And in a lot of countries it would also be a hint to hide for your life, imagine an Russian claiming such things as the things are currently in Russia. The person would see him/her self fly out a window within days
i very nearly skipped this episode. i'm a one time History major, now a full-time Buff, who thought he was well versed in the story of Kysthym. You wildly exceeded my expectations by bringing the focus of the story into the present day. Kudos and thank You. Learning something new every day gives me one more reason to keep on living !:-) 🙏💜⚡
damn, imagine being both a major and a history buff and not knowing surface level googleable things about something you thought you were well versed in.
Perhaps, part of the reason for life is to continue to learn and grow everyday. That should not predicate the reason to live as there are many more gifts of life to embrace and be thankful for.
I actually read a brief story about this as a kid in the 60's. It was very sketchy, and didn't get into specifics, but I remember the part about driving as fast as you can and not stopping. Then, in the 90s, when the extent of the disaster became known, it made sense. Good stuff on your channel!
I had read an article in the '60s, too, perhaps the same one, as it was vague, but spoke of an unnamed person seeing a devastated area with dying trees from a train while travelling in the Soviet Union, and rumors of an enormous nuclear accident. Unnamed persons and rumors don't encourage belief, but nevertheless I filed the article away in my mind and remembered it.
I came across this in about 1977. A scientific paper (from east of the Iron Curtain) spoke of contaminating an area of land at a Becquerel rating of "x". Someone did the sums and worked out that - if this was intentional - it was a MASSIVE dose of radioactivity. Thus, the suspicion grew that "Something Big and Soviet" had unexpectedly gone bang... The truth will out, but kudos for not stopping.....
The more I hear about the Soviet Union, the more I'm baffled by how anyone thought the system was in any way sustainable during that time. Granted, every country has its own screw-ups, but very few have utterly devastated their own country just so other countries would think they were cool.
@@cal2127 not that we're entirely guilt free, we accidentally dropped live nukes on Canada, Greenland, and Spain. Castle Bravo nuke test was twice the yield the scientists expected, and killed several Japanese fishermen, as well as spreading to s of fallout all over the marshal islands. The military had a nuclear reactor blow up in Idaho "The SL-1 reactor accident in 1961 at an Army research facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was the only fatal nuclear reactor accident in the United States". And there's still a nuclear bomb rotting somewhere in the swamps of South Carolina. The Soviets just managed to screw up bigger😅
We only learned about Chernobyl because Swedish nuclear plants detected the pollution caused by the incident. Who knows how many incidents actually occurred in Russia and US during the cold war.
Fuck your both-sides-ism. America did deceitful things during the Cold War, but it never was as incompetent with handling dangerous materials as the Russians, nor did it do coverups that put it's civilians in such jeopardy.
A troubling trend with the Former USSR and into the current Russian government is the lack of maintenance and grand negligence is apparent with a vast majority of accidents. I can name a few off hand with this rather disturbing term- Kystym, the Mitrofan disaster, Chernobyl and the Russian army equipment in the current war.
This accident had one of the same causes which led to the Chernobyl disaster almost 30 years later: ignorance. At Chernobyl, the reactor operators were unaware of the role xenon 135 (one product of uranium 235 fission) played in the neutron economy of their reactor. At Kyshtym, the facility operators were unaware of the April 16, 1947 disaster at Texas City, Texas. On that day, a cargo ship carrying 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded, killing 581 people, and destroying so much of Texas City that the damage was estimated at more than $700. (I mean, it WAS Texas City...) The Kyshtym facility used a chemical extraction method to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel that utilized the fact that ammonium nitrate is an excellent solvent for plutonium, but not the other spent fuel constituents. Ammonium nitrate is a strong oxidizer, and when mixed with a fuel (such as fuel oil), is the most widely used explosive on Earth. But it doesn't need a fuel to detonate - it will do so all by itself if it gets hot enough, as the Texas City disaster showed. (Astute viewers may also recall the August 4 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse exploded, killing 218 and doing $15 billion dollars damage to the city.) The United States stopped using ammonium nitrate to separate plutonium from production reactors entirely after Texas CIty, but the Soviets evidently didn't get the memo. Or perhaps they just ignored it based on economic grounds. After all, the ammonium nitrate is MUCH cheaper than the ammonium dayrate.
"Ammonium dayrate" "After all, it WAS Texas City." I laughed, but there were around 600 people that perished in Texas City that day. Many because they'd crowded into an adjacent parking lot to watch the ship burn. ...It was Texas City.
I have stopped counting the nuclear "accidents" that occured in the Tcheliabinsk area; especially at the Mayack complex..... The place must be as worse as Tchenobyl.
yes I saw page about маяк on wikipedia and I was shocked how many accidents happened there and nothing was done. Also one of my relatives was taking part in liquidation of this accident in 1957, I don't remember but my grandma told that he died from cancer.
@@the_retag Chernobyl is pretty safe to stay there for weeks. Went there in 2019. Mayak area is something different, there are places that could kill you in about 1h. xD Its one of dirtiest places in whole russia. Whole cheliabinsk oblast is wasteland.
@@Pateramalinaas I remember маяк complex still functioning, but since 2000 there wasn’t any accidents, but anyway there still a possibility of accidents
@@Pateramalina some places yes, on the other hand you can still work in the plant, even if its unhealthy. Chornobyl has bad areas as well, there was just a lot more mitigation work done
And of course the whistleblower was painted as the villain, did anyone not see that coming? When I heard someone was investigating what happened I immediately knew where this was heading.
@@joeds3775Really dude? Your guy Biden was pretty fast at getting the US and NATO involved in proxy war with Russia which has the very real consequences of a 3rd world war.... you must live on another planet
There was a book in the 70’s …… “ Disaster in the Urals”.It was about Kyshtem.I also remember reading an article in a science magazine in the early 80’s.
By the 1980s the West pretty much had all the details right to what happened at Kysthym, even down to the cause of the explosion being waste ammonium nitrate used to extract the plutonium. Most of it was kept top secret until after the Russians admitted to the disaster (and even after), but enough was shared to let the Soviets know that we knew they were up to something, and that they blundered. Hence, what us as the public knew officially was fairly limited, but enough to allow decent speculation on what happened. I'll try to find that Documentary. It will be interesting to see how it compares to what we know now. Sadly, most basic searches bring up the Dyatlov Pass incident.
Zhores Medvedev - (1925-2018), Russian biologist, historian and dissident. Having left the USSR for London and stripped of his Soviet citizenship, in 1977 Medvedev published 'Hazards of Nuclear Power', which mentioned the Kyshtym nuclear disaster. At the time, his work was dismissed as baseless propaganda even by his Western colleagues. Medvedev responded by publishing 'Soviet Science' in 1978, which assembled evidence from Soviet publications that taken together comprised conclusive evidence of the disaster's occurrence - from Wikipedia
That’s actually not as bad as it sounds, not great but not terrible either. The radioactive isotopes as I understand them don’t last that long and levels drop rather quickly. It’s the particulates that are the real danger if the water isn’t filtered properly after use. Or more pressingly, the particulates that were dumped into the river in the form of spent and processed fuel
Part of the problem with this stuff was secrecy. According to Richard Feynman he did a safety inspection of the uranium processing at Oak Ridge and noticed several potential runaway reaction problems because the workers had not been told not to store certain containers close together, because chain reactions were secret.
Actually it was not understanding moderators. It was the plywood the area was built out of. It wasn’t figured into the calculations. I worked demolishing nuclear reactors and remediation for about a decade. Lesson 1 The only way to protect myself was through learning everything I could about it. I read about every nuclear accident from all over the world. There are so many more that go unknown. Usually the small ones at small subcontractor companies. They still killed people. The desire for finished product far outpaced the understanding.
"We don't ask questions" applied to almost everything in Eastern Bloc nations, not just Kysthym. Having travelled into East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall it seems everyone used that as a means of self-preservation. Of course, the government knew better, but if you claimed to know nothing, and the official government line was that there was nothing, then self-preservation was more likely. The entire regime was built on lies, and everyone knew that they were lies, but exposing the lies was a deadly gambit. In the end, it turned out that fully one-third of East Germany was acting as informant (to a greater or lesser extent) on the rest of the country. The Soviet Union was not quite so bad, close, but not as severe. Expressing an unapproved opinion could destroy you. Bottom line: It was all a house of lies.
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” ~ Elena Gorokhova, _A Mountain of Crumbs_
I mean the human species is overall pretty excellent at ruining pretty well everything. I guess you could top it with humans and damage to nature? Or however you would like to word it.
The Kyshtym disaster is not just a footnote in nuclear history. It serves as a stark reminder of the potential dangers of nuclear power when mishandled or when governments prioritize secrecy over public safety. The tragedy’s impact on the environment and the health of those exposed to radiation is still felt today. The disaster should be remembered as part of the ongoing conversation about nuclear energy, the need for transparency, and the importance of prioritizing public health and safety.
Govts do this all the time. That’s why it baffles me that anyone trusts the IS govt considering their track record of crap like this. Yet people still just fall to their knees when the “experts” say to do something.
Mayak is an overall very grim thing to begin with. Keep in mind it's very first efforts to deal with the nuclear materials. People didn't know much about the radiation and it's effects by then, add soviet's total disreguard for human life on top of it and you'll get an idea. Like using manual labor to unclog the pipes from radioactive material, or one instance when they've dumped so much radioactive waste from the station they have BOILED THE RIVER.
That breaks my heart. This is the first time I have ever heard of this radiation incident. One thing that makes me sad is that cold radiation storage is completely safe but because of incidents like this, so many people hear “radiation plant” and, understandably, want nothing to do with it and most know nothing about cold storage and how it makes it completely safe. In fact, there are many countries that use this technology without incident.
The advancement of nuclear power is likely to stall due to fear and lack of trust. Governments control the approval of nuclear research, and with current global tensions and past incidents, there's not enough public confidence to push forward.
"North East Ural Trace" was known in the the west during the cold war .. Its cause was unknown until 1991 .. It was considered the worst nuclear accident until Chernobyl ..
Honestly, it''s probably far worse than Chernobyl considering all the radioactive waste that was dumped into nearby rivers and streams and lakes that locals continued to use uninterrupted for weeks and months... potentially years.
This was the basis/ inspiration for Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. The basis for STALKER. Not Chornobyl. This was their way of talking about it without getting in trouble.
There are stories of leaking storage tanks at Hanford in the USA. Cancer rates are higher for "down winders" but the US government has never given any compensation.
"Aurora Borealis? At this time of the year, at this time of the day, in this part of Chelyabinsk, localized entirely at this nuclear facility??" "Yes." "May I see it?" "NYET!"
@@lynnefox4892Not sure how Prometheus, a titan and god, stealing fire justifiies a cynical outlook on humanity due hierarchy-based failures and dealing with new technology, but go off.
Nuclear power is safe, despite incidents like this, and it's even safer now than it's ever been. Nuclear power is a necessary component of addressing energy production in warming climate and providing energy for an energy hungry world.
@IntotheShadows Hello, just letting you know that Simon isn't in focus, the cacti are. It's easiest to see at 8:51. I don't know your camera set up so I can't say whats the easiest way to fix this. But, a stand-in for Simon is probably the simplest universal solution and by stand in, even just a paper face for auto-focus to focus on would work. Much love!
Bad news is bad for tourism, publicity, and image. Therefore, "everything is great". 😁 That's how it is in every country which is currently failing; things are GREAT. That's also why now that Chump is making a fake newsified return, only GOOD news about him will be permitted. 💪😎✌️ No crimes occurred, he never did anything illegal, he's solely responsible for the GOOD things on this planet, and there were never any shady shenanigans over his 60+ years of debauchery. He's flawless, perfect, and celestially omnipotent. Knowledgeable about every possible facet of skills and trades, and there is absolutely nothing and no one better than *Him.* He's all-knowing, and an expert at economics, warfare, logistics, technology, communications, politics, finances, acting, directing, clothing, cars, the internet, TikTok, etc. No mistakes are ever made by a God. ⚔️🇱🇷⚔️ #Chump4Ever
@@ianb4618 It has improved, in 2021 government opened the old alienation zone as far as 3 km from the power plant, because the level of radiation is almost the same as the background radiation. Nonetheless people are scared because of radiophobia and media altering and exaggerating the reality of radiation so nobody ever came back to live there.
Have you Simon seen the series called Chernobyl? It's an series with great cast acting out what happened before and after the Chernobyl explosion. And how much KGB and State were intervening on cleanup efforts and those brave men who gave their lives to save other's. It has 5 episode's, but it really keeps you on edge of your seat.
As mentioned, the INES scale goes up to 7. There have been two level 7 events: Chornobyl (obviously) and Fukushima. Kyshtym is the only level 6 event. There are four level 5 events: the first Chalk River accident (yes, they had more than one), Three Mile Island, Goiânia (Brazil), and the Windscale fire at Sellafield, UK, less than two weeks after Kyshtym. The Windscale fire is worth watching a video about, as there are interviews with some of those involved, including the one who was staring down at a white-hot reactor on fire.
I wonder, why this does not include the Story of Lake Karachay . After the disaster it dried up and radioactive dust was blown over a large area. In the 70s and 80s the whole lake was filled up with concrete and today it's considered the place with the highest radioactive pollution on earth. It was estimated, that less then one hour at the site is enough to give you a lethal dose.
Of coirse not, it was the 50s and it was Soviet Union, where safety has NEVER been a requirement. The casks that we use nowdays are missle, train and plane crash resistant, pratically impossible to destroy.
I grew up in 1950s 1960s Omaha Nebraska. As children being down wind of open air Nevada nuclear testing we were told not to eat winter snowfall. Later it seemed dying of cancer had become as wide spread as the common cold. While it became obvious something had changed the government media presented that increased cancer was due to the increased stress of urban living. Eventually the population possibly affected by radiation died and people stopped dying from urban stress.
I’d never heard of this disaster until today ! Thank you for the very informative documentary and for NOT showing the birth defects to upset me. How the Russian governmental bodies’ staff can live with themselves knowing that they are causing untold suffering on their fellow people is beyond me.
The Soviets pushed their Nuclear Programs too fast. The Eternal Fire of Promithus needs to be respected. That said the Soviet Reactors were poorly engineered and based on US failed designs obtained by Soviet spies in the US. They reverse engineered their reactors based on these designs, hence the catastrophic failure at Chernobyl. They designed in a flaw we learned about with our first reactor design in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project. Graphite can be used to insulate the fuel rods and control the reaction to keep the reactor stable and safe. The error in design involves the fuel rod itself. In the early US design the engineers placed a graphite cone at the tips of the rods to ease the insertion back into their sleeves. What they learned was there is a radiation spike in the reaction process until the rod is completely inserted. This is because the graphite tip is still acting as an insulatior and not allowing the graphite sleeve to absorb the radiation from the Plutonium. The Soviets continued to use this design even against the recommendations of their own engineers because it saved money on the design and manufacture of the fuel rods. In the US design the rods were manufactured in the more expensive manner. The easement cones are machined into the rods, no graphite is used or required except for the reaction control sleeves. In the US design the radiation and reaction spike does not occur while the rods are being inserted back into their sleeves. Two things happened simultaneously at Chernobyl to cause the disaster. 1. Several of the rods jammed because the graphite tips were damaged and worn from usage. 2. They were conducting a Minimum Power test which involves the time between the cooling system being at Nominal Flow and Low or No Flow, and how long it would take to shut the reactor down under these circumstances should there be a system failure on the pumps. When they started to put the rods back in, they estimate 10 of the rods jammed about half way into their respective sleeves. With the cooling system spooling down, the reaction went critical before they realized what happened. By pressing the AZ-5 Scram Button which is supposed to instantly shove the rods into their sleeves, all but the jammed rods went in. This caused a cascading failure and the meltdown of the reactor. What the real issue is over Nuclear Power is the fear mongering over the few accidents that have happened. All of them over poor designs, human error, and cost cutting on designs. In the case of Fukushima... a failure to recognize and heed warnings of geographic location of construction of the plant. Against recommendations the plant was built on the coastline subject to earthquake and tsunami. When engineering and construction warnings are needed, and followed the power plants operate as designed. Meaning no accidents. As for the spent fuel rods... the technology exists now to Recycle them, reconcentrate them until they are zero. But the government does not want to spend the time nor the money to do this. And... the Liberals continue to feed the public fear by politicing and propagandizing the negative aspects of Nuclear Power. There are dangers. They need to be respected. That said, Nuclear Power is the answer to our energy needs. And... the sooner we accept this necessary evil the sooner we get off the need for fossil fuels. Like it or not, unfortunately that is the truth. We only have TWO reliable energy sources, and we have more than halfway used up the petroleum option. There are about 300 years left on petroleum. And... they will use every drop!
How and Why did the Japanese resettle Hiroshima and Nagasaki so easily and the Russians seem to totally destroy their radioactive areas Chernobyl and Kyshtym? How was the radioactivity so different between Japan and the USSR.
Despite what movies and video games might imply it's highly unlikely a child having an extra finger had anything to do with radiation. That's just not how that works. Polydactyly is actually way more common than people think and it often runs in families. The only reason you don't run across people with extra fingers or toes is they tend to be removed very early.
i remember going to en exhibit in Edinburgh with my mum and it was about the Chernobyl incident and it had all sorts of displays and items and various other pictures. It also had displays of how it affected Scotland after the accident. There were multiple pictures of farm animals with defects including two headed animals, I guess those who survive radiation and then procreate do have a higher chance of having offspring with birth defects than those not exposed to significant levels of radiation.
Now do the Rocky Flats plant, I.E. the reason for Denver's "naturally high" background radiation because it happened before the invention of portable Geiger counters so nobody knew what the rate was before the plutonium plant caught fire, and the highly classified cold war dusaster wasn't FOIA'd until Y2K.
At Rocky Flats, over all of the areas and releases of Pu, from some rough math there was anywhere from 0.5 - nearly 2 pounds of plutonium released into the air, ground and ground water. That's just some really quick math (and probably wrong) from reading the provided article. In my eyes, that's an absolutely insane amount of plutonium to be released and that's coming from someone who has dealt with Pu before. Small amounts of it, but an amount of it none the less.
Every video about a horrific russian nuclear accident becomes full of comments about a completely unrelated accident somewhere else in the world. Why is that?
Several of my co-workers went to Chelyabinsk in the mid-1990s to work on a banking project for iBANK System (aka Fujitsu-ICL International Banking Products). They took their own food, carried radiation dosimeters, and were told they'd probably be OK if they stayed on paved surfaces where they wouldn't kick up much dust.
I think you've confused two different things: The Mayak plant itself should be a 7 on the disaster scale. It is not. It's not on the radar, and collectively it makes Chernobyl look like Goania. It's not The Kyshtym Disaster. It's just where it happened. Kyshtym is a 6 (and the Fukushima one you know about will probably eventually be called a 6. It meets the 6 definition more than the 7.) The Kyshtym Disaster *itself* was a fertilizer explosion at Mayak with adjacent radioactive waste, on September 29th, 1957. Think Oklahoma City Bombing, only accidental, if the building held radioactive waste. The plume from that particular disaster became an exclusion zone... That disaster caused the creation of the EURT (East Urals Radioactive Trace) which is an exclusion zone from the fallout of the Kyshtym Disaster itself. That's the 1957 disaster that caused the EURT: The fertilizer explosion and the waste next to it went flying in one particular direction, and that and weather made it land in one (very large) area. Since it didn't include a gamma burst, it really was just the fallout zone from *that* explosion. The 6 on the disaster scale is *only* that one explosion. *Most* of the radiation that fell on populated areas near Mayak is actually from Mayak's other uses and its many, many, many other incidents. In fact, the first finding of major radioactive contamination was downriver of Mayak in 1951. (Kyshtym was 1957) Mayak had *critcality* incidents in 1953, April 1957 (same year as Kyshtym) , 1958, 1960, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1976, multiple incidents in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996. These are just the incidents with criticality. Kyshtym didn't have criticality. On the INES, the Mayak plant has been the source of the only 6 out of 7 disaster, but also includes a couple 4s, several 3s and probably more. In addition to Kyshtym, which threw radioactive fallout into the Urals and created the EURT exclusion zone, Mayak *also* dumped radioactive waste into the Techna River in 1949 and 1950, creating a massive incident and affecting 40+ villages, of which 23 were evacuated. This is usually considered the "first" Mayak Incident, although there were also a few small incidents at the plant beforehand. In 1953, again, before Kyshtym happened, Mayak was responsible for the radioactive contamination of Lake Karachay, and in 1967, a drought caused Karachay's polluted water to become polluted, radioactive dust, killing and sickening a lot of people. An estimated 400,000 people were irradiated. Mayak is a menace, and if anything in Russia ends our planet, it will likely be from there. But. again. Kyshtym is just one explosion and set of fallout. Mayak is where that fallout came from, and is worse than Kyshtym. -Retired Radiation Medicine Research Laboratory Manager.
In a way, having children was a form of welfare. In the culture we are talking about, your children would look after you in old age, and that is why, in part, you need children who will, in effect, take over the farm and make a living for the generational family, all living under one roof.
I mean, reproduction is literally THE goal of all life - ingrained into every cell of every organism Anything that DOESNT want children won't be a species for long
it's not like this kind of thing happens in the US - Dupont stuff, the nuclear landfill north of STL. we cover stuff up too, the Damascus Titan missile explosion, microplastic pollution in TX, the Hanford NPP which used water directly from and discharged water from the columbia river, love canal, etc etc etc it just goes on and on. and ya all this stuff is downplayed, covered up, forgotten except by the ppl who are still affected. oh and all the sunken ships and whatnot from WWII that are leaking oil into the ocean all over the world, BP deepwater horizon (and corexit - a literal coverup).
Why the whataboutism? That’s not what they’re arguing. >joined 18 years ago >1 comment HMMMM. Sounds like a Putinbot or wumao hacked someone’s account.
Minor release of radiation, by Soviet standards. Remember, these guys sank their old naval reactors in the deep dark, cold ocean. There is a big pile of them on the bottom, I hear. Now that's a mess. 😑
But also when The USSR fell, the rest if the world spent millions decommissioning the rest of The USSR's obsolete nuclear subs - there is a video on this somewhere.
@@keithalderson100 Your correct, they were called "americans," mostly. 🤑 Republican americans, if ya can believe that. Money well spent. Other nations helped, of coarse. Teamwork at it's best. There has never been a "sunken" reactor actually removed from the bottom, to my knowledge. They sunk dozens, maybe more. We saw what they were doing and said, WTF ? Stop that shit. Now, or else. 🙃 They said, OK, relax, no problem. Give us some money and we will stop. We did, and they did. Decommission them the right way. They served thier purpose, with honor. Do it right or let um sink at the dock. Got it ! Good, but... way down deep, in the cold dark ocean, there is a pile of nasty soviet naval reactors rusting away. The real "Davy Jones locker," my friend. I lost two subs, two crews, two reactors. 🇺🇸 They were terrible accidents. The learning curve was steep for all. I tried to learn from them. We should go back for the reactors. It could be done, now. Glomar Explorer style. Our duty. 🌎 The Soviets were the biggest polluters in world history. Period. This is nothing, don't get me started about what they have "buried" then denied. 😑
No, it's a reason to have a government that is not-stoopid enough to realize that your economy is composed of your population, and that their health is therefore in the national interest. And not-stoopid enough to realize that physics does not care about our feelings, pride, or convenience. So lying to save face, dodge responsibility, or underestimate problems only makes you pay a much much steeper price down the line.... (but it's hard to get to a place where politicians are _only_ rewarded for actual statecraft and nation building)
@MrNicoJac These two things can go hand in hand with each other. The US Navy would seem to know this which is why naval reactors have never had a failure as severe as Chernobyl.
Hi, just a quick note - when you talk about rubble amounts, bear in mind the 1961 reform dropped a 0 off the amounts. Prior to 1961, 1 USD = 4 RUB, after 1961 1 USD = 0.9 RUB (yes, hidden devaluation)
One of the pieces of film used had a Russian scientist standing over a large copper piece of equipment with pipes coming off in specific ways. That makes friend isnt a piece of nuclear kit, it is the other very, very Russian thing: it was a vodka still. And a rather nice one. Copper is usually for whisky, but it makes for a slightly better, livlier vodka. I am not saying you cant fission with vodka equipment, in just saying... Why would you want to? Plus it makes everything else so much more believable:) arpund the 4:25 or so mark)
So do the people. Tell 'em enough lies, and they'll believe anything you want. That's lesson number one at Chump University, baby! 💪😎✌️ And don't forget Donny's six "D"s... deny, delay, distract, denounce, distance, do it all over again. 😂 #RussianMobMentality
I seem to remember that bats flew around the test compound after being armed and destroyed the installation, so the idea was abandoned as too uncontrollable :-(
@@keithalderson100 I know but the whole story behind it is interesting. Also if they did go through with it it would have been a lot worse then some bombs that were dropped. Just an interesting backstory and topic of what the government tries.
I have a couple of questions. I live in San Francisco Bay Area where big earthquakes are a frequent occurrence. They have been predicting a really big one. 30 miles away from my house is a big nuclear facility in Livermore surrounded by vineyards and wineries. First question, how safe are those wines, second question, would a really big earthquake ( we had a couple over 7 on the scale) of 8 or more on the scale cause a nuclear leak or worse, explosion at the Livermore facility? Is it a disaster in waiting?
My personal experience of being exposed to “safe” levels of radiation is now having double vision which is looking like it will be permanent ( never able to drive again) and a need for hearing aids as my right ear has about half the ability of my left ear and the resultant social isolation leaves one lonely.
Wanting to have children in a situation like that is frankly incredibly selfish. You don’t have the means to afford them a better life where they can leave the poisoned area. They will be burdened with health issues. You are bringing someone into hell and they can’t even consent to it.
I read up on this years ago; as I understand it, there were THREE incidents that EACH released more radioactive material than Chernobyl; making the oblast the most radioactive place on the planet. Right up until around 10-15 years ago, it was illegal to list cancer as the cause of death on a death certificate; and many never get to celebrate their 50th birthday. Back in the mid 2000s, when I was internet dating, there were lots of pretty, young women from the area, desperately trying to find a husband who would get them out of Russia; I felt really sad for them, because, having grown up there, they had perhaps 20 years left, before cancer claimed them. About 10 years ago, on a whim, I tried to find a road route from Europe to my wife's home town in China, the only non rail route I could find, - ran straight through the place.
There was some people that were completely unharmed by the two Soviet nuclear disasters. It works out the CiA learnt that those soviets/Russian’s working in VX and Nerve gas factories were given such strong probiotics that the radiation (& fallout) had no impact on them at all. Most of these people lived to 85-105 years old
When you're labelled 'an enemy of the state' when you start asking questions you know you're on the right path and there are secrets to be uncovered.
An old bomber pilot saying: "The flak is heaviest when you're directly over the target."
Famous last words
Same with "UFO" investigations!
Westerners like to larp that their democratic governments are as bad as the dictatorships. Ffs
And in a lot of countries it would also be a hint to hide for your life, imagine an Russian claiming such things as the things are currently in Russia.
The person would see him/her self fly out a window within days
Sending people back into an irradiated location without their knowledge to study the results. Fallout writers: "write that down, write that down"!
Yeah, it's the kind of shit the US would only do to their african-american population.
That straight up vault tech
@@ChoppaYewTree yeah what do you think they based Vault-Tec off of?
Bethesda: "nobody cares about the story, great games aren't made they're played, it just works"
Vault Tech was way worse.
3:50 Aurora borealis, at that time of year, in that part of the country, localised entirely within their nuclear facility?
Beat me to it
Yes...
May I see it?
No.
😂😂
i very nearly skipped this episode. i'm a one time History major, now a full-time Buff, who thought he was well versed in the story of Kysthym. You wildly exceeded my expectations by bringing the focus of the story into the present day. Kudos and thank You. Learning something new every day gives me one more reason to keep on living !:-) 🙏💜⚡
damn, imagine being both a major and a history buff and not knowing surface level googleable things about something you thought you were well versed in.
@@fufication College in a nutshell.
@@fuficationoh look, an unnecessarily rude comment! 😒
Perhaps, part of the reason for life is to continue to learn and grow everyday. That should not predicate the reason to live as there are many more gifts of life to embrace and be thankful for.
@@fufication He's still probably more well-versed on the story than the average person. Imagine being a hater on the internet
I actually read a brief story about this as a kid in the 60's. It was very sketchy, and didn't get into specifics, but I remember the part about driving as fast as you can and not stopping. Then, in the 90s, when the extent of the disaster became known, it made sense. Good stuff on your channel!
I had read an article in the '60s, too, perhaps the same one, as it was vague, but spoke of an unnamed person seeing a devastated area with dying trees from a train while travelling in the Soviet Union, and rumors of an enormous nuclear accident. Unnamed persons and rumors don't encourage belief, but nevertheless I filed the article away in my mind and remembered it.
"driving as fast as you can and not stopping" made me think "Forbidden Racetrack".
I came across this in about 1977. A scientific paper (from east of the Iron Curtain) spoke of contaminating an area of land at a Becquerel rating of "x". Someone did the sums and worked out that - if this was intentional - it was a MASSIVE dose of radioactivity. Thus, the suspicion grew that "Something Big and Soviet" had unexpectedly gone bang... The truth will out, but kudos for not stopping.....
The more I hear about the Soviet Union, the more I'm baffled by how anyone thought the system was in any way sustainable during that time. Granted, every country has its own screw-ups, but very few have utterly devastated their own country just so other countries would think they were cool.
welcome to communism
Information control
@@andybeans5790 yep, good old information control at its best....
The Aral Sea is another blunder.
@@cal2127 not that we're entirely guilt free, we accidentally dropped live nukes on Canada, Greenland, and Spain. Castle Bravo nuke test was twice the yield the scientists expected, and killed several Japanese fishermen, as well as spreading to s of fallout all over the marshal islands. The military had a nuclear reactor blow up in Idaho "The SL-1 reactor accident in 1961 at an Army research facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was the only fatal nuclear reactor accident in the United States". And there's still a nuclear bomb rotting somewhere in the swamps of South Carolina.
The Soviets just managed to screw up bigger😅
We only learned about Chernobyl because Swedish nuclear plants detected the pollution caused by the incident. Who knows how many incidents actually occurred in Russia and US during the cold war.
Fuck your both-sides-ism. America did deceitful things during the Cold War, but it never was as incompetent with handling dangerous materials as the Russians, nor did it do coverups that put it's civilians in such jeopardy.
I'll do my best to memorise your comment.
The ones we know about are bad enough that. Look up what the US did in the Marshall Islands
And the world media on film 😂
A troubling trend with the Former USSR and into the current Russian government is the lack of maintenance and grand negligence is apparent with a vast majority of accidents. I can name a few off hand with this rather disturbing term- Kystym, the Mitrofan disaster, Chernobyl and the Russian army equipment in the current war.
I’m reminded of 007 on the movie Goldeneye. "Governments change the lies stay the same.” Pretty appropriate when you hear this story.
This accident had one of the same causes which led to the Chernobyl disaster almost 30 years later: ignorance. At Chernobyl, the reactor operators were unaware of the role xenon 135 (one product of uranium 235 fission) played in the neutron economy of their reactor. At Kyshtym, the facility operators were unaware of the April 16, 1947 disaster at Texas City, Texas. On that day, a cargo ship carrying 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded, killing 581 people, and destroying so much of Texas City that the damage was estimated at more than $700. (I mean, it WAS Texas City...) The Kyshtym facility used a chemical extraction method to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel that utilized the fact that ammonium nitrate is an excellent solvent for plutonium, but not the other spent fuel constituents. Ammonium nitrate is a strong oxidizer, and when mixed with a fuel (such as fuel oil), is the most widely used explosive on Earth. But it doesn't need a fuel to detonate - it will do so all by itself if it gets hot enough, as the Texas City disaster showed. (Astute viewers may also recall the August 4 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse exploded, killing 218 and doing $15 billion dollars damage to the city.) The United States stopped using ammonium nitrate to separate plutonium from production reactors entirely after Texas CIty, but the Soviets evidently didn't get the memo. Or perhaps they just ignored it based on economic grounds. After all, the ammonium nitrate is MUCH cheaper than the ammonium dayrate.
"Ammonium dayrate"
"After all, it WAS Texas City."
I laughed, but there were around 600 people that perished in Texas City that day.
Many because they'd crowded into an adjacent parking lot to watch the ship burn.
...It was Texas City.
😅
Wow, I have a dark sense of humor, laughing at a pun like that.
@@grmpEqweer Too soon?
Sorry, I heard "cheaper" & everything else was a blur; safety - what's that?!
I have stopped counting the nuclear "accidents" that occured in the Tcheliabinsk area; especially at the Mayack complex..... The place must be as worse as Tchenobyl.
Yep. And its similarity radioactive, if not worst
yes I saw page about маяк on wikipedia and I was shocked how many accidents happened there and nothing was done. Also one of my relatives was taking part in liquidation of this accident in 1957, I don't remember but my grandma told that he died from cancer.
@@the_retag Chernobyl is pretty safe to stay there for weeks. Went there in 2019.
Mayak area is something different, there are places that could kill you in about 1h. xD Its one of dirtiest places in whole russia.
Whole cheliabinsk oblast is wasteland.
@@Pateramalinaas I remember маяк complex still functioning, but since 2000 there wasn’t any accidents, but anyway there still a possibility of accidents
@@Pateramalina some places yes, on the other hand you can still work in the plant, even if its unhealthy. Chornobyl has bad areas as well, there was just a lot more mitigation work done
"Drive top speed for next 20-30km" translation, "Drive top speed for next 35km, and you'll be mostly safe"
Ricky Bobby: "I wanna go fast, I wanna go fast, I wanna go fast"
Translation: there are no cops, have fun, then get the fuck away from here.
I'd suggest "Well, it's too late now. Better go like hell and hope for the best."
If you can drive at any speed for 30km in a Lada without stopping - "how have you modified it? I want to do that to mineski"
50/50
Thank you, very informative. At 66, living in South Africa I only learnt of this incident today, listening to you.
You have power today? Lol?
When the state economic policy is conscription at gunpoint, it's dangerous for anyone to question the state.
Welcome to trumpland.
@@joeds3775 rent free
@joeds3775 you just questioned the state ya goof. They're gonna disappear you now! Can you believe it? Nice knowing ya.
And of course the whistleblower was painted as the villain, did anyone not see that coming? When I heard someone was investigating what happened I immediately knew where this was heading.
@@joeds3775Really dude? Your guy Biden was pretty fast at getting the US and NATO involved in proxy war with Russia which has the very real consequences of a 3rd world war.... you must live on another planet
There was a book in the 70’s …… “ Disaster in the Urals”.It was about Kyshtem.I also remember reading an article in a science magazine in the early 80’s.
Yes.
To my understanding there has been stuff about this incident for decades, but it has just stayed little known thing.
It was written by an expat Russian physicist named Zhores Medvedev
By the 1980s the West pretty much had all the details right to what happened at Kysthym, even down to the cause of the explosion being waste ammonium nitrate used to extract the plutonium. Most of it was kept top secret until after the Russians admitted to the disaster (and even after), but enough was shared to let the Soviets know that we knew they were up to something, and that they blundered. Hence, what us as the public knew officially was fairly limited, but enough to allow decent speculation on what happened.
I'll try to find that Documentary. It will be interesting to see how it compares to what we know now.
Sadly, most basic searches bring up the Dyatlov Pass incident.
Zhores Medvedev - (1925-2018), Russian biologist, historian and dissident. Having left the USSR for London and stripped of his Soviet citizenship, in 1977 Medvedev published 'Hazards of Nuclear Power', which mentioned the Kyshtym nuclear disaster. At the time, his work was dismissed as baseless propaganda even by his Western colleagues. Medvedev responded by publishing 'Soviet Science' in 1978, which assembled evidence from Soviet publications that taken together comprised conclusive evidence of the disaster's occurrence - from Wikipedia
Congratulations, genuinely. You covered a nuclear disaster before Kyle Hill
Yeah, Kyle Hill is slouching on this nuclear disaster.
All hail ghetto Thor!
And Plainly Difficult
i’m shocked i hadn’t seen this on either of their channels first
Plainly Difficult already covered that early on.
they were not only dumping waste into the river, WHOLE reactor core was cooled by this river directly xD
Holy crap😮
That ideology is pure evil, they will ignore safety to kill their citizens intentionally. It's all ran by the tiny hats.
That’s actually not as bad as it sounds, not great but not terrible either. The radioactive isotopes as I understand them don’t last that long and levels drop rather quickly. It’s the particulates that are the real danger if the water isn’t filtered properly after use. Or more pressingly, the particulates that were dumped into the river in the form of spent and processed fuel
Invisible, tasteless, noiseless, can't feel it: therefore it doesn't exist! "Pravda"!
Part of the problem with this stuff was secrecy. According to Richard Feynman he did a safety inspection of the uranium processing at Oak Ridge and noticed several potential runaway reaction problems because the workers had not been told not to store certain containers close together, because chain reactions were secret.
Actually it was not understanding moderators. It was the plywood the area was built out of. It wasn’t figured into the calculations. I worked demolishing nuclear reactors and remediation for about a decade.
Lesson 1 The only way to protect myself was through learning everything I could about it. I read about every nuclear accident from all over the world. There are so many more that go unknown. Usually the small ones at small subcontractor companies. They still killed people. The desire for finished product far outpaced the understanding.
That is just nuts, I had no idea. I get mad at the U.S. government about a lot of things, but damn, Russia is just a whole different kind of insane
"We don't ask questions" applied to almost everything in Eastern Bloc nations, not just Kysthym. Having travelled into East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall it seems everyone used that as a means of self-preservation. Of course, the government knew better, but if you claimed to know nothing, and the official government line was that there was nothing, then self-preservation was more likely. The entire regime was built on lies, and everyone knew that they were lies, but exposing the lies was a deadly gambit. In the end, it turned out that fully one-third of East Germany was acting as informant (to a greater or lesser extent) on the rest of the country. The Soviet Union was not quite so bad, close, but not as severe. Expressing an unapproved opinion could destroy you. Bottom line: It was all a house of lies.
The Russians and Chinese still don't look at the mess in those countries.
That's a LIE !!! 😂 😆 😂
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
~ Elena Gorokhova, _A Mountain of Crumbs_
It’s like surviving when a convicted felon is president
It still is a house of lies.
Russians and causing misery. Name a more iconic duo.
I mean the human species is overall pretty excellent at ruining pretty well everything.
I guess you could top it with humans and damage to nature? Or however you would like to word it.
America and causing extremism?
@@dantemoose420 There it is...
Trump and MAGA.
Trump and crazy
The Kyshtym disaster is not just a footnote in nuclear history. It serves as a stark reminder of the potential dangers of nuclear power when mishandled or when governments prioritize secrecy over public safety. The tragedy’s impact on the environment and the health of those exposed to radiation is still felt today. The disaster should be remembered as part of the ongoing conversation about nuclear energy, the need for transparency, and the importance of prioritizing public health and safety.
It is an indictment on the failures of socialism and progressivism's 'scientism' over real science.
Dude i was just looking for something to watch! I find this stuff so interesting what's going on in some corner of the world
That's good.
You had me at 'drive at maximum velocity'... that's something you don't hear everyday.
One good thing came out of the disaster.
There is 30 Km or so of highway where you wont get a speeding ticket.
That settlement is the biggest slap 😦 n the face ive seen in a while
Here's $2 a month; go pound sand.
Govts do this all the time. That’s why it baffles me that anyone trusts the IS govt considering their track record of crap like this. Yet people still just fall to their knees when the “experts” say to do something.
It's Russia it's amazing they gave them anything at all.
Aurora Borealis!? At this time of day, in this part of the country, localized ENTIRELY within Chelyabinsk? May I see it?
Thank you Super Nintendo Chalmers
No
Deadly artificial respiratory virus suddenly emerging in a wet market right next to a institue of virology? The more time change....
I've been searching for a long time for a book about this without any luck. Thanks for posting this video
I had to do a project on a nuclear disaster in chemistry during my senior year of high school. I chose the Kyshtym disaster.
Mayak is an overall very grim thing to begin with. Keep in mind it's very first efforts to deal with the nuclear materials. People didn't know much about the radiation and it's effects by then, add soviet's total disreguard for human life on top of it and you'll get an idea.
Like using manual labor to unclog the pipes from radioactive material, or one instance when they've dumped so much radioactive waste from the station they have BOILED THE RIVER.
That breaks my heart. This is the first time I have ever heard of this radiation incident. One thing that makes me sad is that cold radiation storage is completely safe but because of incidents like this, so many people hear “radiation plant” and, understandably, want nothing to do with it and most know nothing about cold storage and how it makes it completely safe. In fact, there are many countries that use this technology without incident.
The advancement of nuclear power is likely to stall due to fear and lack of trust. Governments control the approval of nuclear research, and with current global tensions and past incidents, there's not enough public confidence to push forward.
"North East Ural Trace" was known in the the west during the cold war .. Its cause was unknown until 1991 .. It was considered the worst nuclear accident until Chernobyl ..
Honestly, it''s probably far worse than Chernobyl considering all the radioactive waste that was dumped into nearby rivers and streams and lakes that locals continued to use uninterrupted for weeks and months... potentially years.
This was the basis/ inspiration for Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. The basis for STALKER. Not Chornobyl. This was their way of talking about it without getting in trouble.
There are stories of leaking storage tanks at Hanford in the USA. Cancer rates are higher for "down winders" but the US government has never given any compensation.
One of the tanks had a big leak a few years back!!!! Super “big” investigation happened… they deemed it safe…
Aurora borealis?
What were they making there? Forbidden steamed hams?
Shhhhh....that's legend!!!!!
Rainbow beef. 🌈
"Aurora Borealis? At this time of the year, at this time of the day, in this part of Chelyabinsk, localized entirely at this nuclear facility??"
"Yes."
"May I see it?"
"NYET!"
@@AspieMBProject2012 Aaaaahh!!! Help, Seymourski, the reactor is on fire!!!
Radioactive steamed hams
Simon you always tell me the nicest stories
Soviet commissar to a Russian child: have you ever cleaned up radioactive waste
Child: no
Commissar: well you're going to today
Okay.. is there a punchline? I couldn’t find it 😐
🤔
@@B.404M In Soviet Russia, joke laughs at you. :D
"What is the cost of lies?"
Humans shouldn't be trusted with this kind of power.
Humans shouldn't be trusted. Period.
Humans are defined by being unworthy of trust around powerful things. That's the tale of Prometheus.
@@lynnefox4892Not sure how Prometheus, a titan and god, stealing fire justifiies a cynical outlook on humanity due hierarchy-based failures and dealing with new technology, but go off.
Nuclear power is safe, despite incidents like this, and it's even safer now than it's ever been. Nuclear power is a necessary component of addressing energy production in warming climate and providing energy for an energy hungry world.
You can trust me.
First time i've heard of this Soviet nuclear disaster. Final words; not only robbed them of their dignity but their health, livelihoods and future.
@IntotheShadows Hello, just letting you know that Simon isn't in focus, the cacti are. It's easiest to see at 8:51. I don't know your camera set up so I can't say whats the easiest way to fix this. But, a stand-in for Simon is probably the simplest universal solution and by stand in, even just a paper face for auto-focus to focus on would work.
Much love!
Damnit, now I'll never never not notice it 😂
Op should do an update about Fukushima in Japan. Haven't heard a thing about what is going on over there in years.
Nothing to tell
Absolute shit show, basically relying on technology to improve
@@joeds3775 the situation hasn't improved? Is that why there is nothing to tell?
Bad news is bad for tourism, publicity, and image. Therefore, "everything is great". 😁 That's how it is in every country which is currently failing; things are GREAT.
That's also why now that Chump is making a fake newsified return, only GOOD news about him will be permitted. 💪😎✌️ No crimes occurred, he never did anything illegal, he's solely responsible for the GOOD things on this planet, and there were never any shady shenanigans over his 60+ years of debauchery. He's flawless, perfect, and celestially omnipotent. Knowledgeable about every possible facet of skills and trades, and there is absolutely nothing and no one better than *Him.* He's all-knowing, and an expert at economics, warfare, logistics, technology, communications, politics, finances, acting, directing, clothing, cars, the internet, TikTok, etc. No mistakes are ever made by a God. ⚔️🇱🇷⚔️ #Chump4Ever
@@ianb4618 It has improved, in 2021 government opened the old alienation zone as far as 3 km from the power plant, because the level of radiation is almost the same as the background radiation.
Nonetheless people are scared because of radiophobia and media altering and exaggerating the reality of radiation so nobody ever came back to live there.
Hi, you should make a video on Bhopal gas leak in India and how all the company owners got away without any trial
Have you Simon seen the series called Chernobyl? It's an series with great cast acting out what happened before and after the Chernobyl explosion. And how much KGB and State were intervening on cleanup efforts and those brave men who gave their lives to save other's. It has 5 episode's, but it really keeps you on edge of your seat.
As mentioned, the INES scale goes up to 7. There have been two level 7 events: Chornobyl (obviously) and Fukushima. Kyshtym is the only level 6 event.
There are four level 5 events: the first Chalk River accident (yes, they had more than one), Three Mile Island, Goiânia (Brazil), and the Windscale fire at Sellafield, UK, less than two weeks after Kyshtym. The Windscale fire is worth watching a video about, as there are interviews with some of those involved, including the one who was staring down at a white-hot reactor on fire.
Windscale, renamed Sellafield.... I wonder why?
"We don't ask questions." An ingrained russian attitude that continues to this day.
I think you beat Kyle Hill to this one Simon. Lol
Was thinking the exact same thing.
Jimi *Hendrick's Dry GIN*
Kyle hill is gay
Plainly difficult also
Hill has included this in a couple of his videos - can’t beat the radioactive king
I wonder, why this does not include the Story of Lake Karachay . After the disaster it dried up and radioactive dust was blown over a large area. In the 70s and 80s the whole lake was filled up with concrete and today it's considered the place with the highest radioactive pollution on earth. It was estimated, that less then one hour at the site is enough to give you a lethal dose.
Great video. Love your talking speed. Not wasting time.
Maybe the real world's worst enemy are the friends we made along the way.
Lost count of how many kyshtymographics Simons done.
No, the real world's worst enemies are communists.
I guy named Whistler talking about secrecy. Brilliant!
1:58 The waste was absolutely not stored in modern western commercial used fuel dry casks such as these.
Wait then where
Of coirse not, it was the 50s and it was Soviet Union, where safety has NEVER been a requirement.
The casks that we use nowdays are missle, train and plane crash resistant, pratically impossible to destroy.
I just discovered you. Thank you for telling us about Kischtym I'm always amazed the secrecy that was the USSR.
Fantastic reporting, best effort to document I've heard.
Thanks for bringing this under attention again!
I grew up in 1950s 1960s Omaha Nebraska. As children being down wind of open air Nevada nuclear testing we were told not to eat winter snowfall. Later it seemed dying of cancer had become as wide spread as the common cold. While it became obvious something had changed the government media presented that increased cancer was due to the increased stress of urban living. Eventually the population possibly affected by radiation died and people stopped dying from urban stress.
I’d never heard of this disaster until today !
Thank you for the very informative documentary and for NOT showing the birth defects to upset me.
How the Russian governmental bodies’ staff can live with themselves knowing that they are causing untold suffering on their fellow people is beyond me.
At 10:00 it's weirdly hard to understand "full amount". The audio on the rest of the video is excellent. Can understand at 2x.
Soviet union "lets be cheap and not fix the problem"
Also Soviet union "lets spend millions of dollars covering up our mistake"
Literally on repeat.
Thank you for reminding me about this USSR disaster, as I sometimes have a hard time keeping them all straight.
Great video Thanks - What a damn shame 😢 couldn't imagine - well done video
Why is this guy on every youtube channel? Does he even sleep?
Shotgun approach LoL 😅
Listening to your review of the Russian waste going into the river reminded me of basically the same thing going on at Hanford Wa. / I Can elaborate.
A very powerful presentation.
11:08 "The cost of secrecy" any HBO miniseries coming to mind?
Yes. Chernobyl.
Woah, they now have a new setting for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 3.
The Soviets pushed their Nuclear Programs too fast. The Eternal Fire of Promithus needs to be respected. That said the Soviet Reactors were poorly engineered and based on US failed designs obtained by Soviet spies in the US. They reverse engineered their reactors based on these designs, hence the catastrophic failure at Chernobyl. They designed in a flaw we learned about with our first reactor design in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project.
Graphite can be used to insulate the fuel rods and control the reaction to keep the reactor stable and safe. The error in design involves the fuel rod itself. In the early US design the engineers placed a graphite cone at the tips of the rods to ease the insertion back into their sleeves. What they learned was there is a radiation spike in the reaction process until the rod is completely inserted. This is because the graphite tip is still acting as an insulatior and not allowing the graphite sleeve to absorb the radiation from the Plutonium. The Soviets continued to use this design even against the recommendations of their own engineers because it saved money on the design and manufacture of the fuel rods.
In the US design the rods were manufactured in the more expensive manner. The easement cones are machined into the rods, no graphite is used or required except for the reaction control sleeves. In the US design the radiation and reaction spike does not occur while the rods are being inserted back into their sleeves.
Two things happened simultaneously at Chernobyl to cause the disaster. 1. Several of the rods jammed because the graphite tips were damaged and worn from usage. 2. They were conducting a Minimum Power test which involves the time between the cooling system being at Nominal Flow and Low or No Flow, and how long it would take to shut the reactor down under these circumstances should there be a system failure on the pumps.
When they started to put the rods back in, they estimate 10 of the rods jammed about half way into their respective sleeves. With the cooling system spooling down, the reaction went critical before they realized what happened. By pressing the AZ-5 Scram Button which is supposed to instantly shove the rods into their sleeves, all but the jammed rods went in. This caused a cascading failure and the meltdown of the reactor.
What the real issue is over Nuclear Power is the fear mongering over the few accidents that have happened. All of them over poor designs, human error, and cost cutting on designs. In the case of Fukushima... a failure to recognize and heed warnings of geographic location of construction of the plant. Against recommendations the plant was built on the coastline subject to earthquake and tsunami.
When engineering and construction warnings are needed, and followed the power plants operate as designed. Meaning no accidents. As for the spent fuel rods... the technology exists now to Recycle them, reconcentrate them until they are zero. But the government does not want to spend the time nor the money to do this. And... the Liberals continue to feed the public fear by politicing and propagandizing the negative aspects of Nuclear Power.
There are dangers. They need to be respected. That said, Nuclear Power is the answer to our energy needs. And... the sooner we accept this necessary evil the sooner we get off the need for fossil fuels. Like it or not, unfortunately that is the truth. We only have TWO reliable energy sources, and we have more than halfway used up the petroleum option. There are about 300 years left on petroleum. And... they will use every drop!
The Soviet nuclear weapons and energy production industry have left plenty of ticking tie bombs.
How and Why did the Japanese resettle Hiroshima and Nagasaki so easily and the Russians seem to totally destroy their radioactive areas Chernobyl and Kyshtym? How was the radioactivity so different between Japan and the USSR.
Despite what movies and video games might imply it's highly unlikely a child having an extra finger had anything to do with radiation. That's just not how that works. Polydactyly is actually way more common than people think and it often runs in families. The only reason you don't run across people with extra fingers or toes is they tend to be removed very early.
I had a friend with a sixth toe. She ran around in sandals with painted toenails.
And can really rip on a guitar!?
Birth defects are proven facts about radiation. You really, really should educate yourself on the subject.
@jothain gamma likes to blow DNA strands apart? Go figure...
i remember going to en exhibit in Edinburgh with my mum and it was about the Chernobyl incident and it had all sorts of displays and items and various other pictures. It also had displays of how it affected Scotland after the accident. There were multiple pictures of farm animals with defects including two headed animals, I guess those who survive radiation and then procreate do have a higher chance of having offspring with birth defects than those not exposed to significant levels of radiation.
You should do the one about the nuclear waste problem in washington state. The Hanford site.
Jesus man, slow down just a little. . . . I like your fast paced videos but this is on another level. Ease up bro.
Hard to believe how many people in the USA think a government like this is preferable to what we have now
Now do the Rocky Flats plant, I.E. the reason for Denver's "naturally high" background radiation because it happened before the invention of portable Geiger counters so nobody knew what the rate was before the plutonium plant caught fire, and the highly classified cold war dusaster wasn't FOIA'd until Y2K.
This sounds inconvenient, so it must not be true.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from_the_Rocky_Flats_Plant
At Rocky Flats, over all of the areas and releases of Pu, from some rough math there was anywhere from 0.5 - nearly 2 pounds of plutonium released into the air, ground and ground water. That's just some really quick math (and probably wrong) from reading the provided article. In my eyes, that's an absolutely insane amount of plutonium to be released and that's coming from someone who has dealt with Pu before. Small amounts of it, but an amount of it none the less.
@@BackYardScience2000 a little dab will do ya.
You know about the Savannah river site, and the radioactive reptiles, right?
Every video about a horrific russian nuclear accident becomes full of comments about a completely unrelated accident somewhere else in the world. Why is that?
Several of my co-workers went to Chelyabinsk in the mid-1990s to work on a banking project for iBANK System (aka Fujitsu-ICL International Banking Products).
They took their own food, carried radiation dosimeters, and were told they'd probably be OK if they stayed on paved surfaces where they wouldn't kick up much dust.
Why do vowel deficient places sound ripe for nuclear disaster? Is it just me
If no one talks about it, if it was kept so secret, how was I able to do a speech on the event in high school in the 70s? 🤓
1:20 I’m thinking there is a subtle nod to this “nuclear research outpost” in metal gear 2. Just changed the number.
Interesting, thank you for sharing this
For what it’s worth, the name is misspelled in the title - the first h goes with an s, not a t. Kyshtym, not kysthym.
It's cute how people think Mayak is past tense. The last large incident at the plant was in 2018.
I think you've confused two different things:
The Mayak plant itself should be a 7 on the disaster scale. It is not. It's not on the radar, and collectively it makes Chernobyl look like Goania.
It's not The Kyshtym Disaster. It's just where it happened.
Kyshtym is a 6 (and the Fukushima one you know about will probably eventually be called a 6. It meets the 6 definition more than the 7.)
The Kyshtym Disaster *itself* was a fertilizer explosion at Mayak with adjacent radioactive waste, on September 29th, 1957. Think Oklahoma City Bombing, only accidental, if the building held radioactive waste.
The plume from that particular disaster became an exclusion zone... That disaster caused the creation of the EURT (East Urals Radioactive Trace) which is an exclusion zone from the fallout of the Kyshtym Disaster itself. That's the 1957 disaster that caused the EURT: The fertilizer explosion and the waste next to it went flying in one particular direction, and that and weather made it land in one (very large) area.
Since it didn't include a gamma burst, it really was just the fallout zone from *that* explosion.
The 6 on the disaster scale is *only* that one explosion.
*Most* of the radiation that fell on populated areas near Mayak is actually from Mayak's other uses and its many, many, many other incidents. In fact, the first finding of major radioactive contamination was downriver of Mayak in 1951. (Kyshtym was 1957)
Mayak had *critcality* incidents in 1953, April 1957 (same year as Kyshtym) , 1958, 1960, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1976, multiple incidents in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996. These are just the incidents with criticality. Kyshtym didn't have criticality.
On the INES, the Mayak plant has been the source of the only 6 out of 7 disaster, but also includes a couple 4s, several 3s and probably more.
In addition to Kyshtym, which threw radioactive fallout into the Urals and created the EURT exclusion zone, Mayak *also* dumped radioactive waste into the Techna River in 1949 and 1950, creating a massive incident and affecting 40+ villages, of which 23 were evacuated. This is usually considered the "first" Mayak Incident, although there were also a few small incidents at the plant beforehand.
In 1953, again, before Kyshtym happened, Mayak was responsible for the radioactive contamination of Lake Karachay, and in 1967, a drought caused Karachay's polluted water to become polluted, radioactive dust, killing and sickening a lot of people. An estimated 400,000 people were irradiated.
Mayak is a menace, and if anything in Russia ends our planet, it will likely be from there.
But. again. Kyshtym is just one explosion and set of fallout.
Mayak is where that fallout came from, and is worse than Kyshtym.
-Retired Radiation Medicine Research Laboratory Manager.
I probably shouldn't just leave that out there, sorry. Fukushima is on the INES twice, with a 7 (which is probably a 6) AND a 3
They were desperate to have children. Even sick ones. THAT is what drives me crazy about our species. Even now.
Fr stop having children for awhile ppl!
In a way, having children was a form of welfare. In the culture we are talking about, your children would look after you in old age, and that is why, in part, you need children who will, in effect, take over the farm and make a living for the generational family, all living under one roof.
I mean, reproduction is literally THE goal of all life - ingrained into every cell of every organism
Anything that DOESNT want children won't be a species for long
@@jamesgodfrey1322 Not if you know they will be born very sick, but have them anyway.
@@jamesgodfrey1322 no it's not welfare, it's called being selfish
I recently read a book based on these events, very much worthwhile
it's not like this kind of thing happens in the US - Dupont stuff, the nuclear landfill north of STL. we cover stuff up too, the Damascus Titan missile explosion, microplastic pollution in TX, the Hanford NPP which used water directly from and discharged water from the columbia river, love canal, etc etc etc it just goes on and on. and ya all this stuff is downplayed, covered up, forgotten except by the ppl who are still affected. oh and all the sunken ships and whatnot from WWII that are leaking oil into the ocean all over the world, BP deepwater horizon (and corexit - a literal coverup).
One video at a time...
Why the whataboutism? That’s not what they’re arguing.
>joined 18 years ago
>1 comment
HMMMM. Sounds like a Putinbot or wumao hacked someone’s account.
Erin Brockovich
Minor release of radiation, by Soviet standards. Remember, these guys sank their old naval reactors in the deep dark, cold ocean. There is a big pile of them on the bottom, I hear. Now that's a mess. 😑
But also when The USSR fell, the rest if the world spent millions decommissioning the rest of The USSR's obsolete nuclear subs - there is a video on this somewhere.
@@keithalderson100 Your correct, they were called "americans," mostly. 🤑 Republican americans, if ya can believe that. Money well spent. Other nations helped, of coarse. Teamwork at it's best. There has never been a "sunken" reactor actually removed from the bottom, to my knowledge. They sunk dozens, maybe more. We saw what they were doing and said, WTF ? Stop that shit. Now, or else. 🙃 They said, OK, relax, no problem. Give us some money and we will stop. We did, and they did. Decommission them the right way. They served thier purpose, with honor. Do it right or let um sink at the dock. Got it ! Good, but... way down deep, in the cold dark ocean, there is a pile of nasty soviet naval reactors rusting away. The real "Davy Jones locker," my friend. I lost two subs, two crews, two reactors. 🇺🇸 They were terrible accidents. The learning curve was steep for all. I tried to learn from them. We should go back for the reactors. It could be done, now. Glomar Explorer style. Our duty. 🌎 The Soviets were the biggest polluters in world history. Period. This is nothing, don't get me started about what they have "buried" then denied. 😑
This is still not a reason to give up nuclear power wholesale.
Rather, its a reason to be that much more careful with it.
No, it's a reason to have a government that is not-stoopid enough to realize that your economy is composed of your population, and that their health is therefore in the national interest.
And not-stoopid enough to realize that physics does not care about our feelings, pride, or convenience.
So lying to save face, dodge responsibility, or underestimate problems only makes you pay a much much steeper price down the line....
(but it's hard to get to a place where politicians are _only_ rewarded for actual statecraft and nation building)
@MrNicoJac These two things can go hand in hand with each other.
The US Navy would seem to know this which is why naval reactors have never had a failure as severe as Chernobyl.
Sounds like you trust governments. This has always been a bad idea.
Hi, just a quick note - when you talk about rubble amounts, bear in mind the 1961 reform dropped a 0 off the amounts. Prior to 1961, 1 USD = 4 RUB, after 1961 1 USD = 0.9 RUB (yes, hidden devaluation)
One of the pieces of film used had a Russian scientist standing over a large copper piece of equipment with pipes coming off in specific ways. That makes friend isnt a piece of nuclear kit, it is the other very, very Russian thing: it was a vodka still. And a rather nice one. Copper is usually for whisky, but it makes for a slightly better, livlier vodka.
I am not saying you cant fission with vodka equipment, in just saying... Why would you want to? Plus it makes everything else so much more believable:) arpund the 4:25 or so mark)
The Kyshtym disaster happened in the Ural Mountains in 1957 early in Khruschev's tenure so it was easier to cover up than Chernobyl
The trouble with lying, you forget which things are the lies.
So do the people. Tell 'em enough lies, and they'll believe anything you want. That's lesson number one at Chump University, baby! 💪😎✌️ And don't forget Donny's six "D"s... deny, delay, distract, denounce, distance, do it all over again. 😂 #RussianMobMentality
You should talk about Project X-Ray. Bat bombs the US never used in WWII but how bad it would have been if they did.
I seem to remember that bats flew around the test compound after being armed and destroyed the installation, so the idea was abandoned as too uncontrollable :-(
@@keithalderson100 I know but the whole story behind it is interesting. Also if they did go through with it it would have been a lot worse then some bombs that were dropped. Just an interesting backstory and topic of what the government tries.
1:27 what’s radiactive waste?
@ I was kidding. Radiactive isn’t a word and this guy should know that, particularly given the subject matter being covered
It's a symptom of spending years outside the UK.
Old control rods?
Old control rods?
@ you’re thinking of radioactive waste
I have a couple of questions. I live in San Francisco Bay Area where big earthquakes are a frequent occurrence. They have been predicting a really big one. 30 miles away from my house is a big nuclear facility in Livermore surrounded by vineyards and wineries. First question, how safe are those wines, second question, would a really big earthquake ( we had a couple over 7 on the scale) of 8 or more on the scale cause a nuclear leak or worse, explosion at the Livermore facility? Is it a disaster in waiting?
The day of "the solution to pollution is dilution" mindset.
My personal experience of being exposed to “safe” levels of radiation is now having double vision which is looking like it will be permanent ( never able to drive again) and a need for hearing aids as my right ear has about half the ability of my left ear and the resultant social isolation leaves one lonely.
Do check out the great documentary "City 40" about this incident1
Greed and pride ist the source for the biggest problem in this stage stupidity
It is still a CLOSED CITY.
Love the vids. Thank you.
Wanting to have children in a situation like that is frankly incredibly selfish. You don’t have the means to afford them a better life where they can leave the poisoned area. They will be burdened with health issues. You are bringing someone into hell and they can’t even consent to it.
I read up on this years ago; as I understand it, there were THREE incidents that EACH released more radioactive material than Chernobyl; making the oblast the most radioactive place on the planet.
Right up until around 10-15 years ago, it was illegal to list cancer as the cause of death on a death certificate; and many never get to celebrate their 50th birthday.
Back in the mid 2000s, when I was internet dating, there were lots of pretty, young women from the area, desperately trying to find a husband who would get them out of Russia; I felt really sad for them, because, having grown up there, they had perhaps 20 years left, before cancer claimed them.
About 10 years ago, on a whim, I tried to find a road route from Europe to my wife's home town in China, the only non rail route I could find, - ran straight through the place.
There was some people that were completely unharmed by the two Soviet nuclear disasters.
It works out the CiA learnt that those soviets/Russian’s working in VX and Nerve gas factories were given such strong probiotics that the radiation (& fallout) had no impact on them at all.
Most of these people lived to 85-105 years old
Windscale, not a secret but little discussed history