RedHanded - Episode 353 - Chernobyl: The Power Station That Ended a Nation

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

The world’s most infamous nuclear disaster officially killed just thirty-one people, but in reality it’s death toll is incalculable. Raining radioactive debris over a city, and melting the skin off the on-site workers, the explosion and subsequent meltdown at Chernobyl reactor 4 is one of the most devastating man-made accidents in history. This is the story of how fear, bureaucracy, and lies first brought down a nuclear power station, which then brought down a nation.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And welcome, comrade. To Red Handed Soviet Edition. Uh-oh. I'm scared. Ah! It just made me sad more than anything. Yeah.

This is the very end of the red state. Did you re-watch the miniseries Chernobyl in preparation for this? Have you met me ever? I've already watched it five times nice and I re-watched it I also I listened to the companion podcast of course with the director which is really interesting okay because one of the like YouTube physicists I used to who I'll talk about later in the research for this and also drove my brother up the wall being like but where did the neutrons come from so he's the this physicist named scott manley he said that the hbo series is better than any other documentary he's seen on he was like it's not 100 accurate there are things that they miss out and skate over but

it's better than any documentary out there wow well there you go so quite a lot of it is true like some characters are like the lady scientist for example she's just supposed to represent all of the lady scientists which classic but then what was really interesting is like you know in the opening scenes where legasov is talking into his tape recorder and he's feeding his cat the writer writer was like, in the initial opening sequence, I had him taking out cat food and then I spoke to a consultant who lived in Belarus at the time. She was like, no one had cat food.

Your cat just ate what you didn't want. Yeah. So I think it's an incredible series. It is. It truly is. I haven't seen it since I watched it when it first came out, but it is on the list for a rewatch. I just can't get enough. Yeah, I really want to rewatch it. Do you know why? It's because it's basically half of the cast of The Terror.

And I love that show too. No, it's an amazing cast. It's really, really well written. Yeah, I'm 100% going to rewatch it. But currently I am wasting my life watching Love is Blind Japan which if no one has watched I can highly recommend. There's so much bowing it's it's great. When I moved back from Korea it took me a year to stop bowing at people in shops. Yeah there's so much bowing I really like it I think everybody in it is less of a dick than they are in other versions which I've very much enjoyed. So there you go.

I'll get round to Chernobyl again. Okay. Hope you're ready to learn some physics. Raring to go. Did you do physics A-level or just chemistry? No, I didn't do physics A-level. I did chemistry, biology, maths. Left the physics behind me after GCSEs.

Well, good job me with my C in double science GCSE. It's going to explain it to everyone, probably. This story is full of valiant volunteers going quietly into that good night. And we're going to start with the Soviet Air Force, with one officer in particular, who just so happened to have a recreational interest in radiation. Captain Sergei Volodin started flying helicopters for the USSR

out of Kiev in 1976. He mainly zapped bureaucrats around the Soviet bloc to various meetings. And every so often, out of his own curiosity, Captain Sergei would turn on his helicopter's built-in dosimeter. A dosimeter is a fairly low-tech radiation monitor often found in the cockpits of aircrafts, which I did not know, but I guess you do need to know about it. Hey man, that is yet another pointless answer. Yes!

Game show pointless. What do you find in the cockpit of an aeroplane? A dosimeter. If anybody ever goes on that show and uses all of our pointless answers and wins the grand total of £100 that the BBC gives you for the hardest game show ever, you have to give us some. If you're not British, you have absolutely no idea what we're talking about. Go watch Pointless.

In all of his years of Soviet aviation, Sergei had never heard of Pointless, and he'd never seen the device in his cockpit so much as a glimmer. That would change for good in April 1986. Sergei and his crew were working a standard rescue shift in and around the Kiev area, when he was instructed to fly around Pripyat instead. And he was told specifically to take dosimeter readings.

He'd never been asked to do that before. Pripyat is a city built specifically to house and facilitate the families of power plant workers. A city that now stands hauntingly empty. As soon as you say Pripyat, I'm just like shivers. Because obviously, it's not like that at the time he's flying over it with his dosimeter. But in my mind, it is just the abandoned playground. Yeah, it's the Fer that at the time he's flying over it with his dosimeter but in my mind it is just the abandoned playground yeah it's the ferris wheel for me yeah that's what gets me every time fucking and also a lot of people just left a lot of their stuff because they thought they were coming back so it was just like an abandoned ghost town with all this shit everywhere and by shit i mean people's belongings it's fucking scary now No, Jeremy Wade goes there in an episode of River Monsters.

I have seen it. It's great. A bit underwhelming. It's obviously just another catfish, but still. No, you can go on tours and stuff now, which is why we've got all of the haunting pictures of the empty buildings. Apparently there's, in one of the playgrounds, there's graffiti that says,

Dead kids don't cry. Ew. Those who did live in one of the playgrounds, there's graffiti that says, Dead Kids Don't Cry. Ew. Those who did live in Pripyat back then were dedicated to the Vladimir Il'rik Lenin Power Plant. Ew. Which for obvious PR reasons, we know by a slightly different name. A name directly correlated by many, including Big Gorb himself, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chernobyl. Good comrade Sergei Volodin followed his orders

and flew his crew towards the power plant city and saw that the plant itself, three kilometres away, was pouring out smoke. Apart from the ominous unexplained plume, it was a clear day. Sergei could see people below going about their daily lives. And then he looked up at the dosimeter. Something he had done many times before. But this time, the meter was not still. The dosimeter reading was off the scale. There must be some sort of error, Sergei thought. But before he could do anything other than fiddle with a couple of settings,

an army major burst into the cockpit, screaming at him. You murderer! You've killed us all! The major was sure that just by flying through the air above Pripyat, all of the people in that helicopter,

captained by Sergei, were already dead. And if you say Chernobyl to someone, they'll probably shudder. Maybe they'll know that there was some sort of nuclear disaster that killed a bunch of people. Or maybe, like the rest of us, like we talked about at the top of the show, they might have seen the masterful HBO series with the same name. And as I said, the podcast series, which is produced by HBO, will tell you what was artistic license and what was cold hard fact. But I have to admit, even after my fifth watch, now sixth of the HBO series, I do. And in about an hour, you will too, kind of. Or at least you'll have a really good idea of maybe why. Yeah, let's set the bar lower.

I understand what I understand now because of my brother, who is an engineer, and also because of a book by Andrew Leatherbarrow called Chernobyl 012340. And the significance of that timestamp will be explained later on. Or maybe I won't explain it. Maybe you'll just have to spot it for yourself. Andrew Leatherbarrow is not a physicist. He's not an engineer. But he was a consultant on the HBO show and is now most people's go-to expert on Chernobyl. And what I love about him the most, and his book, is that it all started out as a hobby. Andrew was always interested in Chernobyl, but always felt that a prior level of knowledge was expected when discussing the incident. And he realised, just like I did, that almost no one

knows why it happened. So Andrew went on a quest to understand. And Chernobyl now being Ukraine, but then the USSR, made that quite complicated. The Soviet government didn't exactly have a reputation for telling the truth. In fact, keeping secrets and spinning alternate narratives was kind of their whole bag. So misinformation around Chernobyl abounds.

And competing narratives still exist today. Getting to the bottom of everything that happened over there is hard enough, let alone uncovering an active state secret. But undeterred, over a series of five years, Andrew wrote a book. He posted it on Reddit, and then took on information and critique from witnesses, survivors, nuclear physicists and loads of other people to create what is now, in our opinion,

the best read on Chernobyl that is out there. Yeah, it's interspersed with he went on a trip there. So there's chapters where it's explaining what happened and then it's in it's like chopped in with him being there and like recording his experience there and i just think that's really fucking cool to be like i want to understand this who can help me and then reddit's like we can and what we're not going to do is summarize andrew's work but we are going to start in the same place that he starts his book which is that us humans fucking love radiation we used to put radiation in our mouths. Radiation is what happens when atoms become too big and then they become unstable. And they want to be stable just like the rest of us, so they shed bits of themselves to get there.

And I find it easier to think about it like this. Radiation is energy that we can't see moving from place to place. Some of it's harmless, even helpful, like radiotherapy. Some of it is very not. Eventually, humans figured out that we could use radiation to create limitless clean energy, which sounds like an Avatar plotline. Unobtainium. How I want to obtain you.

I think about unobtainium way too much. It makes me so angry. It's just so ridiculous. It's like they spent all of their time and energy creating all of the fucking whatever the fuck they create in that, and they're like, nah, that'll do. We'll just steal the plot line from Pocahontas and call it unobtainium. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding,

I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge,

but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health.

This is season two of Finding. And this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them.

Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years.

I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons,

and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. But, you know, who wouldn't want unlimited clean energy? This extremely economically valuable piece of information was first uncovered by the Manhattan Project

when they built what they called Chicago Pile 1, far from a commercially viable nuclear reactor plant. Chicago Pile 1 is Far from a commercially viable nuclear reactor plant. Chicago Pile 1 is basically, they're like, it's just a fucking stack of bricks, basically. And they're like, we think that maybe this could work. Stalin got his ear to the ground and all nuclear power research was omitted from Soviet publications and international papers. A sure sign that the USSR were working away. Working away at what? Nuclear fission and how it creates electricity,

the limitless clean energy that leaders would have such a big boner for. I've done quite a lot of brain work on this, so hopefully I've done an OK job. But if I've got anything wrong you can blame my complete inability to absorb anything like a stable isotope all right physics meme yeah joke of the year over here also if i'm wrong it's my brother's fault like the whatsapp conversation between me and my brother is me being like like, OK, so graphite makes slower, no-go-bang. And he's like, yes, Hannah, no-go-bang. OK, so this, I think, is how we make nuclear power.

An atom is empty space and a nucleus made of protons and neutrons and then electrons that fly around the nucleus. Each element, as in our periodic table, homies, has a different number of protons. But if they have a different number of neutrons, they are isotopes of the same element. And the isotopes are obviously the Springfield football team. Baseball? I feel like it's both, isn't it?

This is the most important thing to fact check right now. Yeah, exactly. Fact check everything else within an inch of its life. Springfield isotopes. Baseball, well done. Oh, now I want a jersey. I'll be quirky. I'll be quirky!

There's a lot of niche references in this particular episode. I apologise if you don't know what's going on, but you have done poor watching with your life. An isotope is like an element with an optional upgrade. My Courser is still a Courser, even though it has a sunroof as an optional extra. Some isotopes, like people, are stable, and some isotopes are not.

And for nuclear fission, we need unstable isotopes. They want to be stable, just like the rest of us, so, like I explained before, they either break off little bits of themselves and fling them around, or they split. The splitting, because the bonds that hold atoms together are very strong, that creates heat and energy, and that is the fission bit. And fission is a self-sustaining reaction, because the more neutrons break off, the more they bump into other stuff and split more things. So you only need a little bit in the beginning for it to go on and on and on and on. Most nuclear reactors use the isotope

uranium-2,3,5 because it splits very easily. So inside a nuclear reactor there is uranium, sometimes plutonium but don't complicate things, and then loads of neutrons flying around and these neutrons collide with uranium and then the uranium splits. And when they split they make great energy. And fission is a chain reaction that creates heat within the nuclear reactor. The bomb without the explosion. Instead of the explosion the heat is controlled to produce a steady stream of power from the reaction. There are waste products of fission and they, like uranium, are dangerous. We'll get right into the horrors of radiation sickness later on. You're going to jump out the window. I was going to say, jump out of your skin because you will be a slurry.

So the top priority of a nuclear power plant, apart from supplying clean power, is making sure that the cast-off elements and their cell wall shifting capabilities stay inside the power plant where they belong. And there are a few ways of managing this. Most early reactors used graphite as the main way of slowing fission down. A lot of them still do. So we want to slow down the fission because it stops nuclear power stations from going bang. That's the main one. There are other fail-safes in nuclear power plants to stop things going bang. And these fail-safes include absorbent ceramic pellets, zirconium alloy cladding, reinforced concrete walls, airtight containment buildings, and these

days, essentially an impenetrable metal jumper that goes over the reactor, which is called a pressure vessel. Chernobyl did not have all of the safety features that it should have had. Shocking. Yeah. The RBMK reactors at Chernobyl, of which there were four, did not have the full metal jacket because it would have made the building of the plant twice as expensive. The RBMK only had a reinforced concrete wall all around the reactor and a metal plate at the top of it and at the bottom The RBMKs didn't even really have true containment buildings Which now seems astonishingly negligent But the key thing is that no one, not even the most senior engineers at Chernobyl

Knew that the safety of their plant was so precarious. Britain found out that RBMK reactors were not super safe the hard way and so did the USA after the Three Mile Island debacle. After that Jimmy Carter made improvements and a magnifying glass was cast on previously swept under the rug problems and things improved in the West at least. Now, nuclear sounds scary, especially after the demon core from the Los Alamos causing so many issues. It was exploded at the bottom of the sea at Bikini Atoll, bringing everlasting torment to a sponge wearing shorts. The demon core is so interesting.

It's a plutonium core that caused so many accidents, they were like, we've got to explode this, we can't have it anymore. But the fact is, we loved it. And we loved it even more before all the problems, because it was a source of infinite clean energy. France today is 75% nuclear powered. The US is even 20%. And all told, it is incredibly safe when compared to any other type of power.

I still remember when we were doing a show somewhere and somebody came to the vip session and the only question they asked me was why do you love nuclear so much do you remember and i was like i love so much that you came to this just to ask me that and i was like because the french are kicking our fucking asses and we can't have that no we can't that look everyone can have their opinions on it and yes this all sounds very scary but like we just said there were loads and loads and loads of fucking problems with what was going on in chernobyl and ultimately there is no such thing as a low energy rich country so if you want to continue to live in a rich country, we need an infinite source of clean energy. And France is already fucking doing it.

So anyway, that's why I love nuclear, lady who asked me that question. So yes, let's talk about the other sources of energy. Oil produces 36 deaths per terawatt hour. Biofuel, 1.24. Wind, 1.75. Hydro, 1.24 wind 1.75 hydro 1.4 and worst of all coal with a whopping 170 deaths per terawatt hour that is fucking mental on top of that it is estimated that coal pollution in china alone generated 366 000 deaths in 2013 alone that's not even the people in the mines that's just the air

even when one takes into account both the disaster at fukushima and chernobyl nuclear energy only generates 0.009 deaths per terawatt hour it's just got really bad pr and this is why i think it's sad like i don't know anyway people, people's negative perception of it. Yeah, and, you know, the opinion of nuclear energy being the cleanest is obviously not without contention. Germany's constantly complaining about radiation readings blowing in across the border from France because they have higher standards than France.

So France is like, we're not reading them, and the Germans are like, we fucking are. But even with the effects of a long-term exposure to nuclear power, them nuclear numbers are attractive numbers. Oh my God. Conspiracy theory moment. Do you think Russia blew up Chernobyl so that they could be like, don't anybody use this? Keep buying it from us. Because Germany is like, we're going to close down all of our functioning operational nuclear power plants because people are protesting. Sure. OK.

And then we're going to continue to buy oil and gas from an adversarial nation like Russia. Is it a conspiracy? It would be the most incredible long game because after Chernobyl, the next thing that happened was the US-ISR economy completely tanked and then the oil market crashed. So, long game. Long game. Long game, comrade. Long game. I'm going to look up long game in Russian. Долгая игра.

Got it. Nailed it. Долгая игра. Yes. That was the name of the project. So, overall, nuclear energy, probably good. But Chernobyl, very not good. But why? We're all going to find out. The Chernobyl power plant and its supporting city of Pripyat were constructed in 1970, close to Ukraine's northern border.

The area was chosen because it had a water supply, could be added easily to a railway line, and was far enough away from Kiev to make people not too worried about radiation. The RBMKs at Chernobyl were designed, like a lot of things in the Soviet Union, to be cheap, quick to build, and long-lasting. Like most reactors at the time, they had graphite control rods made of neutron-absorbing boron carbide. Graphite also stops water in the reactor from boiling and entering places that it definitely shouldn't. The more rods and the further they go into the reactors, the slower the fission is. So fewer rods means more power.

Yeah. So to keep the fission at a rate where you can convert the kinetic energy into steam and then eventually into electricity, you have to keep... So graphite and boron love neutrons. They're like, I want to be your friend. Come over to me. Leave the uranium alone. So that slows things down. Got it. But if you want things to speed up, you take them out. Now, at this point, there were already 14 RBMKs operational in the world.

But as we already know, the reactors at Chernobyl were built, cutting a hell of a lot of corners in order to keep the build on target and on budget. At the time of the disaster, so 1986, the reactors at Chernobyl provided 10% of the power to the whole of Ukraine. But what the world didn't know is that before that fateful 1986 that we all know about, there had already been an accident at Chernobyl. Two, actually. On September 9th, 1982, there had been a partial core meltdown. And I didn't know this. Nuclear meltdown means that the fuel in the reactor gets so hot it literally melts the equipment containing it. So what we think happened is that a coolant valve closed to a reactor when it shouldn't have and that meant the reactor catastrophically overheated and melted down.

After the meltdown, the Institute of Nuclear Research found levels of radiation 100 times higher than permissible levels. The USSR government recorded no concerning radiation at all. And the KGB kept the accident a secret from the rest of the world for years. The point is, even before that disastrous night in 86, the USSR, the KGB and high-level energy officials knew that RBMK reactors, including the four at Chernobyl, were not safe. The KGB actually received reports from plants all over the Federation

that explicitly detailed 29 emergency shutdowns in just four years. So they did know, but they couldn't afford another arms race and they couldn't afford another space race. So they were like, we have to beat them on power. We can't let them know that we're not doing this safely. The cooling provisions for the RBMK reactors were just not good enough, and the USSR knew it. Plans were made to improve the reactors, to make them safe, to reinforce the cooling options, and put them all inside a big metal jumper, which they should have had in the first place.

But it never happened. And the faults with the RBMK reactors were kept secret from everyone, even those who ran the plant at Chernobyl. I'm surprised it was only Chernobyl. It's not. It's not. Okay. Cut that. No, you don't have to cut it.

It's an interesting point. I think, you know, the people who are running these nuclear plants all over the Soviet Union are not stupid people. Like they were all trained at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the big misconception. It's not that they didn't know. It's that they knew, but they were willing to take that risk and sacrifice whatever needed

to be done because they couldn't lose face. I know I'm putting it very simplistically, but it's not far from what was going on. You could get a PhD in nuclear fission from an institution in Russia and you probably would be told that RBMK reactors couldn't explode. Yeah. The only people who twigged it were scared for their lives also, you know? Oh, yeah. So hopefully now we all understand a little bit more. Don't worry, there is more physics to come.

Let's get to the big bang that shattered the Iron Curtain. In the very early hours of the morning of 26 April 1986, there were 176 men and women at the Chernobyl power plant working. There were a further 286 builders constructing a fifth reactor just 100 metres away. The team of engineers at Chernobyl, led by Antony Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, were in trouble that night. They needed to complete a safety test. The test was supposed to have been carried out earlier that day,

but the higher-ups were worried about a dip in energy production whilst everyone was at work, so they pushed it back to the nighttime. But if we're really honest, the test was supposed to be carried out years previously before the reactor was ever producing actual power. But in order to keep the construction on target and rewards in sight, it was decided that the test should be foregone, with the

double pinky promise that it would be done eventually. The point of the test was to determine whether Unit 4 could use its diesel generators to efficiently cool itself in the event of a power failure. The delay in the test may not seem too significant, but it was. By pushing it, the test would now have to be carried out by the night crew, who were overall less experienced and had not received basically any prep on how the test needed to be carried out. However, waiting until the morning also wasn't an option. The test needed to be carried out successfully, or Dyatlov would get it in the neck.

Dyatlov came from a poor family. He had to work hard, and he was a nuclear engineer. He had received the best training available to him. He was not an idiot, but he was an arsehole. Yeah, bad guy. He was quick to anger. He would fly into rages and demean those around him. And that night, he only had one thing on his mind.

Completing a successful test and telling his bosses about it. He couldn't face another failure besmirching his record. So, already, not ideal circumstances. In addition to this, the Unit 4 reactor was right at the end of its fuel cycle. That's not uncommon. Reactors often contain old fuel and new fuel. But the stuff bouncing around in Unit 4 was basically 75% done for, so in the process it had accumulated a lot of fission product, which did make it more unstable. It would have been more sensible to wait and conduct the test with totally fresh fuel that everyone hadn't had their fun with yet. But again, targets. So what the night team needed to do was pull out

all 211 control rods, partially from the reactor, to create a similar power level to a power cut to see if the diesel pumps were up to the continued cooling job on their own. Essentially, they're like, if we have a power cut, it takes 90 seconds for the emergency power to come on. So they wanted to see whether the generators could look after themselves, well, look after the reactor core for 90 seconds. That's the point of the test. The day team had helpfully left their instruction manual behind.

Not so helpfully, it was covered in handwritten notes, crossings out and underlinings, making it impossible for the inexperienced night staff to know which set of instructions were the right ones to follow. The night team decided to follow the ones in the book itself, not the handwritten ones. At 28 minutes past midnight, the power levels were low enough for the test to begin.

But before it did, a mistake was made. The reactor was switched from manual to automatic control, which meant that the control rods descended further into the reactor than they were meant to. Now this may have been what was written in the instruction manual, or perhaps just the inexperience of the staff. Some of the men in the control room that night were in their early twenties. They're so young. So the power levels did not stay at a level where the diesel generators could continue to cool the reactor.

Instead, the power levels plunged much lower than they should have, to a total shutdown. The water pumps didn't stand a chance. As the power dropped, xenon was released into the reactor. Now xenon is not some sort of alien that's here to become your new overlord. It is a material that absorbs and inhibits the fission reaction. Great, you might be thinking. It's called a neutron poison. Just sucks them all up.

Sounds good, but unfortunately not. Had the drop in power never happened, then this would have been great. The xenon would have been a fire blanket, stopping the test before it could even begin. But the low power level made the reactor unstable enough to explode. Yeah, essentially, I think the easiest way to think about it is it went way too low and then way too high, way too fast. But no one, not even Dyatlov, knew that. All of the people on site that night had only ever been told that RBMK reactors could not explode.

And they had been taught in the most advanced nuclear facilities and institutions in the USSR that an explosion was impossible. So Dyatlov insisted that the test continued. So it's gone super low and he has to bring it up to a normal functioning level of power. And power was increased by retracting about half of the control rods. But because of the xenon fire blanket, it didn't work. Power could only be increased to 200 megawatts.

So the engineers weren't even close to recovering the actor and being able to start the test. So the systems were manually overridden, and the rest of the control rods were raised. Eight circulating pumps were connected, and a vast overflow was sustained in the reactor. Because the rods had been taken out, they had been replaced by water,

which absorbs neutrons at a slower rate than boron does. So way more neutrons were pinging around, bumping into stuff, creating more fission. That means steam. Loads of it. Which completely overwhelmed the turbines, designed to get the steam out of there and keep heat to a minimum. Had the reactor been operating automatically, it would have shut itself down. But it wasn't. Exactly. Dyatlov was like, override it, we need it 700, it's only at 200. So they pull them out, not physically by hand, but kind of. There were many points where disaster could have been avoided, but Dyatlov would not quit. The readings would have been useless for any kind of test now anyway,

but he still didn't stop. This is the bit for me, like, the readings are already useless at this point. There is no point in continuing anyway. But he does. And at 1.23.04, turbine 8 was disconnected from unit 4. The operator had no idea that this had happened, so they kept going and tried to shut the reactor down to conclude the test.

All of the circulating pumps began to fill with steam, and steam pockets began to form in the core, creating a positive void coefficient. Which is a fancy science way of saying more power, more heat, more steam, less water, very big bad news bears. And then the biggest baddest bear of them all came into play. At 01 23 40, Alexander Akimov, shift supervisor, decided that the only option was to press the emergency shutdown button. This big, possibly red, Soviet button was supposed to shut down the reactor

by putting all of the control rods back into the core very slowly. But again, because almost all of the rods had been taken out manually, putting them all in again was absolutely the worst thing he could have done. But he didn't know that. He was just 32. After the button was pressed, the control rods started to re-enter the core. And then they stopped. The rods being pushed down through the boiling water pushed the reaction to the bottom of the reactor. And the introduction of the graphite momentarily accelerated the reaction even more.

But that was all it took. Knocking sounds were heard coming from the reactor hall. Akimov released the clutch, hoping that gravity would give him a hand and the rods would fall under the fruition of their own weight. But they didn't. They stayed suspended, and no one could explain why. Mind-bendingly, when everything goes wrong in a nuclear reactor, especially a poorly executed RBMK, the safety features are the only thing in the world that

can make the situation worse. It's kind of like when antidepressants' number one side effect is suicidal ideation. It's like when everything has gone wrong, what you're supposed to do makes it worse. Yeah. And it just feels so desperate at this point. You're just like, this says emergency stop. It must fix this. Yeah. So even though the rods were not all the way in, the graphite tips displacing the boiling water was enough to increase the reaction happening throughout the reactor. This caused an enormous increase in both heat and steam, distorting the rods, tunnel and pipes. In just four seconds, the Unit 4 reactor had shot several times past its intended capacity. Pipes ruptured, causing water pumps and safety valves to close, which meant even less cold

water and even more hot steam. The top of the reactor started to jump up and down like a pan lid. Oh my God. You'd just be like... Do we run now? Yeah. But they're being told by Dyatlov that they're being pussies, basically, is what he's telling them. He's shouting at them, like...

In court, he's like, everything was very calm. I'm like, fucking dog shit it was. Anyway, on the inside of the reactor, it was 3000 degrees Celsius. And the reactor contained 15 atmospheres of pressure. 15 seconds after the big button was pushed, the buildup of steam and pressure blew the shell off the reactor, exposing the deadly uranium core to the world. There are conflicting views on how the explosion actually happened.

But most people agree that the reaction got too big, the steam got too much and it just broke its seal, basically. Because the ventilators weren't working, blah, blah, blah, all the things we said. But the bad news is only just beginning. As the roof of the reactor blew off, air rushed inside and reacted with the zirconium cladding of the reactor walls, creating extremely volatile hydrogen and oxygen. And you don't need a chemistry A-level

from a Mallory Blackman book to know what that means. A second bang, even more powerful than the one before. 50 tonnes of vaporised nuclear fuel shot into the night sky, carrying with it consequences no-one could even dream of. The fuel was followed by tonnes of solid radioactive material, mainly graphite, shooting into the atmosphere and scattering on the ground for miles around. Then came the fire. Loads of it.

The graphite that remained in the core lit up and would burn for weeks to come. The eerie glow lit up the night sky, and those in Pripyat woken by the explosions watched on with a mixture of awe and terror. Famously, some residents rushed to a bridge to get a better look. It was renamed the Bridge of Death. After the second blast, half of the building was gone. One man was instantly vaporised from the blast. His remains had never been recovered, if there were any at all. People say that and they're like, oh, like he's interred in the thing. I'm like, but

if he's vaporised, he's not, is he? It's believed that Unit 4 was emitting 30,000 rontions per hour, an instantly fatal dose of radiation. That's 10 Hiroshima bombs all at once. Yeah, doesn't get much more fatal than 10 Hiroshimas. Not even accounting for the radioactive graphite littering the ground. After the double explosion, Akimov, Dyatlov and the others in the control room had no idea what had happened. And they continued to act as if the core was not exposed.

Partially because they really didn't believe it was possible. And partially because they had no idea what else to do. They thought they had done everything right. And you would, you're like, I pressed the emergency shutdown do. They thought they had done everything right. And you would. You're like, I pressed the emergency shutdown button. Why hasn't this worked? Yeah. I turned it off and on.

Literally. Oh, it's so stressful. And this is the thing. It's just like the Soviet Union wasn't not blessed with intelligent people. It's just this is what happens when you operate in secrecy and fear because Dyatlov he does this he pushes himself because he's scared because his neck is on the line he's like if I fail they're gonna fuck me up let's go the whole hog and that's what leads to this so Dyatlov sent two trainees to the reactor hall

to lower the reactor rods by hand. He did regret this for the rest of his life. In the few years before his death, Dyatlov said he realised as soon as they left the control room, he had sent those two men to their deaths. He says that. He's... He maintains his whole life that he was lied to and it wasn't his fault. And that, he was lied to, that's true. But he's also not a stupid man.

He's not a stupid man and he did the test at an unsafe time. And there were many opportunities where he should have stopped and he didn't. But even though he sent these two men to do this, there was no way to get the rods down by hand anyway. Because they're suspended, right? They're stuck. Like, you can't, there's nothing you can do. Yeah. It was a lost cause. Dyatlov ran after the men, but he was too late. Or so he said.

Neither of the trainees made it past the reactor hall. They were too stunned by staring into the exposed core that nobody believed was there. The two men, well, boys really, ran back to the control room, dark with radiation burns, and told Dyatlov that the core was gone. He told them that that was impossible. The blast had just been a hydrogen-oxygen explosion in the emergency tank. And Dyatlov chose to ignore their clear radiation exposure for some reason. Like,

they literally come back a different colour. It's like a sci-fi horror. Both trainees unsurprisingly died just a week later of radiation sickness. And radiation sickness is truly the stuff of nightmares. It's essentially your body burning from the inside out and then you fall apart, vomit and choke on your own organs, bleed from every orifice, your skin cracks off and you swell up like a giant blister. Radiation burns get worse instead of better because your biological cell generation cannot keep up with the rate that the burn is radiating so even though you're trying to make new cells you can't do it

fast enough and this i didn't realize most chillingly of all there is a period of radiation sickness called the walking ghost where the patient appears to be significantly improved symptoms seem to fade away and they're almost back to their pre-radiation state but after the walking ghost comes the next stage which is certain death oh my god we've talked about this case that's actually from japan before and we wanted to do like a shorthand or something on it. And maybe we will. I think it was like we couldn't find enough information. But do you remember the case we've talked about of a Japanese man called Hishashi Auchi, which is like a really unfortunate surname for what happened to him? Does that ring a bell?

No. So Mr. Auchi was 35 years old and he worked as a technician at Japan's Takemura nuclear plant and basically in 1999 they had an incident there and he was exposed like to so much radiation and he gets taken to the University of Tokyo hospital and the doctors there are completely stunned. Basically, they think, and this happens in 1999, so after Chernobyl, that he may be the human being who's ever been exposed to the highest level of radiation in history. Wow.

And they were absolutely stunned when they examined him because he had almost zero white blood cells left and thus zero immune system. And basically, he starts off crying blood as his skin just melts in front of them. What they should have done is just put him out of his misery.

They knew that this man, Mr. Ouchie, was going to die. But they don't. They kept him alive while he was basically disintegrating in his bed. Like he's leaking fluids, he's screaming for his mother, he has constant heart attacks, his skin is like slush. They kept him alive for 83 days to study the effects of radiation poisoning. What in the actual fuck? It's so, so fucked up. Like if people don't know that story i think we'll do a shorthand on it at some point basically they didn't even kill him or you know like put him out of his

misery in the end he has one final cardiac arrest and thankfully died but they were willing to keep him alive for all that time while he was in agonizing pain it's such a horrible story actually makes my stomach turn really really bad stuff but yeah and if you even google images hit it blurs out all of the images you have to go and click on the image to be able to look at it like and i've looked at a lot of true crime images and i've never seen that look at that oh wow and i'm not going to click on that right now because i don't really want to see it one more horrible radiation sickness illness nugget for you. An engineer was found unconscious under a girder after the blast.

So this man is carried out of the reactor shell that was once Unit 4 by his friend, like Feynman's carry. And this friend sustained deep thermal and radiation burns from carrying him. And one of these burns was in the shape of his hand as it had rested on his friend's back as he had been carried out. That's how radioactive he was. People had become deadly weapons. Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes.

And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today.

They say Hollywood is where dreams are made, a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs,

a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. So yes, radiation sickness started to overcome the workers on site.

They're fainting, vomiting, bleeding. And even though his team had seen it with their own eyes, Dyatlov continued to deny the possibility that the call was exposed. A lot of people think that in the control room, there's a lot of groupthink going on, which is essentially a psychological phenomenon when, like, you assume the best possible scenario because you're subconsciously incredibly aware of how out of control your confined space will become if bad news happens. So men waded into the bowels of the reactor to open water valves by hand. They were knee-deep in radioactive water for an hour. But they did not run.

At 2.30am, the on-site staff decided to do the thing they really, really didn't want to do. They had to ring their boss. Plant director, Viktor Brukhanov. When Viktor arrived, he went straight into the emergency bunkers and called a meeting. He believed that the reactor was intact because that is what Dyatlov had told him. And Viktor Brukhanov decided all they needed to do to solve their problems was just add more water. He was sure that the fire brigade and the turbine system would have this whole situation under control in no time. He did request, though, that a radiation reading be taken but amazingly

in a nuclear power plant they could only find one radiation reader which indicated 1,000 microrontians per second which is high but not a death sentence. But it was also the highest reading that that piece of equipment was capable of collecting. The actual number was, in fact, 8 million microrontians per second. So, you know, 1,008 million, no biggie. Why have you also got only one fucking radioactive reader in this bloody power plant and it can only go up to 1000 microbronchions because it's like saying oh it's fine everybody is totally fine literally oh my god

why would we ever need to measure radiation in a nuclear power plant how ridiculous we'll just make sure its maximum capacity is not a death sentence. So don't need to worry about it, anybody. But the men in those bulletproof meeting rooms didn't know things were so bad. They worked on the assumption of the best case scenario that the reactor was intact and there was just a normal fire to deal with. Oh my God. Why would you act under the guise that it was the best possible situation? Because they're scared of Moscow, that's why.

Yeah. You're going to die either way. So that information was sent all the way up the chain to Moscow. That, you know, there was an accident, but everything's under control. Suggestion of an evacuation was not sent up the command chain for fear of instilling panic and also getting into trouble if it turned out to be unnecessary because evacuations are expensive things to pull off. Eventually another more powerful meter was found and it showed 200 ronchons. So we're into ronchons, not micro ronchons now. And in news that will surprise absolutely nobody, it was also the highest reading that that meter was capable of giving. And rather than noticing that maximum readings had happened several times

now, the management decided that the machine just had to be faulty and they ignored it and carried on with their original plan. Oh my god. So the machine is faulty, but the power plant is fine. Yes, these two machines. They're faulty. Yes. But our power plant cannot be faulty because it cannot explode. Yep. And don't look at that glowing core. It's definitely not exposed. You're just tired. Do you need to lie down? And they did this even though

news was starting to travel to the command centre that graphite had been spotted on the ground. The only place where one would find graphite in a nuclear power plant is inside the reactor itself. So the fact that there was so much graphite on the ground, which was tons of it, remember, had to mean that the reactor had exploded and therefore the radioactive core of the RBMK had to be exposed.

Even after Dyatlov saw the graphite himself and knew where it had come from, he still would not accept the reality of what must have happened. And soon, he was too ill to stay on site. So what he had to say didn't really matter anymore. The fire brigade were given no protection at all and treated the blaze like a normal one. Even though the seal to the roof of the reactor had melted because in a chillingly, grenful move, the cladding of the reactor was highly flammable. That particular cladding hadn't been allowed in the Soviet Union for over 10 years, but it was cheap and there was probably a lot of it lying around. So why not stick it to your

fucking nuclear reactor? You've got to keep on track. So on it went. And on April the 26th, 1986, up it went. Not least because not a single fire drill had been conducted at Chernobyl since its opening. Once again, partially because they were all told that an explosion was impossible, and partially because no one was that bothered. Amazingly, it didn't even cross the mind of the Pripyat Fire Department that radiation at the nuclear power plant might be a risk at all and also Pripyat was specifically built so people could work at this nuclear power plant everybody who lives in that city is in some way connected to that nuclear power plant and they don't have any sort of radiation provision for the fire brigade at all this is the problem when the government just lies to everybody and controls all of the information.

And it's just like, believe not what you see with your eyes, but what I tell you. Two plus two equals five. I mean, it is just so terrifying. The whole brigade were sent on a suicide mission, and it didn't dawn on anyone until the firemen started to vomit and soon became incapacitated by radiation sickness. Having said that, though, the doctor on call at Chernobyl that night did realise very quickly what he was dealing with and how at risk he was himself. But he kept working, and later he just said, what else was I supposed to do? The chaos continued throughout the night, with no correct decision being made and plant staff, medics and firemen dropping like flies. But no one off site knew that. Even Moscow,

they'd been told there was no major problem. But after 129 of the most irradiated victims were flown to the infamous Hospital 6 in Moscow, people started to ask questions. I believe Hospital 6 is specifically for radiation-related problems. So Moscow are like, why have we got all of these helicopters with all of these people falling apart from radiation sickness, but you're saying everything's fine, no fatalities? Back in Pripyat, workers arrived at the power plant at 8am for their day shifts as normal.

There was even a wedding held in the city that day. One man took to his roof to sunbathe and noticed that he had done a much more effective job than usual of, you know, catching a bit of colour. And it wasn't until a couple of hours later that he realised something was wrong when he started vomiting uncontrollably. As the fire refused to show any signs of getting smaller, those making the calls were slowly forced to accept that there was something serious going on, and that they were actually making it worse. As the water from the fire hoses was making

contact with the astronomically hot core, it was either vaporising immediately, or worse, separating into volatile oxygen and hydrogen particles. They go bang, they do. Slowly, the horrifying reality started to set in. An evacuation of Pripyat was requested, but denied by Moscow, who still didn't know that the deadly uranium-235 core was exposed because they hadn't been told. But this core was exposed, and it was pumping out poison by the second. Even still, Red Square did decide

to send some other people down to Chernobyl to have a look at the situation. Most famously, there was Valery Legasov, Professor of Chemistry and Deputy Director of the Atomic Energy Institute. As the experts made their way to the site, roadblocks popped up, and with them, wild speculation and widespread suspicion that the situation at the power plant may be much more serious than everyone had first thought.

No simple fire had ever been treated like this before. And that evening was the first time an anywhere near accurate radiation reading was taken at Chernobyl. And it was bad. Real bad. But now the crisis was being perceived for what it really was. Due in no small part to Legasov, who was instrumental in running meetings and convincing politicians how deep in the global shit the USSR really were, and more importantly, that there was just no way they were going to get away with it.

It's like the kid that set fire to his bedroom and he's like, I'm going to have to go tell my mum. Yeah. The house is going to burn down. I've tried. I've tried to put it out. Yeah. And it's like, I'm going to have to go tell my mum. Yeah. The house is going to burn down. I've tried. I've tried to put it out. Yeah.

And it's not going out. And also, I feel like I'm going to be in so much trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Big Gorby is in quite a lot of trouble. I mean, I am obviously, I am swayed by the HBO series because he's quite a sympathetic character in that series. I don't think he was a perfect man. And there are a lot of problems with him.

But I do think it must have been astonishingly scary to go into a room full of bureaucrats and be like, no, we're going to kill millions of people. We literally could end the world. This is how serious this is. If this makes it into the water table, everyone is fucked. So the emergency council needed to move quickly. Their only option was damage control. Legasov convinced the crisis council to drop sand, boron, dolomite and lead from the air onto the blaze from above. The idea being that they would absorb the heat and the rogue

neutrons and eventually make it down to the core. It was also decided that against Moscow's original orders, Pripyat had to be evacuated. In the city on the morning of the 27th of April, life was as normal, until a flyer was delivered to each home. And then at 11am came a broadcast on the radio announcing the temporary evacuation of Pripyat at 2 p.m. that day. A bus was sent to every apartment block and citizens were asked to only take their documents and a bit of food with them. The people of Pripyat were assured that this was just a temporary measure and that the Communist Party were taking all necessary measures to keep them safe. Valery Lagasov knew that this was a lie.

This evacuation was forever. However, the government needed a swift and effective evacuation of Pripyat, without panic. And if people knew the truth, that would never have happened. It's horrible, but it is true. Yeah, I mean, you're telling people, like, get all your shit! It's obviously just going to kill a bunch of people in stampedes

and make it incredibly ineffective. So that meant that people did as they were told. All pets were even left behind. These pets ran after the buses as their owners left, at first playfully and then in desperation. 160,000 people were evacuated from their homes in two hours. That is very efficient. It is.

It's amazing what you can do when you just lie to everybody. Eventually, 200,000 people would be displaced as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe. The secret severity of the disaster wouldn't stay in the USSR for long. Across the Baltic Sea, Sweden was the first nation to figure out that something was up. Very unswedish sounding Cliff Robinson lived in a nuclear power plant about two hours from Stockholm. And on the 26th of April 1986, he woke up at 7am and went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. A short journey that involved passing through a radiation detector. The radiation detector went off as he passed. That's impossible, thought Cliff.

He hadn't been anywhere near radiation. He hadn't even been to the control room. So he ignored it and went about his morning business. Why is everybody ignoring these radiation detectors? I feel like if you live in a nuclear power plant, you're like, uh, Cliff, that's why it's there. But later on, Cliff was forced to confront the beeping again. When a queue of workers set off the same alarm, Robinson took a shoe from

one of the workers and squirreled it off to his lab where he discovered it to be highly contaminated. There were elements present on that shoe that had never been in his power plant. So this radiation contamination had to be coming from outside. It was an external problem. The call is not coming from inside the house. Even still, the workers were evacuated and the Swedish radiation authorities were notified. The plant itself came up clean after testing. There was

nothing wrong with it. And if there had been a nuclear explosion somewhere in the world, someone would have told them by now. So Cliff and the Swedes realised that there was only one option left. The USSR to the south-east. But Moscow didn't say anything. But when Norway and Finland joined in and said that their radiation readings were through the roof too, Gorby had to give in.

A bit. Yeah. Under immense international pressure, Moscow admitted that there had been an accident. A reactor had been damaged at Chernobyl. There were only two fatalities and the affected were being cared for. A commission had been called and everything was under control. The West, used to the Soviet shit, didn't believe a word. Mass hysteria followed in the international press, which is actually

partially why it was so bloody difficult for anyone to work out what had actually happened and how bad the consequences really were. The New York Post wrote that there was a mass grave containing 15,000 victims, which, let's not downplay the tragedy, but there just wasn't. After clearing Pripyat of people but leaving all the dogs behind, the Crisis Chernobyl Commission turned their attention back to the never-ending fire bellowing out of reactor four. Soviet resources were pulled from Afghanistan, mainly helicopters, to drop the gas off sand and boron bags. The pilots were issued with lead plates to pop under their seats.

They did not work. Although none of the boron made it into the core itself, it did manage to seal it. Which sounds like good news. Except it's not. The seal meant that even though they couldn't see the fire anymore, the fire inside Reactor 4 was getting hotter and that meant more fission was happening and that led to a nuclear meltdown. The components of the reactor melted together and created a radioactive magma that burnt

down through the concrete foundations of the reactors. If the magma made it down to the water table below the concrete pads there would be a steam explosion and untold water contamination that would last for centuries, maybe even millennia. And this revelation brought the Emergency Response Commission top brass to embark on a new strategy called counting lives, a utilitarian acceptance that whatever they did, people were going to die. They already had. So now they had to try and minimise the death

and also minimise what the West could find out. To avoid the steam explosion from hell, the pool of hot radioactive water had to be drained from beneath Reactor 4. By hand. Two valves submerged in radioactive water had to be operated by human hands. In the dark. On the 6th of May, three volunteers, with the assurance that their families would be

taken care of, suited up and waded into the darkness. Their mission was successful, and all three of them died very quickly afterwards, making the greatest sacrifice for their country imaginable. Except they didn't. They lived relatively normal lives afterwards, although ill health was never too far from their door. Yeah, the story you get told is

these these three incredibly brave men who are just like well it's it's me or the country you know like but i guess they didn't know that they weren't gonna no no they didn't but immediately the story is told that they died almost immediately afterwards that's not true yeah i think we lost track of two of them but we know for certain the final death toll was counted on the 16th of May. We know that all three of them were alive on the 16th of May. So, yes, they do go on to live normal-ish lives. It's not this instant death. I think it fits quite a handy Soviet narrative to be like, look at these three brave men who yes like i said didn't know what

was going to happen and they were heroes for doing that but they died and so it's okay some people are going to die yeah yeah for the country it's less impressive to say that they didn't because it doesn't give you that hero narrative that if somebody dies it's okay if you see what i mean so yes the men didn't all die and we did actually read that one of them still works in the nuclear industry to this day. Still, their bravery meant that any leftover water could be drained by hoses

and then the core could be frozen with liquid nitrogen. A step in the right direction but by no means a permanent solution. For that, the commission were going to need more volunteers. Skilled ones. Specifically, commission were going to need more volunteers, skilled ones. Specifically they were gonna need miners. The leader of the miners in the Chernobyl series is my favourite character, I love him so much. So they needed these miners because

they needed to cool the ground beneath the reactor. A 150 metre by 30 metre squared tunnel needed to be built 12 metres under the reactor itself to hold refrigeration equipment. And this tunnel had to be built by hand. There was no way anyone was getting a drill near that reactor. So miners were sent under Unit 4 with no ventilation, in 30 degrees heat, and exposed to one rontion per hour for 24 hours at a time. They weren't even given respirators. And out of interest, I looked this up, one rontion per hour is 100 x-rays worth of radiation. Like, an x-ray is like 0.0 fucking whatever.

But worse than that, the giant wonder fridge was never installed because the core magically started to cool itself down. And we think that about a third of those miners died before they were 40. The reactor was the eye of the storm. So let's look at the expanse of the hurricane. After the fire was out and the water drained, the cleanup of the surroundings began. 30 kilometers around Chernobyl was dubbed the exclusion zone, and the military were drafted in to kill everything in it. The decontamination workers were called liquidators, and there were 240,000 of them between 86 and 87. The vast operation concluded in 1990 and as far as we know there are 600,000 confirmed liquidators on record. Now their jobs were varied from burying the forest

turned entirely red by the radiation to cleaning up the radioactive dust that covered everything but worst of all they had to shoot all of the animals. The dogs that had run after the evacuation buses were now roaming around in packs, and quite a lot of them were blind. The dead animals were dumped in unlined pits, and the liquidators were told not to have children for five years after their service was completed. But they had been told the vodka protected them from radiation. So most of them just ignored the advice and hoped for the best. You can't tell 200,000 people to not have children.

Again, I just love this Soviet spin on it. But the vodka will save you from the radiation. I can't do a Russian accent. By November 1986, Unit 4 had been contained in an astonishing feat of civil engineering, called by the 5,000 people who built it, the sarcophagus. And again, the sarcophagus had to be built by the human hand because robots couldn't function in an atmosphere so full of radiation.

And I know I've told you this before and under the duvet, but sarcophagus means flesh eater that is the literal translation well how fitting yeah something i didn't realize is that like i think it's over 500 ronchins machines stopped working no wow and apparently one robot threw itself off the roof like come it like. Like it just got up there and was like, fuck this shit. Oh my God. The build was documented by a filmmaker who for some God unknown reason refused to wear any protective gear. And he was dead within a year.

By the end of 1986, 600 villages within the exclusion zone had been decontaminated and it was a crime for anybody to have a personal radiation meter. Oh my god. Also, having an outside stall was banned all over Ukraine. So no market stalls for you. Get that food out of the disgusting air, please. Wow. But everything is totally fine. Yeah, yeah, no major issues. But is that, excuse me, what have you got in your hand? Is it a street fruit and a radiation meter? Because prison.

Don't worry, it only goes up to a thousand micro-runchins and it says everything is fine and it's not a death sentence. Now at this point, the worst man in the world to be was Gorbachev. Yeah. He took three weeks to address the disaster publicly. He announced that all would be revealed at a conference at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Valery Legasov was received at Vienna with a standing ovation and headlines dubbing him a Soviet who spoke the truth. But that nickname wasn't quite accurate because he essentially went to this conference and presented a report putting the blame squarely on operator error. So it wasn't the state, wasn't the corner cutting, it wasn't the ignoring of the very obvious things that were wrong with this power plant. It was all operator error. Which, like, isn't a total lie, but it is certainly not the whole truth. And Legasov says that he never forgave himself for that. He went on to write papers criticising the RBMK reactors,

proposed further research and better training. But it was all censored or vanished completely by the KGB. Professor Lagasov hanged himself on the second anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Before he took his own life, he dictated his memoirs onto cassette tapes. And this is what he said. The accident was the apotheosis of all that was wrong in the management of the national economy

and had been for so many decades. He's not wrong. No, and that's why he killed himself, because otherwise the KGB would have done it. Well, some people think the KGB did. I mean, I also think that may be the truth, but... I... I guess the fact that he recorded the cassette tapes, they probably wouldn't have allowed that. But who knows?

This is the thing. If we didn't have the cassette tapes, they probably wouldn't have allowed that. But who knows? This is the thing. If we didn't have the cassette tapes, I would think it was the KGB. Yes. And I don't think they were very far behind him. Also, I think it's significant that it was on the anniversary. Like he did that on purpose. And like obviously in the series, he hangs himself at the moment that the button was pressed, which is 01212344 which is the title of the book and the writer on the hba podcast was saying he was like i don't know if that is the moment nobody knows

but i kind of feel like why wouldn't you if you're doing it on the two-year anniversary and you know the time yeah the fact is the men in the control room that night were not totally blameless. They did make mistakes. But they didn't have all of the information. They were taught that the reactor could not explode. And also, there were 45 major safety issues with the Unit 4 RBMK reactor that weren't their fault. And in 1992, the IAEA, which is the International Atomic Energy Agency, revised their original report on Chernobyl and essentially changed their tune from 100% operator error to Chernobyl never would have happened if there was a proper culture of feedback and oversight within the nuclear industry in the USSR. Yeah.

But that's probably a lot easier for you to say Vienna after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Modifications were made to the remaining RBMKs to make them safer. And actually, there are still 11 operational today. Unit 3 of Chernobyl itself was still operational until 2000. Yes, you heard that right. People still live in the exclusion zone too. Many of them found it difficult to settle anywhere else after they'd been turfed out. There are around 187 small communities in the exclusion zone. The stigma that followed them was too harsh. They couldn't find work. So they went back.

Isn't that horrible? Yeah. The official death toll of the disaster is 30 men and one woman, which is obviously not true. But the real number is impossible to know. The affected area is just too vast. And how do you know if a fatal cancer is Chernobyl-related or not? Having said that, cancer rates are three times as high in Eastern Europe than they were before the disaster.

Particularly thyroid cancer because your thyroid is very good at absorbing radiation. Ugh. And infant mortality in the 150-kilometre contaminated zone shot from 20% to 30%. One in three children were found to have defects, mostly internal, in 2006. One in three! So when we're talking about that 150 kilometer zone we're talking some bits of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. And actually to this day in some hospitals in Ukraine you can skip the queue if you were affected by Chernobyl. There's like little

signs. The cleanup cost billions of rubles which at the time was about a dollar. A ruble and a dollar were about the same back then. And it completely fucked the Soviet economy. And then the oil prices crashed, which made everything worse. Gorbachev never recovered. And he dubbed Chernobyl as the primary accelerator of the collapse of the entire Soviet Union. Antony Dyatlov got 10 years hard labour, and as I said, he always maintained that he was innocent and he was lied to, and that he did nothing wrong.

The real human cost of Chernobyl is impossible to know. Liquidators were given a certificate for their service, and they all had the same radiation dosage recorded on their medical card. So it didn't matter where they were, whether they were in a house, whether they were in a tent, they all got the same exposure number. And thousands of them would eventually be crippled by radiation exposure. And what about our pilot from all the way at the beginning? Captain Sergei Volodin was given a medal by the president of Ukraine in 1996. It's the same one that was given to the by the president of Ukraine in 1996. It's the same one that was given

to the firemen after they died in 1986. Sergei told The Guardian, the firemen were all awarded for dying. After 10 years, we are awarded it for still being alive. Sergei doesn't fly anymore. He's too ill and he's too scared. And he receives the same pension awarded to all of the liquidators. 26 Ukrainian hivina a year. A pot of tea costs 35. We will never know the true cost of lies. But surely it has to be more than a pot of tea. Sad. Very sad. I'm sad on the inside. Mm hmm. Yeah. But luckily my cell walls aren't disintegrating. Stay away from Chernobyl. Love nuclear power though.

One thing that did, not positive, but a lot of the commentary I was reading was that because the aftermath of Chernobyl was so horrific, it was one of the contributing factors to the international community being like, oh, we really can't do nuclear bombs anymore. We really, really, really cannot do that. And a lot of places stopped testing, like a lot of the NATO nations. But then India, Pakistan, China and North Korea were like, we're going to do it anyway. But I thought that was an interesting outcome of the world witnessing how horrific it was

to be like, oh, we can we can't yeah we can't be doing that again yeah i guess that's it if i've got something wrong about nuclear fission um i don't care yeah tell it to your physics teacher not to us but that is it that is our episode on chernobyl go check out the mini series we're not sponsored by them it's just a really it's just so good tv we'll see you next time for something else probably with a lower death toll Well, go check out the miniseries. We're not sponsored by them. It's just a really good TV. It's just so good. We'll see you next time for something else, probably with a lower death toll. Maybe.

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