A Brief History of: The Waltz Mill Meltdown (Short Documentary)
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- čas přidán 4. 06. 2020
- #nuclear #history #atomic
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The Waltz Mill facility was the home to the Westinghouse Testing Reactor also known as WTR or TR-2 and in 1960 it would experience a meltdown.
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Sources:
1.www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/48... p5 *****
2.news.google.com/newspapers?ni... *****
3.3wasif.blogspot.com/2014/04/19... *****
4.old.post-gazette.com/healthsc... ******
5.news.google.com/newspapers?ni... ******
6.large.stanford.edu/courses/201... p108
7.books.google.co.uk/books?id=1...
8.www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissio...
9.www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0217/ML021... A
10.www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0217/ML021... A
11.www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0221/ML022... A
12.books.google.co.uk/books?id=M...
13.www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/42...
14.www.westinghousenuclear.com/P...
15.books.google.co.uk/books?id=F...
16.www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0217/ML021... Licence
When conducting a "let's see what happens" experiment on a nuclear reactor, a sudden power drop does not mean "rev it up" like an old carbureted harley loading up at a stop light.
Monkeys with grenades
They did that at Chernobyl as well, after the reactor power dropped too low to run tests.
@@markh.6687 At least in Chernobyl they had the excuse of being under a soviet management.
"Power is dropping, raise the control rods!"
-famous words of too many reactor supervisors, just before too many meltdowns.
@Franku Doge I am pretty sure that they did not really understand how their reactors reacted in different situations... that's why they did the research on them. I'd like to know how good the understanding of the underlying physics is nowadays in the nuclear power stations around the world.
@@cymbala6208 It's still pretty stupid. If your car engine have a noise/strange behavior/loose power, you instinctively won't floor the gas pedal. Unless you're pretty stupid.
Damien Drouart your car is a different thing as it's your private property and so on.
My cousins dad used to own a truck company and he and my cousin would sometimes drive one of the trucks to do drop offs. One day they got in and it ran normal until they tried to pull away, so they just thought it was weird and gave it more gas, and ended up driving a 40km distance just giving more gas than usual. They then came to the first stop and got out, and noticed the brakes had failed to release, the brake drums were red hot and lightly smoking. They ended up having to change the whole brake system on the truck and a few of the rims that had warped when cooling down, it cost several thousand.
Point is, people do dumb shit, in particular in their profession since there is a constant push and drive to just get things done, and thus corners get cut and potential issues ignored. I see it often in my work too, and have been guilty of it a few rare times myself.
This is like a steam locomotive headed to a brick wall and the engineer yelling "MORE COAL" !
Michael A. it‘s actually more like a locomotive going slower and slower for no obvious reason and the driver yelling „more coal!“, which makes sense from his point of view.
Could you do a video about the various types of radiation measurements (grays, curies, REM, Roentgen, siverts, etc) and what various levels of exposure does to a person? I often find myself confused by these terms and what a certain number means.
and there is no correlation between them,you cant make a chart with equivalences,so it`s a huge mess.
same here!
@Bunker Sieben the only thing I like that's French is kisses, and you ain't my mother!
...wait a minute, that didn't come out right.
www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/phys_agents/ionizing.html
This is a straight forward resource on the different units, what they measure and how they convert
Also bananas. Not kidding: "banana equivalent dose" or BOD is a measure of radiation, since all bananas are slightly radioactive. XKCD has a great graphic explaining this stuff.
"Power suddenly dropped..." *Chernobyl flashbacks intensify*
Positive void co-efficient?
@@hypercomms2001 In this case exactly the opposite, but bad control...
basically. but this was before Chernobyl.
Not great not terrible
@@chillaui3773 Yes, most likely the case... I guess that is why it was a test reactor, in order to try out new ideas... and yes, make mistakes and gain greater insights into them.... a bit like the early days of steam when boiler explosion regrettably were a common thing....
I swear every time there's a nuclear disaster it's always because some idiot raised the control rods instead of scraming
Except for Chernobyl...where SCRAMming actually accelerated the problem.
@@brettsalling but the rods were fully raised first.
@@masheroz correct. I was just saying that SCRAM didn't help them in their case.
@@brettsalling yeah, because they raised the rods all the way out. If they didn’t do that, the SCRAM wouldn’t have caused the power to spike.
@@Kylemsguy yup. Exactly
I always love creator who put cites from where the information is got instead putting inconsequent and random things in their video for clicks. That's what I like Plainly Difficult :)
Those who do this know that those of us who want to check their conclusions are going to have to work very hard to contradict them; in other words they are trustworthy. Those who don't give their sources aren't worth trusting.
Thank you for your kind words!
In almost every one of these 'meltdown' documentaries there is a moment when something unexpected happens, and almost without fail the response of trained experts is; "That's odd, but don't stop!"
Cool that a viewer’s father supplied some of the pictures used here!
Really great to hear about his dads story too!
@Chris Aldridge the last name Kolar sounds so familiar to me. I seem to remember my grandmother talking about that name. She was from Hunker her last name was Guidas. For some reason, I seem to remember that she may have had relatives with that last name. Do you know anyone with the last name Guidas? My grandfather was a coal miner also. Maybe that's where I heard that name before.
djg3996 !
@Chris Aldridge are you speaking of Magyar? They lived in Hunker and used to own the farm on the right before you get to Penn Valley Road. His name was Frank.
@Chris Aldridge yes Margie was Frank Sr wife and their son was Frank jr. And they had a daughter her name was Eileen. Frank jr. Should be about 49 and Eileen is in her 50s now. I believe both parents have passed
The more I watch your channel, the more I'm frankly astonished we've made it this far without the Earth becoming an irradiated wasteland a dozen times over. :P
Very true we are very lucky
Lmao!
*Seriously though.*
It IS irradiated.
Why do you think everyone gets cancer.
Hell yeah! Won't need VR for Fallout 2030.
Better start collecting all the "Chem" I can get my hands on.
"Of course it's mine, officer. Doesn't everyone have a brick of 'Jet' containers in their Bugout Bag?"
We're fucking up our planet left and right. No wonder aliens aren't coming.
I love your covering of nuclear disasters - you never use fear mongering, instead looking at it from a perspective of caution, but also learning from past mistakes.
After all of your videos my knee-jerk reaction to a nuclear generator doing ANYTHING unexpected is to shut it down completely. As soon as you mentioned the power drop I was thinking "This is going to be the moment everything goes south fast." Funny how your viewers are better at this than many real life nuclear technicians.
@Disco Sucks I'm not saying they were reckless. I'm saying that I am hyper-cautious about nuclear reactors who are being shifty. I'm a huge proponent of nuclear energy, don't get me wrong, but I would rather get yelled at for being too safe than to be the guy who failed to stop the release of radioactive gases into a residential area.
Thing is, we are looking at this in an era of easy information retrieval. We have seen many such incidents online, and explained online. But in the 60s when nuclear was still barely understood - and incidents such as Chernobyl hadn't happened... Also you have to take into account that information flow was kept strictly under wraps in terms of nuclear power (cold war and all) - it's easy to see why all these mistakes happened despite previous accidents. This was literally the time of 'wild west' nuclear reactors... when issues were poorly understood and safety culture hadn't quite become as paranoid as it is now.
Apart from technical design issues with the reactor, the biggest issue with this, Chernobyl as well as Three Mile Island, was lack of training for the operators. They did not know or misread the danger signs as the reactors got to the edge of their safe operating conditions and allowed the reactor to get to a condition that could not be recovered.
@@KriegZombie And this is actually the issue we have. Most of the 50s and 60s reactors are based off of USN powerplants, and the people on those tend to be HYPER paranoid of anything because a "slight" issue is a BIG issue when you are in a sub. So the reactors are prone to mistakes if you are not watching them close enough. As long as you are operating them "normally", they do fine. But if you mess up, they will make you pay, and commercial plants do not take the time and expense to do drills and training the same way the Navy does (IE Capt is annoyed at Chief, everybody drill). I honestly would not be surprised to see a bunch of Navy powerplant guys on PDs patreon because of what you just said, where they simply want to be as prepared as possible.
@@leechowning8728 Didn't know that. Thanks, fren.
Have you ever considered doing a video on Canonsburg, PA, the most radioactive town in the USA? The Standard Chemical Company had a radium refining mill and then a uranium refining mill there and tailings were just dumped out back. After the plant went through several owners, it was abandoned and the people of the town raided the abandoned mill for building supplies which were radioactive. They used these supplies to build porches and additions onto their homes. The government came in in the late 70's to clean up the town. There is now a significantly higher rate of childhood cancers in the area because of it.
Thanks for the suggestion
@@PlainlyDifficult Similarly, and also in Pennsylvania, was the contamination at Lock Haven by a firm refurbishing radium-painted flight instruments for the Air Force. The stripped radium paint was then poured out in the firm's yard rather than disposed of properly. Here's the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's web report:
www.nrc.gov/info-finder/decommissioning/complex/karnish-instruments.html
@@PlainlyDifficult You're welcome. I love watching your videos because you thoroughly explain what happened in ways I can understand, like what happened at Three Mile Island. I never really understood it until I watched your video on it. I'm really glad I discovered your channel!
It somewhat reminds me of the Iraqi nuclear reactor site. When the U.S. attacked Iraq, the local farmers went into the facility and dumped the uranium oxide out of the containers and took them home. The head scientist got to the site and had concrete trucks pour concrete over the uranium oxide piles. Afterwards, the U.S. forces went around trying to get the farmers to return the containers, by offering even more containers and money for returns.
Canonsburg? Isn't that where the World's Most Comfortable Man in a Sweater, Perry Como, was born?
Last time I was this early Chernobyl was still intact
The parallels go further, the Chernobyl disaster was due to the same action: 'Not enough power? Lets pull out the control rods!'.
You'd think that would be the first lesson for everyone on site in any nuclear plant. Many (most?) disasters have been caused by disabling safety systems and pulling out too many rods.
Or. Ya know.
Pulling a control rod out 6” too far.
Don't worry, the zone will claim you in due time.
@James Sloan I'm jsjsjakskhs
Nice bro Nice
Can we hear about the Pinawa or Pickering accidents next, I just realized how little we've covered Canada's accidents (I like Pickering because how many times things went bad)
Thanks for the suggestion!!
@@PlainlyDifficult aww thanks, I love these videos, your voice is just so calming
Might as well include the false alarm that happened recently at Pickering
@@PlainlyDifficult Oh man, the decades of contamination at Uranium City in Saskatchewan is another to consider.
...and people still think nuclear power is a 'safe' option...
@@TheMatissV it is a relatively safe option, as literally all the ways we've yet devised to supply society with electricity carry significant drawbacks in various aspects.
This was fantastic, I've been trying to find this information for a couple years now. I currently work at this facility in health physics & have always been interested in learning more about what happened, it's surprisingly difficult to find anything on this subject. You had to put in a ton of work to find what you did. I thank you for that sir.
Not that hard; They are all the same: "Let's TEST IT...?" "This is a nuclear reactor, NOT your 8th grade science experiment; "You're FIRED!!!"
@@brentfarvors192 Hmmmm... I wonder what would happen if Project Farm managed to get his hands on a nuclear reactor?? "We're gonna test that!"
@@Vincent_Sullivan Building a reactor is the "easy" part; Might run into some issues getting the fuel, though...
My dad heard about this when he was younger, growing up in PA in the 50s and 60s.
A poorly understood fact about reactors (especially water cooled and moderated designs like this) is that the control rods are only used to raise power during startup, where they will be withdrawn until indications of criticality have occurred. After that, power level will be gently increased until the core produces enough heat to raise the temperature of the coolant/moderator, at which point it will expand. As it expands, it's density decreases, which causes less fission neutrons to be moderated, and more will leak out of the active area of the core. This will cause power (fission rate) to decrease, creating a stable feedback loop called a negative temperature coefficient, requiring rods to be slowly withdrawn until the core reaches it's operating temperature. Once the reactor is at temperature, power is maintained by holding rods relatively steady, and removing heat from the coolant via the secondary steam loop (cooling towers in this case). The lower temp coolant coming back into the reactor will increase power in the core until equilibrium is achieved with the heat being removed from the reactor. Only an idiot tries to maintain power with control rod withdrawal, as the rods are only used to control the overall temperature of the system. Of course, only an idiot would put a guy with three months training in charge of an operating reactor, so way to go Westinghouse...
Thanks, that was refreshingly readable description of what is remotely going on in reactors. I don't know nothing about them, but I find it fashinating how much power they can create from such small physical dimensions. Also people who also saying things like just shut it down, apparently don't think that it's pretty damn complex physics that are affecting reaction. Also process down stream I guess should be considered too. I think there can be easily gridwide serious effects in certain situations. Obviously not saying that it should affect security of reaction. But I assume there are considerations to be taken from the turbine side too?
The Waltz Mill reactor is right down the road from me. NO one around here talks/knows about the meltdown. And only a short little blerb in the news paper was the only thing written about it. My great grandmother who lived behind the reactor talked about how when the melt down happened men showed up and took all of her top soil and called it a day. Waltz Mill is still very active to this day.. From what I know they are actually building a new building right besides the reactor building. not sure what for tho
Hello, miss we are here to collect about a ton of topsoil good day!
Given their past I'd be putting in an FOI request ASAP!
And ate her nice tea cakes . Never said thank you . Ungrateful space suit guys .
@@texasdeeslinglead2401 LOL funny that you bring up cakes. My great grandmonther was known for her Sour Cream Cinnamon Softies cookies, She would make them 100 at a time. Any money she made them space guys cookies and lemon-aid. Damn you texasdee, Now I am craving my grandmas cookies.
@@Emma__Smith rofl .
Always weird to start a video and slowly come to realize that the disaster that it's talking about took place 30 minutes from where you grew up and you've never heard anything about it.
What a bout 30 from were i currently live
@Disco Sucks did you ever meet any of the lot lizards that frequent that truck stop?
@@lorddart21 same for me
Finally!!! So many people never knew this happened. There were so many stories about spillage and even renting a backhoe to dig a trench and bury the reactor alongside barrels of waste, it was crazy.
Lower and upper case letters matter in units and multipliers. Units named after people have capital letters, so the watt is represented by W, not w. Even the non-Roman symbol used for the ohm (named after Georg Ohm) is the Greek omega, literally, "O-mega" or "big O" (so capital O), as opposed to omicron (o-micron) or "little o". This isn't named after anyone, so is a lower case m.
As for multipliers, the convention is that any multiplier under a million is lower case, everything a factor of a million or more is upper case, and there are multiple factors that share letters, like milli- (m) and mega- (M), pico- (p) and peta- (P).
I love your videos. I really do. But when you put a unit down like "mw" for "megawatts" (MW), you're letting the side down.
mW would be milliwatts (thousandth of a watt). OK, there is no "lower case w" unit in the SI, but it is important to get your units and factors right.
Many, many years ago (more than I would like to admit), I was an electronics components engineer in the aerospace industry. Because I was testing some new transistors for a trial run, and the manufacturer hadn't yet produced a formal datasheet, I had to rely on a spec provided by the typing pool and taken from a fax from the manufacturer (I told you it was a long time ago!). It said the collector-to-emitter saturation voltage _Vce(sat) _(one measure of the maximum gain obtainable from the device) was given as 20mV, which I thought was quite believable from the size of the component, so I started testing. Three quite expensive transistors blew up, and I might get into trouble for that. I then got hold of the name and number of one of the engineers working on this new design, and gave him a call. I just asked him what _Vce(sat)_ was on the new transistor, and he said "20 microvolts" (μV, not mV - no wonder the components had blown up).
I went to the person who had written it up and carefully explained that different prefixes meant different things, and she interrupted to say, "Yes, I know that, I'm not a moron!" and I had told her that I had blown up three devices because m is a thousand times bigger than μ. She said, "I know that, but I don't have that "μ" symbol on my golf-ball." (Another sign of times long past). I said, "Well, if you haven't got that symbol, just type the letter "u"; any engineer will understand that."
She said, "Well I'm not an engineer!"
I said, "But you know "m-" means something different to "μ-"?"
She sighed, bored already, and examined her nails. "Of course. BUT I HAVN'T GOT THAT SYMBOL ON MY GOLF-BALL!"
"SO WHY DIDN'T YOU ASK AN ELECTRONICS ENGNEER FIRST?"
"Well, if that's how you're going to react, I think this is the end of the discussion."
I did get called into the department manager's office and quizzed, but I had a full account of the saga, which he accepted. I said I would prefer to liaise with the manufacturer's engineers over spec requirements and compile my own draft specs. PCs had just come in at that time, so I was able to write and print draft specs in Multimate Advantage (Word's great-great-grandfather) on a noisy dot-matrix printer.
The trouble was, I ended up with that chore for the whole section. But at least the draft specs were correct.
Thank you for this.
Glad you addressed this. I also noted that the text in the graphics did not correlate with the voice over. Huge differences there, but are the graphics wrong or the narration?
I have never heard the term "golf ball" used to describe an IBM Selectric typewriter! Brilliant! And yes, I am that old and loved the Selectric.
Its A Nuclear END NOW How IS THAT
@@usmale4915 Yes, for anyone confused, typewriters like the Selectric moved a ball around to print the characters instead of using conventional type bars with the letter on em.
Thank you for documenting all these lower-profile nuclear disasters. (Of course, I personally wonder where all the soil & other material removed from the site ultimately winds up.)
Thank you!
Tennessee
New Jersey
According to other commenters, it ended up in a local mine system called the Yukon Mines. Buried and cemented up. Doubtful it was properly diapered.
This is the first time I saw one of these videos where I thought "actually that's smart" regarding the gravity fed coolant it removes a pump which is a point of failure.
Of course I'm sure they'll fuck it up somehow
"Let's see what happens if remove the nuclear reactor coolant, Homer...?" "DOH!"
I live about 25 miles from there. I drive past it a couple times a month usually. I didn't know that it was a reactor facility decades before my time. Neat.
Finally, good ol' Reactor screw-up. Was getting tired of those high falutin elitist industrial and space disasters!
Frank -O- haha not me - I must be some high falutin' fancy pants cz I love those vids just as much as the bread n butter meltdowns.Cheers Plainly Difficult!
Sounds like this supervisor and the comrade Supervisor from Chernobyl were twins
separated at birth
Holy crap just remembered this mini documentary due to driving right on by this lovely Westinghouse facility. "Radiation Safety Zone" people! Also found out my Uncle worked at the Waltz Mill facility within 5 years of the reactor building getting welded shut. Nothing but tunnel access filled with water
"Built in safety-features"... "offers *no danger* to the sorounding area what so ever"... Well, there's your first clues that something was *bound* to go wrong! Almost as bad as refering to a ship as "unsinkable"...
Who knew Diatlov was in America too 😂
Its just feed water, Ive seen it before.
*dyatlov
For real
is it because of the series chernobyl?
But Dyatlov wasnt in the room...he was "in the toilet". 😉
Im really enjoying the meta/4th wall breaking “...or about here on a map” segments in the last few videos
I live 15 minutes from this site and had the pleasure of touring the facility. Very interesting stuff. They briefly touched on this.
Perhaps you could take a look at the 2000 Enschede fireworks disaster. 23 people died and a whole neighborhood was flattened when a fireworks storage caught fire and exploded. There’s a lot of footage of it.
I worked there for 17 years..It's still a mess.. and it happened more than once.. although the fuel is gone..The ground is still contaminated..and will be for a long..long time..🤔
What is it with old white guys and constantly using "..." in the middle of sentences? It is entirely unnecessary and destroys the flow of your writing.
@@robertmartin8907 it also seems condescending
@@robertmartin8907 People type how they talk. '...' indicates a pause.
@@okiemax You must be fun at parties.
@@nobodynoone2500 whoa whoa whoa. Watch the magic
I love how he always posts his sources so we can read it. I can always trust you when it comes to this. A lot of other channels always add stuff and over exaggerate!
I appreciate that thank you!
@@PlainlyDifficult one of the best channels out there. Keep up the good work!
Engineer: You can't just have a complex system and expect no absolute failures!
Scientist: haha geiger counter goes brrt
click click clickety click.
I gotta admit, that made me laugh.
Yeah, I can confirm that.... and I'm a petroleum engineer.
it sounds like its not famous because all the safety worked. could have been a lot worse
hi. thanks for your video. i live about 5 miles from waltz mills. most of what you say is right but there were people that died from this. they cleaned up back in the 60s and moved everything into an old coal mine a few miles away. not far from the now company called max. by the town called Yukon, pa you can see Westinghouse plant if your on interstate 70 exit 54. the reactor was on the other side of Westinghouse so you can't see the area from the interstate. today they are putting in an industrial park to support Westinghouse.
Actually, the radioactive materials were dumped at Mill Service, which now is known as MAX Environmental. They are looking to expand this landfill that has been in continuous operation for sixty years. My family is from Waltz Mill. My grandfather took the radioactive rods by truck to New York Harbor. Those that died as a result of the nuclear accident and subsequent cleanup, have sealed medical records.
I live a few miles from where this happened. There's stories that the equipment that was used to clean up the sight after became contaminated by radiation. So they dug holes and pushed the equipment in the ground and were left buried in the fields.
Love your videos. I thought I'd read/heard about all reactor accidents, clearly missed this one. Thanks.
Really enjoy your videos, got a slight fascination with these kind of accidents.
Thank you!
I know I have suggested a few things for videos but I enjoy subjects that I have never even heard of before even more! Great job and content!
Thank you!
Absolutely love your videos. Complex things screwing up is so fascinating. Complex things that end up being extremely dangerous doubly so.
My dad worked for westinghouse in the 1970's he started out in maintenance but ended up working in the man ways on steam generators throughout the US & parts of Europe. I also know some of his co workers & people who grew up in Newstanton PA. Many people say the bottom of the reactor melted threw. Many say the ground water was heavily contimanated & Radon gas was released in to the atmosphere. People who grew up their say many fire trucks & other equipment were buried on site much like Chernobyl. A former worker from westing house said many employees in evolved in the clean up passed away from health complications not long after the clean up. My dad passed away from cancer about 10 years after his retirement I know he was exposed to higher than normal radiation levels. I dont believe this was the main cause of his death but I I believe it progressed it quickly.
My Dad died of cancer 30 years ago, thought he was the last of the crew from his days there. However, he had also told me how he had bathed in Carbon Tetracloride after a days work in machine shops and engine rooms in the 1930's and 40's, to clean the grease off. A totally banned material nowadays. With time dangers from common chemicals such as dry cleaning fluid (Trichloroethylene) are now known, radiation may not have been a factor.
You, each time : "... wich is around here on the map"
Me, also each time : "but where is that map on a larger map please ? "
Is this Pennsylvania?
@Rob Speed yup
I live about 10 miles from here, and I can guarantee less than 100 people know this event happened. Really cool, thanks.
It’s gotten over 4000 views in 2 hours.
I'm one of them. Me and all of my friends and family know about it. They even shut down the Interstate when it happened.
1:49 *Black magic, burn the witch!* 😱
🧙♀️
@@PlainlyDifficult 🧙♂️
@@PlainlyDifficult Actually a really well-done effect!
Plainly Difficult I’m going to guess you reversed the footage there
@Plainly Difficult A series on the different reactors would be cool too...Such as why RBMKs are so inherently unstable and how our Canadian Candu reactors are so ridiculously safe.
Sir that scene with the pointing fingers on the map is in REVERSE.
Bum bum bummmmmmmmmm.
I was like howd he do that lol.
I love these brief history videos on nuclear accidents. Thank you for this fantastic content
Can't wait to watch another Great video!
I actually worked in a machine shop just behind (north) of the Waltz mill site. In 93 we made a bobcat skid loader with 2 24in graphite hemispheres on hydraulic arms and a lead lined second hand 4whd ambulance with another thick graphite containment vessel inside it. This was done for Westinghouse Waltz mill and it was understood by us the it was to recover hot material in the forest around the site. There was so much lost radioactive materials around that area from Walt mill and all the failed Westinghouse affiliates and nuclear navy shops that no one really paid any attention.
When I moved to PA from CA. I was astonished. People in PA. thought cancer was like a natural death, you live you grow old you get 17 different types of cancer and you die. And of course all the Robertshaws and Nuclear Mechanicals went out of business with 0 capitol left.
They were always discovering old barns around Waltz Mill, old barns mysteriously filled with 55-gallon drums full of water. There was one about 2 miles from my house no I never did find out who owned it or what was in all the drums.
Loved the video, you must have a great library source for all the info you had found.
Yes, the name on the control rod gearboxes is General Mills. They once had a division which made nuclear equipment, including heavy cranes and refueling equipment.
WHAT! A melt down I didn't know about! Good video yet again :) Keep it up.
Great video as always, thank you!
Jeez, 'Plainly Difficult', your research on Many of your topics is Spot-On!! Your narration is Very good.
They broke their new toy messing with it. I have no experience operating a reactor, but anytime there's an unexpected power drop, anyone with common sense would shut it down and investigate why.
Has the Lenin icebreaker already have been covered?
Nice nuclear story there, true soviet style, involving percussive maintenance on a leaking reactor, and decomissioning with explosives.
@Disco Sucks a sledgehammer is a nuclear reactor maintenance tool in soviet navy.
Interesting vid as always keep up the great work.
Thanks again!
Ah I see we’re back to the usual content
😬
@@PlainlyDifficult I love the 'usual content'😁 (too)
You gotta accept his other content though, one of the worst things as a CZcamsr is having your audience only watch one topic of your videos. Nuclear accidents aren’t endless.
@@PlainlyDifficult I came late to the channel and I love all the topics you cover, and the creative ways you play with the presentations... Fantastic 👍👌
Great video as usual plainly difficult!
4:56 please when using the metric system, be carefull with capitalitazion of letters 60mw ist 60 milliwatt. 60 MW is 60 Mega Watt.
It'll keep your coffee warm!
@john edwards Still spelled milliwatt not milliWatt.
@john edwards Did you mean someone?
AWESOME! a new vid!
Could you do a video on radioactive wastewater from fracking. Maybe the amount of radioactivity produced or something about how it is disposed of. I think it's a topic most people should know more about. The history and consequences are very interesting.
Thanks. I enjoy your videos
For example www.post-gazette.com/business/powersource/2018/06/14/PSU-study-pans-roadway-brine-drilling-wastewater/stories/201806130183
Love your videos
Thanks for another fantastic video
gosh I love your videos. please do a video on the Blackhawk super fund site I grew up right next to.
Great vid!
man your vids are addictive af
I'm just watching, hearing about Westinghouse, thinking about how there's a Westinghouse research thing not far from where I live. Then he mentions Pittsburgh.
Thank you, I thought I knew my nuclear history, but this one was new to me.
I hope one day you cover the 1979 Mississauga Train Derailment. Seems like it's right up your alley.
Nice touch on that intro with those mechanical slideshow sounds.
Thank you!
I have zero experience with reactors, but even I know that if something unexpected happens flooring the gas to compensate is not a good idea.
I am proud as a Pennsylvanian to have more disasters on this channel than any other state 👍
I live on the west side of Pittsburgh and you'd be surprised how few people know about this. Just as many don't realize Shippingsport was the world's first full-scale atomic electric power plant. The original reactor is gone but there is still a power station generating my electricity.
I live in Eastern Pittsburgh and im pretty sure no one here has heard of it
Another great video!
While this was going on, another 60 MWe PWR was operating on the northwest side of Pittsburgh, at Shippingport PA.
Westinghouse sure had a lot of pull in PA.
Thanks for taking my mind off of the absolute stupidity that is happening right now.
Next pint is on me.
I live in Pittsburgh and I'm only just now finding out how many radioactive disaster sites we have near us
Love your videos, but would you mind improving sour SI unit syntax ? :D
If you've never documented the Pepcon explosion in Henderson, NV I think it would make an interesting video. You do an excellent job!
Your videos are very good
How about the Hallam Nuclear Generating Station? It was built off a failed Santa Susana Field Laboratory design(molten salt coolant reactor), failed in 3 years, and potentially contaminated workers with 1 that later died from leukemia at the age of 28. Can't find much more information on it but it might be worth looking into if you can.
Thanks for the suggestion
also good work algorithm I was sitting here working on an antique contamination meter when this popped into suggested lmao.
The events leading up to the melt down are surprisingly similar to Chernobyl.
They ALL ARE! Thankfully, we finally stopped these psycho's running "tests"; "We built the damn thing to make crap loads of POWER, NOT to see if you could melt it down, morons..."
love these videos
Thank you Ben!!
LOL I love the live action map pointers!!
great episode !!!!!!!!!!!
Could you do the Lucens reactor meltdown in Switzerland?
Spoiler Alert: They were running a TEST...
"... a good old-fashioned nuclear reactor screw-up." Those are my favorite too, but I like everything you do :)
It seems that fuel rods are the weak link in reactors since so many accidents occur due to the rods breaking open during operation. Why couldn't anyone build fuel rods that weren't so flimsy?
They've made various improvements over the years, but the biggest improvement yet is currently making its way through the regulatory approval process. www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-things-you-should-know-about-accident-tolerant-fuels
Imagine the stress on those items though, it must be at unreal levels in the material with the heat and stuff - I bet its tough to engineer around the way heat changes materials in nuclear projects
But then its also a challenge thats met each time by a company trying to lower costs and raise profits, and not always with much proper oversight and training apparently...
The rods get brittle over time from self-irradiation.
How about a video on the Arkansas missile silo disaster? Dropping a wrench and almost causing the detonation of a hydrogen bomb.
I would also be interested with that particular disaster. This, however is a great video about a Westinghouse nuclear reactor!
I live in Pittsburgh about 20 miles from where this occured and I've never heard of it
Love to see you do a video on Plum Island laboratory
Maxi pads cleanup! An ex ex girlfriend told me when she drove tractor trailers she delivered corncobs to a nuclear power plant. I have no idea why. ???
Gets used to absorb liquid, to be shipped as a solid. Shipping & disposing of solid rad waste is substantially cheaper than liquid. Infact the liquid waste is processed on site & what remains in filters or liquid has to be solidified in order to ship out for disposal.
I grew up near here and it also had a contaminated water leak sometime around 1980 or so. Water ran down the hill directly into a KOA campground and pond. There were rumors of 3 eyed fish about 2 years later. Campground is still there, probably still contaminated although they say no.
I went camping with my friend at her parent's site here in late 70s.She died of breast cancer at age 43 and her mom of the same at age 64.
The more I watch your channel, the more I think you need a podcast style for your documentary style videos
Good info. Fums up!
This is suspiciously similar to Chernobyl...