- ...You call nuclear reactors "steamed hams"? - Yes! It's a regional dialect. - Uh-huh, uh what region? - uuh, Chelyabinsk oblast. - Really? Well I'm from Zlatoust and I've never heard anyone use the phrase "steamed hams" - Oh no, not in Zlatoust, it's an Ozersk expression. - I see. Also, later: - Seymourov! My face is on fire! - No, comrade worker, it's just the northern lights.
@@worldoftancraft there are dialects in every language. A person from Moscow is going to speak Russian slightly different from a person from Grozny or Irkutsk.
@@worldoftancraft ah, here you are wrong. Dialects don't have to be unintelligible to the mother tongue. An example is Scottish English. It is a dialect of standardized British English, yet any native British person can understand a Scotsman. That's a colloquial dialect, a dialect found solely in casual speech. There are also official dialects, like American English, which has slightly different spelling for some words, and slightly different pronounciation. When a dialect becomes hard to understand to speakers of the mother tongue, it is no longer a dialect, but an unofficial separate language.
I learned about the disaster during the 1970s from a source you don't mention. There were a bunch of Russian scientific papers published in the 1960s, all of which discussed the ecological effects of suddenly removing all members of some species from an ecosystem. Somebody in the scientific community noticed these papers and, by collating the locations of the various species mentioned, deduced the general area in which the disaster took place.
There is also another famous story associated with Kyshtym. A mysterious anthropomorphic creature was found near the town in 1996 and was named the Kyshtym dwarf or Alyoshenka. Ufologists believe that it was a humanoid. According to a more realistic version, this is a mutated human fetus. The cause of the mutation could be, among other things, the consequences of the disaster.
Also, 11 years after Kyshtym, lake Karachay dried out. And a violent windstorm swept up the now exposed and dried out radioactive waste which had accumulated at the lake's bottom and spread it across the region, irradiating 250,000 people. Though to this day, this second disaster still doesn't have so much as a name.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyoshenka Radiation causing deformities. Perfect food for British bedtime story channels with only video/photographic references being panning of crappy drawings. Donno why stupid stories like that is such a big thing in Britain, nobody else gives a crap.
@@ToreDL87 1. That's a really rude way to voice your opinion. 2. This channel isn't popular just in britain, as non-british people also find interest in subtle horror, the mysterious, and the seemingly supernatural.
60's setup studio, as a result of moving on through the Cold War in time, excellent! I like! And, I never heard of 'Kyshtym Disaster ' before so thanks for covering this topic!
We spent 70 years learning how to handle nuclear reactors ... it is very sad to see the current attitude towards a technology that matured so much. Imagine if humans gave up on fire permanently after the first few people suffered burns. This is what we are doing now with nuclear fire.
@@alfredvonschlieffen6813 especially with highly incorrect series like the ever praised Chernobyl. Presenting radiation damage as if it was contagious from one person to the other.
The Fukushima disaster was only 9 years ago. I'm pro-nuclear but let's not kid ourselves about its safety, especially if a terrorist squad can infiltrate a NPP so easily.
Well....like communism though these systems work on paper but human greed, complacency and ignorance are far more dangerous when applied to this aspect. I agree with what you are saying fundamentally. However, a Cancer diagnosis should be far more diversified in its options for treatment and feeling forced to channel efforts down approved treatment methods won't me feel better about Nuclear Medicine. These are life long commitments going into the occupations or diagnosis of illness. So just leaves me torn in thinking that we have gained enough progress to be comfortable with related to this aspect of society. We are not "educated" in this nor are safeguards, cleanup or safe handling where it should be. We need to keep talking, advocating, writing, documenting....in order to continue to climb the mountain we are at the foot of at this moment.
As a Canadian, I am surprised that you didn't mention the Chalk River nuclear incident of 1952, which involved a then-obscure nuclear engineer named James Earl Carter, who went on to become the 39th President of the United States. Chalk River is in Canada, about 2 hours drive northwest of Ottawa on the Ottawa River.
A lot of Americans consider Jimmy Carter a dumb hick peanut farmer from Georgia and dont even know he was close to being a nuclear physicist when his father passed away and he left the Navy to run his family's peanut business. He is a very smart man.
He was sent there, after the incident, as part of the team to clean up the mess. He had absolutely nothing to do with the event itself but was sent there, as part of a US Navy team, to help with the clean up.
Carter was part of the remediation team. But yes I agree, Chalk River doesn't get enough acknowledgment. Especially since it was the worlds first reactor meltdown.
U.S. refusal to reveal the incident was almost certainly also rooted in the need to protect intelligence methods and sources... Eisenhower: "A nuclear plant in the middle of nowhere in the Soviet Union exploded!" Rest of the world: "...And how the hell exactly would you know THAT?!" Although it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the U.S. leaked the story to the Danes just to get it out there.
No, source / capabilities & means protection was not an issue in this instance; atmospheric monitoring capabilities were well acknowledged. Cat was out of the bag when Truman described how they knew that Sov’s had first tested.
Wow! I've been there, and actually worked on one of the Ozyorsk factories some years ago. Not to mention, that my grandfather was evacuated from Ozyorsk after this disaster with his family to another facility in Dimitrovgrad )) From what I saw and heard during my visit to Ozyorsk, the administration of the site had always experienced troubles with organisation of the working process due to a constant hurry which is known as "shturmovshina" in russian. As for Kyshtym disaster, the threat from the radioactive waste tank was realised well before the actual bang, but all attempts to avert the disaster were made impossible by bad design of the storage. Other design flaws manifest themselves in the form of abandoned due to radioactive poisoning production buildings all around the facility.
Ever since Medvedev's 1980 book "Nuclear Disaster in the Urals" was published, this has hardly been an obscure incident. In many ways it remains one of the most severe nuclear disasters, simply because (like Chernobyl) there was very little effort at clean-up apart from "close the door and walk away." It's given us the world's most radioactive lake, for instance. Still a good story.
@@frankkolton1780 it's the fucking radiation. How do I know? Ive already dated two from that oblast, and while they are hot as hell, they also give you radiation poisoning when you break up 💔😝
I remember reading that New Scientist article. Of course there have been many other near misses and radiation exposures from weapons production and civil power plants in the US, UK and France to name just a few. Oak Ridge had a potential storage event with enriched uranium in WWII, only prevented by a visit by a young Richard Feynman, who himself could barely read the site plans and felt out of his depth...but he picked out the problem almost by sheer chance.
I don't watch TV much. Don't even own one. But when my son had me watch Chernobyl episode 1 on HBO during a visit to his house, I was immediately hooked. I came home and watched the whole mini-series via Amazon Prime. One of the most chilling things I ever watched. The mini-series does conclude that Chernobyl was a result of cheap Soviet construction. A litany of engineering shortcuts, shoddy work, and poor facility leadership. And that the disaster was enhanced by dogmatic Soviet propaganda and Soviet unwillingness to admit it's errors. Finding someone convenient to blame, anyone, was more important than finding solutions to the problem of a 2,600 square kilometer radioactive apocalypse. I hope everyone watches it. This previous disaster only reinforces the lessons of Chernobyl for those of us looking backward through Cold War History. Thank you for your always outstanding content.
Thanks David, Kyshtym, yet another nuclear accident I never heard of. As you said the rather excellent series Chernobyl really brings home the reality of Soviet incompetence with all things nuclear as well as the odd order of evacuation.
I think they might of actually covered that war in a video already. And yes they will talk about de-colonization in future videos, I think there is already a couple about Kenya and Ethiopia.
I remember reading about this. I wanted to try to get a list published on a trivia site, so I looked up a bunch of lesser-known nuclear disasters. The list didn't get accepted, but I learned a lot about the disasters. The nuclear field is more dangerous than many people think. I am actually more worried about this disaster than I am about the aftereffects of Chernobyl, since that one has been public and they are constantly working to contain/clean it up. This one was not given the same level of care.
Great content, very well produced. I love the more personal approach with a host rather than just an anonymous voice telling a story. Subscribed after the first video :)
The RBMK reactor which was the reactor used in all soviet era reactors was built so hurriedly, was built with a fatal flaw which contributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and other nuclear incidents in the Soviet Union. The flaw was pointed out by several engineers, but like most information of this type, it was silenced by the party.
You could probably make an hour long episode of what went on at and around Kyshtym and still not cover all of it. The soviets initiallyrefused to move people away from the disaster zone to they could study them, the people became human guinea pigs. Then when they finally accepted they needed to resettle them they moved them CLOSER to the river when they'd receive a higher dose. They made sure to not compensate the people enough to move, they couldn't go anywhere. Then there's the fact they hired prisoners to work at the reactor.. they just went from failure to failure to catastrophic failures. When they dumped the waste in the river they were actually running river water into and back out of the reactor to avoid a meltdown. Frankly, we're lucky they didn't screw it up worse, failure was inevitable.
I first heard about this a year ago. I was watching old archived news reports from when the Chernobyl accident happened and there was a passing phrase about there being a suspected but unconfirmed report of an accident decades earlier. I was like, "Wait, what, why have I never heard of this?" I had to start researching it right away.
@@oleopathic Several dead tourists worked at Mayak, but after the accident. Also, radiation was found on the bodies of the victims and this is one of the biggest mysteries of this case. There are several theories that try to explain them. According to one version, the tourists brought radioactive clothing from their work. According to another version, the group got into the territory that came under radiation contamination after the accident.
@@oleopathic The Russian prosecutor's office recently abandoned the avalanche version, announcing this as the personal opinion of the investigator, which he received by violating the investigative work.
The first mention of Mayak/Kyshtym/Chelyabinsk-40 disaster I read about was in 'Midnight in Chernobyl' which was unstoppably good. Nice that you covered it but no mention of the East Ural Radioactive Trace?
Never heard of it? It stands out in every good source and even on wikipedia it is listed in direct comparisons between incidents on the event scale. I did learn some stuff though, good vid! Thanks.
I am bound to have an awesome Saturday lazy breakfast! Thanks guys, another thing that I've heard nothing about despite being born in the Soviet Union.
When I was in high school in the late 1970s CBS reported the Kyshtym disaster on 60 Minutes. Harry Reasoner presented the claims of dissidents who leaked the story. He showed Russian maps of the area published after 1957. Several towns and villages were missing compared to maps published before 1957.
@@hadirahman3036 the difference at least in the US though is that free speech and open press make it a lot tougher to maintain cover-ups, so it's often less damning to simply admit the incident. For example, Three Mile Island didn't take long to garner public attention.
@@pikmaniac2643 Americans only know about the Vietnam War in 1968 after several years.... They also had no knowledge about several American and cia operations in the past and current,, examples the atom bomb, area 51,iran-contra affair....
Never heard of the "Kyshtym disaster". Years ago I saw a documentary about the Chelyabinsk nuclear incident but this is not the same event, is it? Interestingly enough, I grew up near the nuclear power plant of Kozloduy (Bulgaria) and I kinda know a lot about the nuclear "developments" over the decades but the Kyshtym disaster is something entirely new to me...
Zhores Medyedev, _Nuclear Disaster In The Urals_. He knew that some waste storage facility had exploded. He studied articles in Soviet Biology journals on the effects of radiological contamination of lakes and deduced from the isotopes involved and the reported size of the lakes that this was not a controled experiment.
Yes, I remember the similar effect like described at 10:36 , when Chernobyl happened the sky in my city had the very very dirty rainbow colors a few days! Russian communists insisted that everything was OK and no radiation, after radioactive clouds moved, covered and disturbed Scandinavian countries Moscow Commie confessed that it was an accident on a nuclear power plant.
David - nice video from a secret city in a race to produce plutonium material, slight setback but the reactors remained in use with many more incidents through the years.
You should've seen the faces I was making when I kept hearing the details behind this disaster. I couldn't stop shaking my head. How horrible. Well at least it's acknowledged now as a disaster. On a side note: The host has a new Studio. And I like it. My compliments to all those who made this video a reality.
Guess I haven't heard of this one. Excellent video, and contextualized to be relevant today.👍 BTW, digging the new set. Though I was a bit distracted by what was on the TV in the background 😂.
We will never know how many people died as a result of Kyshtym and Chernoby. In 1978, the New York Times published a long article about a major Soviet nuclear accident east of the Urals. I read that article in real time and was very disturbed. I suspect that at least one retired CIA agent talked to a New York Times reporter. It could even be the case that the NYT got its hands on 1 or more Russian or CIA documents. The NYT acknowledged having talked to people who had worked in the American embassy in Moscow.
Chalk River NRX accident in 1952 in Canada included a fuel meltdown and subsequent hydrogen explosions and is only dismissed as a serious accident due to nuclear awareness being so low at the time, IMHO.
I remember hearing about Kyshtym Disaster in 1977 at school, as we read a book by Roy Medvedev about Lysenkoism, I also remember reading about it in New Scientist.
I first heard of this in the early 80's as satellites were getting better at close observation , and a news story on TV reported that a large area of the Soviet Union was found to be abandoned for reasons unknown . If I remember right they were saying around 125 towns had ceased to exist , no one knew why but a nuclear accident was the popular opinion . Until I learned what I know now I thought it could be a meltdown , we know better now but I never would have thought that a waste release would be that deadly.
The Kyshtym event seems much, much, more serious than the Fukushima disaster. For all the reason mentioned in the video the Kyshtym event was played down, and it didn't involve a reactor. That is probably why it "only" got classified as a type 6 event. But from the description it seems to have been essentially a big dirty bomb that went off in populated area spraying hughe amounts of radioactive material (some 800 PBq according to wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster). It had a deathtoll in the thousands. On the other hand, despite the extreme seriousness of the Fukushima event triggered by an unprecedented Tsunami that killed at least 15000 people and spectacular Hydrogen explosions (shown in the video), (perhaps) one person died, the containment (just) held despite a meltdown, and most of the around 20 PBq Cs released flowed in the Ocean where it was quickly diluted by the fast moving Japan current in the vastness of the Pacific.
Frankly it should be said that *no one* learned from Kyshtym the same problems Chernobyl had wer present in all other nuclear facilities over the planet, it was the Soviet sharing of information after that that really led to the understanding of just how easily these problems can occur, and if Fukushima shows us something is that its not a matter of "if", but rather "when" when it comes to nuclear power.
If you are interested in the Soviet Union,,this channel has tons of gems 💯, i recommend the ones with interviews from Sergei sputnikoff to get started and i would sub to ushanka show, made by comrade Sergei,,
@@unfairfight3625 I've ALWAYS been into modern military history from the great war to current day so I have do doubt I will like this. Heres a pretty interesting fact about my family. My great uncle was Michael Wittmann and I share his last name. He was arguably the best tank commander ever but unfortunately he was a nazi. I reccomend anyone look up a video about him because he pulled off some insane, extremely effective tactics. Allies had a bounty on him and killed him shortly after D day I believe somewhere up by Calais.
@@menwithven8114 im a decentant of Normand Vikings our history is written down since the around year 990 when construction of the castle began,,in the battle of hastings,1066, one of my ancestors participated and is on the bayeux tapisterry,,im a decentant of his,,his dad had the castle built, it was destroyed in a war unfortunately,,a few centuries after we was deported to France 1755,,my family came back in 1790s and established the village I am in in 1800, im also on the original property, it is extremely remote and rich in wildlife,, i will definitely check your great uncle that sounds really interesting,,,yup these are not war based channels,, they are about life in the Soviet Union in general.
Have you not been paying attention to events in the United States the whole past year???? 🤷🏻♂️ Every damn thing they mandated that people do over “Covid19™️” was exactly what you would tell people to do if you WANTED to make people destroy their immune systems and make them sick. Example: in the last year at least 3 major universities did studies on the use of masks to stop viruses. The latest was Stamford University almost two months ago. All the results were the same: Masks Do Not Stop Viruses! And worse, masks will actually make people sick with other worse things like bacterial pneumonia infections, legionnaires disease and MRSA infections on the face. Many government these days are pure malevolent evil, populated by malicious evil people.
2:40 the British also exploited a loophole in the Geneva conventions to force thousands of German soldiers to do slave labour as reparation in the years after the war, although, with a smaller death rate compared to the Gulags.
If 90000 people got cancer and such that makes it significantly worse than Chernobyl where over a 80 year period 200 people are likely to die and Fukishima where no one will die.
Complacancy maked accidents. I work in manufacturing and I have seen accidents where fingers have been crushed or ripped off because of complacancy. People get comfortable in their routine and stop being cautious till disaster happens.
People too often forget the rule on safety rules. "Every safety rule is written in blood" should remind people that these rules are there because someone else was hurt.
Had to build the bomb quick, because the US and Britain had detailed plans to nuclear bomb the Soviet Union. With this background in mind, a few accidents are a small price to pay for creating our own bomb and securing the MAD. Chernobyl had different root causes. It was not a rush construction to catch up with the US. It was the country that was coming apart, including all the management practices.
- ...You call nuclear reactors "steamed hams"?
- Yes! It's a regional dialect.
- Uh-huh, uh what region?
- uuh, Chelyabinsk oblast.
- Really? Well I'm from Zlatoust and I've never heard anyone use the phrase "steamed hams"
- Oh no, not in Zlatoust, it's an Ozersk expression.
- I see.
Also, later:
- Seymourov! My face is on fire!
- No, comrade worker, it's just the northern lights.
This deserves more likes.
@Joey Colton awful
@@worldoftancraft there are dialects in every language.
A person from Moscow is going to speak Russian slightly different from a person from Grozny or Irkutsk.
@@worldoftancraft ah, here you are wrong. Dialects don't have to be unintelligible to the mother tongue. An example is Scottish English. It is a dialect of standardized British English, yet any native British person can understand a Scotsman.
That's a colloquial dialect, a dialect found solely in casual speech. There are also official dialects, like American English, which has slightly different spelling for some words, and slightly different pronounciation.
When a dialect becomes hard to understand to speakers of the mother tongue, it is no longer a dialect, but an unofficial separate language.
Unfunny
I learned about the disaster during the 1970s from a source you don't mention. There were a bunch of Russian scientific papers published in the 1960s, all of which discussed the ecological effects of suddenly removing all members of some species from an ecosystem. Somebody in the scientific community noticed these papers and, by collating the locations of the various species mentioned, deduced the general area in which the disaster took place.
There is also another famous story associated with Kyshtym. A mysterious anthropomorphic creature was found near the town in 1996 and was named the Kyshtym dwarf or Alyoshenka. Ufologists believe that it was a humanoid. According to a more realistic version, this is a mutated human fetus. The cause of the mutation could be, among other things, the consequences of the disaster.
@RavnDream You we have any pic of the humanoid? can you please send the link of the video?
Also, 11 years after Kyshtym, lake Karachay dried out.
And a violent windstorm swept up the now exposed and dried out radioactive waste which had accumulated at the lake's bottom
and spread it across the region, irradiating 250,000 people.
Though to this day, this second disaster still doesn't have so much as a name.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyoshenka
Radiation causing deformities.
Perfect food for British bedtime story channels with only video/photographic references being panning of crappy drawings.
Donno why stupid stories like that is such a big thing in Britain, nobody else gives a crap.
@@ToreDL87 1. That's a really rude way to voice your opinion.
2. This channel isn't popular just in britain, as non-british people also find interest in subtle horror, the mysterious, and the seemingly supernatural.
RavnDream Thank you for posting that.
60's setup studio, as a result of moving on through the Cold War in time, excellent! I like! And, I never heard of 'Kyshtym Disaster ' before so thanks for covering this topic!
We spent 70 years learning how to handle nuclear reactors ... it is very sad to see the current attitude towards a technology that matured so much. Imagine if humans gave up on fire permanently after the first few people suffered burns. This is what we are doing now with nuclear fire.
People are scared of what they don't understand. Sadly many don't bother to learn about it.
@@alfredvonschlieffen6813 especially with highly incorrect series like the ever praised Chernobyl. Presenting radiation damage as if it was contagious from one person to the other.
The Fukushima disaster was only 9 years ago.
I'm pro-nuclear but let's not kid ourselves about its safety, especially if a terrorist squad can infiltrate a NPP so easily.
fire doesn’t affect atoms and have the ability to damage DNA for generations, buddy, claiming nuclear energy to be anything like fire is invalid.
Well....like communism though these systems work on paper but human greed, complacency and ignorance are far more dangerous when applied to this aspect.
I agree with what you are saying fundamentally. However, a Cancer diagnosis should be far more diversified in its options for treatment and feeling forced to channel efforts down approved treatment methods won't me feel better about Nuclear Medicine.
These are life long commitments going into the occupations or diagnosis of illness. So just leaves me torn in thinking that we have gained enough progress to be comfortable with related to this aspect of society. We are not "educated" in this nor are safeguards, cleanup or safe handling where it should be.
We need to keep talking, advocating, writing, documenting....in order to continue to climb the mountain we are at the foot of at this moment.
As a Canadian, I am surprised that you didn't mention the Chalk River nuclear incident of 1952, which involved a then-obscure nuclear engineer named James Earl Carter, who went on to become the 39th President of the United States. Chalk River is in Canada, about 2 hours drive northwest of Ottawa on the Ottawa River.
A lot of Americans consider Jimmy Carter a dumb hick peanut farmer from Georgia and dont even know he was close to being a nuclear physicist when his father passed away and he left the Navy to run his family's peanut business. He is a very smart man.
@@lilyrrichard236 Still a bad president.
He was sent there, after the incident, as part of the team to clean up the mess. He had absolutely nothing to do with the event itself but was sent there, as part of a US Navy team, to help with the clean up.
You kidding, Jimmy Carter had a background in nuclear engineering?? That's mad - and Three Miles Island happened when he was President
Carter was part of the remediation team. But yes I agree, Chalk River doesn't get enough acknowledgment. Especially since it was the worlds first reactor meltdown.
U.S. refusal to reveal the incident was almost certainly also rooted in the need to protect intelligence methods and sources...
Eisenhower: "A nuclear plant in the middle of nowhere in the Soviet Union exploded!"
Rest of the world: "...And how the hell exactly would you know THAT?!"
Although it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the U.S. leaked the story to the Danes just to get it out there.
No, source / capabilities & means protection was not an issue in this instance; atmospheric monitoring capabilities were well acknowledged. Cat was out of the bag when Truman described how they knew that Sov’s had first tested.
In Soviet Russia, Aurora Borealis sees you
Nothing like a little Smirnoff with a little Smirnoff.
Fcking hilarious
So, the Aurora Borealis is the Chuck Norris of Soviet Russia?
Yah, you have a glowing complexion, too…
Simpson's reference
Steamed hams
where??
@@noobstudios4457 the aroraborialus part
came here to upvote
ŇøHă Ģ. ...but you steam a good ham.
Wow! I've been there, and actually worked on one of the Ozyorsk factories some years ago. Not to mention, that my grandfather was evacuated from Ozyorsk after this disaster with his family to another facility in Dimitrovgrad ))
From what I saw and heard during my visit to Ozyorsk, the administration of the site had always experienced troubles with organisation of the working process due to a constant hurry which is known as "shturmovshina" in russian. As for Kyshtym disaster, the threat from the radioactive waste tank was realised well before the actual bang, but all attempts to avert the disaster were made impossible by bad design of the storage.
Other design flaws manifest themselves in the form of abandoned due to radioactive poisoning production buildings all around the facility.
I would imagine the groundwater the that region is highly contaminated right?
10:48 I grew up in the 80s and see what you did there. (Aurora borealis, wink wink...)
"Closed Nature Reserve"!? Sounds like the "Pripyat Nature Park and Science Fiction movie set"
Ironically wildlife, with its shorter lifespan, can continue to thrive when the lead predators are removed or remove themselves. 😂
Ever since Medvedev's 1980 book "Nuclear Disaster in the Urals" was published, this has hardly been an obscure incident. In many ways it remains one of the most severe nuclear disasters, simply because (like Chernobyl) there was very little effort at clean-up apart from "close the door and walk away." It's given us the world's most radioactive lake, for instance. Still a good story.
I'm sure people from Chelyabinsk makes the best Steamed Hams in the country.
It's more of a Yekaterinburg term
"SEYMOUR!"
СЕЙМУР!
There are loads uncommonly gorgeous women in Chelyabinsk.
@@frankkolton1780 it's the fucking radiation. How do I know? Ive already dated two from that oblast, and while they are hot as hell, they also give you radiation poisoning when you break up 💔😝
I remember reading that New Scientist article. Of course there have been many other near misses and radiation exposures from weapons production and civil power plants in the US, UK and France to name just a few. Oak Ridge had a potential storage event with enriched uranium in WWII, only prevented by a visit by a young Richard Feynman, who himself could barely read the site plans and felt out of his depth...but he picked out the problem almost by sheer chance.
I keep seeing the name faynman he is a hero
10:47 most famous scene in The Simpsons history referenced beautifully.
Don't know how I hadn't found your channel sooner. I love the way you put your videos together. Very smooth and professional.
I don't watch TV much. Don't even own one. But when my son had me watch Chernobyl episode 1 on HBO during a visit to his house, I was immediately hooked. I came home and watched the whole mini-series via Amazon Prime. One of the most chilling things I ever watched. The mini-series does conclude that Chernobyl was a result of cheap Soviet construction. A litany of engineering shortcuts, shoddy work, and poor facility leadership. And that the disaster was enhanced by dogmatic Soviet propaganda and Soviet unwillingness to admit it's errors. Finding someone convenient to blame, anyone, was more important than finding solutions to the problem of a 2,600 square kilometer radioactive apocalypse.
I hope everyone watches it. This previous disaster only reinforces the lessons of Chernobyl for those of us looking backward through Cold War History.
Thank you for your always outstanding content.
That Steamed Hams reference will last longer than any radiation.
Thanks
The other common thread is generally covering up how bad it really is and a failure by the government to take responsibility.
This was quite excellent. Thank you.
Thanks David, Kyshtym, yet another nuclear accident I never heard of. As you said the rather excellent series Chernobyl really brings home the reality of Soviet incompetence with all things nuclear as well as the odd order of evacuation.
Nice and informative video 👍
Thanks for this...
As someone who is very interested in history, I love your channel. Btw, will you cover French-Algerian war and other anti-colonial conflicts?
I think they might of actually covered that war in a video already. And yes they will talk about de-colonization in future videos, I think there is already a couple about Kenya and Ethiopia.
I remember reading about this. I wanted to try to get a list published on a trivia site, so I looked up a bunch of lesser-known nuclear disasters. The list didn't get accepted, but I learned a lot about the disasters. The nuclear field is more dangerous than many people think.
I am actually more worried about this disaster than I am about the aftereffects of Chernobyl, since that one has been public and they are constantly working to contain/clean it up. This one was not given the same level of care.
Great content, very well produced. I love the more personal approach with a host rather than just an anonymous voice telling a story. Subscribed after the first video :)
The RBMK reactor which was the reactor used in all soviet era reactors was built so hurriedly, was built with a fatal flaw which contributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and other nuclear incidents in the Soviet Union. The flaw was pointed out by several engineers, but like most information of this type, it was silenced by the party.
One of my new favorite TH-camrs for disasters , adding you alongside plainly difficult and brick immortar
This is the most detailed account of that disaster I have seen in my entire life. Very well done
You could probably make an hour long episode of what went on at and around Kyshtym and still not cover all of it. The soviets initiallyrefused to move people away from the disaster zone to they could study them, the people became human guinea pigs. Then when they finally accepted they needed to resettle them they moved them CLOSER to the river when they'd receive a higher dose. They made sure to not compensate the people enough to move, they couldn't go anywhere.
Then there's the fact they hired prisoners to work at the reactor.. they just went from failure to failure to catastrophic failures. When they dumped the waste in the river they were actually running river water into and back out of the reactor to avoid a meltdown.
Frankly, we're lucky they didn't screw it up worse, failure was inevitable.
RAD-X, A Fallout reference...
And water purifiers for those villages.
With Vault Boy figure on the desk!
I first heard about this a year ago. I was watching old archived news reports from when the Chernobyl accident happened and there was a passing phrase about there being a suspected but unconfirmed report of an accident decades earlier. I was like, "Wait, what, why have I never heard of this?" I had to start researching it right away.
It is interesting that the death of the Dyatlov group in 1959, may also have some connection with the Kyshtym accident.
How ?
I very much doubt that!
@@oleopathic Several dead tourists worked at Mayak, but after the accident. Also, radiation was found on the bodies of the victims and this is one of the biggest mysteries of this case. There are several theories that try to explain them. According to one version, the tourists brought radioactive clothing from their work. According to another version, the group got into the territory that came under radiation contamination after the accident.
@@jangrosek4334 there is new 2020 documentary of Dyatlov Pass. Official reason is avalanche.
@@oleopathic The Russian prosecutor's office recently abandoned the avalanche version, announcing this as the personal opinion of the investigator, which he received by violating the investigative work.
If they had a number of days without accident plaque, it would actually be a scale of how radioactive the whole area was.
The first mention of Mayak/Kyshtym/Chelyabinsk-40 disaster I read about was in 'Midnight in Chernobyl' which was unstoppably good. Nice that you covered it but no mention of the East Ural Radioactive Trace?
Thanks for the video, I learned from it! Never hear of Kyshtym.
Kudos!
You didn't answer the one question many of us have:. MAY I SEE IT?
er, no.
There's a hiways , next to it. Keep your windows closed ,signs, for 25 miles. You can get a dose !
Fantastic video, never heard of this before
Never heard of it? It stands out in every good source and even on wikipedia it is listed in direct comparisons between incidents on the event scale. I did learn some stuff though, good vid! Thanks.
I am bound to have an awesome Saturday lazy breakfast! Thanks guys, another thing that I've heard nothing about despite being born in the Soviet Union.
When I was in high school in the late 1970s CBS reported the Kyshtym disaster on 60 Minutes. Harry Reasoner presented the claims of dissidents who leaked the story. He showed Russian maps of the area published after 1957. Several towns and villages were missing compared to maps published before 1957.
nice video
It's not just cold war, Russia always keeps it's failures in secrecy. As an example is the recent 2019 accident in Arkhangelsk.
I hope will not take long before we know what really happen there
So do America and china
@@hadirahman3036 the difference at least in the US though is that free speech and open press make it a lot tougher to maintain cover-ups, so it's often less damning to simply admit the incident. For example, Three Mile Island didn't take long to garner public attention.
@@pikmaniac2643 Americans only know about the Vietnam War in 1968 after several years.... They also had no knowledge about several American and cia operations in the past and current,, examples the atom bomb, area 51,iran-contra affair....
@@hadirahman3036
keep it coming
This channel should have lots more subscribers than it currently does. The masses are missing out on quality info and presentation
Anyone else liking this setup?
*raises hand in agreement*
Ishraq Sowad Same! Much less cluttered and claustrophobic.
Never heard of the "Kyshtym disaster". Years ago I saw a documentary about the Chelyabinsk nuclear incident but this is not the same event, is it? Interestingly enough, I grew up near the nuclear power plant of Kozloduy (Bulgaria) and I kinda know a lot about the nuclear "developments" over the decades but the Kyshtym disaster is something entirely new to me...
Same disaster.
@@soulsphere9242 Nope. It was a movie on Discovery Channel about the Chelyabinsk explosion...
Zhores Medyedev, _Nuclear Disaster In The Urals_. He knew that some waste storage facility had exploded. He studied articles in Soviet Biology journals on the effects of radiological contamination of lakes and deduced from the isotopes involved and the reported size of the lakes that this was not a controled experiment.
There are no nuclear disasters in Soviet Union. Do you need a vacation?
Siberia is nice vacation this time of year, especially the Ob river valleys.....
Yes, I remember the similar effect like described at 10:36 , when Chernobyl happened the sky in my city had the very very dirty rainbow colors a few days! Russian communists insisted that everything was OK and no radiation, after radioactive clouds moved, covered and disturbed Scandinavian countries Moscow Commie confessed that it was an accident on a nuclear power plant.
New sub. Excellent presentation and information!
Terrific improvement, actually appearing to be looking at your audience! Keep up the good work. I look forward to your next video.
David - nice video from a secret city in a race to produce plutonium material, slight setback but the reactors remained in use with many more incidents through the years.
Thankyou. I had never heard of this.Your work is appreciated.
Well done mate
The fact that so many nuclear accidents happend within the USSR shows how irresponsible the Soviets where with nuclear power.
Rad-X. Ur a man of culture, david
There was a lake that they used to dump radioative fuel rods that were already spent
Sadly in a show of power innocent people had to die.
All hail equality ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾
Very true and thats what sucks the most. :/
That’s just how it works, sacrifices r made in the process
@Libturds Suck Well ur right tovarischi
. Merry Christmas to everyone.
@@JSKR6
Namely ordinary folk.
You should've seen the faces I was making when I kept hearing the details behind this disaster. I couldn't stop shaking my head. How horrible. Well at least it's acknowledged now as a disaster. On a side note: The host has a new Studio. And I like it. My compliments to all those who made this video a reality.
I bet $50 that this video will be good and I have only seen the first minute of it.
I won!
This is also the general location of the 2013 meteor.
Guess I haven't heard of this one.
Excellent video, and contextualized to be relevant today.👍
BTW, digging the new set.
Though I was a bit distracted by what was on the TV in the background 😂.
I'm glad I'm not the only one.
secrecy never stays secret....
We will never know how many people died as a result of Kyshtym and Chernoby.
In 1978, the New York Times published a long article about a major Soviet nuclear accident east of the Urals. I read that article in real time and was very disturbed. I suspect that at least one retired CIA agent talked to a New York Times reporter. It could even be the case that the NYT got its hands on 1 or more Russian or CIA documents. The NYT acknowledged having talked to people who had worked in the American embassy in Moscow.
Chalk River NRX accident in 1952 in Canada included a fuel meltdown and subsequent hydrogen explosions and is only dismissed as a serious accident due to nuclear awareness being so low at the time, IMHO.
Remember what Tomep (Homer) Simpsonkova says, "What happens in Siberia, stays in Siberia, comrade".
Great vid. I first heard of Kyshtym from the game Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops, I had no idea it really happened.
Loved the reference
nice video . love the cold war , could you please make a video covering japan during this era
Very interesting
[obligatory HBO chernobyl meme reference]
I remember hearing about Kyshtym Disaster in 1977 at school, as we read a book by Roy Medvedev about Lysenkoism, I also remember reading about it in New Scientist.
I hope to know of more "smaller" footnotes in the cold war history like this...
Very informative.
I first heard of this in the early 80's as satellites were getting better at close observation , and a news story on TV reported that a large area of the Soviet Union was found to be abandoned for reasons unknown . If I remember right they were saying around 125 towns had ceased to exist , no one knew why but a nuclear accident was the popular opinion . Until I learned what I know now I thought it could be a meltdown , we know better now but I never would have thought that a waste release would be that deadly.
The Kyshtym event seems much, much, more serious than the Fukushima disaster. For all the reason mentioned in the video the Kyshtym event was played down, and it didn't involve a reactor. That is probably why it "only" got classified as a type 6 event. But from the description it seems to have been essentially a big dirty bomb that went off in populated area spraying hughe amounts of radioactive material (some 800 PBq according to wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster). It had a deathtoll in the thousands. On the other hand, despite the extreme seriousness of the Fukushima event triggered by an unprecedented Tsunami that killed at least 15000 people and spectacular Hydrogen explosions (shown in the video), (perhaps) one person died, the containment (just) held despite a meltdown, and most of the around 20 PBq Cs released flowed in the Ocean where it was quickly diluted by the fast moving Japan current in the vastness of the Pacific.
You eat the fish and the corporations and worker Agentur will say: You can work after the cancer till the next.
Nice channel
Love the fallout reference
Excellent video. Love the Simpsons reference.
10:48 this is the best use of the Aurora Borealis meme I've seen yet.
Frankly it should be said that *no one* learned from Kyshtym the same problems Chernobyl had wer present in all other nuclear facilities over the planet, it was the Soviet sharing of information after that that really led to the understanding of just how easily these problems can occur, and if Fukushima shows us something is that its not a matter of "if", but rather "when" when it comes to nuclear power.
Lots of references lmao, also well done on the material research and video production effort, as always.
I'm new to this channel is it good? Any recommendations for paticular videos on here would be greatly appreciated.
It is good. Not biased at all!
If you are interested in the Soviet Union,,this channel has tons of gems 💯, i recommend the ones with interviews from Sergei sputnikoff to get started and i would sub to ushanka show, made by comrade Sergei,,
@@unfairfight3625 I've ALWAYS been into modern military history from the great war to current day so I have do doubt I will like this. Heres a pretty interesting fact about my family. My great uncle was Michael Wittmann and I share his last name. He was arguably the best tank commander ever but unfortunately he was a nazi. I reccomend anyone look up a video about him because he pulled off some insane, extremely effective tactics. Allies had a bounty on him and killed him shortly after D day I believe somewhere up by Calais.
yes it is i m heresince the begınnıng their topıcs are intresting
@@menwithven8114 im a decentant of Normand Vikings our history is written down since the around year 990 when construction of the castle began,,in the battle of hastings,1066, one of my ancestors participated and is on the bayeux tapisterry,,im a decentant of his,,his dad had the castle built, it was destroyed in a war unfortunately,,a few centuries after we was deported to France 1755,,my family came back in 1790s and established the village I am in in 1800, im also on the original property, it is extremely remote and rich in wildlife,, i will definitely check your great uncle that sounds really interesting,,,yup these are not war based channels,, they are about life in the Soviet Union in general.
I have heared of the Kyshtym Disaster: I follow Plainly Difficult, for I am a man of culture.
:P
Quit standing on my foot!
What a change! A YT presenter who is excellent and not trying to be a comedian!
SKIIIIIIIIINNNNNNER
I liked this video as soon as you made a fallout reference! :D
There was California 2 years later. Santa Susanna Field Laboratory, July 13, 1959 ..
love your background
I hope there will be an episode on the Three Mile Island accident. It remains an important nuclear accident that happened during the Cold War.
I just can't understand how a government can have such utter disregard for its own citizens
Have you not been paying attention to events in the United States the whole past year???? 🤷🏻♂️ Every damn thing they mandated that people do over “Covid19™️” was exactly what you would tell people to do if you WANTED to make people destroy their immune systems and make them sick. Example: in the last year at least 3 major universities did studies on the use of masks to stop viruses. The latest was Stamford University almost two months ago. All the results were the same: Masks Do Not Stop Viruses! And worse, masks will actually make people sick with other worse things like bacterial pneumonia infections, legionnaires disease and MRSA infections on the face. Many government these days are pure malevolent evil, populated by malicious evil people.
2:40 the British also exploited a loophole in the Geneva conventions to force thousands of German soldiers to do slave labour as reparation in the years after the war, although, with a smaller death rate compared to the Gulags.
Pop a Rad-X 😂😂. Love it, fallout became a cultural reference itself!
Yes!!
If 90000 people got cancer and such that makes it significantly worse than Chernobyl where over a 80 year period 200 people are likely to die and Fukishima where no one will die.
Complacancy maked accidents. I work in manufacturing and I have seen accidents where fingers have been crushed or ripped off because of complacancy. People get comfortable in their routine and stop being cautious till disaster happens.
People too often forget the rule on safety rules. "Every safety rule is written in blood" should remind people that these rules are there because someone else was hurt.
@@leechowning2712 Oh yes. Sadly true.
Wow, I never heard of it before, thanks.
I love the steamed hams reference.
👏👏to the 'Cold War Conversations' coaster in the background👏👏😉😉
indeed!
Had to build the bomb quick, because the US and Britain had detailed plans to nuclear bomb the Soviet Union. With this background in mind, a few accidents are a small price to pay for creating our own bomb and securing the MAD.
Chernobyl had different root causes. It was not a rush construction to catch up with the US. It was the country that was coming apart, including all the management practices.