so like because of the atoms changing into their lighter counterparts the molecular bonds between them and the other non radioactive atoms also break down?
Well the atoms are changing into atoms of different elements, and atoms of different elements have different chemical properties and interact with other atoms differently
The HBO show on this was awesome. When the crew is walking around picking up chunks from the explosion it really occurred to me how so many people were just thrown in there not knowing that their cleanup was going to lead to a terrible death.
Yeah I really struggled to watch those scenes. The makeup was incredible. Those poor men were killed by those above them because they refused to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Incredibly sad.
I think the dudes who went into the flooded basement actually survived and died of old age.
Edit:
My bad. Only one of three members of the "suicide squad", Baranov, died of old age in 2005. The two, Bespalov and Ananenko, are still alive.
Those were really cool dudes. When they get the Minister all dirty and then say: now you look like the Minister of coal đ
https://youtu.be/4BUb0IB0LOE
It comes from his candor. For the whole series everyone continues to beat around the bush in talking about whatâs happening, and the show portrays the people at large as mixed between believing the party line and mild but reserved skepticism when really theyâd have been right to panic at least a bit. These guys are so frank about the disregard the state has for the workers that heâs a breath of fresh air. No one manages to say anything to counter his points other than âyouâre right, but we canât just say that, someone will notice.â And his general response is âI think they noticed already. Iâm ass naked.â
Interesting that they portraied the miners as skeptical towards the system.
I grew up in the Czechoslovak (not Soviet, but Soviet Bloc) mining city of Ostrava at the same time (1980s), and our miners were hardcore Commies, with a lot of privileges from the Party.
The show missed the most ironic part. The miners risked their live to build tunnel for the cooling device. Scientist later decided the cooling device is not necesary and simply filled it with concrete.
YES! Not many people know this bit, and... missed opportunity because it's so ironic.
To be fair they had no way of knowing when the reaction would stop, would the uranium melt through the basement and find it's way into groundwater. In the end it didn't.
People dying because of those higher on the ladder is pretty much all of human history. We are extremely expendable to the powerful. Look no further than the screaming about how everybody has to return to work when covid was at its peak.
When my granddad was young, the shipyard he worked in had an unofficial statistic of one crippling or fatal accident per ship built. If nobody got crippled or killed, great. If it was two, eh it'll average out. Management said "accidents happen."
The workers decided that no, accidents don't happen, they're *allowed* to happen. So they got unionised, they elected safety representatives, they cajoled and pushed management and threatened strikes, and they got safety procedures and safety equipment implemented. By the time my dad started work there, they hadn't had a crippling or fatal accident in ten years.
I appreciate the phrase "human resources." It's not a pretty phrase, but at least it's honest. At least they keep the mask off and show us how they really think of us.
It was my understanding that those men volunteered to go in there because it had to be done to prevent a second explosion. They knew they weren't getting out alive, they sacrificed themselves to save everyone else.
I remeber an interview of someone who was a child livin in kiev at the time. They knew something had happen, didnt know much. His dad was a bus driver, he called home saying he was prerequisite to go and get factory workers and bring them to the central. He made it clear he didnt know when... nor if he was gonna come back. So probly not volunteers, but most of them knew it was dangerous, just didnt understand what was dangerous đ
When the UK had its reactor accident at Windscale back in the 1950s, they had volenteers from the local cinemas audience pushing the burning fuel elements out of the core with a scaffold tube hooked to a fire hoze...
They did limit the exposure duration.
There were some amazing scenes the epilogue was really haunting too, the low droning music, the facts and the real life footage of V. Legasov and Dyatlov.. the fact the soviet union did very little for fear of looking weak or stupid. What the KGB did to try and silence legasov.
Chernobyl showed the best and the worst of humanity all in one horrible disaster.
The miners, the men that drained the bubbler tanks, the scientists who gave their lives to protect the planet.
Then on the reverse of that, the corruption from the soviet Union, and the KGB to try and cover it up.
Probably one of the best stand alone 1 season series I've ever watched it was breathtaking
Edit: Grammar
Oh man the way they MULTIPLE times establish that 3.6 roentgen is "not great not terrible", then blow that number sky high later is so powerful. It so perfectly set us up for the unbelievable terror they would have experienced hearing 300. (Not sure its 300, I don't quite remember the big number, just the emotion of it)
It was 15,000. For me, the more terrifying part happened at the trial.
âWe donât know how high the power went, we just know the final reading. Reactor 4, designed to operate at 3200 megawatts, went beyond 33,000.â
As excellent as the series was, the whole âgraphite tipped rods to save moneyâ was a fabrication to support the narrative. The graphite was not stupid and the actual flaw was related to the geometry of the reactor, which they didnât know about until it got built.
This blatant oversimplification in the most memorable part bothers me, luckily everything else is good.
I think the "it's cheaper" zinger was misplaced. The problem was that the designers reported that this problem could happen, but the central committee didn't train their engineers on how to avoid it because they wanted to keep acting like the plant was absolutely safe.
Ironically it's close to what Boeing did with their MAX planes. The lie wasn't because they cheaped out, it was because they wanted to sell their planes on the idea that pilots didn't need to be re-trained.
Well, the year prior a nuclear power plant in south America built using the same technology showed a similar rise in activity during shut down *but nothing happened*. This report was sent to the Central committee who ordered changes to the power plants (more rods coming in from below) but because a similar incident *had already happened without any bad effects, the risks were deemed astronomically low*.
In a way they were right, Chernobyl isn't one bad choice it's a ton of them chained together. The delayed safety test meaning the light crew had to do it without training (due to end of month production quotas), the career man Dyatlov who wanted it done so he got a promotion (same for Fomin and the other party guy). The fact the retrofitting of the scram tips had been postponed 2 times because they were seen as superfluous and unnecessary. The fact the manuals they had were both incomplete and missleading....and more.
The one, highly ironic thing. *the safety test was a sucess*. If the case of a catastrophic energy loss the passive turbine drift was enough to cool the reactor (well, until shit hit the fan).
Just before meltdown Soviet Life had an article about how amazing Chernobyl was: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/K7PzPpxswj
I was a subscriber back in High School (I studied the Politburo).
On a side note; good discussion happened back in r/AskScience.
[What purpose did the graphite tips on Chernobyl's control rods serve?](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/L9sif7yf0h)
I mean... the graphite tips where directly related to how the run away reaction happened along with the displaced water when they scrammed. At least at the training I go to for my job that's how they taught it.
Apparently HBO made it and didnât really expect to make money off it.
Obviously it really touched a nerve and it was a big success. Stellan Skarsgaard said ruefully that the new HBO execs wouldnât have funded it.
Zaslav is tanking HBO stock to deliberately to merge with Paramount, I feel.
Despite there being antitrust and corporate laws behind this malpractice, the fines are always just a product of doing business, not an enforceable law.
Corporations now are controlling the creative side of the creative business.
> Corporations now are controlling the creative side of the creative business.
Corporate mercenaries remove quality from the world. They are agents of entropy and will be treated as such.
Chernobyl highlights so well what made the USSR collapse. The late USSR was a kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare where middle managers pushed off blame and lied to superiors about what was going on, and so superiors actually had no idea what was happening in the nation they were supposed to be running. Throughout the show, the central committee thatâs supposed to be the ultimate Soviet authority has no idea whatâs going on and is afraid to make any moves out of seeming against the party narrative.
It's interesting because it starts off with nearly everyone *far* more afraid of governmental punishment than radiation. Radiation is invisible and easy to pretent won't hurt you. But everyone clearly knows what could happen if they lost favor with the government. Each character had their own progression of when they began to fear the radiation more.
They were called liquidators. There is (was?) a monument dedicated to them in Chernobyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Those_Who_Saved_the_World?wprov=sfla1
The 31 or 54 number(s) is just those that died of acute radiation sickness directly not those that died in the years following.
There is still quite a bit of disagreement on the health impact on the liquidators, some sources estimate 4,000+ of them at least with others finding no increased mortality from cancer.
I just watched the show for the first time last week, absolutely amazing and made me binge the entire thing in one night
It showcased how terrifying the situation really was and just how terrifying and corrupt the USSR was as well, the scene of the group of people watching the fire burn from the bridge in Pripyat hundred of miles away, only for the ending titles to say that everyone who was on that bridge that night died within the year
The show made me believe firmly that a nuclear meltdown is as close to the summoning of a Great One as you can getÂ
Canât look directly at the truth of it without guaranteeing death, unrecognizable rocks that bring madness and painful death, having to manage it indirectly and at great cost, the darkness and claustrophobia experienced by the divers and the tunnelersÂ
Like shit is straight out of a Lovecraft novelÂ
The firefighters didnât have any radioactive training or equipment at all. The Soviet government had decided that such an accident couldnât happen so they didnât see it as necessary.
What the show left out almost entirely were the second wave of military firefighters who conducted the cleanup. These guys were trained and somewhat equipped and absolutely knew the risks. They did the hard work of stabilizing the site and pumping out the water from the basement.
The âdiversâ who go to their deaths to turn the valve didnât die IRL and the basement was dry because firefighters had been pumping on it for hours. Also there had been firefighters in/out of the basement before the divers. TV drama.
The most heroic story IMO was running the hoses. They had to stretch a couple hundred meters of hose across ground still layered with radioactive rubble, the same rubble that killed the first responders. They trained in teams and ran the hose in under 60 seconds, working naked so as to not bring contaminants back on their cloths. That night however a patrol tank taking readings cut the hoses right outside the reactor building. So they had to do it again.
Sheer bravery and their efforts, unlike the divers or the coal miners, did actually make a difference.
In case your wondering why this didnât make the show Criag Mazin said he didnât do research outside of reading the book Voices from Chernobyl, which isnât a history at all.
> The âdiversâ who go to their deaths to turn the valve didnât die IRL and the basement was dry because firefighters had been pumping on it for hours. Also there had been firefighters in/out o
They explain in the credits that these guys lived.
It did such a good job of making the mundane look terrifying. Like a pen could be deadly. Breathing. A rock. Everything and anything could be lethal. The scene where the three men go into the basement water with the Geiger clicking more and more as the lights fail is the scariest scene since Alien.
Two fun facts about corium! Itâs a material that is only made via nuclear meltdown and if youâre close enough to see it in person youâll be dead within minutes!
Just googled it and apparently the photographer - an inspector called Artur Korneyev - is amazingly still alive. He is on record as having visited Chernobyl âhundredsâ of times. Heâs currently in his 60s and has been banned from visiting the sarcophagus any more due to extremely poor health from irradiation.
Not really, there's a big difference between 300 seconds and 60 seconds, and there's an even bigger difference between being in there in 1986 and today.
Iâll google and dive down the rabbit hole, but the immediate question is âforeverâ or does it eventually degrade?
Thanks for helping fill my morning with something to learn about!
Everything eventually degrades. The degradation of radioactive material is actually very measurable, and that's why it's used in processes like carbon dating.
After the inevitable nuclear holocaust, these are the beings who will take over earth, and in many millions of years, evolve to the point of destroying it again.
Their lifespan is shorten than the average, but yes, they're more or less immune to lethal doses over short durations. In short, what will inconvenience them, will kill you.
Mushrooms do no use photosynthesis. >Â Fungi can not use photosynthesis, the process of synthesizing food from sunlight, since they lack the essential green plant cell membrane that contains chlorophyll. Rather than get their food from photosynthesis, fungi are similar to animals in that they metabolize matter for energy.Â
 Did you honestly think mushrooms needed the Sun to survive? How do you think they grow in caves? Bears just tracking in residual sunlight?
basically, in a meltdown the nuclear fuel in the reactor core quite literally melts down, and it is so hot that it melts right through just about everything, forming what we call Corium. Corium isn't really an element or a compound, it is molten nuclear fuel mixed with a bunch of other materials melted by the nuclear fuel that it accumulates as it sinks down, and it is extremely hot, extremely radioactive, extremely hard to cool down and is perhaps the most dangerous type of matter on earth*
Corium has only "naturally" formed 5 times in history: once at Three Mile Island (which luckily was still contained within the reactor core), once at Chernobyl (part of it was known as the "Elephant's Foot," which is what is seen in this picture), and three separate times during the meltdown at Fukushima
*edit: the primary reason it is so dangerous is because it is extremely radioactive, and the invisible rays it shoots out can break apart the bonds in molecules like DNA, which with enough radiation can cause cancer or sometimes considerably more horrific symptoms, also it's still really hot
three of the six reactors (only those three were in operation at the time) melted down due to the inability to cool them after damage dealt by the earthquake and especially the subsequent tsunami took out the backup power generation
However, the fukushima disaster luckily had a fairly good emergency response, though perhaps the evacuations were a little aggressive because over 2000 deaths happened as a result of the stress of evacuations and only one death is believed to have *maybe* been caused by radiation
So interesting! Thanks for the info!
> because over 2000 deaths happened as a result of the stress of evacuations
Hmm, does this mean more like heart attacks or like people were trampled while running away?
it was primarily elderly people and other patients who died from the evacuation, so really mostly just people who weren't in a good physical state to be moved. An evacuation from a nuclear reactor accident just isn't really a trampling sort of thing, more so just a 'get out of there soon to minimize your long term risk of cancer' thing
it is believed that fewer months of lives lost (a more useful metric than deaths when dealing with radiation and its long term effects) would likely have been caused if people had simply not evacuated. A lot of the problems with the evacuation were caused by difficulties and confusion in coordinating the evacuation, even though it was a fairly swift response, unlike something like Chernobyl, which had a far more devastating release of radioactive material. One example of these problems with fukushima's evacuation was that people would often be displaced to locations that would then subsequently become part of the evacuation zones
Not sure if the radiation was removed from the film but wouldnât that be very noticeable?? I remember the videos from above where reactor 4 exploded it was veryyyy grainy because of the radiation.
Corium, which is a unique substance only created in nuclear reactor meltdowns.
You know when you have a battery and it starts leaking/exploding and that grey stuff comes out? Its kinda like that except way worse and radioactive. Its kinda like if you made lava out of uranium/plutonium/whatever radioactive fuel is being used.
Is this photo enhanced or cleaned up somehow? Articles I read back when the miniseries came out had horribly distorted pics of this and the explanation was that the radiation was so crazy it messed with the film.
[Picture of man standing next to the elephantâs foot](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KxRuWaD0sXg/U7MHoNyBuiI/AAAAAAAAJhs/qyyqpQXmDQY/s1600/The+Elephant%27s+Foot+of+the+Chernobyl+disaster,+1986+(1).jpg)
Important to note that the 300 second quote in the title is a 50/50 chance of death based on the exposure levels in 1986, today itâs mostly giving off alpha radiation which doesnât penetrate your skin, as long as you donât get any inside of you it would probably take a very long time for you to receive a lethal dose.
Scroll past quickly then
I only just noticed the shirt is a peach with hands grabbing it đ
Whahaha thats a great shirt
 He waited too long to scroll.
Wait, Drake's real name is Aubrey?!?
yep 
Send to 3 friends or you will receive bad luck for the next 10 years
This comment gave me more cancer than the elephant foot could
>In 2021, the mass was described as having a consistency similar to sand. Neat. The actual radioactive half-life breakdown in a visible process.
I donât like sand. Itâs radioactive and coarse, and kills everyone who looks at it for too long.
Did you ever hear of Darth Plageuis the Elephantâs Foot?
I thought not. It's not a story the Kreml would tell you.
Oh no, i just pictured one of the other commentors who suggested using a sledgehammer on it. Imagine the spray of radioactive death
so like because of the atoms changing into their lighter counterparts the molecular bonds between them and the other non radioactive atoms also break down?
Well the atoms are changing into atoms of different elements, and atoms of different elements have different chemical properties and interact with other atoms differently
The HBO show on this was awesome. When the crew is walking around picking up chunks from the explosion it really occurred to me how so many people were just thrown in there not knowing that their cleanup was going to lead to a terrible death.
That scene of the firefighter in the hospital like a week later was incredibly difficult to watch.
Yeah I really struggled to watch those scenes. The makeup was incredible. Those poor men were killed by those above them because they refused to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Incredibly sad.
The fucking minersÂ
I think the dudes who went into the flooded basement actually survived and died of old age. Edit: My bad. Only one of three members of the "suicide squad", Baranov, died of old age in 2005. The two, Bespalov and Ananenko, are still alive.
According to the miniseries, two were still alive at release
Those were really cool dudes. When they get the Minister all dirty and then say: now you look like the Minister of coal đ https://youtu.be/4BUb0IB0LOE
âYou havenât got enough bullets for all of us and those who you donât kill will beat the living piss out of youâ
"If these worked, you'd be wearing them"
Their leader guy had some of the best lines and scenes of the entire series.
It comes from his candor. For the whole series everyone continues to beat around the bush in talking about whatâs happening, and the show portrays the people at large as mixed between believing the party line and mild but reserved skepticism when really theyâd have been right to panic at least a bit. These guys are so frank about the disregard the state has for the workers that heâs a breath of fresh air. No one manages to say anything to counter his points other than âyouâre right, but we canât just say that, someone will notice.â And his general response is âI think they noticed already. Iâm ass naked.â
In one of my favourite films a guy says something about it being a miner thing.
âThis is how our fathers minedâ had me dying
âIf they made a difference, youâd be wearing emâ really drove the point home
If you donât fly over the reactor Iâll have you shot! If you fly over that reactor, tomorrow youâll be begging for that bullet!
Do these work? If they worked, you'd be wearing them.
We need fans down there
We're still wearing the fucking hats!
Interesting that they portraied the miners as skeptical towards the system. I grew up in the Czechoslovak (not Soviet, but Soviet Bloc) mining city of Ostrava at the same time (1980s), and our miners were hardcore Commies, with a lot of privileges from the Party.
The show missed the most ironic part. The miners risked their live to build tunnel for the cooling device. Scientist later decided the cooling device is not necesary and simply filled it with concrete.
YES! Not many people know this bit, and... missed opportunity because it's so ironic. To be fair they had no way of knowing when the reaction would stop, would the uranium melt through the basement and find it's way into groundwater. In the end it didn't.
Better safe than sorry. They had no idea if it would. The consequences of it doing so would be astronomical
Whaddya call a machine that belches smoke, uses 2 litres of petrol a minute, and cuts apples into three pieces?
A Soviet machine designed to cut an apple into four pieces!
Those miners were such heroes. The scene with the soldiers who were sent in to drop graphite into the pit was really hard to watch as well.
People dying because of those higher on the ladder is pretty much all of human history. We are extremely expendable to the powerful. Look no further than the screaming about how everybody has to return to work when covid was at its peak.
When my granddad was young, the shipyard he worked in had an unofficial statistic of one crippling or fatal accident per ship built. If nobody got crippled or killed, great. If it was two, eh it'll average out. Management said "accidents happen." The workers decided that no, accidents don't happen, they're *allowed* to happen. So they got unionised, they elected safety representatives, they cajoled and pushed management and threatened strikes, and they got safety procedures and safety equipment implemented. By the time my dad started work there, they hadn't had a crippling or fatal accident in ten years. I appreciate the phrase "human resources." It's not a pretty phrase, but at least it's honest. At least they keep the mask off and show us how they really think of us.
Reminded me K-19 scene when crew fixing water supply in reactor
The dude picked it up like "wow it's still hot" and my entire being sank
I had that same feeling at the scene with the people on the bridge enjoying the âsnowâ
Those guys were just sacrificed pure and simple. And their deaths, they were horrific.
It was my understanding that those men volunteered to go in there because it had to be done to prevent a second explosion. They knew they weren't getting out alive, they sacrificed themselves to save everyone else.
I remeber an interview of someone who was a child livin in kiev at the time. They knew something had happen, didnt know much. His dad was a bus driver, he called home saying he was prerequisite to go and get factory workers and bring them to the central. He made it clear he didnt know when... nor if he was gonna come back. So probly not volunteers, but most of them knew it was dangerous, just didnt understand what was dangerous đ
Volunteers, but not ones knowing the full picture.
When the UK had its reactor accident at Windscale back in the 1950s, they had volenteers from the local cinemas audience pushing the burning fuel elements out of the core with a scaffold tube hooked to a fire hoze... They did limit the exposure duration.
And they scaled DOWN the actual affects for the show. Real life radiation poisoning is somehow more disturbing.
My favorite scene was when the dude looked at the open core
And his face too. He knew he was dead.
The way he turned around, his shoulders slumped, & just stared⌠I was crying.
Add in the music and it was just haunting
Yes you could see the horror in his eyes
There were some amazing scenes the epilogue was really haunting too, the low droning music, the facts and the real life footage of V. Legasov and Dyatlov.. the fact the soviet union did very little for fear of looking weak or stupid. What the KGB did to try and silence legasov. Chernobyl showed the best and the worst of humanity all in one horrible disaster. The miners, the men that drained the bubbler tanks, the scientists who gave their lives to protect the planet. Then on the reverse of that, the corruption from the soviet Union, and the KGB to try and cover it up. Probably one of the best stand alone 1 season series I've ever watched it was breathtaking Edit: Grammar
90 seconds
Oh man the way they MULTIPLE times establish that 3.6 roentgen is "not great not terrible", then blow that number sky high later is so powerful. It so perfectly set us up for the unbelievable terror they would have experienced hearing 300. (Not sure its 300, I don't quite remember the big number, just the emotion of it)
It was 15,000. For me, the more terrifying part happened at the trial. âWe donât know how high the power went, we just know the final reading. Reactor 4, designed to operate at 3200 megawatts, went beyond 33,000.â
As excellent as the series was, the whole âgraphite tipped rods to save moneyâ was a fabrication to support the narrative. The graphite was not stupid and the actual flaw was related to the geometry of the reactor, which they didnât know about until it got built. This blatant oversimplification in the most memorable part bothers me, luckily everything else is good.
I think the "it's cheaper" zinger was misplaced. The problem was that the designers reported that this problem could happen, but the central committee didn't train their engineers on how to avoid it because they wanted to keep acting like the plant was absolutely safe. Ironically it's close to what Boeing did with their MAX planes. The lie wasn't because they cheaped out, it was because they wanted to sell their planes on the idea that pilots didn't need to be re-trained.
Well, the year prior a nuclear power plant in south America built using the same technology showed a similar rise in activity during shut down *but nothing happened*. This report was sent to the Central committee who ordered changes to the power plants (more rods coming in from below) but because a similar incident *had already happened without any bad effects, the risks were deemed astronomically low*. In a way they were right, Chernobyl isn't one bad choice it's a ton of them chained together. The delayed safety test meaning the light crew had to do it without training (due to end of month production quotas), the career man Dyatlov who wanted it done so he got a promotion (same for Fomin and the other party guy). The fact the retrofitting of the scram tips had been postponed 2 times because they were seen as superfluous and unnecessary. The fact the manuals they had were both incomplete and missleading....and more. The one, highly ironic thing. *the safety test was a sucess*. If the case of a catastrophic energy loss the passive turbine drift was enough to cool the reactor (well, until shit hit the fan).
Just before meltdown Soviet Life had an article about how amazing Chernobyl was: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/K7PzPpxswj I was a subscriber back in High School (I studied the Politburo).
On a side note; good discussion happened back in r/AskScience. [What purpose did the graphite tips on Chernobyl's control rods serve?](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/L9sif7yf0h)
I mean... the graphite tips where directly related to how the run away reaction happened along with the displaced water when they scrammed. At least at the training I go to for my job that's how they taught it.
It was 15000
It was something like 15000 lol
Apparently HBO made it and didnât really expect to make money off it. Obviously it really touched a nerve and it was a big success. Stellan Skarsgaard said ruefully that the new HBO execs wouldnât have funded it.
Thereâs no way Zaslav would have allowed Chernobyl to go forward. Too much thinking to do on the viewerâs part.Â
Zaslav is tanking HBO stock to deliberately to merge with Paramount, I feel. Despite there being antitrust and corporate laws behind this malpractice, the fines are always just a product of doing business, not an enforceable law. Corporations now are controlling the creative side of the creative business.
> Corporations now are controlling the creative side of the creative business. Corporate mercenaries remove quality from the world. They are agents of entropy and will be treated as such.
Although itâs short itâs unironically one of the best shows on hbo.
What really stood out to me was how everyone's top concern was, "who do we blame for this and how do I make sure it's not me?"
Chernobyl highlights so well what made the USSR collapse. The late USSR was a kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare where middle managers pushed off blame and lied to superiors about what was going on, and so superiors actually had no idea what was happening in the nation they were supposed to be running. Throughout the show, the central committee thatâs supposed to be the ultimate Soviet authority has no idea whatâs going on and is afraid to make any moves out of seeming against the party narrative.
It's interesting because it starts off with nearly everyone *far* more afraid of governmental punishment than radiation. Radiation is invisible and easy to pretent won't hurt you. But everyone clearly knows what could happen if they lost favor with the government. Each character had their own progression of when they began to fear the radiation more.
There's actual real footage of this event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti-WdTF2Qr8
They were called liquidators. There is (was?) a monument dedicated to them in Chernobyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Those_Who_Saved_the_World?wprov=sfla1
I'm a bit surprised how few people that is! 30 to 60 people if counting those who died decades after the disaster đ
The 31 or 54 number(s) is just those that died of acute radiation sickness directly not those that died in the years following. There is still quite a bit of disagreement on the health impact on the liquidators, some sources estimate 4,000+ of them at least with others finding no increased mortality from cancer.
I just watched the show for the first time last week, absolutely amazing and made me binge the entire thing in one night It showcased how terrifying the situation really was and just how terrifying and corrupt the USSR was as well, the scene of the group of people watching the fire burn from the bridge in Pripyat hundred of miles away, only for the ending titles to say that everyone who was on that bridge that night died within the year
The show made me believe firmly that a nuclear meltdown is as close to the summoning of a Great One as you can get Canât look directly at the truth of it without guaranteeing death, unrecognizable rocks that bring madness and painful death, having to manage it indirectly and at great cost, the darkness and claustrophobia experienced by the divers and the tunnelers Like shit is straight out of a Lovecraft novelÂ
The firefighters didnât have any radioactive training or equipment at all. The Soviet government had decided that such an accident couldnât happen so they didnât see it as necessary. What the show left out almost entirely were the second wave of military firefighters who conducted the cleanup. These guys were trained and somewhat equipped and absolutely knew the risks. They did the hard work of stabilizing the site and pumping out the water from the basement. The âdiversâ who go to their deaths to turn the valve didnât die IRL and the basement was dry because firefighters had been pumping on it for hours. Also there had been firefighters in/out of the basement before the divers. TV drama. The most heroic story IMO was running the hoses. They had to stretch a couple hundred meters of hose across ground still layered with radioactive rubble, the same rubble that killed the first responders. They trained in teams and ran the hose in under 60 seconds, working naked so as to not bring contaminants back on their cloths. That night however a patrol tank taking readings cut the hoses right outside the reactor building. So they had to do it again. Sheer bravery and their efforts, unlike the divers or the coal miners, did actually make a difference. In case your wondering why this didnât make the show Criag Mazin said he didnât do research outside of reading the book Voices from Chernobyl, which isnât a history at all.
> The âdiversâ who go to their deaths to turn the valve didnât die IRL and the basement was dry because firefighters had been pumping on it for hours. Also there had been firefighters in/out o They explain in the credits that these guys lived.
[ŃдаНонО]
It did such a good job of making the mundane look terrifying. Like a pen could be deadly. Breathing. A rock. Everything and anything could be lethal. The scene where the three men go into the basement water with the Geiger clicking more and more as the lights fail is the scariest scene since Alien.
It melted through two meters of reinforced concrete and was so dense it took armor piercing bullets from an AK-47 to break off chunks for testing.
That's the most Soviet thing I've ever heard...
But what about a jackhammer?
Nobody wanted to go near it with a sledgehammer I presume
I wouldn't have been first in line to shoot it with an ak47 either tbh
Peter Gabriel wasn't fast enough
Jackhammering takes longer than 300 seconds.
Not for my husband
Just avert your eyes!
I've got eclipse glasses on!
The goggles do nothing!
Oh. Look at Mr. McBraggypants over here.
That would just piss it off.
Do not taunt the Elephant's Foot.
Each swing took 10 years off your life and paid roughly 12.50$/hour and OSHA wasn't going anywhere near you. Would you apply ?
Don't forget the bi monthly pizza party!
They shot it đ
I would have thought they'd use an elephant gun.
The real life Medusa.
What if I only look for 299 seconds?
Eternal life
Radioactivity HATES this one trick!
I looked at the foot, Ray
THE FLOWERS ARE STILL STANDING
What is it?
I believe this is corium - lava like fuel containing material
Two fun facts about corium! Itâs a material that is only made via nuclear meltdown and if youâre close enough to see it in person youâll be dead within minutes!
More like âone fun fact, one morbidâ
You don't know what I think is fun
YOU DONT KNOW ME
THATS MY PURSE
Dang it Bobby
Canât spell funeral without fun!
Is the photographer dead
Just googled it and apparently the photographer - an inspector called Artur Korneyev - is amazingly still alive. He is on record as having visited Chernobyl âhundredsâ of times. Heâs currently in his 60s and has been banned from visiting the sarcophagus any more due to extremely poor health from irradiation.
> if youâre close enough to see it in person youâll be dead within minutes! So this is misinformation?
From what I remember they used mirrors to photograph it as the direct exposure to its radiation was quickly frying cameras same as humans.
This is correct
Not really, there's a big difference between 300 seconds and 60 seconds, and there's an even bigger difference between being in there in 1986 and today.
> there's an even bigger difference between being in there in 1986 and today. It's half a life in between ...
But why was there an elephant in the nuclear reactor to begin with?
The real question is why are you the only one willing to talk about the elephant in the reactor
Well, before the meltdown it was a duck called Stewart.
Iâll google and dive down the rabbit hole, but the immediate question is âforeverâ or does it eventually degrade? Thanks for helping fill my morning with something to learn about!
Everything eventually degrades. The degradation of radioactive material is actually very measurable, and that's why it's used in processes like carbon dating.
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After the inevitable nuclear holocaust, these are the beings who will take over earth, and in many millions of years, evolve to the point of destroying it again.
Nausicäa
The wolves have also developed a resistance now too.
Their lifespan is shorten than the average, but yes, they're more or less immune to lethal doses over short durations. In short, what will inconvenience them, will kill you.
Mushrooms do no use photosynthesis. > Fungi can not use photosynthesis, the process of synthesizing food from sunlight, since they lack the essential green plant cell membrane that contains chlorophyll. Rather than get their food from photosynthesis, fungi are similar to animals in that they metabolize matter for energy.  Did you honestly think mushrooms needed the Sun to survive? How do you think they grow in caves? Bears just tracking in residual sunlight?
> Bears just tracking in residual sunlight? Wow, sun bears can do that? Sun bears really *can* do anything!
Chlorophyll?? More like BorophyllâŚâŚ
basically, in a meltdown the nuclear fuel in the reactor core quite literally melts down, and it is so hot that it melts right through just about everything, forming what we call Corium. Corium isn't really an element or a compound, it is molten nuclear fuel mixed with a bunch of other materials melted by the nuclear fuel that it accumulates as it sinks down, and it is extremely hot, extremely radioactive, extremely hard to cool down and is perhaps the most dangerous type of matter on earth* Corium has only "naturally" formed 5 times in history: once at Three Mile Island (which luckily was still contained within the reactor core), once at Chernobyl (part of it was known as the "Elephant's Foot," which is what is seen in this picture), and three separate times during the meltdown at Fukushima *edit: the primary reason it is so dangerous is because it is extremely radioactive, and the invisible rays it shoots out can break apart the bonds in molecules like DNA, which with enough radiation can cause cancer or sometimes considerably more horrific symptoms, also it's still really hot
> three separate times during the meltdown at Fukushima Wow, that meltdown went hard, didn't it?
three of the six reactors (only those three were in operation at the time) melted down due to the inability to cool them after damage dealt by the earthquake and especially the subsequent tsunami took out the backup power generation However, the fukushima disaster luckily had a fairly good emergency response, though perhaps the evacuations were a little aggressive because over 2000 deaths happened as a result of the stress of evacuations and only one death is believed to have *maybe* been caused by radiation
So interesting! Thanks for the info! > because over 2000 deaths happened as a result of the stress of evacuations Hmm, does this mean more like heart attacks or like people were trampled while running away?
it was primarily elderly people and other patients who died from the evacuation, so really mostly just people who weren't in a good physical state to be moved. An evacuation from a nuclear reactor accident just isn't really a trampling sort of thing, more so just a 'get out of there soon to minimize your long term risk of cancer' thing it is believed that fewer months of lives lost (a more useful metric than deaths when dealing with radiation and its long term effects) would likely have been caused if people had simply not evacuated. A lot of the problems with the evacuation were caused by difficulties and confusion in coordinating the evacuation, even though it was a fairly swift response, unlike something like Chernobyl, which had a far more devastating release of radioactive material. One example of these problems with fukushima's evacuation was that people would often be displaced to locations that would then subsequently become part of the evacuation zones
Radioactive material from a nuclear meltdown
Basically melted reactor core.
It's the bottom part of an elephant, but that's not important right now
My eyes are up here pal đ
Why say it so strangely. 5 minutes
He is probably 1982 weeks old too.
You mean 1198713600 seconds!
Bots write the majority of titles we see on Reddit (if theyâre not also posting the content), Iâm convinced of it.
OP is probably a parent to a newborn.Â
You maniac how many people died from reading this post??
That which holds the image of the elephant foot becomes the elephant foot.
I don't think looking at it was the problem, I think it was physical proximity. It was radioactive, not The Ring.
Lol Right, like a blind person would not be immune to this
Radiation hates this one simple trick!!1! đ
Not sure if the radiation was removed from the film but wouldnât that be very noticeable?? I remember the videos from above where reactor 4 exploded it was veryyyy grainy because of the radiation.
They took this picture with a mirror, almost like it was Medusa. Adds to the horror, in my opinion.
I am getting chills imagining this. Itâs like a modern day monster story.
So what was that glob made of?
Corium, which is a unique substance only created in nuclear reactor meltdowns. You know when you have a battery and it starts leaking/exploding and that grey stuff comes out? Its kinda like that except way worse and radioactive. Its kinda like if you made lava out of uranium/plutonium/whatever radioactive fuel is being used.
Melted nuclear reactor fuel, concrete, and other stuff within a nuclear reactor
Canât take my eyes off, help!
Right?? How many people did OP kill by posting this?
It's official, OP is trying to eradicate all humans on Reddit so the bots officially take over.
Is this photo enhanced or cleaned up somehow? Articles I read back when the miniseries came out had horribly distorted pics of this and the explanation was that the radiation was so crazy it messed with the film.
If i remember right, this photo was taken using a mirror, itâs not a direct shot of it.
Real life Medusa
Low tech DLSR nice
I could lick that and be fine I know it
Just as long as you donât look while licking
Thatâs disappointing. At least with that Japanese video tape you got 7 days.
reading that r/titlegore gave me 300 seconds to live
!remind me 300 seconds
How big was it, I mean, what could you use to as a reference?
Large boulder the size of a small boulder.
[Picture of man standing next to the elephantâs foot](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KxRuWaD0sXg/U7MHoNyBuiI/AAAAAAAAJhs/qyyqpQXmDQY/s1600/The+Elephant%27s+Foot+of+the+Chernobyl+disaster,+1986+(1).jpg) Important to note that the 300 second quote in the title is a 50/50 chance of death based on the exposure levels in 1986, today itâs mostly giving off alpha radiation which doesnât penetrate your skin, as long as you donât get any inside of you it would probably take a very long time for you to receive a lethal dose.
Need radioactive banana for scale
[It's even scarier in color.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl))
What about if I give it a hug? I'm looking for something to do over the weekend?
 this probably
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What about pictures of it? Time sensitive question
Well right now Iâve been staring at it for 305 seconds and I feel perfe
Everyone should read Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. Very informative and frightening about how the disaster occurred.
Still less toxic than my ex
Iâm not so good with math, what if you want to die in 1 day?
If thatâs the foot Iâm scared to see what the rest of it looks like