It's ok, your faithful servants are still here to consume your soup. Fun fact: I was making a giant pot of chicken tortilla soup when you uploaded this. Edit: ok, I've gotten through the whole thing. I legitimately cried a bit during the oral histories bit, that was very difficult to listen to.
I'd like to say it's one of the people that can't handle having their already present notions challenged doing it, but the first 5 minutes really didn't target too many groups yet.
The testimony of the father was really sad and actually make me cried, while that defender of the soviet testimony was really insighful of that era, and its a really strong quote in his last line. "If thats what a free man does, than there no money for his funeral"
My grandfather made a good point once, he said “Sure Chernobyl killed a few hundred to a few thousand, but have you ever wondered how many died in the coal mines or as a result of coal power?” He is a staunch supporter of nuclear power and while I think it is not a truly perfect source of power, I think it is part of our future, and you’re going to have to get used to it.
@@3MGPLUGofl oh boy burning coal isn’t affecting a town or city or a country or a state or even a whole country, it impacts the world as a by product of burning it creates greenhouse gases. Oil spills have reeked utter ruin upon marine environments. The toxic leftovers from coal mining in Appalachia have poisoned water supplies across the region with heavy metals and radioactive substances. In Kentucky, thanks to the systematic mountain top coal mining, the flooding in 2022 was devastating and reports say it’s only going to get worse because the water cycle has been severely disrupted. Leaded gasoline is probably the cause of a wave of violent crime beginning sometime in the 70’s and lasting until the 90’s. Lead causes cognitive impairment and increased aggression. It’s even suspected it correlates heavily with IQ differences between effected and non effected populations. Nuclear energy has its dangers. Environmental impacts from uranium mining? Almost certainly. Issues with waste disposal? Definitely. Issues with safety? Yes but they are all manageable. When we look at the issues with nuclear power in the US we see one common thread: greed and NIMBY panics. Although I can’t blame the not in my back yard folks because for example with the 3 mile island incident greed and ass covering overtook all. Even in the repair phase of the project the private company involved was reckless to save MONEY. At the end of the day the nuclear gold rush in the US wasn’t so much s problem with nuclear energy but the power and politics behind it. We made cheap inefficient plants that created more waste. We skimped on safety for workers and community members alike. I’m not saying nuclear alone is the answer to all our energy needs and problems but it’s relatively safe compared to its alternatives and many of the previous issues have been solved. We just need to prioritize those things over profit. The navy has used nuclear energy safely for decades and their track record is impeccable. There’s a simple reason: the military has an incentive structure that supersedes profit and cost efficiency - military readiness. If our goal is safe clean energy that’s a goal we can if not accomplish do far better on. If only our incentive, our end goal, was safe clean energy and the funding and incentives reflected that. Peoples behaviors track their incentives. Profit, like with healthcare, doesn’t belong in the nuclear energy industry.
@@3MGPLUG Depends on your idea of "liveable", but Centralia is an example of exactly that happening. But yeah you're pretty much right there. Nuclear power is a technology that should have been used to bridge between fossil fuels and renewables. These days it makes no sense to expand using nuclear power and there really isn't much future in it as far as large scale energy production goes. If you're going to spend ~15 years, billions of dollars, and pose a risk to the safety of people and the environment, build a dam instead.
@@Kingdomkey123678That depends on the regulations. Ever heard of vocational licensing? Don't get me wrong I want my doctor to be licensed but a hair stylist doesn't need hundreds of hours of practice and to pay for a license.
I love how this started off as another semi-upbeat and humerous video, and by the end transformed into one of the most scathing critiques of the powers that be I've ever seen.
@@dasraffnix9471 I was watching this while painting and sort of zoned out until the voice recording of the man talking about how his daughter passed away. Even though it's just a voice actor, knowing that there is some father out there who had to live through it - idk but my heart goes out to that family. At that point I realized that he (soup emporium) was NOT going to make another light-hearted satirical video essay about something like this and wow... coal mining isn't an option and more innovative methods have a long way to go, but this can't be the best option.
@@whyaminartkidsounds like you took the wrong message from chernobyl. This wasn't nuclear power's fault, and this physically cannot happen to western nuclear plants. Literally, the physical mechanism that caused this doesn't exist in properly designed reactors.
@@LogjammerDbaggagecling-qr5ds He didn't even mention it and also even as a recent grad MSc in Nuclear Physics, that's wrong. Yes the takeaway is that Nuclear Energy isn't the issue... Itself. But the at times lax regulations imposed on it are what causes these issues and it's demonstrated by the now defunct regulatory body of Japan, NISA. After the IAEA report, rather than enforcing some proper safety measures of a tsunami of that magnitude, they basically said that it won't happen, only for later to happen with a bigger tsunami. It's a heaping clown show.
I don't know what to make of this. It feels too good for TH-cam, but it's also exactly the kind of thing TH-cam needs, where else could you put a documentary like this? I just want this to get the recognition it deserves, this is a masterpiece, and you are a great man for treating the subject of Chernobyl for the first time with empathy and respect for the victims, their land and their futures.
I'll admit, I was a little afraid at some parts of this video that you wouldn't acknowledge certain points, that you'd leave something out to push a narrative or something. But having watched the whole video, I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that you included damn near everything I could think of to discuss and then some, and you addressed it all tactfully and with the respect such a complex topic deserves. What a poignant, well-researched piece this was; I sincerely hope you get more views.
Honestly, I think that your thesis is very good, and I am extremely pro-nuclear, which is why I need to always remember that Chernobyl was awful. I think that it is worth considering that the extreme horrific nature of those disasters is what allows Nuclear to be so safe: all future nuclear power plants have to be able to withstand the worst possible earthquake in their region as a direct result of fukushima, and Chernobyl helped to ensure that we phased out systems that would create that kind of a meltdown. I want more GEN-IV, because with them come the same kind of potential standarization that allowed for the RBMK reactors to become so prolific, as well as reduced risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, but more importantly: I want gas & coal to be held to the same standards we have right now for nuclear. I don't want nuclear to be deregulated, because I don't trust the free market to not cut those kinds of corners, I want coal & natural gas to be treated with the same kind of disposal standards that cause nuclear to be so expensive.
Fully agree with pro nuclear, it's way more efficient and sustainable than coal, loads cleaner too, but uranium leaves far too much waste with a shelf life that's way to long, if we could get everyone on board with thorium and educate everyone about the benefits we could easily meet out ever growing need for energy with alot less risk in the long-term
I want coal and gas power plant to implement an emission standard (ie: particle & chemical scrubber at the smoke stack for coal, and then CO2 scrubbers for both coal and gas) to the point there's not even an argument to not continue using them.
yeah its kind of crazy to me how we hold nuclear to such a high standard, as we should, because of its potential for massive destruction and death it can cause yet we dont do the same for coal and gas and the millions and millions of deaths it has caused by polluting the air.
What about higher standards for solar and wind? You can't build solar farms without destroying ecosystems. Coal has contributed to the greatest advancements in history (from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Age) but is also responsible for some pollution. Can society continue advancing while relying on a source of energy that's available less than 50% of the time. Maybe if the entire planet was covered or if solar panels orbited it society could continue advancing but when all the trees are cut down how will that affect oxygen (trees are responsible for 30% but "Our approach to forest management can have implications for our oceans. With their potential to either release or absorb CO2, there is a growing focus on managing forests to enhance their capacity to capture and store it. Thus, healthy forests can take in carbon that the oceans would otherwise absorb." (and result in ocean acidifcation). Fewer trees also means nothing to absorb rain which means more flooding every time it rains. Without trees, birds would be easier prey which would mean insect populations would not be controlled. When Mao wanted sparrows destroyed the locust population ballooned and ate the crops which contributed to the Great Chinese Famine which was responsible for 15-55 million deaths. Another example of removing something from the ecosystem, "In the 70 years of the wolves' absence, the entire Yellowstone ecosystem had fallen out of balance. Coyotes ran rampant, and the elk population exploded, overgrazing willows and aspens. Without those trees, songbirds began to decline, beavers could no longer build their dams and riverbanks started to erode." Then there's the 300x more solar waste problem which will be toxic forever (because toxic metals don't decay). Nowhere in the world has 100% recycling and whatever number they have is debatable because some consider waste to energy (burning garbage) to be renewable. It would take Japan 20 years to recycle the 10k-20k tons of solar panel waste it currently has. Wind has its own problems. You can't line wind turbines up in a row because the ones in back wouldn't get any wind. That means that wind turbines change weather patterns. There have been articles about using wind turbines to stop/reduce hurricanes even though "In fact, if we didn’t have regular hurricanes occurring, the world would in fact end." (National Hurricane Center-NOAA). The blades are made from heavy duty plastic which is difficult to recycle so whatever hasn't eroded over the years from the wind (scattering plastic across the planet, just like radiation from an accident) winds up in landfills. How do you provide enough energy for a technological world while only using solar and wind and without changing weather patterns and cutting down trees or destroying deserts (you can't just move forests or deserts). If the idea is saving the planet how is solar and wind any good for the planet. If all that matters is co2, okay they win, but so would ending the human species. "“I couldn’t see the sky or clouds, just a grayish layer,” she says. “Definitely, we have never seen something like this.” The dust over Puerto Rico represented the leading edge of a giant plume that had traveled more than 5,000 miles from the Sahara desert across the Atlantic Ocean, spreading into the skies above North America and beyond. This particular dust plume is at once remarkable and totally ordinary. Each year, these kinds of plumes sweep off the Sahara, carrying some 180 million tons of mineral-rich dust from its dried-out pans. Thousands of miles downwind, the fine-grained dust shapes both the ecology of the places it lands and the climate as a whole." National Geographic
@@namename9998 You make a lot of valid points but I'm just gonna jump on one that peeves me every time I see it : Trees You could raze every tree, shrub, flower, grass, algae and phytoplankton on the planet and you wouldn't run out of oxygen for 100 million years, it's a fifth of our atmosphere and the non-vegetal biosphere consumes a tiny amount of it, even human activity barely makes a dent with all the excess fossil carbon we release that tries to reoxydize. And regarding carbon sequestration, forests aren't that great at it either, mature forests are basically neutral, storing as much through growth as they lose through decay, and while young forests can indeed store carbon, especially if used commercially for construction, they might not do it as efficiently as the biomes they replace as some grasslands, marchlands and especially bogs are better at absorbing and retaining carbon in the long run. Also the albedo of a forest is lower than grasslands and fields which might negate the cooling from the carbon it stored by absorbing more incident light. TL;DR : it's not that simple and you shouldn't be too concerned for trees regarding oxygen and climate but rather emphasize their usefulness in preserving biodiversity if saving trees is your objective, there are much greater concerns for habitat loss than breathability.
I would like to point out that the war generation really wasn't happy. While they might have celebrated it outwardly at first most people bore a deep trauma from the occupation and war. I know here in Denmark it took decades before people were even really willing to talk about the war and it was mostly the generation who came after who did so, the people who lived through the war just referred to it as "the evil years". People did eventually start to open up about it and talk more about it but it left a huge impact on the entire generation and reinforced an already existing cultural trauma in Denmark due to the repeated invasions and occupations by Germany. It wasn't really until the 90s that the cultural trauma started to lift, partly due to a new generation which had grown up with a friendly Germany and partly due to cultural events. But even still most countries in Europe who suffered under the occupation still have a lot of unresolved issues related to it, it's a hard time to process and one that has entered national myth as well.
Yes, I think one of the best books that captures those voices and that sentiment is interestingly another of Aleksijevitj’s “the unwomanly face of war”. The trauma and stigma around the horror of the war rested heavily on those who lived through it especially women who often weren’t or did not want to be celebrated to the same extent.
My grandmother, who was a small child during the occupation, only ever recalled it with sorrow and horror. Her mother had worked with the resistance and her Polish step father lost a brother in the concentration camps. The war and post war years were not good years, no one remembers them that way.
I appreciate that the humorous undertones subsided as you moved into the accounts of the people who suffered and gave them the gravity and seriousness that the international community has not. As someone who works in the academia and sciences, your point on privileging narratives and certain forms of knowledge speaks to me. The standard "unit" of knowledge production in science is publications but this typically takes the form of a written paper, which privileges thinkers with good writing skills (and usually English writing skills.) As someone who has struggled with reading and writing, I've found videos like yours to be far more provocative, informative, and accessible in producing knowledge than many paper's I've read. What you've presented here clearly qualifies as scholarship and is a stellar case as to why sciences should expand beyond valuing the written word.
i couldn’t agree more with this sentiment! i love seeking out professional, academic-quality content in formats like this that often afford the ability to go into greater depth, with a wider range of visual aids and demonstration, and in a more engaging fashion than the typical paper. plus you can get away with cracking a few jokes. it’s truly wonderful. if it is a well-sourced, professional piece by someone who understands the field, it should be taken seriously, regardless of format!
As someone who struggles writing the thoughts in my head, and with complete knowledge it isn't quite this simple, this is where I recommend having what would essentially be a scribe who also has similar academic interests and understands you as a person. You can have them redraft papers that turn your barely understandable drivel into something understandable to your peers (this is why I say they need to understand YOU as well as the field, as they need to be able to essentially translate your specific breed of autism into something neurotypicals understand, and doing that without a very good understanding of what you were even talking about is gonna fail utterly). Obviously like I said, easier said than done, like almost stupidly so, but it is something I'd recommend. If you got a good friend in the field, drag them into being your paper writer.
The plight of the Sami people hits close to home for some reason- the fact that the world is changing well beyond your control and becoming more dangerous and more harmful, and that even the most well intentioned actions to protect you from that new reality can still tear you apart. The feeling that nothing will be the same and that you have to conceive most everything as exchangeable or equal value in order to cope with the loss.
I think it's always funny how native culture of so called minorities are always treated as invaluable, and need to be guarded by all kinds of programs. But when a majority culture feel threatened, their desire to guard their own culture is seen as bad.
@@16m49x3 "thing bad" ain't it. the sami never even asked for electricity let alone nuclear reactors while the demands of modern society have pushed their environments to extremes that make their way of life almost impossible. we too deserve protection from a hostile environment, but we did this to ourselves and we're making everyone else pay for it with their health too.
Looking at the timestamps (1 hour and 45 minutes) and the reference sheet, it looks like a ton of work went into this. I'm sure this is going to be an interesting watch.
This may be one of the most depressing things I've listened to lately, but it's a hard truth that people need to hear. Thank you for your extensive coverage.
I cried at several points of this video, and the voices you included of the "Chernobylites" will live in my heart from now on. I live very closely to a nuclear power plant in the United States with a horrible safety record and which has been involved in a major corruption scandal. My concerns over nuclear power stem from that. I really appreciate such an indepth and critical look at nuclear power and a dissection of the Chernobyl disaster and the nuclear energy industry as a whole. This video has made me reconsider my view of nuclear energy in light of climate change and non-renewable energy sources. I can't say in pro-nuclear now, but I will have to grapple with it as an option. Thank you.
No nuclear power plant in the US has a horrible safety record. Safest place to be, by far. Way safer than being on the road, in your home, at your job, at a sporting event, at school, on a train .... Stats and facts.
Hello fellow northwest Ohioan!!! Davis Bessie is actually safer than three mile island. Especially since our techs in the 70’s caught the error before it let off any radioactive material
I work in the nuclear industry and love that you discussed the relevancy of the LNT model - it's still debated by academics in the radiation protection field and you can see back and forths between academics in some radprot journals. It was one of the most intersting topics to read into when I first got into the industry. Re: cancer rates in nuclear facility workers versus the general population, anecdotally some people consider this to make sense as radiation levels of facility workers are recorded and limits set to ensure safety - a regular person has no idea of how much radiation they may regularly come into contact with (e.g., living in a naturally Radon heavy environment like the South West & Wales).
Yes. In my last job I was a radiation protection supervisor alongside my normal role in medical research because we worked with certain radioactive isotopes (beta/gamma emitters) plus occasionally also x-rays. We had these sorts of debates often because the government insists there is no safe level of radiation, so we have to be extremely careful about risk assessing everything, yet we purposefully give it to volunteer humans when we run certain study types. A while back we had to do monitoring for radon across the entire site, and the subsequent calculated dose levels in the updated risk assessments showed higher exposure levels for people working in the basement “cold” labs in one building, than that already calculated for those working with radioactive material in the ground floor “hot” lab in ours.
You don’t work in the nuclear industry, I’ve seen your other comments about how you’re a Doctor and Geology Specialist on other videos posted by this channel, stop pretending to be an expert. Best regards, Someone who works in the Nuclear Industry
@@Geoffreyshadid Ok, and your proof is? Sorry bud, but this Canuck is a fucking skeptic, especially when somebody else tries to call out somebody else for being what they themselves claim to be.
I got more radiation from one chest CT scan than I got my entire time in the Navy (assuming I'm doing my conversions correctly, the Navy didn't use standard/modern units for measurement). And I've done around 7 or 8 reactor compartment entries on the Enterprise, including one 15 minutes after shutdown. Unfortunately I've had 3 CT scans in recent times. I really don't like them, I do worry about that radiation. It's much higher and acute than anything I ever got in the Navy, and went right into my chest. But of course I'm just one person. You can hardly draw any conclusions from one person. In case anyone is curious, it's been over 20 years since I've been in the Navy. And my NEC of 3386 meant that I did more reactor compartment entries than most normal nuclear operators, not to mention we had 8 reactor compartments. More modern designs are better and I'm sure they have less hot spots than we had. But I've only worked on S5W (training) and A2W plants.
@@Geoffreyshadid is this directed at me or faux? I’ve certainly never claimed to be a geology expert or doctor. I’m a researcher in pharmaceuticals and medical science, which involves working with radioactive isotopes.
Fuck me this is an absolute masterpiece of an essay. I’m really impressed with the content you put out and I look forward to seeing what you make next.
Subscribed based off this one video alone. This is far and away one of the best videos covering the human side of Chernobyl and the affects on the people, as well as the political fallout instead of the nuclear one. Simply fucking remarkable. And a Hbomberguy cameo to boot. An absolute masterpiece, as a Ukrainian thank you.
I love your videos they’re incredibly interesting. I like that you don’t oversimplify or entirely skip things that are ‘too complicated’. even if I don’t understand some technical parts, I like that you do take the time to explain them, and you’re clearly passionate about your topics so it remains genuinely interesting. it feels like learning for real, not just being fed information, yet it stays fun.
Radium paint wasn't confined to military equipment by any means. Hundreds of thousands of watches and alarm clocks were made for public consumption. It's still very, very easy to find them today. Hell, there were even Gilbert chemistry sets that had radioactive materials (including paint) and taught you how to build a geiger counter!
As someone who is mathematically-minded and spent years studying radiation and its effect on biology, I appreciate the segment where you break down the fact that radiation isn’t just creeping death and that government-defined “healthy levels” of radiation are very flimsy. For those wondering, while you don’t want to use a half ton ingot of Uranium-235 as a body pillow, radiation (even from a modern nuclear attack) is just not something you have to worry about as far as health concerns. People still live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the area has become wilderness as opposed to wasteland. People have this misconception that radiation is bad, and while not untrue, it’s also not gonna have any more effect on the average length of your life than the danger of driving will.
One of the issues with the exclusion zone is that the upper layer of soil itself was buried deeper into the ground in the contaminated areas. It is still not safe to dig holes in the area, so any long-term settlement of large groups of people is impractical. I mean, it is difficult to maintain a town without ever patching roads, repairing underground pipes or cables, or making foundations for new buildings. It is still just one disaster, though, and an extremely unlikely one (ironically, SOME of it was due to more independence granted to republics).
I think the thing most people don't understand is that radioactivity can either be intense or last a long time, but never both. It's a trade off. Elements/Isotopes that are extremely radioactive have a short half-life, while those that remain radioactive for many thousands of years are relatively mild sources of radiation. I like to compare it to a sprinter vs a jogger. The sprinter can do a lap much faster but will be out of breath afterwards, whereas the jogger can make multiple laps but much slower. They're using the same total amount of energy, one's just more conservative.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni Exactly, this is the problem with the mass hysteria the media has whipped up the last 50 years. People just dont realise that the real nasty stuff that we should worry about are short term problems. This is why people are so against burial of radioactive waste "it's dangerous for millions of years!! " - uranium gets dug out the ground FFS. Ironically uranium poisoning as a toxic heavy metal is more of an issue than its radioactivity, its a similar story for plutonium. So basically if you ingest uranium you'll die of heavy metal poisoning long before radiation does.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni While I understand what you're trying to get at, sufficient amounts of long half-life material could create intense radiation. Of course, you would need to deliberately pile insane amounts of the material into a single spot to achieve that with the sole intention of creating such a situation, it is something worth noting to be possible.
I recently discovered your channel and I was really excited for your next video; this is a terrific documentary on the disaster, nuclear power, and its politics-I have always been pro-nuclear, and am adamant that it is necessary in order for us to phase out fossil fuels entirely, but this definitely made me look at it in a new light. We mustn't be blinded by our own hubris and not be persuaded by technocrats who are willing to turn a blind eye every time something happens; we must say that it can happen here but that we have a plan of making sure it won't.
The technocrats of today overwhelmingly advocate renewables. Often in the face of hard realities of wind being fickle and solar (by definition) not being able to keep the lights on. This has led to a deeper dependence in fossil fuels than ever before. You used to just burn lignite because it was cheap. Now you have to because there is no other way to generate the power. I won't even get into the crippling dependency this has created in energy sources like gas to make these low-carbon politically-favorable "solutions" work to "assist" the highly variable sustainable green generation and meet demand. Yet another energy-related political tie-in to Ukraine and it's effects on policy resulting in bad events for them.
@@rwaitt14153 The focus on just shoving batteries in everything to replace fossil fuels is another problem that compounds on top of what you said. Not only are lithium batteries themselves environmentally destructive to produce, but in many cases they do little to reduce carbon emissions beyond simply shifting the source of the emissions upstream to the coal and gas power plants that produce the energy to charge them. People are looking for a quick and easy fix for our environmental issues, and are reluctant to commit to the real, long-term systemic change that is needed in not only our energy infrastructure but the way we live our lives.
I find it strange. I have always been avidly anti-nuclear. I was raised by German Atomkraft Nein Danke parents, who grew up during the Cold War, constantly scared of nuclear war. I grew up in Ireland, and I remember researching the continuation of Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant in the UK, because I was concerned it would fail due to its age and harm us in Ireland as well as the UK. Even when a windfarm was built 500 feet from our home, I was against that, but also nuclear. Funnily enough this very well made documentary has actually swayed me to be more pro-nuclear. I have been moving in that direction for a while already, don't get me wrong. But looking at nuclear disasters is a good way to look at disasters caused by fossil fuels: Oil spills, coal mining, gas explosions, not to mention "gradual" pollution and climate change.... How can we possibly look at the toll of nuclear energy without looking at the toll of fossil energy? I think my current opinion on the matter is this: There needs to be a global effort to transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible, with nuclear to provide both a phasing in process and the necessary baseline requirement for energy grids to mitigate renewables' unpredictability and fluctuation. And a capitalist mode of economy cannot feasibly do this on time.
One of the worst realisation is that simmilar instability in reactor happened before in Lenigrad power plant at Sosnovy Bor. But crew of other blocks let alone power plants were not instructed about that, becuase it would imply imperfcetion in whole systems. And yes, those old power plants were designed laughably bad in terms of security in case of undesired states
This reminds me of when car manufacturers in the US were brought to court over known issues with vehicles and engineers needing to let somethings go for both the sake of cost, time-frame, and reality. Essentially it boiled down to the engineering teams trying to make rational arguments and explain why they would choose what to fix before a cars release. But all the courts and people wanted was for them to acknowledge that people were suffering and they would begin doing more.
i genuinely don't understand how you're able to make such highly informative videos but i just wanna thank you for all the work you do. seriously it's amazing.
I'm a history major and I'm working on my senior thesis (it's about Vlad the Impaler). There are lots of stories and legends about him that aren't backed up by documents, but that's not super important. Whether a story circulated in the HRE was true or not doesn't change that it was culturally impactful nor does it change people's impressions. That's what oral history is. It tells us what people thought about a thing, even if they are blatantly wrong. An example from the modern era is 9/11. Lots of people have memories of that day--memories that can be confirmed or disputed by hard evidence. However, we can't get the cultural impression of 9/11 without oral history. Even conspiracy theoriests fall in here. Yeah, they're wrong, but their impressions of the event are relevant to whatever insular community they create and opinions of them are relevant to America as a whole. History is the study of people and it mixes a lot of disciplines.
Lol, it's not "super important" whether thousands of people were slowly tortured to death by having a pole penetrate through their bodies? A lack of respect for truth is a lack of empathy. Would you say that it's not "super important" whether the holocaust happened?
A masterpiece on the legacy of Chernobyl, and one that will undoubtedly be passed over by the powers that be due to the political conflicts presented and criticized in the video.
@@lhaviland8602 How is it paranoia? The info in this video steps on a lot of toes that would object to this video if it were to become widely disseminated.
This video is a wonderful examination of why nuclear power is a safe and proven technology that is nevertheless unsuitable for use by a great many human beings due to our internalized beliefs about risk, profit and loss, and our tendency to favour short-term profits over everything else. Nuclear power poses several of what science fiction author Ian M. Banks dubbed an "Outside Context Problem".
Chernobyl dumped its shit into the atmosphere once, by accident. Coal plants dump theirs into the atmosphere every day of every year, forever, by design.
Except unlike radiation, CO2 can photosynthesized into Oxygen by our massive army of trees. Radiation just rots away everything it touches. You cant even compare them
@@PrimetimeX that is such a kindergarten view... It's not just CO2 which also is getting dumped in excess, Coal has radioisotopes... Worse, Coal ash, due to its size, is more compact and ash can be washed into the eco system and bioaccumulate. The fact you state that as a counterargument means you are not to be taken seriously, this is Ben Shapiro "Sell their houses and move" levels of bad. It literally just goes to show that oil and gas is winning while you bash at allies for supporting a power source that they know isn't perfect but that the alternative in every facet is way worse. TLDR You are so anti-nuclear that you state a kindergarten view of coal burning like the greenhouse gases are just it... While happily ignoring coal ash being much much worse radioactively and sincerely piss off.
I’m no scientist, I find this video in my recommendation randomly because of educational videos i liked to watch, and this information I’m trying to process is just a hard reminder how a human can be so cruel. I feel its too much to know yet here I am watching this. Thank you so much for the video and the effort and all the time for making this video, have a nice day and take care!
An excellent video that I shall rewatch and think about for some time I'm sure. I do wish to quibble with your source number 263: They're specifically adding Chernobyl despite it being outside the timescale they wanted to use, but not adjusting for hydroelectric having similar outlier disasters. Their source (Sovacool et al) has a table for fatalities averaged from 1950 to 2014 they could have used; it seems irresponsible to construct a span to specifically include the worst nuclear accidents, but exclude the dam failures of the 70s.
That's a bit of context I wasn't aware of about the Sovacool paper some of the data is based on. I'll add that into the reference sheet. Thanks for letting me know!
Commenting for the Algorithm, but I also wanna mention if I haven’t already how magnificent this video turned out, I’m glad to be a subscriber and a patron! I’m looking forward to seeing what you bring to the table next. The guy losing his daughter also still never fails to make me bawl my eyes out, this is just too powerful.
This fantastic essay only reinforces my favorite line from the Chernobyl miniseries: "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
"Both oil and nuclear lobby sway the narrative, also we genuinely don't know anyway, but lets fill this almost two hour video with interesting trivia" I'm not even mad
Absolutely amazing video. One of the best I've seen on this platform. This one's gonna stick with me for a long time; you treated the subject with so much *humanity*. Brilliant, powerful work.
I believe this is your best video yet. And likely one of the best essays I've heard thus far. I can be wrong. There are a lot of things I haven't seen or heard yet, but of all the things that I _have_ seen, this takes the cake. And I will frankly not argue about that.
So one question here is, "how bad is 1000 Bq/kg?" Normally, your body has about 8000 Bq of Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 in it. This is spread out over 60 or so kg. So 1000 is 8x the limit. Basically, those sheep are about 10x as radioactive as people, which is about 3 mSv/year worth. The problem though is that this stuff has a tendency to bioaccumulate. Under the worst case scenario, every kg of meat you eat would just add on to your body's natural radioactivity. If you ate 1000 kg over many years under this assumption, that would make you have a million Bq. Which might sound pretty bad. And it is... but, that's still only around 30 mSv/year. Vs ~100 needed for CRS, or ~100 per hour for ARS. of course, this gets into a question. What's the biological halflife of Cs-137? Well, it turns out it's actually more like 2 months. This is pretty important because it means you really have to eat a lot of those sheep very quickly to do much damage. The stuff gets thrown out a lot faster than people give credit for. It's definitely not sitting there for years. That suggests to me that if you ate a kg/day of those sheep, you're gonna have about 70000 extra Bq of radiation. Which is about 2 mSv every year. So if your diet is mostly those sheep for a year, you might be almost 10x as radioactive as normal because of it and have about 2% the dose needed for CRS. Cancer is another concern. If we go by the (obviously incorrect for a self-repairing system) Linear No Threshold model, we can calculate that after a year of eating pretty much nothing but radioactive sheep, your risk of long term cancer might be increased 0.01%. Though as the COVID-19 crisis shows, spread out a low death rate over a large population and it gets bad fast. If a hundred million people eat nothing but radioactive sheep for a year, that model suggests 10,000 excess cancer deaths. Of course, that's just one model. And we should keep in mind most of the biological and statistical evidence that has been studied supports either diminished, negligible, or even protective carcinogenic effects of low dose whole body irradiation below the threshhold of CRS, or even potentially well into the threshhold of CRS. Considering we're talking about 2% the threshold of CRS, we really have no idea but it's almost surely less than 0.01%. Quite possibly dramatically less. Though the cancer rate increase from eating that much meat, radioactive or not.... I'm pretty sure that's gonna be way past 10,000 excess death.
Amazing video. I am a pro - nuclear power person, and your video both strengthened my resolve in its importance, while also tempering me and reminding me that I have to hold nuclear power to the same level of scrutiny as fossil fuels, or any other energy source. Thank you for releasing this and good job. Liked and commented to increase engagement and spread video 👍
Nuclear power is one of the greatest double-edged swords we have discovered. When treated with respect and careful planning for all eventualities are taken into account, it is an extremely safe form of power with incredibly minimal pollution and comparably low upkeep costs. When handled without care and regard, it can collapse a country and kill thousands, leaving millions to suffer and die slowly as a result of subsequent ecological and socioeconomic factors. I am 100% pro nuclear power, but I hold the same reservations that Soup has in this video. That you MUST overbuild and you MUST plan for everything, because that is the only thing that can keep those plants viable in the social hivemind. Anything less breeds distrust and sets society back decades in terms of fossil fuel independence for their power grid.
Thanks for this, this is beautiful. I also am in favor of nuclear, but always found it hard to be on the same page as many of other "nuclear bros". This doc could deserve an award.
To be fair on the western reactors thing; the eastern reactors were incredibly dangerous, as they were designed with minimal safety or redundancy, which is why Chernobyl was able to happen in the first place. That doesn’t excuse the ridiculous austerity plans but I think not wanting any more unsafe eastern style reactors built is a legitimate concern…
My problem is always like,, before Chernobyl happened, people insisted that reactor type was safe. Concerns were always brushed aside on the basis that it'd take so many things going wrong at once for a meltdown that it was unlikely to ever happen, but it did. People say the same things about Fukushima too "they couldn't have planned for all this to go wrong at the same time" The idea that nuclear power is safe always comes with the caveat of health and safety protocols being followed properly and the people in charge not lying or cutting corners I don't personally think I can ever trust the people in charge of these reactors to maintain them properly, whether they be privately or government owned. Maybe I'm just overly paranoid about it, but I still never feel that I can trust it.
@@CryptP the thing is that applies to nearly every single power source. If hydroelectric isn't maintained properly and safety standards aren't followed it can also lead to catastrophic death. Whilst the risk of death for solar and wind is lower, it's not absent. Solar panels for 1 need semiconductors, and the mining for that can be very dangerous. Nuclear has less deaths per kilowatt hour than hydroelectric or any fossil fuel, even including Chernobyl and other disasters. Energy generation needs constant vigilance, like a lot of things, but given proper attention it is safe. Nuclear power is looking to be a necessary part of a decarbonised energy grid, to provide a base level stable power, similar to what nat gas does now. Nuclear is far from perfect, but it's better than climate change.
@@alexarnold8461 True, but accidents with other types of site don't lead to entire cities becoming both abandoned and impossible/difficult to actually return to for a still unknown amount of time. Chernobyl happened over 3 decades ago, Pripyat is still abandoned. Few people live and work there, and they can only live there for a regulated amount of the year. The destruction is that which can't just be repaired and undone. Had Fukushima been hit only by a tsunami, they would've rebuilt by now and the city would be pretty much fine again. But add a meltdown to that, and the only work really done in the area is attempts to contain the radiation. Buildings still sit destroyed, left exactly where they are, covered in a thick layer of radioactive dust and debris. My point isn't that we just can't have nuclear power, but that it won't feel safe - especially to communities who will live in the shadow of a reactor - unless it's sufficiently idiot-proofed, because the scale and scope of the damage done by nuclear accidents is so fundamentally greater. There's a reason accidents at nuclear power plants scare people a lot more than other types of plant, people aren't just dumb and blowing it out of proportion.
@@CryptP I'd like to point out that hydroelectric power also wipes towns, cities, and wild areas off the map. In order to build a reservoir you have to flood tons of land upstream. And, to add in politics, whose land gets flooded is usually who has the least amount of political power to stop it. Likewise, areas downwind of coal and oil powerplants suffer from air pollution, and coal plants produce fly ash, which is chemically toxic, dissolves readily in water, and will never be safe. Arsenic dust now will be dangerous in a billion years, and we keep them in open pits lined with plastic sheets in Tennessee. And oil and natural gas? poison the land and water they travel over. Oil spill that choke the oceans. Fracking that poisons fresh water. Those places are poor, they are not cities, but they're still casualties of carbon power. Solar plants also take up tons of space; we just don't have to think about them because no one wants to live in the desert. And when they wear out, we don't know how to recycle them. They have toxic compounds too, like cadmium, but we don't think about that because it's easy to move that toxic pit to Africa. Modern nuclear reactor designs are incredibly safe. The technology was founded in the 1950s, and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were built in the 1970s. Even a traditional design has made massive improvements in simplifying the design to reduce the avenues for cascades, and more experimental designs leverage the advances we've made in materials science to add fail-safe characteristics. One example is that you could build a robotically-kept reactor and bury it deeper in a concrete dome. I did grow up in a community next to a nuclear reactor. Saw the steam rise into the sky, heard the monthly alarm tests. I'm happy it wasn't an equivalent amount of fossil fuel power plants.
@@CryptP There were verifiable causes for concern regarding the RBMK design but they were suppressed by the Soviet regime. After Chernobyl the remaining RBMKs were gradually modified to increase safety. Fukushima could have been planned for, wasn't, even still the reactors would have made it. The problem was the location of the generators, which was flooded, and made it impossible to restart the cooling systems. Fukushima is absolutely infuriating because it wasn't nuclear power's fault.
"I studied geology for *5 YEARS, I AM ALLOWED TO GEEK OUT ABOUT SOIL* " As a student, I completely understand how you feel. Also this explains why there are such precise maps in your videos
Those oral stories from Chernobyl were horrifying to hear, so... applause to the people who narrated them for us. Especially Dan Richardson, who sounded like he was so genuinely crying and grieving I can't... Has he, too, lost a child he had to put in too small a coffin?
This is one of the most genuine and impressive feats of research, and importantly explanatory storytelling, I have seen in a very long time. Legitimately your best work so far, bravo.
Fantastic video, thank you for making it. Certainly changed my view on Chernobyl, and probably how I'll try to address the topic when discussing nuclear energy.
Dear Soup, Thank you. This was enlightening and very moving. Please continue to make this kind of content, its the kind of content the internet desperately needs. Your insights and thoughtfulness reflects man's better half. This is the kind of content we, mankind, deserve. Take care
Commenting as an absolute non-scientist, non-mathematician with not a single STEM bone in my body - your channel is incredible and this is a masterpiece. You present things in such a clear, transparent way that's easy to grasp, easy to laugh along with, and easy to learn a lot from. Not only that, your message and absolute rock solid moral ground and view on humanity, working towards solutions and open discussions about issues, and calling out political or money related shenanigans - Jesus man. This is just such an insane show of talent
Commenting again after finishing the vid to say a few things. I'm a mother... the bit you picked out with the man who lost his little girl and had to lay her on the door his late father had been on just had me sobbing. secondly near the end your thesis is a bit hard to follow as you jump around from pro and anti arguments. It might just be me being tired and medicated but i had to listen to it a few times. This is an amazing essay. I would love a list all the readers, I'm bad with voices and only Harris Bomberguy's stood out to me and I want to see these people's channels if they have them. Thank you for all the work you did on this. I'll remember Katya. I'll remember.
Literally at a loss for words, I’m a regular enjoyer of video essays for a number of reasons. 1) I’ve been a fan of documentaries since I was a kid and I love learning things 2) I love stories and storytelling 3) the quality of content and the dedication of online creators like you is compelling Just good work all around, I appreciate what you do. Time for me to binge your content :)
Soup. this is really good. it started of with a lot of dry numbers and amounts of Becquerel in milk and I thought here we go.... But this film turned into a really great piece about the people of Chernobyl. You gave them a face and a voice and a place in history. I mean it. This is really well done.
Goddamn, dude. There are video essays, then there are video essays. This has more references than some PhD dissertations! Most importantly, you hit the right notes outside what is normally covered in videos on Chernobyl.
This was getting way to heavy so I had to take a break and watch some Brain David Gilbert... he just uploaded a new video about the US Health Insurance System so I came back here.
I have a presentation on Friday about this very topic... I wrote a paper about so much of the stuff that you've talked about (not just on Chernobyl but nuclear in general). Your tone and call to action has really inspired to ask these very questions to my classmates. Thank you!
I remember watching Chernobly with my parents and them telling me that my sister was effected by the disaster, she had a mild rash that came from nowhere and when they went to the doctor they said it was from Chernobly. I'm serbian by the way so yeah a lot of people were effected without evan knowing.
Bonus: Every time someone says "the scientific understanding of low dose rates is limited", what the public is likely to take away from that is that the effects are really bad, but they could be even worse. So on a democratic level this just drives policy toward even more radiophobia. What should be said instead is that the effect of low dose rates is unknown, but is so small as to be statistically undetectable and thus on a colloquial sense nobody could ever tell the difference living in slightly elevated radiation levels from not. So, what you would rationally expect from policy is to just not care about it.
My great gramma was a survivor of the radium clock paint. She used to tell me stories of the girls playing with the paint and painting their faces and teeth because it was fun and funny to them while they worked their long hours. She lived til the day after her 95th and I'm grateful we had the time we had with her because she very well could have died decades ago because of the paint.
This is frankly one of the best video essays in construction because with many video essays, I'm left waiting for the essayist to explain how things are connected and what point they are trying to make. Here though, I got to the end realizing that I completely understood their point and agreed with them far before they ever explicitly stated the point of the video.
Brilliant video that needs to be more widely seen! Agreed that we do need to include nuclear power in the energy mix to accelerate decarbonization. France is an interesting example where they invested heavily in nuclear in the past and it currently produces 75% of their electricity. Apparently it just got announced last month France now does plan to build some new nuclear power stations, but I don't know whether it will fill the gap as the old ones reach end-of-life. So much like Germany, it's going to create a gap which is likely to be filled by gas or coal.
Not in a million year France will return to gas or coal power for our main production Building a (fission) nuclear power plant is fast, there will be no need to return to fossile fuels Also, we produce so much that we sell electricity to other countries We have a few gas power plant, but they all are from bio-fuel, so they are green We have ONE coal power plant, but it's not for energy, it's for research, if they burn 1T a year it's a miracle And we *already* replace our nuclear power plant progressively with newer ones, not every ones at the same time, that would be extremely dumb Good thing, because their life-span have the same gap needed to build new ones, as if it was *intended* from the start Not even counting ITER in the mix
I learned so much from this video. Not just about the debate for or against nuclear (I knew it was expensive but I don't think I really understood just HOW expensive it is), but about how that debate affected so many lives near the end of the 20th and may have helped bring down the Soviet Union. Thank you Soup.
Living in eastern germany meant that our first news about the incident came from western german news channels... which nearly everybody watched. It led to the founding of quite a lot of environmental groups that (among others) drove the change and eventually helped overcome the system.
Yeah that happens alot in situations like this. Which is why if Nuclear power especially in Germany is to be taken in full swing it needs to be done with the workers in mind.
This was powerful. And truthful. And awesome. I've always been one of those sociopaths comparing the thousands of deaths of Chernobyl to the millions that die every year due to fossil fuel pollution. Hearing this gave me a human dimension of the story and makes me approach the issue in a more responsible manner. Do I still like nuclear energy? Absolutely. But are we doing enough to ensure these things don't happen again or at least too often? That's the question we should ask and not "is it better to run on batteries or nuclear"
"I've always been one of those sociopaths comparing the thousands of deaths of Chernobyl to the millions that die every year due to fossil fuel pollution." And a damn smart one at that. Every one of those fossil fuel deaths is just as tragic.
Considering batteries require mining for limited materials that results in the deaths of many people per year, generate tons of waste, and the sum electrical energy production does not equal what would be needed to even put all American cars on battery power...... yeah nuclear is way better
I've been attempting to explain this to people for years. Yes, nuclear can be clean and insanely efficient. But it can also be devastating when things go wrong. There isn't a single energy source available to humans today that can't decimate a population or ecosystem in one wrong move. Each and every form of energy we create is going to cause some kind of death to someone somewhere. It's a matter of recognizing the massive multidimensional scales we tip constantly. Look at avocados. A produce that rots in most grocer's bins at an elevated cost to consumers has created cartels and stripped whole communities of their water supply. The whole picture can be really difficult to consider, but it's invaluable that we do it. We can't consider technology without humans.We can't consider science without politics. To hold fast to one without the other is missing the rest of the story/issues. And this limited perspective leaves us increasingly vulnerable to their inevitable failures when we fail to plan for them.
Yes, we are doing enough to ensure these things don't happen, because it only happened once in 70 years, and it happened in a country that disregarded every safety measure they possibly could. You can't compare 3 mile island or Fukushima to Chernobyl, because 3 mile island was contained by the safety measures we built in, and the Fukushima meltdown was caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a tsunami.
Could you please refine from calling engineers „sociopaths“? We make tough decisions based on current science and best practices. We also need to have a value (monetary) that represents the cost of different states of casualties including death. Why? Well, if you‘re designing a complex system a risk analysis is completed and used for the detail design, ideally reviewing it at every milestone and ofc implementing and testing its measures. Sometimes the probability of something going wrong is so high + big impact on operator/public safety that a process is completely redesigned. Or ignored, then you go full Union Carbide and Bhopal the population. Short: Engineers need a price tag that represents the cost of a life in country X. We aren‘t all sociopaths but often are led by sociopaths. Thank you for taking notice of this strange, but very important aspect of engineering.
It makes sense. If you took the covid pandemic as simply the raw numbers of deaths, hospitalizations, and people affected long term by the disease, you wouldn't really have a clear picture of the worldwide existential dread it has and currently still is causing
If you considered everything that could possibly kill you, you literally wouldn't be able to have a functional life. I took the attitude that if Covid was going to kill me, there was nothing I could really do about it, but the odds are low anyway (statistically it was still more likely I'd die in a car accident, and I'm not afraid of driving). I got the vaccine as a sensible precaution and just stopped thinking about it after that. I've had two close relatives get Covid and survive. It's not like there's nothing I'm afraid of, but I try to be more logical than emotional when it comes to evaluating risks. Disease will never go away, but the chances of getting it are low, and the chances of surviving it if you do get it is pretty high, in the modern world. People are more afraid of dying in a plane than in a car, despite the latter being objectively more dangerous; fear is an emotional response, not a logical one. One shouldn't let emotion be in the driver's seat of their life. The fear people had of Covid was way out of proportion to how dangerous it truly was, and it allowed the government and politicians to exploit it easily. If there's one lesson we should take away from the pandemic, it should be not to allow that ever again.
I just saw this, I can't believe TH-cam didn't notify me of this! I'm frustrated because I love your content and thought you quit. Sorry I'm a month late, but great video again man!
Soup: I HAVE STUDIED GEOLOGY FOR 5 YEARS, I AM ALLOWED TO GEEK ABOUT SOIL me, having studied geology for four years and currently making my end-of-degree work in soil science: *spills tears of joy over the 10 parent material samples spilled in my lab desk*
Good on you at trying to understand this incident. And to the pharmacy that made bank selling you headache medication. This incident was just as complex a situation locally and wide scale. As well as politics, and soviet documents looking more like bar codes than archives and other modern day shenanigans.
Excellent video Soup. It's so easy as a nuclear advocate to see completely uninformed fear mongering and respond by falling into equally uninformed denialism and complacency. Industrial accidents can and will happen. That is inevitable. When you advocate for something with as much potential for harm as nuclear, you need to plan for and account for that. The reason it is so safe is precisely solely down to people who have acknowledged the risks and planned for them. Every nuclear accident we have seen at serious scale was not the fault of people worrying and saying we need to take our time. It was by "denialists" who wanted to steam ahead without fully informing themselves and others of the necessary information to do this very good thing safely.
Fr, it never puts me at ease when I see nuclear advocates go "Nuclear power is totally safe and fine as long as it's properly maintained and regulated" Like yeah I know that, nuclear disasters happened because of errors made in construction and operation of these plants. That's the point. What I need is nuclear power that's safe even if the people running it do fuck up pretty colossally, because inevitably something will go wrong at some point. Always assume that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and plan accordingly.
Chernobyl's fault was not "denialists". It was politics. Politics was the reason the flaw in the RBMK reactors was suppressed. Politics was the reason the managers at Chernobyl delayed safety testing. Politics was the reason power demands were higher than assumed as factories attempted to meet quotas. Politics was the reason the testing was not simply done some other time.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD oh, ok well we'll just have a non political political issue then. Well identified. It's reductive to just say it was "politics". That's such a broad and meaningless term. What did their politics cause them to do? Deny. They denied the faults with the reactor. They denied the problems they were having. You can have politics whilst acknowledging the need to be honest about flaws and problems. In fact, I would argue that refusing to deny is in and of itself political.
@@windows95leon It's not reductive. The Soviet style of management demanded the censorship of weakness. The Soviet style of middle-management required lying to higher ups because if you were honest and admitted delays, you'd get sacked. They never denied that nuclear was dangerous. That's precisely why the accident occurred during SAFETY TESTING.
This is something i insist when talking to people about history. To keep in their minds the social, economical and political intentions behind every event but most importantly to NEVER forget that there is a human element to it. It is a very hard but needed practice to not only zoom out to see it from a macro perspective but also to zoom in and see how it affected humans on an individual level.
Great video, not sure if it's just me but the sound you use for the highlighting gives me Goosebumps and shivers. I've never quite had a sound do that so badly to me.
You click on this video thinking you’re gonna hear a lot about the Chernobyl disaster, and you come away learning about neoliberalism and shock therapy. Great work. I applaud you for doing your research. And my heart goes out to the people of Eastern Europe.
97:55 While it’s true that the Soviets initially favoured the RBMK due to its ease of construction, by the time Gorbachev came to power VVER had already displaced it as the dominant reactor being built. Of the ten reactors that entered construction in Russia (I couldn’t find any list with construction dates for the whole USSR but Chernobyl and Ignalina were the only RBMKs built outside Russia anyway) between 1980 and 1985, only two were RBMKs (both at sites which already housed such reactors) with the rest being VVERs. So while Gorbachev was a proponent of nuclear power, I wouldn’t say that he was pushing for RBMKs
I really really loved the amount of detail and context added to the situation, I would love to get more videos about events like this. The news footage, the explanations of the political climate. It’s all just delicious.
The section read by Hmbomb, "because we had faith that we lived fairly, that for us man was the highest thing, the measure of all things" actually has me crying, it's brutal I don't really know what to do with it, but as horrific as the USSR was in many ways, somehow the way it instilled this belief, only to stab it in the heart... it gets to me more than the rest
Trying to determine the death toll of the Chernobyl meltdown is a lot like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a mountain, except the boulder is the elephant's foot.
take out message is that Tchernobyl deathtoll is so small that it is barely noticeable when compared to other exposures (chemicals, metals, malnutrition etc... and let's not even speak about tobacco and alcohol). Yet we have it as a massive catastrophe in our shared beliefs. How much of this is due to the coldwar? In conclusion I'm more worried about climate change, pollution and biodiversity than I am about nuclear plant accidents. Because there are some thing that are currently on their way to create mass deaths, and nuclear power isn't on the list.
I just watched your Koko video, and am watching this one currently, and just want to stop for a sec to say I've found my new favourite youtube channel - I'm gonna unashamedly deepdive your catalogue today while I crochet; cheers from Canada!
My friends were working in a special cancer comission in which they were connecting or disconnecting patient's cancer with Chernobyl disaster. And believe me there were thousands of files just for one part of Kyiv...and around 90% of these people died because of cancer caused by the disaster. And there a hundreds of these comissions aroumd the country and how knows howany people died bevause of Chernobyl, but for sure there are hundreds of thousands😢 My uncle was a liquidator, they were obliged to collect radiation data during the day to determine how many radiation your body is collected and how many hours you still can work and and the end of the day the man in charge of writing it down was dividing it all by 10...so they were working 9 times more than it was allowed and got 9 times more radiation than the "safe" amount allowed back innthe day...fortunatly he just lost his hair but other guys just didn't survive...
My God, I just discovered your channel of video essay documentaries. These are so well written, researched and crafted! I've subbed Amazing work bravo!!
This is amazingly well written and researched! I wish other TH-camrs handled such sensitive subjects with the realism and compassion that you display here.
Apologies to all the people who unsubbed 5 seconds after I uploaded this. That sorta thing is becoming a habit I'm not sure why tbh
It's ok, your faithful servants are still here to consume your soup.
Fun fact: I was making a giant pot of chicken tortilla soup when you uploaded this.
Edit: ok, I've gotten through the whole thing. I legitimately cried a bit during the oral histories bit, that was very difficult to listen to.
Do you want me to burn the heretics?
I'd like to say it's one of the people that can't handle having their already present notions challenged doing it, but the first 5 minutes really didn't target too many groups yet.
I'm sorry, I did not address you properly. Do you want me to burn the heretics, my emperor?
@@Oujouj426 I think it's more about they forgot they were subbed and got reminded and changed their mind.
The testimony of the father was really sad and actually make me cried, while that defender of the soviet testimony was really insighful of that era, and its a really strong quote in his last line. "If thats what a free man does, than there no money for his funeral"
As an academic, my eyes have been opened to the power of individual stories. I could not bear watching my wife and daughter decay before my eyes.
And I like the broader point made about the value of oral history.
@barnabyjoy katya i will remeber you
I bought that book when I saw it on the nobel list. Its great but hits so hard my mother couldnt continue reading it.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one affected by that testimony.
My grandfather made a good point once, he said “Sure Chernobyl killed a few hundred to a few thousand, but have you ever wondered how many died in the coal mines or as a result of coal power?” He is a staunch supporter of nuclear power and while I think it is not a truly perfect source of power, I think it is part of our future, and you’re going to have to get used to it.
Not perfect but nuclear is the best we’ve ever done
I couldn’t have said it better 👍
@@3MGPLUGofl oh boy burning coal isn’t affecting a town or city or a country or a state or even a whole country, it impacts the world as a by product of burning it creates greenhouse gases. Oil spills have reeked utter ruin upon marine environments. The toxic leftovers from coal mining in Appalachia have poisoned water supplies across the region with heavy metals and radioactive substances.
In Kentucky, thanks to the systematic mountain top coal mining, the flooding in 2022 was devastating and reports say it’s only going to get worse because the water cycle has been severely disrupted.
Leaded gasoline is probably the cause of a wave of violent crime beginning sometime in the 70’s and lasting until the 90’s. Lead causes cognitive impairment and increased aggression. It’s even suspected it correlates heavily with IQ differences between effected and non effected populations.
Nuclear energy has its dangers. Environmental impacts from uranium mining? Almost certainly. Issues with waste disposal? Definitely. Issues with safety? Yes but they are all manageable.
When we look at the issues with nuclear power in the US we see one common thread: greed and NIMBY panics. Although I can’t blame the not in my back yard folks because for example with the 3 mile island incident greed and ass covering overtook all. Even in the repair phase of the project the private company involved was reckless to save MONEY.
At the end of the day the nuclear gold rush in the US wasn’t so much s problem with nuclear energy but the power and politics behind it. We made cheap inefficient plants that created more waste. We skimped on safety for workers and community members alike.
I’m not saying nuclear alone is the answer to all our energy needs and problems but it’s relatively safe compared to its alternatives and many of the previous issues have been solved. We just need to prioritize those things over profit.
The navy has used nuclear energy safely for decades and their track record is impeccable. There’s a simple reason: the military has an incentive structure that supersedes profit and cost efficiency - military readiness.
If our goal is safe clean energy that’s a goal we can if not accomplish do far better on. If only our incentive, our end goal, was safe clean energy and the funding and incentives reflected that.
Peoples behaviors track their incentives. Profit, like with healthcare, doesn’t belong in the nuclear energy industry.
@@3MGPLUG Depends on your idea of "liveable", but Centralia is an example of exactly that happening. But yeah you're pretty much right there.
Nuclear power is a technology that should have been used to bridge between fossil fuels and renewables. These days it makes no sense to expand using nuclear power and there really isn't much future in it as far as large scale energy production goes. If you're going to spend ~15 years, billions of dollars, and pose a risk to the safety of people and the environment, build a dam instead.
@@3MGPLUG no, it'll burn for decades and make miles of land unliveable
One the final part about regulation and safty, there's a reason they say "regulations are written in blood"
Exactly, just look at the Ronan Point disaster.
Que demonios estás haciendo aquí :0
God damn it, your channel is annoying.
And yet some people really think that regulations are bad
@@Kingdomkey123678That depends on the regulations. Ever heard of vocational licensing? Don't get me wrong I want my doctor to be licensed but a hair stylist doesn't need hundreds of hours of practice and to pay for a license.
I love how this started off as another semi-upbeat and humerous video, and by the end transformed into one of the most scathing critiques of the powers that be I've ever seen.
It's quite poweful
@@dasraffnix9471 I was watching this while painting and sort of zoned out until the voice recording of the man talking about how his daughter passed away. Even though it's just a voice actor, knowing that there is some father out there who had to live through it - idk but my heart goes out to that family. At that point I realized that he (soup emporium) was NOT going to make another light-hearted satirical video essay about something like this and wow... coal mining isn't an option and more innovative methods have a long way to go, but this can't be the best option.
@@whyaminartkid that door clip always gets me
@@whyaminartkidsounds like you took the wrong message from chernobyl. This wasn't nuclear power's fault, and this physically cannot happen to western nuclear plants. Literally, the physical mechanism that caused this doesn't exist in properly designed reactors.
@@LogjammerDbaggagecling-qr5ds
He didn't even mention it and also even as a recent grad MSc in Nuclear Physics, that's wrong.
Yes the takeaway is that Nuclear Energy isn't the issue... Itself. But the at times lax regulations imposed on it are what causes these issues and it's demonstrated by the now defunct regulatory body of Japan, NISA. After the IAEA report, rather than enforcing some proper safety measures of a tsunami of that magnitude, they basically said that it won't happen, only for later to happen with a bigger tsunami. It's a heaping clown show.
Soup, I’ve lost track of the pins
He should have let us write them down
I don't know what to make of this. It feels too good for TH-cam, but it's also exactly the kind of thing TH-cam needs, where else could you put a documentary like this? I just want this to get the recognition it deserves, this is a masterpiece, and you are a great man for treating the subject of Chernobyl for the first time with empathy and respect for the victims, their land and their futures.
I'd say put it on nebula, its the back up for all the education and learning TH-camrs put their videos
I'll admit, I was a little afraid at some parts of this video that you wouldn't acknowledge certain points, that you'd leave something out to push a narrative or something. But having watched the whole video, I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that you included damn near everything I could think of to discuss and then some, and you addressed it all tactfully and with the respect such a complex topic deserves. What a poignant, well-researched piece this was; I sincerely hope you get more views.
Honestly, I think that your thesis is very good, and I am extremely pro-nuclear, which is why I need to always remember that Chernobyl was awful. I think that it is worth considering that the extreme horrific nature of those disasters is what allows Nuclear to be so safe: all future nuclear power plants have to be able to withstand the worst possible earthquake in their region as a direct result of fukushima, and Chernobyl helped to ensure that we phased out systems that would create that kind of a meltdown. I want more GEN-IV, because with them come the same kind of potential standarization that allowed for the RBMK reactors to become so prolific, as well as reduced risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, but more importantly: I want gas & coal to be held to the same standards we have right now for nuclear. I don't want nuclear to be deregulated, because I don't trust the free market to not cut those kinds of corners, I want coal & natural gas to be treated with the same kind of disposal standards that cause nuclear to be so expensive.
Fully agree with pro nuclear, it's way more efficient and sustainable than coal, loads cleaner too, but uranium leaves far too much waste with a shelf life that's way to long, if we could get everyone on board with thorium and educate everyone about the benefits we could easily meet out ever growing need for energy with alot less risk in the long-term
I want coal and gas power plant to implement an emission standard (ie: particle & chemical scrubber at the smoke stack for coal, and then CO2 scrubbers for both coal and gas) to the point there's not even an argument to not continue using them.
yeah its kind of crazy to me how we hold nuclear to such a high standard, as we should, because of its potential for massive destruction and death it can cause yet we dont do the same for coal and gas and the millions and millions of deaths it has caused by polluting the air.
What about higher standards for solar and wind?
You can't build solar farms without destroying ecosystems. Coal has contributed to the greatest advancements in history (from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Age) but is also responsible for some pollution. Can society continue advancing while relying on a source of energy that's available less than 50% of the time. Maybe if the entire planet was covered or if solar panels orbited it society could continue advancing but when all the trees are cut down how will that affect oxygen (trees are responsible for 30% but "Our approach to forest management can have implications for our oceans. With their potential to either release or absorb CO2, there is a growing focus on managing forests to enhance their capacity to capture and store it. Thus, healthy forests can take in carbon that the oceans would otherwise absorb." (and result in ocean acidifcation). Fewer trees also means nothing to absorb rain which means more flooding every time it rains. Without trees, birds would be easier prey which would mean insect populations would not be controlled. When Mao wanted sparrows destroyed the locust population ballooned and ate the crops which contributed to the Great Chinese Famine which was responsible for 15-55 million deaths. Another example of removing something from the ecosystem, "In the 70 years of the wolves' absence, the entire Yellowstone ecosystem had fallen out of balance. Coyotes ran rampant, and the elk population exploded, overgrazing willows and aspens. Without those trees, songbirds began to decline, beavers could no longer build their dams and riverbanks started to erode."
Then there's the 300x more solar waste problem which will be toxic forever (because toxic metals don't decay). Nowhere in the world has 100% recycling and whatever number they have is debatable because some consider waste to energy (burning garbage) to be renewable. It would take Japan 20 years to recycle the 10k-20k tons of solar panel waste it currently has.
Wind has its own problems. You can't line wind turbines up in a row because the ones in back wouldn't get any wind. That means that wind turbines change weather patterns. There have been articles about using wind turbines to stop/reduce hurricanes even though "In fact, if we didn’t have regular hurricanes occurring, the world would in fact end." (National Hurricane Center-NOAA). The blades are made from heavy duty plastic which is difficult to recycle so whatever hasn't eroded over the years from the wind (scattering plastic across the planet, just like radiation from an accident) winds up in landfills.
How do you provide enough energy for a technological world while only using solar and wind and without changing weather patterns and cutting down trees or destroying deserts (you can't just move forests or deserts). If the idea is saving the planet how is solar and wind any good for the planet. If all that matters is co2, okay they win, but so would ending the human species.
"“I couldn’t see the sky or clouds, just a grayish layer,” she says. “Definitely, we have never seen something like this.”
The dust over Puerto Rico represented the leading edge of a giant plume that had traveled more than 5,000 miles from the Sahara desert across the Atlantic Ocean, spreading into the skies above North America and beyond.
This particular dust plume is at once remarkable and totally ordinary. Each year, these kinds of plumes sweep off the Sahara, carrying some 180 million tons of mineral-rich dust from its dried-out pans. Thousands of miles downwind, the fine-grained dust shapes both the ecology of the places it lands and the climate as a whole." National Geographic
@@namename9998 You make a lot of valid points but I'm just gonna jump on one that peeves me every time I see it : Trees
You could raze every tree, shrub, flower, grass, algae and phytoplankton on the planet and you wouldn't run out of oxygen for 100 million years, it's a fifth of our atmosphere and the non-vegetal biosphere consumes a tiny amount of it, even human activity barely makes a dent with all the excess fossil carbon we release that tries to reoxydize.
And regarding carbon sequestration, forests aren't that great at it either, mature forests are basically neutral, storing as much through growth as they lose through decay, and while young forests can indeed store carbon, especially if used commercially for construction, they might not do it as efficiently as the biomes they replace as some grasslands, marchlands and especially bogs are better at absorbing and retaining carbon in the long run.
Also the albedo of a forest is lower than grasslands and fields which might negate the cooling from the carbon it stored by absorbing more incident light.
TL;DR : it's not that simple and you shouldn't be too concerned for trees regarding oxygen and climate but rather emphasize their usefulness in preserving biodiversity if saving trees is your objective, there are much greater concerns for habitat loss than breathability.
I would like to point out that the war generation really wasn't happy. While they might have celebrated it outwardly at first most people bore a deep trauma from the occupation and war. I know here in Denmark it took decades before people were even really willing to talk about the war and it was mostly the generation who came after who did so, the people who lived through the war just referred to it as "the evil years". People did eventually start to open up about it and talk more about it but it left a huge impact on the entire generation and reinforced an already existing cultural trauma in Denmark due to the repeated invasions and occupations by Germany. It wasn't really until the 90s that the cultural trauma started to lift, partly due to a new generation which had grown up with a friendly Germany and partly due to cultural events. But even still most countries in Europe who suffered under the occupation still have a lot of unresolved issues related to it, it's a hard time to process and one that has entered national myth as well.
Yes, I think one of the best books that captures those voices and that sentiment is interestingly another of Aleksijevitj’s “the unwomanly face of war”. The trauma and stigma around the horror of the war rested heavily on those who lived through it especially women who often weren’t or did not want to be celebrated to the same extent.
My grandmother, who was a small child during the occupation, only ever recalled it with sorrow and horror. Her mother had worked with the resistance and her Polish step father lost a brother in the concentration camps. The war and post war years were not good years, no one remembers them that way.
I appreciate that the humorous undertones subsided as you moved into the accounts of the people who suffered and gave them the gravity and seriousness that the international community has not.
As someone who works in the academia and sciences, your point on privileging narratives and certain forms of knowledge speaks to me. The standard "unit" of knowledge production in science is publications but this typically takes the form of a written paper, which privileges thinkers with good writing skills (and usually English writing skills.) As someone who has struggled with reading and writing, I've found videos like yours to be far more provocative, informative, and accessible in producing knowledge than many paper's I've read. What you've presented here clearly qualifies as scholarship and is a stellar case as to why sciences should expand beyond valuing the written word.
As a science lover - but even more than that, humanities nerd - I can't like this comment enough. This is an attitude we all need to have.
i couldn’t agree more with this sentiment! i love seeking out professional, academic-quality content in formats like this that often afford the ability to go into greater depth, with a wider range of visual aids and demonstration, and in a more engaging fashion than the typical paper. plus you can get away with cracking a few jokes. it’s truly wonderful. if it is a well-sourced, professional piece by someone who understands the field, it should be taken seriously, regardless of format!
😊
As someone who struggles writing the thoughts in my head, and with complete knowledge it isn't quite this simple, this is where I recommend having what would essentially be a scribe who also has similar academic interests and understands you as a person. You can have them redraft papers that turn your barely understandable drivel into something understandable to your peers (this is why I say they need to understand YOU as well as the field, as they need to be able to essentially translate your specific breed of autism into something neurotypicals understand, and doing that without a very good understanding of what you were even talking about is gonna fail utterly).
Obviously like I said, easier said than done, like almost stupidly so, but it is something I'd recommend. If you got a good friend in the field, drag them into being your paper writer.
The plight of the Sami people hits close to home for some reason- the fact that the world is changing well beyond your control and becoming more dangerous and more harmful, and that even the most well intentioned actions to protect you from that new reality can still tear you apart. The feeling that nothing will be the same and that you have to conceive most everything as exchangeable or equal value in order to cope with the loss.
I think it's always funny how native culture of so called minorities are always treated as invaluable, and need to be guarded by all kinds of programs. But when a majority culture feel threatened, their desire to guard their own culture is seen as bad.
@@16m49x3 "thing bad" ain't it. the sami never even asked for electricity let alone nuclear reactors while the demands of modern society have pushed their environments to extremes that make their way of life almost impossible. we too deserve protection from a hostile environment, but we did this to ourselves and we're making everyone else pay for it with their health too.
@@insom_anim
And no country in the west asked for foreign export of labor, increased immigration or dependency on foreign powers for food and energy
@@16m49x3 what even are you trying to communicate here? 🤨
@@ilarious5729
that the sami cultures experiences are experienced by the majority of people
Looking at the timestamps (1 hour and 45 minutes) and the reference sheet, it looks like a ton of work went into this. I'm sure this is going to be an interesting watch.
This may be one of the most depressing things I've listened to lately, but it's a hard truth that people need to hear. Thank you for your extensive coverage.
I cried at several points of this video, and the voices you included of the "Chernobylites" will live in my heart from now on.
I live very closely to a nuclear power plant in the United States with a horrible safety record and which has been involved in a major corruption scandal. My concerns over nuclear power stem from that.
I really appreciate such an indepth and critical look at nuclear power and a dissection of the Chernobyl disaster and the nuclear energy industry as a whole. This video has made me reconsider my view of nuclear energy in light of climate change and non-renewable energy sources. I can't say in pro-nuclear now, but I will have to grapple with it as an option. Thank you.
You live in Philadelphia?
try living near a coal mine
Well don't include the actual voices in your heart. Those are translators as those Ukrainians wouldn't have spoken English.
No nuclear power plant in the US has a horrible safety record. Safest place to be, by far. Way safer than being on the road, in your home, at your job, at a sporting event, at school, on a train .... Stats and facts.
Hello fellow northwest Ohioan!!!
Davis Bessie is actually safer than three mile island. Especially since our techs in the 70’s caught the error before it let off any radioactive material
I work in the nuclear industry and love that you discussed the relevancy of the LNT model - it's still debated by academics in the radiation protection field and you can see back and forths between academics in some radprot journals. It was one of the most intersting topics to read into when I first got into the industry. Re: cancer rates in nuclear facility workers versus the general population, anecdotally some people consider this to make sense as radiation levels of facility workers are recorded and limits set to ensure safety - a regular person has no idea of how much radiation they may regularly come into contact with (e.g., living in a naturally Radon heavy environment like the South West & Wales).
Yes. In my last job I was a radiation protection supervisor alongside my normal role in medical research because we worked with certain radioactive isotopes (beta/gamma emitters) plus occasionally also x-rays. We had these sorts of debates often because the government insists there is no safe level of radiation, so we have to be extremely careful about risk assessing everything, yet we purposefully give it to volunteer humans when we run certain study types. A while back we had to do monitoring for radon across the entire site, and the subsequent calculated dose levels in the updated risk assessments showed higher exposure levels for people working in the basement “cold” labs in one building, than that already calculated for those working with radioactive material in the ground floor “hot” lab in ours.
You don’t work in the nuclear industry, I’ve seen your other comments about how you’re a Doctor and Geology Specialist on other videos posted by this channel, stop pretending to be an expert.
Best regards,
Someone who works in the Nuclear Industry
@@Geoffreyshadid Ok, and your proof is?
Sorry bud, but this Canuck is a fucking skeptic, especially when somebody else tries to call out somebody else for being what they themselves claim to be.
I got more radiation from one chest CT scan than I got my entire time in the Navy (assuming I'm doing my conversions correctly, the Navy didn't use standard/modern units for measurement). And I've done around 7 or 8 reactor compartment entries on the Enterprise, including one 15 minutes after shutdown. Unfortunately I've had 3 CT scans in recent times. I really don't like them, I do worry about that radiation. It's much higher and acute than anything I ever got in the Navy, and went right into my chest. But of course I'm just one person. You can hardly draw any conclusions from one person.
In case anyone is curious, it's been over 20 years since I've been in the Navy. And my NEC of 3386 meant that I did more reactor compartment entries than most normal nuclear operators, not to mention we had 8 reactor compartments. More modern designs are better and I'm sure they have less hot spots than we had. But I've only worked on S5W (training) and A2W plants.
@@Geoffreyshadid is this directed at me or faux? I’ve certainly never claimed to be a geology expert or doctor. I’m a researcher in pharmaceuticals and medical science, which involves working with radioactive isotopes.
Fuck me this is an absolute masterpiece of an essay. I’m really impressed with the content you put out and I look forward to seeing what you make next.
Subscribed based off this one video alone. This is far and away one of the best videos covering the human side of Chernobyl and the affects on the people, as well as the political fallout instead of the nuclear one. Simply fucking remarkable. And a Hbomberguy cameo to boot. An absolute masterpiece, as a Ukrainian thank you.
I love your videos they’re incredibly interesting. I like that you don’t oversimplify or entirely skip things that are ‘too complicated’. even if I don’t understand some technical parts, I like that you do take the time to explain them, and you’re clearly passionate about your topics so it remains genuinely interesting. it feels like learning for real, not just being fed information, yet it stays fun.
Radium paint wasn't confined to military equipment by any means. Hundreds of thousands of watches and alarm clocks were made for public consumption. It's still very, very easy to find them today. Hell, there were even Gilbert chemistry sets that had radioactive materials (including paint) and taught you how to build a geiger counter!
I didn't know that! Thanks for letting me know!
YOU’RE BACKK!!!! AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON! am thrilled to see it. Thanks for keeping it going!
As someone who is mathematically-minded and spent years studying radiation and its effect on biology, I appreciate the segment where you break down the fact that radiation isn’t just creeping death and that government-defined “healthy levels” of radiation are very flimsy. For those wondering, while you don’t want to use a half ton ingot of Uranium-235 as a body pillow, radiation (even from a modern nuclear attack) is just not something you have to worry about as far as health concerns. People still live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the area has become wilderness as opposed to wasteland. People have this misconception that radiation is bad, and while not untrue, it’s also not gonna have any more effect on the average length of your life than the danger of driving will.
One of the issues with the exclusion zone is that the upper layer of soil itself was buried deeper into the ground in the contaminated areas. It is still not safe to dig holes in the area, so any long-term settlement of large groups of people is impractical. I mean, it is difficult to maintain a town without ever patching roads, repairing underground pipes or cables, or making foundations for new buildings.
It is still just one disaster, though, and an extremely unlikely one (ironically, SOME of it was due to more independence granted to republics).
I think the thing most people don't understand is that radioactivity can either be intense or last a long time, but never both. It's a trade off.
Elements/Isotopes that are extremely radioactive have a short half-life, while those that remain radioactive for many thousands of years are relatively mild sources of radiation.
I like to compare it to a sprinter vs a jogger. The sprinter can do a lap much faster but will be out of breath afterwards, whereas the jogger can make multiple laps but much slower.
They're using the same total amount of energy, one's just more conservative.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni Exactly, this is the problem with the mass hysteria the media has whipped up the last 50 years.
People just dont realise that the real nasty stuff that we should worry about are short term problems.
This is why people are so against burial of radioactive waste "it's dangerous for millions of years!! " - uranium gets dug out the ground FFS.
Ironically uranium poisoning as a toxic heavy metal is more of an issue than its radioactivity, its a similar story for plutonium. So basically if you ingest uranium you'll die of heavy metal poisoning long before radiation does.
It's funny how people always compare things to driving when they're trying to downplay risks, because driving is kind of dangerous lol.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni While I understand what you're trying to get at, sufficient amounts of long half-life material could create intense radiation. Of course, you would need to deliberately pile insane amounts of the material into a single spot to achieve that with the sole intention of creating such a situation, it is something worth noting to be possible.
I recently discovered your channel and I was really excited for your next video; this is a terrific documentary on the disaster, nuclear power, and its politics-I have always been pro-nuclear, and am adamant that it is necessary in order for us to phase out fossil fuels entirely, but this definitely made me look at it in a new light. We mustn't be blinded by our own hubris and not be persuaded by technocrats who are willing to turn a blind eye every time something happens; we must say that it can happen here but that we have a plan of making sure it won't.
The technocrats of today overwhelmingly advocate renewables. Often in the face of hard realities of wind being fickle and solar (by definition) not being able to keep the lights on. This has led to a deeper dependence in fossil fuels than ever before. You used to just burn lignite because it was cheap. Now you have to because there is no other way to generate the power. I won't even get into the crippling dependency this has created in energy sources like gas to make these low-carbon politically-favorable "solutions" work to "assist" the highly variable sustainable green generation and meet demand.
Yet another energy-related political tie-in to Ukraine and it's effects on policy resulting in bad events for them.
Definitely.
@@rwaitt14153 The focus on just shoving batteries in everything to replace fossil fuels is another problem that compounds on top of what you said. Not only are lithium batteries themselves environmentally destructive to produce, but in many cases they do little to reduce carbon emissions beyond simply shifting the source of the emissions upstream to the coal and gas power plants that produce the energy to charge them.
People are looking for a quick and easy fix for our environmental issues, and are reluctant to commit to the real, long-term systemic change that is needed in not only our energy infrastructure but the way we live our lives.
I find it strange. I have always been avidly anti-nuclear. I was raised by German Atomkraft Nein Danke parents, who grew up during the Cold War, constantly scared of nuclear war. I grew up in Ireland, and I remember researching the continuation of Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant in the UK, because I was concerned it would fail due to its age and harm us in Ireland as well as the UK. Even when a windfarm was built 500 feet from our home, I was against that, but also nuclear.
Funnily enough this very well made documentary has actually swayed me to be more pro-nuclear. I have been moving in that direction for a while already, don't get me wrong.
But looking at nuclear disasters is a good way to look at disasters caused by fossil fuels: Oil spills, coal mining, gas explosions, not to mention "gradual" pollution and climate change.... How can we possibly look at the toll of nuclear energy without looking at the toll of fossil energy?
I think my current opinion on the matter is this: There needs to be a global effort to transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible, with nuclear to provide both a phasing in process and the necessary baseline requirement for energy grids to mitigate renewables' unpredictability and fluctuation. And a capitalist mode of economy cannot feasibly do this on time.
The same should be said for solar & wind. Clean fuel doesn't mean clean energy.
One of the worst realisation is that simmilar instability in reactor happened before in Lenigrad power plant at Sosnovy Bor. But crew of other blocks let alone power plants were not instructed about that, becuase it would imply imperfcetion in whole systems. And yes, those old power plants were designed laughably bad in terms of security in case of undesired states
This reminds me of when car manufacturers in the US were brought to court over known issues with vehicles and engineers needing to let somethings go for both the sake of cost, time-frame, and reality. Essentially it boiled down to the engineering teams trying to make rational arguments and explain why they would choose what to fix before a cars release. But all the courts and people wanted was for them to acknowledge that people were suffering and they would begin doing more.
i genuinely don't understand how you're able to make such highly informative videos but i just wanna thank you for all the work you do.
seriously it's amazing.
I'm a history major and I'm working on my senior thesis (it's about Vlad the Impaler). There are lots of stories and legends about him that aren't backed up by documents, but that's not super important. Whether a story circulated in the HRE was true or not doesn't change that it was culturally impactful nor does it change people's impressions. That's what oral history is. It tells us what people thought about a thing, even if they are blatantly wrong.
An example from the modern era is 9/11. Lots of people have memories of that day--memories that can be confirmed or disputed by hard evidence. However, we can't get the cultural impression of 9/11 without oral history. Even conspiracy theoriests fall in here. Yeah, they're wrong, but their impressions of the event are relevant to whatever insular community they create and opinions of them are relevant to America as a whole. History is the study of people and it mixes a lot of disciplines.
Lol, it's not "super important" whether thousands of people were slowly tortured to death by having a pole penetrate through their bodies? A lack of respect for truth is a lack of empathy. Would you say that it's not "super important" whether the holocaust happened?
A masterpiece on the legacy of Chernobyl, and one that will undoubtedly be passed over by the powers that be due to the political conflicts presented and criticized in the video.
Paranoia much?
@@lhaviland8602 How is it paranoia? The info in this video steps on a lot of toes that would object to this video if it were to become widely disseminated.
This video is a wonderful examination of why nuclear power is a safe and proven technology that is nevertheless unsuitable for use by a great many human beings due to our internalized beliefs about risk, profit and loss, and our tendency to favour short-term profits over everything else.
Nuclear power poses several of what science fiction author Ian M. Banks dubbed an "Outside Context Problem".
Chernobyl dumped its shit into the atmosphere once, by accident. Coal plants dump theirs into the atmosphere every day of every year, forever, by design.
Except unlike radiation, CO2 can photosynthesized into Oxygen by our massive army of trees.
Radiation just rots away everything it touches.
You cant even compare them
@@PrimetimeX that is such a kindergarten view... It's not just CO2 which also is getting dumped in excess, Coal has radioisotopes... Worse, Coal ash, due to its size, is more compact and ash can be washed into the eco system and bioaccumulate.
The fact you state that as a counterargument means you are not to be taken seriously, this is Ben Shapiro "Sell their houses and move" levels of bad.
It literally just goes to show that oil and gas is winning while you bash at allies for supporting a power source that they know isn't perfect but that the alternative in every facet is way worse.
TLDR
You are so anti-nuclear that you state a kindergarten view of coal burning like the greenhouse gases are just it... While happily ignoring coal ash being much much worse radioactively and sincerely piss off.
@@artyom2801 im not anti-nuclear im pro-nuclear.
My comment is deleted so idk what I said or what youre responding to.
@@PrimetimeXyour "unlike radiation" comment.
I’m no scientist, I find this video in my recommendation randomly because of educational videos i liked to watch, and this information I’m trying to process is just a hard reminder how a human can be so cruel. I feel its too much to know yet here I am watching this. Thank you so much for the video and the effort and all the time for making this video, have a nice day and take care!
This was a great deep dive. The Chernobyl stories were so well delivered. Hearing Harry's voice caught me off guard, but he did a great job
An excellent video that I shall rewatch and think about for some time I'm sure. I do wish to quibble with your source number 263: They're specifically adding Chernobyl despite it being outside the timescale they wanted to use, but not adjusting for hydroelectric having similar outlier disasters. Their source (Sovacool et al) has a table for fatalities averaged from 1950 to 2014 they could have used; it seems irresponsible to construct a span to specifically include the worst nuclear accidents, but exclude the dam failures of the 70s.
That's a bit of context I wasn't aware of about the Sovacool paper some of the data is based on. I'll add that into the reference sheet. Thanks for letting me know!
And dams are targets during war (WW2, Korean, Croatian).
Commenting for the Algorithm, but I also wanna mention if I haven’t already how magnificent this video turned out, I’m glad to be a subscriber and a patron! I’m looking forward to seeing what you bring to the table next.
The guy losing his daughter also still never fails to make me bawl my eyes out, this is just too powerful.
This fantastic essay only reinforces my favorite line from the Chernobyl miniseries:
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
"Both oil and nuclear lobby sway the narrative, also we genuinely don't know anyway, but lets fill this almost two hour video with interesting trivia"
I'm not even mad
Yoooo first video in 7 months let's gooooooooo
Can't wait to see it, your videos are so well-edited and fun to watch!
ha ha, "fun"
Absolutely amazing video. One of the best I've seen on this platform. This one's gonna stick with me for a long time; you treated the subject with so much *humanity*. Brilliant, powerful work.
I believe this is your best video yet. And likely one of the best essays I've heard thus far. I can be wrong. There are a lot of things I haven't seen or heard yet, but of all the things that I _have_ seen, this takes the cake. And I will frankly not argue about that.
This is the post-essay comment
So one question here is, "how bad is 1000 Bq/kg?"
Normally, your body has about 8000 Bq of Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 in it. This is spread out over 60 or so kg. So 1000 is 8x the limit. Basically, those sheep are about 10x as radioactive as people, which is about 3 mSv/year worth.
The problem though is that this stuff has a tendency to bioaccumulate. Under the worst case scenario, every kg of meat you eat would just add on to your body's natural radioactivity. If you ate 1000 kg over many years under this assumption, that would make you have a million Bq.
Which might sound pretty bad. And it is... but, that's still only around 30 mSv/year. Vs ~100 needed for CRS, or ~100 per hour for ARS.
of course, this gets into a question. What's the biological halflife of Cs-137?
Well, it turns out it's actually more like 2 months.
This is pretty important because it means you really have to eat a lot of those sheep very quickly to do much damage. The stuff gets thrown out a lot faster than people give credit for. It's definitely not sitting there for years.
That suggests to me that if you ate a kg/day of those sheep, you're gonna have about 70000 extra Bq of radiation. Which is about 2 mSv every year. So if your diet is mostly those sheep for a year, you might be almost 10x as radioactive as normal because of it and have about 2% the dose needed for CRS.
Cancer is another concern. If we go by the (obviously incorrect for a self-repairing system) Linear No Threshold model, we can calculate that after a year of eating pretty much nothing but radioactive sheep, your risk of long term cancer might be increased 0.01%. Though as the COVID-19 crisis shows, spread out a low death rate over a large population and it gets bad fast. If a hundred million people eat nothing but radioactive sheep for a year, that model suggests 10,000 excess cancer deaths.
Of course, that's just one model. And we should keep in mind most of the biological and statistical evidence that has been studied supports either diminished, negligible, or even protective carcinogenic effects of low dose whole body irradiation below the threshhold of CRS, or even potentially well into the threshhold of CRS. Considering we're talking about 2% the threshold of CRS, we really have no idea but it's almost surely less than 0.01%. Quite possibly dramatically less.
Though the cancer rate increase from eating that much meat, radioactive or not.... I'm pretty sure that's gonna be way past 10,000 excess death.
Amazing video. I am a pro - nuclear power person, and your video both strengthened my resolve in its importance, while also tempering me and reminding me that I have to hold nuclear power to the same level of scrutiny as fossil fuels, or any other energy source. Thank you for releasing this and good job. Liked and commented to increase engagement and spread video 👍
Nuclear power is one of the greatest double-edged swords we have discovered. When treated with respect and careful planning for all eventualities are taken into account, it is an extremely safe form of power with incredibly minimal pollution and comparably low upkeep costs. When handled without care and regard, it can collapse a country and kill thousands, leaving millions to suffer and die slowly as a result of subsequent ecological and socioeconomic factors. I am 100% pro nuclear power, but I hold the same reservations that Soup has in this video. That you MUST overbuild and you MUST plan for everything, because that is the only thing that can keep those plants viable in the social hivemind. Anything less breeds distrust and sets society back decades in terms of fossil fuel independence for their power grid.
Thanks for this, this is beautiful.
I also am in favor of nuclear, but always found it hard to be on the same page as many of other "nuclear bros".
This doc could deserve an award.
I strongly agree
To be fair on the western reactors thing; the eastern reactors were incredibly dangerous, as they were designed with minimal safety or redundancy, which is why Chernobyl was able to happen in the first place.
That doesn’t excuse the ridiculous austerity plans but I think not wanting any more unsafe eastern style reactors built is a legitimate concern…
My problem is always like,, before Chernobyl happened, people insisted that reactor type was safe. Concerns were always brushed aside on the basis that it'd take so many things going wrong at once for a meltdown that it was unlikely to ever happen, but it did. People say the same things about Fukushima too "they couldn't have planned for all this to go wrong at the same time"
The idea that nuclear power is safe always comes with the caveat of health and safety protocols being followed properly and the people in charge not lying or cutting corners
I don't personally think I can ever trust the people in charge of these reactors to maintain them properly, whether they be privately or government owned. Maybe I'm just overly paranoid about it, but I still never feel that I can trust it.
@@CryptP the thing is that applies to nearly every single power source. If hydroelectric isn't maintained properly and safety standards aren't followed it can also lead to catastrophic death. Whilst the risk of death for solar and wind is lower, it's not absent. Solar panels for 1 need semiconductors, and the mining for that can be very dangerous. Nuclear has less deaths per kilowatt hour than hydroelectric or any fossil fuel, even including Chernobyl and other disasters. Energy generation needs constant vigilance, like a lot of things, but given proper attention it is safe. Nuclear power is looking to be a necessary part of a decarbonised energy grid, to provide a base level stable power, similar to what nat gas does now. Nuclear is far from perfect, but it's better than climate change.
@@alexarnold8461 True, but accidents with other types of site don't lead to entire cities becoming both abandoned and impossible/difficult to actually return to for a still unknown amount of time. Chernobyl happened over 3 decades ago, Pripyat is still abandoned. Few people live and work there, and they can only live there for a regulated amount of the year.
The destruction is that which can't just be repaired and undone. Had Fukushima been hit only by a tsunami, they would've rebuilt by now and the city would be pretty much fine again. But add a meltdown to that, and the only work really done in the area is attempts to contain the radiation. Buildings still sit destroyed, left exactly where they are, covered in a thick layer of radioactive dust and debris.
My point isn't that we just can't have nuclear power, but that it won't feel safe - especially to communities who will live in the shadow of a reactor - unless it's sufficiently idiot-proofed, because the scale and scope of the damage done by nuclear accidents is so fundamentally greater. There's a reason accidents at nuclear power plants scare people a lot more than other types of plant, people aren't just dumb and blowing it out of proportion.
@@CryptP I'd like to point out that hydroelectric power also wipes towns, cities, and wild areas off the map. In order to build a reservoir you have to flood tons of land upstream. And, to add in politics, whose land gets flooded is usually who has the least amount of political power to stop it.
Likewise, areas downwind of coal and oil powerplants suffer from air pollution, and coal plants produce fly ash, which is chemically toxic, dissolves readily in water, and will never be safe. Arsenic dust now will be dangerous in a billion years, and we keep them in open pits lined with plastic sheets in Tennessee. And oil and natural gas? poison the land and water they travel over. Oil spill that choke the oceans. Fracking that poisons fresh water. Those places are poor, they are not cities, but they're still casualties of carbon power.
Solar plants also take up tons of space; we just don't have to think about them because no one wants to live in the desert. And when they wear out, we don't know how to recycle them. They have toxic compounds too, like cadmium, but we don't think about that because it's easy to move that toxic pit to Africa.
Modern nuclear reactor designs are incredibly safe. The technology was founded in the 1950s, and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were built in the 1970s. Even a traditional design has made massive improvements in simplifying the design to reduce the avenues for cascades, and more experimental designs leverage the advances we've made in materials science to add fail-safe characteristics. One example is that you could build a robotically-kept reactor and bury it deeper in a concrete dome.
I did grow up in a community next to a nuclear reactor. Saw the steam rise into the sky, heard the monthly alarm tests. I'm happy it wasn't an equivalent amount of fossil fuel power plants.
@@CryptP There were verifiable causes for concern regarding the RBMK design but they were suppressed by the Soviet regime. After Chernobyl the remaining RBMKs were gradually modified to increase safety.
Fukushima could have been planned for, wasn't, even still the reactors would have made it. The problem was the location of the generators, which was flooded, and made it impossible to restart the cooling systems. Fukushima is absolutely infuriating because it wasn't nuclear power's fault.
"I studied geology for *5 YEARS, I AM ALLOWED TO GEEK OUT ABOUT SOIL* "
As a student, I completely understand how you feel.
Also this explains why there are such precise maps in your videos
1:07:10 this story had me in tears. Such a moving piece, it tells the stories behind the statistics.
Those oral stories from Chernobyl were horrifying to hear, so... applause to the people who narrated them for us. Especially Dan Richardson, who sounded like he was so genuinely crying and grieving I can't... Has he, too, lost a child he had to put in too small a coffin?
This is one of the most genuine and impressive feats of research, and importantly explanatory storytelling, I have seen in a very long time. Legitimately your best work so far, bravo.
I have no idea how content this good, this long, this deep, can be made. I'm just amazed.
Giggity
Fantastic video, thank you for making it. Certainly changed my view on Chernobyl, and probably how I'll try to address the topic when discussing nuclear energy.
Dear Soup,
Thank you. This was enlightening and very moving. Please continue to make this kind of content, its the kind of content the internet desperately needs.
Your insights and thoughtfulness reflects man's better half. This is the kind of content we, mankind, deserve.
Take care
Commenting as an absolute non-scientist, non-mathematician with not a single STEM bone in my body - your channel is incredible and this is a masterpiece. You present things in such a clear, transparent way that's easy to grasp, easy to laugh along with, and easy to learn a lot from. Not only that, your message and absolute rock solid moral ground and view on humanity, working towards solutions and open discussions about issues, and calling out political or money related shenanigans - Jesus man. This is just such an insane show of talent
Sidenote - I may be alone here. But I've always fuckin loved volcano documentaries and videos. So big vote here for more juicy volcano content
Commenting again after finishing the vid to say a few things. I'm a mother... the bit you picked out with the man who lost his little girl and had to lay her on the door his late father had been on just had me sobbing.
secondly near the end your thesis is a bit hard to follow as you jump around from pro and anti arguments. It might just be me being tired and medicated but i had to listen to it a few times.
This is an amazing essay. I would love a list all the readers, I'm bad with voices and only Harris Bomberguy's stood out to me and I want to see these people's channels if they have them. Thank you for all the work you did on this.
I'll remember Katya. I'll remember.
I'll remember Katya.
The father talking about his daughter brings me to tears everytime I hear it, the story section of the video is exceptionally profound
Timestamp?
Literally at a loss for words, I’m a regular enjoyer of video essays for a number of reasons.
1) I’ve been a fan of documentaries since I was a kid and I love learning things
2) I love stories and storytelling
3) the quality of content and the dedication of online creators like you is compelling
Just good work all around, I appreciate what you do. Time for me to binge your content :)
Soup. this is really good. it started of with a lot of dry numbers and amounts of Becquerel in milk and I thought here we go.... But this film turned into a really great piece about the people of Chernobyl. You gave them a face and a voice and a place in history. I mean it. This is really well done.
I'm surprised more people don't know this channel, your videos are amazing at combining information with entertainment. Keep it up!
Goddamn, dude. There are video essays, then there are video essays. This has more references than some PhD dissertations! Most importantly, you hit the right notes outside what is normally covered in videos on Chernobyl.
This was getting way to heavy so I had to take a break and watch some Brain David Gilbert... he just uploaded a new video about the US Health Insurance System so I came back here.
I have a presentation on Friday about this very topic... I wrote a paper about so much of the stuff that you've talked about (not just on Chernobyl but nuclear in general). Your tone and call to action has really inspired to ask these very questions to my classmates. Thank you!
This needs about 7 billion more views. Excellent work on a crucial topic.
I am in awe at the sheer amount of research that has gone into this and the depth of analysis and connected ideas that this lays out
I remember watching Chernobly with my parents and them telling me that my sister was effected by the disaster, she had a mild rash that came from nowhere and when they went to the doctor they said it was from Chernobly. I'm serbian by the way so yeah a lot of people were effected without evan knowing.
Or people misattributed their normal or abnormal conditions to Chernobyl.
probably misattribution
@@tsrenis could be, but statistics dont lie. Hungary had a ~30% jump in dermatological problems that month, medical data was supressed of course.
This is one of if not the best essays I've ever seen. You've opened my eyes, thank you.
Bonus: Every time someone says "the scientific understanding of low dose rates is limited", what the public is likely to take away from that is that the effects are really bad, but they could be even worse. So on a democratic level this just drives policy toward even more radiophobia.
What should be said instead is that the effect of low dose rates is unknown, but is so small as to be statistically undetectable and thus on a colloquial sense nobody could ever tell the difference living in slightly elevated radiation levels from not. So, what you would rationally expect from policy is to just not care about it.
My great gramma was a survivor of the radium clock paint. She used to tell me stories of the girls playing with the paint and painting their faces and teeth because it was fun and funny to them while they worked their long hours. She lived til the day after her 95th and I'm grateful we had the time we had with her because she very well could have died decades ago because of the paint.
This is frankly one of the best video essays in construction because with many video essays, I'm left waiting for the essayist to explain how things are connected and what point they are trying to make. Here though, I got to the end realizing that I completely understood their point and agreed with them far before they ever explicitly stated the point of the video.
Brilliant video that needs to be more widely seen! Agreed that we do need to include nuclear power in the energy mix to accelerate decarbonization. France is an interesting example where they invested heavily in nuclear in the past and it currently produces 75% of their electricity. Apparently it just got announced last month France now does plan to build some new nuclear power stations, but I don't know whether it will fill the gap as the old ones reach end-of-life. So much like Germany, it's going to create a gap which is likely to be filled by gas or coal.
Not in a million year France will return to gas or coal power for our main production
Building a (fission) nuclear power plant is fast, there will be no need to return to fossile fuels
Also, we produce so much that we sell electricity to other countries
We have a few gas power plant, but they all are from bio-fuel, so they are green
We have ONE coal power plant, but it's not for energy, it's for research, if they burn 1T a year it's a miracle
And we *already* replace our nuclear power plant progressively with newer ones, not every ones at the same time, that would be extremely dumb
Good thing, because their life-span have the same gap needed to build new ones, as if it was *intended* from the start
Not even counting ITER in the mix
I learned so much from this video. Not just about the debate for or against nuclear (I knew it was expensive but I don't think I really understood just HOW expensive it is), but about how that debate affected so many lives near the end of the 20th and may have helped bring down the Soviet Union.
Thank you Soup.
Living in eastern germany meant that our first news about the incident came from western german news channels... which nearly everybody watched. It led to the founding of quite a lot of environmental groups that (among others) drove the change and eventually helped overcome the system.
and now Germany primarily relies on gas....
Yeah that happens alot in situations like this. Which is why if Nuclear power especially in Germany is to be taken in full swing it needs to be done with the workers in mind.
@@elilass8410 coal
you depicted the situation and the empathy beautifully. loved it. upload that 5 hour video, i'll watch it
That ending was so powerful. Absolutely masterful work.
This was powerful. And truthful. And awesome. I've always been one of those sociopaths comparing the thousands of deaths of Chernobyl to the millions that die every year due to fossil fuel pollution. Hearing this gave me a human dimension of the story and makes me approach the issue in a more responsible manner. Do I still like nuclear energy? Absolutely. But are we doing enough to ensure these things don't happen again or at least too often? That's the question we should ask and not "is it better to run on batteries or nuclear"
"I've always been one of those sociopaths comparing the thousands of deaths of Chernobyl to the millions that die every year due to fossil fuel pollution."
And a damn smart one at that. Every one of those fossil fuel deaths is just as tragic.
Considering batteries require mining for limited materials that results in the deaths of many people per year, generate tons of waste, and the sum electrical energy production does not equal what would be needed to even put all American cars on battery power...... yeah nuclear is way better
I've been attempting to explain this to people for years. Yes, nuclear can be clean and insanely efficient. But it can also be devastating when things go wrong. There isn't a single energy source available to humans today that can't decimate a population or ecosystem in one wrong move. Each and every form of energy we create is going to cause some kind of death to someone somewhere. It's a matter of recognizing the massive multidimensional scales we tip constantly. Look at avocados. A produce that rots in most grocer's bins at an elevated cost to consumers has created cartels and stripped whole communities of their water supply. The whole picture can be really difficult to consider, but it's invaluable that we do it.
We can't consider technology without humans.We can't consider science without politics. To hold fast to one without the other is missing the rest of the story/issues. And this limited perspective leaves us increasingly vulnerable to their inevitable failures when we fail to plan for them.
Yes, we are doing enough to ensure these things don't happen, because it only happened once in 70 years, and it happened in a country that disregarded every safety measure they possibly could. You can't compare 3 mile island or Fukushima to Chernobyl, because 3 mile island was contained by the safety measures we built in, and the Fukushima meltdown was caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a tsunami.
Could you please refine from calling engineers „sociopaths“?
We make tough decisions based on current science and best practices.
We also need to have a value (monetary) that represents the cost of different states of casualties including death.
Why? Well, if you‘re designing a complex system a risk analysis is completed and used for the detail design, ideally reviewing it at every milestone and ofc implementing and testing its measures.
Sometimes the probability of something going wrong is so high + big impact on operator/public safety that a process is completely redesigned.
Or ignored, then you go full Union Carbide and Bhopal the population.
Short: Engineers need a price tag that represents the cost of a life in country X.
We aren‘t all sociopaths but often are led by sociopaths.
Thank you for taking notice of this strange, but very important aspect of engineering.
It makes sense. If you took the covid pandemic as simply the raw numbers of deaths, hospitalizations, and people affected long term by the disease, you wouldn't really have a clear picture of the worldwide existential dread it has and currently still is causing
And this is why I like being mostly emotionless
To clarify, I don't have any feelings of dread around COVID, not taking that away from people.
If you considered everything that could possibly kill you, you literally wouldn't be able to have a functional life. I took the attitude that if Covid was going to kill me, there was nothing I could really do about it, but the odds are low anyway (statistically it was still more likely I'd die in a car accident, and I'm not afraid of driving). I got the vaccine as a sensible precaution and just stopped thinking about it after that. I've had two close relatives get Covid and survive. It's not like there's nothing I'm afraid of, but I try to be more logical than emotional when it comes to evaluating risks. Disease will never go away, but the chances of getting it are low, and the chances of surviving it if you do get it is pretty high, in the modern world. People are more afraid of dying in a plane than in a car, despite the latter being objectively more dangerous; fear is an emotional response, not a logical one. One shouldn't let emotion be in the driver's seat of their life. The fear people had of Covid was way out of proportion to how dangerous it truly was, and it allowed the government and politicians to exploit it easily. If there's one lesson we should take away from the pandemic, it should be not to allow that ever again.
This is also why lockdowns aren’t the miracle tools they seem to be, due to the devastation of the economy causing lots of deaths too
I just saw this, I can't believe TH-cam didn't notify me of this! I'm frustrated because I love your content and thought you quit. Sorry I'm a month late, but great video again man!
Soup: I HAVE STUDIED GEOLOGY FOR 5 YEARS, I AM ALLOWED TO GEEK ABOUT SOIL
me, having studied geology for four years and currently making my end-of-degree work in soil science: *spills tears of joy over the 10 parent material samples spilled in my lab desk*
I appreciate that you site your sources, keep making stuff
Good on you at trying to understand this incident.
And to the pharmacy that made bank selling you headache medication.
This incident was just as complex a situation locally and wide scale.
As well as politics, and soviet documents looking more like bar codes than archives
and other modern day shenanigans.
Excellent video Soup. It's so easy as a nuclear advocate to see completely uninformed fear mongering and respond by falling into equally uninformed denialism and complacency.
Industrial accidents can and will happen. That is inevitable. When you advocate for something with as much potential for harm as nuclear, you need to plan for and account for that. The reason it is so safe is precisely solely down to people who have acknowledged the risks and planned for them. Every nuclear accident we have seen at serious scale was not the fault of people worrying and saying we need to take our time. It was by "denialists" who wanted to steam ahead without fully informing themselves and others of the necessary information to do this very good thing safely.
Fr, it never puts me at ease when I see nuclear advocates go "Nuclear power is totally safe and fine as long as it's properly maintained and regulated"
Like yeah I know that, nuclear disasters happened because of errors made in construction and operation of these plants. That's the point. What I need is nuclear power that's safe even if the people running it do fuck up pretty colossally, because inevitably something will go wrong at some point. Always assume that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and plan accordingly.
Chernobyl's fault was not "denialists". It was politics.
Politics was the reason the flaw in the RBMK reactors was suppressed.
Politics was the reason the managers at Chernobyl delayed safety testing.
Politics was the reason power demands were higher than assumed as factories attempted to meet quotas.
Politics was the reason the testing was not simply done some other time.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD oh, ok well we'll just have a non political political issue then. Well identified.
It's reductive to just say it was "politics". That's such a broad and meaningless term. What did their politics cause them to do? Deny. They denied the faults with the reactor. They denied the problems they were having.
You can have politics whilst acknowledging the need to be honest about flaws and problems. In fact, I would argue that refusing to deny is in and of itself political.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD politically driven denialism is still denialism
@@windows95leon It's not reductive. The Soviet style of management demanded the censorship of weakness. The Soviet style of middle-management required lying to higher ups because if you were honest and admitted delays, you'd get sacked.
They never denied that nuclear was dangerous. That's precisely why the accident occurred during SAFETY TESTING.
Amazing documentary you got here. Loved every second of it wish it was twice as long. Good job!
This is something i insist when talking to people about history. To keep in their minds the social, economical and political intentions behind every event but most importantly to NEVER forget that there is a human element to it.
It is a very hard but needed practice to not only zoom out to see it from a macro perspective but also to zoom in and see how it affected humans on an individual level.
Great video, not sure if it's just me but the sound you use for the highlighting gives me Goosebumps and shivers. I've never quite had a sound do that so badly to me.
I think the answer to how many did Chernobyl kill is quite simple in this context.
Too many, and way more than had any reason to.
Holy crap. This video is so good. How does it have so few views? With a little polishing up, you could show this in theaters.
This... Is impressive. Thank you for all the work you put into this
returning a month later, this video is criminally underwatched. absolutely stellar work.
You click on this video thinking you’re gonna hear a lot about the Chernobyl disaster, and you come away learning about neoliberalism and shock therapy. Great work. I applaud you for doing your research. And my heart goes out to the people of Eastern Europe.
97:55 While it’s true that the Soviets initially favoured the RBMK due to its ease of construction, by the time Gorbachev came to power VVER had already displaced it as the dominant reactor being built. Of the ten reactors that entered construction in Russia (I couldn’t find any list with construction dates for the whole USSR but Chernobyl and Ignalina were the only RBMKs built outside Russia anyway) between 1980 and 1985, only two were RBMKs (both at sites which already housed such reactors) with the rest being VVERs. So while Gorbachev was a proponent of nuclear power, I wouldn’t say that he was pushing for RBMKs
I didn't know that - will check and add that clarification to the reference sheet
I really really loved the amount of detail and context added to the situation, I would love to get more videos about events like this. The news footage, the explanations of the political climate. It’s all just delicious.
The Soup Master has returned
The section read by Hmbomb, "because we had faith that we lived fairly, that for us man was the highest thing, the measure of all things" actually has me crying, it's brutal
I don't really know what to do with it, but as horrific as the USSR was in many ways, somehow the way it instilled this belief, only to stab it in the heart... it gets to me more than the rest
Trying to determine the death toll of the Chernobyl meltdown is a lot like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a mountain, except the boulder is the elephant's foot.
take out message is that Tchernobyl deathtoll is so small that it is barely noticeable when compared to other exposures (chemicals, metals, malnutrition etc... and let's not even speak about tobacco and alcohol).
Yet we have it as a massive catastrophe in our shared beliefs.
How much of this is due to the coldwar?
In conclusion I'm more worried about climate change, pollution and biodiversity than I am about nuclear plant accidents.
Because there are some thing that are currently on their way to create mass deaths, and nuclear power isn't on the list.
Discontinuing nuclear power because of nuclear disasters is like discontinuing airplane travel because of planecrashes.
Airplane crashes don't leave vast swathes of land uninhabitable for hundreds to thousands of years.
I’m citing this for a college essay. 10/10 lovely work
I just watched your Koko video, and am watching this one currently, and just want to stop for a sec to say I've found my new favourite youtube channel - I'm gonna unashamedly deepdive your catalogue today while I crochet; cheers from Canada!
I can't believe this went under the radar for me until now. This is super interesting, and you've expressed everything amazingly well.
1:12:00 did you really have to go from the quiet testimonies to the screeching computer noises?
Holy.... how long did you spend on this... How do you even organise your thoughts...
This.. is... amazing!!!
My friends were working in a special cancer comission in which they were connecting or disconnecting patient's cancer with Chernobyl disaster. And believe me there were thousands of files just for one part of Kyiv...and around 90% of these people died because of cancer caused by the disaster. And there a hundreds of these comissions aroumd the country and how knows howany people died bevause of Chernobyl, but for sure there are hundreds of thousands😢 My uncle was a liquidator, they were obliged to collect radiation data during the day to determine how many radiation your body is collected and how many hours you still can work and and the end of the day the man in charge of writing it down was dividing it all by 10...so they were working 9 times more than it was allowed and got 9 times more radiation than the "safe" amount allowed back innthe day...fortunatly he just lost his hair but other guys just didn't survive...
My God, I just discovered your channel of video essay documentaries. These are so well written, researched and crafted! I've subbed Amazing work bravo!!
This is amazingly well written and researched! I wish other TH-camrs handled such sensitive subjects with the realism and compassion that you display here.