Historically High - The Chernobyl Disaster

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

In what still stands as the worst nuclear disaster to take place on this planet, the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine on April 26 1986 was the catalyst that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Poor materials, rushed construction, and a staggering amount of ineptitude regarding the design and operation of the nuclear reactors were the main factors in this shit show we're about to dig into. What exactly happened that night? What kind of impacts are still being dealt with today? How the hell does a nuclear reactor even work? Oh you bet your sweet ass we'll cover it, all you gotta do is press that play button. Sponsor: Mini Museumhttps://shop.minimuseum.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=historicallyhighSupport the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chris and I love doing this podcast, but an unexpected result of it is a growing collection of historical artifacts and memorabilia related to some of the topics that we've covered. But when I'm looking for something like that, I always stop at mini museum first. One of the coolest pieces we actually have in the studio here is they had a piece of the glass, a fragment of the glass from the atomic shield windows during the testing for the Manhattan Project that we covered during the Oppenheimer episode. That was a lot of fun to do. One of my favorites is the piece of samurai sword that we have to kind of commemorate our samurai episode. Man, that was a bloody, bloody episode. I feel like it classes up the studio just a little bit. It brings a little sense of nobility to it.

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and a brick fragment from the 1938 renovation of the White House. That is Americana in a bundle. That is a lot of America. Whatever you're interested in, they've got you covered. One of the coolest things I got sitting in front of me right now is for my birthday. Adam was able to find a piece on Mini Museum. It is from the original Star Wars A New Hope

that's seen in Tatooine, where R2D2 and C3Pio were traveling, you see that skeleton of the crate dragon in the background, I got a piece of that sitting right here on the desk. And if you're into real space stuff, they actually have like meteorite pieces and fragments. You guys are in luck

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many, but you will find many things on minimuseum.com. Greating comrades. Welcome to another. I sound like fucking Count Dracula on that. That sounded much different in my mind. Was Transylvania a part of the USSR? It might have been. That's kind of in that Romanian area, isn't it?

It's got to be Transylvania, Romania. Welcome, comrades to another episode of historically high. I am your host, Professor Chris. See, it fucking turns into Dracula. Yeah. Yeah, it's got to be wherever that pervert, Andrew Tate, was hiding them women, right? That's true, yeah. Got to be somewhere in there.

Well, it's fun to talk about the USSR, and it's kind of where we're headed today with our USS radiation episode as we talk about Chernobyl. Now, you always think immediately Chernobyl, Russia, correct? Yes. Chernobyl's in Ukraine. Yep. And I think we probably should know that more because all the fighting going on over there. I think Russia's taken back Chernobyl or something like that. They go back and forth.

Here's how my mind works with the whole thing. So after World War II, we get the situation where everyone's fucking tired. Russia has taken everything that Germany has taken previously when they went east. Russia's taken everything back. And while they're in those areas,

they're like, we can just probably keep these areas, right? And we'll create this new thing. It'll be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic? Is that what it was? Sure. Sounds good. And it's also known as the Soviet Union. So USSR, Soviet Union, same thing. Now, the Soviet Union comprised not just Russia, but a bunch of other countries as well. Lithuania,

Ukraine being the second biggest landmass. Belarus, I think, was one of them. Yeah, Belarus was in there. What is like Kajikistan, a whole bunch of the stands or Azerbaijan, I think, was actually one. There was a whole ton of places. All those in there. Yeah, all of those essentially after the fall of the Soviet Union

all became their own countries, but after World War II, they were all part of the USSR. And because they're part of that, my mind when I think of Chernobyl is Russian. Because that's who essentially was kind of running the show, was the USSR was centered, the focal

point of power was in Russia, it was in Moscow. So, you automatically would think Russia. Ukraine is actually the centerpiece for where our episode's going to take place today. We are going to be talking about the Chernobyl disaster and just kind of how this one's going to be a tough one for us to explain nuclear power as two guys without a physics degree. I think we'll do okay.

You can simplify it down to an acceleration, deceleration type thing, but I studied, I rabbit hold so hard on the actual reactor and what happened and what the catalysts and everything were that I feel like I'm going to get kind of overly focused on. it. This thing is just a shit sandwich any way that you slice it. For those of you, you know, the name Chernobyl, there was an HBO series that just came out, I think probably within the last couple years that was really good. I refrained from watching it until we're done with this episode because I didn't want to muddy the waters between dramatization and all that kind of shit. But Chernobyl itself has a ton of farther reaching implications than I had any clear about not only just from an ecological standpoint, but also where it kind of put the world at as far as like all these other countries gaining their independence, kind of based on this one

event. Yeah, a political standpoint that I didn't realize coincided with these two things. And this comes at a time as well when when you think of like, this is coming off the heels of before this nuclear power was the power of a bomb. That's what it was. designed for. You then enter the Cold War when the first nuclear reactor is created, and this is still insanely new science. And it's kind of the point where I don't think people really knew what the fuck they were doing to a degree. They knew enough to get it to work a couple times. And they're just like, well, this is what works. We're just going to go ahead and keep doing it like this. And because of that, it leads to this fucking disaster. We're not going to keep you

waiting any longer on this. Remember guys, rate, review, subscribe, fall, Five stars, all that good stuff. You got something? Yep, we forgot to do our introductions. That is Chris. I am Adam. If you've listened to any of their episodes, you know that. If you're new, welcome.

Strap yourselves in because we're about to melt this down. All right. Well, we've got to go back a little bit before the disaster itself and kind of set the stage. Oh, you know I love my geography here. So Chernobyl itself is in Ukraine. It's nine miles south of The town itself existed before the power plant The power plant itself is actually not called

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant It was the Vladimir Lennon nuclear power plant Yep Don't really hear that name Because apparently they don't want it to be tied to him With being a nuclear disaster It was the Vladimir Lenin power plant Up to a point

Up to a point Up to a certain melting point actually You have the capital city of Kiev, Kiev, however you want to pronounce that, 60 miles to the south. So it's not really that far. It's about an hour away from the capital. And when they created Chernobyl, if anybody has ever played, I'm going to give you a call of duty callback here. There's a mission in call of duty. It's one of the most well-known missions. It's called all gillied up. And it involves special forces and gilly suits sneaking through the city of, is it? Pripyet, right? Pripyet. Pripyt, which was the city built to house all of the 5,000 workers in their families that actually worked at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

They called them, this was so cool, they called them Adam grads. Yeah. Because they were the, like, Lenin grads, Stalin grads, Adam grads for the nuclear company, or for the nuclear plants. Yeah. So kind of going back, that kind of gives you an idea of setting the stage geographically. the first nuclear power plant that actually was ever created, where did that occur, Adam? Right in the heart of Chicago in 1942.

This was, we're going to hit this one real quick, not a real point, because this all really kicks up. This was kind of like, hey, could we actually get a little energy out of this? 1942, something called these Chicago piles, and they were able to kind of create a crude reactor that they could kind of harness energy from a little bit. Was it also the kind of reactor, because I do recall in the Opinimera episode, we talked about how the reactors had to be created in order to further enrich the uranium and plutonium. Yes. So was it kind of a byproducted dual purpose reactor? Yeah, and we'll see that going along in nuclear history just because if you have a weapons program and you have a nuclear power plant, you also have the capabilities to enrich that nuclear weapons program. You had the weapons first.

And then you're like, oh, shit, we can create power with this, but at the same time, we can also create a supply for our weapons. weapons. Yeah, to test to do whatever we need to. So after the U.S., just microwave Japan, the hope for nuclear power kind of shifted from, oh, should we have dropped that bomb to, hey, this is actually pretty sweet. Maybe we can do something with this energy. December 20th, 1951, the EBR1 experimental station produced a sultory 100 kilowatts of nuclear energy. in this little town that nobody's ever heard of that has a current population of 879 called Arcoe, Idaho. It powered four light bulbs.

It was how much the 100 kilowatts popped down. Pretty sure you can actually power a light bulb with a potato, right? It's pretty close. Idaho potato is something to do with that. Yeah. This whole site in Arco, Idaho, oh, shit, Arcoe, Idaho is kind of a fascinating place because we have this occur. God damn.

Shouldn't have smoke something. much before this episode. July 17th, 1955, it becomes the first community ever to be solely powered by nuclear energy. They ran the entire like community village thing. It was, it's like a bunch of

ranchers basically. They ran on nuclear energy for an hour. This kind of sounds like lightweight, but if you're thinking of this is the first time that you're having the hope that this could be a renewable, usable, usable energy source because you're scaling it up.

every country at this point that was able to create a nuclear weapon, which was basically right after World War II, us, and then the Soviet Union, not long after, this was state secrets as far as not only the nuclear programs and how they went about constructing those, but also when they started converting over to nuclear power plants, it wasn't like, oh, well, we took all the information that we learned in Arco, Idaho,

when the Russians took that and then did this. They had no fucking clue. It was all, we're in the midst of the Cold War here. So all this stuff is insanely secretive. And one thing that I never really thought about was I just thought when they said nuclear reactor, for some reason my brain was just like, oh, there's one way you do that. Yeah. And everyone has figured out that one way and maybe one is bigger than the other.

There are so many different ways that these reactors can work. And you start to kind of see where corners get cut. They try to kind of slap these together. And we get into some trouble. doing that. Yeah, and even here in this country, January 3rd 1961, back center stage, Arco Idaho, the SL1

reactor is destroyed by operator error and a steam explosion that launched out of the reactor. It ended up killing all three of the workers that were on it. This was the world's first and the U.S. 's only fatal reactor accident. Someone's, you know, ask yourself a steam explosion.

What is that? I heard something that kind of blew my mind, but it makes total sense. So, an explosion is essentially the rapid change from a solid to a gas or from a liquid to a gas. And the reason that we always associate fire with explosions is if during that expansion and when it converts to gas, it expounds outward, which is what causes the damage and the concussive force. But it does that to such a high degree of heat that anything that can possibly burn or be flammable within the confines of that explosion catches on fire immediately, and that's where you see essentially the shape of the like circular fireball or whatever it is. Steam explosions essentially is just when that water is flash

turned into steam immediately, and with it being steam, steam takes up much more space than the liquid form of water, and when it does that, when it changes immediately from a liquid to a gas, it creates an explosion and blows outward. There's just nothing to burn, but the temperatures so high and that converts so quickly that it does the same thing as an explosion. Explosions essentially, that's why there can be an explosion in space and no fire. It's just the expansion of that gas. Well, and also I might be over my skis on this and correct me if I'm wrong, but once that steam is turned, or once that water is turned into steam so fast, it separates the hydrogen

molecules from the oxygen molecules and hydrogen, much like you have hydrogen power, is the explosion of those hydrogen molecules. Oh, the humanity. Yeah, explosion of those molecules. So you still get this just massive reaction that happens. And unfortunately, when you talk about a steam explosion of a nuclear power plant, there's going to be a large amount of radiation that comes with that steam explosion.

From what I read, all three of these guys had to be buried in zinc line caskets because they were still fairly radioactive from this explosion. But we're talking about 1961. The whole reason that they're on this path of this peaceful use of nuclear power is in 1954 Dwight Eisenhower signed something called the Atomic Energy Act. And it was to try to find a better use for the boom booms. It was basically America and Eisenhower being like, okay, we acknowledge that other people have these weapons, but no one gets to use them going forward. Like, you got to use yours. It's like, we didn't want to use ours. we had to use ours

but now that we've used them let's everybody find a different use for this are we all in agreement well it's funny too because he sets that stage because in that exact same year in 1954 we get the release at the beginning of that year of the USS Nautilus. The USS Nautilus was

the first nuclear powered submarine it used something called an S1W pressurized water reaction so we had created a small enough version of a nuclear reactor to put on a ship, to put on a submarine. That's pretty far from the nuclear reactors that they were building before that, I would assume. So I guess the, I was going to wait till we got into the Chernobyl, the actual power plant part, but I think if we just kind of explain, let's not get

into the actual technical part of it, but a nuclear reactor is just a steam engine. That's what it is. So instead of a coal-fired steam engine like they had in the Industrial Revolution where they were using coal fire. It would then heat up a bunch of water within a pressurized tank. That water would convert to steam because of the expansion, the steam would be forced through like a pipe. It would then, because it's traveling so fast and there's so much pressure, it would then turn a turbine. The turbine is what actually creates the power. Same as a hydroelectric. You have the water flowing through. It's turning the turbines and that's what's creating electricity. In a nuclear power plant, just sub the coal for creating the heat with essentially nuclear materials that create

much more efficiently, vast quantities of heat, you're then using the water that that heat then flash boils and turns into steam to turn turbines again to create power. It's just a fancy steam engine is what it is. Well, yeah, you're converting from coal, which may burn for 45 minutes, to uranium and isotope that has a half-life of 22,000 years. Yeah. So while you do still have to have...

A little bit more volatility than material. than the other. But you also still produce nuclear waste that has to go somewhere. This whole entire episode, I've kind of fought with this, because I've always not really been a fan of nuclear power. And to hear everything from like the first 98% of nuclear power, it sounds awesome. It's just that last 2% of where we put the nuclear waste.

Because if there is any sort of a leak or anything like that, and it's anywhere near a water supply or anything that is vital, to the survival of the people around it, that's when shit gets a little bit iffy for me. Yeah. Whereas I know other forms of power put a lot of CO2 and carbon and shit like that in the air. Coal power does the same thing,

just so much worse. That's why there's so much smog in places like China and other countries that aren't on board with different forms of energy. But on average, they say that nuclear power is by far and away the safest form of power. It's just if things go wrong. When it's done right.

Yes. Yeah. If things go wrong. This whole episode is the discussion of when things do not go right. Exactly. All right. So we've got nuclear submarines now up at this point. It brings us essentially to June 27th of 1954 as well.

When the, is it the Obninsk? Obnizk power plant becomes the first power plant to supply a power grid. So basically able to transfer the electricity out to several different locations. It's not just like, hey, we're just testing it out at this one little town or we're testing it to see if it'll power this submarine. It's essentially testing it to see if it can work on a larger scale of providing power to a large amount of individuals. Yeah, five megawatts. As we learned in our Scotland episode, Watts is named for the Scott that created the form of energy. Is that correct?

It was a measurement of energy, but he was the steam engine guy. Yes. He was the fucking steam engine guy. Yep. Five megawatts seems like a hell of a lot back then. When we talk about some of these later, like 30 megawatts and things like that, that's just how far this evolution has come from 1954. That was, oh, okay, so that one was, yeah, correct.

We get the first commercial nuclear power station in Winscale, England. It was connected to the national power grid on August 27, 1956. So we now have a national power grid, a grid that goes all. over England. I'm assuming they probably threw some to Scotland. But you were able to power these just vast areas. What else are you able to do? You are able to produce something called plutonium 239. That was for Britain's nuclear weapons program that they were working on. Waste not want not. So again, 1954, we have this special atomic energy, peaceful development thing. And Britain's like, that's a great idea. In 1956, we're going to have a national.

power grid and we're still going to have some uranium for nuclear weapons. Oh, France gets in on it. Dude, this blew me away. From 1973 to 1988, France constructed 25 power plants and today almost three quarters of the country's energy supply is

done through nuclear energy. So in 15 years, they constructed 25 nuclear power plants. Yes. Which still today supplies... I'm sure they've done more since then. Oh, yeah. Or decommissioned them for other types of power, things like that.

But at the same time, you can see where everybody is in this race to essentially kind of make their country energy independent. They don't want to be dependent on foreign oil. If the war has shown us anything, it's that independence within your own borders is key to survival. During this time frame when, you know, America's working on nuclear power, Britain's working on nuclear power, France is working on nuclear power, they still kind of have that focal point on using that for nuclear weapons. They haven't, you know, they're doing things with nuclear power. They're creating nuclear power plants, but it's not a priority for them at this point. And this is forcing them to kind of fall behind in what is basically the new nuclear race.

You have the space race, you have the arms race essentially, you know, in World War II. Now you have essentially the nuclear race kind of in the middle of the Cold War. and during the 1980s there was one new nuclear reactor started up on average every 17 days now when these things are dude that's so many power plants here's the thing too about these reactors

it shows like the fucking Simpsons and everything where it just shows like Homer not paying attention and he's actually supposed to be monitoring the reactor and everything fucking life imitates art or the other way around but you had these power plants, once these things were online

and once these nuclear reactors were started up, they were meant to be, you know, able to be shut down if they needed to for maintenance, all that kind of stuff, keep them from going critical. But they were kind of just meant to start running. Yeah. And run for long, long, extended periods of time. So it's a big deal. It's not like they're just switching these things off and turning them back on.

Fucking, if you're looking at a map of Europe, it's just like little lights, lighten up all over fucking Europe every 17 days where we're literally like 30 or 40 years removed of just the discovery of this power and it's just fucking

rapid fire building these disaster factories that could potentially happen from a brand new technology it reminds me of that part on Jurassic Park where Malcolm is like you guys got so excited to think if you you know you got so excited that you could that you didn't think if you should. Well, and there's so many other elements to it when you look at like the fact that they had

power before that clearly, but they were coming from these coal sources or oil or anything like that to now you have all of these other industries that were producing the power don't have to work as hard because nuclear power is so efficient. Well, think of like how you would always see things during that kind of that, kind of that nuclear race when you would see like Adamtown and you you know you see the symbol of the atom and the Jetsons and everything was so futuristic

this is a time frame where everyone is like look at how advanced we are our country's running off nuclear power we don't run that coal shit anymore that's you know for the fucking middle ages or whatever so it was almost also a status symbol to show how well your country was doing

by how much of your power was being produced by these brand new technologically advanced power plants the one in question that we're going to be focusing on today 20 minutes into the podcast but we have to explain kind of the history behind it how it leads us to this point is like we discussed the Vladimir Lennon power plant which is commissioned in I believe it was construction started in 1972 yep the plan for this was fucking ambitious um the initial phase had them I think creating four nuclear reactors

and the total original plans before that pesky disaster happened was to actually have 12 nuclear reactors on the site of this power station where it actually sits is kind of next to the Pripyat River and between the river and the power plant itself they had this insanely huge like cooling ponder multiple cooling ponds four mile long cooling pond

where they would have to draw all of the water in and then where all of that partially irradiated water were also come out when you're looking at an image of this if you ever kind of look from a bird's eye view, the river's just like separated by like a strip of land. It's like, that's got to be seeping into the fucking groundwater and going into the river, right? It's so close. It's so close to each other. So the initial plan has the Chernobyl power plant, Lenin, I'm just going to call it the Chernobyl power plant. We'll tell you when it switches from Lenin to

Chernobyl, but just know it's a Chernobyl power plant. They're using these things called RBMK-1000 reactors. Now, this was a Russian-designed reactor. again, this is in the Soviet Union so even though this is in Ukraine they're still being overseen and essentially the whole point of this with the communism and everything like that by taking care of all these

other countries and spreading your technological advancement and everything to these other countries, you're basically taking care of these other countries. That's what you have to do to keep them. You want their resources, you want to be able to tax them, use their, you know, all of their shit. You have to be able to also provide them services as well

for them to want to stay within your Soviet Union. So the first Ukrainian nuclear power plant is Chernobyl. This is the first one to be built. These RBMK reactors basically because they're designed in a, you know, not an echo chamber, but basically just in a vacuum, just Russia, it's different from the American designed reactors. You don't want a capitalist idea in a communist society. Exactly. Yeah, the belief was that because these nuclear reactors were built by the government, essentially the communist regime, that they could not fail. They were immune to failure, unlike the lesser inferior capitalist societies and their nuclear power plants. Crazy thing is the, I could see why they would do this, but just to play devil's advocate, when you're creating a department that is going to oversee the,

nuclear power program in your country, I could see why you would want to pull resources and knowledge from the previous department that handled nuclear shit, which was the guys building the bombs. At the same time, maybe don't have the guys whose specialty was making shit explode and cause as much damage as possible of being in charge of the things that are not meant to explode.

Also, at the same time, they said when you had these people that were working with in the same ministry that actually oversaw the nuclear weapons program, now handling the nuclear power plants, you're looking for ways to kind of, like, dual service these power plants where you're still doing this weapon shit. So why don't we make these reactors the types that will serve dual purposes and while also providing energy,

they're going to provide nuclear materials that we can use in our weapon program? That's, yeah, that's a... So instead of designing some of the... something strictly and solely with the safety protocols to just simply provide power, you're kind of splitting up what you're doing with this. So you're not going to get the highest quality on both sides. Well, if that's not terrifying enough, because you have these jobs declining in the coal power industry,

in these other forms of power building, you have to give those guys jobs in a communist country to make sure that everybody's good. So you're taking people from the coal power industry into the nuclear power industry into the nuclear power industry when there's really almost nothing could be further apart than how you burn coal for power and how you burn nuclear power.

If your job is to watch a pressure gauge and release pressure, increase the pressure, do things like that that you're moderating essentially the power output and everything. Yeah, I could definitely see how that would transition over. But a lot of the people hired here, like I said, there's 5,000 people working at this power plant. these, the people that design the reactors and the power plants, those are your nuclear physicist, your engineers.

School guys. Yeah, they're not the guys running these power plants. These are run by chief engineers, guys that maybe have an idea of nuclear power and knowledge in that. But most of the guys working in these control rooms and monitoring these insane banks, get on your phone if you're able to right now and look up Chernobyl control room for, And take a look at what these guys were looking at. It looks like something out of fucking war games. It's nothing but an entire wall of gauges and readouts and flashing buttons.

And in the middle, there's the nuclear reactor display that shows you all this kind of shit. How you just have a few guys sitting in here. And they're supposed to keep eyes on all this kind of stuff. And at the same time, they don't really have any knowledge of what they're managing. They just know, hey, this number good, these numbers bad. When this needle goes into the red, it's bad. Open up the manual. What does it tell me to do?

Oh, it tells me to do this. I do this. Oh, it's not changing. Flip the next page. What do I do now? These aren't the kind of people that have a knowledge of nuclear physics reactions that can sit there and say, I know what's happening here. I need to think on the fly and try to stop anything horrible from happening.

They have flow charts. If light red, yes, do this. If light not red, no, do this. and there's always going to be a little bit of gray area in the middle, not to mention, they wanted to get young guys in there so they could have 30 and 40-year careers working at this power plant. One of the guys that's in the control room during this day in question that we're leading up to was like 25 years old running a nuclear reactor.

I don't want a 25-year-old Uber driver. I definitely don't want a 25-year-old guy running the reactor. So with these reactors, the reason that, that they had to have, you know, this is before time when everything was moderated essentially by computers or anything. So the reactor in question, the one we're talking about, they're for these RBMK reactors. And what the RBMK, I'm going to try to do my best to kind of explain what happens in these, is think of it as you basically have a giant pit in the ground, a circular pit way down in the ground. I think the size of it, the actual core were like the fuel

material would be was 22 feet deep and then 40 feet in diameter. So these things were fucking enormous to generate a ton of heat, steam power. And how they were kind of arranged is you had inside the containment area, normally like American-made reactors, I think British-made and also French-made ones, everything was sealed within one housing. The core, I think the steam, like all the water and everything, but it was also then housed in like a protective like concrete shell. Steel.

A steel shell. Well, they used concrete when they were designing these RBMK reactors and then setting down in the concrete was basically what I would describe as a donut. Yeah. That was then filled with like some type of nitrogen. It was some type of gas, right? Weren't those the steam pipes? They might have been.

So you have basically a, hollow donut that's used as kind of a buffer, and then you have the core within that. The core is where all the reactions are going to occur. Now, the RBMK basically in Russian stands for high power channel type reactor. It's what's known as a graphite-moderated reactor. So the whole thing with creating nuclear power is it's this dance. And the dance is simply you don't just set something and let it sit there idle. when you have a reaction that is providing the heat that then generates the power,

you have to have a way that can moderate or slow or increase that reaction. It's not flicking on a light switch. Uranium is going to essentially split its, is it atoms or what would the term be? Uranium would be known as an isotope. An isotope is any element that has an uneven number of neutrons and protons. or protons and neutrons. And when that happens, it is more likely to try to shed one or the other

to try to even itself out and stabilize it as a stable element. So you have these things called neutrons that are kind of what facilitates this sort of beginning of the chain reaction. When a neutron is born, they move very, very quickly. So they're very inaccurate as to where they're bouncing around. the idea is to fire the neutrons directly at the uranium or whatever the isotope is.

So that way when it hits, it breaks off more protons and neutrons. The more neutrons there are that are aiming down at this isotope, the more energy you're going to have. So when it breaks apart these uranium isotopes, that's where you get the huge release of energy is when these things break apart. The startup process that we talked about a little bit earlier on, you would build these nuclear reactions. you would get everything ready, and you would essentially have to jumpstart these reactors to get the fuel rods, which were made of the uranium,

to basically start reacting. Once they started reacting, it was almost a self-perpetuating thing where these neutrons would be flying around, they would be hitting these isotopes and break them off, creating more and more energy, which in turn is creating these giant fuel rods would create insane amounts of heat.

But this is happening on a microscopic atom level. So it just looks like essentially this rod is just getting insanely hot due to the material it's made of. Now, in order to control that, you need to control the speed of the reaction or basically the neutrons within that fuel source. The neutrons are what are doing everything. They're bouncing around in there, like Adam said, they're breaking apart all these other uranium isotopes or uranium atoms, and that's what's causing the energy. The energy, when it increases, generates more heat, produces more steam, produces more power. If you need to produce less power, you have to basically have some type of absorbing agent that you can use. And these reactors had what are what's called control rods.

Now, within the reactor themselves, it's a circular reactor, and so these control rods actually go up to down. They're not coming in at the side or anything like that, so they can be raised and lowered. Now, part of these control rods are made out of graphite. Now, graphite is what's known as a moderator. It's why it's called the graphite moderated reactor. the graphite, once it was inserted and it was in a position between the fuel rods, it would actually, and in a weird, it sounds counterproductive, but it would actually slow down the neutrons.

It wouldn't stop them. It wouldn't prevent them from doing anything. It would slow them down to a point where it was more likely that they would hit other, the uranium atoms. And that in turn would then create the chain reaction that would keep perpetuating the heat. Essentially, that's what would rev it up. That's the gas pedal, is putting it. putting those graphite rods in there is the gas pedal.

That's what cranks it up to produce more power. You ready for a sports metaphor? Yes. This is like pitching in baseball, pull the ball back, throw it as fast as you can. You might hit the strike zone one time out of five. Yeah. You pull back, you aim, you throw 10 miles an hour slower. Your aim is going to be a lot greater because you have more control instead of trying to whip your arm forward.

So these neutrons, instead of being as fast moving as they are usually, in Western culture reactors and other cultures, they usually use water. Water and graphite are both considered, what was the word of? Moderators. Moderators, yes. Water works about as efficiently because the neutron and the atoms inside of the water are roughly the same size, so it kind of slows down like it's moving through jelly. as soon as those moderators come out and it slows everything down because they're basically pinging off of that they're headed straight back into those isotopes

like you're talking about for those explosions. It's like surrounding something with something metal and then throwing a bouncy ball as hard as you can and just pings and bounces off of it versus surrounding it with something soft like a foam mattress and you throw a bouncy ball and it just absorbs into it and the ball drops. This is where you get the other part of the control rod

which in the case of Chernobyl they were made out of a material called boron. Boron is essentially an absorbing material for the neutrons. So to slow down the reactor, to bring its power input, and to cool the rods down, they would then lower these in. And now how the rods were actually constructed is you had the graphite, which was near what you would consider the bottom portion of the rod. You then had like a four-foot section.

And these control rods, just to kind of give you a scope of sides, they're enormous. They're 14 feet 9 inch graphite sections. That's how long they are. And probably I would say when we saw the pictures, you can see images of these. They're squared and maybe 8 by 8. Yeah, they're big. 8 by 8 square of just these fucking rods of graphite.

It was a 4 inch like telescopic type separator. And on the other side of the rod was the boron section. So to kind of give you an idea if you're looking at the reactor, if you have the control rod, you bring it up. That's the graphite portion. It's heating up. It's going faster. You lower it down to where then the boron section is in between the control rods,

and it then slows everything down by absorbing the neutrons, and without the neutrons then bouncing back and bouncing around crashing into those other uranium atoms. The energy is going to go and kick down, and then you're just generating the heat by what's happening within the uranium itself. Well, there are other methods that, like Adam was kind of saying, that you could slow down that as well, is you could use regular water, which they considered light water. You could use heavy water.

When did we touch on heavy water? As part of the German nuclear program that they were trying to develop. Wasn't it the Todd organization when they were making the heavy water? Oh yeah, it was because they had that factory out in Norway or whatever it was. Somewhere in Scandinavia.

No, no, it was the SOE. Yeah. Because they had that operation where they took that thing. You're right. That's right. Heavy water is essentially just think of it by that name.

It's almost more condensed to where it absorbs that even more so, so it can stop the reaction even more so. It's enriched with some other element, I think, isn't it? So, you know, being that this is essentially government built as well, they're looking for ways that they can mass produce these types of reactors. When it comes to nuclear reactors, my feeling on it, I might be the weird one in the room,

is that stuff should be built exactly customized for that exact purpose and not try to build things in mass where they're built with a lower, quality. So the pros of these RBMK reactors is they were cheaper. They used light water so they didn't have to manufacture the heavy water, which if you go back to listen to the SOE episode, you have to have an entire process to enrich and make this heavy water. Without having to use that, you can just pump water out of the river and use it out of the cooling ponds that they were using. Graphite was a relatively inexpensive moderator, which is why a lot of other places did not use graphite. Well, and it has to be pure, too.

You can't have any sort of stepped-on graphite because it's not going to do its job correctly. What this also allowed you to do is what you could use as your fuel source. A lot of these had to have a certain enrichment level of the uranium in order to function correctly. These RBMK reactors were able to use uranium that was a lower enrichment. Basically, meaning it's kind of like diesel, how diesel isn't processed as much. Yeah.

It costs more, which, just has no bearing on, but basically it was just less refined, but because that was more readily available, this power plant was able to go ahead and have a better access to a fuel source. So they're like, fantastic, we'll just go and use these. Well, the cons where there was this, we're getting into the science nitty-gritty here. We've been in it for a minute. Yeah, we're going to try not to get lost to this, but it's very important to understand this to know what happened.

Within these reactors, you have these things called void co-affirmative. And the void coefficient would be essentially where within the reactor, when you're moving these rods, if, you know, hydrodynamics, water can get displaced. If you have a cup of water and it's full of the top and you take your finger and you stick it in there, your finger is going to displace the water. It's going to spill out. And when you pull your finger out, you're going to have less water in there. When you're raising and lowering these control rods, the graphite rod, I believe, was of a different size than the, boron rod. It was shorter so water could actually flood

in on each side. And that water would in turn also help kind of cool the process. It was meant as a coolant as well, but it would also be able to go and create more steam in there where more of the activity was going on. The void coefficient is when they're moving these rods, you can

essentially create space in this reactor where there's really nothing going on and there's nothing to slow down these neutrons. Or the water is being flashboiled and creating steam. and you're getting these pockets where almost the temperature and you're not able to really control anything

because it's just kind of the wild west in there and you don't have a moderator or anything like that. So in these reactors, there were these large void coefficients where this kind of stuff could happen. You don't want this to be a thing in your reactor. You want this to be as small as possible because it's a wild card.

You don't know what it's going to do. These reactors were also unstable when you were operating them at lower levels. These nuclear reactors were meant to operate, you know, not at high, high levels all the time, but at a safe level to where there was a consistent chain reaction going on and was producing it was producing consistent results

where you could almost kind of predict what it was going to do by kind of getting it in the sweet spot. Once you got these down to a lower energy level, it fluctuated too much. It might dip down too low and then you're trying to get it back up and you all of a sudden it spikes and you get it too high and it's this game of like, it's a balancing act with weights on each side of it.

What makes it tougher too is during the nuclear reaction that happens there's a an element another element produced called xenon gas xenon gas is known as basically like a reactor killer xenon gas sucks up and takes in all the neutrons

just like the boron does except at a more efficient pace if you're... It's naturally occurring. Yeah. The xenon gas it's just a byproduct. Exactly but it normally with your reactor is running at the levels it should be the xenon is getting burnt up and used as quickly

is it's being produced, so it doesn't have any bearing. It's a negative, or yeah, it's a zero sum. When you slow it down, you're still producing that xenon gas. And there's not enough activity within the reactor to burn it all up. Yeah, those negative coefficients that you were talking about all of a sudden involved being filled with xenon gas, which is also going to slow down all of that. Not to mention, if you have your control rod set up there, you might have boron and xenon gas at the same time sucking away all those neutrons.

There's so many within these reactors. There's so many things at work. It's not just one thing that's raising or lowering it. All these different things can come in that are doing different things at the same time. And you're trying to make sense of it. It's juggling. And you're just trying to keep your eye on all these different balls. To kind of give you an idea of how big these individual reactors were,

there were 1,661 fuel channels in these reactors. So they're cylindrical, and they go up. and down. 211 control rod channels within here. So 211 individual control rods within these reactors. If you can pull up a picture of it, basically when you can look down on it, it looks like a giant circle in the ground

with a whole bunch of like metal squares on it when they have all of the reactor, the control rod caps on. When they take those off, it basically just looks like there's a bunch of tubes sticking in the ground. And this is where all of the control rods are. So there's 211 of those.

just for for scale the 1954 power plant that produce 5 megawatts each one of these reactors produces

1,000 megawatts so just exponentially bigger, exponentially more power, exponentially more danger. So if you don't

get it right with a 5 megawatt probably not going to be worse or not bad well it's not going to be good but it's not going to be bad your

higher risk you want to want the higher reward, you own the higher risk. They wanted this to be the largest nuclear power plant in the world. And with having 12 reactors as the original plan was, it would have been. The fuel that they're using for this in the fuel rods is basically uranium dioxide. And it's a form of uranium that is not weapons grade, but it's able to split apart. It's like a lower octane. It's a lower octane, but it's easier to essentially split these uranium atoms in their part so it's better for what they're actually using it for.

Now, again, the heat turns the water to steam, steam powers the turbines, water also acting as a coolant. Now, with these people that you're having control this again, you have four of these reactors, you have, and they're constantly being monitored, which means you have multiple shifts. So it's not just like you have these guys that are working, that are specialized between eight to five, they clock out, they go home, you have like multiple shifts of these guys coming in, so everyone has to be at the same level. Well, as with any job,

usually your night shift is probably going to be a little bit weaker. B team. Yeah, it's the strippers on Tuesday afternoon. Yes, exactly. Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead, man. As far as the reactors go, the first reactor was finished,

eventually behind schedule in 1977. craftsmanship wasn't great. The biggest problem that they had was they had to have an extra step in the construction process were when these reactors were built and then shipped into the power plants, they then had to be stripped down

completely all the bolts and everything out of them because they were manufactured in such a poor way that these guys had to make sure that they had everything inside of them to work efficiently. So the plant that they were, or the building site that they were coming from was slapping these things together so haphazardly

that they had to be deconstructed and then rebuilt correctly once they got to the plants. They're being mass produced. That's a scary, scary thought that that had to happen. Another thing too is not only the reactors themselves, but as with Russia during the Cold War,

the KGB is a big part of this story as well. And if you have a nuclear power plant that's going to be in a country outside of Russia, one of the things, especially during the Cold War, you're looking out for sabotage, people selling state, secrets, things like that. So there were KGB agents stationed at these power plants that would, you know, listening

on the conversation, the hub, I'd kind of get a feel for everyone, do interviews if they needed to. But basically, their job was to report back to KGB headquarters with anything suspicious and kind of the status of the plant. During construction of this, there were several reports sent back to KGB headquarters in Moscow that was like the cement they're using it, they're not even mixing it correctly. Some of the cement that they're pouring in for these buildings and for the reactor, you know, housings, they're not even mixing it correctly.

They're, you know, there's chipping, there's cracking, things like that. I mean, you're already having construction issues that are going to be in areas that should be the most stringently manufactured you possibly can. Well, you're getting those from the first reactor being finished in 1977. The second reactor was finished in 1978, the third in 1981, and then the fourth in 1983. So this first one took you five years to build. And I'm sure they started building on the second one before they were finished and all that kind of stuff. But they started just going faster and faster and faster to get these done.

And when you're doing that, if you were cutting corners in the beginning and it took you that long and then you're just pumping them out this much faster, how many more corners are you cutting? So along with that, like Chris was talking about, they had to build this little city called Pripyat that was outside of it. The city was constructed, I think it was like 15 kilometers or something. something like that away from... So Pripyat was two miles from the power plant. How many kilometers is it? I think it ends up... Shit, I don't know.

Two miles. Yeah. So it was supposed to house the workers and the families and everything like that. It Pripyat at its peak, and this is very important in 1986, and there's a reason why we don't talk about the population in 1987, had a population of 49,360 people. This city had come so far that they had like soccer fields. they had an arena for sports, they had skating ranks,

they had everything in this town. One of the most well-known images of Chernobyl is a Pripyat and it's the amusement park. And this is the Ferris wheel? And you see the Ferris wheel. Yep. Yeah, that's a huge one. Yeah, that's just if you're looking for images

of kind of those things that just encapsulate like an event or a time, it's seeing Pripyat now once it's been reclaimed by, you know, the forest and you see the trees growing everywhere. And there's just all of the... these in the classic like Russian style cement buildings and everything for housing and then you see this like Ferris wheel there. Now even leading up to 86, this place did not have a sterling

reputation. The KGB had kind of labeled this place as an accident waiting to happen just due to what they'd seen during the construction process. The way that they designed this plant and kind of the layout is you have reactor number one that's its own building and its own housing, its own control room, distanced from that by a little bit, not within the exact same building you have Reactor 2. Then they built Reactor 3, and then literally using like a shared wall,

they built Reactor 4 right next to it to save on cost from building an additional fucking wall. And while they were in the process of starting to map out 5 and 6, you're trying to get to 12 and automatically between 3 and 4, you're like, ah, let's just not build another wall. How lazy. We're already taking shortcuts. What's one more going to do?

1982. So this is even before the fourth one is brought online. Reactor one has a partial meltdown. There was an issue with like a cooling valve that was faulty. I don't know if it was operator error, but someone forgot to, I think, open one after they had done like a test for the shutdown and reopen it back up.

It ended up having a minor meltdown, but everything was essentially contained within the reactor so there was no radiation. no super major radiation leaks. There was still some fucking leakage. Well, yeah, because they had had a ruptured uranium tank that had gone unnoticed for a few hours, and there were significant amount of radiation

that were just pouring out of this tank. But how do you not have something in place to be like, oh, shit, the uranium tank is ruptured? When all of your fucking Geiger counters was like, just fucking redlining, and you're looking at it being like, well, that can't be right. They're all busted.

I'm not convinced they had Geiger counters on shit like that. It's like when we talked about a little bit later, the guys that were having to travel underneath just finally turned them off. Yeah. They didn't want to have to fucking think about it. Yeah, I guess ignorance is bliss at that point. Well, took him eight months to go and repair that one and get reactor one back up and operational. Oh, yeah.

How much did everybody else find out about that? Nothing. Is it? Not a law. We had a nuclear incident that took place in a partial meltdown. USSR was like, nothing happened. Yep. And at this point, there is a, like, atomic energy committee because there's so many of these nuclear power plants in all these different countries.

So there is, like, an international governing type body that kind of oversees to make sure people got their shit dialed in when they're building these plants. In the 1980s, this is all happening. 1984, reactor three and four in the steam separator room, which I don't know if they shared this room, but there was a steam separator room that went up to 520 degrees. in this room, enough heat to basically shift the concrete of the building to the point where they were noticing it and they were like, this heat's not going to go away, this is going to be consistent, it's shifting the concrete, what do you think is going to happen if the roof collapse in or something collapses in onto this reactor? Yeah, it's probably going to blow up.

No, and they didn't really do anything to fix it. They're like, what are we supposed to do? The fractures already built. We can't really rebuild the building. This is when they hedge their bets and they're like, hey, let's not keep this name of Vladimir Lenin power plant. maybe let's go with something a little less tied back to our guys. The way the wind was going.

Just in case this collapses, make sure it collapses on the Chernobyl power plant, not the Vladimir Lenin power plant. Well, we come to, you know, basically what we've been building up to during this episode is we come to the fateful April 25th of 1986. And Reactor 4 is what's going to take center stage here. it had been basically scheduled to have a test performed where the test seems pretty, pretty minor.

So basically what they were going to do is they had some concerns with the turbines that were being powered by the nuclear reactors themselves. They were generating power also for the plant itself. So when they're generating this power, if there's an actual power outage of the plant itself, if it's sabotaged, if something happens, they needed to know if this turbine, while it was slowing down, would still create enough power until the diesel backup generators kicked in. The reason this is important is because if they were to go without power, essentially they're unable to control the levels of the radiation for that time frame until the generators kick back in.

And at that point, if something were to happen and they didn't kick in or it took too long, you could be in a situation that's unrecoverable. Yeah, you're going to have another melted core. And this safety test, just to point out how important this safety test was and how serious the Russians took this, this was supposed to be done before the reactor was turned on in 1983. This test had been pushed three years down the road while it's running. You're running a crucial test that's going to determine if you can prevent this thing. if you could cool the core in a power outage.

And you're like, I mean, it's been running for three years, but boss has been breathing down my neck about this folder I've had on my desk for the last three years that I haven't gotten it done. And I've been telling him, I'll get it to you. It's already been taken care of. So we actually need to crank this thing out. And you'd think, okay, if we're going to run a serious test like this, we need to have our fucking A team on this.

We need to have the day shift, our best guys to make sure this thing goes off without a hitch. We definitely should not wait for, night to perform this, right? Yeah. Well, and that's why on April 25th, they started this test. They started this test. They started to power down. They ended up having to call off the test because they were right in the middle of peak hours for the factories. And they didn't want to risk losing a power outage while they were running their factories because if there's a power outage at the factories, you can't make any money. So instead of powering it all the way

back up 100%, they're just like, well, we're going to be doing the test soon anyway. Let's just keep it at half power. And that is where the ultimate undoing comes in. There are so many things that led to this. It's a combination of both operator error, but also defaults in the actual machine itself, the reactor itself, to where it's just this perfect storm of everything going wrong that can't go wrong. even to the degree of even the communication between the people that were actually running the test,

the test team, and those people that were actually in charge of monitoring and controlling the reactor, they hadn't communicated. They weren't on the same page as this, and it took them a while to get onto the same page after shit was already kind of in motion. Because...

But that's 2 p.m. on April 25th is when this test is being slated to start. April 25th 11 p.m. is when the second shift comes. And these tests, they're a very long time because it takes when you're dealing with things like these reactions and trying to get these things under control, it's not like you can just turn the power off.

You have to bring it down to... It's kind of like swimming. You're coming back up to the surface. You have to come up in a controlled manner to where you don't get the bends. You have to bring a reactor down the same way where you have to bring it down in a controlled manner to make sure once it's shut down,

it's done safely, it's cooled, then you can start the process of starting it back up. And if shit goes south, you need to be able to raise it in a consistent enough manner or not to cause things to go wrong. Well, when they were doing their little wishy-wash thing on how they're going to do it,

they were trying to bring the reactor down and stabilize it. I think it was like at 1,000 megawatts, right? I think so. Well, due to the fact that they were trying to do multiple things, like they started this test, then they were like, well, we can't shut it down, completely. We got to go and provide some power.

They were already kind of like doing half measures on this thing. They weren't sticking to what they should have been doing. The power ends up falling down to 30 megawatts. So from where they needed to have it at 1,000 megawatts, falls down all the way to 30. At this point, alarms and bells are going off that they need to try to stabilize this thing. They need to get levels within the appropriate, you know, ranges. Because shit's getting hotter. Because it's getting hotter.

And so they're like, okay, we need to go ahead and get all of the control rods for And so they basically dump all of the control rods. And was it the boron sections that they dropped in? Or was it the graphite sections? Graphite sections because they had to raise it back up. Correct. So it was already up. And as they were raising them down to get to the boron sections,

you have to pass the graphite sections. So when all of those control rods are when I say freed, I believe what they're referring to is they were completely pulled out and the reactor was just in its natural state of water and the fuel runs. It was just react. in its way that it was doing that. There was no moderators in their absorbers. When they have to bring them back down, because the first thing that's going to hit between those fuel cells is going to be the graphite, which in turn speeds up the reaction to go ahead and create

more heat, that's the first thing that hits. Well, there was low steam pressure at that time, and as all of the control rods, because of the low steam pressure with all of the control rods removed, Basically, this is fluctuating back and forth because they've made so many changes so quickly that ideally you're making adjustments maybe once an hour with these things, if even that. You're just basically keeping it within an acceptable range. At this point, because of all of the steps that they've taken and all of the things they haven't foreseen about how long it takes this to come down and build back up, they're making adjustments every few seconds to this. Do we lower it? Do we raise them? Do we add this? Do we pull these? Do we leave these in? And they're in a position where they're lowering some rods to try to control it from a certain amount and they're bringing out the rest of them. It's just they're just chickens with their heads cut off.

They're not sure how to kind of get this thing stabilized. Well, this whole process, this less experienced night shift that's trying to solve this issue. This guy named Anatoli Diatlov, not a part of the Diatlov mountains. That might be an episode sometime. But he's the one that's on duty when the permission is given to continue this test. That's 1110 like we talked about. And this is just going to be a timeline of how this goes because it goes wrong so quickly. By 1228, the power falls below the level which the reactor is considered stable.

We have an unstable reactor just like you were talking about as soon as that power loss happens. Like, well, shit, what do we do? And the response that was against the safety protocols in the book was to remember, most of the control rods like you talked about. When those control rods are removed, all of the xenon gas is building up inside because you have this positive or negative pressure change. And you're at a low enough level of power

to where the xenon isn't getting built or isn't getting destroyed and burnt up as it's being generated. You now have it bringing it down even lower, correct? Because the xenon is absorbing it. So the power is just plummeting. Eventually, after these control rods are pulled, the xenon gas is built up, it stops raising power slowly.

They finally get it to a stable enough power at 1 a.m. and Diatlov gives the go-ahead to proceed. The emergency shutdown system, which they were concerned about ruining the test, is then shut off. The big red button that you're supposed to push when everything goes wrong and you're about to test this scenario, why do you not still have that emergency shut off button? Why is that not still a part of your choice? But all the other safety features are still off. All the other rods have been pulled out for control.

1.23 and 4 seconds. The test begins. And 4 seconds is so important at this point. The unexpected power surge occurs as you have the xenon gas. It's still fighting inside of it. 123 and 58 a.m. is when the first explosion occurs. So what ends up happening inside the reactor as they're proceeding with this is when you're making these alterations,

it takes time for these things to essentially kind of like work themselves out. So they're making a change and it's having a reaction. But then they're doing another change. And so by the, they don't know what level. So like if they would have waited to see

what power level would have been raised to, it could have gotten up to this level, but because they're doing these other actions before it has a chance to reach what it's supposed to be doing, they're making the wrong decision to go the other direction. and what you get in here basically, because, again, water is also making, you know, is also a player in this because water is in there supposed to be cooling, generating steam, things like that.

Well, what ends up happening is there's a reduction of water flow in there as they're moving these rods in and out because it's displacing the water. And then when they're pulling the rods out, the water's not flowing in fast enough to fill in these gaps. And you're getting the water that is in there because there's so much heat and not enough water to cool it. you're getting an increased amount of steam. Well, with all of this water, the rest of the water that's barely in this reactor gets flash turned into steam, that steam is what's generating the power.

And it kicks this power surge. I think they said it was 100 times what the nominal power levels were going to be. So big. And with that increased heat, what ends up happening is these fuel rods. Once they get hot enough, the increased heat actually ruptured the fuel.

And what, What happens is even if it's a tiny, tiny little microscopic, there's so much heat that's occurring in here when these particles break off. I don't know if this is accurate, but this is how I see in my head from kind of a logical perspective. If you have a fuel rod, the only place that is generating heat is the surface of it, correct? Sure. The place where you would detect heat. That's what's touching the water to create the steam and everything like that. The core isn't where you're detecting it.

When you're breaking off pieces and it starts to break off. Now all of that, you're getting more surface area where there's exposure to heat, creating more steam. And because of the rapid creation of all of this steam and nothing to cool it within this confined area, like Adam says, first explosion happens and basically just fucking destroys the core. Now, for situations such as this to protect workers from radiation when they're working on these reactors and everything, they have this thing called the upper biological shield. And it's basically the lid that goes on the top of the reactor. How big was it? Fuck me. So this lid is 58 feet in diameter.

So 58 feet across. It is 2,000 tons of steel and concrete. It's drilled with holes that go all the way through this huge, thick fucking cap. And that's where all the control rods are able to go down and be accessed into the core and everything. But this thing is 2,000 tons. during this explosion, this thing gets blown through the roof of the reactor, destroys the roof, and then lands back down on the reactor in an almost near vertical. So like if you're, I guess, bouncing a penny or a quarter on its side,

that's basically how it's sitting, but in the reactor itself. It also blew through the thousand-ton roof. Yes. That's how much concrete. was up there and that's how strong it was being pressurized was sent through a roof that weighed a thousand tons. And it's not like it destroyed this

this cap either. This thing was so fucking strong. Yeah, it was like it just shot it off like a frisbee and it came right back down and landed. Yeah, so that's 123.58 a.m. is when this first and second explosion happened just one after another. There's a giant fireball.

Dust, graphite, and radiation just begin spewing out of this whole. in the roof of the reactor and it launches. Did you watch any of the HBO documentary? Uh-uh. It's very cool. It's just like this subtle shot in the background out of a window while you're seeing what's going on inside this apartment building.

And it just almost looks like a Hiroshima, just a straight blow up straight out of it. And I don't know. They said that that HBO documentary is very, very accurate. But just to know that you're sitting in a town in Prepiat and that just happens and you don't, all of a sudden you see it, and then like three seconds later you see the entire apartment building shake. So the reactors themselves are sealed.

So all the radiation is contained within these reactors, and there's a fuck ton of radiation in here. Everything also within these reactors is irradiated. And it's also superheated. Now, the fire, how this happens, everything happens so fucking quickly due to physics. as soon as air is able to reach within the reactor and all of these pieces of radioactive, superheated graphite

are exposed to air. What does a fire need to survive? Oxygen. These things, because of the heat, instantly burst into flames, and that's where you get this essentially explosion in a fireball. You get all this flaming shit launched into the air. It's also the expansion of all of this steam

within the reactor that is a radiated steam. This stuff gets launched into the fucking atmosphere so fucking quickly. I think they said the amount of radiation that escaped Chernobyl was it 400 times

of Hiroshima. I think it was. And they said, I'm trying to remember the name of the guy. He's the guy that went on and made the series of videotapes. Yeah, that he hung himself. Yes. He was He was like the lead Soviet nuclear scientist.

Yes. And they sent him out. And as he's flying in, he's looking at the sky, and the sky is fucking red. There's so much particulate and radiated material in the sky and up in the atmosphere at this point that the fucking sky is red. You'd think at this point, everybody involved in this whole entire song and dance that just witnessed this, it just felt this big explosion and everything. like that. They all got to be like, oh shit, oh shit, the core's exposed, everything's going wrong. We need to get out of here. Oh no, no, no, no, no, my friend. These RBMK reactors that they were using were always taught, even at the highest levels of chemistry and all that kind of stuff,

that these couldn't explode. So the belief of Dyatlov was that this was just the steam blowup or the steam explosion, but the core was still intact. When, in truth, this couldn't be further from the truth, because once that cap blew off, you have this core exposed to the world giving off radiation. And you're like, well, how did they fucking not know that? Couldn't they just look at it and tell? They may have had, okay, so pull up a picture of reactor number four after the explosion.

You'll see it. It's fucking just completely shredded. It almost looks like shredded cheese off, like, laying off of the side of this building. The control room was, I think, like, 900 feet. It's like 300 meters or 900 feet from the reactor. So it's not like one of those things where it's a control room and they have a big glass window and it's overlooking the reactor and they're able to see everything that's going on.

All this is done just by meters and being blind. So when this happens, there's so much shit. No one can get into the reactor because it's basically been completely obliterated. So they're basically just having to be like, so that totally didn't break the reactor, right? have no fucking knowledge of this. This building is now completely on fire and they're basically just hoping. They don't fucking know. They're just listening

to what they told them about these R.B. whatever reactors. Yeah. It's not possible that it must have like you've been, like you said, a giant steam rupture that happened to cause this. They figured it out though. You hear they figured it out? Dietlov sent two

of the younger members that were like trainees, like green guys, He's like, hey, go check and see if the core is showing. They go ahead and head down, and Dyatlov in some sort of, I don't know if it was his memoir or something, was like this, was when I realized as soon as they walked out of this room that I had just sent them to their deaths. These guys get down, end up seeing that the core is exposed,

run back up to the control room, open the door. Their skin has changed colors from the radiation coming off of this exposed core, and they say, the core is exposed. We just saw it. This is, look at us. Look at what's going on. You know that metallic taste in your mouth?

That's because there's radiation flowing all through this building. They lived a week longer and then died of radiation poisoning. Just from walking out and looking at the exposed core that was shining out onto them. I told you that. That's fucking, the radiation thing is fucking terrifying because I don't think we even at that point had an understanding about what it is. I mean,

it's fucking odorless. You do get the metallic taste in your mouth if you're exposed to certain levels of it. But if it's in lower but still dangerous levels, you don't even get that. It's, you don't see it. You, it just fucking kills you. It breaks you down at the fucking cellular DNA level. It unravels that shit. Cooks you like a microwave.

Yeah, exactly. Without the heat. Mm-hmm. You just, you don't know what's even fucking happening. Well, there was a dedicated fire department, essentially for Pripyat and for, you know, the Chernobyl Power Plant. This happens. They don't think the reactor's been. breach. There's a fire. The firefighters got to step in and get to work. So

firefighters are dispatched to get out there. Um, 128, the first firefighters arrive with no protective clothing or information. And I mean, they had their fire gear on and everything for fire. That's what they were told. They were there to stop a fire. They weren't there to stop a nuclear reactor leave. They were never prepared for that scenario. They were never trained for that. It's like, your job is to put out fires that may occur in the town and that may occur at the power plan, but these never going to be nuclear fires. Someone might microwave their fucking popcorn too long in the break room and start a fire that way or something.

This was never a preparation for anything even related to radiation. They were there to put out fires based upon the steam explosion. When they show up, all of a sudden they get there, they're wearing no protective clothing, and as they're walking up, there's firefighters are looking down and they're seeing these giant chunks of...

The graphite. Yeah, graphite that's still like smoldering and on fire. They got shot out of the reactor. there is no other place in the general area of vicinity or vicinity that you would find that large of a chunk of graphite except for inside of the nuclear reactor. It's not like this is just the dumping station for the extra pieces of fucking graphite. It gets to the point where,

because it's also attached to reactor three, strangely enough, the building for reactor three, it's like not showing a ton of damage, but going back to the idiocy of the construction, process on this. They actually made the roof or used for part of the construction of the

roof of reactor three, this stuff called the bitumen. That's a fucking combustible material. And now you have all of this flaming fucking material that's now resting on the roof of reactor number three threatening to catch this combustible

material on fire, which in turn if that catches and it collapses down into reactor three, it's already bad enough. Like what's going to happened at that point. So you have firefighters that are going up to the roof that are fighting fires. Being up on the roof, they're right next to the opening for this fucking reactor that is just pissing radiation anywhere and everywhere. And they were doing an interview with one of the, it was like the fire chief or one of the guys that was in charge. And he's sitting there and he's like, we're trying to put the fire out. We're up there. And one of my guys comes up and he's like, boss, I'm feeling fucking weak and shit. He's like, I can't keep my feet under me. He's like, okay, go down. He might, you know, smoke inhalation or anything like that go down to the truck two of the other guys come up and it's like we're getting ready to pass out man i don't know what we're gonna my legs will barely keep me he's like all right you guys go down and he was still trying to do it himself and he's like it got to the point where all of a sudden it hit me i had the taste of my mouth and my legs just threatened to stop working he's like and i i barely got out of there and so you have these guys not only the firefighters but kind of anybody that's responding that's moving in at this point to assess the damage

that's got no idea and because of that no type of preparation to deal with anything on the scale of what's going on. Everybody's getting this radiation poisoning and it's shocking the amount of people that are listed as died from this.

By 2.15 in the morning there was a meeting of local Soviet officials that had decided to block off Pripyet. Don't evacuate it. Don't evacuate the town that's closest that's just getting the closest. debris field of the explosion. This is where 100%

the whole thing about like the USSR state secrecy and everything comes in is instead of trying to be forthright, you know, they didn't know the degree of it, but at the same time, if there's anything going on at a nuclear power plant, probably need to maybe notify at least the surrounding area. That's something that occurred to kind of prepare them for that.

All they did is they were worried about containment, not just containment of the radiation about the damage, but containment about the information of this getting out. And so basically it was like, we're just going to lock down everything. No one's coming in, no one's going out. We're just going to try to keep this contained and keep the information from spreading

that this has occurred until we know what degree it is. It's very scary. It's very scary that they just kind of want to play it out and see how it goes. What's even more scary is it took them to 5 a.m. for them to shut down Reactor 3. Well, it takes a while, but was that when they started the shutdown? Yes.

Okay. Because they were going to do one and two later on that morning because they were trying to figure out a way not just to cut off all the power at the same time. Yeah. Oh, can you imagine how many fucking red lights that would? Yeah. Because they still haven't told Moscow. I don't know if at this point either. Well, and not to mention, we forgot to say it earlier.

So I guess two mentioned now. This power plant produced 10% of the power inside of Ukraine. Yeah. So if you shut down completely. completely. That's going to raise some alarms, and that's going to get the international community probably thinking, because what if

an embassy is being powered like that? I don't know if they had a lot of amuses in communist Russia at that point. But at the same time, it's going to provide a lot of questions. Those questions need answers, but let's get the answers after a bathroom break.

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Okay, so we come to the morning, 6.35 a.m. At that point, all the fires have been put out, except basically the biggest one. More, close to board. Yeah, they've been working their way in, controlling all the smaller ones of all the debris that's been launched out. And you basically have the fire of all,

of the materials that are flammable that are still within the reactor that got blown out, you know, they got blown around in there but are still in there on fire. You can't get in there to fight them because your skin will fucking melt off from the radiation. And so what do you do? How do we get in there to plug this hole? This, I don't even really know where to start with this plan, but by 10 a.m. on April 27th, they decide that they're going to dispatch helicopters to dump sand. boron, clay, lead, and dolomite

to try to snuff out this fire. Let's airstrike the fuck out of this reactor, right? How did they protect the pilots from all this radiation coming up? They gave them lead plates to put under their seats to try to block all of this untold... Oh, we didn't even talk about this. Push that door.

So, once this explosion happens, Datloff is up there. He's like, well, we've got to figure out how much radiation this bad boy's produced. and we need a Geiger counter. They could only find one Geiger counter there. This Geiger counter went up to 1,000... Whatever the rads or whatever the...

Micro-rads, I think is what they were called. That was what this topped out at. So they turned it on, it jumped up. It's screaming at its limit. Well, in an X-ray, I think I read was like 0.1 micro-rads. Or like one micro-rad. You can get a certain amount of them, a year as far as x-rays and still be fine.

This thing jumps all the way up to a thousand micro-rads. Like, okay, well, that's bad, but it's still only a thousand micro-rads. As things progress, they're like, well, we need to make sure that it's only a thousand. Is there another one we can get to? They go and get to another one that goes up to like 5,000 micro-rads, and they bring it in. Turn it on again. The pin jumps only up to 5,000. Like, okay, 1,000 is bad, 5,000's 5 times worse.

There's no way that it could be any worse than this. You're looking at that number and the first thing you do is you just feel your testicles and then you turn around to see if you're already fucking spout a tail. Did you see what the full exposure ended up being? Uh-uh. 8 million, or 8 million rads. So not even micro-rads. 8 million.

I'm pretty sure micro-rads now that I'm saying it doesn't sound right, but whatever the measure of radiation is. Yeah. So this is just dumping out into the atmosphere. there's no way that these helicopter pilots are safe from this little sheet of life. I'm trying to think of it in the sense of like, you know, when they do an aerodynamics test for a car and they have the smoke, and you can see it peeling, I see the radiation being the smoke and the helicopter being up right on top of it, because you have to be dead centered over the reactor if you're going to drop something straight down.

And when we say drop something, it wasn't like you would imagine like a firefighter, like whether you get the bucket, it's full of water, and then they release it and dump it. this is a guy in the back of the helicopter throwing out bags trying to aim them down into the reactor because again this is a big building that's been blown off in the reactor although very sizable again that lid being

52 meters across you're up high and you're hitting this down where it's nothing but fucking carnage below I don't even know if you can spot what you're aiming at yeah because it's the big glowing thing inside the building but beyond that you can't get close to this And the other thing too is all the radiation, it's not like it comes up and because it hits the helicopter,

it branches off like a fucking flashlight beam, and you don't see it's like a shadow. You're just surrounded by this radiation. It's permeating and flowing in every which fucking direction. You're just stewing in it. And so they're making multiple flights with these helicopters, dumping sand, boron, clay, lead, and dolomite into the burning core. Each of these things was selected for a certain,

you know a certain purpose the boron obviously to go ahead and slow down any of the existing reactions that are still going on in there sand i think to try to go ahead and snuff out the heat and any of the fires clay was meant to go ahead and try to seal it to prevent the radiation from escaping um the lead because it's they use it for what one yeah why not fucking and i don't even know what dolomite is except from that fucking movie that had eddie murphy in it on netflix it was dolomite wasn't it what edie murphy movie it was a new one one of the ones that you don't want to watch with any Murphy like a Netflix original yeah I definitely

didn't catch that no we're right rad radiation unit nice that's pretty good they said they don't even know if one of these bags that they dumped actually hit the reactor and hit its target because they were just fucking initially they had them kind of hovering over

and as soon as they found out probably from when the pilot got back and vomited it all over the ground and they're like yeah can't just hover over that they then made it to where they were just flying passes and it was just like, and drop the bag and just hoping that it fucking found its way in there. I think some of it had to because it seems like

it almost insulated this core, where they cut off some of the oxygen, but like you say, it definitely wasn't completely covered, but there was enough to where this smoldering mess starts burning down. Where, yeah, instead of the heat all escaping up,

all of a sudden, you still have all of that heat trap there, that heat is now converting all of that material, including, the fuel mixing with the concrete. It mixed into something called, was it chromium? I'm trying to remember what the term was for when the uranium, it mixes in with everything. It can mix it with the graphite, the concrete, and it basically creates lava. And the lava starts, it doesn't have anywhere to go.

It's just building up additional heat. It starts melting through the concrete. The concrete and basically turning this stuff into more chromium. So now, yeah, they've solved an issue of kind of trying to stifle the radiation that's coming up. That's kind of the thing that's been, that's the hair on fire. That's what they've had to taken care of first. They can take a breath now. And they're basically like, okay, now that we've got this contained, what are our concerns now?

Because we're not out of the fucking woods. Yeah. So April 27th, 2 p.m., 36 hours after the explosion, officials finally notify 115,000 people in preparation. And then in these surrounding villages, which blows me away that there's just these villages out there that are living in this blast radius and zone. They didn't take into account those small villages. There's no way. Fuck no. Well, here's the thing, too.

So, again, the town of Chernobyl is about nine miles south of the power plant. Pripyat being two miles right there. So you've already evacuated Pripyat, 50,000 people. Chernobyl, which is population, I think they said 12,000. this thing is only 10 miles also from the border with Belarus. That's not good. Not good for the Belarusian people. If you're fucking evacuating the people that are nine miles away

at a Chernobyl in the surrounding areas, are you telling the people, because they are part of the Soviet Union. Are you telling the people in Belarus that there's fucking radiation and they need to fucking run from it? Then you've got to block the people go into any other sort of media to get that information out too if you tell them what's going on. So, in order to get a, orderly evacuation of Pripyat.

They actually hadn't told Russian officials back in Moscow yet, or Moscow yet. How about the radiation? Yeah. Hey, yeah, of course. There was a bit of an explosion. There was a fire because they're going to know what emergency services were used. At the same time, only certain people are probably privy to the amount of radiation. They're like, it's totally undercut.

It's fine. We had an issue. It's all taken care of. Hey, how are you? Well, and Moscow's response is, well, if it's not that bad, why do we need to evacuate them? No, denied. Permission denied. And they're like, it's a little worse than we let on.

They're like, how much worse? And so they kind of let him in on it and they know. Enough to evacuate 115,000 people. That bad. So in order to evacuate 115,000 people in orderly fashion, they go ahead and they tell them that there is a small problem at the plant and they are three days that they're going to be removed from prepiote and these surrounding villages in Chernobyl. leave your stuff.

Take a change of underpants, maybe a couple additional sweaters, but you guys will be back in three days. And this is, I think, where maybe I kind of came to the realization that I might not be the best person because when I heard that they left all their pets behind,

I just immediately was so, so sad because it's just pets. Like, when we get into what has happened to the children, that actually, I think, affected me less than thinking about all the animals that were just left behind for no reason. But they get these guys out. The total evacuation takes like six hours or some shit like that.

They had over a thousand buses. Just so fast. And how do you not, how does nobody, this is the Cold War, you're just spying on any fucking other. They said that was one of the biggest, like, failures of the CIA. It was a huge embarrassment that when it eventually did come out. Because again, Russia has not mentioned peep to anyone outside. of the Soviet Union at this point.

This thing is still on the fucking hush-hush. And they wouldn't have. They wouldn't have. There is an incident coming to April 28th, so we're about two days into this. The Swedish air monitors trace a large amount of radio. Well, let me go back.

There are some employees that are heading into work at a Swedish nuclear power plant, and they have to go through radiation detectors and everything. They're safe there. Yeah. They got fucking protocols. Well, safe to a certain point because the first guy that ends up showing up, he, like, lives at the power plant.

He goes in for breakfast as he walks through the monitor. The monitor goes off. He's like, what the shit? I haven't even been in the control room yet. There's no way I've been exposed to any sort of radiation. That must be off. I'm just going to go eat my breakfast. We'll see what happens.

Well, all of a sudden, it keeps ping with some other people. And they're like, oh, my God, we've got a fucking leak. They go over, they look over their entire plane. they're like, okay, it's not us. Go ahead and contact all the other Swedish plants, all the ones around us. Let's find out if anyone else has got an issue. Report comes back.

No one else has an issue. So one of the guys, I think he was also like a meteorologist as well. He's like, I'm going to go track the weather patterns. If we're detecting this in the atmosphere and everything, we can probably find out where it's coming from. Traces the weather patterns back and is like, this is coming from the fucking Soviet Union. So did the officials go ahead and,

is it the international atomic agency that ends up calling because the Swedes report it to them and then they step in? I think the Swedes called them. We're just calling Russian. They're like, yeah, hello. Anything wrong with any of your nuclear stuff down there? What do you mean?

Nuclear. What do you mean? But yeah, this wouldn't have been found out. I mean, eventually it would because this is a shit ton of radiation. But this lets you know how much has already been released within these two days. 750 miles?

I think so. 750 miles is where this radiation is detected in enough of an amount that they're able to track it back. Well, the other reason that this was a bad look for the USSR was because once that radiation detector inside the Swedish power plant went off, the initial guy goes and grabs one of the dudes in line shoes that just set it off, and he takes it into his laboratory. and as he's seeing this radiation matter on the shoes, he realizes that the matter on the shoes isn't coming from the same fuel that they use. It's coming from the cruder, more basic shit

that they're using in the USSR. Like imagine that. You can't see it. You've just been walking around all morning and this particulate and this radiation has been on the ground to where you're stepping in it and it's going on your shoes. I just, it absolutely blows me away.

they call Belarus. I wonder if Russia was like, hey, that's not us. I think the wind's blowing from China on the other side. They probably have some nuclear stuff going on over there.

Like, what's the excuse? Yeah, like metal. Yeah, everyone has been tasting metal on our side too. That's really weird.

There's no, like, there's no comeback to that when they're like, well, the wind blew from your direction and that's where it's coming from. What do you?

There's no response. It's got to be you. But they, Gorbachev at this point, doesn't say anything. They're just like, yeah, it was a small accident.

we'll go ahead and take care of it. We get all the way to May 4th when they decide, hey, this elephant's foot of, what were you saying it was? Cadmium or? Yeah, chromium or something like that. It starts with a C, but it's the mixture of, and it's not just the mixture of the chromium. So the elephant's foot that you're talking about, that big blob mass thing that generates just a shit ton of radiation. It's So, you know, when you superheat sand, you get glass.

So the combination of all this shit that they drop on, the boron, the, you know, dolomite, the clay, the sand, all of that, it eventually because of the heat crystallizes. Think of it the elephant's foot as, and it doesn't look like a crystal, it's just this weird lump-looking thing. But you basically are taking all this radioactive shit surrounding it and then crystallizing around the outside, almost preserving it as this fucking radio. radioactive rock that's just generating all this shit from inside it. And it's still burning down. And below the surface is the massive water, not like water deposit. Yeah, so it was essentially the cooling tanks. It's because they had to have them so close to the reactor to be able to pump that water in there.

No, it was to the groundwater. They were worried about it hitting. Well, the one thing, okay, so it was two things. So it was the China Syndrome. And what China Syndrome is is the... There's an explanation for why it's called China Syndrome. Yeah, it's, it makes sense. It's kind of a...

It's not slang, but it's just kind of a weird, common term for what this is. This isn't a conservative talking about COVID. No. This is... No, you can relate to so many things. Basically, the thought was, is in the event of a nuclear meltdown, the materials could get so hot that potentially, they could melt through everything all the way down through the Earth's core, come out the other side,

and it would be like, you know, when you say you're going to dig a hole to China, that's what it would be. It was called China Syndrome. It was the thought process that that could work its way through the entire planet Earth, pop out on the other side, and then you have a nuclear disaster on the other side. I'm pretty sure that Russia isn't on the other side of China. No, but I think that that was. Yeah, exactly. the best example that I can think of for China syndrome is there's this little meme cartoon and it's Obi-1 and Darth Vader getting ready to square off in the Death Star and right before they do

Obi-1 Canobi just takes his lightsaber and turns it upside down and drops it and it burns through the floor and keeps burning down and then just walks away and Darth Vader looks down he's like oh shit oh shit oh shit and it just finally gets its way to the core and explodes So that's kind of what it's what it is in essence. What's in between the core of the earth in the surface? All of the groundwater sits down below. So they had concerns that it would also, because of all of it being insanely re-autoactive, that it would reach its way eventually in and poison and pollute the aquifers in the groundwater. More immediate is below the reactor, they had, and this was for an immediate, like, nuclear fallout type thing is there were water tanks under there that were used for the coolant for the water for

the reactors. Now, all of this stuff is still insanely hot. If anything, you've made it worse because now you're trapping all the heat and all the reactions that are still occurring with this material are confined in just heating themselves up in perpetuity. If that type of heat were to hit those tanks, then being deeper below the reactor, creating another steam, explosion because of the amount of water that is also in those tanks and the amount of the material, it's going to erupt outward. They thought it could be, the explosion could be 10 times more than I think the second larger explosion that it occurred. But that wasn't the danger. The danger was with that explosion.

It would be launching particulates and radiation 10 times, either further, higher into the atmosphere. As far as the range goes, the prediction. were if this would have occurred, it could have potentially rendered a good portion half or more of Europe uninhabitable due to the amount of radiation that would have landed everywhere. That's pretty bad. It's a pretty fucking bad. Pretty bad deal. So in order to prevent this from happening, and again, we're still just days into this thing. They send three on May 6th.

They send three plant mechanical engineers. guys name are it was Olesi Oleski Annenko Valeri Bespalov and Boris Barnov

they volunteer to go under the reactor into essentially like the catacombs or the hallways and drain the water out of these tanks just completely saturated

in radiation they give them like scuba fucking wet suits they give them like I think you know oxygen masks and everything and then of course Geiger counters so they can hear how much fucking radiation is around them all times but they said once they got in there because it was just going crazy they one of the guys just turned it off he's like I know what's happening here

none of us expect to get out alive they called them the suicide squad basically they were also told this is never a good thing when the people that are asking you to do something tell you this if anything happens to you we'll make sure to take care of your family yeah your families will be taken care of Well, these guys end up finding this release, draining the water out of this, potentially saving how many lives, countless lives, and end up making it back out. Now, kind of going back early in our story, the guys that went into the reactor and then came back being dead within a week, you'd think, well, these guys made the fucking sacrifice. They're obviously not going to make it throughout this story. These motherfuckers, the fucking, the Chernobyl 3, end up living.

like full, complete lives. They're honored as like heroes of Ukraine after all this thing kind of gets said and done and it slows down. But these guys end up living. Like I think two of them are still alive today, right? Yeah, what I'm died in like 2004. Yeah.

And he had worked in the nuclear sector after this had happened as like a consultant. So these guys still, the Russian narrative is that they all three died. That was like the hero's death when in truth, all three of them actually lived. So that's just the propaganda or be like, these guys sacrificed to make

sure that nobody else died. Not only that, but they also then started having the concerns like we're talking about the groundwater. If this thing seeps in the aquifers, they brought in coal miners and dug a fucking tunnel under the reactor and dug a huge pit

under the reactor and lined it with concrete so it couldn't seep into the groundwater or at least delayed it. They had to dig it by hand. Because machines wouldn't work with all the radioactivity in the air. I'm trying to, like, you are digging a tunnel literally underneath active, spewing radiation. The liquid hot shit could fall like, and you're just underground digging a fucking hole and then just trying to pump concrete into it.

Like, it's fucking terrifying to think about having to do that job. Yeah, I mean, just the thought of having to go under. ground and do all that, but at the same time, if you don't get another concrete foundation underneath that reactor and it does get that groundwater, everybody's poisoned. Everybody dies. Once you poison that groundwater, there's nothing else. How far does that river reach? Yeah. And how much does it branch off? What's the aquifer feeding that's underneath there? I mean, they're doing anything and everything, you know, liquid nitrogen underneath the dead reactor to try to cool it. I don't know how they're getting these hoses or how they're positioning

this shit in here. Also, at this point, they're trying to establish this exclusion zone. They've done the evacuation. They're trying to determine what they need to do and what the fallout is in the surrounding area. That's everything from trying to soil samples, finding out if they need to turn over the soil,

which then you're just mixing a radiated soil in with the new shit. Yeah, that part didn't make any sense to me. You're just trying to bury the radiation is what you're basically doing. The fucking animals, all the animals that were left. not just the pets and everything, but you also have a huge agricultural sector within this area and within this exclusion zone

and can't really do anything with radiated animals, can you? Well, you can. You can shoot them. How many animals did they end up killing? I don't remember the exact amount. There's thousands, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a whole hell of a lot. And they have something called, well, it was called the Red Forest.

and once that radiation leaked out and got to this forest, it turned all the green leaves to like a brownish red color. I saw that they said initially when it happened, it was almost a blood red. And then if you look at pictures of it now, it looks like almost like, yeah, like a burnt orange or like kind of a brownish. It looks dead, but it still actively grows, doesn't it? Yeah, it came back.

They had to slash and burn that. All of the villages that were affected, they just went ahead and burnt to the ground. Just this group of hundreds of thousands of ones, workers and we'll get to kind of the number of the people that took care of everything. But they're just cleaning up this exclusion zone. And the reason why I was talking earlier about why the population of Preciat doesn't matter after 1986 is because it never ever gets inhabited again.

Most of these areas can't be inhabited again, but somehow, we'll talk about it later, it still happens. But this foundation of concrete that was poured underneath, begin something called the sarcophagus. And the sarcophagus was going to be just this massive concrete structure that was going to enclose this nuclear fallout and stop this radiation from happening. We're going to cap it. Yeah.

We're going to build a concrete cap. And then we're just going to set it on top there. And then bingo bingo bingo bongo, Bob's your uncle, radiation contained, we're all good. And we're going to do a compliment sandwich here. They finished this shit in 1986. So this, or in November of 1986. So this happens May 9th, 1986. By November, this sarcophagus is

completely done and enclosed. That's a pretty amazing feat. It is. And I mean, it stemmed a good chunk of the radiation, but again, something done this quick. It's being done not haphazardly, but it's being done as an immediate fix. So Band-Aid for as long as you can keep the Band-Aid on. Band-Aid didn't last too long because the middle of the complement sandwich is the fact that it started showing cracks within months after it was built.

They had the same company that initially built the fucking power plant. They're like, oh, yeah, we've worked out there before. Oh, you need us to build over one of the things that we built. All right, all right, we can do that. Positive side on the other part. In 2016, they had rebuilt the structure around it to completely enclose it again. Yeah, I think the way they built it is it was... Ukraine built it this time.

Yeah, exactly. And it was steel. It's supposed to last for the... the next hundred years. Not really sure what the future plans are. After that hundred years, what they're going to do with it. But this was basically, it looks like, it was like a, not a, it's not a half dome. It would basically be like, God, I hate the fact that I want to say the term Quartet

Hutt, because that's the term that I know for that shape. But basically a circular hanger type shape that would then basically push over the top of this and then they would seal it in. So they're just pushing this thing into place. And, yeah, that's, that's the work. sits right now as far as kind of as far as containment goes. They determined that the exclusion zone, at first I think they said it was going to be like nine kilometers and then they extended it to like 15 kilometers and then finally they're like

it's going to be 30 kilometers. So there still is currently a 30 kilometer exclusion zone around all of Chernobyl. We get to May 14th finally. This is the first time, April 26th. Oh, wait, wait, wait, before we get to May, May 14th. I want to talk about May 1st. So May 1st is May Day. And in the Soviet Union, it was International Workers Day.

So it was celebrated as a national holidays and part of the Soviet Union, you know, Ukraine and everything. Huge parades is a huge celebration. So we're talking five days after this happens is basically one of the biggest holidays in the Soviet Union. Radiation is, has been leaking out like crazy. It's been working its way all over the area. Um, what do you do to try to stop that from getting to the larger cities? You do a little thing called cloud seating. I wonder when cloud seeding became a thing.

It had to have been sometime around world. They had to have figured something out around World War II about it because I remember... Do you think it's that old? Well, I remember seeing some footage in World War II during like some naval battles. They would do this within like the English Channel and like in the Battle of the Atlantic. They would have planes that could fly over and they would drop a chemical that would create almost a sheet of clouds. And then it would be used for like that Navy to get away. Like use it as a screen.

I think they probably took that and kind of used it and figured out what they could do meteorologically as far as like rain and what they, because it was just dry ice. So basically what cloud seeding does. Is that all cloud seeding is dry ice? Back then it was. Okay. I think they use a chemical now. Because they still do it, trying to do it like during the Olympics and shit like that, try to cut down on the smog, try to clean up the area.

So cloud seeding would have these giant Russian converted bombers fly over these rural farmlands between the major cities like Moscow and, you know, Chernobyl. And basically pump a bunch of like dry ice vapor and everything into these areas, which would then congregate, moisture would form, and it would basically force rain. all that rain that's coming down would then push the radiation and absorb the radiation have it essentially knock it down

before it got to Moscow well it would knock it down in the form of fucking black rain and so you have this huge area that is I think it's kind of north it'd be like northeast of Chernobyl kind of heading up toward Moscow that this area was just decimated

by this fucking radioactive rain and this was to protect all of the fucking celebrations and shit in Moscow because everyone didn't know what the fuck was going on. Well, Kiev that you have that is 60 miles fucking south of where all this shit is going on, they were like, hey, do you think we should maybe just here in this area, kind of dial back on the old May Day celebration? Because, you know, the fucking heinous amounts of radiation that could possibly be in the end,

and they're like, nah, go ahead and do business as usual. So they had fucking everyone out. Think of it as a giant citywide celebration. Kids, families, everyone just out in the fucking streets, just swimming in all this. this shit. Yeah, that's a can't be a great

parade. You know, so you sacrifice the fucking rural farmlands with acid fucking rain, and then in the area

that is probably most in danger, one of the areas highest population that's most in danger like, nah, just let him go

about the business. That's a move. It's a choice. It also comes into play with what's going to happen to what this is going to lead to

choices like that. Yeah. 1946. You're pretty much right on was when cloud seeding was invented. Nice. Yeah.

So we get up to May 14th, the first time that Gorbs, Mikhail Gorbachev, speaks publicly about the incident. And as he does it, he promises something that he, I'm very excited

to do the Gorbachev episode because I feel like he's a very interesting figure. He promised something called Glasnost. And Glasnost was basically, like openness. Yeah, is that what it means? A policy of openness. He wants all government institutions to be more transparent about what's going on, about what

they're doing. He promises transparency for Chernobyl. Now, this is where I'm a little confused by this because he wants to do this. And I think that this was maybe from what I had heard, like his actual intention of doing it. But the higher ups that were still below Gorbachev just didn't. tell him about how bad Chernobyl was and he wasn't going to go down there obviously to like survey the damage himself. So I think he probably was trying to be transparent about what was going on but maybe he wasn't being told the whole story himself. It's not to say that Gorbachev was a good man I'm

sure and so if we hedge both bets going into the Gorbachev episode eventually I feel like we're in okay shape. But immediately they downplay everything. Glass Knoff becomes no more. and it affects the USSR in a way to where trust it becomes just an all-time low in this communist country. August 25th, a little fast forward, the International Atomic Energy Conference blames the accident on human error subpar culture of safety and Soviet reactor design flaws.

That, to me, all seems to be like, yeah, I would probably rank those in a different order. I would probably say reactor design, flaws one, safety two, and then human error three. Does that seem like what would have gone wrong? What was your order again? Instead of human error, subparse culture of safety and then Soviet reactor design flaws, I would probably go reactor design flaws, safety, and then human error.

I think you could interchange the last two, but I think here's the thing about the reactors is these reactors, they did have safety protocols in which these things would essentially shut them down and try to correct themselves, but they were all switched off. For some reason. There was approval given by, I think, like, the chief engineer or something, to be able to switch those off. I don't know if he didn't like the sound of the fucking alarms going off,

and he was just like, can someone just turn that shit off and turn up all the blinking lights? But these things were designed in a way to where you could do that. Now, that should be a fucking no-no because in what situation do you need to override the safety procedures. So definitely design of that,

not just the design and how it function, but also the way that it was built itself and the construction of where was actually housed. All of it was just a fucking recipe for disaster. Yeah, it does seem odd that they would know exactly how to subvert the emergency shutdown, right? That shouldn't be something that you're teaching people how to do to turn off the emergency shutdown.

Not only that, are the guys that are actually performing this, you have a guy that's telling them to do this, but the guys, do they even know any better to know that? Like, they're looking at this guy, and they're like, well, this guy's my boss. He's obviously got to know more about fucking nuclear reactors than I do. So I guess I just have to do what he says. Yeah. And obviously there's some, somebody's got to be blamed in this situation.

The full USSR report was, it was human error. And you've got to have some heads on spikes to just fast forward a little bit in 1987. Six former officials and technicians at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were convicted of causing the 1986 disaster. They were sentenced up to 10 years in labor camps. You have the plant director, Victor Barunkov, was sentenced to 10 years, hard labor camp. So you're going to the gulag, bitch. You're headed all the way up there. He also got five years concurrently for his abuse of power over this power station.

I don't know what his abuse of power was because they, I guess he told them not to run the safety test for three years. Here's the thing, too, is when it came out, like you were talking about this, International Atomic Energy Conference and blaming the incident on human error first where's all the information coming from? It's coming from within the fucking Soviet Union. That's the only people that are keeping records there

so they're able to spin it however they want. Of course they're going to go ahead and put the fact that the reactors are the least likely thing that caused it. It was definitely these guys that just did everything possible to make sure this thing melted down. They're able to prove that. At the same time, they're

also able to hide all of the other incidents in which this same type of reactor had any fucking issues. Well, the first guy that you're going to sentence is the designer of the reactor, right? Oh, he was just the plant director. Okay. And he wasn't even there when it happened. But how does he get an abuse of power in this whole thing? He was let know after that.

I forgot the best part about this trial that happened is just like here, they believe that you should be tried where you committed the crime. they brought them back to... Chernobyl, right? Yeah. For, excuse me, for the trials. And there was actually a Geiger counter in the courtroom to make sure that they were allowable levels for the court or for the trial to take place.

Or how much time they could spend doing that? Didn't one of the guys walk in? He's like, should we be doing this here? Why are we doing this here? It happened here. This is tradition. This is what we do. We're going to put so many more people at risk of radiation poisoning

just so we can prove a point. At the same time, that's kind of a boss move, because it's like, no, this is the fucking scene of the crime. Yeah. We're returning to try you at the scene of the crime. Nikolai Fulman was a chief engineer. He got sentenced to 10 years. Anatoly de Atlawf, the guy that was making the decisions

that was telling everybody, the Corps was still intact. He gets 10 years. Alexander Kovolenko, chief reactor of number four, or chief of reactor of number four, pled not guilty. He got off. Uri Lashkin, the senior engineer, pled not guilty, he got let off. Dyatlov served like between three and five years, I believe, of that 10-year sentence. So maybe that tells you that they just needed somebody's head on a pike before he got off on good behavior.

They had to have a face of how the face couldn't be the reactor. Well, in 10 years seems like a really long sentence for something like that. But at the same time, if you let him out in three, it doesn't look as. No, it didn't notice that. Yeah, exactly. That's not going to be front-page shit. He's just going to disappear

or go off somewhere and live the rest of his days. Yeah. So we had cleanup efforts that lasted seven months. This blows my mind. Within 15 months, 75% of the land

in the contaminated zone was under cultivation. So they were trying to grow vegetables inside the contaminated zone. How, why? You can't do anything with that.

A third of the evacuated villagers were actually resettled within the containment zone. And they said that part of the reason these people wanted to go back was because in all of the places that they were evacuated to, there was this stigma about them that they were exposed to this radiation. So they were always, like, dirty. So people wouldn't give them a place to live.

People wouldn't give them jobs. It was like they had the mark of the beast on them. Scarlet fucking letters. Yeah. So why not go back to a potentially dangerous situation, but rebuild your village? continue on the way you were like try to live a life inside a containment zone so during you know all of this stuff is you know the russians are speaking to the international atomic energy conference

Gorbachev comes out and speaks publicly about the incident but they're not really addressing this stuff in the matter of like not a trial but almost like a hearing you or anything like that um there's a guy from a soviet union who was one of their top nuclear scientists his name was valeri Legasov. Yeah, this is the guy that I think so. Maybe. Yeah, so this guy was like a fucking prodigy. He was the cream of the crop, one of the top ten scientists

in the world. And he basically was brought in to be like, kind of like walk us through how this happened and whose fault it was and everything. And they're doing this kind of in-house. This isn't like an international type thing. He basically comes to the conclusion that this is

the fault of the fucking reactor at the same time the fault of inadequately trained people to handle the reactor, having it be unable to, once the reactor reaches a certain point, not able to bring it back. And there was the Soviet Union Party line that any time they were to speak in any international conferences or anything like that, it was going to be the same story. It was human error. That's what happened. The reactors are sound. Blah, blah, blah.

This guy knew better. and during a conference, I believe it was, like the United Nations, it was an international atomic energy conference in Vienna. He actually broke down all of the circumstances that led to the Chernobyl disaster, not pulling any punches from the Soviet Union or anything like that. It basically spilled it out that it was fucking rush construction, faulty equipment, all of this stuff. and at this point

the international community after hearing this this guy is ostracized is a fucking pariah in Russia going forward for the rest of his life his career is ruined all that stuff followed monitored by the KGB but to the international community

he's finally come out and provided answers to what happens well this also kind of starts a snowball effect of showing this glass nose thing that Gorbachev was speaking of his horse shit because they haven't been transparent about any of it and the rumblings around the Soviet Union start to gain traction as you get these anti-nuclear activists and groups that are demanding the closure of these nuclear power plants

take them out of our countries because now they know for sure you know this type of nuclear reactor was pretty widespread it was in use all over the Soviet Union they had like two different kinds the Soviet Union had them but beyond the Soviet Union borders everybody had something different correct so all of these countries that are within the Soviet Union that were their own countries before but absorbed after World War II, there's a lot of these anti-nuclear activist groups, sentiments that are, you know, building up, and they start to build up almost into rival political parties that are, that are lashing out against the Soviet Union that basically you guys put fucking bombs in our countries,

you're not taking care of us, you're not even able to take care of your guys' selves, you're not transparent, you're lying to us, and in March 11th, on March 11th in 1990, Lithuania is actually the first ones, and they're the first state to leave the Soviet Union basically due to trust issues over Chernobyl. And so much of that after Chernobyl was like this waterfall of the oil market going to shit and a lot of these international markets that these guys were heavily invested in just went belly up.

So there's a tremendous shortage of money. you have a ton of these different products that you're producing to support these countries aren't being sold. You don't have money to support those countries. And so Lithuania is like, well, you lied to us about Chernobyl. Now you're not being able to take care of us financially like you said that you would. You're not an overseer anymore. We don't need to deal with you anymore because you can't tell us the truth about anything. If you're lying about what happened at Chernobyl, what makes me think that you're not lying about the money that you're trying to give my country to support me?

You also have this tremendous international pressure now on Russia specifically because they're the ones that are building these reactors of being like, these obviously aren't safe. This is not just an issue that stays contained within Russia when it goes fucking bad. Yeah. I.e. fucking Chernobyl of it spreading all over Europe. So there's also this intense pressure of like, you probably need to start shutting down these reactors. And then you have all these countries being like, so now you can't provide a safe power either. Like, what do we even hear for? And in August 20, or what do I say?

In August on the 24th in 1991, Ukraine, which is the second largest, or was the second largest state within the Soviet Union, declares independence and leaves the Soviet Union, which is basically the catalyst of the dissolving of the entire Soviet Union as a whole. What do you do at that point? You just lost your second biggest landmass, and it was the second country that's left you. Like, you can't keep it all together without the resources of Ukraine because you were playing this three-card Monty with everybody's shit trying to keep everybody happy. You can't take care of us. You can't even take care of yourself.

Yeah, I had zero clue that Chernobyl led to the... The collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeah. It's fucking crazy. Well, I wish that I could say that that's the craziest thing that came out of the story. But it's definitely not. now that the Ukraine is on their own and now that they need to support themselves,

they need nuclear power. It's, oh my God, yeah, it's a fucking vicious cycle. Like, we're independent, but now we need to support our independent power needs. There's this power plan in Chernobyl that still has three operational reactors. Yeah, sure, I mean, the entire area is basically a death zone. But you know what?

Fuck it. reopen reactor number you know let's go ahead and reopen the power plant um one and two three all three are still running progressively over time through deals and pressure from other countries they slowly shut them down

through it was agreements in which the western powers would start to supplement like their energy needs right or help them to go ahead and create other sources of energy to make it to where they could go without the nuclear power yeah it's just uh you have to do something and on an international stage, now that Ukraine is by themselves

and Russia is not watching over them, if they show any bit of weakness and Russia tries to take Ukraine again under force this time, kind of like a scorn lover, that's not going to be good, but also if they need help, now you as the Western powers

that supported them leaving the USSR are now kind of beholden to them to make sure that you can clean it up next time. Yeah. So progressively, I mean, I don't know really The date blows me away Because I was so old at this point in time

And had no idea that Chernobyl was still running Yeah Of course you didn't Like why That can't be like They're like that place I thought that place was fucking blown up Uh huh

No no no it's just a small section of it Was actually blown up And don't worry about the radiation Because we're working our guys in shifts We know exactly how much radiation These guys can take to live full long healthy lives. And here's the actuality of it. The money was so fucking good that they were paying these people to go back in there to run this power plant that they couldn't, the risk, they're like,

well, it's 10 years off my life, but it is an extra $10,000 or rubles or whatever the fuck they used a year. Which one do I pick? Yeah, do I pick stability now and death sooner, or do I live? Gotta eat now. Live below my name. Even if it's going to be two-headed fish that were catching out of these fucking pawns. So when was reactor number three, the closest one, to reactor number four. Where was it shut down? That one didn't get shut down. Was that the longest standing one?

Yeah. So the reactor that was the closest to being damaged, December 15th of 2000. I would have figured it would have been like a millennium, like let's shut it down in January. They got a whole other year into the new millennium. I would have figured it would have been shut down in 1990. Yep.

Yeah, something very, very quickly. It just, I don't understand. how Chernobyl made it into the new movie. Well, and it kind of becomes laughable at this point, because now we get to the disclosure of information about like the deaths and the impact and everything like that. So the reports out of Moscow reported 45 deaths associated with Chernobyl. Now, it doesn't seem like a very high number, and it definitely is just skewed to all fuck. We get two, the died of falling debris, 20 the diet of very high. radiation sickness and 15 terminal thyroid cancer cases.

That's all that they are linking back to Chernobyl. Well, the numbers get so confused at this point because it's so tough to tell like kind of some of the cancer rates and the long-term effects of radiation and just to try to figure it out like say you live through it, you're fine, you live a long healthy life. But your wife miscarries 15 times because your seed has been radioactively altered. But we can't track that definitively back to Chernobyl. Sure, you were there and you were dose with a lethal amount of radiation or near lethal. But, you know, we really can't say for certain that you develop this.

I mean, you could have got this cancer even without Chernobyl. Yeah. Yeah, two from falling debris, which I guess that kind of makes sense. That was the easy way out. Yeah. one of the guys I think he was down in like the boiler room or something like that when the explosion happened he ended up being rescued and saved in his buddy that came down and picked him up to take him to safety put him in like a fireman's carry this guy was exposed to so much radiation that as the man was carrying him out and dropped him off

he had thermal and radiation burns on his shoulders and he actually had a handprint burned into his back from where the guy he was carrying out had his hand on his back. That's how radioactive a person was. It like melted it into his skin. Yeah. 28 from radiation sickness, a lot of those were the firefighters that were told everything's okay. This is just an explosion that's non-nuclear. 15 terminal cases of thyroid cancer, which I guess maybe they had developed it fast enough.

to where they could kind of track it to it. Then this is where the skewed numbers come in. In 2006, the UN reported there were 4,000 deaths attributed to it. You can look a lot deeper. You can try to point some more fingers at Russia. I certainly believe there had to have been more than 4,000 deaths, but I don't know where they come up to that number. There have been different organizations that have been different studies on it

that say the numbers are like in the hundreds of thousands, but at the same time, I don't know where you get that data from because Russia's not releasing the cutoff point. Yeah, and where's the cutoff point? I think I heard to this day in Russia when you go into a hospital, there's an actual express line that you can go into if you have proof that you were within the Chernobyl blast radius. I believe there were 800,000,

it was either 600 or 800,000 volunteers that went in to do cleanup in the contaminated zone. Oh, yeah, they were mobilizing volunteers. military, pretty much anyone and everyone they could get a hand on. Which totally tracks with what Russia does, because in every war that Russia's fought, their greatest power was how many people they could throw in the problem. Was being able to muster their resources? Yep. So, I mean, there's no way it was only 45 deaths.

I don't think 4,000 deaths even comes close to it. Some kind of the debated facts, but kind of the most believe things, cancer rates are three times higher in Eastern Europe than they were pre-disaster. and mostly it's thyroid cancer, and thyroid cancer doesn't do well. It absorbs a lot of radiation. I mean, that's, that to me seems like that's some sort of an effect.

I don't know. I figured the effect would be worse, I think. Yeah. Infant mortality rate within the 150 kilometer contaminated zone, which also goes into Belarus and another country that I'm blanking on. But they, found that the infant mortality rate jumped from 20

to 30%. I mean that's 20%'s already extremely high, I think. I'm not sure what mortality rates are now. Yeah, to raise that much just kind of seems insane to me. On a positive note, I guess if we're going to try to end this on a positive note, the area that's in the containment zone

and around Chernobyl, basically nature has taken that thing back. looking at you know images of Pripyat and everything it basically just looks like a city that's being it looks basically like an apocalypse movie the city's just being reclaimed there's trees growing out of fucking like third floor windows in this place and you have all of these species of animals that had not been seen in this area coming in essentially kind of thriving in this you have like war hogs deer moose you have these wolves that are in there and basically these animals because there's not any type of like human interference or anything like that have adapted you don't you know you're not

getting gigantic fucking animals or shit like that or mutated things but you know these animals essentially living this area have adapted to the radiation or perhaps have shorter lifespans yeah but essentially the the area is really bouncing back um birds not really getting you know spend a lot of time in the air where the radiation hangs out yeah so you know the fertility rates in in the avian populations has declined in a major way, but they're basically just swimming through an ocean of radiation. Yeah, and I mean, to me, that makes total sense because they spend the most time in the radiation. They might be more susceptible. Their biological makeup could be more susceptible. Yeah, if a bird has eight eggs and only two of them hatch correctly, you know, it's a major decline,

but also at the same time, all of the other elements that the humans bring in aren't there to affect the birds. Yeah. So there's still a decent population of them. In 2011, there was a statement by Chernobyl's former power plant director. He must have replaced the dude that got pinched. Ihor, Gromotkin, I don't know, yeah, close enough. He said the Chernobyl reactor site will not be habitable for humans for at least 20,000 years and the 100 kilometer zone around the plant. It was likely contaminated with something called plutonium 239,

which I believe is what they were using. The half-life of plutonium 239 is 24,000 years. So we just blanked that area of the planet out for that many years. But at the same time, there were guys that were still working inside the plant until 2000. Yeah. Like everything here is saying like not habitable for humans, unless it's during your shift. Yeah. Then it's habitable for you.

It's crazy to think, too, had, you know, know that that water not been emptied out of that reactor and it would have reacted like that and if it could have you know had that additional explosion covering Europe the same way just think of extrapolating the Chernobyl zone and just drawing a larger and much larger much larger circle around that can you imagine if like if this was something to where this encompassed a fifth of Europe and there was just this giant circle in the middle of Europe where no one could fucking live you'd be studying this in high school for days. Yeah.

This would be something, I don't know if there would be another nuclear power plant still on the planet. The fact that, you know, as bad as this is being the worst nuclear disaster, the second being Fukushima in Japan, which will, you know, definitely cover. And then through Mile Island? I think then maybe through Mile Island. But you can definitely see that there was a movement away from it. But has there been kind of a renaissance of nuclear energy?

I think there has been. I think it's growing because the population's growing because we need to figure something else out. We know that fossil fuels are going to run out eventually. Nuclear power will run out eventually. It's going to happen, but if you can kind of spread it around on a bunch of different credit cards, then you might be okay. That's true. And I still think there's a lot of pushback in the United States. It's kind of like when I started saying that I think like 95% of nuclear power, 98% of nuclear power is great.

Yeah. It's still, I think, that 2% that has people hung up, and I can't really say that I blame them, because it is kind of a scary thing to know that there is a chance. I mean, it's happened in places where there have been leaks. It's built by people. It's run by people. There's a human element to it. Any time there's a human element to it, there's the risk of something going wrong. But when the stakes are so high, that's what makes it so concerning. Did you hear, I think, it was like having Nixon and control the nuclear football. That was a fucking, yeah. It's a tough choice. Was it called like the demon reactor in Los Alamos? Did you hear anything about that? They kept having so many problems with it that they just decided that they had to get rid of it.

So they took it out to the ocean and took it to the ocean floor and just exploded it. No, I'd never heard about that. Yeah, I should have done more research. I'm sure it'll come up in a different episode. But they had so many issues with it that they knew they couldn't keep it around. So they took it to the ocean. They sunk it and then they blew it up. I mean, what else do you do?

Probably not the best thing to do, but I mean, an original idea. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, if the theory that water is good for that situation, maybe that was the idea. A lot of salt water and a ton of salt water should be even better. I think the biggest takeaway that I have from this beyond just learning everything else that we have, and how fascinating it was, was Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion. Yeah.

It was a nuclear power plant, but it was just steam explosions that happened. And to think the magnitude of what a nuclear explosion would have done is so much larger than what happened in trouble. They were so lucky. Uh-huh. If a few things break different, it just becomes a nuclear explosion. If it hits those water tanks like you were talking about and blows everything up and there's just that much radiation, we're talking about something completely different. Because what, Hiroshima was like 75,000 people that it killed. Yeah.

Somewhere around that. And this thing was that much bigger than Hiroshima. We're talking about half of Europe being uninhabitable. What does that fucking do to the current world? Yeah, so I thought that this was the worst thing that could have happened. But there was a much worse option. Yeah. And the fact that this directly led to the fall of the Soviet Union,

I've always had questions about that, about how it went down and just a colossal fuck up. A self-inflicted wound is what led to its downfall is kind of cool. All right, you got anything else, man? No, no, this was a lot of fun. Very informative. Hell yeah. All right, guys, thanks for joining us another week.

We'll catch on the next one. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway, because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like. Please follow us on our social media.

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