuclides aren't a bad thing necessarily. It means the activity is going to be lower than a nuclide with a much shorter half-life.
A fact most people dont realize. A half-life of 5 minutes is terrifying, one of a billion years isnt.
The real danger is not even the uranium. Rather its isotopes of cesium, strontium or other radioactive daughter elements that were created during the operation of the reactor and now make up the corium. Those are also responsible for the decay heat that causes all nuclear accidents.
maybe not more dangerous to be around, but really difficult to store. To be fair, anything with a half-life of more than a hundred years or so is pretty hard to store safely for its lifetime.
Long half life good! Short half life...well not so much
@@josh9673 One gram of material with a half life of 5 minutes vs one billion grams of material with a half life of 5 billion minutes.
Same same.
"If the Uranium is there...why if we just...remove it"
-The Girl that solved Homelessness
Why don't we nuke the hurricane?
-The President that solved Hurricanes
@@vahidmirkhani nuke a hurricane and you just a ton of radiation to it.
Yea, I like that idea.
As far as removing something you can’t stand next to for five seconds and getting a lethal dose?
That girl can go do it herself.
@@vahidmirkhani Funny thing is that it would probably work. But a hurricane never bothered anyone that much anyway.
@@billybbob18 define "work" in this context of nuking a hurricane.
@@billybbob18 hurricanes have bothered so many people lol
serious Derek isn’t real, serious Derek can't hurt you
Serious Derek:
If Derek were being serious, he'd stop pretending to panic over U-238. U-238 is harmless if you don't eat it or crush it up and snort lines of it. And if you do eat it, you die because it's a heavy metal with chemical toxicity before you even notice the radioactivity.
if this will be a relevant problem in 100 years, then humanity will have done amazing for itself.
Ah those were the good old days when Chernobyl was a tourist attraction! Now it's a warzone!
Yep, and a year a go they were digging trenches there and shelling the area. Smart huh? :*(
@@MongooseTacticool well, russians have been acused of many things, and smart is not one of them.
yeah. Good old days!.
Have you watched Brooklyn 99?
don’t worry the ukronazis will get wiped out soon
@@Bharatxd NINE! NINE!
But most of the radioactive materials there are Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, both of which have a half life of around 30 years.
Shhhhhh! Don't spoil the video!! 😂
@@user-jt1jv8vl9r Bro I’m Done😂😂 this Comment Is It😂 I Gotta Get Up For Work In The Morning, Goodnight😂
The longer the half life the less radiation.
@@klavesin it's the exact opposite
@@09gosha Radioactivity is proportional to the number of decayed nucleus per unit of time, hence inversely proportional to the half-life period. Is it incorrect for rough comparison in general?
I love when Veritasium, VSauce and Kurzgesagt give me existential dread
Wow, i also watch these science channels. Do you have any more channels like these
@@avengersendgame9706 I also watch PBS Space Time, although I think I see a lot of interesting stuff but not necessarily dread inducing. If I remember any others I'll reply again
@@avengersendgame9706
Sci-show, action lab, aperture, hanks channel, journey to the microcosms, minute earth, minute physics, nilered, pbs eons, star talk
These are some channels that came to my mind. Hope they will be as interesting to you as they're to me in this gerne.
@@avengersendgame9706Kyle Hill did do a lot of Chernobyl content. Very intelligent man interested in teaching and learning in a fun way.
Except in this case veritaserum is peddling click bait nonsense - shame on him. The U238 is irrelevant - it's U235 and other radioisotopes that are the problem.
"theres too much radiation to be here"
Cameraman : 🗿
Derek : 🗿
Above the reactor, not that far out
There is almost none.
first short in the morning, thank you. going back to bed now.
good luck with sleeping though 😅
😂😂😂😂
Fun fact: the quantity of wildlife living in tchernobyl is nearly one of the highest in the world. Because radiation isn't that high in the perimeter, and humans don't bother
Doesn’t make it safe. You can go there to visit and be ok. But it won’t be safe to live there for like 20k years.
@@Hellsing12002people do live there… some never left.
@@Hellsing12002there's no sharp line between dangerous and not dangerous. The boundaries of the exclusion Zone include safe peripheral areas many miles from the actual contaminated Zone. This allows a neutral buffer zone.
@@joshroi8610, no they don't. the zone is off limits because it is contaminated. The outer areas that got missed by the blast debris are not considered contaminated, them people came back. There are also other villages that are still abandon, and others buried, which tend to be closer to the contaminated locations. And no one came back to Pripyat. So no one is living in the zone like they use to before the blowout. The spill fall is spread out far, with areas worst than others, starting from NPP4 out..
No one is living there anymore because it is forbidden. The current radiation levels are at most 40-100 mSv (millisieverts) per year which have no consequence on human health (of course excluding the reactor and surroundings, ~1km area). For reference, the world average is of 3 mSv a year. Some people live in regions where they receive up to 100 mSv a year and have a longer average lifespan.
Just build a Egyptian pyramid around it. They last thousands of years…
You deserve a nobel price
I could've had a V8!
True facts.
What if the Egyptians built them to cover ovet their own RMBK Reactor Core ?¿? 😳
@@timothylessing4774💀 😳
@@timothylessing4774pyramids are actually Rocket engines😂
I love your channel. Thank you so much for still posting cool stuff like this.
For those who dont know, this project is called Chernobyl New Safe Containment. It was built by Novarka. The project started in 2011 and was finished in 2017.
Yes the half life of U238 is 4.5B years, it gives off radiation very slowly and therefore is very weak. It is the isotope that makes up over 99% of naturally occurring Uranium.
If the uraniam-238 is decaying so incredibly slowly it must be emitting an infinitesimally small amount of radiation...
Also, most people are grossly ignorant about Chernobyl - yes, reactor #4 was destroyed in 1986, but reactors #1, #2, and #3 were kept in operation for 5, 10,and 15 years.
Power generation at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant only ceased in December 2000, and thousands of people still work on site there today.
I can’t tell if you’re joking
@@xij3505 Google it and you'll see it's true
@@xij3505 He’s not
@@FlorianWendelborn I know that it’s true, maybe I just misinterpreted the point of his comment
@@xij3505 point is that uranium 238 is not the reason why they built the structure.
A man who has been teaching his entire life to make this world a better place to live. Thanks Derek
In 2000 thousand years, people may call this place cursed and not even know why.
This is the most interesting and insightful comment in the entire comment section . Not kidding
@@raj6913 If historic records didn't exist.
We know a lot from over 2000 years ago and things and we document way more than ever before in all sorts of ways.
Additionally this was one of the most reported most historically relevant events in our time. Let alone if modern technology doesent completely vanish they could detect radiation. Even with way less advanced technology.
For your theory to be true humanity would have to devolve back into cavemen without history or writing or technology or anything really.
Nobody knows what's going to happen over the next 2000 years but if the past is any indication of the future that's HIGHLY unlikely.
Even humans going completely extinct seems a lot more plausible than that.
It's still an interesting comment.
This is counting on the loss of a tonne of information. It would require the collapse of civilization, no records to survive and technology to not be able to detect radiation. It’s highly unlikely that will happen. What’s more likely is we develop a way to clean it up. Possibly even recovering the radioactive materials and using them in the future.
If that ever happens, at that point, there's gonna be a lot of "cursed" places
2000 thousand? Do you mean 2 million years? Really bad way to type it.
All kinds of misinformation here. First of all, U238 is the naturally occurring variant-99.9% of all Uranium in nature is U238. He meant U235, with a half-life of 700M years. But the fact that the half life of U235 is so long is exactly what makes it less dangerous than the short-lived isotopes like strontium and cesium.
But Derrick is wanting that drama, it creates click$.
Did you listen with turned off sound? He clearly said U238
U-238's half life being 4.5 billion years is correct.
Idk what you just said but I pulled out my old Chem 350 text book and am digging around because of it 😂
@@reformed_attempt_1That’s what he’s addressing, did you READ his comment?
The camera Zooms in closer and closer to him, as the words get scarier and scarier. That's how movies work engulfing the attention of audience !!
"pan" is when the camera goes sideways.
@@captain_context9991 Yeah, he meant "zoom". But otherwise, his point is valid. 🙂
@@Milesco thank you, edited now 😊👍🏻
Thank you for this, this needs to be on bill boards everywhere this stuff including nuclear weapons no joke
It is not uranium 238 that we have to worry about! The cesium-137 and the strontium 90 will be long gone in 100 years!
Can you please elaborate? I don't know anything about these. Please share.
Can you please elaborate? I want to know more in detail. (I don't have an engineering background)
@@darshanjoshi8803scroll up and read the second to top comment thread. U238 decays much slower so it puts off very little radiation.
137 is what you get in the cloud after an explosion. From this or testing. It goes into the soil and plants take it up as it’s similar to potassium. Your find it in honey in America and many food crops in Eastern Europe. Many areas are no go for crops as once you heat enough of it it breaks down organic tissue
@@darshanjoshi8803Well , I've done some study and to make the initial reactor they must separate the U235 out ( only one half of one percent ) of the total Uranium in the ore because U238 is not fissile. But with a breeder tractor running on U235 they can make a man-made element called Plutonium which is highly fissile fuel.
U238 is not the problematic isotope, U238 is the primary isotope in depleted uranium used in tank armor and Warthog projectiles. U235 is the problematic isotope, and has a much shorter half life.
I was looking for this comment. Yes, exactly. All this drama about "4.5 billion years" is completely off the point.
Ok 700 million years instead, you think we're still gonna be around?
Big difference between weapons grade uranium and what a reactor makes..
You should definitely look into Mayak and Tomsk.
Have a look-see what U-238 can amount to in danger
Oh yeah..
That is also the cause, of England learning to have respect for nuclear science
Not only that but it is non fissile and an alpha emitter with a low decay rate. Box it up properly and U-238 is not a problem.
It's all the other nasties that are tied up in the corium and elsewhere that I'd be worried about.
And those 4.5by of half life is why U238 is not a problem.
Thank you.
Exactly. It’s the fission products that make the levels high, not the fuel. It’s misinformation like this that is contributing to irrational fear of nuclear power.
If is not a problem why are they covering it?
@@lorenzogiampietri6812 For the caesium and strontium isotopes with half lives of ~30 years.
@@justpaulo Exactly. Both short- and long-lived isotopes are unproblematic, it's the medium ones that are the problem with high activity levels on the order of ~100 years.
The highly radioactive corium isotopes have half lives of 160 days- 18 years… U238 has weak radioactivity, exists in nature and is not a problem
The close up shot at the end 😆 this dude is a part time scientist and part time model
A model scientist
Just like our fuckboy Hawkins
Man ive always likes this guy, but he ain't a true scientist by my standards. (Or anyone from Newrons day, unfortunately)
This was complete misinformation at best.
You probably eat things weekly with a more dangerous half life than that.
The issue is that the length of something's half life is *_perfectly reverse correlated_* with the radiation risk or danger something poses.
It's the short half life that concentrates the radiation emissions. It just concentrates them into a shorter span of time, as opposed to how, say a light sourxe gets more dangerous when you concentrate the beam spread into a smaller spatial angle....i.e make a 10 watt light into a 10 watt laser.
Shorter half life is basically concentrating the energy release into smaller time chunk rather than a smaller chunk of space like with a laser
@@ChadDidNothingWrong I remember learning about -Sir- Tony Newron. One hell of a -scientist- scientologist.
@@ChadDidNothingWrong I remember learning about -Sir- Tony Newron. One hell of a -scientist- scientologist.
Yeah.
If only he could pronounce his S's.
Every time he does an S,
it looks and sounds like "Ffsss" 🤣
U238 is not what’s in the reactor. That isotope is extracted to get U235 which is what’s in the reactor as well as byproducts like CS-137, PU-239 that are the cause of the radiation and meltdown. FYI
Not quite. The fuel of an RBMK reactor was enriched to 2% U235, but 98% U238, but the U238 isn't the scary part of Chernobyl.
@@saturnslastringno. The mutants and ghosts are the scary part. I played this video game and I'm sure it took place in that exact place.
@@alincioaba 🤣 had me rolling
You can literally hold uranium 238 in your hand, you just told us yourself that it is not that radioactive. It's other elements that are worth worrying about within the corium.
It's amazing how the smile is gone from his eyes.
He normally emits *some* level of joy from his face, so if you are a fan but also a dummy like me that needs stuff put into perspective to even get close to understanding the concept... Rewatch.
I was born 90 miles away from it and lived there for 19 years lol
We have crazy stories what happened at that time...
zelensky and us govt are war criminals
How’s your health?
@@01SaltyWitch you see, he was born as a Javelin
@@DjSapsan 💀💀💀
I came to visit for a few weeks just before the war started. Can't wait to go back, hope everything is going well for you.
The TV show Chernobyl was done so well, literally brought tears the way it was portrayed so dramatically
The TV show Chernobyl was FICTION, it's not supported by facts in any way.
Now they need to make a movie about Fukushima and have that scene when the old people from the local village volunteered to march into the intensely radioactive site to try to manually operate controls. They marched in KNOWING they'd die from radiation while inside. But they did it to try to save everyone else.
@@int_pro Yeah, that would be a typical movie, turning no deaths or diseases into a horror story with heroes who get green from radiation until their skin fall off.
The one with the solitary guy in the suit as the cover? Yes it was very well done. A beautiful example of how relatively sound science can be completely upended by cheaparsery and incompetence.
@82MLPGTS The Russian way.
Mentioned uranium 238 is consider one of most stable uranium isotopes and main ingredients in uranium ore. It is not nuclear hazard - if it would be all uranium mines would not exists and miners would die in seconds. U238 is not problem here but fission products. Having new confinement allow us to start cleanup project similar that happens at TMI melted reactor. They need structure because RBMK reactors used there did not have confinement structure like TMI had and cleanup cannot be performed in safe way.
Whatever mixtape the workers were bumping that night must have been straight 🔥🔥
I was told when I was younger that nobody could go and visit that area for at least 100 to 200 years because the radiation would be too bad. It was taught in schools it was on the news it was all over TV talk shows.For well over 10 years they pumped out the stories of nuclear radiation. For the last 15 years they’ve been doing guided tours there, and you’re stood right in front of it in a T-shirt…
Doesn’t mean it’s safe
@@iverson7x so that why you have tours there?
& advertised trips to see the reactor?
Is this was as deadly as it was marketed… people visiting would suffer immeasurably.
Thats not the environment to take people on tours.
Its all a scam.
@@iverson7x - Yes, it does.
It is not a scam. It appears you may not know how radiation exposure and distance are related. The farther you stand away from the source, the less radiation you get. But the relationship or more dramatic that you might think.
Radiation exposure (or dose) is inversely proportional to the SQUARE of the distance. In other words: if you stand 2 tiles farther from a source, you get 4 times less radiation. So where he was standing would be completely safe. Right over the reactor? Deadly and cancer causing.
you can take a photo standing next to the elephant's foot btw
U-238 isn't a hazardous radioisotope. It's all the other fission products and radionuclides that caused the problem.
That 4.5 billion years sounds scary, until you realize that the uranium was just lying in the ground before being mined and brought to the reactor.
It wasn't just lying in the ground. It's been "enriched", a process that creates the higher radioactive uranium-235.
@@High-Tech-Geek it doesn't create u235, it filters u235 from the rest of the uranium
@@Jankyito I guess you're right. It just concentrates it all in one place.
@@Edward4Plantagenet U238 makes 99.3% of natural uranium.
This makes me feel better
This man is brave enough to go out close enough to take this video. We know damn well the area is still pretty radioactive
238 decays slow but the radioactivity is also very low. It’s the byproducts of 235 that are dangerous.
And the bread PU with the fission byproducts with half lives of 30years or less.
the problem isn't U-238. It does decay into some nasty isotopes but that happens over a VERY long time....the problem is it's 15% enriched with U-235 that can spontaneously fission as well as alpha decay to TH-231
No, U-235 isn't the issue either, nor is the decay chain of U-238 an issue. Also the RBMK fuel was NOT enriched to 15%. The issue nowadays are the fission products with intermediate half lives like Cs-137 and Sr-90, or transuranics like Am-241. Uranium was never, and will never be the issue
Bingo
They should build another power station over the top of it and plug it back in.
Or they could've just let the old one keep running as units 1-3 weren't effected by the famous accident.
FYI this power station only shutdown in 1999. And was only due to political pressure from other countries. Ukraine quite likes their nuclear power plants.
@@bronzedivision Ooo Eridani Lighthorse profile pic. Nice.
This guy is too optimistic.
Derek using his timemachine once again
One of most chilling lines from the show Chernobyl for me was "We are dealing with something that has never occurred in this planet before"
I guess he missed the Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuclear fall out.
This is misleading. U238 is the stable depleted stuff, the other radisotopes decay significantly faster. In human terms it's still ridiculously long of course but the hottest stuff there won't be the Uranium. Remember humans dug that Uranium up, drove it around in trucks, enriched it to make it more radioactive then piled it together to encourage fission. If it was just Uranium it'd be manageable. That's the thing about long half lives. They're inherently less radioactive. It's the Strontium, Cobalt and other fissile products that need to cool and that will happen "relatively" quickly. But there's also an unmanaged poorly charted fissile mass under there somewhere that will change over time and be a continuous source of hot elements and toxic contamination. It'll be centuries or longer before this problem fades, but not billions of years.
Blabla bla and you mislead yourself because nobody cares
@walangpart2 stop embarrassing yourself.
Mhm, this video is stupud
By the definition of "stable" in nuclear physics, U238 isn't stable. Then again, ones that are "stable" might just have half lives way higher than any known.
Less radioactive! then go build a house and stay with your family.
Cameraman :how close should i get?
Guy talking about chernobyl: yes
Cesium 137 is the concern. And the fact they have to keep the spent rods from units 1-3 cool in the onsite pools they made for them. Unit 4 has an ongoing reaction continuously melting its way down into the earth, there is no solution, only covering it up as long as they can.
how fast is it melting the earth I wonder? Maybe it will get to the other side of the earth in eastern Russia that would be funny since it was their fault
Whatcha talkin bout, Willis???
You think these idiots care about facts?
@@enridemi3886 Do you suggest that there is a negative gravity on the other side of the planet?
@@birrextio6544 it was just a joke 😂
Once that new sarcophagus was in place they had cranes inside that started to dismantle I’m pretty sure the whole building
What? How is that possible?
@Robosing there's railing on the veiling that allows crane arms to slide around and they have people inside helping along with robot drivers
@@patrickoneill6297 nuclear power is pretty safe but it's dangerous when incompetent people run it
No, they did not. It's still as it was before the sarcophagus. Starting to dismantle it would be a terrible idea, as it would kick up and disturbe a lot of radiation. You should watch the video Kyle Hill made where he got to go inside it just a few months before the Russian invation
@@matthewsmith7802 _"There's a railing on the veiling...."_
Is that in the chalice from the palace with the brew that is true?
ah, what an afternoon to look deep into the abyss
You reminded me of Carl Sagan in this video because of the way you spoke.
As many pointed out already U-238 is not the problem but other way more radioactive isotopes. This short is kinda cringeworthy in my opinion because I’m sure he knows U238 isn’t the problem but just wants to make it seem like a big deal or some kind of sales tactic for TH-cam
Hooooly shomit the sigh of relief you just gave me
Yeah. I'm a bit disappointed with the misinformation on this video. Veritasium is usually so good.
He is getting a payoff from the nuclear industry I'd bet. They downplay everything. And they steal billions when they build a plant and double it with cost overruns. One American nuke plant was given an inspection and they found that over 100 items like gauges, valves, piping , and many other crucial items were replaced with untested to nuclear standards off the shelf parts! Even the nuts and bolts have to be the highest quality, and they were found lacking! It's an industry that doesn't care about killing people, destroying water supplies, poisoning millions of fish, it is all about killing. For profit. Totally satanic, destroying the very building blocks of our bodies, and our world! Radioactive high level waste dumped everywhere. EVERYWHERE!
Just my thought. Uranium sounds more tragic than Cessium haha
This s a moronic comment honestly
U238 Isn't the problem. It's the elements with much shorter half lifes. It's only been 37 years since the explosion and already the radiation is exponentially less dangerous than what it was in the first few years.
There will be a cleaning product on TV that will remove it someday soon here.
"Sarcophagus" is the perfect vibe for the concrete enclosing Chernobyl.
I suspect they're already considering ways to recover and use it (the fuel). Such as robotically drilling the elephant's foot and re-processing the drill chips. It's actually a large source of fuel, and you don't have to go prospecting for it.
Right. But then they are still suffering from commie police man in the hed syndrome.
Best idea
That thing is so radioactive that it will fry up all the electronics in a robot
@alok5065 hmm, how thick of lead plates needed to shield it? Then use mirrors to look at it with shielded camera?
Cats meow
I love how every tech TH-camr is showing us Chernobyl like we haven't already seen it
YOU’VE seen it already. There are people on this site who only follow one tech TH-camr each.
the video is very old
@@Horopter 'scientist' more like. This video is non-science.
Just to mention, Uranium-238 is VERY common. If you dig a hole 100x100x1m then you have dug up 50-200kg Uranium. You can hold Uranium-238 right in your hand with very little danger. The really dangerous materials are shorter lived isotopes but then we are still talking about 10.000 years. At least the shortest lived isotopes have all completely decayed meanwhile, today the reactor radiates at around 0,01% of its 1990 rates. The rest though... 10.000 years.
Perspective is so important
I used to work at a facility that had pure uranium ingots stacked all over the place just sitting out under shelter. This guy needs to get his facts straight.
He's not interested in getting facts straight anymore, it's all about the money.
Just so people know, such a long half-life doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. You can think of it as a measure of how long it takes to use its energy. Something with a smaller half-life releases it’s energy in a shorter burst and has a much more dangerous amount of radiation. U-238 produces so little radiation at a time that it’s basically inert. U-235 is much more dangerous because it has a shorter half-life of 700 million years and can sustain a fission chain reaction
The uranium 238 left in the core is not the dangerous stuff. There is U238 in the ground everywhere. What’s dangerous is the other fission products from when the reactor was operating normally and those created in the runaway prompt criticality.
No one understand wtf you are saying
@@belinhobeli9569what do you not understand??
"All manmade things return to nature"
Chernobyl: laughs in radiation
"..will last,.. a 100 years."
Ok.
Stolen
in 5 billion years, when all life has ceased on this planet...
... and the sun is engulfing the earth...
... Derek will be just about ready to start the next sentence
Most of the radiation dose from nuclear reactors comes from the fact that fission products have excess neutrons. The fission products have short half-lives, so the material is quickly turning into some other element.
The uranium, because it has a long half-life, is not doing much. It emits radiation very slowly. (The U-238 is the material that was removed from the ground at the uranium mine. That radiation is part of the natural background radiation that life is evolved to contend with. (There are repair mechanisms in organisms to deal with radiation damage.)
The soviets used uranium 235, which has a half life of 700 million years. Still a very long time
During enrichment for power plants, U-235 concentrations are bumped up from
@@KD-rz8su nobody cares about Uranium its the fission products
If it's still that radioactive, he wouldnt be standing that close.
It's interesting that when we build a shell to cover something very dangerous it lasts a hundred years, but there are megastructures still intact after thousands of years.
because we use much cheaper and faster methods of construction now, generally at least
I would just rather assume, because the high radiation is damaging the shell that extrem, that it can't last any longer
Ummmm, stay off jury duty.
While both the things you mentioned are correct, it's not correct in this context since the structure that will be put here will suffer damage from the inside from the radioactivity
This is a warzone now.
No
It isn't warzone
Yeah. Something not usually considered if people wonder "should we build a nuclear power plant?". But maybe they should.
@@SolarWebsitePower plants are literally the most secure building on the planet, and are all built with the capability of withstanding extreme military damage, including carpet bombing.
Chernobyl is a weird example, as it's a power plant that was intentionally built with safety flaws, and the whole incident is a sum of so many layers of incompetence that it's genuinely absurd to think about. Thankfully, any of the currently operative nuclear power plants are a lot safer, and not built as military-grade plutonium producers, and not ran by the USSR.
It WAS a warzone… briefly. Russians tried to dig in around the area earlier in their invasion, only to be driven off when the ambient radiation proved too much to bare.
Daaaaaaaamn ! That's an old video
I swear horror movie producers/writers can make such a cool movie where it can look found footage like this and there are mutated animals possibly even people turned monster and they need to escape Chernobyl
The 238 isn't the problem though, unless you're eating it its radioactivity is so minimal it's unlikely to do any damage. It's the 235 and various radioactive byproducts of the disaster you gotta watch out for.
U235 isn’t the problem, as the amount is less than natural uranium mined from the earth.
U236 is worse, and of course plutonium, strontium etc.
Soviet reactors use non-enriched uranium and graphite moderators. Therefore, Soviet nuclear fuel/waste is different.
Uranium is highly toxic so if you're eating it you have other things to worry about
Look at this place, fifty-thousand people used to live in this city, now it's a ghost town.
Top gear quote?
I miss those days of my life. Good old days.
@@MawDaws nah that was clearly a spongebob squarepants quote
@@MawDaws call of duty: modern warfare
@@potapotapotapotapotapota nah it's call of duty modern warfare
Actually U238 is not the problem (if nuclear waste was 100% uranium you could touch it with your bare hands). The problem is the other radionuclides produced while the reactor was in operation. The longest living have a half life of 100.000 years. A lot, but certainly not 4.5 billions.
The 2 main elements of concern here are Strontium 90, a half life of 28 years, and Cesium 137, half life of 30 years. In the last 38 years, the "Elephant's Foot" has lost at least half of it's radioactivity.
It’s not the uranium that’s the issue….the radionuclides of concern have a much shorter half life
Which means there'll be nowhere for the radiation to go except straight down into the ground, and the watertable. You can't just cover it, you have to envelope it.
The casing is around the reactor, so let’s just hope that, when it was built they put a solid concrete layer under it…..which they had to have done. That’s an extreme amount of radiation, so if it was leaking into a water table, we would know.
@@tommyd4325 concrete can contain radiation??? I must Google this. Brb
@@tommyd4325Are you kidding? The Russians have 160 nuclear subs with the reactors still in them, beached in the north sea. Russia dumped millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the Techa River in Central Russia. AND the chernobyl reactor is vented into the air; and the air particles rain out, all over Europe and Russia, even China! Some elements like xenon133 are gases, but then when it decays in 5 days( ten halflives, 50 days) into cesium, an active metal, often in the lungs of some creature; and people too! Cesium attacks the muscles, and especially the heart muscle
@@tommyd4325 The elephant's foot already burned through several layers of concrete. Upon meltdown, it literally liquified the floor under it and then continued to melt through other layers beneath.
That camera zoom at the end felt personal lol
1. How long last most buildings?
2. Inside are cranes to demolish the reactor.
3. On the earth is radioactiv material, if we use it or not.