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have you ever made a video on the titan II incident where the guy dropped a socket and punctured the outer skin of the missile in the silo? a single socket defeated a nuclear missile and almost caused a broken arrow incident,just one slip by a mechanic
Have you already covered the guy who looked straight down the barrel of a particle accelerator and had a proton beam shot through his eye at near the speed of light?
"Hey I dropped the lid, caused an ongoing criticality incident, and received a lethal dose of radiation". "Well, we know just the guy to go back in there and retrieve the lid..."
🤔 he wouldn't have ended up more dead, so after a couple of days the result would have been the same, but I wonder if increasing his dose would have made him suffer more or less in those few days. If he died quicker, maybe less suffering... but idk exactly how much more painful the radiation sickness could have been, I'm not a medical expert at all. The robot didn't have the same ethical issue. If it weren't for the robot I could have been totally convinced that plainly difficult just misspoke and meant to say this happened in the 60s and 70s (he did also say Russian federation though, so that would date it more recent too). It just seems like an incident that would he set during the cold war.
And now there's an excellent mean prank to use on scientists with experience with radiation... Rig up a camera flash with a blue-tinted plastic filter...
he was dead the moment it happened the cells aren't reproducing anymore once they're gone they're gone it's just a matter of how long until each cells breaks down
Gotta say as tragic as the guy's pointless premature end was, hearing how he dropped off his perch less than three days after the incident was kind of a relief. A pity poor Ouchi and Shinohara had to suffer a much more drawn out fate.
@@forgonenapster8888 I think it's something in the lines of "Considering that no one trully knows what exactly happened, it's an achievement". P.S. I don't speak russian but as a bulgarian I can understand a bit. Hope this helped.
Blue flash and in an instant full body internal "sunburn" from hell... (if you want to scare someone working with radiation to death take a picture of them with a flash...)
I really appreciate your video editing and narration style! No creepy music or hyperbolic storytelling-just the facts and a good dose of humor to balance out the video topic. :)
Having read the IAEA report I'm not sure that having a supervisor present would have saved the technician. The prompt criticality seems to have been caused by him dropping the top reflector on to the fissile sphere. Sounds more like a design deficiency of the test apparatus combined with a simple accident more than a breach of safety regulations. RIP technician :(
No safety chain on top reflector. No clearance blocks on lower reflector (to assure 3x-5x gap) before applying hydraulic pressure. Assembled vertically, with gravity holding parts together. ALL bad design choices.
I may have gotten the wrong idea from this video, but it sounded like one of the issues was an incorrect measurement, which may have been prevented by someone double checking.
I find it interesting that both this incident and the Demon Core incident would have been prevented if the experiment had simply been performed horizontally. One would think the sort of super smart, big brain people that design this type of experiment would recognize the potential hazards of "Spontaneous Gravitational Assembly!"
I respect the ingenuity of whoever decided that what Louis Slotin's dragon tickler needed to be safe was a floor jack. I mean, he wasn't _right,_ but he was ingenious.
"BALLS" in big letters had me choking on my coffee 🤣 We all noticed it wasn't sunny the day you narrated this. Here, have some virtual sun 🌞 from Michigan, we got plenty
@@bmstylee We've got some beautiful Londonesque weather here in the Toronto area too - windy, chilly and cloudy. So, typical Lake Ontario weather, until summer batters us into submission with sudden and absurd heat, humidity, mosquitos, and blackflies. Canadian weather means never doing anything by halves.
@@neuralmute I should have seen this 45 degrees in the middle of May coming. I disassembled my propane heater in my garage gym. Which means it will be snowing next week. It did snow 2 weeks ago.
even the comic has explained why the hulk was a special case. by saying gamma radiation is connected to THE DEVIL HIMSELF which explains why it either kills everything harder then anything else but a blackhole could do or turns you into a destruction bound monster like hulk
I feel like if the dose he received was nearly double what was known to be lethal in the past, I would have asked for ALL the morphine, versus undergoing surgeries only to have the same outcome :(
@@onglt27 I mean, If given a choice it seems like an easy one, a bullet to the head is fast and imo a lot better than a slow death by radiation poisoning
This is seriously the greatest youtube channel I have ever come across. It combines nuclear science and picking a part accidents. Amazing stuff, can't get enough
In the US, when i worked with material, a "hazmat" team would not cover any radioactive accident. Only Rad-Con team would do this because of the expertise required. Hazmat has giant footed clumsy oaths that could pass for decent janitors. Techniques and knowledge required to clean up an accident site are not in their perview. Sorry to put it bluntly, but Hazmat wouldn't cut it.
hahaha as I was reading I thought it was going something like "just think his life could have been saved if the top half of his body had been amputated" hahaha
Maybe lower the bottom half well below so there is no way they can touch. Build a ring on the top lid for top half to perfectly line up and where it can't fall in. Maybe one day of cutting and welding could have saved his life.
PD wasn't super-detailed in the telling of the tale, but I think that might be the significance of the bad measurement. If his safety device was meant for an overly large top shell compared to the one he was actually using, it could have slipped right through something that was supposed to stop exactly this from happening. That 205 compared to 265 mm is pretty significant (over two inches for you Liberians) if it's extra space in a hole.
Honestly having done the paperwork and having another person standing by would not have prevented the upper part slipping from his hands, the procedure as written was risky. His supervisor was probably saved by not being there with him.
Yes. It might saved his life, sarcasm aside. Maybe the top was recently oiled? Maybe the ladder was wobbly? Maybe he was not strong enough to hold the cover? We DO NOT know what might have been found out if his superiors knew what he was attempting.
For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost... it sounds silly, but the missing paperwork might have resulted in a double-check and saved him. To be fair, whoever checks the paperwork might have been just as lax, and nothing would have changed.
You would think, in cases like this and the Demon core, where if the two halves of the shell touch, you are instantly doomed to a horrible death, you would be extremely careful, to a ridiculous level, of making it impossible for the two halves to be together.
Ok, so I asked this before but I really need to know. When you show the Plainly Difficult scale rating, do you record the point to the number for each video individually? Or is each number point a pre-recorded shot that you just filmed for each value on the scale. I don't know why I need to know this but I do
i dont have the time or desire but im sure if you goto a few videos and look at the numbers, how theyre positioned and the backdrop im sure you can tell if they were all filmed at once or in seperate events.. i notice the 4 in this video is clocked at an angle go check another video id lean towards pre recorded
@@AndrewBrowner I was thinking that when I was watching it, to see if they were the same, but it means going to find videos that were both rated the same on the Plainly difficult scale and comparing I might do that later today, I'm just hoping he replies first Ngl, I'll laugh if he's seen this but he's just grinning and waiting for someone to actually do the work and find out before swooping in to confirm
@@Neppy22 That's what got me thinking! I was sure I saw the scale on carpet once I've got the chance now to go back through and check, so I guess I will I dont know why I need to know this, but since i had the thought, it wont leave my head.
Gotta say, I just love the labeled comments you put into your vids. All the disaster stuff is so grim, as it should be, but I enjoy the little bits of sarcasm you employ with little labels you add.
Moral of the story: ALWAYS recheck or remeasure the data. You could say it was the fault of the guy who originally took the measurements and wrote a 0 that looked like a 6
Personally I think it was a failure of everyone involved, pretty much everyone did something wrong and it eventually led up to this event occurring. The engineers designed it inadequately with flaws in its safety measures, the technician was careless by not following the protocols set in place to prevent things like that occurring and even earlier than that being the person who's poor handwriting made it look like a 6 on the measurement instead of a 0
It's morbidly terrifying that back in the day the world more or less tested the limits of nuclear energy by slapping two pieces of radioactive materials together until someone could taste the color blue and melted into goop.
A simple, removable shield over the lower hemisphere during assembly seems like an obvious precaution... At least the bits werent being propped on with a screwdriver.
It's gotta be quite the feeling to know you've already given yourself a long painful death in the seconds after you make a mistake like that. I can't imagine how I would take it
Seeing the test set up at the start my first question was "Why do they not set up the test and add the radioactive material the very last??" Close followed by "Why are people who work with cores so allergic to remote operated equippment"
All of that takes extra time and you've still got to do a dozen of these tests before friday and if you do them all by the book it'll take until next thursday _at least_ and your supervisor's been on your case for months now...and suddenly taking shortcuts looks extremely appealing. And after all, you've done this a hundred times before, you know how it goes, what can go wrong, right?
You cannot do it practically. Suspending the radioactive material in the air is a bad idea. Best you can do is move the lower assembly into position first and use robotic manipulators to move the upper potion into position. That said, robotic manipulators have limits on how much radiation they can tolerate.
@@sonicmastersword8080 i would suspend the upper sphere and raise the lower with hydraulics. 100% radioactive proof and if a line fails the core seperates by gravity. Same works for any reflectors type experiment. Work against gravity, use hydraulics, any failure results in the experiment returning to default.
The thing that amazes me about these criticality accidents is that there's so much manual input required by the technicians to perform these experiments. I don't think filing the proper paperwork or having a supervisor watching him work would have saved this man, sadly. In fact, in all likelihood the supervisor would be just as dead. As the IAEA suggested, the protocols were adequate but did not and would not have stopped this. It's unlikely the weight difference would have been caught by a supervisor or anyone going over filed paperwork. The only way this accident doesn't have is if the subcritical assembly and reflector assembly are physically prevented from having any contact with one another until it is time to begin the experiment. Something that should be done by a better mechanical apparatus operated by an external safety lock, rather than expecting the technicians to be perfect all the time.
I was about to comment the exact same thing. The design should not allow the top hemisphere from entering the lower part. It defeats the purpose of having the lower part raise up. Protocols are a poor substitute for good design.
It would be interesting to know what safety upgrades they undertook after this incident to help mitigate it. There are often a lot of underlying design choices that seem obvious to us for the apartus that don't make logical sense once you know I'm greater detail how the experiment is actually meant to be carried out.
@@princeofcupspoc9073I think the general message here is that operator error is inevitable. Slippery gloves trying to handle a smooth half globe will end badly at some point if safeguards are not in place.
Tendency??!?? It was the Precedent-Generating Standard Operating Procedure that never failed the Russians for at least 4 decades!!! Oh... Your comment may have been a rather covertly-deployed adeptly-issued semi-dry understatement. Never mind, then.
While true that some get unfairly blamed, sometimes it really is the case where you put a ton of safety devices and procedures and they're all undone by complacency or one person electing to bypass them.
It’s morbid…. but very interesting to think about the moment after receiving a fatal dose. What must that feel like? To mentally grasp how terrible the situation is, but to physically feel ok for a while.
Only feel fine for a few hours and then it gets worse hour on hour from there. Imagine your arms having to be amputated tomorrow but but they are working fine right now, that is insane!
I like your vids man, great stuff. Maybe you could do a super short one explaining why there are so many units for measuring the exposures like Gr, Gy, SV and how top read them, when they best apply etc?
Because these units measure different things. Exposure (how much electric charge the ionization created in the substance) is measured in roentgen, absorbed dose (how much energy was transferred to the substance by radiation) is measured in Gray or Rad, and equivalent dose (how much damage the ionization caused to biological tissue) is calculated either from exposure (then it's measured in Rem) or from absorbed dose (then it's measured in Sievert), by multiplying it by a certain factor depending on the type of radiation (usually 1 for gamma and beta regardless of energy, for neutrons and alpha different coefficients are used depending on the particle's energy). The standard units are Gy and Sv. For simplicity, for gamma radiation it's basically 1 Gy = 1 Sv = 100 Rad = 100 Roentgen = 100 Rem. In reality though, the thing that radiation counters measure is just activity (number of particles hitting the counter and causing ionization), and the dose rate it displays is calculated from counts per second based on the counter's calibration.
@PlainlyDifficult - I love that you provide bibliographies and source lists so we can go do further reading if we want. I've been a documentary addict since before the internet even existed, and I am here to tell you that you do a really good job, IMNSHO.
I've been living in Sarov since I was born and I never knew that this happened. Before this video the only bad thing that I knew about were the forest fires of 2012. Anyway, nice video dude. Very informative👍
You know, i noticed between this and the one at Los Alamos, gravity was used in both instances. Why not turn the experiment horizontal instead of vertical. Micro measurements would be easier to obtain, and with a screw arrangement, accidents would have been cut to almost zero chance...just wondering.
Because, a sphere inside of a hollowed out sphere its size in cavity would only have that spherical core roll out and fall onto the floor. The reflector should've either been on a hinge or rail, so that it didn't have to be lifted above the contraption.
@@ReiAnikaAyanami a non spherical assembly wouldn’t go supercritical, due to the geometry. Any other shape, the neutron flux would escape the core and prevent fission. They later designed the Godiva device to do the same thing, while everyone was in another room safely. That device was destroyed due to a somewhat similar incident occurred, just as it was designed to do. Blow apart, rather than blow up and that time, without killing anyone. It was followed by Godiva II, which survived and I believe it’s on display at Los Alamos.
I dont know ... any enviroment where you slipping what you are holding = death is an unsafe enviroment for me. And yes i know that he had bascially the worst outcome but it should have been possible to build a rig that you can only lower it mechanically and with that you dont risk slipping. And/or can even do it from outside the room
It would have been so easy to have the upper half assembled in one place then the lower half assembled and then remotely moved under the the upper half and then raised.
@@StephenJohnson-jb7xe exactly and the cost for that is relatively low but of course it requires awareness of what you are doing has a risk of failing ... and often enough things are not tough completely through.
@@aaronpaul5990 This is one of those things that are only thought about after something has gone wrong, and because it hadn't gone wrong yet the people writing the procedures don't see a reason to change it.
The Russians have a general disregard for nuclear safety look up the echo and November class subs and the staggering number of reactor incidents that happened
It would have been enough to add the fissile material core only when ALL the other components were already in place. In any reactor the fissile material is the LAST thing that's added.
I'm out camping in the back woods and taking a shit on 5 gallon bucket watching this with my coffee overlooking a huge valley coverd in green it domt get better than this.
So basically nobody thought to have a steel safety rod that goes through the assembly above the core when assembling the top half, so any dropped hemispheres can't enclose the core. Two holes and a piece of pipe. Come on, guys....
you should consider covering the Tangiwai railway disaster, which occurred in New Zealand 1953. A lahar would damage the Tangiwai railbridge, which would collapse under the Christmas eve Express and plunging it into the still raging river. At the time it was the eighth deadliest railway crash in the world
Very interesting, this is an incident I've never heard of before. Every time I'm thinking about Cherenkov radiation I wonder how the Tschernobyl reactor looked like when it went off, it must have been a magnificent view.
I find your videos fascinating and highly educational. I do have one suggestion though : you often skip between various radiation units, even within the same video. Is there a way you could use a standard unit so that it’s easier to compare levels of exposure from one video to another. Thanks for your work. NOSS
When learning about nuclear reactors as a kid-- This is how I thought/figrued they worked. Later, upon learning of rods and such, I found it very confusing.
Why on earth was it SOP for this test to have the fissile material already in place while the assembly of reflectors around it took place? I mean is it too hard to build your apparatus, evacuate the lab and then have the fissile material introduced remotely? Also, I'm not sure that "if something goes wrong the assemly will melt" is really a safety feature...
Even not remotely. It would have been enough to add the fissile material, even manually, only when all the other pieces of the apparatus were already in place and the lower shell was lowered to the maximum.
@@LinasVepstas It never reached enough temperature, because the shells were not completely closed. Ironically, the technichan obtained a stable reaction.
Just goes to show that no matter how dangerous something is, people will still skip steps and ignore safety directions. Overconfidence and a bad safety culture do not make good bedfellows.
Honestly that’s a pretty well thought out setup. It’s too bad he got hurt, but you can really see how they learned from their past mistakes and did their best to make it safe.
officials evacuating building: "not to alarm you guys, but a rogue nuclear reactor has assaulted a technician and taken over the test chamber... we need to have a robot go poke it with a stick."
Have you ever heard of the east German Wismut? There was no major accident, but they dumped low yield uranium ore on a big hill in town and ppl didn't know what it was and used the stuff in their gardens and to play on them. Would make an interesting story I think.
It's also pretty heartbreaking what happened to the miners. They had no idea what they were dealing with and suffered horrible health issues, especially lung cancer. Even then, doctors couldn't be honest about the actual cause of the disease.
The same was done in USA, with asbestos. Literally people driving stop there to ask the name of those mountains. No mountains, just asbestos piles crunching the town. They even use the stuff for the school park,etc.. Still there, still cleaning.
That blue flash and heat wave to the face is one of the scarier things i can imagine. Poor guy, also thats why such places have rules. But still....poor guy😔
I feel like maybe they could have learned from the demon core accident that putting the reflector on top where it can be dropped is not so good. They could have assembled it horizontally to prevent these sorts of things from happening?
I imagined how these technicians could prank each other with an ultra bright blue LEDs they hide into the test equipment and turn on at the most exciting moment.
Just one thing; this whole apparatus was designed to create a "criticality event", so this was the desired outcome. Of course, the criticality wasn't supposed to occur with someone within the shielded room, and this aberration made it a 'criticality accident'.
I wonder if the church was destroyed in the Soviet era, and rebuilt after? It happened in Moscow, the great cathedral was blown up and was going to be replaced by a big Soviet monument, only the money ran out, and they only finished the foundations... so filled them with water and decided it was the people's huge swimming pool instead.
@@worldcomicsreview354 and then they made that back into a cathedral after the collapse of the USSR. Meanwhile the orthodox church now walks in step with Putin, a former KGB officer and tool of the state that persecuted them ... but is ok, he's the defender of tradition etc. Can't make this madness up 😅
May i take a moment to point out that this video series features ads that are placed in sensible positions within the video, and i greatly appreciate this.
Man, I didn't expect that someone from another non-Slavic country would talk about such a small city with a population of 98,000 people. I'm from Sarov myself, so it was very interesting to listen to you)
Best part of the criticality videos other than the obvious great information and narration: The vibrating source or vibrating person who has received a lethal dose. Great touch! Please keep them coming!
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I really get a kick out of when anything goes very bad you have the characters say "Balls".
have you ever made a video on the titan II incident where the guy dropped a socket and punctured the outer skin of the missile in the silo? a single socket defeated a nuclear missile and almost caused a broken arrow incident,just one slip by a mechanic
Have you already covered the guy who looked straight down the barrel of a particle accelerator and had a proton beam shot through his eye at near the speed of light?
Also I'm in NE London!
Which episode is the worst incident to happen on your scale of 1 to 9 ?
"Hey I dropped the lid, caused an ongoing criticality incident, and received a lethal dose of radiation".
"Well, we know just the guy to go back in there and retrieve the lid..."
Hey its either two people get a lethal dose or one person gets two lethal doses
"Look at the bright side... You can be the first man in history to literally drop dead twice..."
"Well, your name is now Spock.. Go back in there and at least take the thing apart..."
You made the mess, you clean it up.
🤔 he wouldn't have ended up more dead, so after a couple of days the result would have been the same, but I wonder if increasing his dose would have made him suffer more or less in those few days. If he died quicker, maybe less suffering... but idk exactly how much more painful the radiation sickness could have been, I'm not a medical expert at all.
The robot didn't have the same ethical issue. If it weren't for the robot I could have been totally convinced that plainly difficult just misspoke and meant to say this happened in the 60s and 70s (he did also say Russian federation though, so that would date it more recent too). It just seems like an incident that would he set during the cold war.
"And a blue flash of light"
That man is about to have a very bad day.
That's one "light" you don't ever want to walk towards.
Ironically if you do SEE that light your already SCREWED...
@@damien9683 Depends. If you see it through like 3m of water, you're probably completely fine.
And now there's an excellent mean prank to use on scientists with experience with radiation... Rig up a camera flash with a blue-tinted plastic filter...
Ah, the marvel of Cerenkov radiation. Something I hope never to see.
What blows my mind is that the flash of light occurs in the fluid inside of the eyeball 😳
I thought I had read about every nuclear event ever, but the russians are a gift that keeps on giving
Yeah, they always know how to take a problem and escalate it into a Disaster; especially when it comes to Atomics...
Talking about gifts. Looks like Chernobyl is coming back to haunt us some more.
I know right.
I thouth that too, until i find this channel, and boy i was wrong,...
Ah - nuclear ignorance is established way beyond any political or economical border….
All right. Demon Core 2: Extended Criticality Boogallo.
lol!
Lmao
Ugg: Aah! don't close those two halves!
Family: I can do that!
Came to say this but took an arrow to the knee
Sequels are always bad
You know it's going to be a bad day when you suddenly taste the color blue...
he was dead the moment it happened the cells aren't reproducing anymore once they're gone they're gone it's just a matter of how long until each cells breaks down
You become a meat product instead of a living human meanwhile your brain still functions.
@@MrJob91 like what happens when you pour salt on frog legs
@@Aaron-zu3xn exactly
unless you have synesthesia
Gotta say as tragic as the guy's pointless premature end was, hearing how he dropped off his perch less than three days after the incident was kind of a relief. A pity poor Ouchi and Shinohara had to suffer a much more drawn out fate.
Masato & Hisashi will later be part of the Tokaimura Reprocessing Plant Accident just 2 years later.
Did you know that nuclear technicians can't buy life insurance?
They can only get half-life insurance.
Only for negative spin positrons emitted by nuclei with a cross-section less than 0.1(6) barns
@@oscar_charlie So that would be a no...?
And I said "resonator? I barely know her!"
BzZxXz, B zzz,Bass, Bzzx
Why do we have to wear these ridiculous ties?
Already could gather that this is going to be "Russian Demon Core" amazing
Yep, I knew it from just the thumbnail!
Demon core
Again
As Russian I cannot imagine what you had to go through to gather all this information! Great job and thank you!
Мдауж с учётом того ,что никто ТОЧНО не знает, что произошло на маяке, это был подвиг.
@@c0mbo What
@@forgonenapster8888 I think it's something in the lines of "Considering that no one trully knows what exactly happened, it's an achievement".
P.S. I don't speak russian but as a bulgarian I can understand a bit. Hope this helped.
He just read the report, da? o_O
@@c0mbo Yeah, nobody knows, this is all so big a mystery. Maybe it was aliens?
I read a book about every criticality accident... That damned blue flash is when you know you're cooked!
I can't believe you own a magical book that transcends time and space and knows every criticality event that will happen
@@aansherina4536 You dont have one?
@SleepyBear Harry Potter and the Chamber of Beryllium.
Blue flash and in an instant full body internal "sunburn" from hell... (if you want to scare someone working with radiation to death take a picture of them with a flash...)
@@a64738 that's hysterical
I really appreciate your video editing and narration style! No creepy music or hyperbolic storytelling-just the facts and a good dose of humor to balance out the video topic. :)
Having read the IAEA report I'm not sure that having a supervisor present would have saved the technician. The prompt criticality seems to have been caused by him dropping the top reflector on to the fissile sphere. Sounds more like a design deficiency of the test apparatus combined with a simple accident more than a breach of safety regulations. RIP technician :(
The other technician would have supposedly told him not to manually handle it alone like that.
No safety chain on top reflector.
No clearance blocks on lower reflector (to assure 3x-5x gap) before applying hydraulic pressure.
Assembled vertically, with gravity holding parts together.
ALL bad design choices.
I may have gotten the wrong idea from this video, but it sounded like one of the issues was an incorrect measurement, which may have been prevented by someone double checking.
I feel like a rule that requires the radiation source to be the last thing added and the first thing removed would avoid myriad potential problems.
@@NecromancyForKids Yes that too!
I find it interesting that both this incident and the Demon Core incident would have been prevented if the experiment had simply been performed horizontally. One would think the sort of super smart, big brain people that design this type of experiment would recognize the potential hazards of "Spontaneous Gravitational Assembly!"
good point
There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom.
How do you keep the core in horizontaly?
@@PatrickOMulligan Hang it?
Heck, the apparatus to hang it can also be a preventative measures so two half can never become stuck.
@@trirahmat5384 I think they did do that in the end.....
I respect the ingenuity of whoever decided that what Louis Slotin's dragon tickler needed to be safe was a floor jack. I mean, he wasn't _right,_ but he was ingenious.
"BALLS" in big letters had me choking on my coffee 🤣
We all noticed it wasn't sunny the day you narrated this. Here, have some virtual sun 🌞 from Michigan, we got plenty
I'm getting some nice London weather in Ohio. Cold and raining at the moment.
We're good ta, for the first time in 264 days
@@bmstylee We've got some beautiful Londonesque weather here in the Toronto area too - windy, chilly and cloudy. So, typical Lake Ontario weather, until summer batters us into submission with sudden and absurd heat, humidity, mosquitos, and blackflies. Canadian weather means never doing anything by halves.
@@neuralmute ♪I'll die with the black flies licking my bones
In North Ontario-o-o!
In North Ontario!♪
@@neuralmute I should have seen this 45 degrees in the middle of May coming. I disassembled my propane heater in my garage gym. Which means it will be snowing next week. It did snow 2 weeks ago.
Remember: lethal dose of gamma radiation doesn't = hulk
lethal dose of gamma radiation = death
you do get swole, just not in that way
@@LeviathanRX You get liquified
You mean that you don't turn green and your molecules swell up?
A lethal dose of anything tends to be..... lethal !!!
even the comic has explained why the hulk was a special case.
by saying gamma radiation is connected to THE DEVIL HIMSELF which explains why it either kills everything harder then anything else but a blackhole could do or turns you into a destruction bound monster like hulk
I feel like if the dose he received was nearly double what was known to be lethal in the past, I would have asked for ALL the morphine, versus undergoing surgeries only to have the same outcome :(
I'd be like "just shoot me in the head"
@@alternator7893 Begging for the bullet by morning aye?
"Bro just gimme some morphine and some pizza and lemme watch TV till the end..."
@@onglt27 I mean, If given a choice it seems like an easy one, a bullet to the head is fast and imo a lot better than a slow death by radiation poisoning
They did. Either that or complete sedation.
This is seriously the greatest youtube channel I have ever come across. It combines nuclear science and picking a part accidents. Amazing stuff, can't get enough
I studied this stuff in college and you have shown me way more events happened than even I was able to find and read about.
The Hazmat teams have gone from stepping on each others feet to having a robot parked on them. Hopefully they get steel toed boots.
Nah they were still standing on sach other, he just didn’t comment on it.
In the US, when i worked with material, a "hazmat" team would not cover any radioactive accident. Only Rad-Con team would do this because of the expertise required. Hazmat has giant footed clumsy oaths that could pass for decent janitors. Techniques and knowledge required to clean up an accident site are not in their perview. Sorry to put it bluntly, but Hazmat wouldn't cut it.
@@jerrynewberry2823 as a hazmat ops guy I can completely agree. Our training is “if it’s radioactive, go away. No, no, farther.”
I used to dread having a fatal workplace accident. There’s something so cold and impersonal about the follow-up to an industrial accident.
what's stopped the dread from persisting now?
@@asmokeus I don’t work
Just think his life could have been saved if the top half of the sphere had a handle.
hahaha as I was reading I thought it was going something like "just think his life could have been saved if the top half of his body had been amputated" hahaha
Safety chain.
Or better yet, safety blocks that would prevent close assembly of reflectors until ready.
Maybe lower the bottom half well below so there is no way they can touch. Build a ring on the top lid for top half to perfectly line up and where it can't fall in. Maybe one day of cutting and welding could have saved his life.
@@haroldhenderson2824 Nah, a safety screwdriver will do it
PD wasn't super-detailed in the telling of the tale, but I think that might be the significance of the bad measurement. If his safety device was meant for an overly large top shell compared to the one he was actually using, it could have slipped right through something that was supposed to stop exactly this from happening. That 205 compared to 265 mm is pretty significant (over two inches for you Liberians) if it's extra space in a hole.
Even if the technician broke the rules thus causing his injuries, you still can’t help but feel sorry for him. RIP.
Honestly having done the paperwork and having another person standing by would not have prevented the upper part slipping from his hands, the procedure as written was risky.
His supervisor was probably saved by not being there with him.
How stupid do you have to be to think any of this is a good idea.
Risk = 99.9%
Benefit = 0.1%
“We can probably predict what happened next”
TH-cam decided that was the perfect point to cut in a ... LIFE INSURANCE commercial 😂
That's amazing 😂
Hilarious
"Interested in handling subcritical cores with lax safety attitude? Then have we got the product for you!"
@@johnladuke6475 Rather stick a penny in the breaker and take a bath with a toaster...
Mine was a trailer for the new Loki TV series...the one where they blame Loki for completely effin' up the universe.
Poor Zakharov. If only he'd filled out the paperwork.
Yes. It might saved his life, sarcasm aside. Maybe the top was recently oiled? Maybe the ladder was wobbly? Maybe he was not strong enough to hold the cover? We DO NOT know what might have been found out if his superiors knew what he was attempting.
Then he could have killed a supervisor too. Classic case of "I've done this a hundred times. Piece of cake."
@@jfan4reva You are right, there is no such thing as reliance on routine in that work.
For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost... it sounds silly, but the missing paperwork might have resulted in a double-check and saved him. To be fair, whoever checks the paperwork might have been just as lax, and nothing would have changed.
Maybe if he did the paperwork he might've gone into "do everything as perfectly as possible" mode instead of "shortcuts are great" mode?
Ohh perfect timing! Just got home from work not long ago, and made myself a coffee. Definitely a nice way to start my weekend this morning
No better way to start a weekend morning like a criticality accident video 😅
You would think, in cases like this and the Demon core, where if the two halves of the shell touch, you are instantly doomed to a horrible death, you would be extremely careful, to a ridiculous level, of making it impossible for the two halves to be together.
Ok, so I asked this before but I really need to know. When you show the Plainly Difficult scale rating, do you record the point to the number for each video individually? Or is each number point a pre-recorded shot that you just filmed for each value on the scale.
I don't know why I need to know this but I do
i dont have the time or desire but im sure if you goto a few videos and look at the numbers, how theyre positioned and the backdrop im sure you can tell if they were all filmed at once or in seperate events.. i notice the 4 in this video is clocked at an angle go check another video
id lean towards pre recorded
@@AndrewBrowner I was thinking that when I was watching it, to see if they were the same, but it means going to find videos that were both rated the same on the Plainly difficult scale and comparing
I might do that later today, I'm just hoping he replies first
Ngl, I'll laugh if he's seen this but he's just grinning and waiting for someone to actually do the work and find out before swooping in to confirm
Hah, the same thing went through my head a few videos back- prerecorded would be the most efficient, that's probably how I'd do it.
I think they're different. Todays scale is neater and without going and checking I'd swear some of the scales are on carpet? I need to know now too...
@@Neppy22 That's what got me thinking! I was sure I saw the scale on carpet once
I've got the chance now to go back through and check, so I guess I will
I dont know why I need to know this, but since i had the thought, it wont leave my head.
Wow.. sounds like one of these oddly shaped zeros being read as 6..
Wow, it’s not the demon core!
It's the Demon Core's Russian cousin.
Demon Cores equally touchy cousin!!!🤬😱😵
It is the демон core !
@@Ganiscol It's the Димон core
Russians will get it (:
@@jules6511 Is this supposed to be funny ?
Gotta say, I just love the labeled comments you put into your vids. All the disaster stuff is so grim, as it should be, but I enjoy the little bits of sarcasm you employ with little labels you add.
Moral of the story: ALWAYS recheck or remeasure the data.
You could say it was the fault of the guy who originally took the measurements and wrote a 0 that looked like a 6
It was the fault of the fool who thought he was immortal and could do it alone.
Personally I think it was a failure of everyone involved, pretty much everyone did something wrong and it eventually led up to this event occurring. The engineers designed it inadequately with flaws in its safety measures, the technician was careless by not following the protocols set in place to prevent things like that occurring and even earlier than that being the person who's poor handwriting made it look like a 6 on the measurement instead of a 0
that kind of mistake happens a lot in my job, we have some men with absolutely terrible handwriting
That poor robot, like Rodney Dangerfield said “I get no respect!”
It's morbidly terrifying that back in the day the world more or less tested the limits of nuclear energy by slapping two pieces of radioactive materials together until someone could taste the color blue and melted into goop.
Another case of "Every Rule Written In Blood"
Every rule written in blue glow😊
1:57 Love the "shocked" clocktower face
When I foolishly trigger the cause of my own demise I can only hope that my last words will be "Balls!".
A simple, removable shield over the lower hemisphere during assembly seems like an obvious precaution... At least the bits werent being propped on with a screwdriver.
Even better to add the fissile material only when all the other pieces were already in place.
I'd have put the shield on tracks, to slide out of the way during assembly.
It's gotta be quite the feeling to know you've already given yourself a long painful death in the seconds after you make a mistake like that. I can't imagine how I would take it
i'd have the decency to remove the lid instead of having colleagues sort the mess.
"Elysium?"
Seeing the test set up at the start my first question was "Why do they not set up the test and add the radioactive material the very last??"
Close followed by "Why are people who work with cores so allergic to remote operated equippment"
All of that takes extra time and you've still got to do a dozen of these tests before friday and if you do them all by the book it'll take until next thursday _at least_ and your supervisor's been on your case for months now...and suddenly taking shortcuts looks extremely appealing. And after all, you've done this a hundred times before, you know how it goes, what can go wrong, right?
You cannot do it practically.
Suspending the radioactive material in the air is a bad idea. Best you can do is move the lower assembly into position first and use robotic manipulators to move the upper potion into position. That said, robotic manipulators have limits on how much radiation they can tolerate.
@@sonicmastersword8080 i would suspend the upper sphere and raise the lower with hydraulics. 100% radioactive proof and if a line fails the core seperates by gravity.
Same works for any reflectors type experiment. Work against gravity, use hydraulics, any failure results in the experiment returning to default.
Keep up the amazing work, love your videos and always worth the watch.
The thing that amazes me about these criticality accidents is that there's so much manual input required by the technicians to perform these experiments.
I don't think filing the proper paperwork or having a supervisor watching him work would have saved this man, sadly. In fact, in all likelihood the supervisor would be just as dead. As the IAEA suggested, the protocols were adequate but did not and would not have stopped this. It's unlikely the weight difference would have been caught by a supervisor or anyone going over filed paperwork.
The only way this accident doesn't have is if the subcritical assembly and reflector assembly are physically prevented from having any contact with one another until it is time to begin the experiment. Something that should be done by a better mechanical apparatus operated by an external safety lock, rather than expecting the technicians to be perfect all the time.
I was about to comment the exact same thing. The design should not allow the top hemisphere from entering the lower part. It defeats the purpose of having the lower part raise up. Protocols are a poor substitute for good design.
It would be interesting to know what safety upgrades they undertook after this incident to help mitigate it. There are often a lot of underlying design choices that seem obvious to us for the apartus that don't make logical sense once you know I'm greater detail how the experiment is actually meant to be carried out.
The video DOES NOT tell you EVERYTHING that happened in perfect detail. You CANNOT draw any such conclusion.
@@saxon215 good point
@@princeofcupspoc9073I think the general message here is that operator error is inevitable. Slippery gloves trying to handle a smooth half globe will end badly at some point if safeguards are not in place.
Feel so bad for the technician. I can't imagine getting a lethal dose of radiation and knowing that I would die horribly.
This channel is gem, change my mind.
There is a tendency to blame everything on the individual who made the mistake, this enables his managers to avoid responsibility.
Tendency??!??
It was the Precedent-Generating Standard Operating Procedure that never failed the Russians for at least 4 decades!!!
Oh...
Your comment may have been a rather covertly-deployed adeptly-issued semi-dry understatement.
Never mind, then.
While true that some get unfairly blamed, sometimes it really is the case where you put a ton of safety devices and procedures and they're all undone by complacency or one person electing to bypass them.
Was he alone in the bloody room, against the regulations? Yes! So shut the f up!
A new Plainly Difficult video? This'll be good
Also, 6.5 days? Holy shit...
I love how you cover this subject uncritically.
If he didn't it leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.
It’s morbid…. but very interesting to think about the moment after receiving a fatal dose. What must that feel like? To mentally grasp how terrible the situation is, but to physically feel ok for a while.
Only feel fine for a few hours and then it gets worse hour on hour from there. Imagine your arms having to be amputated tomorrow but but they are working fine right now, that is insane!
Basically an instant dead man walking sentence. What must one feel? Resignation? Denial? Any hope of a miracle? Or simply shock?
Another excellent production. Thanks for the lesson!
I like your vids man, great stuff. Maybe you could do a super short one explaining why there are so many units for measuring the exposures like Gr, Gy, SV and how top read them, when they best apply etc?
Because these units measure different things. Exposure (how much electric charge the ionization created in the substance) is measured in roentgen, absorbed dose (how much energy was transferred to the substance by radiation) is measured in Gray or Rad, and equivalent dose (how much damage the ionization caused to biological tissue) is calculated either from exposure (then it's measured in Rem) or from absorbed dose (then it's measured in Sievert), by multiplying it by a certain factor depending on the type of radiation (usually 1 for gamma and beta regardless of energy, for neutrons and alpha different coefficients are used depending on the particle's energy).
The standard units are Gy and Sv. For simplicity, for gamma radiation it's basically 1 Gy = 1 Sv = 100 Rad = 100 Roentgen = 100 Rem. In reality though, the thing that radiation counters measure is just activity (number of particles hitting the counter and causing ionization), and the dose rate it displays is calculated from counts per second based on the counter's calibration.
All your videos are great, but I love your nuclear accident documentaries the most! Thank you!
Your videos are the rarest ones that I hit like before watching...
Thank you!
@PlainlyDifficult - I love that you provide bibliographies and source lists so we can go do further reading if we want.
I've been a documentary addict since before the internet even existed, and I am here to tell you that you do a really good job, IMNSHO.
Read Atomic Accidents by James Mc Caffie it's a verry informative book 😊
I've been living in Sarov since I was born and I never knew that this happened. Before this video the only bad thing that I knew about were the forest fires of 2012.
Anyway, nice video dude. Very informative👍
I love the low production value graphics, seriously it ADDS to the overall quality with effort going towards research instead of flashy visuals
You know, i noticed between this and the one at Los Alamos, gravity was used in both instances. Why not turn the experiment horizontal instead of vertical. Micro measurements would be easier to obtain, and with a screw arrangement, accidents would have been cut to almost zero chance...just wondering.
You'd then have to have something to hold the internal radioactive material.
yeah this doesn't really make sense. Would you glue the core or something?
Because, a sphere inside of a hollowed out sphere its size in cavity would only have that spherical core roll out and fall onto the floor.
The reflector should've either been on a hinge or rail, so that it didn't have to be lifted above the contraption.
@@spvillanowhy make it a sphere a then? why not a shape not likely to roll off the table?
@@ReiAnikaAyanami a non spherical assembly wouldn’t go supercritical, due to the geometry. Any other shape, the neutron flux would escape the core and prevent fission.
They later designed the Godiva device to do the same thing, while everyone was in another room safely. That device was destroyed due to a somewhat similar incident occurred, just as it was designed to do. Blow apart, rather than blow up and that time, without killing anyone. It was followed by Godiva II, which survived and I believe it’s on display at Los Alamos.
I love the dry humour in the visual presentations so much.
I dont know ... any enviroment where you slipping what you are holding = death is an unsafe enviroment for me. And yes i know that he had bascially the worst outcome but it should have been possible to build a rig that you can only lower it mechanically and with that you dont risk slipping. And/or can even do it from outside the room
It would have been so easy to have the upper half assembled in one place then the lower half assembled and then remotely moved under the the upper half and then raised.
@@StephenJohnson-jb7xe exactly and the cost for that is relatively low but of course it requires awareness of what you are doing has a risk of failing ... and often enough things are not tough completely through.
@@aaronpaul5990 This is one of those things that are only thought about after something has gone wrong, and because it hadn't gone wrong yet the people writing the procedures don't see a reason to change it.
The Russians have a general disregard for nuclear safety look up the echo and November class subs and the staggering number of reactor incidents that happened
It would have been enough to add the fissile material core only when ALL the other components were already in place. In any reactor the fissile material is the LAST thing that's added.
The lesson is that you can't always trust people to follow instructions, even when those instructions are directly protecting their lives.
A lot of times it's the experienced workers who cause trouble, they're confident to the point where they become lackadaisical.
Working without supervision is the only way to ensure your foot is not stepped on.
I can think of a more immediate example of that inability to follow life-saving instructions.
@@PMA65537 Eh, I think both the Cecil Kelly and SL-1 accidents could have been avoided if there had been some kind of supervision.
Love me some plainly difficult and a coffee in the morning!
Lmao Dyatlov what are u doing here
same except it's evening here
Right here with ya brother ☕
But its the afternoon
I'm out camping in the back woods and taking a shit on 5 gallon bucket watching this with my coffee overlooking a huge valley coverd in green it domt get better than this.
Another swell, informative and cheeky episode.
Thank you!
Love the graphics too.
I love the term "excursion." it makes it sound like the fissile material is just going for a night out on the town with her girlfriends.
Yeah. Watch out she's likely 💥
This was a great video! Well done. Thank you so much for your efforts. I learned a lot. Greetings from Arizona.
So basically nobody thought to have a steel safety rod that goes through the assembly above the core when assembling the top half, so any dropped hemispheres can't enclose the core.
Two holes and a piece of pipe. Come on, guys....
Great videos! Been watching you since January.
7:26 “Let’s check your exposure“
...Guy is standing there glowing.
you should consider covering the Tangiwai railway disaster, which occurred in New Zealand 1953. A lahar would damage the Tangiwai railbridge, which would collapse under the Christmas eve Express and plunging it into the still raging river. At the time it was the eighth deadliest railway crash in the world
Very interesting, this is an incident I've never heard of before.
Every time I'm thinking about Cherenkov radiation I wonder how the Tschernobyl reactor looked like when it went off, it must have been a magnificent view.
I really am out here listening to/watching videos about horrific accidents while camping outside. A bug hitting my tent scared the heck out of me
265mm - 205mm = 60mn. As Maxwell Smart would say, "Missed it by that much".
As we say in Pittsburgh PA
Off by a c-u-nthair.
@@ClickClack_Bam in Oz we say a Bees dick.
Great doc again mate. Sunday morning treats.
I find your videos fascinating and highly educational. I do have one suggestion though : you often skip between various radiation units, even within the same video. Is there a way you could use a standard unit so that it’s easier to compare levels of exposure from one video to another. Thanks for your work. NOSS
Hello from Sarov) It's very amazing to see video on english about my city.
1:57 That tower has seen things, man...
Wow, never thought I would see a TH-cam documentary about my city. Love from Sarov
When learning about nuclear reactors as a kid-- This is how I thought/figrued they worked. Later, upon learning of rods and such, I found it very confusing.
Rest in peace Mr. Zakharov.
ooh Criticality my favorite kind of Plainly Difficult video
Why on earth was it SOP for this test to have the fissile material already in place while the assembly of reflectors around it took place? I mean is it too hard to build your apparatus, evacuate the lab and then have the fissile material introduced remotely? Also, I'm not sure that "if something goes wrong the assemly will melt" is really a safety feature...
Obviously, it didn't melt...
USSR dpnt care comrade
Even not remotely. It would have been enough to add the fissile material, even manually, only when all the other pieces of the apparatus were already in place and the lower shell was lowered to the maximum.
@@LinasVepstas It never reached enough temperature, because the shells were not completely closed. Ironically, the technichan obtained a stable reaction.
Thank you for producing such great content Plainly Difficult, and good day UK!!!🙏👍👻
Just goes to show that no matter how dangerous something is, people will still skip steps and ignore safety directions. Overconfidence and a bad safety culture do not make good bedfellows.
Yeah
No better way to start a Saturday than a Plainly Difficult short documentary =)
Honestly that’s a pretty well thought out setup. It’s too bad he got hurt, but you can really see how they learned from their past mistakes and did their best to make it safe.
Bruh "hurt" ? He died. lol.
Earliest I've ever been for your videos
I do love a good criticality!
It is amazing that procedures are not followed when the consequences can be so dire.
officials evacuating building: "not to alarm you guys, but a rogue nuclear reactor has assaulted a technician and taken over the test chamber... we need to have a robot go poke it with a stick."
"Not again."
Have you ever heard of the east German Wismut?
There was no major accident, but they dumped low yield uranium ore on a big hill in town and ppl didn't know what it was and used the stuff in their gardens and to play on them. Would make an interesting story I think.
It's also pretty heartbreaking what happened to the miners. They had no idea what they were dealing with and suffered horrible health issues, especially lung cancer. Even then, doctors couldn't be honest about the actual cause of the disease.
The same was done in USA, with asbestos. Literally people driving stop there to ask the name of those mountains. No mountains, just asbestos piles crunching the town. They even use the stuff for the school park,etc..
Still there, still cleaning.
That blue flash and heat wave to the face is one of the scarier things i can imagine. Poor guy, also thats why such places have rules. But still....poor guy😔
I feel like maybe they could have learned from the demon core accident that putting the reflector on top where it can be dropped is not so good.
They could have assembled it horizontally to prevent these sorts of things from happening?
Yes, but where's the *fun* in doing things the safe way?
It's surprising there wasn't a system to lock the top reflector in place, or a tether to prevent it from falling.
Watched enough of these that turning on my PC and seeing the blue light makes me nervous.
A brief history of: Deepwater Horizon? I’d be into it
I imagined how these technicians could prank each other with an ultra bright blue LEDs they hide into the test equipment and turn on at the most exciting moment.
Just one thing; this whole apparatus was designed to create a "criticality event", so this was the desired outcome. Of course, the criticality wasn't supposed to occur with someone within the shielded room, and this aberration made it a 'criticality accident'.
We're talkin about the weather. Slow & calm delivery.
1:56
The look on that clocks face is not one of approval.
1:57 nicely designed emoji right beneath the clock on the tower!
1:57
The church realizing its now in a closed city for nuclear testing:
D:
Lol, I didn't notice that.
Well they can still hold critical mass.
I wonder if the church was destroyed in the Soviet era, and rebuilt after? It happened in Moscow, the great cathedral was blown up and was going to be replaced by a big Soviet monument, only the money ran out, and they only finished the foundations... so filled them with water and decided it was the people's huge swimming pool instead.
@@thetransformatorium7980 God damn you. Ha ha
@@worldcomicsreview354 and then they made that back into a cathedral after the collapse of the USSR. Meanwhile the orthodox church now walks in step with Putin, a former KGB officer and tool of the state that persecuted them ... but is ok, he's the defender of tradition etc. Can't make this madness up 😅
May i take a moment to point out that this video series features ads that are placed in sensible positions within the video, and i greatly appreciate this.
Man, I didn't expect that someone from another non-Slavic country would talk about such a small city with a population of 98,000 people. I'm from Sarov myself, so it was very interesting to listen to you)
Best part of the criticality videos other than the obvious great information and narration: The vibrating source or vibrating person who has received a lethal dose. Great touch! Please keep them coming!