Why Isn't Hiroshima a Nuclear Wasteland Like Chernobyl?
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
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I've often wondered, why different nuclear disasters in history have had some different outcomes. Chernobyl is still deserted and uninhabitable for thousands of years, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki are beautiful thriving Metropolises. But why? What happened in these disasters that have lead to such different outcomes all these years later? The engineer in me just had to figure this out, so I got digging. Let's Figure this out together!
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Chapters
0:00 - Introduction
0:30 - History of the Bombs
2:00 - Chernobyl: What Happened
5:00 - The Difference
7:10 - Nuclear Fission
8:00 - The differences
11:50 - Quantities
what we'll cover
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Hey so you just straight up stole my title AND thumbnail huh?
dam he really did
lol
uhh yeah i just came here because i was flabbergasted at the audacity and confidence put forth with his theft.
Wow omg
oh gosh you are right!
Heart attack? FDR's last words were "“I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.”, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Ahahaha, yes. That is quite hilarious you remember that, I remember things I've done bad in my life I wish I could forget
Honestly this is on the minor side for what he says wrongly with confidence
Yes yes
@@Pr0toPoTaT0 what are you talking about
@TopatTom Beats me honestly, that was a month ago. Maybe a girl I threw down a well, maybe a affair. Who knows.
I was fortunate to visit Chernobyl in 2006, 20 years after the event. Much of the destruction of Pripyat is mainly down to lack of maintenance. There was no specific damage to Pripyat from the Chernobyl explosion. The buildings were so poorly constructed that after 20 years of not being looked after, they are disintegrating - tiles falling off walls, windows falling out of their frames. Any metalwork is just rusted away. Most interesting is the return of nature. They had a sports arena, still there, but the sports field looks like a forest with hundreds of well developed trees growing out of the field. You also see the roads breaking up as trees grow through the asphalt. The forests around the site are also well populated with wild animals - wolves and bears had been sighted when we were there. As someone who worked my whole career in nuclear power station operations, I was appalled by the culture that allowed such an event to happen. On a positive note, the formation of WANO (World Association of Nuclear Operators) following Chernobyl has resulted in much better sharing of best practice, whether thats in training of staff, maintenance, management or any of a wide area of aspects of power station operation. Chernobyl had a flaw in its design - known about by the Russian hierarchy - but not transmitted to the operators, and not addressed in their training. Basically they were set up to fail, and the management style of dictatorship didn't allow for anyone to question anything.
The fact that there was no mass death of animals or plant life in chernobyl shows that there was no radiation danger at all, the government just wanted the people off the land. blessed be to the babushkas who see through the propaganda.
Not exactly surprising from a country that genocided its own people, basically the same thing in china now with thousands of abandoned cities. Its kinda sad to see. @@lenvap8584
It's not like there was a shortage of neutron damage going on before the remains of reactor core 4 were covered by concrete, so its no wonder the infrastructure degraded so quickly afterward.
"Chernobyl had a flaw in its design - known about by the Russian hierarchy"
*Soviet hierarchy.
It may seem on the face of it like the term Soviet and Russia are interchangeable, but they are not.
Non Russian eastern European Soviets worked in Russia and vice versa.
That is why there is a large Russian population still in Ukraine, and basically every nation occupied in the USSR Cold War era following WW2.
(which is why Russians are also the largest minority ethnic population of Germany today)
People there I’ve spoken to say, it was human error. The flaw was it left no room for human error, not enough automatic fail safe redundant safeties. Result BOOM-SKY:/ Chernobyl basically led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Wars today. Maybe better in some ways worse in others. Every action has a reaction , no pun intended. Stay Safe ☢️ may you date a hot Radium Girl… 👧🏻
Thank you, mervyn. Your comment added to this video in a most coherent and helpful manner. I appreciate the information you provided.
I do hope that anyone who thinks, or has been taught, that Communism is the way to go and better that Capitalism and a Free Society, watches this and realizes it is not and that nothing has changed. It is and always has been a disaster for every society who has ever tried it.
There is no "right way" to do Communism. It has always failed and always will. Even China abandoned most of the precepts of communism because it was such a total failure economically. It is simply anti-human nature and has and will always fail.
You're mostly correct, but there's even more to it. I was ironically operating a nuclear reactor in the middle of the Pacific on a submarine full of nuclear warheads when Chernobyl happened, so I'm reasonably well versed in this stuff. The reason Plutonium is such a desired weapons material, and the reason you need much less of it, has little or nothing to do with the "mechanism". Shotgun-type weapons are easy and almost foolproof, which is why Little Boy was already built before the Trinity test proved the much-more-complicated Implosion-type weapon would work. What makes Plutonium-239 so good is that it releases on average 2.7 neutrons per fission, while Uranium-235 only releases 2.43 average neutrons per fission. Since chain reactions are really just a numbers game, that makes it easier to create a highly supercritical reaction using far less material. The vast majority of the Chernobyl core wasn't even U-235, it was overwhelmingly U-238, since the reactor was based on a Plutonium breeder design that irradiated U-238 to make Plutonium. U-238 will fission, but only when hit by a very fast neutron, while U-235 can fission with both fast and moderated (slow) neutrons. The other thing to keep in mind is that nuclear fuel isn't highly radioactive, or it would decay before it ever got used. It's really more of a chemical toxicity hazard than a radioactive one. What is left after you fission it however, is radioactive as all hell, and and Chernobyl was nearing the end of it's core life. That meant it's core was chock full of Cesium and Strontium goodness just waiting for a chance to visit the European countryside. The explosion itself wasn't nearly as powerful as a nuclear bomb, put it was still a nuclear event, peaking at several hundred times the rated power of the core. The Hydrogen and steam explosions were icing on the cake. What remained was a superheated mess, both from the power excursion and from the normal 7% residual decay heat from the most radioactive and shortest-lived fission products. All that heat was trapped in the remains of the core, with no operable cooling systems to remove it, so it got hot enough to vaporize tons of those longer-lived fission products before the Russians could bury it under 5,000 tons of Borated sand. Pretty much a "fallout factory outlet"...
The thing to note, the danger of the radiation is mostly from ingestion. Alpha and beta won't do much as long as it stays _OUTSIDE_ the body. (a few inches of air will stop alpha. and a sheet of tin foil can block beta - i.e. your clothes are a pretty good moderator.) But once inside the body, it's fractions of a mm from important things and will mess them up.
What a cool comment to stumble on! wow!!
@@jfbeam Yeah, the Alpha particles are very damaging, but because Uranium has such a long half-life, the actual radioactivity isn't that high for a small inhalation dose. If it was highly radioactive, it would be extremely dangerous to mine for, and we wouldn't be using it for tank guns without a lot of radiological controls.
@@jimfrazier8611 Uranium and Plutonium are biologically toxic - period. The point about radiation (bomb vs. oops) is that both create other highly radioactive things, and can make the things around them radioactive. So it's not just the source material one has to thing about.
(If you inject plutonium, you won't glow in your casket, but you will be dead all the same.)
Another thing to remember is that all the rector material did not blow out the top. There's quite a bit of the core in the basement of the building. It's known as the "Elephant's Foot".
That exposed material is still radioactive as all get out! Look up the film sometime. The grainieness of the film is not due to the film stock speed, it's the atomic nuclei impacting the film!
I lived in Hiroshima from 1996~2002 and have friends there who are "hibakusha" (atomic bomb survivors). Indeed, it is a beautiful city with wonderful people.
Do you know if there were many birth defects?
There were not any birth defects, just burns and scarring, cause it was a firebomb attack. The rumour that an atomic bomb was dropped on hiroshima as made up by the american government to convince the japanese government to surrender. The evidence is if you look it up, the americans only allowed one single reporter to travel to hiroshima to report on it and the plant life and people in hiroshima was perfectly healthy again after about two weeks. If you look at the photos all the other cities that wwere firebombed have the exact same destroyed appearance, plenty of buildings ere left standing in hiroshima. You would imagine the atomic fallout from a blast would wipe out all plant life including seeds, they even estimate atomic blasts could cause radiation for decades, I remember they used to say that the radioactive fallout would last thousands of years, but they have continually dropped that number as more and more historians have figured out that it was just ww2 propaganda. @@The_Reality_Filter
@@The_Reality_Filter Bomb _survivors,_ they weren't born from survivors, unless L4JP elaborates for the both of us.
@@LongDeadArtist i think that The reality filter meant that if any babies born at that time had defects.
@@The_Reality_Filter There were long term effects in the survivors, including those who were in utero at the time. Much increased rates of various cancers, including the weird cancers. There don't seem to have been an increase in actual birth defects in what I read.
I've been wondering, now that we know that the grandchildren of Scandinavians who survived famines have epigenetic effects from the grandparents experience, how the grandchildren of the survivors have been affected.
Stayed in Hiroshima recently. It's a beautiful city with its own identity, very different to others in Japan. Loved it.
I too was struck by the modernity of Hiroshima compared to other Japanese cities. Of course nothing there is older than 1945.
@@jgrenwod 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Well, you didn't get that part:
Even 80 years after the bombs fell, TODAY, a statistically high amount of deformities occur on babies. Many of those fates decide that these children can't take a breath and enjoy life like we do... and write on CZcams. They had no chance! And these are direct effects of the bomb. Yeah, some call it "indirect", but I don't care about playing it down. That's propaganda and terminology. Also cancer rates are through the roof. That Japanese are a "proud nation" doesn't make it better. Born with disabilities you are stigmatized and as a women ... well, you don't deliver normal babies? ... YOUR FAULT! (I'm over-exaggerating. Of course my fellow Japanese citizens are good people. Just saying ... there are problems in every society!).
I really do not think, why a family that you do not know (or they you), should give you information about their Miscarriages. You are a tourist. You are a stranger. That isn't the business of strangers at all. Have good holidays!:)
this video is total BS. Chernobyl, while uninhabited by humans, now has a thriving ecosystem. No animals have two heads or seven legs, they all appear to be normal and living that way.
Between the fact the bomb exploded far above the ground (so there was relatively little fallout) and the fact a typhoon in September 1945 washed away most of the radioactive topsoil from the city, that's why they were able to rebuild Hiroshima so quickly.
Or the city was firebombed and they just made up the atomic bomb story to win the war. How can there be very little fallout? would the radioactive material not rain down upon the city? If all of that radioactive topsoil was washed away then where did it go? Surely there would have been plants and animals dying around the city in every direction. Arent they always telling us to be afraid of radiation clouds traveling to nearby cities? Im just a bit confused cause we always get told different things.
It also helps that nuclear weapons by design don't just blanket an area in radioactive fallout as they use most of the fissile material in the reaction whereas the explosion of Reactor 4 at Chernobyl simply coated the entire area in unspent radioactive material.
Weapons that deliberately irradiate an area are often called "dirty bombs" instead of nuclear weapons
10:20 The additional fact about air-burst explosions is that the reflection off the ground actually doubles the strength of the outward traveling blast wave, increasing the destructive potential of the bomb. ANOTHER thing most people would find interesting is that it was only Reactor #4 that had the meltdown and explosion, the OTHER three reactors were virtually untouched, so after decontamination THEY REOPENED (Reactor #1 on 1 October, 1986, Reactor #2 on 5 November, 1986, & Reactor #3 on 4 December, 1987), and KEPT OPERATING. Reactor #2 had a fire in 1991 and was shut down, Reactor #1 shut down in November 1996, and the final reactor, #3, was finally shut down on 15 December 2000 ... OVER FOURTEEN YEARS after the disaster.
The real irony on chernobyl is that because of the exclusion zone and no human involvment, it is now one of the most nature like places on earth.
Hah! Nicely put! But, now that you mention it, the return of nature caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, however brief, is even more food for thouhgt.
Nature would return quite quickly if the government run corporations like monsanto and shell oil, which is owned by the dutch monarchy or rockefeller oil industry in america hadnt taken over everything. Now they are mass mining cobalt and trying to create all of these electrric style engines that produce electromagnetic radiation that kills all of the plants and animals. All of that "green" energy they claim to be trying to make meanwhile they raid the homes of organic farmers and steal from inventors like stanley meyer. I mean they could have allowed us to keep moonshine engines from back in the past but they had to get the government to ban alcohol to stop that. @@Israel_Two_Bit
That's not true, we have places where human not really go or built anything... And radioactivity is a danger to all life. I'm not sure how many animals live there, but for sure many died and suffered there in the years...
@@Israel_Two_Bit No.
The Russian invasion in Feb. '22 made the place a hot mess again. No pun intended. They were digging dugouts and tank cover bringing up the buried radioactive fallout back up to the surface again. Allegedly some RU soldiers got radiation exposure/sickness during their occupation of the Chernobyl area. Retards the lot of them.
Of interest. At 3:32 there is a picture of the exploded reactor 4. In the end of the building not destroyed, is reactor 3. It never ceased operations throughout the disaster, and it was in continuous operation until the year 2000 when is was closed partially due to international pressure. In 1991 there was a turbine fire in reactor 2 plant, causing it to be closed permanently. Unit 1 was later closed in 1996. The decommissioning of all 4 reactors is slated to be completed by 2065. They are currently looking at the possibility of upgrading the sarcophagus of reactor 3, which is currently in its 2nd iteration since the accident on April 26, 1986 at 1:23:58 am.
Sorry, the picture is at 3:19
Love the input!
So if chernobyl and it surrounding lands and homes had to be evacuated due to radioactive fallout risks, how were they able to keep people working at the nearby building and keep it running until 2000? I thought the radiation was far too dangerous even for those in radiation suits? Also I thought radiation was heat so would the extra heat from the others melting down cause damage?
@@nickxelyt5660 strict controls on dosimeter readings. Just look it up. It’s open source knowledge that these we in operation all along.
I was interested in an answear as well so looked into it, on reddit people talked about it
Keeping the reactors "....was not exactly about power shortages or some perverted communist pride. The nuclear power plant cannot be just turned off and left for good. Usually (there are rare exceptions) it requires a long decommissioning procedure. In the end of that procedure all nuclear waste including spent nuclear fuel, reactor constructions, etc. should be relocated into the long-term storage facility. The whole task could take decades.
Chernobyl NPP was the first nuclear power plant with RBMK reactors eligible for the potential decommissioning. The procedure was not developed yet, but it was obvious that decommissioning of the NPP will require the same level of its decontamination as the "business as usual". The obvious choice was to exploit the remaining resource of survived reactors before decommissioning the power plant.
By the way, they almost lost the Chernobyl NPP during the first post-disaster winter. It was just insufficient heat to keep reactor cores alive."
And the way they worked there is from Quora:
"After the accident, well yes radiation levels in a large area were very high. But levels varied. Some people volunteered, some people were just sent in clueless to the danger. People did need to be sent in as there were things to be done to mitigate the radiation release.
Even for obscenely high radiation levels, working there is no problem. Living for much longer after is a problem but thats another story
For some of the more radioactive areas where the need was great workers were given what protective suits were available then they ran to the area, worked for X seconds, then ran back for decontamination. Then others followed. Some did die."
Hope I could help! ^^ @@nickxelyt5660
You know, now that you mention it... That is a BLOODY GOOD QUESTION! Thanks for answering it. People always overlook the sheer mass involved.
I should like to add two relevant points:
First, according to my sources, LittleBoy barely made the threshold to be considered a nuclear detonation versus a nuclear deflagration. Not that a large nuclear deflagration would be discernible from a small nuclear detonation if you were at the site at the time. The difference between those two might be worth your time at a later date.
Second, as you mentioned, Chernobyl was a meltdown, not a nuclear explosion. Nuclear explosions are deliberately tailored to be as efficient as possible, that is to say, fission as much fissible material as possible before the heat and pressure buildup scatters it. Nuclear reactors on the other hand are deliberately designed to fission as ineffectively as possible while still maintaining a chain reaction, precisely to _prevent_ scattering it. Even if a nuclear reactor didn't have orders of magnitude more fissible material in it than a bomb, due to its ineffectiveness as a bomb, a much higher percentage of it would remain to be scattered in the atmosphere.
They knew before they dropped the bombs a air burst would allow the radiation to dissipate and a ground explosion wouldn’t have. They just had to prove it the initial test explosions we’re done on stands elevating the explosive mechanism. Also a air burst covers a larger area.
Yes, that's part of Ricky's argument in the video. But I think the fuel mass is even more critical. If you had spread 10 tons of radioactive fuel even at the elevation of an air burst, I'm pretty sure the fallout would have been tremendous. I mean, we're talking about orders of magnitude more radioactive debris.
@@Israel_Two_Bit This is NOT all that different than the partial burning of fossil fuel causing bigger pollution. In case of a purposeful nuclear explosion, all the fuel is used up, whereas Chornobyl is like a radioactive dirty bomb going off.
@@Israel_Two_Bit
The radiation doesn't last that long.
My old man took photos of Hiroshima not long after the blast and the radiation was of no consequence.
@@t1n4444 Yes. That's totally right. Chornobyl was just like a massive dirty bomb. My point isn't about that, but rather that the detonation height itself wasn't all that determinant in reducing fallout, but rather the amount of fuel. (unburnt fuel, as you pointed out).
Actually, there are a number of factors in play. Ground bursts tend to be nasty as they significantly irradiate the ground - and blow it all over. An air burst doesn't have much mass to irradiate (just air), and air (mostly nitrogen) doesn't stay radioactive for long. Air bursts also optimize the blast wave area. (go play with the sim at nukemap to see the effect of altitude.)
Then there's the simple fact Fat Man and Little Boy were _pounds_ of purified radioactive material. Chernobyl was tones of rather dirty reactor core material. Bombs are designed to vaporize their core - E=mc^2 mass to energy type of thing [only about a gram does all that damage!] - and Chernobyl was a bunch of core material that was absolutely never meant to ever be exposed, much less scattered over the landscape. (the short version: the stuff in the core of a nuclear power reactor is n-a-s-t-y!)
To be honest, there were times that this thought came up, but I always assumed that the bombs were peanuts compared to what happened at Chernobyl. Thank you for the enlightenment. For some reason Chernobyl has fascinated me for years. When I got my hands on the HBO Chernobyl series, I started watching at 11 pm and only went to bed at 6 am after I'd watched it all. Later I watched comparison videos (real versus HBO) and information about the elephant foot. I've watched scientific documentaries about the wildlife and I watched a video about how they put the new dome in place. Besides all this, I love watching horror movies of all kinds. But actually going to Chernobyl and visiting Pripyat feels like next level horror, a kind I don't want to experience and that has nothing to do with the radiation but with what I think (from what I watched on videos) is the most eerie, unsettling environment in the forsaken city, knowing how it all went down.
Strange we didn't see an HBO series on the H-Bombs, but I guess Chris Nolan's got us covered.
There was a documentary (Nova?) about 10 years after the Chernobyl disaster where a scientist and a camera team were among the first to go into the destroyed reactor and take readings outside of the sarcophagus. I read about it, but I couldn't watch that man and his camera crew. I'm OK with Jurassic Park but in general I don't like horror films.
Your content is so educational. I love it.
This was very interesting and fascinating. I was very intrigued given that I randomly found this. You answered a question I never thought I wanted answered. Thank you and keep up the great work.
Great Video. Looking forward to more such interesting explanations.
Amazing video. So much knowledge. Literally a knowledge bomb.
An excellent discussion and research. I learned a lot. Thanks.
This question bothered me also. Thanks for this video
I've watched a couple of videos about this topic, but this one is by far the most convincing. I don't think anyone before mentioned that massive difference in the amount of fuel!!!
Yes, that was a very interesting point!
I wish he would have mentioned the percentages of enrichment between the bomb fuel & power plant fuel. (Maybe he did and I missed it?)
What else would it be? It's pretty obvious that's why isn't it?
@@DavidHalkobombs are enriched to >95% U-235 (called weapons-grade), while the Chernobyl core was only enriched to a few %. Natural Uranium ore is about 0.7% U-235. This was mostly due to the RBMK being based on the early Soviet breeder-reactor designs, which used graphite neutron moderation to allow low-enriched fuel while breeding some of the U-238 into Plutonium (also an excellent reactor fuel if you don't want to bother chemically extracting it from the fuel). We used the same type of reactors at Hanford, which is why the separation process is still undergoing a massive cleanup effort decades later. we were just more careful not to ever let it lose cooling, and we designed our cores to never increase power if cooling was lost.
@@jimfrazier8611 - yeah… I knew the fuel in the reactor has a very low enrichment percentage, but a lot of it in an accident still made a very long lasting mess.
Contrasting that to the results of a relatively small amount of fissile material, enriched to a very high percentage, making a shorter lasting mess, is a bit counter intuitive, but it would have made the presentation more complete.
The tsunami arriving when it did, to dilute & wash out radioactive fallout, was pretty amazing. This was something I was unaware of.
@@dondrap513 That's my point! You would think it was so obvious, but most people who talk about this topic only mention the air burst and how that helps disperse radiation and how Chernobyl happened at ground level but they fail to mention that small little fact.
Well done, great animations. You are a great educator
Really insightful video. I’ve heard some of the things you describe here, but not all in one place. Thanks for the good research on this one.
I was thinking the same thing.
@@bobhill3941please consider Kyle Hill's videos on the subject! Also, if it strikes your fancy, take note of when his video on Hiroshima's recovery was released, as well as how eerily similar this new cop- I mean content is!
Thank you for your hard work on this
Great video and I have always wondered about the very questions you answered. Amazing facts and very interesting. You have a new subscriber !
Thanks Ricky, this was a fantastic video. Your content is very informative, and well delivered. Another Home run Sir, please continue with great content.
He prettier much stole the video from Kyle Hill
Shamelessly stealing not only a thumbnail, but an entire premise behind an editorial is very 2023 CZcams of you to do. Shoutout to Kyle Hill.
Ok ya this just got recommended to me and immediately I was like wait isnt that Kyle's thumbnail im about a quarter way through this and already issues in the explanation of chernobyl. Im gonna finish the video to see if its even capable of standing on its own but I doubt it. Im glad im not the only one who's noticed.
Wow it really is lmao. I was wondering why his script sounded like a highschool summary
Why post your work .it's up for grabs after that .. protect yourself by all means or someone will steal your ideas
I've wondered this myself. Thanks
I went to Hiroshima recently, very quiet compared to Tokyo. The whole time I was there I felt uneasiness like if all of the ghosts of the victims who were vaporized 70 years ago were watching me. Then I went to peace park and it felt so calm there. The locals are very friendly towards Americans. It’s just crazy to be at a city that was completely wiped out by a nuclear bomb only 79 years ago.
This is a very interesting video. Thank you. I am so impressed with your choice of subject and your excellent, clear, coherent presentation, I've subscribed to your channel and am looking forward to watching your other videos.
Thanks!
I always wondered about that. Very interesting explanation. Thank you.
Wow this was such a great educational and experience in this video 🙌
Thankyou! I've always wondered this exact question myself.
Fairly decent information regarding the difference between Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Chernobyl.
Now, talk about Three Mile Island and the Japanese incident and how these two events are even more negligible.
Very informative! Thanks.
Woah. This totally blew my mind - definitely thought of meltdowns as giant explosions. Thank you!
Dark subject matter.
I appreciate the factual lens you used minus the Homer Simpson joke.
Once again great work Ricky.
I wouldn't go so far as to call anything on You Tube "factual".
Thank you for this information I always wondered it but could never figure it out myself
So essentially the energy was used in the bomb and small quantity of material and in Chernobyl it was Cherned up 😊and spat all over by a small explosion.
Nice summary!!
Enjoyed the topic and your information I have also enjoyed may of the informative information most of your commentors have made. The Sciences are of great interest for me. Have not understood all that of nuclear science but have least learned something today thanks to your post. Now to read up on how nuclear medicine works 😊
You twice showed an aerial view of the Itsukushima temple at Miyajima. That's on an island across from Hiroshima and over 10 miles from Ground Zero.
Love the name of your channel.
I remember learning about Chernobyl in middleschool 10 years ago. It was event to remember. My homeland is Latvia and I remember teacher telling after that disaster, the radiation reached Baltic and those days were very hot and that USSR were hiding this so many people caught sickness, still are sick and died.
Your teacher was at best misinformed. It takes two Sieverts of whole body dose for threshold radiation sickness. Only the firefighters in the first night got those doses. None of the civilians, none of the liquidators, and certainly no-one who wasn't standing right next to the reactor.
The remaining reactors sharing the same building operated for years afterward with full staff showing up to work every day.
Very interesting content - gracias!
I believe the difference between chernobyl and Hiroshima / Nagasaki, is that when the chernobyl power plant exploaded, the core melted into a substance that ate through the floor of the power plant hitting it’s final resting place. When the elephants foot was made and now known as corium. Or known as the dealiest nuclear fallout substance, it took all elements of what it ate through and created whatnit is now. Ontop of that material also being vented into the atmosphere before they built the sarcophagus to the chernobyl powerplant. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima bomb was created as a hydrogen bomb, i’m not an engineer, of any types but after some research i believe that the chemical make up of both Elephants foot ( waste at the bottom of Chernobyl plant ) and the Nagasaki / Hiroshima bomb are hugely different. Then making chernobyl not habitable for many many years to come.
"The Nagasaki and Hiroshima bomb was created as a hydrogen bomb". No No No. That is a different process altogether, The Japan bombs were fission devices a Hydrogen bomb is a fusion device although a small fission device is needed to initiate it.
This is a amazing video. I never new the differences in the 4 levels of bomb detonations.
I saw a video awhile back about Chernobyl saying a good bit of wildlife is back living in the area and a few people. I'm wondering about that. Interesting video. I'd never thought about the differences between cities that were hit by nukes and the Chernobyl event. I find your videos very interesting and informative.
To stay on the topic of Chernobyl, I think your take on the new dome would be very interesting. Also, is there cause for concern regarding the elephant foot?
Its just a huge lump of ceramic. That by this date is just mildly radioactive.
Great breakdown thx
Very interesting info!
If you do go to Chernobyl sometime, make sure to book a private tour and 2 days.
We have been there twice, first on a big bus with tourists then the second time on a private two day tour staying in a hotel in Chernobyl.
It's such a difference that you can't even explain it in words.
Just save up the money for the two day private tour its ao worth it.
Thanks for the advice. Im sure its stunning beautiful since its obvious the radiation apparently caused no harms to the plants and animals and they just reclaimed the landscape with ease. Must be like an oasis of russian nature there.
Interesting, I've always wondered about this.
Makurazaki Typhoon took a big chunk of radiation to sea, Then Godzilla was born 🐲
Okay, that was funny!!
@@Edgeofthecontinent seriously! Loved this comment because I was just watching two separate trailers of two new Godzilla movies. Godzilla is starting to feel like the Marvel Franchise. How many have they made, like 42???
@@Israel_Two_Bit Monsterverse is potentially becoming a larger franchise like MCU and it's easier to adopt many Titans around the world because of cultural mythology around the countries...
ah, thank you, finally I understood why the nuclear explosions didn't leave much residue after all. it makes a lot of sense. I wondered exaclty the same thing for years, it felt like you were answering my question. Great video, excelent research and exectution, you got one more subscriber.
Excellent, thank you!
You know I enjoy this video well done
I’m glad to see you guys got of the fence.
Not about this issue or this topic.
I started watching you guys because it was obvious you do a great job.
But I did take a break.
It is unfortunate that it was this topic that brought me back to your content, however am looking forward to having a look at previous content, and your future content.
Thank you very much, you guys do a great job.
Nicely researched video on the nuclear
Differences between Hiroshima & Chernobyl: At Hiroshima, The Little Boy released a huge amount of radiation in less than one second in an air burst. Very little radiation got into the ground. But at Chernobyl, the reactor released a collosal amount of radiation on the ground, and over several days. That's why Chernobyl is uninhabital now.
Tell the wildlife it is uninhabitable, they are thriving.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk As mutations, so I have read.
@@Marc816 You have read no such thing from any reputable source.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk I saw it right here on youtube!!!!
@@Marc816 CZcams University is not a reputable source. 95% of the information there is anti-nuke fear mongering.
When you started the video my immediate reaction was, it's probably due to the amount of fuel that was actually used in the reactions and the speed of the reactions. The bombs were quick reactions with all the fuel being used in an instant. The fuel for the plant is a slow burn that takes longer to use. The stored energy still remains. Spent fuel rods are nowhere near as radioactive and we use them for munitions due to the metal density. My .02 cents for two bit. I hope you had a great thanks giving! Love the videos!🎉
are you a chemist?
“spent fuel rods are nowhere near as radioactive and we use them for munitions”
Most depleted uranium, used in munitions & armor, arises as a by-product of the production of enriched uranium for use as fuel in nuclear reactors and in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Enrichment processes generate uranium with a higher-than-natural concentration of lower-mass-number uranium isotopes (in particular 235
U, which is the uranium isotope supporting the fission chain reaction) with the bulk of the feed ending up as depleted uranium.
Munitions are not commonly made from spent fuel rods, since the spent fuel rods would need to go through a recycling process.
Spent fuel rods are very radioactive. The cost to recycle them, just to produce depleted uranium munitions, is cost prohibitive.
The US Obama administration backtracked from President Bush's plans for commercial-scale reprocessing reverted to a program focused on reprocessing-related scientific research.
Spent fuel is not used for ammo. It is highly radioactive. Depleted uranium is used for special ammo, but that is very different from spent fuel. Depleted uranium has never been in a reactor, instead it is separated from U-235 during the enrichment. It is a byproduct of nuclear fuel production.
Mastered harnessing the atom is a bit of an overstatement. We're still just boiling water...
Hi Ricky.
I visited Chernobyl & Pripyat with a friend in 2008 whilst on an Eastern European road trip. What crazy places they were, feeding bread to the huge radio active catfish in the reactor cooling lakes to standing on the roof of abandoned hotels in Pripyat. The levels were still really high back then, we got served a 3 course meal from a lovely lady with the biggest beard I've ever seen plus all the dogs had limbs missing. We even had to stand in a huge geiger counter to measure our radiation intake before we could leave. Armed checkpoints making sure we had the correct documentation just added to the experience, what a memory! Plenty of photos too!😊
Great video idea.
Thank you for the explanation relating to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I too had wondered the same thing.
My dad was stationed outside of Nagasaki as part of the army of occupation. Told me a story of him and his buddy driving a jeep into the city & finding a cast iron pot bellyed stove & dragging it back to the hooch. Dad said he slept very close to that stove.
I said "that's why you're still here! Early form of kemo!"
I was thinking about this yesterday.
I love your videos.
Excellent video
15:40 fun fact - that’s “Battleship Island” off shore from Nagasaki. Named for the build up of buildings above an active coal mine
My wife and I spent some days in Hiroshima in October. It's a beautiful city with a great focus on promoting peace.
great video, champion.
The main issue is that Chernobyl had been fissioning for years before it blew up. Thus months worth of fission products were in the reactor, even before it blew up. Many of them were also fairly long lived, which leads to a much bigger release. Chernobyl had more fission products than Little Boy had U-235 (by mass). That explains why Chernobyl is still radioactive.
Same amount of fuel whether it exploded on day one or day 1,000. In fact the longer the fuel is being used the more depleted it becomes, meaning less radioactive.
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Nah mate. Uranium 235 is fissioned, turning it from mildly radioactive with around 1 in a billion atoms decaying in a given year. This is turned into stuff like Cesium 137, which is shorter lived, but that means that it sprays out a similar quantity of energy in a much shorter timeframe. That is to say, about 1 in 50 atoms will decay in a given year. So before you had say, 1 kg of U-235 with a microgram or so decaying every year. Now you have 1kg of Cs-137 of which more than 20 grams decay in any given year. 20000000 million times more decays, each yielding a compareable level of energy. Cs-137 is thus much more deadly than U-235. This also explains why people can manually handle fresh nuclear fuel, but need shielding and robots/cranes to handle spent fuel.
It's the radionuclides produced by the fission that cause the long term radiation, whether the Uranium is depleted or not is besides the point.
@@colinmacdonald5732 Exactly.
@@colinmacdonald5732 You have very strange science on your planet. Here on earth the more something is depleted from its energy producing radionuclides, the less radioactive it becomes.
I used to attend auctions and once found a chamber of commerce brochure from Hiroshima dated less than 5 years after the bomb dropped! I was astonished, even though I knew it was now a thriving city, that it was a recovering city so soon. Thanks for the explanation.
9:30 Air burst also works with the surrounding land for the bowl effect
No misinformation, just some very well researched data and a logical explanation of the reasons why Hiroshima is not a nuclear wasteland. Well done!
I was stationed at a U.S. Army military base in Bavaria, West Germany when Chernobyl occurred. We were given a device to take readings of radiation (RADS) in the atmosphere, we had max levels of 175 RADS above normal, the highest the human body can take safely. Other countries of course had much higher readings. A few years ago I was curious and did an internet search which led me to an article where it was said nuclear fallout was still being found in the flora and fauna of Bavaria, Germany to this day. Nearly 57 years old now, has always been in the back of my mind whether I would be affected in some way.
Sheeeesh the thumbnail hits hard
As someone said, FDR, didn't die of a heart attack, but while sitting for a portrait, he collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage?
Great One.
One other thing, the reactor in #4 had no containment. It was used to make weapons grade plutonium.
Pripyat had been on my bucket list for years while other destinations simply ended up higher on the list, until I saw a Dutch documentary (for which I was unable to find any English sources mentioning it online right now) in which a frank conversation was held with a local tour guide. This guide confessed that most of the radiation-contaminated soil had been removed, but in certain spots, it was left and actually collected. These were the spots where the guides would hold their Geiger counters to show tourists how bad the radiation still was. The guide also confessed that most of the items left in the buildings were placed there to increase the appearance of personal drama and distress. In other words, you're mostly looking at an orchestrated show, which reduced my interest greatly. The Geiger counter purchased by the Dutch documentary team was smuggled into the area as well and proved the story of the guide. In fact, they checked it on their flight back and found radiation levels in an airborne plane are higher than they are in Pripyat. To top it off, they talked to locals who had an orchard within the highly dangerous contaminated zone. These people admitted they were forbidden to sell their produce to tourists and foreigners to keep up appearances, while they themselves had been eating the food for decades without any adverse effects. If I recall correctly, these people included an elderly lady who did not show any signs of poor health.
So I am honestly confused about the situation in Chernobyl and its surrounding. Is it all hugely exaggerated in order to keep the tourist business going? I mean, what about the Russian soldiers stationed there right now? What about the employees operating the remaining reactors near ground zero? There is an article online mentioning how for decades the people who prevented further escalation in Chernobyl had died afterwards, while they were very much alive for years or decades afterwards, so there has been a lot of disinformation.
Appreciated the meta-analysis of multiple factors and clear chart of conclusions; but, was surprised at no mention of the effect of the nuclear attacks on life expectancies-a fact long central to survivors' protests for recognition, care, and against nuclear armaments.
The Dyatlov picture attached at the beginning is Oleksyi Breus. A member of the staff that night.
14:00 The mass would be the first thing to look into!
Strange to put it last.
Fun fact: by yield-to-fallout ratio the Tsar Bomba was the 'cleanest' in all of history and other than it being a thermonuclear weapon a significant part of the reason was that its air-burst height was 4km. At that height its huge fireball didn't touch the surface while the shock wave obliterated anything within a 50km radius and shattered windows even 800km away.
Hiroshima and also Nagasaki had radiation ☢️ to a certain level but yet Chernobyl radiation lasted for a few days while the nuclear ☢️ reactor was actually on fire. Certain level of radiation can actually be more radioactive than others, having a shelf life span from a few days, months, a few years, up to several thousands of years before it's actually habitual with people again.
Something else to note is the particulate size. A larger radioactive mass will take many half-lives to reduce to an activity of background radiation. In a nuclear explosion, most, if not all, of the fissile material and products are vaporized, the particle size is tiny, and the material is essentially diluted. By comparison, the meltdown at Chernobyl ejected and spewed 'chucks' of radiative mess, most of which didn't go very far (less dilution) and thus will continue to radiate for a very long time before the particles are small enough to reach a low activity.
Windscale accident was the first .. my grandfather used to tell stories of his upside down lathes and how tooling uranium would burst into green flames..
The differences between the bombs and the reactor are to some extent academic. In both cases there was a sudden unconstrained release of energy that caused the damage.
At Chernobyl the energy release while sudden was still relatively slow compared to that of a bomb. Consequently, it developed a much less powerful shockwave thus limiting the extent of damage.
At Chernobyl the sudden nuclear energy release was coupled to the reactor's cooling water leading to a steam explosion (not hydrogen, as occurred at Fukushima) as the water almost instantaneously vaporised.
This was sufficient to destroy the reactor building. However, the real catastrophe was that tons of graphite moderator (think coal) then caught fire. Sustained by the still superheated molten nuclear fuel, the nuclear chain and chemical reactions continued on for days. This propelled tons of highly radioactive irradiated material into the air spreading it over the surrounding landscape.
In the atom bombs the nuclear chain reaction was very fast, all over in less than a millisecond. This created an intense shockwave as the bomb body and immediately surrounding atmosphere was superheated by the near instantaneous rise in gamma, xray and light radiation as well as a flux of high energy neutrons.
The airburst meant the material entrained in the nuclear reaction itself was for the most part confined to the vaporised bomb body and immediately surrounding air (out to a hundred metres or so). When the nuclear reaction ceased, this highly irradiated material was quickly dispersed on the wind.
During the bomb reaction some gamma, xray, and neutron radiation did reach the ground causing materials around ground zero to become mildly radioactive but this was shortlived. By far and away the worst damage was from the enormous shock wave followed by intense light and heat.
If the bombs had gone off on the surface the residual radiation would have been much greater.
In Australia in the nineteen fifties a number of surface blast A bomb tests were conducted. Sixty years on, some of those test sites are still too radioactive to enter or linger around. They will likely remain that way for another couple of centuries.
Very good analyses why one nuclear explosion is different from another type.
Interesting video, I just wish that people would call "The Manhattan Project" by it's proper name " The Manhattan Engineer District" 01:06. Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion, it was a huge steam explosion that aerosolized and spread the contents of the reactor over a wide area. Basically a "Dirty Bomb".
i can already check off that bucket list point, was there a few days before the new sarcophagus was pushed over it. what i didnt ecpect was the kind of mass tourism in that area. the other reactores worked like normal for quite some time and the workers are relativly save. they tryed to clean up alot of the area or buried the smaler structures, nature is taking back the area and buried the bad stuff under a layer of new soil. so over time that stuff will be a good bit underground wich is an extra layer of shielding, but i wouldnt want to dig a hole for my house in that area.
but thx for the video, explained quite a bit, was also sometimes wondering a bit about that, my theory would have been that most of that material in the explosion gets used up to make that big blast leaving less to radiate the area.
Wow, great information Just watched the movie Oppenheimer. I was actually wondering this exact question.
My wife's cousin lived near Chernobyl. One of her cousins was born with many birth defects. 😢😢
One of my friends and his family from back home in the States. They have a family they adopted near Chernobyl. They go there every year to visit.
Ty - finally I get an answer to this question 😀
The main difference is the bombs were designed to explode and had just the right amount of nuclear fuel to do the damage but the nuclear reactor left plenty of fuel exposed to the elements after the explosion.
Chernobyl didn't explode due to jammed control rods. It exploded because the control rod tips had a positive void coefficient that sent the core well beyond critical when all of the rods were simultaneously rammed in, displacing the water and steam moderating the reactor until then. A fatal design flaw that turned the scram function into a self-destruct button.
If they hadn't pressed the scram it would likely have just melted down in a "normal" way like TMI.
@@colinmacdonald5732 if they had re-inserted rods in a staggered manner to avoid creating a positive void coefficient across the whole core all at once, the disaster might have been avoided. At least one documentary I have seen said this positive coefficient problem was a known issue covered in the operators' manual.
Thank you.
Extremly simplified but easy to understand answer: radioactivity is a slow decay of excess nuclear energy. To be the most destructive it can be in an instant, a bomb needs to use the most of its energy.
If you want a nuclear warhead to generate radioactivity, burst it underground, but not too far, so the material very close to the detonnation point absorbs insane amounts of energy they can only store through nuclear transmutation, but close enough to the surface so some it gets proppelled in the air. That's how most nuclear bomb tests went disastrous, and why most of the others did "little" long term damage.
It is even pretty well theorised how you can use a specifically designed cobalt shell arround a nuclear bomb to generate insane amounts of radioactivity, to the point one big enough could probably be a doomsday weapon.
The difference isn't because of the air-burst, it has to do with what you hit on earlier in the video. Also, Chernobyl didn't use primarily U-235 or it would have been a bomb. Unstable isotopes like strontium don't stop being radio-active because it's in the air as opposed to the ground. Unstable isotopes do however stop being unstable after they stop being the isotope that's unstable. Bombs are designed to get all that fissile materiel to skip half-life altogether and decay right away, while reactors are only meant to accelerate decay rates, not bypass them altogether.