CLARIFICATION: At 00:58 when I mention the show being an essay against Communism, I mean Communism with a capital 'c', that is, the government of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, etc., not the theory of communism (this isn't a show about economics). The Soviet Union's quest for nuclear power valued success (building a bad design now to meet an arbitrary goal) over safety (building a proper design later so it won't blow up), as evidenced by the eventual explosion of the Chernobyl reactor.
I thought I ought to inform You. But after this shortly after this documentary series came out tourism in in Pripyat sky rocketed. Causing more vandalism, artifacts in the exclusion zone to go missing, people taking instagram photos in highly contaminated zones like the inside of one of the claws used to clean up reactor 4, and crazy enough someone stole one of the fire fighters boots that was thrown in to the hospitals basement. A entire sect of Stalkers are left to repair and clean up the mess after all the irresponsible tourists.
The problem being that the self-delusion and cultural darwinism (that is almost like the Sith from the star wars universe in their willingness to betray one another) is a direct result of communism. A perfect example of this is that scene where Bryukhanov turns on Fomin to ask "Why did director Shcherbina see graphite on the roof?" It happens every time it is implemented. It's happening now in the US. The left "eating itself" if any of them step out of line or say even one thing wrong. unless their power is significant enough to overcome the "wrong think" and force a cultural shift (or more rarely, their reach weak enough that they are simply ignored to the point of ceasing to exist). You cannot dismiss communism as "just an economic policy" because it isn't. It is a socio-political ideology which demands absolute power and authority over anyone and everyone within the system, and cannot abide the existence of an alternate system. Communism is a religion with all the fervor of the Christian Crusades or an Islamic Jihad, but without a god or a sane body of religious law. Instead, what you get, is bureaucrats who have gotten to where they are by being ruthless and willing to throw anyone under the bus to advance themselves or simply not be shot in the head.
I love that our culture has evolved to the point where a nuclear scientist can watch a tv show, relay is thoughts to the outside world in a t shirt, and call radioactivity "spicy." I don't imagine a nuclear scientist during the Cold War interviewed by Walter Cronkite would be allowed to say "spicy." Love it.
Good point. I had distant relative, my grandmother's cousin, who worked on the latter parts of the Manhattan project and for years at Oak Ridge. He was well known in the family to have a expressive sense of humor and I suspect he'd have liked this as well. He also taught physics for years at University of Michigan. Why not use "spicy" to communicate? Seems to fit. :)
they wouldn't have been allowed to give an interview like that, would they? telling the whole world which kind of reactor is more effective or which elements to use and that they (might) have been refining plutonium for atomic bombs... xD
@@Nico6th (*read in hardcore Russian accent with soviet athem playing in the background*) Of course they would have. Mother and father russia would have just sent them to gulag after. Lenin would be proud. Stalin would be proud, and paranoid. But most importantly, rbmk reactors don't explode.
Another quotation which applies in this context, from Sherlock Holmes, is "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".
In case you didn't know, this quotation is from the book "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson" and it goes like this "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you"
The scene where the workers look down over the ledge and see the burning reactor, roaring like a jet engine, was the most frightening scene in the whole series for me.
I have no idea if this actually happened this way, but even just this reenactment gives me some extreme dread deep down. Like looking into Satan's eye.
@@maw4734 It didn't, iirc the workers were blocked by a wall of pyroclastic ash in the hallway and turned back. Looking directly into the core would've been near instantly fatal.
The bit where they look into the open reactor just feels almost Lovecraftian, merely by looking at something they’ve condemned themselves to a horrible fate. It’s like a real-world basilisk or Medusa, only a lot more drawn-out.
Indeed. Even when I was a kid and the disaster happened, I remember news reports showing helicopter footage of the burning glowing core from above, and what I thought at the time is: "that's what the gate to Hell looks like".
My husband (who is a nuclear engineer as well) watched this as it aired. He would react to things long before I had any clue what was going on. It was like sitting through a horror movie because he kept cringing and gasping (especially when the firefighter picked up the graphite).
My background is astrophysics, but that part had me actually yelling at the TV. "Don't pick that up! Get back! NOOO!" I don't care what they told you is going on, if it's a nuclear reactor, you don't just go picking stuff up that's falling from the sky.
I'm a mechanic and science nerd, and seeing him reach for that was a big cringe. Violates rule one of blue collar life. If you're not sure, don't f with it.
It was very interesting to watch all the reactions... I don´t have a science background, only what I learned at school but I have/had an idea how nuclear power plant works... Is it because I am from the Eastern Bloc and this was something Russians were so proud of? Because we were all about "what to do when evil Americans attack us with nuclear bombs"? I had an idea of what exposing a person to radiation does. Many people watching Chernobyl seemed to know... not much. When Dyatlov was walking through the corridor and saw those pieces on the roof below through the windows I knew what those were and I knew he knew. When I saw the firefighters arriving at the plant it was already awful enough because I knew that was a death sentence and the graphite lying around... When he was about to pick it up I was shouting as well, although he was already dead anyway, right. It´s a brilliant series, although when I watched it the first time I was distracted by some acting, didn´t seem like Soviet atmosphere...
I kept wondering why the graphite was shown as the "main bad" thing here, when in reality there were pieces of the fuel rods lying everywhere in the debris, like "has the graphite itself been activated, or what?" Thank goodness he explained it, I figured it has been contaminated by fission products, sure, but I never considered the impurities in the graphite being activated as well.
My daughter is a chemist and I am a social historian. We watched the series together. It took us about 9 hours. I kept stopping the movie to explain historical context and she kept stopping it to explain the science.
Without a doubt, every scene that cuts to a different group of workers, firemen, people on the bridge, etc it was an immediate thought that wow they just died by confronting this monster essentially and at that time many had no idea
I am Soviet born/now Russian and I can tell you with all responsibility - this movie is literally made of lie. Every aspect, except characters` names, their appearances and the way the reactor was blown - all is wrong and was, as I think, especially painted black to show you how ''terrible'' USSR was.
@The Atomic Age, I'm not sure if this has already been explained or not but I just wanted to clarify why they show this bleeding reaction of the engineer at the 20:00 mark. This man was Alexander Yuvchenko. He was exposed to about 4.1Sv. Prior to helping the three men into the reactor hall, he helped a severely steam burned pump operator that had asked him to go and help another operator. However, he found that part of the building was totally gone. He went outside with foreman Yuri Tregub and personally saw the blue glow in the air above the reactor. When he ran inside to report it, he encountered the three men sent by Dyatlov to manually lower the rods. Alexander said he began to get uncontrollably sick about an hour after that and his throat was very sore. Three hours after that he was unable to walk. They all thought that they had gotten doses similar to the reactor operators on submarines, but that man told him his dose was probably way higher because people don't vomit at just 50rem as was his case. When the hospital techs measured his dose by examining the drop in his white blood cells, they measured his exposure at 4.1Sv. He had a 50-50 chance of living. After his vomiting and nausea went away, he remembers lifting his hospital bed sheet one day and seeing a poof of black dust, which turned out to be his dead skin. Parts of skin were turning violet and black over the days. The worst area affected was his left shoulder, hip, and calf - as correctly shown here in the show. Although it wasn't this immediate onset of bleeding, that exact area of his body is where he suffered intense beta burning. The door shielded the rest of his body from the horrific rates inside the reactor hall. He survived after multiple skin graft surgeries and the replacement of blood vessels in his arm from vessels in his leg. After his two years of intense treatment, he lived in decent health until his death from leukemia in Nov 2008. He gave many interviews on his experiences and was a good man.
How wonderful and breathtaking it feels for simply sharing this man’s story you can honour him and his sacrifice, I feel so moved every-time I learn something new about this event.
I mean at that level its not 50/50 its just live or die odds are kind of inpossible to make no one is willingly taking doses that high ans i dont think they approve studies like that not anymore even for rats
Something I really appreciated about this series is how the director did an accompanying podcast to the series, one notable topic of discussion of which was discrepancies between reality and what is shown, and other artistic liberties taken for the sake of presentation, and explains in detail why those choices were made.
@@raven4k998 Unexpectedly people does stand looking at disasters like tsunamis, explosions, etc. It's freeze response to danger and it's common (I'm one of those who primary response is freezing, but not in life-death situations lol). It can come from ignorance, astonishment, fear, but the magnitud of those disaster is so much bigger than our existence, what we can do to survived may or may not be enough and it's not in our control, it's at most the chances and hope we hold onto.
@@Ari_Mondragon yeah I mean if you freeze in a hurricane your pretty much screwed all it take then if for you to get hit with debris and it's been nice knowing you freezing in that sort of scenario will not save you at all
My father recently retired as a chemical engineer at a nuclear waste processing facility. When this mini-series came out, his facility held a Q & A with the local population because lots of people had lots of questions. They had some of their medical staff on hand, and they backed up what you were saying about the burns and the vomiting. For the sake of drama, the series accelerated the effects of radiation poisoning.
that dramatization is also becuse this series was sort of based on the book Voices of Chernobyl, which is more like a series of statements by folk that lived through the incident, either directly or indirectly, and their ideas of the effects of radiation of course differed from what we currently know about it. The medical inacuracies are intentional, because they aim to reflect the perception of people at the time rather than an objective reality
@@mexa_t6534 The problem is that almost everyone watching the series took everything as objective reality, at a time when we should actually be building as many new reactors as possible.
@@pajander it still made it very clear that radiation is nothing to be joked about and made a lot of people want to understand radiation better. Thats a win in my book.
@@Tobatcie LOL try the second one...the scale is super scary. 3 and 4 get worse and worse...at least emotionally when u can see the crazy consequences of it. 5 is the finale that summarizes the whole thing perfectly.
The thing I got most vividly from this series was the raw human heroism of the men on the ground. A few days in, they had a very good idea of this risks. They went in anyway. Dug pits. Went into irradiated water. They did it to save lives. The lives of millions. Most of them knowing they were dead men. But millions of lives were on the line. So they did it. And because all of these heroes walked into this fire, the disaster was much less bad than it could've been. Regardless of the shitty leadership and regime, it was real heroism
riiiiiiight... that sound more like a story released by the USSR to make them seem like heroes for containing the mistake that was intentionally made. Sorry but any reasonable person is not buying what they are selling.
Yeah, not that it's not impressive what they did, but no, there were no millions of lives on the line. The worst of the accident took place during the initial explosion, and the worst of the side effects were the failure of the government, not distributing KI pills to the nearby population beforehand and not instructing them to avoid fresh milk and vegetables. Thus the I-131 caused excess thyroid exposure leading to cancers. None of this was helped by the liquidation effort, that was solely meant to put the power plant back into operation as fast as possible, and you can say it did its job in that regard because the power plant went back into operation. But it was not "to save millions of lives". There was nothing dramatic left to happen, radiologically speaking. The show is bullcrap in that regard.
@@adamwal4591 you do realize this show is a piece of anti soviet propaganda essentially right. Even though the this was a Russian problem thousands of men put their literal lives on the line to make sure that this didn't turn into a full blown nuclear cataclysm. If they didn't knowingly expose themselves to radiation that could potentially instantly kill them the core could have not only melted down, but also caused a chain reaction in the other 4 reactors at chernobyl creating a chernobyl X 5. You know there is truth to the sacrifices made because a meltdown didn't end up happening.
@@marcushankins8171 yeah yeah... soooo they turn off multiple safety features on the reactor and turn it up to ten times it's operating level but THEY are the heroes for saving the day. Spare me that nonsense.
It was actually a nuclear power plant in Sweden, Forsmark, that discovered that something was wrong. A plant worker had been outside the inner perimeter and the alarm was raised when he reentered the inner perimeter. He had got something on his shoes from outside. They told us that the inner perimeter had much lower radiation levels than normal background hence the need to scan on entering.
@@user-lp3cf5yn5b Basically yes, alarms triggered in Forsmark, due to fallout carried by the wind, which led to investigation by Swedish authorities. They concluded it was coming from outside of Sweden and came to the conclusion that it probably came from the east. They put pressure on the Soviet regime who finally confessed. It is mentioned in the chernobyl accident Wikipedia page and in a lot of Swedish pages.
@@user-lp3cf5yn5b Yes. The fallout from Chernobyl was such that it was setting off radiation alarms in other countries (which is briefly mention in the show), and Sweden was thd first to ask the USSR what happened, which brought the attention of the rest of the world.
22:30 - Even if they're badly exaggerating the rapidity of the effects of radiation poisoning, the mental shock alone of what these people have just seen, not to mention the fear of what's going to happen to them after their irradiation, could be enough to cause nausea and vomiting after the adrenaline starts to wear off back in the control room.
That's probably quite accurate TBH......the dose rates were officially registered at about 5.9(6 mSv) rem per SECOND. My opinion is that it was probably much higher, especially for those two who looked directly into the burning graphite in the remnants of the core. I suspect that dose was in the range of 50-100 rem (.5-1 Sv) per second.
The suddenness of ARS is directly proportional to dosage, and an indication of prognosis. That's why the guy who reported the explosion, who saw the channel caps jumping, vomited almost immediately afterward while Dyatlov, who was mostly in the control room, offices, and surrounding areas didn't start feeling the effects until 4 hours later. Dyatolov survived, the guy in the reactor chamber did not.
I honestly can't imagine experiencing something like that and having the intellect to know what was coming for me and then not finding a firearm to put a bullet through my head before it happens. Is it denial? Courage? Irrepressible hope? What keeps somebody alive mentally in order to face that kind of agony and Hell? No if it really takes that long for the symptoms to manifest but I know for an absolute fact what is about to happen why the Hell do I want to stay in this life to experience THAT?
To me the scariest part was when they were looking into the exploded core, those guys were definitely dead men walking I cant even imagine how bad of a dose they got, although the chart you used gave some understanding which was really interesting to speculate on and in the different scenes that was really interesting and hearing all the technical stuff explained much appreciated, sub'd and looking forward to part two if you do it mate.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM If nothing else, do a video on the roof scene from the fourth episode, but especially on the explanation of what happened in the fifth. It would be really interesting to get your take on both of those scenes.
@@radkonpsygami7634 Like the guy says in the chopper, if you fly over the smoke you'll be wishing you took that bullet, radiation is so cruel and morbidly fascinating the way it can slowly kill people in these ways which I wouldn't wish on most people
The two guys who went into the reactor hall were trainees and both died. The guy who held the door open took a nasty dose from radioactive dust on the door, but survived.
At that very moment you can see a large amount of dust in the air being whipped up by the heat. Breathing in all that stuff couldn't possibly be good for them either. I can only imagine it compounded their exposure.
About RBMK don't explode: AFAIR the idea at the time was that control rods are in the channels above the reactor level suspended by the powered holding mechanism that - in case of power loss or by decision of operator who foresees the runaway chain reaction and wants to shut it down quickly - just releases these rods, they free-fall into the channels and reaction got shut down quickly and safely. The construction though had a fatal flow - and that's the vapor cushion between the water level and the inserted rods that displaces the water itself before rod takes place. It is not obvious when rods are slowly inserted in controlled matter, it is just a slight variation in the power output, but when inserted all at once to quickly control criticality for a short period of time it increases reactivity level before decreasing it - because water in the channel catches much more neutrons than steam does. And the way this flaw was exposed in Chernobyl was the worst possible setup for that to happen. Sorry for my broken English, hope you can get some idea out of my comment.
Your English is OK! I'm a nuclear engineer, and I think I can translate this. For a chain reaction to occur 2 things are needed, neutrons need to be moderated from high to low energy (in this type of reactor), and extra neutrons need to be absorbed. Graphite does the moderation, while water does the absorption. When the control rods were inserted, they displaced the water thus removing that absorption for a split second DUE TO a vapor/ gas bubble that is formed in front of the control rod as its being dropped. This delay is just enough for the number of neutrons in the reactor to overwhelm the reactor control rods.
@@1999colebug Yes. But the problem is that people believed that this security mechanism makes violent thermal explosion absolutely impossible - that if things go really wrong all control rods can be dropped at once and that will slow down chain reaction to the level where the energy absorbed by the remaining water evaporation will cool down fuel rods to the level preventing total meltdown. Of course, that was seen as a last resort because after that due to the multiple factors restarting reactor again would be a task compared in complexity to full core rebuild and refueling, but the "RBMK reactor physically can not explode" mantra were so deep in minds of all the engineers and management that they seen no problem doing some serious shortcuts in the safety protocols. Because - what's the worst case scenario? Ok, one energy production block would be offline for couple of years. "Not great, not terrible". And we all know how it ended.
It wasn't a vapor cushion, but it's the same general mechanism. Basically, the control rods were designed to be slightly inserted into the core already, but since this had a poisoning effect on the reactor, the designers added a graphite tip to the bottom of the rods. this meant that if too many are inserted at the same time while there aren't enough rods already inserted, it will cause a brief spike in transmission. However due to multiple mistakes while setting up the reactor for the test they were doing, they ended up only having 14 control rods left deployed, while the other 200-ish were retracted. Now, the original designer of the RMBK had figured out that if less than (I think it was) 17 rods were inserted, an emergency shutdown of the reactor could cause a runaway reaction. There was a second problem which was the RBMKs were huge, so they effectively acted like multiple reactors, but the temperature sensors in the core couldn't read the entire reactor. What happened was the lead engineer in the control room accidentally defaulted the starting power of the reactor to less than the amount to keep a reaction going with a normal amount of control rods inserted. The control room staff basically had to pull this reactor out of a nose-dive by removing control rods. The reaction started heating up, they carried out the test, but the temperature started rising too quickly, so they initiated a shutdown. As the graphite displaced water in the bottom of the core, suddenly there was a spike in reactivity, which displaced the giant steel and concrete cap on top of the reactor.
@@Movingfrag There is also politics involved. The designs being a state secret, and flaws in the design couldn't be openly discussed so anyone who wasn't aware of the flaws would have no idea how to use the safety features correctly without causing a runaway reaction. Took the suicide and memoirs of Dr. Legasov to get that out into the open.
"I'm at a loss for words," 19:46 - I was waiting for this moment, because when I first saw this, I had a lot of thoughts, but could not communicate any of it verbally. I'm no nuke engineer but am an old tech geek who observed the space race with my father and currently work in IT. I remember feeling what I think you are feeling when first watching this excellent drama. The only words I came up with for this scene were, "The Angel of Death is indeed beautiful." I don't believe in such things but their description of the unimaginable is useful at times. We all seek inner peace, even at the end. I loved this reaction and subscribed, thank you.
The part where the group of people are on the railroad bridge, looking at the fire and the column of radioactive ions shooting into the sky, you see the particles falling on them and the music gets very eerie and ominous... that part gave me goosebumps. The children playing in the ash, the poor baby googling at falling particles... they had no idea the radiation was hitting them.
The fact that these professionals take their time to react to videos in regards to their field, “Doctor reacts, sniper reacts to…, astrophysicist reacts, nuclear engineer,” etc. Love this!
The only case I've ever heard of where the person felt immediate effects from radiation exposure was the Cecil Kelley incident. He immediately started screaming "I'm on fire" after the excursion, and everyone initially though he had spilled acid on himself because of how he was acting. He died 35 hours later, so the dose he got was _massive,_ somewhere around 36 Gy.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM Looking directly at the exposed fuel, even for a very few seconds, in the way that several men did in 3 or 4 incidence, must be a massive and lethal dose, is it not?
@@dimatha7 yeah, but it took several hours for the demon core exposures to cause radiation sickness. Cecil Kelly was exposed to the highest known whole body dose and his symptoms manifested in minutes through skin burns and unconsciousness. That's what the show is showing here.
@@JKSSubstandard Sort of, yeah. Though the guys at Chernoby managed to duck out from the particle beams just in time to experience Demon Core esque symptoms instead of just melting.
Fun fact about the "filmy grain" in photos or film, Kodak was one of the only entities outside the US military to know about nuclear testing. Kodak found that on certain days their film production was destroyed, the new film was grainy. The Kodak engineers suspected radioactivity and fallout as the culprits and started doing math and asked the government about the dates of nuclear tests on specific dates. From then on, to ensure silence and not cost the corporation money, Kodak executives were given advanced notice of nuclear testing to close the plants for cleaning and maintainence
Your reaction to the exposed core was pretty much the same as mine. It is.... Unfathomably horrifying. Those of us that have worked in the nuclear field know that there aren't words to describe how terrible that actually is. It's just... Nope. NopeNopeNopeNope.
Mmm have you seen the dose rates on the main beam of industrial electron accelerators? like dynamitrons and rhodotrons. They reach levels of thousands of Sv per second! that means you aren't even in the main beam and you are already dead from bremsstrahlung.
The nuclear physics part of studying astrophysics was extremely humbling. When you pause for a moment and take a step back and think about what is being unleashed in a reactor it truly is terrifying. We are an amazing species with a boundless capacity for learning and discovery, but man does that come with some really big mistakes.
27:15 The main thing I learned from this series (not sociologically, but hard-science) is that there's a difference between acute radiation poisoning and long-term radiation poisoning. And the former is possibly the single worst way to die in the world. Dying by inches as different cell types conk out, without the nervous system ever really doing so.
That’s what makes it so insidious. The cellular systems shut down based on rate of mitosis (dividing and multiplying) in order of fastest to slowest. The intestines shut down first, but the nerves and cardiac cells go last, meaning that even as your body is literally falling apart at the cellular level, your heart will keep pumping blood, and you feel every part of the process.
So basically your body is decomposing and you're still alive and able to feel every moment. Not much of a believer in euthanasia but I'd say that's a worthy exception.
Is it? A friend of mine, an operator on Unit 4 was in Pripyat with his family when the reactor exploded. His entire family in the years following the event had on average 8 severe diseases that were a direct result of the radioactive material exposures and radiation exposures they suffered in Pripyat. Now multiply that by a couple of million people exposed to significant levels, and the more than 10,000 and likely less than 100,000 people slowly killed by this catastrophe over the next 15 years.
The guy holding the door to the reactor core actually lived quit a long time afterwards. His name was Alexandr “Sasha” Yevchenko. There is a documentary on TH-cam about the accident in which he recalls that night. One of the things he said that the concrete walls of his office was bending like rubber. That’s scary
When you imagine, that the rbmk buildstructure was built like a normal officebuilding with no proper reinforced walls, then yeah, those thin walls would buckle like rubber under such tremendous forces. They were built cheap, then they kept cruicual information from the operating staff, like the positive void coefficient or the graphite tipped controlrods and maybe other details. Then let the events unfold like back in the day, with nobody knowing, that the az5 button could act as a detonator and the catastrophe is completely set to go off
The part where you see the core on fire and the people shoveling graphite off the roof in to the hole and the counter is going absolutely nuts have me the chills like nothing I have ever experienced
To elaborate on what you mentioned about the sounds in the music: the composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, created the entire soundtrack using only ambient sounds & field recordings she made inside & around the decommissioned power plant they filmed at in Lithuania. She had a great 2019, winning the Emmy, Grammy & BAFTA for "Chernobyl" & the Academy Award, Golden Globe & a second BAFTA for "Joker." She's now just one Tony shy of an EGOT.
yes, that plant was an old RBMK reactor as well. I love that she effectively gave the reactor itself an ominous voice in the show with the ambient sound. brilliant.
I did not know that! What an excellent way to create the soundtrack. That's a really interesting piece of information - which I really appreciate - except that I will have to watch the whole bl00dy thing yet again now. Thanks for that! 🤣
@@PV1230 They also used that reactor as the filming location of all shots related to the inside of the facility and most of the external shots as well.
This was exactly the kind of review I’ve been waiting for. Ever since this show aired, I’ve been reading as much as I could understand on radiation. From Madam Curie to Fukushima. Thank you for making sense of it all.
i can explain it more easily t u when the real chernobyl exploded bcause of faulty and cheap labor of a nuclear power plant that shouldnt have happened on april 26 1986 and thousands of people and people after theyre affected and died bcause of radiation poisoning during and over the years thats why i dont like nuclear power plants and plutonium plants and power plants
@@valeshia385 So you don’t like them because of the incompetence of a government essentially? I wouldn’t say that’s a good reason to hate nuclear power, especially nowadays where we stand on the brink of a climate crisis and need a new powerful and effective power source immediately.
@@ZettyLad ok u want a example of why nuclear energy is dangerous a teenage boy almost destroyed his town by the nuclear energy he got bcause of a book his family gave and if the nuclear dept didnt intercept him that whole town wouldve gotten cancer thats what im talking about is cancer when it comes to nuclear energy and back in the day when it exploded all that radiation went everywhere and to this day chernobyl is still spewing radiation which also causes cancer and the same thing almost in the usa when 3 mile Island almost had a meltdown and thats still spewing radiation and back in 1999 3 asian men was exposed and ones man dna actually melted from their exposure to radiation and even tho what im going to tell u something i lost my aunt to cancer and i watched her die cancer comes in many forms even with nuclear hydrogen plutonium and the russians stole the designs from the usa and made cheap nuclear power plant bcause their was supposed to be a secondary protection over the poles and the chernobyl incident made russians to put another protection on all their nuclear power plants and have u seen the real footage of the real chernobyl maybe u should watch it
@@valeshia385 Yeah? My grandmother died from cancer to, so it ain’t like I don’t have experience dealing with that terrible disease. My point is, it’s raving fear mongering like this that prevents nuclear energy from obtaining the funding it needs to become more safe, efficient, effective, and powerful; applying 21st technology and methods to nuclear energy and making explosive meltdowns like Chernobyl a thing of the past. Also, if this show didn’t make it clear to you, the only reason Chernobyl got as bad as it did was because of Communism and the Soviet Union, and their absolute refusal to believe that they could possibly do something wrong on this scale. The Soviet Union’s blatant disregard for human life and safety is evident throughout all of it’s history, and that culture seeped into that fateful April day. Believe me, if the Soviet Union was different and wasn’t afraid to admit their wrongdoings and treat their nuclear power plants with the respect and care they deserved, the Chernobyl disaster would have NEVER happened. And just for example, in modern times, it took the crust of the Earth moving and sending out a huge tsunami towards Japan at a very badly placed nuclear reactor near a tsunami prone shore to create a nuclear disaster near the levels of Chernobyl, and even then Fukushima was nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. Not to mention, just so you know, tens of thousands of people die every single year from complications resulting from fossil fuels and the pollution it causes. Whether that be from disease resulting form inhalation of the literal shit we’re pumping into the air, or people on things like oil rigs. Either way, that’s thousands of times more deaths in a single year, than all the deaths nuclear energy has caused in its e n t i r e existence. Need I also tell you the precarious situation our planet is in, and how our extensive use of fossil fuels is warming it up at shocking rates. I’ll tell you, the damage our use of fossil fuels is going to cause to this planet will cause m i l l i o n s of deaths, and then affect the lives of billions more and plunge millions into financial hardship and poverty once the shorelines start flooding. But, if we were to put aside our fire of some spicy rocks because of the incompetence of an evil and corrupt government for just a damn minute, we’ll realize that by beginning to utilize nuclear power safely and with modern technologies and research, we will save billions of people across the planet from the effect of climate change, save the planet, and save the lives of millions of people, and even start saving thousands of children and adults in a place in China who could die from health complications resulting from all the smog and pollution in the air. When I argue for all of this, I’m not thinking about now, I’m thinking about the future when our actions today will reflect far more powerfully in the future. I frankly don’t give a shit about people’s irrational fears of nuclear power today, because it will be the future generations of tomorrow who will feel the effects of our fear and inability to put it aside the most.
i'm pretty sure the "joke" is that their detection equipment only went up to 3.6/hr as the max possible dose you are receiving, when in reality they were getting much higher than that.
yeah that is a joke and the bigger joke assuming that the radiation level is 3.6 when the detection maxes out at 3.6 if the detector maxes out never trust the reading for that reason cause it's likely higher to max it out
That scene where the firefighter picks up the chuck of graphite and gets a really severe radiation burn in like 5-10 minutes could be accurate. If you get at minimum 150Gy blistering can be immediate or take up to an hour. Its certainly possible given where that graphite was only like 20 minutes prior
Still made the bottom drop out of my stomach when he picked it up. Blistering and burns only added to it. Exaggeration or not, it still worked on me. This miniseries was the sum of all my fears.
I watched a video on a nuclear physicist reacting to the show Chernobyl and who was also one of the first responders on scene. She said this scene is fairly accurate but overly dramaticized. She describes how touching the rod is deadly but won't disintegrate your hand like that. You would only feel tingling sensations in that hand, and It would actually take weeks before you started showing any symptoms of nausea and vomiting.
Don't think he would've received 150Gy so quickly though. Hisashi Ouchi, who was standing over a fuel tank as it went critical, received 17Gy. He felt almost instantly nauseous and started vomiting and when he made it to the hospital his skin was swollen and red like it was sun burnt. It took couple of days though before his existing skin started to deteriorate like in this scene.
Thank God that unlike a lot of others you’ve got the programme volume vs. your volume perfectly balanced. Also, you’ve given the subject video a decent size so we can actually see it.
28:45 The monitoring station in Norway confirmed it. But what triggered the alert was a Swedish nuclear worker entering his place of work and the radiation that fell on him from outside triggered the alarms. That's when they realised there was an invisible cloud of radiation spreading over Europe and the jig was up. Then monitoring stations further West (Norway) and so forth confirmed it.
those 2 guys who looked into the core died agonizing deaths soon after but before they did they said the reactor core looked like a volcano crater, to quote the guy who propped open the door "All three of them died very soon afterwards. That wall and the door basically saved my life. I received quite a high dose propping open the door. We had done everything we could. That was the worst feeling: that there was nothing else we could do."
Just came across this and wanted to give you a shout-out. This is exactly what I want from an expert react. Knowledgeable and passionate for the SM without being pretentious and gatekeeping. Can't wait for more!
Soviet? Ask now: why do they all have British accents when everything else was so concerned with hyper-realism? Every work of fiction that takes place in another time -- future and past -- or another place is really an interpretation of the writer's here and now. The lens of distance and time enables them to look at a contemporary problem with a more dispassionate eye. In the US and in Britain, we are in a war of competing truths and the weapons are lies. That's what the Chernobyl series was about. It warns of a looming disaster if we keep at it, without necessarily joining in the fray.
As much as right-wingers just can't stop beating a dead horse over the Soviet Union, lets not forget that while it did eventually collapse, it was also a global superpower with 50000 nuclear weapons and the world's second largest economy for it's 90 year lifespan. It also had at least 20 functioning nuclear reactors at one point and only one of them underwent a meltdown. You can at least try to be nuanced; the reason the USSR failed can't be encapsulated by a Reddit-tier phrase such as "The universe is not obliged to make sense to you", the USSR/Russia has historically had some of the greatest scientists in world history.
@@Hooga89 Lately Ive been returning to the idea that there are different societies that better fit different types of personalities. Myself as an American capitalist love the ideals my society ascribes to but also can see how communism would be apealing to others. I think every nation has the right to form their government as they see fit without interference from others. Lastly citizens should be allowed to migrate to the nation that fits their personality.
First off, I just saw the series this weekend for the first time and now I've found your channel. This is fantastic! Thank you! Secondly: after seeing the series this weekend for the first time, all I can say is: may you always be safe and NEVER have to go through anything like that. Thanks for bringing clarity to this infuriating, inspiring, depressing, fascinating story.
Regarding 26:35, RBMKs don't have a secondary coolant loop for power generation. The same water that passes through the core and becomes steam is used directly to drive the turbines. In this context, the feedwater would be the returning flow to the steam separators from the condensers & aerators.
I'm a nuke operator and we have gone over this event in training scenarios so I was familiar with the sequence of events before this program, however, watching this production made it more real to me somehow and reinforced the human aspect. The scene where the fireman picks up the graphite chunk is one of several that just had me say out loud, "he's dead already and he doesn't even know it". The reaction you had to the two guys looking at the open core was EXACTLY the same reaction I had: for anyone that understands the science, this is a bloody horror movie. Except that you can't say to yourself, "its just a movie, its just a movie". This is real stuff that happened to real people and many of them died horrible, lingering, painful deaths. As you said, nothing uplifting to see here. Good job though, I think I'll watch you watch the 2nd episode.
im just a mechanic..... but have hobbies in weather and Chernobyl.... . and ya..... looking into a burning core.... would just put a person in shock instead of running away..... a person might just look a second longer, because its such a "pretty view" / horrific view
This is why as Nuclear operators (Im a systems operator guy in the field not the control room) our first priority each and every day is the health and safety of the public, second is the plant and last is the people working at the Nuclear plant.
As a mechanical designer who spent 10 years designing valves for nuclear submarines, I'm very interested in nuclear theory and engineering. I was moved by the stark reality of this mini-series and I appreciate your expertise in translating the effects of ionizing radiation on human tissue.
I think, in reality, there was probably also an element of, "A reactor in general can't explode like an atomic bomb" which is true*. Partially because the government hadn't informed anyone that the control rod tips were made of graphite and would greatly increase heat in the core, I don't think anybody had considered the possibility of runaway boiling/positive void coefficient triggering a steam explosion. *The second explosion in Chernobyl, following the initial steam explosion, may have actually been a nuclear "fizzle". While a full-on explosion wasn't possible with LEU, there's been some research suggesting that the extremity of the event may have been enough to cause a small nuclear blast equivalent to a few tons of TNT thanks to parts of the core undergoing prompt criticality.
@@NyanCatHerder Another possibility (and more likely in my opinion) is a carbon dust explosion graphite is after all mostly carbon and there would be enough graphite dust, oxygen and heat for ignition (the core was after all open to air at this point and very hot).
There's the engineering/scientific aspect that's open to conjecture, but the "RMBK's don't explode" thing is almost definitively a specifically Soviet mantra pushing the idea that Soviet nuclear designs are not flawed. They don't fail unless its very public. And even when it IS very public, they tend to blame everything else. Multiple submarine nuclear reactor failures, missile failures, various naval casualties, they tried to downplay everything. Their political reaction to Chernobyl is a perfect example of this. They'll deny any fault until proven otherwise, then continue to downplay it. They had to project an air of competency to the world in order to solidify their role as the US' biggest rival. If the world knew their submarine and commercial reactors were failing left and right, they'd be subjected to significant political pressure to fix it. Suffice it to say, if nobody knows your reactor is garbage, then no one will bitch at you to fix it, and you won't have to spend money to do it!
@@thundercactus yeah there's really no valid against the fact that reactor did explode and did so violently enough to throw around the multi ton lid like it was a child's toy. As for the Soviets not wanting to admit/believe the reactor exploded you got to remember that their whole lifestyle depended on the illusion that USSR was a perfect paradise, so admitting the disaster would mean people might start asking the wrong kind of questions like they did irl, which lead to the fall of the Soviet Union, not sole cause but one of several thing that caused that.
My grandfather was in the Navy nuclear power program and spent 18 months in Antarctica during their nuclear power testing program. He past away before this show came out, it would have been interesting to see what he thought as well. Thank you for sharing your analysis. We did watch the news together when Fukoshima happened and he had tons of insight of how the disaster was 15+ years in the making before the tsunami and how misinformed the media is about nuclear power. Looking forward to seeing your other videos, this was my first!
From what I have read the measurement tools they were using only went up to those levels. The actual radiation they were actually exposed to was so high their tools were not capable of measuring it.
They even address this in the series. That's why they go on to get the "better" tool (wider range) that (as mentioned) immediately burns out the circuitry.
btw. to give some context to this: Measuring radiation is actually quite easy. It becomes a bit more challenging when you want to measure very sensitive but other than that no big deal. However, in all cases you measure single radiation events when measuring electronically (i.e. one single gamma ray). For technical reasons you can't measure much more than around 10.000 events per second - which sounds a lot... However, since you want to measure very sensitive (µSv region) you need one count to mean much less than one µSv - which leads to design choices (sensitive measurement volume) for the measurement device that allow you to measure probably up to several mSv/h. If you now have multiple Sieverts per hour the device will more or less be overloaded with radiation events that it can't count any more, which leads to the measured value in some cases even being lower than the maximum the device would be capable of. This you can more or less only solve by taking a less sensitive device, that is not suitable for detecting low amounts of radiation (that you would see in every day operation of such a plant). So what they needed to get is not an especially sophisticated device but rather the contrary.
I just started watching this with my friend and I know NOTHING about nuclear energy at all, so I really appreciate this video! I’m about to binge your other videos to learn more. I would really love if it you made this a series and reacted to each of the episodes in the show!
A quick note about the firefighter who burned his hand: I believe that the injuries shown were near immediate after he came into contact with the graphite chunk, and the burns were caused by the thermal heat of the graphite, as opposed to the radiation (which he also got a lethal dose of, IIRC)
I don't know if the bent of the series is specifically anti-Communist (though there is plenty of that in the show), but more broadly anti-lies. Essentially, the organs of power that exist on the necessity of lies to uphold them, and the refusal to listen to (or outright ostracization) of those who know better due to inconvenient facts. There are parallels (in some cases intentional) to similar trends in modern Western societies that could lead to similar consequences, despite not being Communist or necessarily authoritarian. This kind of split becomes more apparent later in the series between the 'honest' Communists addressing the issue (the scientists, the generals, the soldiers, the miners, the actual on-the-ground managers) and the 'dishonest' ones (the apparatchiks, the bureaucrats in the rear, and the state's security, such as the KGB, invested in keeping up the illusion of power). While the show can definitely be interpreted as anti-Communist (and it's certainly not sympathetic to Communism), I feel it is more indifferent to Communism itself. The actual message conveyed seems more about warning against the 'it couldn't happen here' mentality. Which, to be frank, we've seen occurring in increasingly dramatic fashion over the last few years. Perhaps not to Chernobyl's levels, but enough to make me doubt we actually learned the proper lessons from that catastrophe.
Structures of power at a certain point only exist to perpetuate that power. Western leaders have denied and covered up many disasters and let the guilty go free. It's the same thing. Those in power always abuse it for their own ends
That's something I'm scared about hearing one day while I'm working or just out and about, hearing someone say "X would never happen here!" Or "X? Nah, that'd never happen, nope." Only for them to be wrong, terribly wrong in the end. I feel that way for things like an invasion or a WW3, and with how things have gone lately, I feel that kinda mentality is gonna bite us in the butt in due time. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but then again, do you really want to anticipate the day that "bite" happens?
Small correction to 26:35. In most western reactors there are two loops of water, one for the reactor core and one for the turbines connected by a heat exchanger. In RBMK reactors there ist only a single loop of water. This water turns into steam in a steam drum shortly after exiting the reactor and goes straight into the turbines from there, carrying with it all the radioactivity it received while being in the core.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM I remember this from school when I was 13-15ish (Sweden around late 1980-ies). For some reason this was emphasized A LOT. The years after the accident the subject of nuclear energy and Chernobyl was not just brought up in physics class, either. It would pop up here and there in other subjects, too. I think it even came up in history class despite the accident being just a couple of years ago. And this difference with single vs dual system was always on the tests. 13ish year old me got the impression that this was the reason for the accident.
Pretty much this, most western reactors are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) with two loops, but there's also some Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) which also feed directly to the turbine without a heat exchanger. Those are mostly older designs though.
21:52 - Sudden Onset Radiation Sickness There is actually precedent for this. In 1999 when Hisashi Ouchi was irradiated in the Tokaimura criticality accident, he received 17k millisieverts of radiation - over three times the lethal level of 5k millisieverts. He said that almost immediately, he had nausea, pain, and difficulty breathing. He managed to make it back to the changing room before he vomited and passed out. For comparison the 17k mSv dose is equivalent to 1,822 Roentgen. If the core was really outputting 15k Roentgen, that comes out to 140k mSv - over eight times what Ouchi received, and 28 times the lethal level of exposure. Given that, I find it entirely possible that one of the trainees *who stared down into the open, burning reactor* fell and never made it back to the control room, and the one who did immediately showed signs of sickness.
We’re it that high however i might expect to see symptoms like immediate organ destruction and such. Radiation is an odd and difficult to measure thing with many moderating and few exacerbating factors.
I heard about him, literally a dead man walking from that moment. Whats really disturbing about that was the accounts of his skin simply falling off. Basically having to come to terms with the reality you are decaying away.
Read about the Cecil Kelley criticality at Los Alamos. The guy got hit in the face with fast neutrons and gamma, fell down off his ladder, forgot what he was doing (flipped a switch several times) then ran out the door yelling "I'm burning up, I'm burning up". Within 10 minutes he was in shock and showing a pink skin from exposure. Its frightening what a quick high dose can do to someone. Kelley died within 35 hours of his exposure. So his was more radical than those experienced at Chernobyl. Most of the staff made it to Moscow and died within 2 weeks to 2 months. The "skin peel" effect was nonsense though. It takes a few days for your dead skin to not be able to heal itself and cause bleeding wounds.
I highly reccomend the podcast that released between each episode. Guy from NPR interviews the Director and they discuss the episodes and talk about behind the scenes and things they weren't able to include in the show. It was really good.
I knew the “Open Core” scene was bad. The show did a fantastic job of communicating how terrifying that scenario was even to people who know very little about reactors or radiation. But seeing a professional safety engineer just sit there violently shaking his head in response to it kinda hit different. He wasn’t even trying to be dramatic about it (I’m pretty sure), it just really, truly unnerved him to see that raging inferno where a core should have been. My point is that his reaction was even more sobering for me than when I first watched this episode.
I loved you pulling up charts to give us exact information. It was very interesting that the scenes you lingered on and that disturbed you most were often different to other TV reactors. You got punches in the gut from visual cues that most other people don't have the knowledge to be terrified of.
Always gotta pull up the charts ;) It's important, especially as a nuclear engineer, to always consult the charts/tables/regulations for the official numbers. Trying to memorize that stuff is prone to errors. I'm glad I could offer you a different perspective as to what terrified me in the show.
I'm not sure if this has been said before but I've heard the reason RBMK reactors "don't explode" is because they were so robust they were believed to not have the ability to blow up, follow that with the KGB making sure they were perfectly safe according to the records, everyone just thought an explosion was impossible.
It was basically just propaganda. RBMK cores "can't explode", the Titanic is "unsinkable", and hydrogen gas is "perfectly safe" in airships... with plenty of dead every time. Y'see? I'm all about knowledge, science, technological progress and all that= don't get me wrong. It's just oh so costly whenever our reach exceeds our grasp. When the politicians say otherwise it gets even worse.
What I love is the view of the exploded core from the first and last episodes. No wonder you are at a loss for words. It looks like an Eldritchian horror, an ancient and primeval terrifyingly powerful and insidious force that is glowing and pulsing with unholy power and its burnt, twisting tendrils reaching towards the sky to disperse its evil... Absolutely engaging. As is your video! Love that I've found your channel too. Its so well done. You are a wonderful teacher and it's just nourishing to listen to. I am from Ireland and we got, at least on East Coast(I'm from Dublin) orange boxes of Iodine pills in the 90s because the government was so afraid of Sellafield being attacked and poisoning us all. An Irish woman started a charity for kids of Chernobyl and I even remember as a kid seeing some of them who would come over and stay with a family for Christmas and be spoilt rotten. Although we don't have any nuclear power it's very much in our society. Am going to enjoy my daily cycle listening to the rest of your awesome channel. I wish you the best for the future andd hope your channel grows to the levels it deserves!
19:17 I had the exact same reaction you did. I actually felt as if I was being irradiated throughout watching the series. I did actually visit Chernobyl in 2014 and even then, I know you can't "feel" radiation, but this exact scene killed me. I'm actually dead now.
My wife's uncle was one of the first responders after the incident and he stated that the series was extremely accurate in its depiction of the events.
I've watched reactions from some of my favorite TH-cam personalities and enjoyed their perspectives. But like mine, their reactions were visceral, totally emotional. It's only episode one and you've seen it before, but your knowledge and background on this provides a unique perspective. I look forward to learning more through future episodes. Thank you. And any exaggerations the producers made is fine because in most cases I believe the end result was the same for most of the principal characters, quick death to shortened lifetimes.
Thank you for the detail that the "feed" water is from the secondary, supossedly "clean" loop, so they were acting like if was fine for the "clean" loop to be severly enough contaminated that it was "hot". The idea of being blasé about radioactives in the turbine loop as part of normal operation is mindblowing.
I'm a huge horror fan. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I've never been impacted by any other media in the way I was by the scene at 18:55. Brought me back to the days of being a child afraid of the dark or what's hiding under your bed. Good lord.
20:08 I know radiation can affect blood platelets (though I'm not sure if that effect is immediate or it comes later) that even minor wounds can bleed like crazy. Maybe that bleed on his side was an existing wound that was sustained during the explosion, and it started bleeding profusely because of the radiation affecting his blood's ability to clot? But again it probably comes at a later stage of ARS, and it does seem like dramatic/artistic license on the film's part. This character was based on Aleksandr Yuvchenko, who actually did hold the reactor hall door open for his colleagues (who all died of radiation sickness). He received around 4 Sv (or 400 Roentgen) and spent almost a year in a Moscow hospital. He managed to live another 22 years before dying of leukemia in 2008.
So I wonder if it wasn't because he was using his hip/body to prop the door open. While he received a 400 Roentgen dose, how localized was that dose? I mean, sure, as a whole body dose, it will do one thing, but if he received a significant portion of that 400 Roentgen localized to his hip, that could explain the rapid tissue breakdown and bleeding. Between what was essentially fallout on the door from the explosion and maybe also neutron activation of the steel in the door, that door had to be "hot" both thermally and radioactively.
Radiation sickness causes a drop in platelets (and all blood cells) because it kills the stem cells that produce them so the reduction in clotting occurs later. The symptoms of ARS are all due to the body not being able to replace high turnover cells.
You're great at explaining complicated things in a clear way. You'd make a great teacher. I was "unlucky" with physics teachers at high school. Both were super smart and good at their subject but they weren't good teachers. They couldn't explain things to students who weren't naturally inclined. They "got it" and couldn't understand if you didn't. So you had 3 or 4 guys in the class who did well (and would have anyway) and the rest of the class struggled! A good teacher can make their subject accessible to most, in my opinion. You've got that ability.
A pegged high dosimeter doesn’t sound good lol. What feels like a lifetime ago, I worked on a nuclear reactor. Glad I can still follow along. It’s crazy what those guys had to go through. We’ve come along way but still have so far to go with the safety side of nuclear power.
I'm no PhD, but Gen 4 reactors seem pretty darn safe, at least relative to any energy production. I'd rather we be building those than clearing acres of land for solar panels and turbines that can't hold their own without fossil fuel "back-ups". I'd bet money the back-up is pulling most of the weight.
@@logicplague oh for sure when done right and regulated nuclear power can be a good bridge between energy technologies. The problem is getting people to understand how safe it is.
@@logicplaguebet away. Who cares where we get electrons from. I know so many people with solar on thier home so no acres cleared, wind turbines can have crops below or better yet be at sea. Yes you need multiple energy sorces nulcear where safe and economic is great. Not so good when not done safely here, fukushima. As more EVs have vehilce to grid most peoples ecosystem will be self contained. Minning industry in Australia is now using heaps of RE as fuel is exceedingly expensive to truck 1000km inland etc. If you are wedded to only one source of electrons your problem is not power its ideology.
16:11 that was the true point of the “3.61 roentgen” repeating bit. The dose, they were trying to portray, was significantly higher and his was very much lethal. It was just ironically that their gauges maxed out at 3.61. As you correctly stated In the beginning which was very true - a case against communism if anything. Can’t report bad news if you can’t measure it
A case against any top down organization that squashes critical voices, in favor of happy talk. The Challenger disaster in part because dissenting voices were silenced.
@@timothyhouse1622 Multiple events similar in reason, but not in scale, happen in the USA every. Single. Year. Lol the people that used this event to shit on communism, specifically, just aren’t critical people. I don’t care how intelligent you are, if you draw this event down to Stalinism, you’re not that critical of your own preconceptions and biases.
To be competely fair, situations like this have happened in american Nuclear accidents too. Now I am not trying to promote or defend communism in any way, but rather warning that the moment you start thinking this happens with only one ideology or one group of people, is the moment you let your guard down to allow similar incidents to happen in your own group. We are all human, and we all have the same capacity of making those mistakes. Of course this was the very mistake the soviets themselves made, they thought that the soviet union was infallible, that it could not make mistakes, and Chernobyl was just one event out of many that proved that belief wrong. But Americans, Europeans, Asians, ect ect can fall prey to that same kind to thinking, and then fall victim to the same accidents. Just as an example, the reason the RMBK reactor was such a flawed design was because of way to aggressive cost cutting that compromised safety. And as we have seen plenty of times before, many capitalist corporation and companies across many industries have been caught engaging in highly aggressive cost cutting measures at the expense of safety, and many, like the soviet union, tried to pretend that the resulting accidents either didn't happen or they tried to downplay them. It is a pitfall that can affect all nations, cultures, and ideologies.
They do speed up how fast radiation poisoning takes effect in the show, but they do explain at some point, the usual timeframes, and the effects of it in a more realistic manner.
Another interesting and subtle point from the director in an interview , the beginning sounds of the credits is actually bits of recoding of one of the other operational reactors in Russia. Those sounds even though there ment to sound like that are beyond spooky to hear.
Containment domes in western and Japanese nuclear reactors are 3 foot thick concrete with rebar literally woven so tight it is hard to see light through the rebar weave. They were designed to withstand the direct impact of a commercial aircraft.
Interesting fact, besides film and digital camera sensors being able to pickup radiation the human eye can too. Our astronauts with their eyes closed see flashes of light every so often. It’s been identified as cosmic rays passing through the either the retina or optic nerve. (We treat them as radiation workers with a lifetime maximum dose)
@@Damo2690 Not that I'm OP, but it sounds like they roughly keep track of that sort of thing to determine when an Astronaut can no longer go to space. Not sure that's true, but that's how I interpret the comment.
Ah, I thought of that story too, while Charlie was speaking at 24:07. And remembered a story in which Buzz Aldrin told Neil Armstrong, on their way to the moon, "when I close my eyes I'm seeing little flashes." Neil told him "Don't report that to the ground." I'm sure they guessed it was the effect of cosmic particles whizzing through their heads and didn't want to make the Flight Surgeon panic.
@@Damo2690 if you receive enough radiation over a certain amount of time your risk of cancer goes up. We have set limits for how much radiation an astronaut can be exposed to over their career before that risk becomes to great. If an astronaut is getting close to that limit they may not be permitted to fly certain missions where the expected dose would put them over that limit.
@@Damo2690 There is a legal class of workers in the United States called 'radiation workers' that entitles the workers to certain things in order to survive doing their jobs long-term, primarily in the form of strictly limiting the time they spend in highly radioactive environments. Many countries have a similar legal class. Astronauts are classified as radiation workers. There is currently a debate about whether or not we should reclassify commercial pilots as radiation workers as well, due to the amount of radiation they are constantly exposed to in the upper atmosphere. The counter-argument to this is that there are too few pilots in the USA to increase their ground time as much as we probably should. People are conflicted.
Concerning the hand burn from picking up the graphite, during an experiment for the Manhattan Project Louis Slotin was holding a half plutonium core in his hand during an experiment (ah the early days of no safety and just starting to learn about radiation), with a slip the halves met causing a instant critical reaction..in his hand. Everyone in the room felt the heat it produced, and Slotin experienced a "intense burning sensation in his left hand". So while I'm sure Chernobyl took some artistic liberties in somethings they showed, I believe they were trying to portray and show what Slotin went through with what would happen if someone picked up the graphite on the ground. It was a great series!
I think the radiation, from fast neutrons and gamma rays alone, during a brief fission reaction is significantly higher than even from irradiated graphite from a reactor core. Just looking at the estimates, they think he received 10 Gy(n) and 1.14 Gy(γ). Since the weighting factor for 2 MeV neutrons (mean for Pu-239 fission) is about 20, this amounts to 201 Sv in a fraction of a second. Conversely (and I’ll admit this doesn’t allow for surface contamination of the graphite lumps with contaminants from the fuel assemblies, but there is a difference of 5 orders of magnitude between the dose received by Slotin and my calculation for the graphite), I’ve calculated the equivalent dose from activated graphite to be around 10 mSv, which is way low and won’t produce any significant biological effects. I think the bulk of the radiation that firefighters were exposed to was from ejected fuel and fuel assembly material, not graphite. Calculations below, if you want to check. As I said, it’s entirely possible that the amount of radiation was ten or even a hundred times higher than this due to contamination of the graphite from other core ejecta, but it’s still orders of magnitude smaller than Slotin received from almost direct contact with a Pu-239 fission reaction. Analysis of Nitrogen Impurity Impact on C-14 generation in RBMK-1599 Reactor Graphite: total C-14 activity at the point of maximal thermal neutron flux = 6.8x10^5 Bq/g Density of graphite = 2.26 g/cm^3 Hand sized piece of graphite is about 10cm x 10cm x 10cm = 1,000 cm^3 Mass of graphite lump = 2.26 kg Activity = 1.54x10^9 Bq C-14 radioactive decay is by beta emission at 6,353 keV per decay. Assume about half goes into the hand, so 7.7x10^8 Bq or 4.88 keV/s, or 0.782 mJ/s. Assume a human hand weighs about 0.46 kg, so this is 1.7 Gy/s and now assume a firefighter held this chunk of graphite for 5 seconds, so total dose is 8.5 mGy. Beta radiation has a weighting factor of 1, so total equivalent dose is just 8.5 mSv.
When I watched this show for the first time I did so with my partner, who works in a power station and has a degree in chemical engineering. It added to the experience so much - there were so many things I didn't understand that he was able to explain or contextualise, so I'm glad that other people will get something similar by watching your video :)
Explosions are just from steam pressure, Fukushima had a build up hydrogen, literally had blast walls at top of building that are meant to go first in an hydrogen explosion so it will be more “controlled” and not take the whole building down.
My father suffered a radiation overdose from a physicist's mistake in cancer treatment. Our family got to experience the results. It took just under two years for the radiation burn to kill him. I really felt for the people that had to deal with this.
If anyone cares about what happened I suggest the book about Chernobyl named: Chernobyl the History of a tragedy, by Plokhy. That particular scene is completely made up as well as the entire argument of the movie other then the cause of the RBMK reactor events that lead to the explosion. The entire control room had way more people then on the movie is shown (the experienced previous shift Team Stayed in the room to help the operation under such delicate conditions) and Everyone Knew instantly the Core had Exploded! No one talked about RBMK reactors not being able to explode ... specially Dyatlov that was in charge of the operation. The entire movie is a complete fabrication with small exceptions of actual facts.
The radiation fields by the blown out north wall were estimated to be 8000 rem in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The firefighters who worked on the unit three roof and the turbine hall received fatal doses of radiation within 10 minutes. They worked in those areas for hours. They were puking within half an hour. One firfighter went completely blind for ten minutes while he was standing in the gamma fields, his sight came back afterwords. Its a terrifying and fascinating story.
In romania we still use rbmk reactors ( we only have one in the whole country with 2 units ) we almost had a meltdown a few weeks ago in unit 4 ( dam unit 4 will always be cursed ) and there are no plans to safely dissasamble it . The only modification was that the tips are no longer made of graphite but we still have a positive void coeficient
Thank you for the clarification that its a STEAM explosion, not a nuclear (fission) explosion! I work in the power / energy field and the amount of times I've had to explain that to people who gained fear from this series is alarming. They could have fixed that false impression with adding one word to the script (the cynic in me believes the omission was intentional).
I worked nuclear security, and commanded the adversary team for training exercises. They taught us how they work, then taught us how to break them. Then we started doing what we called "site exploitation", looking for vulnerabilities. Writing new training exercises to challenge the security force, the reactor operators, and the entire command structure to what might happen if the balloon ever went up for real. "OH, we can chop the entire B train electrical right here? Good to know!" We picked the brains of the reactor ops, the fire brigade, the "shiny pump and valve guys", everybody who had any information, we could use. I actually rewrote the physical security plan, TWICE, to incorporate exploits we found. I still remember which switches, in which order, to turn to cause a meltdown and part 100 release path. But I use my powers for good. 😇
@@jackstecker5796 That kind of statement is, for me, one that would get my attention no matter the context. Even if you're using that knowledge to stop such things from happening, the idea that anyone has that kind of know-how on hand is a scary thing.
So nice and fulfilling to see an engineer review the movie. It is the reactions of the educated people that interest me the most. Thanks for separating the actual part from the dramatic effects.
I just found your channel and I'm very intrigued on the method you use to communicate by the constant rubbing of your hands I saw this when I was instructing Nuclear Power Engineers in the Navy. and if you allow me to say it seems to me it’s because you're trying to control everything that's going on in your mind with what you're hearing and seeing but explaining it at a level that us ordinary folks can understand so in effect you're dummying it down for us while trying to control the 10,000 things going through your mind every second. The rubbing of the hands - converting the left-over energy. Well done sir
Hey im from Bulgaria, having a rare desease caused by Chernobyl ( cant proof that, im born 1990 ) and im Deaf , thanks for reacting to it, CHERNOBYL affected a lot of countries , specially soviet countries, because in my country, when that happent, there was a parade, where everyone was 'forced' to go and cheer up and cheer the communism and such. After that rain, the cancer and autoimmune/ DNK deseases drastically increased, and we suffer high anomalies rate due to people being exposed to that rain back then, and also due to noone said that the Vegetables from the garden during that time, should not be eaten. I also have a very strong picture of clothes outside, after the rain, with gray/ dark marks all over them, due to that toxic rain.
@@MelinaHristova Some distant family of me was at holiday in Sweden (parents and kid girl) before, during and just after Chernobyl. They died all 3 that same year of "sudden" cancer.
I think the guy on the door started bleeding on the spots where he had been pushing/resting against the door, which would be heavily irradiated itself at that point, thus hitting those spots with way more powerful exposure.
yeah, radiation in the air is not comparable to the radiation in the objects. This still can be seen in the Chernobyl power plant by measuring the level of radiation getting released by objects versus the level of radiation in the air.
I get where you're coming from but I wouldn't expect the door to be more radioactive than being exposed to the core at the time depicted in the show. It's important to distinguish between radiation (alpha, beta, gamma rays etc) vs radioactivity (the particle that emits the alpha, beta, or gamma). The door could have either been activated by radiation or contaminated with radioactivity, which would be less than being exposed to the core. But yeah air is a fluid so radioctivity will disperse through it quickly whereas if radioactivity contaminates a solid object, itll hang around for a lot longer
The problem here is that it wasn't just a radiation dose, but many of the people suffered incidental injuries in the explosion. It is likely he sustained a minor injury and discovered that it was no longer clotting, rather than bleeding from damage to the skin caused by the radiation itself. [Although, yes, some licence was involved in the production.] The tables you are reading from generally concern what we consider to be whole body dose. However specific tissues have different radiation sensitivities and will be affected in different ways, that are not accounted for in a whole body dose calculations. For example a large dose can kill the skin just through energy deposition in the tissues (causing erythema [or effectively "sunburn"]), which will affect the ability of the skin to heal over any minor cuts, such as healing a wound, in much the same way as a pure thermal burn. The problem with gamma radiation is that the photons are of much higher energy than UV, so they penetrate tissue a lot deeper. [One method I was taught for testing for serious skin exposure is to take a pair of tweezers and pluck the hairs in the region you think might be affected. If the hair is easily removed, those skin cells are pretty much dead. If not, well at least you generally get to improve your knowledge of invective.] Radiation burns are as bad as thermal burns for causing damage to the body. Let alone DNA damage which is far more associated with the long term stochastic problems (like cancers), and is more important for long-term low dose exposures. Here we have people being directly exposed to large amounts of radiant energy which is killing the cells of their body directly. The biological effects are due to different cells of the body having different tolerances for this type of damage. And if they survive the burns, then they still have to deal with the overall exposure levels they have picked up. And as for film, there is a relatively famous film of the May Day parade in Kiev (4 days and 90km away) that shows lots of bright white flashes from the gamma radiation from the fallout passing through the film stock).
19:57 That show just blew my mind, the first time I watched that masterpiece of a show. It was like the stuff nightmares are made of. Completely rooted in reality, and yet... I don't know. I don't know if it ACTUALLY looked like that, but that visual is stunning.
I think I read somewhere that due to the intense amount of ionizing radiation present the core burned with a ghostly blue fire, but that's not particularly scary so the producers changed it to this off yellow. Can't seem to find the source for that anymore, though. However, the visual of that burning core is utterly terrifying.
I think I read somewhere that due to the intense amount of ionizing radiation present the core burned with a ghostly blue fire, but that's not particularly scary so the producers changed it to this off yellow. Can't seem to find the source for that anymore, though. However, the visual of that burning core is utterly terrifying.
I’ve watched another video showing side by side footage of the show, compared to actual surviving film of the events just after the meltdown. Pretty accurate, and the ensuing radiation sickness was also pretty accurately portrayed, in all it’s horrifying reality.
@@allisonfisher9304 I heard they toned the radiation sickness down a notch out of respect to the poor souls that actually succumbed to it. They didn't want the show to become about shock value and thus cut out some of the most horrific bits. Still, seeing Vasily on that table, gray and necrotised... Chilling.
I'm a Medical Radiation Technologist (which is obviously not the same as a Nuclear Engineer), but I watched this with my wife and friends, and the way I reacted I think made them more scared than the show. You just immediately know a lot of these people are going to suffer horrific deaths. You don't even have to know the history of what happened to the firefighters and the other people on the ground. Seeing the graphite on the ground, and the men staring into the open core, and the meter capping out at 3.6R... you already know so many of these people are walking dead men. My wife and friends didn't even understand. They got the musical cues that this was a very bad situation, but they didn't understand how devastatingly bad what they were watching was. I had to explain that they were basically standing in an invisible field of poison that would give many of them a slow death I wouldn't wish on anyone.
This guy is the best! Brilliant and dumbs it down for all of us un-scientific types. Im a Ph.D. but in the humanities, and I really appreciate these brilliant technical minds- like a Dr. Feynman lecture without the jokes.
If I remember the report correctly the firefighter who picked up the graphite began complaining about his hand within an hour or so (specifically numbness, tingling, and pain) but the visible damage didn’t appear until the morning.
So after searching I’m sure the source I got that from was the log of Volodymyr Pravyk’s radio reports from the scene but I can’t remember where I got access to that. Also the various articles about the firefighters in general say that they began experiencing symptoms after 30 minutes.
Wow 30 minutes. That's crazy. It's also important to distinguish between how someone feels and the physical presentation of symptoms, I didn't really consider how long it takes for someone to feel the effects
@@TheAtomicAgeCM thats why u dont mess with graphite it has more radiation than the explosion and the graphite is the one thing that controls a power plant from exploding
@@TheAtomicAgeCM I read somewhere that the graphite piece was emitting close to a 1000Gy , but again , we would never know what happened behind the iron curtain.
CLARIFICATION: At 00:58 when I mention the show being an essay against Communism, I mean Communism with a capital 'c', that is, the government of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, etc., not the theory of communism (this isn't a show about economics). The Soviet Union's quest for nuclear power valued success (building a bad design now to meet an arbitrary goal) over safety (building a proper design later so it won't blow up), as evidenced by the eventual explosion of the Chernobyl reactor.
I thought I ought to inform
You. But after this shortly after this documentary series came out tourism in in Pripyat sky rocketed. Causing more vandalism, artifacts in the exclusion zone to go missing, people taking instagram photos in highly contaminated zones like the inside of one of the claws used to clean up reactor 4, and crazy enough someone stole one of the fire fighters boots that was thrown in to the hospitals basement. A entire sect of Stalkers are left to repair and clean up the mess after all the irresponsible tourists.
that's most unfortunate, very sorry to hear that. Thanks for informing me.
The problem being that the self-delusion and cultural darwinism (that is almost like the Sith from the star wars universe in their willingness to betray one another) is a direct result of communism. A perfect example of this is that scene where Bryukhanov turns on Fomin to ask "Why did director Shcherbina see graphite on the roof?"
It happens every time it is implemented. It's happening now in the US. The left "eating itself" if any of them step out of line or say even one thing wrong. unless their power is significant enough to overcome the "wrong think" and force a cultural shift (or more rarely, their reach weak enough that they are simply ignored to the point of ceasing to exist).
You cannot dismiss communism as "just an economic policy" because it isn't. It is a socio-political ideology which demands absolute power and authority over anyone and everyone within the system, and cannot abide the existence of an alternate system.
Communism is a religion with all the fervor of the Christian Crusades or an Islamic Jihad, but without a god or a sane body of religious law. Instead, what you get, is bureaucrats who have gotten to where they are by being ruthless and willing to throw anyone under the bus to advance themselves or simply not be shot in the head.
Any type of communism is an essay against communism ,has failed and will fail every time including its baby brother socialism
Stalkers... good game.
I love that our culture has evolved to the point where a nuclear scientist can watch a tv show, relay is thoughts to the outside world in a t shirt, and call radioactivity "spicy." I don't imagine a nuclear scientist during the Cold War interviewed by Walter Cronkite would be allowed to say "spicy." Love it.
Good point. I had distant relative, my grandmother's cousin, who worked on the latter parts of the Manhattan project and for years at Oak Ridge. He was well known in the family to have a expressive sense of humor and I suspect he'd have liked this as well. He also taught physics for years at University of Michigan. Why not use "spicy" to communicate? Seems to fit. :)
they wouldn't have been allowed to give an interview like that, would they? telling the whole world which kind of reactor is more effective or which elements to use and that they (might) have been refining plutonium for atomic bombs... xD
@@Nico6th (*read in hardcore Russian accent with soviet athem playing in the background*)
Of course they would have. Mother and father russia would have just sent them to gulag after. Lenin would be proud. Stalin would be proud, and paranoid. But most importantly, rbmk reactors don't explode.
Since it wasn't covered like in the U.S., and because those two men saw that core with fire, wouldn't they die pretty quickly? That's close.
@@AmberBootheCat yeah, those two probably didn't live very much longer. Aren't they among those who were later shown in the hospital dying?
"The universe is not obliged to make sense to you"
Incredibly well said
true so true
Another quotation which applies in this context, from Sherlock Holmes, is "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".
@@Guzunderstrop even if you think the improbable is impossible
Or Samuel Clemens AKA Mark Twain; "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must be credible."
In case you didn't know, this quotation is from the book "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson" and it goes like this "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you"
The scene where the workers look down over the ledge and see the burning reactor, roaring like a jet engine, was the most frightening scene in the whole series for me.
I have no idea if this actually happened this way, but even just this reenactment gives me some extreme dread deep down. Like looking into Satan's eye.
@@maw4734 It didn't, iirc the workers were blocked by a wall of pyroclastic ash in the hallway and turned back. Looking directly into the core would've been near instantly fatal.
Same. It looks like the gates to hell.
That and the effects of radiation poisoning
The control rods jumping in the explosion scene is terrifying
The bit where they look into the open reactor just feels almost Lovecraftian, merely by looking at something they’ve condemned themselves to a horrible fate. It’s like a real-world basilisk or Medusa, only a lot more drawn-out.
Indeed. Even when I was a kid and the disaster happened, I remember news reports showing helicopter footage of the burning glowing core from above, and what I thought at the time is: "that's what the gate to Hell looks like".
Great analogy.
An irreversible curse of death, cells shredded and warped to molecular or even atomic extremes. To die days before you lose consciousness.
Brilliant observation. An epic moment indeed.
Like looking at the face of the Gorgon.
My husband (who is a nuclear engineer as well) watched this as it aired. He would react to things long before I had any clue what was going on. It was like sitting through a horror movie because he kept cringing and gasping (especially when the firefighter picked up the graphite).
My background is astrophysics, but that part had me actually yelling at the TV. "Don't pick that up! Get back! NOOO!" I don't care what they told you is going on, if it's a nuclear reactor, you don't just go picking stuff up that's falling from the sky.
I'm a mechanic and science nerd, and seeing him reach for that was a big cringe. Violates rule one of blue collar life. If you're not sure, don't f with it.
It was very interesting to watch all the reactions... I don´t have a science background, only what I learned at school but I have/had an idea how nuclear power plant works... Is it because I am from the Eastern Bloc and this was something Russians were so proud of? Because we were all about "what to do when evil Americans attack us with nuclear bombs"? I had an idea of what exposing a person to radiation does. Many people watching Chernobyl seemed to know... not much.
When Dyatlov was walking through the corridor and saw those pieces on the roof below through the windows I knew what those were and I knew he knew.
When I saw the firefighters arriving at the plant it was already awful enough because I knew that was a death sentence and the graphite lying around... When he was about to pick it up I was shouting as well, although he was already dead anyway, right.
It´s a brilliant series, although when I watched it the first time I was distracted by some acting, didn´t seem like Soviet atmosphere...
I kept wondering why the graphite was shown as the "main bad" thing here, when in reality there were pieces of the fuel rods lying everywhere in the debris, like "has the graphite itself been activated, or what?" Thank goodness he explained it, I figured it has been contaminated by fission products, sure, but I never considered the impurities in the graphite being activated as well.
I annoyed the hell out of my family because I am not usually a vocal person but when he grabbed it I actually yelled out.
My daughter is a chemist and I am a social historian. We watched the series together. It took us about 9 hours. I kept stopping the movie to explain historical context and she kept stopping it to explain the science.
that's awesome
That's both amazing and super wholesome!
I would need to stop to cry, personally.
I wished I had been able to watch it with the two of you. The discussion must have been wonderful.
@@Asehpe me, too. It would add so much to the movie.
The first episode of Chernobyl is perhaps the greatest piece of existential horror ever made.
Right lmao
Facts 😩
Without a doubt, every scene that cuts to a different group of workers, firemen, people on the bridge, etc it was an immediate thought that wow they just died by confronting this monster essentially and at that time many had no idea
Chill
I am Soviet born/now Russian and I can tell you with all responsibility - this movie is literally made of lie. Every aspect, except characters` names, their appearances and the way the reactor was blown - all is wrong and was, as I think, especially painted black to show you how ''terrible'' USSR was.
@The Atomic Age, I'm not sure if this has already been explained or not but I just wanted to clarify why they show this bleeding reaction of the engineer at the 20:00 mark. This man was Alexander Yuvchenko. He was exposed to about 4.1Sv. Prior to helping the three men into the reactor hall, he helped a severely steam burned pump operator that had asked him to go and help another operator. However, he found that part of the building was totally gone. He went outside with foreman Yuri Tregub and personally saw the blue glow in the air above the reactor. When he ran inside to report it, he encountered the three men sent by Dyatlov to manually lower the rods. Alexander said he began to get uncontrollably sick about an hour after that and his throat was very sore. Three hours after that he was unable to walk. They all thought that they had gotten doses similar to the reactor operators on submarines, but that man told him his dose was probably way higher because people don't vomit at just 50rem as was his case. When the hospital techs measured his dose by examining the drop in his white blood cells, they measured his exposure at 4.1Sv. He had a 50-50 chance of living. After his vomiting and nausea went away, he remembers lifting his hospital bed sheet one day and seeing a poof of black dust, which turned out to be his dead skin. Parts of skin were turning violet and black over the days. The worst area affected was his left shoulder, hip, and calf - as correctly shown here in the show. Although it wasn't this immediate onset of bleeding, that exact area of his body is where he suffered intense beta burning. The door shielded the rest of his body from the horrific rates inside the reactor hall. He survived after multiple skin graft surgeries and the replacement of blood vessels in his arm from vessels in his leg. After his two years of intense treatment, he lived in decent health until his death from leukemia in Nov 2008. He gave many interviews on his experiences and was a good man.
Thank you for the info
Jesus how do you replace the blood vessels in your body??
How wonderful and breathtaking it feels for simply sharing this man’s story you can honour him and his sacrifice, I feel so moved every-time I learn something new about this event.
When watching I thought he was bleeding from holding the door open and the door crushing him
I mean at that level its not 50/50 its just live or die odds are kind of inpossible to make no one is willingly taking doses that high ans i dont think they approve studies like that not anymore even for rats
Something I really appreciated about this series is how the director did an accompanying podcast to the series, one notable topic of discussion of which was discrepancies between reality and what is shown, and other artistic liberties taken for the sake of presentation, and explains in detail why those choices were made.
if you were looking into a split open nuclear reactor core would you shit yourself and run away or stay and look into it for a few minutes?
@@raven4k998 Most people say that they would run away from a disaster if they saw it, but almost nobody does.
I wasn't aware of this podcast, so thank you for mentioning it.
@@raven4k998 Unexpectedly people does stand looking at disasters like tsunamis, explosions, etc. It's freeze response to danger and it's common (I'm one of those who primary response is freezing, but not in life-death situations lol). It can come from ignorance, astonishment, fear, but the magnitud of those disaster is so much bigger than our existence, what we can do to survived may or may not be enough and it's not in our control, it's at most the chances and hope we hold onto.
@@Ari_Mondragon yeah I mean if you freeze in a hurricane your pretty much screwed all it take then if for you to get hit with debris and it's been nice knowing you freezing in that sort of scenario will not save you at all
Hearing an actual nuclear engineer call something radioactive "spicy" just validated me calling it spicy for years.
My father recently retired as a chemical engineer at a nuclear waste processing facility. When this mini-series came out, his facility held a Q & A with the local population because lots of people had lots of questions. They had some of their medical staff on hand, and they backed up what you were saying about the burns and the vomiting. For the sake of drama, the series accelerated the effects of radiation poisoning.
that dramatization is also becuse this series was sort of based on the book Voices of Chernobyl, which is more like a series of statements by folk that lived through the incident, either directly or indirectly, and their ideas of the effects of radiation of course differed from what we currently know about it. The medical inacuracies are intentional, because they aim to reflect the perception of people at the time rather than an objective reality
@@mexa_t6534 The problem is that almost everyone watching the series took everything as objective reality, at a time when we should actually be building as many new reactors as possible.
What an incredibly intelligent opportunity! Would that more local communities or even nearby cities had sponsored such Q&A panels.
@@pajander it still made it very clear that radiation is nothing to be joked about and made a lot of people want to understand radiation better. Thats a win in my book.
@@pajander it's still horror. Doesn't matter if the symptoms show after 4 hours or 10 minutes, what difference does it make.
I've said it before, I can't see how people watch episode 1, then decide to wait to watch the next 4 of them. Such a good series.
exactly. no idea why he doesnt upload more...its super good
I did this. Always feels so drained after watching an episode.
I must have watched the first 2 episodes 3 times before watching the third because that's how HBO an it. More to it every time.
I have still only watched the first one because it gave me a panic attack.
@@Tobatcie
LOL try the second one...the scale is super scary.
3 and 4 get worse and worse...at least emotionally when u can see the crazy consequences of it. 5 is the finale that summarizes the whole thing perfectly.
The thing I got most vividly from this series was the raw human heroism of the men on the ground.
A few days in, they had a very good idea of this risks. They went in anyway. Dug pits. Went into irradiated water.
They did it to save lives. The lives of millions. Most of them knowing they were dead men. But millions of lives were on the line. So they did it. And because all of these heroes walked into this fire, the disaster was much less bad than it could've been.
Regardless of the shitty leadership and regime, it was real heroism
riiiiiiight... that sound more like a story released by the USSR to make them seem like heroes for containing the mistake that was intentionally made.
Sorry but any reasonable person is not buying what they are selling.
Fact! Just because their government was at fault for this, The People of Russia can be selfless and admirable.
Yeah, not that it's not impressive what they did, but no, there were no millions of lives on the line. The worst of the accident took place during the initial explosion, and the worst of the side effects were the failure of the government, not distributing KI pills to the nearby population beforehand and not instructing them to avoid fresh milk and vegetables. Thus the I-131 caused excess thyroid exposure leading to cancers. None of this was helped by the liquidation effort, that was solely meant to put the power plant back into operation as fast as possible, and you can say it did its job in that regard because the power plant went back into operation. But it was not "to save millions of lives". There was nothing dramatic left to happen, radiologically speaking. The show is bullcrap in that regard.
@@adamwal4591 you do realize this show is a piece of anti soviet propaganda essentially right. Even though the this was a Russian problem thousands of men put their literal lives on the line to make sure that this didn't turn into a full blown nuclear cataclysm. If they didn't knowingly expose themselves to radiation that could potentially instantly kill them the core could have not only melted down, but also caused a chain reaction in the other 4 reactors at chernobyl creating a chernobyl X 5.
You know there is truth to the sacrifices made because a meltdown didn't end up happening.
@@marcushankins8171 yeah yeah... soooo they turn off multiple safety features on the reactor and turn it up to ten times it's operating level but THEY are the heroes for saving the day.
Spare me that nonsense.
The man who held the door open actually survived. The door shielded him well enough. That's just crazy!
"It's over" and he lived
It was actually a nuclear power plant in Sweden, Forsmark, that discovered that something was wrong. A plant worker had been outside the inner perimeter and the alarm was raised when he reentered the inner perimeter. He had got something on his shoes from outside. They told us that the inner perimeter had much lower radiation levels than normal background hence the need to scan on entering.
@@user-lp3cf5yn5b Basically yes, alarms triggered in Forsmark, due to fallout carried by the wind, which led to investigation by Swedish authorities. They concluded it was coming from outside of Sweden and came to the conclusion that it probably came from the east. They put pressure on the Soviet regime who finally confessed. It is mentioned in the chernobyl accident Wikipedia page and in a lot of Swedish pages.
@@user-lp3cf5yn5b Yes. The fallout from Chernobyl was such that it was setting off radiation alarms in other countries (which is briefly mention in the show), and Sweden was thd first to ask the USSR what happened, which brought the attention of the rest of the world.
22:30 - Even if they're badly exaggerating the rapidity of the effects of radiation poisoning, the mental shock alone of what these people have just seen, not to mention the fear of what's going to happen to them after their irradiation, could be enough to cause nausea and vomiting after the adrenaline starts to wear off back in the control room.
Also true!
There could also have been smoke and toxic gases in the air which could cause nausea.
That's probably quite accurate TBH......the dose rates were officially registered at about 5.9(6 mSv) rem per SECOND. My opinion is that it was probably much higher, especially for those two who looked directly into the burning graphite in the remnants of the core. I suspect that dose was in the range of 50-100 rem (.5-1 Sv) per second.
The suddenness of ARS is directly proportional to dosage, and an indication of prognosis. That's why the guy who reported the explosion, who saw the channel caps jumping, vomited almost immediately afterward while Dyatlov, who was mostly in the control room, offices, and surrounding areas didn't start feeling the effects until 4 hours later. Dyatolov survived, the guy in the reactor chamber did not.
I honestly can't imagine experiencing something like that and having the intellect to know what was coming for me and then not finding a firearm to put a bullet through my head before it happens. Is it denial? Courage? Irrepressible hope? What keeps somebody alive mentally in order to face that kind of agony and Hell? No if it really takes that long for the symptoms to manifest but I know for an absolute fact what is about to happen why the Hell do I want to stay in this life to experience THAT?
To me the scariest part was when they were looking into the exploded core, those guys were definitely dead men walking I cant even imagine how bad of a dose they got, although the chart you used gave some understanding which was really interesting to speculate on and in the different scenes that was really interesting and hearing all the technical stuff explained much appreciated, sub'd and looking forward to part two if you do it mate.
Thank you! I plan to do the rest of the series, maybe not each episode a separate video but I wanna look at it all
@@TheAtomicAgeCM If nothing else, do a video on the roof scene from the fourth episode, but especially on the explanation of what happened in the fifth. It would be really interesting to get your take on both of those scenes.
@@radkonpsygami7634 Like the guy says in the chopper, if you fly over the smoke you'll be wishing you took that bullet, radiation is so cruel and morbidly fascinating the way it can slowly kill people in these ways which I wouldn't wish on most people
The two guys who went into the reactor hall were trainees and both died. The guy who held the door open took a nasty dose from radioactive dust on the door, but survived.
At that very moment you can see a large amount of dust in the air being whipped up by the heat. Breathing in all that stuff couldn't possibly be good for them either. I can only imagine it compounded their exposure.
About RBMK don't explode: AFAIR the idea at the time was that control rods are in the channels above the reactor level suspended by the powered holding mechanism that - in case of power loss or by decision of operator who foresees the runaway chain reaction and wants to shut it down quickly - just releases these rods, they free-fall into the channels and reaction got shut down quickly and safely. The construction though had a fatal flow - and that's the vapor cushion between the water level and the inserted rods that displaces the water itself before rod takes place. It is not obvious when rods are slowly inserted in controlled matter, it is just a slight variation in the power output, but when inserted all at once to quickly control criticality for a short period of time it increases reactivity level before decreasing it - because water in the channel catches much more neutrons than steam does. And the way this flaw was exposed in Chernobyl was the worst possible setup for that to happen. Sorry for my broken English, hope you can get some idea out of my comment.
Your English is OK! I'm a nuclear engineer, and I think I can translate this. For a chain reaction to occur 2 things are needed, neutrons need to be moderated from high to low energy (in this type of reactor), and extra neutrons need to be absorbed. Graphite does the moderation, while water does the absorption. When the control rods were inserted, they displaced the water thus removing that absorption for a split second DUE TO a vapor/ gas bubble that is formed in front of the control rod as its being dropped. This delay is just enough for the number of neutrons in the reactor to overwhelm the reactor control rods.
@@1999colebug Yes. But the problem is that people believed that this security mechanism makes violent thermal explosion absolutely impossible - that if things go really wrong all control rods can be dropped at once and that will slow down chain reaction to the level where the energy absorbed by the remaining water evaporation will cool down fuel rods to the level preventing total meltdown. Of course, that was seen as a last resort because after that due to the multiple factors restarting reactor again would be a task compared in complexity to full core rebuild and refueling, but the "RBMK reactor physically can not explode" mantra were so deep in minds of all the engineers and management that they seen no problem doing some serious shortcuts in the safety protocols. Because - what's the worst case scenario? Ok, one energy production block would be offline for couple of years. "Not great, not terrible". And we all know how it ended.
It wasn't a vapor cushion, but it's the same general mechanism. Basically, the control rods were designed to be slightly inserted into the core already, but since this had a poisoning effect on the reactor, the designers added a graphite tip to the bottom of the rods. this meant that if too many are inserted at the same time while there aren't enough rods already inserted, it will cause a brief spike in transmission. However due to multiple mistakes while setting up the reactor for the test they were doing, they ended up only having 14 control rods left deployed, while the other 200-ish were retracted. Now, the original designer of the RMBK had figured out that if less than (I think it was) 17 rods were inserted, an emergency shutdown of the reactor could cause a runaway reaction. There was a second problem which was the RBMKs were huge, so they effectively acted like multiple reactors, but the temperature sensors in the core couldn't read the entire reactor.
What happened was the lead engineer in the control room accidentally defaulted the starting power of the reactor to less than the amount to keep a reaction going with a normal amount of control rods inserted. The control room staff basically had to pull this reactor out of a nose-dive by removing control rods. The reaction started heating up, they carried out the test, but the temperature started rising too quickly, so they initiated a shutdown. As the graphite displaced water in the bottom of the core, suddenly there was a spike in reactivity, which displaced the giant steel and concrete cap on top of the reactor.
@@Movingfrag There is also politics involved. The designs being a state secret, and flaws in the design couldn't be openly discussed so anyone who wasn't aware of the flaws would have no idea how to use the safety features correctly without causing a runaway reaction. Took the suicide and memoirs of Dr. Legasov to get that out into the open.
@@dawn-blade lol, I'm 22, graduated college last May. Do the math.
"I'm at a loss for words," 19:46 - I was waiting for this moment, because when I first saw this, I had a lot of thoughts, but could not communicate any of it verbally. I'm no nuke engineer but am an old tech geek who observed the space race with my father and currently work in IT. I remember feeling what I think you are feeling when first watching this excellent drama. The only words I came up with for this scene were, "The Angel of Death is indeed beautiful." I don't believe in such things but their description of the unimaginable is useful at times. We all seek inner peace, even at the end. I loved this reaction and subscribed, thank you.
The part where the group of people are on the railroad bridge, looking at the fire and the column of radioactive ions shooting into the sky, you see the particles falling on them and the music gets very eerie and ominous... that part gave me goosebumps. The children playing in the ash, the poor baby googling at falling particles... they had no idea the radiation was hitting them.
Appropriately nicknamed the "bridge of death"...
You see the father holding thr baby later in the hospital begging for help
The fact that these professionals take their time to react to videos in regards to their field, “Doctor reacts, sniper reacts to…, astrophysicist reacts, nuclear engineer,” etc. Love this!
The only case I've ever heard of where the person felt immediate effects from radiation exposure was the Cecil Kelley incident. He immediately started screaming "I'm on fire" after the excursion, and everyone initially though he had spilled acid on himself because of how he was acting. He died 35 hours later, so the dose he got was _massive,_ somewhere around 36 Gy.
yeah it's going to be one of those situations where someone gets an incomprehensible level of dose
There was also demons core incident
@@TheAtomicAgeCM Looking directly at the exposed fuel, even for a very few seconds, in the way that several men did in 3 or 4 incidence, must be a massive and lethal dose, is it not?
@@dimatha7 yeah, but it took several hours for the demon core exposures to cause radiation sickness. Cecil Kelly was exposed to the highest known whole body dose and his symptoms manifested in minutes through skin burns and unconsciousness. That's what the show is showing here.
@@JKSSubstandard Sort of, yeah.
Though the guys at Chernoby managed to duck out from the particle beams just in time to experience Demon Core esque symptoms instead of just melting.
Fun fact about the "filmy grain" in photos or film, Kodak was one of the only entities outside the US military to know about nuclear testing. Kodak found that on certain days their film production was destroyed, the new film was grainy. The Kodak engineers suspected radioactivity and fallout as the culprits and started doing math and asked the government about the dates of nuclear tests on specific dates. From then on, to ensure silence and not cost the corporation money, Kodak executives were given advanced notice of nuclear testing to close the plants for cleaning and maintainence
19:11 The absolute *fear* in your eyes as you watch that scene is spine-tingling.
The embodiment of “NOPE” in one look
Your reaction to the exposed core was pretty much the same as mine. It is.... Unfathomably horrifying. Those of us that have worked in the nuclear field know that there aren't words to describe how terrible that actually is. It's just... Nope. NopeNopeNopeNope.
yeah just nope you don't want things to go there just nope not going to let that happen
"You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before." -Legasov
Mmm have you seen the dose rates on the main beam of industrial electron accelerators? like dynamitrons and rhodotrons. They reach levels of thousands of Sv per second! that means you aren't even in the main beam and you are already dead from bremsstrahlung.
The nuclear physics part of studying astrophysics was extremely humbling. When you pause for a moment and take a step back and think about what is being unleashed in a reactor it truly is terrifying. We are an amazing species with a boundless capacity for learning and discovery, but man does that come with some really big mistakes.
@mycroft16 Even more so when one considers the temps and pressures required to achieve fusion, which we've also managed to do.
27:15 The main thing I learned from this series (not sociologically, but hard-science) is that there's a difference between acute radiation poisoning and long-term radiation poisoning.
And the former is possibly the single worst way to die in the world. Dying by inches as different cell types conk out, without the nervous system ever really doing so.
it exploded..... there is no core it exploded.......
That’s what makes it so insidious. The cellular systems shut down based on rate of mitosis (dividing and multiplying) in order of fastest to slowest. The intestines shut down first, but the nerves and cardiac cells go last, meaning that even as your body is literally falling apart at the cellular level, your heart will keep pumping blood, and you feel every part of the process.
@@Kwatcher100 which translated loosely means you die a slow painful as hell death if you get a good does of radiation
So basically your body is decomposing and you're still alive and able to feel every moment. Not much of a believer in euthanasia but I'd say that's a worthy exception.
Is it? A friend of mine, an operator on Unit 4 was in Pripyat with his family when the reactor exploded. His entire family in the years following the event had on average 8 severe diseases that were a direct result of the radioactive material exposures and radiation exposures they suffered in Pripyat.
Now multiply that by a couple of million people exposed to significant levels, and the more than 10,000 and likely less than 100,000 people slowly killed by this catastrophe over the next 15 years.
The guy holding the door to the reactor core actually lived quit a long time afterwards. His name was Alexandr “Sasha” Yevchenko. There is a documentary on TH-cam about the accident in which he recalls that night. One of the things he said that the concrete walls of his office was bending like rubber. That’s scary
yes that is insane lol
How is possible for a wall to bend when it's supposed to not be elastic?
@@Valerio_the_wandering_spriteHeat.
When you imagine, that the rbmk buildstructure was built like a normal officebuilding with no proper reinforced walls, then yeah, those thin walls would buckle like rubber under such tremendous forces. They were built cheap, then they kept cruicual information from the operating staff, like the positive void coefficient or the graphite tipped controlrods and maybe other details. Then let the events unfold like back in the day, with nobody knowing, that the az5 button could act as a detonator and the catastrophe is completely set to go off
@@Valerio_the_wandering_sprite The same way how the 9/11 towers fell.
17:06 "there this guy goes" as he picks up the graphite.
literally had me dying.
Had you dying? A curious choice of words.
The part where you see the core on fire and the people shoveling graphite off the roof in to the hole and the counter is going absolutely nuts have me the chills like nothing I have ever experienced
My favorite thing about this is how serious you take the safety aspect of what you do and know. Much respect.
To elaborate on what you mentioned about the sounds in the music: the composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, created the entire soundtrack using only ambient sounds & field recordings she made inside & around the decommissioned power plant they filmed at in Lithuania. She had a great 2019, winning the Emmy, Grammy & BAFTA for "Chernobyl" & the Academy Award, Golden Globe & a second BAFTA for "Joker." She's now just one Tony shy of an EGOT.
wow that's amazing. thanks for sharing!
yes, that plant was an old RBMK reactor as well. I love that she effectively gave the reactor itself an ominous voice in the show with the ambient sound. brilliant.
I did not know that! What an excellent way to create the soundtrack. That's a really interesting piece of information - which I really appreciate - except that I will have to watch the whole bl00dy thing yet again now. Thanks for that!
🤣
@@PV1230 The noises "music" you hear are actually from the RBMK reactor at Ignalina. If i remember correctly.
@@PV1230 They also used that reactor as the filming location of all shots related to the inside of the facility and most of the external shots as well.
This was exactly the kind of review I’ve been waiting for. Ever since this show aired, I’ve been reading as much as I could understand on radiation. From Madam Curie to Fukushima. Thank you for making sense of it all.
i can explain it more easily t u when the real chernobyl exploded bcause of faulty and cheap labor of a nuclear power plant that shouldnt have happened on april 26 1986 and thousands of people and people after theyre affected and died bcause of radiation poisoning during and over the years thats why i dont like nuclear power plants and plutonium plants and power plants
@@valeshia385 So you don’t like them because of the incompetence of a government essentially? I wouldn’t say that’s a good reason to hate nuclear power, especially nowadays where we stand on the brink of a climate crisis and need a new powerful and effective power source immediately.
@@ZettyLad ok u want a example of why nuclear energy is dangerous a teenage boy almost destroyed his town by the nuclear energy he got bcause of a book his family gave and if the nuclear dept didnt intercept him that whole town wouldve gotten cancer thats what im talking about is cancer when it comes to nuclear energy and back in the day when it exploded all that radiation went everywhere and to this day chernobyl is still spewing radiation which also causes cancer and the same thing almost in the usa when 3 mile Island almost had a meltdown and thats still spewing radiation and back in 1999 3 asian men was exposed and ones man dna actually melted from their exposure to radiation and even tho what im going to tell u something i lost my aunt to cancer and i watched her die cancer comes in many forms even with nuclear hydrogen plutonium and the russians stole the designs from the usa and made cheap nuclear power plant bcause their was supposed to be a secondary protection over the poles and the chernobyl incident made russians to put another protection on all their nuclear power plants and have u seen the real footage of the real chernobyl maybe u should watch it
@@valeshia385 Yeah? My grandmother died from cancer to, so it ain’t like I don’t have experience dealing with that terrible disease. My point is, it’s raving fear mongering like this that prevents nuclear energy from obtaining the funding it needs to become more safe, efficient, effective, and powerful; applying 21st technology and methods to nuclear energy and making explosive meltdowns like Chernobyl a thing of the past. Also, if this show didn’t make it clear to you, the only reason Chernobyl got as bad as it did was because of Communism and the Soviet Union, and their absolute refusal to believe that they could possibly do something wrong on this scale.
The Soviet Union’s blatant disregard for human life and safety is evident throughout all of it’s history, and that culture seeped into that fateful April day. Believe me, if the Soviet Union was different and wasn’t afraid to admit their wrongdoings and treat their nuclear power plants with the respect and care they deserved, the Chernobyl disaster would have NEVER happened. And just for example, in modern times, it took the crust of the Earth moving and sending out a huge tsunami towards Japan at a very badly placed nuclear reactor near a tsunami prone shore to create a nuclear disaster near the levels of Chernobyl, and even then Fukushima was nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. Not to mention, just so you know, tens of thousands of people die every single year from complications resulting from fossil fuels and the pollution it causes. Whether that be from disease resulting form inhalation of the literal shit we’re pumping into the air, or people on things like oil rigs. Either way, that’s thousands of times more deaths in a single year, than all the deaths nuclear energy has caused in its e n t i r e existence. Need I also tell you the precarious situation our planet is in, and how our extensive use of fossil fuels is warming it up at shocking rates. I’ll tell you, the damage our use of fossil fuels is going to cause to this planet will cause m i l l i o n s of deaths, and then affect the lives of billions more and plunge millions into financial hardship and poverty once the shorelines start flooding.
But, if we were to put aside our fire of some spicy rocks because of the incompetence of an evil and corrupt government for just a damn minute, we’ll realize that by beginning to utilize nuclear power safely and with modern technologies and research, we will save billions of people across the planet from the effect of climate change, save the planet, and save the lives of millions of people, and even start saving thousands of children and adults in a place in China who could die from health complications resulting from all the smog and pollution in the air.
When I argue for all of this, I’m not thinking about now, I’m thinking about the future when our actions today will reflect far more powerfully in the future. I frankly don’t give a shit about people’s irrational fears of nuclear power today, because it will be the future generations of tomorrow who will feel the effects of our fear and inability to put it aside the most.
The coal pit-boys scene almost dropped me. They KNEW they were about to dig their way to an early grave and carried on. Heroes.
Heroes? It didn’t solve the problem. They didn’t even use the mine
@@darbyoharawhat does that matter? They put their lives on the line, end of.
I guess they had enough faith in the shitty communist system that their families would be better off.
I recently learned about the Idaho Nuclear Meltdown and that core had 5 control rods. Chernobyl had 250+.
Which is insane.
a good example of how different nuclear reactor designs can be
i'm pretty sure the "joke" is that their detection equipment only went up to 3.6/hr as the max possible dose you are receiving, when in reality they were getting much higher than that.
yeah that is a joke and the bigger joke assuming that the radiation level is 3.6 when the detection maxes out at 3.6 if the detector maxes out never trust the reading for that reason cause it's likely higher to max it out
That scene where the firefighter picks up the chuck of graphite and gets a really severe radiation burn in like 5-10 minutes could be accurate. If you get at minimum 150Gy blistering can be immediate or take up to an hour. Its certainly possible given where that graphite was only like 20 minutes prior
Witnesses of the actual event said, the firefighter in question only complained about swelling and a numbness in his hand *days* after that night.
Still made the bottom drop out of my stomach when he picked it up. Blistering and burns only added to it. Exaggeration or not, it still worked on me. This miniseries was the sum of all my fears.
@@vilefly Right? I was like "oh my god! Put that down! You're fucked!"
I watched a video on a nuclear physicist reacting to the show Chernobyl and who was also one of the first responders on scene. She said this scene is fairly accurate but overly dramaticized. She describes how touching the rod is deadly but won't disintegrate your hand like that. You would only feel tingling sensations in that hand, and It would actually take weeks before you started showing any symptoms of nausea and vomiting.
Don't think he would've received 150Gy so quickly though. Hisashi Ouchi, who was standing over a fuel tank as it went critical, received 17Gy. He felt almost instantly nauseous and started vomiting and when he made it to the hospital his skin was swollen and red like it was sun burnt. It took couple of days though before his existing skin started to deteriorate like in this scene.
Thank God that unlike a lot of others you’ve got the programme volume vs. your volume perfectly balanced. Also, you’ve given the subject video a decent size so we can actually see it.
28:45 The monitoring station in Norway confirmed it. But what triggered the alert was a Swedish nuclear worker entering his place of work and the radiation that fell on him from outside triggered the alarms. That's when they realised there was an invisible cloud of radiation spreading over Europe and the jig was up. Then monitoring stations further West (Norway) and so forth confirmed it.
those 2 guys who looked into the core died agonizing deaths soon after but before they did they said the reactor core looked like a volcano crater, to quote the guy who propped open the door "All three of them died very soon afterwards. That wall and the door basically saved my life. I received quite a high dose propping open the door. We had done everything we could. That was the worst feeling: that there was nothing else we could do."
Just came across this and wanted to give you a shout-out. This is exactly what I want from an expert react. Knowledgeable and passionate for the SM without being pretentious and gatekeeping. Can't wait for more!
excellent! exactly what I'm going for. thank you!
It's not an essay against communism it's an essay against the danger of lies; what they lead to. Government Lies are not exclusive to communists.
“The universe is not obliged to make sense to you.”
Pretty much nailed the problem with the Soviet system in one sentence. Props.
Neil Tyson's quote. Great stuff.
Pretty much nails the problem with what is going on in todays anti science movement.
Soviet?
Ask now: why do they all have British accents when everything else was so concerned with hyper-realism?
Every work of fiction that takes place in another time -- future and past -- or another place is really an interpretation of the writer's here and now. The lens of distance and time enables them to look at a contemporary problem with a more dispassionate eye.
In the US and in Britain, we are in a war of competing truths and the weapons are lies. That's what the Chernobyl series was about. It warns of a looming disaster if we keep at it, without necessarily joining in the fray.
As much as right-wingers just can't stop beating a dead horse over the Soviet Union, lets not forget that while it did eventually collapse, it was also a global superpower with 50000 nuclear weapons and the world's second largest economy for it's 90 year lifespan. It also had at least 20 functioning nuclear reactors at one point and only one of them underwent a meltdown. You can at least try to be nuanced; the reason the USSR failed can't be encapsulated by a Reddit-tier phrase such as "The universe is not obliged to make sense to you", the USSR/Russia has historically had some of the greatest scientists in world history.
@@Hooga89 Lately Ive been returning to the idea that there are different societies that better fit different types of personalities. Myself as an American capitalist love the ideals my society ascribes to but also can see how communism would be apealing to others. I think every nation has the right to form their government as they see fit without interference from others. Lastly citizens should be allowed to migrate to the nation that fits their personality.
First off, I just saw the series this weekend for the first time and now I've found your channel. This is fantastic! Thank you! Secondly: after seeing the series this weekend for the first time, all I can say is: may you always be safe and NEVER have to go through anything like that. Thanks for bringing clarity to this infuriating, inspiring, depressing, fascinating story.
Thank you for the kind words! I hope I never have to either :) Welcome.
Regarding 26:35, RBMKs don't have a secondary coolant loop for power generation. The same water that passes through the core and becomes steam is used directly to drive the turbines. In this context, the feedwater would be the returning flow to the steam separators from the condensers & aerators.
I'm a nuke operator and we have gone over this event in training scenarios so I was familiar with the sequence of events before this program, however, watching this production made it more real to me somehow and reinforced the human aspect. The scene where the fireman picks up the graphite chunk is one of several that just had me say out loud, "he's dead already and he doesn't even know it". The reaction you had to the two guys looking at the open core was EXACTLY the same reaction I had: for anyone that understands the science, this is a bloody horror movie. Except that you can't say to yourself, "its just a movie, its just a movie". This is real stuff that happened to real people and many of them died horrible, lingering, painful deaths. As you said, nothing uplifting to see here. Good job though, I think I'll watch you watch the 2nd episode.
I respect what you saying
im just a mechanic..... but have hobbies in weather and Chernobyl....
.
and ya..... looking into a burning core.... would just put a person in shock
instead of running away..... a person might just look a second longer, because its such a "pretty view" / horrific view
@@kainhall What hobby in weather?
This is why as Nuclear operators (Im a systems operator guy in the field not the control room) our first priority each and every day is the health and safety of the public, second is the plant and last is the people working at the Nuclear plant.
Genuine question:
Do you ever run drills where the boss gives psychopathic orders and you only pass if you refuse to drive the reactor off a cliff?
As a mechanical designer who spent 10 years designing valves for nuclear submarines, I'm very interested in nuclear theory and engineering. I was moved by the stark reality of this mini-series and I appreciate your expertise in translating the effects of ionizing radiation on human tissue.
The "RBMK reactors don't explode" thing is explained in the show. The government censured some science !
I think, in reality, there was probably also an element of, "A reactor in general can't explode like an atomic bomb" which is true*. Partially because the government hadn't informed anyone that the control rod tips were made of graphite and would greatly increase heat in the core, I don't think anybody had considered the possibility of runaway boiling/positive void coefficient triggering a steam explosion.
*The second explosion in Chernobyl, following the initial steam explosion, may have actually been a nuclear "fizzle". While a full-on explosion wasn't possible with LEU, there's been some research suggesting that the extremity of the event may have been enough to cause a small nuclear blast equivalent to a few tons of TNT thanks to parts of the core undergoing prompt criticality.
@@NyanCatHerder Another possibility (and more likely in my opinion) is a carbon dust explosion graphite is after all mostly carbon and there would be enough graphite dust, oxygen and heat for ignition (the core was after all open to air at this point and very hot).
SampoPaalanen: there is an elephant in the room, but I'm certain the thing we should discuss is the window coverings.
There's the engineering/scientific aspect that's open to conjecture, but the "RMBK's don't explode" thing is almost definitively a specifically Soviet mantra pushing the idea that Soviet nuclear designs are not flawed.
They don't fail unless its very public. And even when it IS very public, they tend to blame everything else. Multiple submarine nuclear reactor failures, missile failures, various naval casualties, they tried to downplay everything.
Their political reaction to Chernobyl is a perfect example of this. They'll deny any fault until proven otherwise, then continue to downplay it. They had to project an air of competency to the world in order to solidify their role as the US' biggest rival.
If the world knew their submarine and commercial reactors were failing left and right, they'd be subjected to significant political pressure to fix it.
Suffice it to say, if nobody knows your reactor is garbage, then no one will bitch at you to fix it, and you won't have to spend money to do it!
@@thundercactus yeah there's really no valid against the fact that reactor did explode and did so violently enough to throw around the multi ton lid like it was a child's toy. As for the Soviets not wanting to admit/believe the reactor exploded you got to remember that their whole lifestyle depended on the illusion that USSR was a perfect paradise, so admitting the disaster would mean people might start asking the wrong kind of questions like they did irl, which lead to the fall of the Soviet Union, not sole cause but one of several thing that caused that.
19:08 that scene is seriously horrifying. It's like staring death in the face.
My grandfather was in the Navy nuclear power program and spent 18 months in Antarctica during their nuclear power testing program. He past away before this show came out, it would have been interesting to see what he thought as well. Thank you for sharing your analysis. We did watch the news together when Fukoshima happened and he had tons of insight of how the disaster was 15+ years in the making before the tsunami and how misinformed the media is about nuclear power. Looking forward to seeing your other videos, this was my first!
From what I have read the measurement tools they were using only went up to those levels. The actual radiation they were actually exposed to was so high their tools were not capable of measuring it.
They even address this in the series. That's why they go on to get the "better" tool (wider range) that (as mentioned) immediately burns out the circuitry.
btw. to give some context to this: Measuring radiation is actually quite easy. It becomes a bit more challenging when you want to measure very sensitive but other than that no big deal. However, in all cases you measure single radiation events when measuring electronically (i.e. one single gamma ray). For technical reasons you can't measure much more than around 10.000 events per second - which sounds a lot... However, since you want to measure very sensitive (µSv region) you need one count to mean much less than one µSv - which leads to design choices (sensitive measurement volume) for the measurement device that allow you to measure probably up to several mSv/h. If you now have multiple Sieverts per hour the device will more or less be overloaded with radiation events that it can't count any more, which leads to the measured value in some cases even being lower than the maximum the device would be capable of.
This you can more or less only solve by taking a less sensitive device, that is not suitable for detecting low amounts of radiation (that you would see in every day operation of such a plant). So what they needed to get is not an especially sophisticated device but rather the contrary.
I just started watching this with my friend and I know NOTHING about nuclear energy at all, so I really appreciate this video! I’m about to binge your other videos to learn more. I would really love if it you made this a series and reacted to each of the episodes in the show!
Thank you! Hope you like the other stuff 😀 I will indeed be covering the rest of the series
@@TheAtomicAgeCM I don't remember much in 1986 but a power surge and a loud banging noise
@@chornobylreactor4 bro, u ok? did they get you some feedwater?
@@theopdiamond8349 nope they didn't the fools and im not ok I have mental issues because of it
"The universe is not obligated to make sense to you"
Dyatlov: (pukes)
"Case in point."
Absolute gold.
A quick note about the firefighter who burned his hand: I believe that the injuries shown were near immediate after he came into contact with the graphite chunk, and the burns were caused by the thermal heat of the graphite, as opposed to the radiation (which he also got a lethal dose of, IIRC)
I don't know if the bent of the series is specifically anti-Communist (though there is plenty of that in the show), but more broadly anti-lies. Essentially, the organs of power that exist on the necessity of lies to uphold them, and the refusal to listen to (or outright ostracization) of those who know better due to inconvenient facts. There are parallels (in some cases intentional) to similar trends in modern Western societies that could lead to similar consequences, despite not being Communist or necessarily authoritarian.
This kind of split becomes more apparent later in the series between the 'honest' Communists addressing the issue (the scientists, the generals, the soldiers, the miners, the actual on-the-ground managers) and the 'dishonest' ones (the apparatchiks, the bureaucrats in the rear, and the state's security, such as the KGB, invested in keeping up the illusion of power). While the show can definitely be interpreted as anti-Communist (and it's certainly not sympathetic to Communism), I feel it is more indifferent to Communism itself. The actual message conveyed seems more about warning against the 'it couldn't happen here' mentality. Which, to be frank, we've seen occurring in increasingly dramatic fashion over the last few years. Perhaps not to Chernobyl's levels, but enough to make me doubt we actually learned the proper lessons from that catastrophe.
Structures of power at a certain point only exist to perpetuate that power. Western leaders have denied and covered up many disasters and let the guilty go free.
It's the same thing. Those in power always abuse it for their own ends
@@anjetto1 You're right. The state is the problem. But comunism is 100% state. Is worse.
Well said sir. Well said.
That's something I'm scared about hearing one day while I'm working or just out and about, hearing someone say "X would never happen here!" Or "X? Nah, that'd never happen, nope." Only for them to be wrong, terribly wrong in the end. I feel that way for things like an invasion or a WW3, and with how things have gone lately, I feel that kinda mentality is gonna bite us in the butt in due time. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but then again, do you really want to anticipate the day that "bite" happens?
Small correction to 26:35. In most western reactors there are two loops of water, one for the reactor core and one for the turbines connected by a heat exchanger. In RBMK reactors there ist only a single loop of water. This water turns into steam in a steam drum shortly after exiting the reactor and goes straight into the turbines from there, carrying with it all the radioactivity it received while being in the core.
Ohh ok that would explain a lot with the quite radioactive feed water 😆
@@TheAtomicAgeCM I remember this from school when I was 13-15ish (Sweden around late 1980-ies). For some reason this was emphasized A LOT. The years after the accident the subject of nuclear energy and Chernobyl was not just brought up in physics class, either. It would pop up here and there in other subjects, too. I think it even came up in history class despite the accident being just a couple of years ago. And this difference with single vs dual system was always on the tests. 13ish year old me got the impression that this was the reason for the accident.
Pretty much this, most western reactors are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) with two loops, but there's also some Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) which also feed directly to the turbine without a heat exchanger. Those are mostly older designs though.
true, RBMK was Boiling type,...
@@B20C0 PWR not older nor newer to BWR (at least not by much), its different desighn type, whit both pross and cons,...
21:52 - Sudden Onset Radiation Sickness
There is actually precedent for this.
In 1999 when Hisashi Ouchi was irradiated in the Tokaimura criticality accident, he received 17k millisieverts of radiation - over three times the lethal level of 5k millisieverts. He said that almost immediately, he had nausea, pain, and difficulty breathing. He managed to make it back to the changing room before he vomited and passed out.
For comparison the 17k mSv dose is equivalent to 1,822 Roentgen. If the core was really outputting 15k Roentgen, that comes out to 140k mSv - over eight times what Ouchi received, and 28 times the lethal level of exposure.
Given that, I find it entirely possible that one of the trainees *who stared down into the open, burning reactor* fell and never made it back to the control room, and the one who did immediately showed signs of sickness.
We’re it that high however i might expect to see symptoms like immediate organ destruction and such. Radiation is an odd and difficult to measure thing with many moderating and few exacerbating factors.
I heard about him, literally a dead man walking from that moment. Whats really disturbing about that was the accounts of his skin simply falling off. Basically having to come to terms with the reality you are decaying away.
Read about the Cecil Kelley criticality at Los Alamos. The guy got hit in the face with fast neutrons and gamma, fell down off his ladder, forgot what he was doing (flipped a switch several times) then ran out the door yelling "I'm burning up, I'm burning up". Within 10 minutes he was in shock and showing a pink skin from exposure. Its frightening what a quick high dose can do to someone. Kelley died within 35 hours of his exposure. So his was more radical than those experienced at Chernobyl. Most of the staff made it to Moscow and died within 2 weeks to 2 months.
The "skin peel" effect was nonsense though. It takes a few days for your dead skin to not be able to heal itself and cause bleeding wounds.
Ouchi had an Ouchi
"17k millisieverts" or as we in the nuclear world say....ya know.......17 Sieverts
I highly reccomend the podcast that released between each episode. Guy from NPR interviews the Director and they discuss the episodes and talk about behind the scenes and things they weren't able to include in the show. It was really good.
Yes, I've been listening to it for the latter parts. Thanks for the recommendation.
I knew the “Open Core” scene was bad. The show did a fantastic job of communicating how terrifying that scenario was even to people who know very little about reactors or radiation. But seeing a professional safety engineer just sit there violently shaking his head in response to it kinda hit different. He wasn’t even trying to be dramatic about it (I’m pretty sure), it just really, truly unnerved him to see that raging inferno where a core should have been.
My point is that his reaction was even more sobering for me than when I first watched this episode.
I loved you pulling up charts to give us exact information. It was very interesting that the scenes you lingered on and that disturbed you most were often different to other TV reactors. You got punches in the gut from visual cues that most other people don't have the knowledge to be terrified of.
Always gotta pull up the charts ;) It's important, especially as a nuclear engineer, to always consult the charts/tables/regulations for the official numbers. Trying to memorize that stuff is prone to errors.
I'm glad I could offer you a different perspective as to what terrified me in the show.
Looking into the fire is like a glimpse of Hell. Absolutely terrifying.
I'm not sure if this has been said before but I've heard the reason RBMK reactors "don't explode" is because they were so robust they were believed to not have the ability to blow up, follow that with the KGB making sure they were perfectly safe according to the records, everyone just thought an explosion was impossible.
It was basically just propaganda. RBMK cores "can't explode", the Titanic is "unsinkable", and hydrogen gas is "perfectly safe" in airships... with plenty of dead every time. Y'see?
I'm all about knowledge, science, technological progress and all that= don't get me wrong. It's just oh so costly whenever our reach exceeds our grasp. When the politicians say otherwise it gets even worse.
Like how people had believed the Titanic was "unsinkable".😞
What I love is the view of the exploded core from the first and last episodes. No wonder you are at a loss for words. It looks like an Eldritchian horror, an ancient and primeval terrifyingly powerful and insidious force that is glowing and pulsing with unholy power and its burnt, twisting tendrils reaching towards the sky to disperse its evil... Absolutely engaging. As is your video! Love that I've found your channel too. Its so well done. You are a wonderful teacher and it's just nourishing to listen to. I am from Ireland and we got, at least on East Coast(I'm from Dublin) orange boxes of Iodine pills in the 90s because the government was so afraid of Sellafield being attacked and poisoning us all. An Irish woman started a charity for kids of Chernobyl and I even remember as a kid seeing some of them who would come over and stay with a family for Christmas and be spoilt rotten. Although we don't have any nuclear power it's very much in our society.
Am going to enjoy my daily cycle listening to the rest of your awesome channel.
I wish you the best for the future andd hope your channel grows to the levels it deserves!
19:17 I had the exact same reaction you did. I actually felt as if I was being irradiated throughout watching the series. I did actually visit Chernobyl in 2014 and even then, I know you can't "feel" radiation, but this exact scene killed me. I'm actually dead now.
RIP
Dead and retardid, which is a double whammy
@@DudeBro571 The_Kombinator does what alexb3079 retarDON'T.
My wife's uncle was one of the first responders after the incident and he stated that the series was extremely accurate in its depiction of the events.
Love hearing this from your perspective. Can’t wait for you to roll out the rest of the series.
I've watched reactions from some of my favorite TH-cam personalities and enjoyed their perspectives. But like mine, their reactions were visceral, totally emotional. It's only episode one and you've seen it before, but your knowledge and background on this provides a unique perspective. I look forward to learning more through future episodes. Thank you. And any exaggerations the producers made is fine because in most cases I believe the end result was the same for most of the principal characters, quick death to shortened lifetimes.
Thank you for the detail that the "feed" water is from the secondary, supossedly "clean" loop, so they were acting like if was fine for the "clean" loop to be severly enough contaminated that it was "hot". The idea of being blasé about radioactives in the turbine loop as part of normal operation is mindblowing.
I'm a huge horror fan. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I've never been impacted by any other media in the way I was by the scene at 18:55. Brought me back to the days of being a child afraid of the dark or what's hiding under your bed. Good lord.
20:08 I know radiation can affect blood platelets (though I'm not sure if that effect is immediate or it comes later) that even minor wounds can bleed like crazy. Maybe that bleed on his side was an existing wound that was sustained during the explosion, and it started bleeding profusely because of the radiation affecting his blood's ability to clot? But again it probably comes at a later stage of ARS, and it does seem like dramatic/artistic license on the film's part.
This character was based on Aleksandr Yuvchenko, who actually did hold the reactor hall door open for his colleagues (who all died of radiation sickness). He received around 4 Sv (or 400 Roentgen) and spent almost a year in a Moscow hospital. He managed to live another 22 years before dying of leukemia in 2008.
So I wonder if it wasn't because he was using his hip/body to prop the door open. While he received a 400 Roentgen dose, how localized was that dose? I mean, sure, as a whole body dose, it will do one thing, but if he received a significant portion of that 400 Roentgen localized to his hip, that could explain the rapid tissue breakdown and bleeding. Between what was essentially fallout on the door from the explosion and maybe also neutron activation of the steel in the door, that door had to be "hot" both thermally and radioactively.
That quick bleeding was a liberty taken for effect. Bleeding is an ARS symptom yes but it takes about a week to set in
Radiation sickness causes a drop in platelets (and all blood cells) because it kills the stem cells that produce them so the reduction in clotting occurs later. The symptoms of ARS are all due to the body not being able to replace high turnover cells.
I did also hear of another bloke who's body is still in there today. I thought this character might have been based on him as well.
@@jmaia2 I always thought the bleeding was caused by holding the door open, I mean I thought it was pretty obviously that...
You're great at explaining complicated things in a clear way. You'd make a great teacher. I was "unlucky" with physics teachers at high school. Both were super smart and good at their subject but they weren't good teachers. They couldn't explain things to students who weren't naturally inclined. They "got it" and couldn't understand if you didn't. So you had 3 or 4 guys in the class who did well (and would have anyway) and the rest of the class struggled! A good teacher can make their subject accessible to most, in my opinion. You've got that ability.
thanks so much! very nice of you to say :)
A pegged high dosimeter doesn’t sound good lol. What feels like a lifetime ago, I worked on a nuclear reactor. Glad I can still follow along. It’s crazy what those guys had to go through. We’ve come along way but still have so far to go with the safety side of nuclear power.
Especially one that reads to 200 Rem or 500 Rem.....
I'm no PhD, but Gen 4 reactors seem pretty darn safe, at least relative to any energy production. I'd rather we be building those than clearing acres of land for solar panels and turbines that can't hold their own without fossil fuel "back-ups". I'd bet money the back-up is pulling most of the weight.
@@logicplague oh for sure when done right and regulated nuclear power can be a good bridge between energy technologies. The problem is getting people to understand how safe it is.
@@logicplaguebet away. Who cares where we get electrons from. I know so many people with solar on thier home so no acres cleared, wind turbines can have crops below or better yet be at sea. Yes you need multiple energy sorces nulcear where safe and economic is great. Not so good when not done safely here, fukushima. As more EVs have vehilce to grid most peoples ecosystem will be self contained. Minning industry in Australia is now using heaps of RE as fuel is exceedingly expensive to truck 1000km inland etc.
If you are wedded to only one source of electrons your problem is not power its ideology.
19:09 so glad he didn’t say It was fake. Genuinely felt the same shock I had watching the show
As a chemistry major. I have absolutely loved this review. Thank you for doing such a captivating review. ❤️
Awesome, thank you! and you're welcome
25:57
Dyatlov: *vomits*
Charlie: Case in point.
*Instantly subscribes*
16:11 that was the true point of the “3.61 roentgen” repeating bit. The dose, they were trying to portray, was significantly higher and his was very much lethal. It was just ironically that their gauges maxed out at 3.61. As you correctly stated In the beginning which was very true - a case against communism if anything. Can’t report bad news if you can’t measure it
A case against any top down organization that squashes critical voices, in favor of happy talk.
The Challenger disaster in part because dissenting voices were silenced.
How adorable, you think that this only happens in Communist countries.
What if your speedometer maxed out at 10 000mph? The scale was good by design
@@timothyhouse1622 Multiple events similar in reason, but not in scale, happen in the USA every. Single. Year. Lol the people that used this event to shit on communism, specifically, just aren’t critical people. I don’t care how intelligent you are, if you draw this event down to Stalinism, you’re not that critical of your own preconceptions and biases.
To be competely fair, situations like this have happened in american Nuclear accidents too. Now I am not trying to promote or defend communism in any way, but rather warning that the moment you start thinking this happens with only one ideology or one group of people, is the moment you let your guard down to allow similar incidents to happen in your own group. We are all human, and we all have the same capacity of making those mistakes. Of course this was the very mistake the soviets themselves made, they thought that the soviet union was infallible, that it could not make mistakes, and Chernobyl was just one event out of many that proved that belief wrong. But Americans, Europeans, Asians, ect ect can fall prey to that same kind to thinking, and then fall victim to the same accidents.
Just as an example, the reason the RMBK reactor was such a flawed design was because of way to aggressive cost cutting that compromised safety. And as we have seen plenty of times before, many capitalist corporation and companies across many industries have been caught engaging in highly aggressive cost cutting measures at the expense of safety, and many, like the soviet union, tried to pretend that the resulting accidents either didn't happen or they tried to downplay them. It is a pitfall that can affect all nations, cultures, and ideologies.
They do speed up how fast radiation poisoning takes effect in the show, but they do explain at some point, the usual timeframes, and the effects of it in a more realistic manner.
Another interesting and subtle point from the director in an interview , the beginning sounds of the credits is actually bits of recoding of one of the other operational reactors in Russia. Those sounds even though there ment to sound like that are beyond spooky to hear.
Containment domes in western and Japanese nuclear reactors are 3 foot thick concrete with rebar literally woven so tight it is hard to see light through the rebar weave.
They were designed to withstand the direct impact of a commercial aircraft.
Interesting fact, besides film and digital camera sensors being able to pickup radiation the human eye can too. Our astronauts with their eyes closed see flashes of light every so often. It’s been identified as cosmic rays passing through the either the retina or optic nerve. (We treat them as radiation workers with a lifetime maximum dose)
What does your last part mean
@@Damo2690 Not that I'm OP, but it sounds like they roughly keep track of that sort of thing to determine when an Astronaut can no longer go to space. Not sure that's true, but that's how I interpret the comment.
Ah, I thought of that story too, while Charlie was speaking at 24:07. And remembered a story in which Buzz Aldrin told Neil Armstrong, on their way to the moon, "when I close my eyes I'm seeing little flashes." Neil told him "Don't report that to the ground." I'm sure they guessed it was the effect of cosmic particles whizzing through their heads and didn't want to make the Flight Surgeon panic.
@@Damo2690 if you receive enough radiation over a certain amount of time your risk of cancer goes up. We have set limits for how much radiation an astronaut can be exposed to over their career before that risk becomes to great. If an astronaut is getting close to that limit they may not be permitted to fly certain missions where the expected dose would put them over that limit.
@@Damo2690 There is a legal class of workers in the United States called 'radiation workers' that entitles the workers to certain things in order to survive doing their jobs long-term, primarily in the form of strictly limiting the time they spend in highly radioactive environments. Many countries have a similar legal class.
Astronauts are classified as radiation workers.
There is currently a debate about whether or not we should reclassify commercial pilots as radiation workers as well, due to the amount of radiation they are constantly exposed to in the upper atmosphere. The counter-argument to this is that there are too few pilots in the USA to increase their ground time as much as we probably should. People are conflicted.
Concerning the hand burn from picking up the graphite, during an experiment for the Manhattan Project Louis Slotin was holding a half plutonium core in his hand during an experiment (ah the early days of no safety and just starting to learn about radiation), with a slip the halves met causing a instant critical reaction..in his hand. Everyone in the room felt the heat it produced, and Slotin experienced a "intense burning sensation in his left hand".
So while I'm sure Chernobyl took some artistic liberties in somethings they showed, I believe they were trying to portray and show what Slotin went through with what would happen if someone picked up the graphite on the ground. It was a great series!
'The Demon Core'.. it happened twice... th-cam.com/video/aFlromB6SnU/w-d-xo.html
I think the radiation, from fast neutrons and gamma rays alone, during a brief fission reaction is significantly higher than even from irradiated graphite from a reactor core. Just looking at the estimates, they think he received 10 Gy(n) and 1.14 Gy(γ). Since the weighting factor for 2 MeV neutrons (mean for Pu-239 fission) is about 20, this amounts to 201 Sv in a fraction of a second. Conversely (and I’ll admit this doesn’t allow for surface contamination of the graphite lumps with contaminants from the fuel assemblies, but there is a difference of 5 orders of magnitude between the dose received by Slotin and my calculation for the graphite), I’ve calculated the equivalent dose from activated graphite to be around 10 mSv, which is way low and won’t produce any significant biological effects. I think the bulk of the radiation that firefighters were exposed to was from ejected fuel and fuel assembly material, not graphite. Calculations below, if you want to check. As I said, it’s entirely possible that the amount of radiation was ten or even a hundred times higher than this due to contamination of the graphite from other core ejecta, but it’s still orders of magnitude smaller than Slotin received from almost direct contact with a Pu-239 fission reaction.
Analysis of Nitrogen Impurity Impact on C-14 generation in RBMK-1599 Reactor Graphite: total C-14 activity at the point of maximal thermal neutron flux = 6.8x10^5 Bq/g
Density of graphite = 2.26 g/cm^3
Hand sized piece of graphite is about 10cm x 10cm x 10cm = 1,000 cm^3
Mass of graphite lump = 2.26 kg
Activity = 1.54x10^9 Bq
C-14 radioactive decay is by beta emission at 6,353 keV per decay. Assume about half goes into the hand, so 7.7x10^8 Bq or 4.88 keV/s, or 0.782 mJ/s.
Assume a human hand weighs about 0.46 kg, so this is 1.7 Gy/s and now assume a firefighter held this chunk of graphite for 5 seconds, so total dose is 8.5 mGy. Beta radiation has a weighting factor of 1, so total equivalent dose is just 8.5 mSv.
When I watched this show for the first time I did so with my partner, who works in a power station and has a degree in chemical engineering. It added to the experience so much - there were so many things I didn't understand that he was able to explain or contextualise, so I'm glad that other people will get something similar by watching your video :)
Explosions are just from steam pressure, Fukushima had a build up hydrogen, literally had blast walls at top of building that are meant to go first in an hydrogen explosion so it will be more “controlled” and not take the whole building down.
My father suffered a radiation overdose from a physicist's mistake in cancer treatment. Our family got to experience the results. It took just under two years for the radiation burn to kill him. I really felt for the people that had to deal with this.
19:22 Wait...was that a slight tremor in your breathing? Man...that scene really hit you!
And mind you, that white inferno was raging at nearly half the temperature of the surface of the Sun.
Yeah it's terrifying haha
I have never felt so angry in my life at someone p
If anyone cares about what happened I suggest the book about Chernobyl named: Chernobyl the History of a tragedy, by Plokhy. That particular scene is completely made up as well as the entire argument of the movie other then the cause of the RBMK reactor events that lead to the explosion. The entire control room had way more people then on the movie is shown (the experienced previous shift Team Stayed in the room to help the operation under such delicate conditions) and Everyone Knew instantly the Core had Exploded! No one talked about RBMK reactors not being able to explode ... specially Dyatlov that was in charge of the operation.
The entire movie is a complete fabrication with small exceptions of actual facts.
The radiation fields by the blown out north wall were estimated to be 8000 rem in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. The firefighters who worked on the unit three roof and the turbine hall received fatal doses of radiation within 10 minutes. They worked in those areas for hours. They were puking within half an hour. One firfighter went completely blind for ten minutes while he was standing in the gamma fields, his sight came back afterwords. Its a terrifying and fascinating story.
In romania we still use rbmk reactors ( we only have one in the whole country with 2 units ) we almost had a meltdown a few weeks ago in unit 4 ( dam unit 4 will always be cursed ) and there are no plans to safely dissasamble it . The only modification was that the tips are no longer made of graphite but we still have a positive void coeficient
Thank you for the clarification that its a STEAM explosion, not a nuclear (fission) explosion! I work in the power / energy field and the amount of times I've had to explain that to people who gained fear from this series is alarming. They could have fixed that false impression with adding one word to the script (the cynic in me believes the omission was intentional).
Was what hsppened not scarey enough?
I worked nuclear security, and commanded the adversary team for training exercises. They taught us how they work, then taught us how to break them.
Then we started doing what we called "site exploitation", looking for vulnerabilities. Writing new training exercises to challenge the security force, the reactor operators, and the entire command structure to what might happen if the balloon ever went up for real. "OH, we can chop the entire B train electrical right here? Good to know!"
We picked the brains of the reactor ops, the fire brigade, the "shiny pump and valve guys", everybody who had any information, we could use.
I actually rewrote the physical security plan, TWICE, to incorporate exploits we found.
I still remember which switches, in which order, to turn to cause a meltdown and part 100 release path. But I use my powers for good. 😇
>still remember which switches to turn to cause a meltdown
🤨
@@bean108 What? I did it 4 times on the control room simulator. Its in the SGI PSP of target set packages. Its one of the harder ones to get, though.
@@jackstecker5796 That kind of statement is, for me, one that would get my attention no matter the context. Even if you're using that knowledge to stop such things from happening, the idea that anyone has that kind of know-how on hand is a scary thing.
So nice and fulfilling to see an engineer review the movie. It is the reactions of the educated people that interest me the most. Thanks for separating the actual part from the dramatic effects.
Thank you! I too am most interested in watching experts review relevant videos
I just found your channel and I'm very intrigued on the method you use to communicate by the constant rubbing of your hands I saw this when I was instructing Nuclear Power Engineers in the Navy. and if you allow me to say it seems to me it’s because you're trying to control everything that's going on in your mind with what you're hearing and seeing but explaining it at a level that us ordinary folks can understand so in effect you're dummying it down for us while trying to control the 10,000 things going through your mind every second. The rubbing of the hands - converting the left-over energy. Well done sir
haha very interesting, quite possible! it literally is translation that I'm trying to do here. thank you!
@@TheAtomicAgeCM Absolutely
“I am become death, the spicy destroyer of worlds.” - Robert Oppenheimer probably
Hey im from Bulgaria, having a rare desease caused by Chernobyl ( cant proof that, im born 1990 ) and im Deaf , thanks for reacting to it, CHERNOBYL affected a lot of countries , specially soviet countries, because in my country, when that happent, there was a parade, where everyone was 'forced' to go and cheer up and cheer the communism and such. After that rain, the cancer and autoimmune/ DNK deseases drastically increased, and we suffer high anomalies rate due to people being exposed to that rain back then, and also due to noone said that the Vegetables from the garden during that time, should not be eaten. I also have a very strong picture of clothes outside, after the rain, with gray/ dark marks all over them, due to that toxic rain.
Wow. Thanks for sharing.
@@TheAtomicAgeCM Thanks, im not deaf, mute, problem with the larynx , im fine with the hearings. Bad Typo. Cheers and happy new year
@@MelinaHristova Some distant family of me was at holiday in Sweden (parents and kid girl) before, during and just after Chernobyl. They died all 3 that same year of "sudden" cancer.
I think the guy on the door started bleeding on the spots where he had been pushing/resting against the door, which would be heavily irradiated itself at that point, thus hitting those spots with way more powerful exposure.
yeah, radiation in the air is not comparable to the radiation in the objects. This still can be seen in the Chernobyl power plant by measuring the level of radiation getting released by objects versus the level of radiation in the air.
I get where you're coming from but I wouldn't expect the door to be more radioactive than being exposed to the core at the time depicted in the show. It's important to distinguish between radiation (alpha, beta, gamma rays etc) vs radioactivity (the particle that emits the alpha, beta, or gamma). The door could have either been activated by radiation or contaminated with radioactivity, which would be less than being exposed to the core. But yeah air is a fluid so radioctivity will disperse through it quickly whereas if radioactivity contaminates a solid object, itll hang around for a lot longer
The problem here is that it wasn't just a radiation dose, but many of the people suffered incidental injuries in the explosion. It is likely he sustained a minor injury and discovered that it was no longer clotting, rather than bleeding from damage to the skin caused by the radiation itself. [Although, yes, some licence was involved in the production.]
The tables you are reading from generally concern what we consider to be whole body dose. However specific tissues have different radiation sensitivities and will be affected in different ways, that are not accounted for in a whole body dose calculations. For example a large dose can kill the skin just through energy deposition in the tissues (causing erythema [or effectively "sunburn"]), which will affect the ability of the skin to heal over any minor cuts, such as healing a wound, in much the same way as a pure thermal burn. The problem with gamma radiation is that the photons are of much higher energy than UV, so they penetrate tissue a lot deeper. [One method I was taught for testing for serious skin exposure is to take a pair of tweezers and pluck the hairs in the region you think might be affected. If the hair is easily removed, those skin cells are pretty much dead. If not, well at least you generally get to improve your knowledge of invective.]
Radiation burns are as bad as thermal burns for causing damage to the body. Let alone DNA damage which is far more associated with the long term stochastic problems (like cancers), and is more important for long-term low dose exposures. Here we have people being directly exposed to large amounts of radiant energy which is killing the cells of their body directly. The biological effects are due to different cells of the body having different tolerances for this type of damage. And if they survive the burns, then they still have to deal with the overall exposure levels they have picked up.
And as for film, there is a relatively famous film of the May Day parade in Kiev (4 days and 90km away) that shows lots of bright white flashes from the gamma radiation from the fallout passing through the film stock).
@@reverance_pavane thanks for sharing some radiation effects on tissue knowledge!
19:57 That show just blew my mind, the first time I watched that masterpiece of a show. It was like the stuff nightmares are made of. Completely rooted in reality, and yet... I don't know. I don't know if it ACTUALLY looked like that, but that visual is stunning.
I think I read somewhere that due to the intense amount of ionizing radiation present the core burned with a ghostly blue fire, but that's not particularly scary so the producers changed it to this off yellow. Can't seem to find the source for that anymore, though. However, the visual of that burning core is utterly terrifying.
I think I read somewhere that due to the intense amount of ionizing radiation present the core burned with a ghostly blue fire, but that's not particularly scary so the producers changed it to this off yellow. Can't seem to find the source for that anymore, though. However, the visual of that burning core is utterly terrifying.
@@mauricedanens1797 it was blue because of Cherenkov radiation yes
I’ve watched another video showing side by side footage of the show, compared to actual surviving film of the events just after the meltdown. Pretty accurate, and the ensuing radiation sickness was also pretty accurately portrayed, in all it’s horrifying reality.
@@allisonfisher9304 I heard they toned the radiation sickness down a notch out of respect to the poor souls that actually succumbed to it. They didn't want the show to become about shock value and thus cut out some of the most horrific bits. Still, seeing Vasily on that table, gray and necrotised... Chilling.
I'm a Medical Radiation Technologist (which is obviously not the same as a Nuclear Engineer), but I watched this with my wife and friends, and the way I reacted I think made them more scared than the show. You just immediately know a lot of these people are going to suffer horrific deaths. You don't even have to know the history of what happened to the firefighters and the other people on the ground. Seeing the graphite on the ground, and the men staring into the open core, and the meter capping out at 3.6R... you already know so many of these people are walking dead men.
My wife and friends didn't even understand. They got the musical cues that this was a very bad situation, but they didn't understand how devastatingly bad what they were watching was. I had to explain that they were basically standing in an invisible field of poison that would give many of them a slow death I wouldn't wish on anyone.
This guy is the best! Brilliant and dumbs it down for all of us un-scientific types. Im a Ph.D. but in the humanities, and I really appreciate these brilliant technical minds- like a Dr. Feynman lecture without the jokes.
If I remember the report correctly the firefighter who picked up the graphite began complaining about his hand within an hour or so (specifically numbness, tingling, and pain) but the visible damage didn’t appear until the morning.
So after searching I’m sure the source I got that from was the log of Volodymyr Pravyk’s radio reports from the scene but I can’t remember where I got access to that.
Also the various articles about the firefighters in general say that they began experiencing symptoms after 30 minutes.
Very interesting. Thank you!
Wow 30 minutes. That's crazy. It's also important to distinguish between how someone feels and the physical presentation of symptoms, I didn't really consider how long it takes for someone to feel the effects
@@TheAtomicAgeCM thats why u dont mess with graphite it has more radiation than the explosion and the graphite is the one thing that controls a power plant from exploding
@@TheAtomicAgeCM I read somewhere that the graphite piece was emitting close to a 1000Gy , but again , we would never know what happened behind the iron curtain.