Doomed to Fail - Ep 200: Disaster on the Graveyard Shift - Chernobyl

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Let's talk about the most expensive disaster of all time! The meltdown at Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. A safety test that was anything but 'routine' ended in an explosion of radioactive material, and everything became poison. We'll talk about the USSR, Nuclear Power, the disaster itself, and the aftermath. This is episode 200!! We are so excited to have gotten this far, thank you so much for listening!!  Sources:The Chernobyl Disaster [Ben Fogle] - Parts 1-3 (Documentary 2022) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsr3vxsgjnA'This is my home': Life inside Chernobyl’s exclusion zone | VOANews - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MokT_Y0YDhwChernobyl: Flourishing lives in the dead zone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYxO7iGO6b0Chernobyl mini series - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7366338/?ref_=ttch_ov_iMidnight in Chernobyl  / Adam Higgenbotham - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_ChernobylChernobyl: Minute by Minute | Full Film - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGw3kRGX35sInside Chernobyl's Abandoned Ghost Town | Pripyat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_3DFTm8ioAFrequently Asked Chernobyl Questions - https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqsExploring Chernobyl: A Stalker's Unseen Journey Inside The Exclusion Zone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-ef7wi_TQThe Elephant's Foot - Corpse of Chernobyl - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIWu8rbWLGo Cary Elwes's memoir, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride. Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Moment. Hi, Taylor. Hi, Fars. I just squeaked a little bit.

How were you? Good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. You know, I was thinking about this about how. I almost feel like I don't have a right to tell parents that I'm tired because I know what y'all endure. No, you know, I was tired when I was 20.

You're tired for the life you're living. But I also- No idea what it's like, but you also can be tired. I did listen to a podcast where somebody was talking about how to harness the energy of a parent and how it's like a weird superhuman capability given how much running around you have to do along with balancing job and household and all that stuff and what they were articulate and was like yeah but it's different because you get that energy from something else like you're not dwell you're not pulling from the same reservoir exactly because like you have an obligation to keep another thing alive and so it's just

yeah I guess parents I guess you're kind of superhuman in some way so thank you yeah yeah we're Yeah, we're so busy that I wrote on the calendar that they can ask me new questions on Thursday. I wrote, you may ask mom new questions on Thursday because we have so many activities between last week and this Thursday that I'm not taking any new requests. Miles is like, Mom, can I have a hot dog? It's like, no new questions. Nope. Thursday. Nothing. Nothing.

Send for yourselves. Oh, my goodness. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to doomed to fail. Fars is tired. I'm actually not that tired. We bring you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. And I'm Taylor, joined by Fars.

I'm joined here. And you go. No, no. Don't please. This is episode 200. Oh, yeah. It's where it is. It's a fireworks sounds.

Can't say, but Taylor's doing the firework hands sign, the international sign for fireworks with their hands. Mm-hmm. Isn't that exciting? it's kind of crazy I know it's a little nuts yeah like what are we doing it's super fun

like we've been doing this while think of all stuff that we didn't know yeah I know I know like ultimately like I that's the one thing that besides our accountability structure to one another that keeps bringing me back

is like unless you just snap out of like your day to day life a little bit and me like I'm gonna research something I don't know a lot about or I haven't looked at a very long time and it's just going to break up the week into something else that that could be

interesting so that's been very very fun yeah it has been fun it's a lot of work though I will admit um I oh I just got actually speaking of books I just got abundance in the library let me check it out I have to like check it out I was going to go away on my phone but I will read that it's I did buy abundance recently as well good for you okay let me have to check out they're going to it away from me. Oh, no, I think I got it. No, I'll read that this week. I'll have another one doing 14 days. Oh, Libby's so stressful. I read like a stupid meme that was like, I lived it. All my Libby holds came in at the same time. Because if you like have a bunch of stuff from the library, it'll come to the same time. And you're like, I don't have 100 hours this week to listen to

books, you know. Is your library really busy? Actually, it must be. I actually pull from two libraries. I pull from the LA library and the San Bernard, you know, County Library. So, yeah, they're both pretty busy. I don't really know how it works with, like, licensing, you know, but they can, like, you know, give out three copies at a time, you know? So I have, I'll admit right now that I've never been to the Austin one that's downtown. I'm positive Blair has and just probably told you about it.

But apparently, so the outside of it's gorgeous. It's very cool looking, very modern. It's got like a great greenscape outside of it. And I hear that it's like a bar on the rooftop, a rooftop that you can hang out and read it. It's supposed to be one of the, also. also were you the one that told me or did somebody else tell me that you can check out seeds okay somebody else told me yeah yeah you can check out all sorts of stuff they like lawnmowers and video cameras and yeah guess how many gumballs are in the gumball jar it's really fun

you can do so many cool things the library the library is the best i get yeah i mean you can do canopy you can watch movies for free um you can do obviously books i used to do when we lived in l. we live next to the library or not we work next to the library member and i used to like order books and wonder where in the la county your book was they would bring it to that library you could just go get it yeah it's incredible you didn't even have to go like it was really fun one of the better resources that we spend public funds on yeah for sure for sure um yeah we have a little tiny one it's like one little room but it's really cute and i really like it's i have one that's pretty close to me and it does look like i looked at it recently because because i talk to you all the time

and so i was like i need to go check out the library that's near me because i write my my bike by it. And I haven't gone yet, but it is, it is dramatically smaller than the one that's downtown. But if you've been to the downtown awesome one, tell me about it because I hear it's awesome. And they're all connected. So like if something's not at your library, like they'll find it from another library. You know what I mean? Like this is like there's a talk to a librarian message at New York University.

It's like an AIM chat with someone like a chat bot, whatever, not a chat about is a human. And I was on the cover of NYU today when I graduated from college in 2004. like in the fountain, because there's a fountain in Union Square that you jump in after graduation. So it was me and my friend Lonnie and then my ex-boyfriend and then our friend Frank. And I'm like, okay, now I feel like I have the technology to remove my ex-boyfriend from the photo and then I can get it printed because I don't want him in there. He looks stupid and he's dumb. So I don't want him in there. So I was like, how do I get this digitized?

Because I have it, but it's like big and like it's 20 years old. So I was like chatting with a librarian and just like this person who works at the library and she was so cute and, you know, she's 20 years younger than me and It was like, okay, here's what you do. You go here, you tell them you want this, this and this, and then they're going to get it for you, and then they can digitize it. And, like, librarians just, like, want to help you. It's lovely. Taylor, I just learned this today because I went to the Apple store this weekend, and I was tinkering with a new iPhone.

And apparently with a new iPhone, if you take a picture, they have this AI thing where you can, like, circle a person or a thing you don't want in the picture, and it removes it. Yeah, you can do that. Anybody can do that? Yeah. I did not know that was a thing. Isn't that amazing? I feel like I just, there's so many pictures where I, like, you would have to send it to a guy to Photoshop it and it would cost like 100 bucks. Now you can just like do it.

The age where we're all out of jobs is coming pretty soon. Yeah, whatever. Cool. Well, anyway, go to your library, read books. It's super fun. I did read a book for this one, but I read it like a long time ago. And I was like, I'm not reading it again. So I did other things to prepare for this.

But I told you I'm going to do a big one because I did. a big one last time i did the donner party and you did end run last time oh i did end run last time and i did the darn party before that so two big ones and i'm going to do i'm going to now i'm going to have you guess what is the most expensive disaster in human history uh it's got to be 9-11 no good guess this one is the total and it's ongoing is 700 billion dollars, U.S. dollars, to clean up, contain Oh, Chernobyl?

Yes. Wow. It's also the worst nuclear disaster in history, obviously. So, all of that. I have a ton of sources. I'll put them in our notes. I watched like a bunch of YouTube

like little documentaries. I also watch the TV show. You've watched that, right? I've not. Rachel's tried to get me to watch it. I've gone halfway through. But again, this is one of those things where I've been obsessed with this.

And the TV show adds, like, drama that I'm like, I don't know if I need. Well, I think it's super good. And I also think it's really helpful. Like, I think I saw this before with other things where if you watch even like a dramatized version, at least you have like a person whose face you can picture, even though it's not like the real person, but you can like kind of picture to their mannerisms and be like, oh, it was that guy. Yeah, that's a good point.

So that I feel like that helps me when I'm trying to visualize these things. I'm just like, oh, it's. It's like faceless, great non-player characters in your mind. Yeah. Like, I can make them up in my mind, but I can be like, oh, this is how they move. Like, I can kind of merge them together. And so freaking HBO Max changed their name back to HBO Max. You heard this.

It's so ridiculous. Who cares? So my brother-in-law works there. And in this constant change that they're having, they took away the friends and family to get free HBO plan. So I couldn't watch it. last episode. And I'm not amused.

I've seen it before, but I was still mad. Amongst the many issues HBO is having. I was like, I'm not paying for this. Ridiculous. So I watched most of it this time, but it was great. So essentially, what happened is on April 26, 1986, 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, which is way worse than a regular explosion.

if your house explodes it's not great if like in the la fires and in 9-11 so there's fire and there's stuff in the air that is not great you know i think we talked about this after the la fires i was like where is everything you know and it's in the air it just gets like reduced into particles and all that's bad but it is not as bad as radiation the radiation was like 400 times more than the bombs dropped on japan in world war two just literal poison invisible poison in the air. Taylor, I learned because my mom was telling me probably a conspiracy theory about how there's microplastics in our brains now. Oh, they're everywhere.

I heard that too. And so I researched it and we do have a blood brain barrier which only allows oxygenated blood through but apparently microplastics can also get in. And so I think it's real. Well, I heard that they tried to do a test

and they couldn't find anyone that didn't have microplastics in them to test on. Oh, my God. Like, they tried to do an experiment, and there was no control because there's no one who is not affected. Our brains are like half Mattel. I mean, I'm just like, fuck it. So a fun story, before we get to the horror of it, of it all, did you ever see the Princess Bride? Yes. We watched it recently.

It's so good. My kids loved it. It holds up. It's very, very fun. I also read Carrie Ellis's memoir called, As You Were, I, Inconceivable tales from the making of the Princess Bride. It was like... Inconceivable. It was like silly.

Like there was really fun things. Like at one point Rob Reiner told him not to get on like an ATV with Audrey the Giant. He was like, don't do it. And Carrie Ellis was like, totally, I'm not going to do it. And he totally did it and broke his ankle. And he had to pretend that his ankle wasn't broken. And Rob Reiner was like, you did it, didn't you? And he's like, I did.

Yeah. How would you even fit with him on there? But I bring it up because a few weeks after, the Chernobyl disaster. Carrie Elvis was filming a movie in East Germany, and Rob Reiner and the other producer, Andrew Scheinman, had to go to see him for his last audition, and they almost didn't go because they were so scared to go to East Germany because of the radiation in the air. Andrew Scheiman, like, ran from the, like, left his, like, left stuff in the cab, ran to the hotel, wouldn't even drink the bottle of water. It was like, we've got to get out of here as fast as you really possible. So I think that's fun. I mean, it's got to be terrifying. Yes.

I'm sure, you know, they survived, but. Yeah, they survived. But at that story, I was, I think is fun. So anyway, I have some context. And we're going to talk about through the whole thing, the USSR as a country, nuclear power radiation, the turnover power plant and the city around it, the disaster. And then what's happening now? Because it still exists, obviously. These are disasters that are like thousands of years. Like, it's not going to be clean anytime soon. Like, you can't. It's area ruining forever. Time is insane. So we're in Cold War USSR. So the Soviet Union existed from 1922 to 1991, and it was the largest country on Earth, which comes with a lot of problems because it's hard to communicate over that big of a piece of Earth, especially like before super modern technology. It also borders a ton of countries, like 15 countries. So you have to like defend like all these borders, all these different countries. Russia now and the USSR all had 11 time zones,

which is just an insane amount of time zones. So you can be on one side and the other side, and there's 10 hours between places in the same country. Yeah, it sounds. Which makes things difficult. Also, so the USSR is like, once it fell apart, other countries spun off of it. And two of them that we're going to talk about today are Ukraine and Belarus.

Mostly in Ukraine, the Chernobyl was in Ukraine, but also Belarus was super affected as well. This is also obviously a very, very socialist society. So the culture of the USSR is that we can do anything and we are doing it. So we can do satellites, we can go to space, we can do nuclear power plants, like we are strong, we continue to do things. And you very much like Enron, you can never go backwards. You're always pushing forward. You cannot admit mistakes.

You cannot say that anything is going wrong. You're just like, yes, things are going well. And even though like you may know as a person, this is not going well, you say yes anyway. was this cruise under this was Khrushchev right Gorbachev Ah okay

so a Gorbachev was like just just new he was like his first year doing it so they keep pushing forward

and you know you can't keep pushing forward forever but one of the big things that the USSR wanted to do was have the most nuclear power plants

in the world so they built a handful of them so a nuclear power plant do you know how nuclear power works as far as

I don't let me tell me I do know how it works. So it's steam power, and the steam is generated in perpetuity by inserting, I want to say uranium rods, but I could be mistaken on that. I think there's- Uranium or petonium, either one. Into a reactor, which contains water, which is heated up and generates steam, which turns turbines, which creates electricity. Correct. So it takes a lot of water to keep it cool because it's like insanely hot.

The reaction is insanely hot. And then the water is like constantly going into it, cooling it, creating the steam turbines and all of it. You know what's funny is like in this 200th episode, out of 20 times you've asked you if I know something, I say no or I say yes, maybe like once. And it just happened to be about nuclear vision and reactions. Good for you. Everyone should know this. Thank you. Yeah, good for you.

And so, yeah, and I feel like also there's like, I don't know, I haven't heard about radioactive waste in a long time. But I feel like in the 90s, that was like the biggest thing was like, where are we going to put all those waste? Like it just generates other problems. But it is like, it does generate a lot of electricity. So obviously during all that, there is radiation. And radiation itself is particles that like energy that travels through space. This is like super dumb science corner time. But there's, like, alpha, beta, and gamma particles.

Gamma is the one that's, like, pure energy, highly penetrating. You have to have, like, lead or concrete. Like, it's really, really tough. And that one's the one that's really going to kill you. The units that they're in, like, historically, there's been rotogen has been the amount of radiation, like, unit. But now people usually use columns per kilogram or graze, which is GY, to, like, measure how much you're absorbing of the radiation. You also, there's also a unit called a sivert, which is how much radiation is coming into your body. So, for example, if we're looking at like a millicevert, which is like the tiniest amount,

like one of the tiniest amounts that you can get, if you get a dental x-ray, it's 0.005 miloseverts. So like very small amount. And then, you know, natural background radiation by being outside, like, per year you're going to get like two to three of them per year like just going to happen depending how much time you're outside and then a fatal radiation dose is going to be 4,000 to 5,000 so if you get like super with radiation you're going to die pretty quickly yeah in like really gross ways yeah you remember ouchy no what's that in last pod the worst way to die he got hit with like a million severs yes and then like his heart would stop but they would keep him alive and there was pictures of him

with his like he was just like a skeleton man with like a brain and heart yes actually was reading about that a little bit that was in Japan in an accident where he got like with the radiation all the sea works yep yeah and then like they kept him alive yeah for a while and it just like so it like ruins your body and I think I have

more of it later but it basically stops your cells from being able to grow so you can't build red blood cells white blood cells it changes your DNA like it just which is why they say roaches will survive in the nuclear blast is because they're cells are like stupidly slow splitting and so because of that it doesn't the impact the radiation doesn't get felt felt for like a very long time compared to human cells that split constantly

right like several generations they don't have to worry about it good for them so some ways that you can measure radiation like in the air it was obviously like the geiger counter it says is Geiger Mueller, so I feel like Mueller's probably mad because we know it's a Geiger counter, but it clicks. So there's a gas filled tube inside of it. I mean, radiation hits it. It ionizes the gas and causes a spark, which is the click. So if you do spend time watching

Chernobyl documentaries, you're just going to hear that click constantly. It's a very scary. I can literally hear it in my head right now. Yeah. It is like, basically like, you're fine too. You're going to die. You're like, holy shit. Like, do you want to be anywhere near that? So there's also little things like a

dosimeter. There's some that like if you work in a nuclear power plant or somewhere around there, you might have one, like, on your ID card. And maybe if you're even like, even if you're like doing like the deluxe rays, you might have one. If you're exposed to too much radiation, it will, it will darken and let you know that you're close to it. And then there's others that will like glow and give you a reading, just like how bad, how bad it is right now. So they're not like stopping it from happening, but they're telling you how much it happens. If you get radiation sickness, you're going to vomit, you're going to lose your hair. You're going to get a fever. You're going to get

burns. And like, it's so interesting because you're like, I didn't touch anything, you know, but then all of a sudden you have like burns all over your body. It's just like the air is poison. Again, yeah, it's killing your ability to make new cells. Your red blood cells, they can't carry oxygen. Your white blood cells can't fight infection. And there's like a day where you might feel okay and then a day where like you're, you melt essentially. Like you're everything, It's really gross. We've all seen. Is a U-571?

Matthew McConaughey submarine, where the kid goes into the nuclear reactor without any protective gear on and he comes back and he's like melted? I haven't seen that one, but my example was the stand. Do you ever see the stand? No. Okay. So the Stephen King book and like in the very, okay, essentially everyone, FYI, it's the end of the world. There's a disease. And then also God is there and the devil.

And all the good people go to Boulder, Colorado, and all the bad people go to Las Vegas. And there's this crazy guy who, like, blows up St. Louis. And he finds a nuclear bomb, and he knows that the devil's in Las Vegas. And he rides a nuclear bomb on the back of a truck and brings it to Las Vegas. And the time he gets there, he's melting off. It's great. It's metal. Metal a.

Yeah. So all of that is, like, stuff that happens in the background. So we're in the USSR. They really want to have nuclear power, and they're doing it. So, they build a big plant in Ukraine. It is the Chernobyl plant is located 16 miles northwest of the city of Chernobyl that is in Ukraine. But that's not the city yet. That's the city of Chernobyl that they build index to.

So basically, where you are is like forests. And they build the city, the Pripyat city. You have to do the Pripyat. Can you do that? Pripyet. How many gropels? You got a squint when you do it for some reason. So they build a city

Like you said Out of no Nothing There's like build it out of Out of nothing All of a sudden You know In a couple years

50,000 people live there There are schools It's meant to be like a really Perfect socialist city And they build that city Two miles from the plant So you can work there You're two miles from work

You can ride your break to work Sounds nice You know Like you live in this like beautiful city There's these high rises They're the high rises They're the high rises That like in the United States

And in the UK I feel like their projects Yeah yeah It's like concrete was brutalist structure yeah yeah but that was like the idea was it was like a perfect soviet socialist place it's a very very young city because it's young families you know the dad works at the plant the wife stays home they have a couple kids there's you know a lot of a lot of children there's fairgrounds so i'm sure you've seen this far as but like there are in the ruins of it is

the ferris wheel yeah the ferris wheel is huge so you can definitely see that it's still standing so yeah it's very nice by 1979 it's a full-ass city 50,000 people live there and they start building the plant a man and I'm sorry to all of our Russian listeners but a man named Victor Bruchinov he is the first director when he starts he's 34 years old he's the only director he he's there with the event but he is 34 years old he had never worked at a nuclear power plant but he had like been like an engineer and you know, been a director before

so they let him take this job. He is, if you do watch the show, he's the guy, the actor is named Khan O'Neal. He has like a really,

really rough voice. He's also like one of the police officers in the penguin and he's in our flag means death. Like he's, if you know who I'm talking about,

you know what I'm talking about. It's like a really, it sounds like he fits the rule. Yeah. So he's this guy. And his job is to get it up and running. It takes seven years

to turn reactor one on. So it's not like a quick thing. It takes a long time, but they have reactor one, take seven years, and the plan is to have six reactors. So each reactor doing its own thing, pushing power into parts of the USSR, they start with one, and they're going up to six. The one that we are going to talk about is number four. Number four is built in 1983, and the way that they would tell you, if you asked them in 1983, how is it going? They would say, it is going fantastic. like everything is going great everything is perfect we've had absolutely no problems but there were

already problems and part of the reason that the problems were hidden is another part of the ussr which is the kgb so what are you looking up you look very interested in well i'm looking up a map because i'm trying to get a sense of where i should know this but i'm trying to get a sense of where ukraine is amongst russia's i don't know what we block the Soviet block. It's very north. It's very close to Sweden. Yeah.

I'm like all over the map here. I should know this. It's northwest. Okay, northwest. Yeah. Well, the reason I'm trying to get next to Sweden. Wow, this thing is huge. Wow, Russia is huge.

Right. That's what also I'm trying to say. How do you, it's governing that area, like, you know, remember when Katha McGrath went on a sled ride all over Russia to try to meet new people because she's like how am I supposed to govern these people? They are you know, 85 days away or whatever. Whatever long it takes you to

slide across Russia. Yeah. So basically, if you have this thing in, okay, if you have this thing in Ukraine, you can basically power most of the Western Soviet blocks. You got Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Moscow, St. Peter. So there's a strategic reason why it was

in Ukraine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Moscow was pretty west, westerly as well. Yeah, yeah. It's like,

pretty close to border with Ukraine. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes. So, as I was saying, they would tell you

everything was going great, but it was not going great. And now that things have been declassified and we know things aren't going, weren't always going great. But the KGB is like the spies on each other of the Soviet Union and so someone is always following you and someone's always following them and

you're always like supposed to pretend everything is okay because if you don't you're going to get and like it's an immense amount of trouble that like you pretend everything's okay so there's a part in the Chernobyl show where the main guy he's there he's been there he's been in Chernobyl for like one day the disaster already happened and he knows that like he's going to die because he's standing there like all these things but they're not doing anything about it yet but he's in the bar of the Pripyat Hotel and there's a couple and they're like anything we should know about should be worried and he's like oh no everything's fine and they're like good and they're the KGB because if he said no everything is not fine then he would go to jail for saying that everything wasn't fine

because everything's supposed to be fine yeah which is not how you solve problems but now we know that there was a report in 1983 that reported there were 27 accidents and a ton of failures leading up to this. In September in 1982, there was a partial core meltdown in reactor one due to a faulty cooling valve and it had to be offline for eight months. So in released KGB

documents, that from 1984, they said quote, they knew as early as 1983, quote, that it was one of the most dangerous nuclear power plants in the USSR. So they knew that it wasn't going well. And a lot of that was due to construction and like

not doing every detail that you needed to We'll talk about that. So Unit 4 is an RBMK reactor. There's 17 of them in the USSR. So it's not the only one. There's a bunch of them. And it is built by December 1983. So the last thing you need to do when you build a nuclear reactor or like, I imagine a car or something else, is a safety test.

Like it's done. Let's make sure that it'll work and no one's going to die. But in the way that it worked is, you got your bonus in December of the year that you were in and you wouldn't get your bonus for all the work you did on the reactor if it wasn't done by the end of the year. So they had to say that it was done because a lot of people were like counting on the bonuses and like the promotions and the things that would happen after it was finished. So it had to be finished. There was no option to say, let's just wait until next year. So the director signed off and said it was done

at the end of 1983, but they never did the safety test. It's interesting. It's like everybody knew that something was amiss and we're turning a blind eye to it and then disaster struck. You just don't say anything. Hmm. Exactly. I know.

So now it's 1986 and they have to do the safety test. It is like there is no more waiting. It's been online for a couple of years. They have to do it. by a certain time. And the day that they have to do it by is May 1st. So May 1st is May Day, which is a big deal in the USSR. It's like Labor Day, but like everything is a labor party. They're super, super excited. Everyone will be out on the street. It's like Lenin's big party, big picture of Lenin. Everyone has a red flag. Everyone's excited. And they're going to do it by then.

Because the holiday's coming up. Everybody wants, nobody wants to work. They all want to go do the holiday. It's spring. There's this like beautiful illusion. of everything being fine and they're like let's just complete this test before mayday so we can go party yeah makes sense you know so so hold on i'm going to pause and sniff i'm going to take a notes on something i want to bring it up later while you're doing that oh thank you okay so farce it is april 25th 1986 And we have to do the test today is the day. And what we need to do for the test is to, and I'll think I have more details, but essentially, turn the power down and make sure that if there is a blackout, that the reactor will be able to stay cool and protect itself.

Because the worst thing that can happen is the cooling systems fail and it explodes. Exactly what happened at Fukushima. Yes. We should do that one too. Yep. That was so recent, too. So you're not testing at full power, you're testing at like half power and then it's just making sure that things work. So they pull power from parts of the reactor and bring it back slowly and they use power from outside source to make sure that it would work.

Again, if it's not cooling, it's very, very bad. So they started in the morning of April 25th and then part way through the day, another nuclear reactor 300 miles away got shut down for another reason. And because of that, they had to pull it back. to full power because they needed the power from the other reactor being shut down. This I did not know. So that's, they would have done the test during the day with more

qualified people if this hadn't happened. But part of the problem, part of the thing that happened is that the test was done in the middle of the night by the graveyard shift and they're just like kids. They just started, you know? They don't have, like, I don't know if like more experienced people,

could have necessarily stopped it. It was like something that was bound to happen probably. But like part of the problem is you have these people working at one in the morning who have never done this before. They assumed it would be over. They didn't know they were going to do this when they came to work today. Yep. You know?

So I had to pull it back up, keep it going. And then they started the test again at 11 p.m. So it should have been done by now. It should have been over. But instead they're starting super, super late. So because of this, because they went up. down with the power. There's xenon gas created and growing inside of the reactor getting hotter and hotter that they don't know this is happening. So that's going to contribute to the explosion

as well, this like added gas that they didn't know was going to come. So here's what happens. It's partially shut down, which we know. And there's eight cooling rods, like you're talking about the rods that are working. And there should be 15, but we have eight working because we're doing this test and at 115 they do like the final part of the test and there's a sudden surge of power and they hit the emergency button so it's a baby named leonid tuptidov he is like what's happening like everything's going crazy the temperature is rising like crazy so he has this emergency emergency button he hits the button and that's when it explodes like the core itself explodes and the reason that it exploded is because they hit the button and the fuel rods went in and they had different they had like

graphite tips on them that caused more reaction than it should have yeah that that parts yeah i recall this where like there was something defective about the because the rods when you insert the rods they control the reaction so you can slow it down or speed it up there was something defective within the rods that caused i mean it's it's like the swiss cheese bottle where like everything aligned to go exactly because they were like they've been using the rods successfully for a while it didn't it wasn't just like it was it was it just happened because it was so so hot and it was so so hot because they're doing the test and because they had paused the test exactly that like all the different things that happened so he hit it and the huge steam explosion it destroys the building the building that

the reactor is in is like a 17 story building and now it has a hole in it and that means the core is gone but that has never happened before like no one knows this like it has just it isn't something that has happened and um wait real quick taylor are you going to because this is the scariest part to me is the core aspect are you going to go into details of what the containment was and all that i want to do what they do afterwards or do you mean like right now well when this happens the scary part to me, which is the elephant foot ultimately. Yeah, yeah, I'll get to that the end. It is that the core

has like, I forgot how many tens of feet of concrete between it and like being exposed to the outside world. That's how hot this thing got. Yeah. It's like it burned all the way through the entire

containment. It's like crazy. The magnitudes like you can't, I forgot how many, do you know what the temperature was? It was like as hard as the sun or something. Like it was insane. Yeah. It's like thousands of degrees. And yeah.

So it's, so yes. So I forgot to mention that there's a nuclear engineer there and he's the boss at this time. His name is Anatoly Diatlov and a lot of it, a lot of it is him like not understanding what's happening and not knowing what's happening. But he keeps saying, keep putting more water into it. You have to keep the core cool because they thought that something else happened, like just like the building exploded, not the core. because the core has never exploded before.

But like you said, it's not just in case in the concrete, it's in case in graphite and like all these minerals and things that are supposed to be able to handle all this heat, and that explodes. And so you have like this graphite, which is this rock that is black and looks like a rock and it is as hot as the sun. And it is going to kill you.

And it is in the air. Yeah, it's freaky. Yeah. So, Dielov, again, he's like, this, like, what, keep it cool, like what's happening? Like, this has never happened before. this cannot happen but it was over inside they were like are we being bombed like is it the americans like what is happening like you don't really understand what's happening two people died

instantly and the official death toll is 34 but like we know that that is not correct yeah there are babies being born like 10 years later who had like defects exactly exactly um they also had these the dissimiters and the readers that they had something that they talk about a lot in the show not everything in the show is like 100% true you know it's drama like the there's a one of the main characters in the show is a woman scientist from from Belarus and she's not a real person she's kind of like a good bunch of people made into one character you know so there's like things that like are true and aren't true if you watch that but one thing that is true is that they have their dissimiters went to a certain point so they were like oh we have this much radiation

but like it just because it couldn't go any higher, you know, like your, if you're, if you have like a 200 degree fever, your thermometer is going to tell you have a 110 degree fever because you don't have a 200 degree thermometer, you know. So, um, so they're trying to figure out what's going on. I have a couple quotes. One of one person from the night shift, um, Alexander Akamov, he, his final words were, quote, I am guilty. I feel guilty. We did everything wrong. He was one of the ones who went down into this into the core to try to put more water into it like into the building and he died two weeks later from radiation but he was basically like this has to be our fault you know what's going on so outside the roof is partially on the ground so it didn't

like collapse it like exploded out so parts of the roof that like exist and then all the graphite is on the ground and it is on fire but it is like you said the hottest fire you've ever seen like you don't even know what to do and they call all the firemen from people pet to come in, help us. What do we do? The hoses are melting. Their shoes are melting to the ground. There is no water because it just turns into steam immediately. Yep. You know, you can't.

It's too hot. You can't do anything to it. Yeah. It's way too hot. And the firemen start vomiting. Like almost immediately. So they're also getting sick like right away from it. And there's just like nothing that you can do. Like I said, it's 400 times more radiation than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. So just like

you're going to die from this already. And it's going to kill you sooner or later, but also they don't know, you know, so they, they just are there doing their job. They have no idea what's going on. Also, the interesting part is that this isn't even all the radiation. What they're taking in is a residual kickoff. The core is burnt into like four levels beneath it away from them.

This is just like the residual stuff that just happened to be in the air. You can't go next to it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like if you're next to it, you die immediately. There's no, you can't like get that close to it. Yeah, totally. It's like lava. You can't get next to lava, you'll catch on fire. Yep, yep. Like you're going to...

I've heard that before. That's an old tail made sale. Yeah. So, and Diatlav, the supervisor, he knows he's going to jail. He's like, I'm fucked, we're fucked. This is, everyone's going to go to jail for this. If I don't die immediately, which he didn't. One fireman said, quote, we had no idea it was dangerous. We just thought it was a regular fire. We didn't even wear protective gear. The flames were strong, though, and blue like gas. We threw water at it and stood right on the roof of rail. actor four, which is like you're not supposed to do that. But they just were like trying to put, trying to pour water on it to cool it down, which was impossible. The director and other

like bureaucrats basically are in a bunker underground, which they had built as a crisis center, just in case they got like nuked by the Americans, all the things. So they're trying to figure out what's going on. But it's also a lot of being like, we have it under control. Congratulations, comrade, you know, because they're not going to admit that they don't have under control. There's a part in the very beginning of the show, or they all clap at each other. Great job handling this disaster, everyone. But also, like, this had never happened. Yeah.

When something is unprecedented, like, you don't know how you can react. Like, you're like, what is going on? Like, I mean, most people are like, what is going on? Yeah. They have no idea. So, but they're starting to see people sick and starting to see things happening. And then the fire is, like, not going out. But by 2.15 a.m., they blocked the road so you couldn't get out of prepet or the surrounding area.

So they kept everybody in. They're like, everything is fine. everybody just stay here and the police officers are blocking the roads also not in protective gear everyone should have had that and they sent some of the firemen who are the first responders via helicopter to moscow they went to hospital number six in moscow where they died a few weeks later i have a quote from a nurse who said quote they arrived in clothes soaked with radioactive blood we were told not to touch them without gloves but we were nurses we couldn't just let them lie there so we held their hands and and they died one by one. They just, like, didn't. It couldn't help them. It was way too late. So, again, a lot of the detectors didn't go as high as it could be.

There was just so many things. So some of the things that happened that got us to the explosion. So there were definitely operational errors during the safety test. And they decided after, so after the, you know, after this is like over contained and there's a trial, the reasons that it happened were partially because of some RBMK reactor design flaws. So it was a Soviet designed, water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor, and it had no containment structure. So it had some, like you said, the concrete outside and the graphite, but like in other parts of the world, they had a much more robust containment. But they didn't have that there.

Yeah. And one thing it had is it had a positive void coefficient at low power, which means, that the reactor increased instead of decreased with the with the steam so that made it hotter than it was which was not what they expected it to happen so that was something that was like happening unexpectedly also we talked about the rods had the graphite tip on them so when the graphite hit the core first it momentarily reacted to it and made it hotter so they should have like essentially spent more money and had different different rods but they didn't they did this because it usually is fine you know like at the regular temperature of the court which is still

really fucking hot it's okay to have a graphite tip but when it's exceptionally hot because this test is happening and all of the gas that's in there they didn't expect to happen it's going to explode right but they didn't know because they never happened before like you were saying and then there was also like at the low power there was just like not as much safety things as they should have had and they also should have done this test a long time ago you know it had been working for a very long time it was a weird day all sorts of things so that was like the human error is like they shouldn't have done it after having to turn it back move back up again all of those things you know yeah of course so it's the middle of the night and then now it's the morning and it's a nice

day and everybody in prepayette it's acting like it's a normal day and the children are out going to school they there's people pushing there's like so much stock footage of women pushing strollers Like that's, you'll see that in every single one. But there's people just outside living their life, getting ready for May Day. About 10 hours later, they tried to clean up the streets with soap, but it didn't really help except the radiation. But they try to, like, do a little bit of that. But they're like, it's fine. Everything's fine.

The next day, they tell Gorbachev that it happened. Like, they haven't told him yet. And they say, you know, we had a little problem, but everything's fine. Everything's under control. Don't worry about it. And he was like, cool. Not going to worry about it. but the thing with a nuclear disaster is that people are going to find out because it's in the air you know geiger counters in california are going off yeah so in minsk which is a capital of belarus people detected a ton of radiation and that like already the first day they were like stay inside wash your shoes close the windows like everybody be careful and then other countries to outside the USSR started to start to feel it as well so

one story that I thought was super fun is in Sweden, like we taught said, is close, but there are some guys that worked at a nuclear plant there, and they walked to work that morning, and it was raining. So they walked to work, and it's raining, and they get to work, and there is a radiation detector, which is, like, at the door, and it's meant to be when you're leaving work to make sure you have no radiation on you, you know? Like, that's why it's there. But they go into work, and it goes off, and they're like, what the hell? Not good. We're just outside. You know, like, that doesn't make any sense. So that's what they knew something was happening,

and they knew that it was coming from, they knew that it was coming from Chernobyl because of like the type of thing it was. And they were like, what's going on? And the rest of it was still like not wanting to tell the world it was happening when it's definitely like a world event. You can't keep it to yourself. It's very similar.

I feel like we talked about volcanoes with like the smoke going into like the atmosphere and like hitting the jet stream. And then you're like, crap. Yep. Everyone knows. So finally in April 27th, they announced that people had to leave prepack. They had to, like, leave.

You have an hour to get your stuff and to leave. They said, you will be back. Just bring a little bit of stuff. And then it will be, everything will be fine. So what they did is, I'm going to tell you what they said. This is a, it's a fucking miracle of Soviet efficiency. Within a couple hours, they evacuated 53,000 people from the city on buses. They said, bring a suitcase, you will come back.

They never went back. So this is, they do this in the show and they do this in a bunch of, the documentaries, and they do it in Russian, obviously, but I'm going to read it to you in English because I don't speak Russian. But this is the announcement is way too long and like very weird and calm. But over loudspeakers coming from like the loudspeakers in town, they said, quote, attention, attention, dear comrades, the city council of people's deputies informs you that due to an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, an unfavorable radiation situation is developing in the city of Pripyat.

measures are being taken by the Communist Party, its organizations, and the armed forces to deal with this. Nevertheless, to ensure complete safety, especially of children, a temporary evacuation of the city's residents and nearby settlements is required. For this purpose, starting from 2 p.m. today, April 27th, buses will be provided for each residential block escorted by police officers and city officials. It is recommended to take documents, essential personal belongings, and food for a short stay. The administration of enterprises and institutions in the city has determined the personnel who will remain to ensure the city's continued functioning. Dear comrades, when temporarily leaving your homes, please make sure to close windows, turn off electrical and gas appliances, and shut off the water. Please remain calm, orderly, and disciplined.

There's something so eerie and creepy about the way you read that. I feel like I'm watching, like, not Resident Evil, oh my God, I forget the name that, whatever, Raccoon City. picture you announcing this in Raccoon City. Yes. Yes. Like, everything's fine. Take a walk. You're like, mm, not fine. So again, they never go back.

The keep getting pushed out farther and farther. Eventually, there will be a 30 kilometers out from Chernobyl exclusion zone, which I'll talk about more later, but it's 26,000 square kilometers. You can safely live there in 24,000 years. We'll start planning. it'll go back to the way that it was, you know, in the 21,000 years. So they get everybody out, which is really incredible, but all around the USSR, it's still Mayday in a couple days. And there's tons of people out in the streets. And these people are going to

eventually, you know, like you said, like children are going to be born with cancers. People are going to get cancer. You know, that's going to be a big part of it. And I'll tell you more about that actually later too. Other bad news that I did not know is that they did a thing called Operation Cyclone, which is a secret operation, where they sent jets over the area where the clouds were, because the wind is starting to move toward, like, Mother Russia. It's moving east towards Mother Russia, and they're like, we don't want this shit over here. So they take planes and they go into the clouds, and they shoot the clouds with silver iodide to create rain.

Seriously? Mm-hmm. And it rains, radioactive rain on. on Belarus, and there's parts of Belarus that will never recover. Because they were like, we don't want this shit in Moscow. We got to stop it. So they make it rain radiation over Belarus. I've never heard that.

I know. Isn't that wild? That isn't. I can't like they had the technology to do that back then. Yeah. So they were like, we got to stop it before it gets to us. So they did that, which is fucked up. so in the plant they're not telling people about the full danger obviously those helicopters dropping sand and boron and other things into the core but you can't get that close to it either because the radiation destroys machinery so there's like videos of helicopters getting close and then just tipping over wild which is very sad and what they've been putting it in is actually making it hotter like all these things are happening and it's going to start to melt into the groundwater below so you're right that it melts it

it down, but it hasn't, like, hit the actual, like, groundwater yet, but let me tell you about that in a second. So in the show, again, you should watch it. The star is a guy named Valerie Legoslav. He's a nuclear physicist. He knew that nuclear power wasn't safe. He was a kind of of a person who would, like, actually say stuff and, like, talk to people about it. And so they called him into help. And basically, what his studies had been, like, before this is, like, the infrastructure for this and the people working in it are both getting old. What do we do? which kind of reminds me of air traffic controllers. Yeah.

You know? And all like banking and air traffic software, which is LISP, and nobody knows how to write LISP. Yep, exactly. So he's bringing this up and he's saying like, you know, they're very, it's hard, very hard to innovate in the Soviet society. And he's always, he's been talking about this a while. So they bring him in, he brings in some things like what they should put on the fire

and, you know, how the green, He really helps this. He ends up testifying in, like, a council in Vienna. They're not ever going to get to, but, like, he dies by suicide a couple years later. Like, he just, this, like, ruined his, him. He knew he was going to die from being there for so long because he was, like, there helping, like, in the days after. He knew that it was cutting his life shorter and shorter, but he was still, like, really upset by it. So the thing that you were talking about, the core melting down, is something that they thought might happen.

And it's called the China syndrome. Have you heard of this? It sounds familiar, but I don't know what it means. So it's actually from, it's like not a real thing. It can't, probably can't really happen. Oh, yeah. It melts from the U.S. all the way down into China. Into China.

Yeah, exactly. Which would be bad for everyone. But there was a movie in 1979 called The China Syndrome about stopping this from happening in the United States. So that movie came out like three weeks before the reactor at Three Mile Island had its accident. So we talked about that. someday too the one that we had in like 1979 so I know so basically meaning like the core could melt all the way of China like you said so they needed to put a heat exchanger underneath it because actually it's not going to melt through the entire planet but if it hits the groundwater it will create an explosion that is the equivalent of several megatons of TNT and it would just have destroyed a big part of Europe like actually destroyed it not like radiation in the air, like it would have exploded.

Yeah. So it's why when your windshield is froze, you don't throw hot water on it because it just reacts badly. Yes. So it's that. So what they do is they get 400 miners from around the country, not young people, men who mine, you know. Thank you for explaining. Some of them may have been in their teens. I don't know.

So I feel like if you've ever seen a joke where it's like no minors and then like they like pan to a guy with like covered in coal, being like, I really want to be, I want to, please give me a beer. It's so funny. So, so stupid. So they dig a hole underneath it, to try to do this heat exchange to move it out. And it ended up that they didn't need it, but they did it anyway as a precaution.

So of those 400 minors, a lot of them are going to get sick later. But they worked in like 120 degree heat because they're underneath it. And a lot of them did it naked and with no protection because there's something they could do. They just like had to, they had to do it. They had to do this hole.

So they were doing that. One thing that I didn't know until I watched one of the many, many short documentaries is that I watched on YouTube. But so in Hospital 6 in Moscow is where the people are going afterwards. So if they, like, are sick enough that they can't help anymore, but they're not dead yet, they helicopter them over to Moscow to Hospital 6. And the USSR calls an American doctor from California named Dr. Robert Gale for help. and this guy is so California he's super like blonde and he's wearing like a polo shirt when they interview him now when he's older but they have pictures of him and he looks exactly the same he's wearing a polo shirt with like a sweater around his thing very 80s like a very 80s California doctor they call him in the middle of the night and they say we need you to come help in in Ukraine and they say pack a bag they put him on like a big plane just him and the pilots and like a couple Russian guys and a stewardess and they

fly him over to Moscow because he is like the number one bone marrow transfer specialist in the world and they knew that something with the bone marrow that was like transforming inside people's bodies because of all the radiation and he goes there he sees that their bone marrow has been irreversibly destroyed like it cannot be cannot be saved but he had invented something new with hormones to stimulate bone marrow but it wasn't out on the market yet because it had never been tested on humans, but they knew he was coming. And so they said, he told them what he had. And they were like, okay, have you done it? Like, how does, how does it work on humans? He says, I don't know. We've ever done it on humans before. And then they were like, well, we don't

know if we want to do it. And he said, I'll do it. I'll do it. And so he put the hormone treatment into his own body. And he, nothing happened to him. Everything was fine. So he was the first person that they did it on. And they said, okay. And they did it with the response. with the first responders, and they were able to save more than 90% of them from dying immediately with that bone marrow hormone treatment that this California doctor had. Wait, so they can reverse radiation poisoning?

I think it was, like, specifically in the bone marrow, and if, like, hadn't gone to, like, another part, then, like, it was okay. That's wild. I don't know that. Yeah, that was wild. So now that, like, people are out of the area, all of that, There's a cleanup operation. They're called liquidators.

There's 500,000 young men across the area. It's going to be brought in to help clean up. And a lot of it is going to be stuff like in the plant itself. They need to build a sarcophagus around it, like a big, heavy thing that can stop the radiation. They need to build it. Before they can build it, they have to clean everything up and have to clean up the roof. On the roof, there are pieces of that graphite that was like around the core. and it's so radioactive

that they can't use machines to push it over the edge. They're trying to clean up the roof and pushing all the graphite into the core. They can't do it. All the machines die. So they get people to do it.

They call them human, they call them bio-robots because it's just people. And they have 90 seconds at a time that go onto the roof and they scoop up graphite, throw it over the edge, and then run back.

Because you can't be longer than that. Right. So they some of them would like drink vodka be like it's going to help us you know of course I would do that as well I mean it's very restaurant of course you take your shop for you do that

so there's a very very sad helicopter pilot in one of the documentaries I saw who just was crying the entire time and he's pretty much like maybe that cleaned to them like I don't know like whatever it works and he's just like very very sad because he's just like watching people kind of go to somebody that's going to drastically

decrease their life yeah and you know thousands people did it they also have to clean up the exclusion zone. So there's a bunch of small towns around this area. They need to be evacuated. And even then, like, they do, they spray things on the buildings that, that attracts radiation to bring the radiation onto the buildings, and then they destroy the buildings and bury them. But it's still there. You know, they have to, like, till all of the land and flip it to bury all the radiation. And then, like, hopefully, like, it doesn't come out again. That's what they're doing these places. There's an entire episode of the Chernobyl show where it's just a guy shooting

animals, I fast forward through it. Don't watch it. Why is he shooting? Oh, oh, oh, oh, because the animals have the radiation. Mm-hmm. So they have to kill all the animals in the area and just remove all of the livestock and the wildlife. Here's the health crisis. So after this, after these guys go through and they bulldoze these towns and they, you know, shoot all these animals and have to do all these, like, really devastating things, there's a health crisis amongst liquidators because they assume that they're going to get cancer, which they are, but they assume that their life

expectancy is so much lower that they just like don't take care of themselves at all. Right. You know, they take more risks. They, you know, are like, you know, they drink constantly. They smoke constantly. Also, everybody's smoking constantly anyway because it's like the 80s. Of course. And so they have like drastically lower life spans, like not just because of the radiation, but also

because of their lifestyle choices because after that you feel terrible. Yeah, of course. I get it. From that, about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer will come up. That's going to be the biggest one, especially if you're, like, drinking the milk and, like, eating the food in the area. Thyroid cancer is the one that most people are going to get after this. There was one elderly resident. I have a quote that says, they came in trucks, told us to leave everything.

Our goats, our icons, our houses. I told them, I was born here. I will die here. I dug a bowl with my husband. I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of leaving my land. so people like you know that's very traumatizing party people yeah so now it's September a couple months later and they need to start charting on the rest of the reactors because the rest of the reactors are like have still been working and like all this other stuff has been

happening but by November 1986 they've built the sarcophagus which is like the cover inside the sarcophagus it's obviously like covered in radioactive dust and it's obviously like like, constantly just getting more and more deteriorated because everything's happening. And because of the heat from what's left of the core, which we'll talk about, and the water, inside those sarcophagus, it's constantly raining radioactive water. So crazy. Isn't that crazy? So it's like, it's not great in there. And of course, afterwards, that's like part of the cleanup stuff.

Of course, afterwards, there is a trial. The director, Victor Brokanov, he is going. to go to a labor camp for five years. He was, he was sentenced to 10, but he served five. The chief engineer got 10 years, and the deputy chief engineer, the one who was there, who kept saying that nothing was wrong and that they needed to cool the core, he got 10 years and served five. He never admitted any guilt. He said that he did everything that he was supposed to do. Other engineers were reprimanded or investigated. They did the trial. near the turnerable plant to be kind of be like symbolic about it but it was like there's so many

systematic flaws that it's kind of like there's so many people who are at fault but they you know like you said Swiss cheese who knows you know yeah like they're going to blame the people who designed it they're going to blame people who are there they're going to blame the test they're going to blame this they're going to blame that all of that so now today or I guess around the area after this So after that, the sarcophagus is on and we're starting to kind of move on. There's still people are going to start getting cancer. Like you said, children are going to be born with like bad reactions and bad things are happening. The first generation of animals, there were some cases where the animals lived and there were some stories of like three-eyed dogs, stuff like that.

But that was just like the first generation and then it seemed to be okay after that. So one group of people that I watched a documentary about are the babushkas of the area. Do you know what a babushka is? Grandma. It's a ramma. It also means the scarf. They're so fucking cute. It's so fucking little scarf tied around them.

And a lot of them didn't leave or they went back. And they said like before, it said radiation doesn't scare me. Starvation does. Because that's a big thing in that area as well because we talked about like the siege of Leningrad. There's plenty of starvation in the area. So they are most likely all dead by now because this is. documentary years from 2009, but they lived longer than the older people who left their villages and stayed like in Kiev because they got to live in their land. And they got to like, they're

like, one of the women is like, why would I go to Kiev and live in a shitty apartment and eat processed food and breathe car exhausts when I can live here and fish in my lake and milk my cow and, you know, grow things in my garden where I've lived my whole life and my whole family's literature forever. So I'm going to stay here. And a lot of them lived longer than the women and the older people who went to the cities because they were just like living a healthier life in other ways, you know? There's something about the enrichment experience of being a human that is not quantifiable that I'm convinced does something for longevity. Absolutely. Absolutely. So they are living in like these little houses together and like there's like one to two women like in like a little village, you know, and they.

they have been through so much they just want to stay and so there's like one really cute woman who like lets this documentary guy into her house and she like gives him this like moonshine that she's made like by herself you know and she's like makes food for him and she's just like I live here I like it you know and they're very sweet and they you know like I said outlive the others that had that relocation trauma so the grandmas are they lived and they had they had a good time there obviously prepet itself is abandoned and I watched a video and I couldn't find it this time but a long time ago I watched one that was so sad this woman like got to go back to her apartment and expected it to like be there but it wasn't because people have like rated it you know and

you know taking stuff out of it which is bad because there's that stuff had radiation on it and like all the windows are broken and like the rain has come in and so it's like very destroyed but you can like you can watch videos of going through like the schools where there's like you know open textbooks talking about socialism pictures of lennon it's so weird so so eerie and the weather and the animal and the plants have taken over so actually the wildlife is flourishing you know there's i wouldn't necessarily like eat venison from that area or live deer or like a bearer but like the animals are okay and they're living there and then the vegetation is kind of taking over and um you there have also been wildfires which

it's not good for anyone if those if that area catches on fire so that's happened a couple times since then you can visit you can take a bus tour if you want to um maybe not I wouldn't say go on vacation to Ukraine today but didn't Russia attack

it did I'm going to get to that yeah I'm going to get to that so um but you yeah but you can take a bus tour there on December 15th 2000 the last reactor in operation with shutdowns, people have still been working there. There's 2,000 people work there that go in

and out. They take like a special train there from a city that they built a little bit outside of it because you can't just like turn them all off. Right. You know? So it still exists. It's in the process of being decommissioned right now. Another thing that you mentioned before is the elephant foot, which is at the bottom

of reactor four. It's kind of like what is left. It is like the melted core. It is made of a element called corium which can only be formed in a nuclear meltdown. So, yay, we made a new thing. It is that. So the pictures of it, everything about it is just so nightmare-induced.

Yeah. It is essentially, so the Coriam we have created as people in Three Mile Island, in Chernobyl, and three times in Japan. Yeah. So we've created it a couple times. But yes, you're right. It looks like black lava. It looks like an elephant's foot. Exactly.

It's like a big blob. We had pictures of it, but the pictures are like one guy like three. camera down, took a picture, and took it back up. If you're around it for more than 200 seconds, you're dead. Yep. Like, there's no, nothing about it. It's still incredibly hot. It can still melt concrete.

So, it'll be hot for, I don't know, all time. So, pretty. It's still super hot. So the sarcophagus itself, they built, started to deteriorate. So in 2010, there was, like, a world collaboration effort to cover it again. And they built a new one. So it is something that is like, it's like a, it's like a, uh, an archway over it and they built it like a little bit further away and then they

scooted it on top of the existing sarcophagus like three feet a day yeah like really really slowly and in 2016 it got put in its right place but it took a really long time because like sometimes you could only work on it for five minutes a day yeah because you had to leave which is wild so once it was on the radiation levels in the area fell by 90% just like in the air so that was really good it's not completely sealed because people still have to go into it to maintain things so there are like doors you can get people can go in there i did see a documentary where some YouTuber was on a tour and he got into the sarcophagus the new one and that's where you can see the old one right and it is terrifying to look at and you're able to kind of go into where the reactor area was but there was like this giant new cement wall that was put into place next to it. But on the other side of it is where it all took

it's very scary. It's a very creepy. Like you can find it I'm sure if you just YouTube it. There's like a thousand. Maybe a million Chernobyl. People like sneaking in too. You know, I watched one of like some dudes like saying overnight in one of the apartments and like trying to sneak around. There's plenty of that.

Crazy people. So that new cover is supposed to last at least 100 years if not more. So that's good. The guy who built it'll probably last longer. So that's on there now. And then this is what you mentioned. If you are driving a tank, for example, from Russia to Ukraine and you want to get to Kiv, you have to go through the exclusion zone, which is bad because that is radioactive. And so in 2022, when Russia

attacked Ukraine for the first time, they got there via the exclusion zone, which kicked up a shit ton of radioactive dust by like rolling their tanks through as one part and then they did take over the plant because people were still working there and held them hostage for like eight days and like

could you like if I was held hostage and told to do my job I would like send weird slack messages like nobody would die though you know but these people were under all this intense pressure to like keep everything maintained while there's like guys with guns to their head. So crazy. So. So

crazy. They also have bombed it recently. Like, also I'm not good. Leave it alone. Let us just, let us just keep that little bit by itself. So, um, but this is my last thing. One part of that I thought that I learned researching that little part is there are Russian soldiers who are like in their 20s who don't know about Chernobyl. Uh, yes. Yes. You know? Because of, because of, because that culture of like we've never done anything wrong that was part of the USSR is the culture in russia and like they just don't learn about it yeah isn't wild so like they would go there and they don't know they don't know the story it's like right next door it affected their parents and like all these people but like there's parts of russia where they never told them yeah so they just didn't know so crazy

which is crazy yeah it's a horrifying situation uh and it's one of the it's one of those few stories that like i constantly go back to over and over again because it's just like such nightmare fuel and we're lucky it doesn't happen again except when it did with fukushima i know i got to go back in and learn a little bit more about that one that one was and also i watched a movie about three mile island um here in the u.s and that one was so sad because like they didn't evacuate the town around it but like you can't sell your house what you're going to do? I mean, that one was a near meltdown.

It didn't actually happen. Yeah, and this isn't a full meltdown. This was an explosion. It started melting down, but also, like, you still... Well, I think a meltdown is anything where the core escapes containment. And in this case, it absolutely escaped containment. The elephant's foot sitting on the ground in a basement. Like, you can see in pictures that, like, it's a basement.

Like, it's not being pictured through a stethoscope. like a concrete bunker like it's literally like no no walked around yeah no it's like out of the containment um yeah so but in three mile island like all those people got cancer you know like all like their kids like you like imagine knowing that like your kids are going to die like you're you're all going to get it so super scary but i still think nuclear powers in theory the safest i know and i feel like i've heard a lot of that as well so it's like one thing doesn't happen. Well,

I think the measurement there is in units of energy produced versus deaths or like costs incurred due to disaster. But yeah, I'm very poorly qualified to make further statements. I know. I've heard that as well, but I want to know, if anyone knows,

I'd love to know a little bit more about that because I think that's super interesting. Like, what are we supposed to do? Yeah, when you were talking and I took notes, I was thinking about the Deepwater Horizon. It was like, man, I really want to research that. But.

Yeah. And I also want to, like, research what the handover was between Lenin and Stalling, because I don't totally understand that. Mm-hmm. That's fair. But that is a very fun story. And I, you know what? You're the 80th person to tell me to watch the Chernobyl documentary,

or not documentary, the HBO show. And I think I need to finally bite the bullet on this. You really should. It's really really good. Man, one thing also is looking this up, about Lenin. Like they have his picture everywhere, like in the show. He has such a great fucking portrait that they use. Like, I mean, his mustache is legendary.

What a great picture. It's really, really good. Yeah, wild. And he feels so, it's so, it's so, it's so, those societies, like, like the USSR and like North Korea where like you're not being told everything and like I know we're not being told everything but I feel like we like aren't being

like that's like North Korea you think that there's no other countries you know. Yeah you're not being actively deceived to that extent. Did you hear about that ship that they tried to launch? Mm-mm. North Korea built like some new giant battleship or something

and they tried to launch it but they messed it up anything fell on its side in front of like Kim Jong-un and like everybody else and he immediately was like this is like a huge crime like a state level crime they arrested four people today apparently yeah whoa I'm not glad those poor people are gonna get blown to this I think is exactly that like maybe they knew something was going on and weren't allowed to see anything you know yeah wow that's interesting that's so sad those poor people oh 19 hours ago North Korea arrest senior official over worship launch failure oh yeah they're they're fucked um Kim called it a criminal act

severely damaged the country's dignity and pride oh no thanks she's not wrong but still I know poor poor those those bastards in their families yeah

their families everyone well that was a fun start to the 200th episode I know. I'm like, definitely had like, oh, during, on Tuesday, we had a softball game and I had just watched like a three hour documentary about it. And then it started to smell like burning rubber. And I was like, guys, I got to go. Like, everybody was like, what is that smell? Are they like doing asphalt? I'm not sure they were just doing like a road somewhere, you know? But I was like, I just want to shock around. I need to go home because I can't do it. Very cool. Well, thank for sharing and doing that research.

and yeah, I'm probably going to watch some documentary reads tonight, so. I'm excited, do it. You can hear that guy your counterticking your dreams. I do want to watch that guy again and went inside the sarcophagus because I remember seeing that and was like, this is so scary. I was like, I was like in bed watching.

I was like, I don't even want to go to sleep. Yeah, no, terrifying. Terrifying. Terrifying. Well, thank you, Fars. Thank you, everyone. I have some good ideas that Morgan and Justin had sent me this week, too,

so I'm excited to dig into those. and thank you everyone who's listening. This has been a really fun 200 episode journey. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for hanging with us. Tell you friends.

Tell you friends. We have a Patreon. I'm going to put out a press release. I've never done that before. I've read me emails and people and be like, hey, we have 200 episodes. I don't know. Yeah, why not?

Tell people. We've got to be our own promoters. Yeah. And then we have Patreon. We're at Doom to Fail Pod and all the social media. And if you just found us, we have a whole bunch of stuff in the archive.

So take a look. Duneful Pond of gmail.com Doomedafel pod on all the socials. Taylor is hyperactive on there. So yeah, find us where you can find us. Miles is here too. Miles is here too.

Hi, Miles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Miles can listen in about 10 years because he's age. Yeah, yeah. We're going to make it age appropriate. Cool.

Well, go ahead and cut things off. Anything else, Taylor? That's it. Thank you. Sweet. We'll go in it. Thank you.