The Chernobyl Orthodox Christmasode Disaster of 1986 | Episode 79

A young boy asks his dad about radiation and says, is there anything we should be worried about? And his dad pats him on both heads and tells him no. Hello and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode. This is a very special, extra girthy Christmas Disastersode, and with it we are fulfilling the slightly belated Christmas wishes of more listener requests than ever in the history of the show. Together, we will be visiting the hands down most dangerous place on Earth. You will learn why this is probably the worst bad day at work episode of all time. We'll visit Earth's first model post apocalyptic suburb, and we will find out how much radiation it takes to melt your hands off. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you'd hear the story of the most radiated intern in history and his trusty Acts. You'd take a side trip to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to find out how their local electric company nearly destroyed the planet, and you would learn about the most lethal tourist photo op anywhere on the planet. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So if all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin, allow me a moment to just say, wow, it's been another hell of a year, and together we've survived gsshopper apocalypses, car wreck stampedes, submarine implosions, poison gases, wildfires, rock slides, cyber trucks, fireworks, balloons, cable cars, shopping infernos, volcanoes, shipwrecks, rockets, train crashes, hail and hurricanes, And ask yourself, would your second favorite podcast put you in that much peril? Nine of those episodes began as requests from listeners just like you. And maybe I made you laugh over the last year, Maybe I gave you something interesting to share. Maybe I just made you feel a little less alone for a moment. Whatever it is that makes you come back to this show again and again, I say thank you. I wouldn't do this without you, and this is not me shaking my cup, but I literally could not do this without the financial support of listeners like you. And on that note, it is my distinguished honor to announce that no one episode has ever been as requested as many times as today's story. Pack a pair of comfortable, close toe running shoes, a guider counter designed to attack both beta and gamma radiation, and maybe a helmet just in case things get shelly. We are visiting Ukraine. We haven't been to Ukraine since the skanel Of air show disaster of two thousand and two, and I'm willing to bet that a lot more of you have become familiar with the name since then. The last time we were here, before all the unbelievably visceral horror of that episode, we talked about how Ukraine checked a lot of boxes for interesting and beautiful places. From the breathtaking Carpathian Mountains to the beaches of Odessa, Ukraine is full of stunning architecture on earthly cathedrals, underground temples, riverside paradises, rich culture, well armed people, and the cuisine. I said Ukraine was home to everything from fairytale castles to ski resorts. And mind you, last time we were here, Russia wasn't and they've done some remodeling. That's said, with so much natural beauty and cultural history, where should we begin our visit this time? Don Bass, Sharon Nizza, Leviv. Well, sure, any one of those would be frankly awesome, But we've come all this way and don't you want to see something truly tooth looseningly unique perfect. I love that attitude and you're gonna love today's journey. Today we'll be driving north about eighty miles or one hundred and thirty kilometers from Kiev, the capital, into northern Ukraine, just about as far as you can get. We're not going to stop until about sixteen kilometers or ten miles south of the border with Belarus. For today, we will be visiting a little rural city called Chernobyl. Now, some of you may be saying, I recognize that name from something. Chernobyl. Isn't that a nature reserve in some kind of exclusion zone? Oh? I forgot to say. It's nineteen eighty six, so I don't know what you're talking about. What I can tell you is. On our way, we're going to pass through dense forests, small villages, and tranquil open landscapes. As we make our way to a truly technical marvel. We are going to witness a massive industrial undertaking, and it's the kind of thing you just need to see for yourself. But along the way, we're going to pass through a city called Privia. It's a bustling little place. It's filled with young families, and by Soviet standards, life Impripriot was good. You got swimming pools and washing machines, and theaters and schools and even an amusement park. The people Appripa were so well off they invented the term nuclear elite. In fact, Hey, while we're here, I'm looking forward to riding on the shiny new ferris wheel in town. Oh but okay, it doesn't actually open for a few days, so we'll just have to pop back by on our way out of town. About forty nine thousand people live here. The town was specifically built to house the families of workers, many employed just up the road about three kilometers or five miles, at the Vladimir iliach lenin Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Chronobiliska Outomna Elektrichna Stansaya, the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Was this the first nuclear power plant, No, hardly. By nineteen eighty six, there were already about four hundred nuclear power plants around the world, which sounds like a lot and begs a question. Am I able to explain the complicated and controversial boner that people had for nuclear power? Okay, at the time, nuclear energy was going to save the world. The idea that you could replace an entire coal burning power plant with ever reactor the size of a living room, which produced more energy and cleaner Oh hell, yes. People truly believed that nuclear energy was the beginning of a new utopia for mankind. And I wouldn't call it a renewable energy source, but it is very clean, the cleanness we've ever conceived outside of wind and solar and hydroelectricity. Nuclear power doesn't produce smog or pollutants like traditional power plants. The only thing coming out of a nuclear power plant is harmless steam. Of course, the only issue is where and how you dispose of the batteries when you're done, so to speak. We're not going to get into it, but nuclear waste could be its entire own episode. The shovel in the ground photo op happened back in nineteen seventy and they cut the ribbon and slapped out the welcome at on September twenty sixth, nineteen seventy seven, and what a sight it was. Chernobyl is a huge industrial complex that included the reactor buildings, turbine halls, the cooling ponds, and all kinds of various support and research facilities. The plant was powered by Soviet built RBMK reactors for RBMK one thousand design reactors to be specific, which were built between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty three, and each reactor unit was housed in its own separate and massively reinforced concrete containment building. The buildings were about fifty by fifty meters. It's one hundred and sixty five feet square and about seventy meters or two hundred and thirty feet tall. Call it ten dodge caravans long and twenty eight in height. That is as big as a twenty two story building. Then to make it even taller, you got to slap on the iconic red and white striped chimneys. Over units three and four. Those alone were almost five hundred feet tall. The reactors were connected by turbine halls bigger than the Empire State building laying on its side, bigger than a mall, bigger than an airport. You could cram a dozen Sphinxes of Egypt into this thing with room to spare. Altogether, the industrial complex takes up as much space as one hundred thirty two thousand, eight hundred and eighty seven tennis courts or about two million Dodge caravans, if that's easier to understand. Oh and the cooling pond for water to draw on to keep the reactors cool. That covered about twenty two square kilometers or nine square miles. That is almost the size of Manhattan. And most people don't know this, but Chernobyl was built and designed with the intention of being able to expand up to twelve reactors, which would make it a full three times the size. Reactor five was already eighty percent finished, and they didn't make them big for the sake of making them big. But they also didn't make them small. Or maybe they did make it big just because they could. After all, it's no state secret that the USSR loved big, shiny symbols of technological prowess. So what can I tell you about the place? RBMK one thousand reactors huh or reactor Bolshoi mosh nosti Kanali. Unlike Western reactors, RBMK reactors were designed with a dual purpose, obviously ushering in a utopia while also fueling the weapons of mass destruction to maintain it. The RBMK design generated power while also pumping out weapons grade plutonium. Kind of goes against the spirit of peace and love through nuclear energy, but it was their sandbox to play in. And let me say this, Now, this is not a science of engineering podcast. I'm going to tell you a thing or two, but when it comes to the technobabble, there is no test at the end. Inside the reactor, neutrons split uranium atoms, and that makes more neutrons, and they split more atoms, and there we have more neutrons, and on and on and on. This is a chain reaction which produces heat, which boils water into steam, which passes through the reactor, which then goes on to drive each of the five hundred megawat turbines. Together, they produce about one thousand megawats of electric power per unit. Basically, each reactor puts out enough energy to power six hundred and thirty thousand homes. It's called channel type reactor. That just means that each fuel channel operates independently, which means you can refuel this thing without actually having to shut it down. And they do it with a specially designed refueling machine. They do not do this by hand. This is not our first episode, after all. Now I described how a chain reaction works before, and I described how they use water as a coolant, and they also use graphite as a moderator that helps slow down the neutrons for the fission process. It's not about runway power generation. It's all about moderating speed. And we've covered this a few times. But again, unlike your Second Favor podcast, there are no tests here. The reactivity or power of a reactor is controlled by raising or lowering control rods, in this case two hundred and eleven of them. When lowered into the reactor, they absorb neutrons and reduce the rate of fission. Picture two hundred and eleven Kirk douglasses. If you've been listening long enough, the show is about five years old now, and when you look back to our very first episode, what was it? It was a bad day a work story. A guy got pancaked into a ceiling and stapled into place by a plug through his groin, which had actually been shoved up into his armpit. It was a hell of a first episode. And if I really think about it, bad day of work stories are probably my personal favorite, which is why it is such an honor and pleasure to be able to bring you a story of one of the worst days at work anyone has ever had? You ever have a day so bad that it ended creating a global panic that took over the planet. Our story today begins April the twenty fifth, nineteen eighty six. Of the many things that happen at a nuclear power plant to keep it running smoothly, testing and research is an irregularly scheduled part of it. Tonight, Unit four's reactor was to be shut down for a planned safety test. The test was to determine whether the reactor's turbines could provide enough power to run the coolant pumps in the event of a power loss before the backup diesel generators could kick in. It's little like turning off your car to see if you could coast all the way home off the power from the radio. And this test needed to be done tonight. It had been scheduled for earlier in the day, but there was a power outage somewhere else, so Chernobyl needed to keep up the power to feed the grid all afternoon. And now it was just the night shift's problem. And no spoilers. And I can only guess your feelings by the end of this episode, but I just want to point out this test being performed was aimed to prove safety. The test will be running had been carried out at Chernobyl three times over the last four years, but the power from the turbine ran down too quickly and they ended up having to restart the reactor. But that was then and this is now, and they had come up with new voltage regulator designs that were hopefully, we're going to solve the issue. So fingers crossed fourth times. The charm. The Soviets were world renown for their managerial bullying. It came from the top down and no one was spared. Everyone answered to someone else. Anatotly Dillotov was the shift supervisor and the man having the lives of his family threatened by shadowy voices on the phone if tonight's testing was unsatisfactory, and unsatisfactory can be a very threatening word. And what complicated matters for him was before you can run a test like this, you have to disable a few automatic shutdown systems. Not like that's ominous or anything. Now, most thoughtful people will say the closest you should ever get to voluntarily shutting down a safety system is during those brief moments when you're changing out your smoke detector batteries. Each reactor was built with three diesel generators that kick in if power was suddenly lost. It just takes about a minute for that to start up and take over. And the last thing you want at a nuclear power station is a total shutdown with no pumps running. The idea here is that the momentum of the slowing turbines should still be enough to generate the power needed to keep those pumps running the whole time. It's like that moment where you successfully coast up your own driveway in a freshly gasless car. When I said this testing was planned, that is true, but it just was not clear to a lot of the staff see. It was happening at the beginning of the night shift, and this was all new news to most of the control room. It was supposed to be the day shift's problem, but they couldn't spare the juice, so the test got moved. As the shutdown proceeded, the reactor was operating at about half power. Anatoly Dilotov personally supervised. There is this weird management mentality where you have to make a change, no matter how small or petty, just to prove your worth. And anecdotally, Anatotally was a real dick about it, if you believe the HBO miniseries version. He was practically throwing furniture about it. For the test, power was reduced and the reactor should ideally stabilize around seven hundred megawats, but at this point in the story we only know what they know, and what they knew was that the power had dropped to thirty People in Poland knew it had dropped to thirty megawats because of Anatolely's animated howling. They tried increasing the power, but nothing worked. It was like the reactor had developed a mind of its own, and no one had ever seen anything like this. Before. They felt they needed to pull more control rods to create more reactivity in the core to bring it back up to speed. But nothing was working, and doing this on paper was going to leave the reactor highly unstable. But they were making this up as they went along. If this were somewhere covered in some manual, they did not have time to read about it. Nothing was working. The laws of physics themselves dictated that they should be getting more power. One young operator about the program manuals. He said there were all kinds of crossed out instructions, and he was told to follow those crossed out instructions. When the reactor finally stabilized around two hundred megawatts, Dillatov decided that was good enough to continue the test. You have to remember there was a long line of people ready and waiting to scream at him about it at this point, whether they realized it or not, the reactor only had eight control rods in place, and the minimum I mean, the set number where you evacuate your bowels is supposed to be fifteen. The turbine stop bowels were closed, the pumps started slowing and the water began to warm, and the lack of water flowing through the core allowed more heat and steam to build inside. This shouldn't even be possible, but like I said, the safeguards that prevent stuff like this had been disabled. Now, if you're familiar with twentieth century science fiction, you know what a computer looks like. It is a wall coated in flashing lights and buttons. Obviously, well in the control room, the heat and power from the reactor spiked so dramatically that every light and button in the room burst to life. If the overhead lights had exploded from the spike, they would still have been able to read from all of the warning lights. All hell breaks loose. The reactor had been designed to work at thirty two hundred megawatts, but in this moment, it was putting out more than one hundred times that and rising. And this is the moment that they hit the scram button famously referred to as a Z five. Hitting a Z five dropped the rods back into the core, and as predicted, everything stopped cold. And with that, with that, everyone began to calm down. I'm only kidding, of course. Let us momentarily leave the control room and visit with one of the plant workers who was on an overhead catwalk near the actual reactor while all of this was playing out, And if I haven't already explained, the core itself is about twenty one feet high and about thirty six feet across. For reference, that's about twice the size of the SL one or stationary low power reactor number one from our first episode. The reactor corps alone weighed about seventeen hundred tons. Now the lid to the reactor is sectioned up into spaces for all of the two hundred and eleven control rods, and each of those weighed seven hundred and seventy pounds, which is heavy, way too heavy to be seen dancing as if they were being tickled from below. But to the Kawok engineer, that is exactly what he was seeing, even though it strictly was not possible. It'd be like laying down and looking up at your ceiling and then just watching it dance like a flag. You would have to think that you were hallucinating, well, hallucinating or not. The engineer ran, which was a prudent move considering what he saw was again not only impossible, well, it was about to change history faster than the human eye could perceive. It it exploded, and I mean the explosion blew the reactor's one thousand ton lid clean off. That is two million pounds. Remember the USS New Jersey, the flagship of the Pacific Third Fleet from our very early US Navy versus Typhoon Cobra of nineteen forty four episode. Imagine thirty four of them, thirty four Iowa class battleships, stacked on top of each other. That's a pretty dramatic depiction of the weight of the reactor lid, and it meant nothing. I tried to find a way to compare or illustrate the power of the explosion, and the closest I could come up with was that same amount of force might have been applied if ten fully loaded tanker trucks carrying eight thousand gallons of gasoline all exploded at the same time. The lid was not pulverized or obliterated by the explosion. It was damaged, but it remained largely intact and was found tilted at an angle, partially covering the core. The going suggestion is the lid might have jumped maybe thirty feet in the air or before gravity yanked it back down and again getting two million pounds to move a single inch is an unbelievable feat. As near as I can tell, the force required to lift the lid maybe about two hundred tons of TNT, and the sound generated would have been louder than firing the business end of a twelve gage shotgun resting up against your ear, and with the lid now gone, oxygen was free to flow into the reactor, where it mixed with hydrogen and superheated graphite. The second explosion was closer to twenty five trucks going up at the same time. If the second blast had been the result of one solid block of TNT, that block would be a cube forty feet on each side and as tall as a four story building. The first blast destroyed the reactor core. The second destroyed humanity's calm acceptance of nuclear energy. Oh and the building. It wasn't just an explosion, It was a radioactive geyser fire and radioactive particles spewed into the sky, creating an eerie glow visible for miles because the core had been exposed to the atmosphere. And this as a sentence, all of those words that I just said in that order were never meant to be said. And was never thought to even be possible. It's really hard to create an analogy to explain the amount of fallout vomiting from this room, but it's roughly equivalent to about four hundred times the fallout from the Horosima bombing. Mind you, people of the plant didn't know this. In fact, even when they found out, they didn't believe it. Inside the reactor room, the roof and floor had been destroy Radioactive materials lay everywhere, and severed steam pipes screamed deafeningly. The people who were near the room at the time were dead or dying. One man was so disfigured no one even knew who he was until he spoke in the control room. They don't understand what's happening. The entire building rocked. They absolutely felt the explosion. They just refused to believe that it could have been the reactor core. They were kind of blind, and they were really just guessing at what to do. They wanted to flood the reactor area with coolant water, but the tanks had been destroyed, so Dilotov ordered his men into the room to re insert the control rods by hand. He doesn't understand or can't understand that there's nothing to insert, and there's nothing to insert into. It's all destroyed. But again, reactors don't explode, So Dilotov sends them to look again. He wanted them to look down into the reactor room. Of the four men sent, three will die in excruciating pain. They described it like looking into a volcanic crater, and to look directly into a reactor's core is to know death. The fourth man only survived because he never actually entered the room. He just held the door. But just because he did not get the full nazis melting after staring into the ark of the Covenant treatment. He still held the door to the worst place on earth. His arm, leg, and shoulder would turn black after touching it. Bits of nuclear fuel had been raining down across the whole area, setting everything else on fire. This entire situation is utterly unprecedented. By two in the morning, firefighters were brought in to fight the fire starting all around the plant. They had no idea the danger that they were in. They were never told what had happened, and they were handling radioactive materials bare handed. The only place you will find graphite anywhere near the facility is in a pencil or in the actual reaction core. But to all appearances, what appeared to be graphite lay broken everywhere. There was debate about whether graphite could be irradiated enough to actually burst into flames, but no one was lining up to try to solve this experiment. The firefighters thought that they were just handling debris, and anecdotally the whole time they were receiving the equivalent of four million chest X rays. The levels of radiation that they were exposed to was described as appalling. Their immune systems were destroyed just standing there. Some people's hands began to burn and melt, and these men began dying within days. So you're on your way to work and the chocolate bar in your hand begins to melt, and a few of your teeth slide loose, and your bangs fall out. Would you know what to do? If you're not familiar with the way that radiation poisons your body. What it does is it steals electrons from the atoms in your molecule, and for the record, you really like them the way they are. Now you are a giant pile of molecules that we call tissue, and radiation destroys the chemical bonds, which ends up kind of melting the tissue. If you go to your kitchen and carve a little u out of cheese and then just nuke it for twenty seconds, you'll begin to see what I mean. After an hour or two of exposure, your GI track starts to break down, releasing bacteria throughout your body, which will leave you force ejecting force ejecting feces and stomach contents from both ends. You won't have many white blood cells at this point, so you will become a kind of a flea market for infections. You will be coated in blisters and ulcers while count less bacteria eat you from within. So if we took a few steps backwards, what could we have done differently? Well, protecting yourself isn't always possible, so I'm going to tell you what you can do to minimize the amount of damage. One first things First, radiation is a proximity killer. Proximity and duration are no good for you. So step one is to move away from the source of the radiation as quickly as possible. The further you are, the less exposure you have. And putting thick materials like concrete or brick or lead. If you've got it between you and the source, provides extra shielding. Highly recommend. Now step two strip. If you were exposed, so was your outfit, and any kind of radioactive particles sticking to your clothes are still cooking you. So you want to lose them and bag them up and throw them as far away as you safely can. And now here is where I am going to break with convention and tell you something that we all learned wrong. Here is why you do not want to silk wood shower yourself clean. We all think you jump into the hottish shower you can find and scour your skin off with metal scrubbing pads. And we think this because movies and television have done a terrible job of teaching you how to clean yourself after a radiological exposure. You don't want anything in your skin, so scrubbing is no good. Scrubbing actually damages your skin, which can increase absorption and worse, the other thing that no one considers is that hot water opens your pores. So what I'm saying is screw that noise. Let me be clear, you still need to have a shower, but you don't want it hot and I'm not telling you specifically to shave your head, but losing that hair would not be a bad idea. You can wash it to remove any existing particles of radiation, but conditioners, If your shampoo contains a conditioner, you're screwed because conditioners contain bonding agents that basically glue radiation to your hair, and you do not want radiation bonded that close to your brain, Thank you, but no. You are also going to want to be hypervigilant in watching first signs of earth lead radiation sickness, you know, nausea, barfing, diarrhea, fatigue, or just any kind of odd or unusual skin colorations. And these things could take hours or they could take days. There's no way to say radiation does not affect everybody the same way. So what I'm going to tell you is you want to take your wet, hairless ass to the hospital, unless you had a doorless microwave running for a while, in which case the way that I suggested to do this is call for emergency services and explain what the hell has happened, because sometimes it's better for them to come to you than for you to poison an emergency room unintentionally, emergency workers will have a better idea how to help you, and access to things like potassium iodide which can help save your organs. And of all this, mostly I'd want to tell you to try not to worry, because staying calm can make the whole situation less terrifying, which, yes, is a lot to ask, I understand in a lot of these, say fifty segments where fear and consequence are way up there. If there is only one thing that I can ask you to try to remember is that you cannot panic your way out of a situation. Radioactive smoke, dust, and steam blasted free from the plant like a nuclear Roman candle, while the remaining nuclear fuel inside was melting into a literal radioactive lava. And what does lava like to do most cool and turn into cursed rocks. Well, yes, obviously in Hawaii, but here lava wants to eat, and at thirty six hundred degrees celsius or forty five hundred fahrenheit, this lava began eating its way into the basement. And there will be a lot of frightening things in this episode, but this is easily one of the top ten. They call it the elephant's foot. Obviously, if you've heard any of our previous Soviet era episodes, you already know this whole thing was downplayed and covered up. There were entire departments of government media people that straighten their ties and crack their knuckles in order to do this. The inevitable cover up for this disaster began in earnest from the top down. But within a day a man named Boris Shcherbina was on the scene. He'd been ordered there by Mikhail Gorbachev himself, And if you saw the HBO miniseries, Sherbina was the guy who beat the phone to death and threatened to throw that scientist out of the helicopter. Gorbachev himself wasn't known as the guy who personally threw people out of helicopters, but imagine being the one to have to tell him you need to evacuate the city of Pripiat, And immediately he said, the station is close by and its omitting radioactive contagion, and the people in the city are living it up full blast. Weddings are going on, and that was his way of sugarcoating it. Levels of radioactivity in Pripiat were rising alarmingly early on, the levels were recorded between fourteen and one hundred and forty milli renkins per hour, but it didn't take long for it to rise as high as six hundred and for reference, fifty milaernkins or more per year can be dangerous. Four hundred millaernkins in a year will cleanly punch your clock, and parts of the planet interior had reached more than twenty thousand milaerenkins per hour. Inside Reactor four is now a molten reactor core, a large mass of graphite and concrete slag burning around twelve hundred degrees or twenty one hundred ninety fahrenheit. And just like non Patreon listeners, the citizens of Pripiat have no idea that they live less than a handful of miles from one of the most infamously dangerous objects on Earth. They don't know anything, and how could they. The phone lines had been cut and roads had already been blocked. Thirty eight hours after this all started, a woman's voice appeared over speakers across. Pripiat attention attention in connection with an accident at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station. Unfavorable radiation conditions are developing in the city of Pripriot. In order to ensure complete safety for residents, children first and foremost, it has become necessary to carry out a temporary evacuation. And they do not know it at the time, but all of these people grabbing for their wallets and house keys will never go home again. Meanwhile, back to the plant, they desperately needed to plug the barrel of the gun, so to speak. And normally you'd think of concrete, but they needed something that was going to help absorb neutrons or it was just going to end up melting in the heat. And as such, five thousand tons of boron dolomite, sand, clay, and lead were dumped onto the core by an endless parade of helicopters. It's the only thing they could think to do. They didn't have time to wait for a better idea, and the plan as it was didn't go great. A radioactive laser beam was blasting directly over the reactor, so pilots couldn't fly directly over it and live long enough to talk about it. And because of this, it meant that most of the materials drop landed around the reactor and if they were lucky, maybe a bunch of it would just blow into the hole. One helicopter famously clipped a crane wire and fell from the sky, leading most to believe the worst about the radiation, which really did not help morale. And you know, party members are having some pretty high decibeled conversations about all of this, but as loud as they may have been, it all kicked up a gear when they learned after just two days Sweden had detected radiation floating over its borders from Ukraine. And it is worth pointing out that Sweden doesn't actually share a physical border with Ukraine, but Belarus does, and they gotta be all, wait, sorry, what's happening. It was only a matter of time. American satellites will be snapping picks overhead, and sweaty newscasters around the world would be breaking the story. And if there's one thing Soviets do not like, it is embarrassment. Russian media immediately went on the offensive, talking about American nuclear embarrassments like Three Mile Island and other nuclear accidents right out of the narcissist handbook. And what did not make the news and did not become public knowledge were the secret KGB reports detailing for separate incidents at the Chernobyl plant. A report from nineteen eighty three said that Chernobyl was amongst the most dangerous in the USSR, and I ask among When we've talked about this kind of thing in the past, the story always ends up with bulldozers, but not in this case. A reinforced steel and concrete casing was built around the ruined reactor building. The technical name was the Shelter Object, but everyone just calls it the sarcophagus. And it was done by October of nineteen eighty six. That was just seven months The Eglinton light Rail streetcar line of Toronto has been under construction for the last twenty plus years. At a distance, the Sarcophagus kind of looks like a spaceship nestled in the trees, but up close, at ground level, it is a monstrosity. They built it away from the plant and then rolled it into position, which made it the largest mobile object in history. The Statue of Liberty would sit neatly inside this thing, and the lifespan of the design was only twenty to thirty years, which is fine because Sarcophagus two point zero is planned to last at least one hundred years, and yes, an exclusion zone was formed covering an area around one thousand square miles or twenty six hundred square kilometers. In twenty thousand years from now, the town of Pripiat might be safe enough for humans. And for now, the town has a real life after peace vibe, and you can visit now, but it can be a dicey and nervous expedition. There are entrepreneurs in the local area that will take you on safari to hunt, eat, and bore. The sarcophagus provides just enough coverage to prevent the release of unwanted radiation into the atmosphere. The problem, of course, is the structure is basically being eaten from within. There are about two hundred tons of highly radioactive material sitting deep within the plant. If it's easier to imagine it as ninety eight Dodge caravans melted into a glowing slag, well there you have it. This is an environmental disaster that will last forever, or at least twenty thousand years. And they do keep updating the shelter when they can, but Ukraine is not exactly Saudi Arabia, and they've been a little distracted for the last couple of years by other stuff, you know, unexpected guests. So wha what happened? Well, as power levels were lowered in preparation for the test, they dropped too low and the reactor ground to a halt and erased the power. The boron control rods were removed, which did the trick like crazy, and when the water warmed, it created bubbles, and bubbles create a little thing called a positive void coefficient. Basically, think of it like this. Water can absorb heat to keep things cool, but bubbly water cannot absorb the same amount of heat. The bubbles throw off the math, which really screws things up. Emergency shut down procedures were started, but when the control rods were reinserted, the power levels rose dramatically. The rods were made of boron, which does slow down reactions, but the tips of the rods were made of graphite, which did the opposite. And why on earth would you use rods like this, Well, they're cheaper and it's not just the rods. The RBMK reactor itself also hid its own dangerous design quirk. The thing was unstable at low power. Like all machines, it had operational limitations and safety systems, but all of that was poorly understood by the people who actually operated it, and with all those safety protocols disabled for the purpose of the test, all of the reactor's flaws were laid bare. When they reduced power, a radioactive byproduct called xenon one thirty five began to build up and quote poison the reactor see Xenon one thirty five eats neutrons, which makes it harder for the reactor to do its thing. Of course, operators didn't know this when they started yanking out the rods, so when so many rods hit the reactor at the same time, the xenon burned off and there was a huge surge in reactivity. Add that to the design flaws in the reactor and you get yourself a catastrophic chain reaction. The reactor entered into an uncontrollable feedback loop, and the intense heat being generated instantly boiled all of the water into steam, which, as we all know, water immediately vaporized into steam expands to seventeen hundred times its original volume, and that was enough to create an explosion that blew off the reactors. One thousand ton lid and they believe that about five percent of the one hundred and ninety two tons of fuel in the core was ejected. That is nine point six tons, or four and a quarter dodge caravans of the worst stuff on Earth just sprayed across Western Europe like a toy sprinkler. For the next ten days, most of the radioactive particles fell to earth as dust or debris, lighter materials lighter than dust. We're talking about here a column sniffables while they were blown over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe to varying degrees. All the fires were put out in a few hours, including the roof of the turbine building, and all at cost were twenty eight lives, six of which were firemen. Whole body doses between four to five thousand milligray in a short timeframe would kill about half of those exposed, with eight to ten thousand milligray being universally fatal. The doses received by the firefighters who died were estimated at more than twice those levels, and everyone else got acute radiation syndrome, which you remember, causes nausea, barfing, diarrhea, skin burns, fatigue, hair falling out, the complete destruction of your immune system and confusion, organ failure, unbleeding. And we have never called anything harrowing on the show before, but this is harrowing. Now let's see who should we kill next? Okay, well, next on the to do list was cleaning up the radioactivity across the site so that the remaining three reactors could still be used and to make it safer again. To figure out what to do with reacting four. They sent men with shovels and makeshift safety gear to run up to incredibly dangerous to be shovel up as much as you can in ninety seconds and throw it wherever they tell you. Imagine having a work shift less than two minutes long. Around six hundred thousand men from across the Soviet Union were involved in the recovery and clean up from nineteen eighty six to nineteen eighty seven, and they called them the liquidators. In the early days, most liquidators absorbed about one hundred miliseiverts of radiation. Maybe one in ten received as much as five times that amount. The highest doses were received by about one thousand emergency workers and on site personnel during the first day of the accident, they had been bathed in up to twelve thousand runkns of radiation. And we have talked about bravery on the show before, but never on the scale of this episode. Here is the thing with the fires out. They now realize that they have filled the place with water, and they are worried there could be another massive explosion, an even bigger explosion than the first two. Imagine pointing a radioactive raygun so powerful that it separates water back into hydrogen and oxygen. Well, that happens here, and enough hydrogen builds, and in theory, they were looking at a three to four megaton thermonuclear explosion on their hands. That would be almost four thousand times the destructive power of Hiroshima. And let me restate this to really drive this point home, because each part of this story gets a little scarier than the last. They were worried about twenty thousand gallons of water that had poured into the building. Imagine a pile or stack of Dodge caravans full of water, all superheating and super expanding into steam beneath the most openly radioactive place on Earth. All the water had to do was interact with the Core and most of Eastern and Central Europe would become uninhabitable for generations, and the environmental and agricultural and ecological consequences, all the trickle down and all the health effects would become a global issue. This explosion would blow everything, including the remaining functioning reactors, into a flaming mist that would poison everything. So imagine being asked to climb through a claustrophobic series of pipes and tubes deep beneath the most radioactive place on the planet, in the heat and the dark, all the fine valves to open a sluice gate to remove the water and stop the explosion, knowing that if you die or drown on the way, most of Europe becomes uninhabitable. Alexionenko, Valerie Bespalov, and Boris Baranov got that speech and did exactly that. They saved a huge part of the world, and their statue is pending. No rest for the wicked, I guess. So with that part of the disaster averted on to the next chapter. Remember that molten core we talked about. They had to bury the reactor to smother themedia effects, but the trade was that this raised the temperature, so Now, the fear was the core was going to burn through the cement base and once it touched the groundwater no more drinking water in most of Europe forever. So who do we kill about that? Miners? Of course, about four hundred miners were volunt told at gunpoint to dig a huge tunnel below the reactor and construct a cooling pad for a liquid nitrogen heat exchanger, which sounds all right, but it was fifty degrees or one hundred and twenty two fahrenheit underground, so they worked naked. They weren't under any illusions that wearing clothes or wearing respirators was really going to help them. Iodine one thirty one was a big part of this early on, but its half life is only eight days after that Caesium one thirty seven step to the plate, which itself has a half life of thirty years. They are both by products from the reactor core, which obviously, best case scenario, are supposed to stay in the reactor core, not sprayed willy nilly across an area big enough to park two point three billion Dodge caravans as many as three hundred and fifty thousand people within a thirty kilometer or almost twenty mile radius were evacuated by the time this was done, and I contend if it were not for those first responders, the area we were talking about would have been disturbingly larger. The initial death toll was officially given as two severely exposed plant workers plus twenty eight firemen who all died due to radiation exposure. Nineteen more died by two thousand and four from all kinds of different causes which were pretty clearly linked, but no cigar. We will never really know the exact death toll. There are so many trickle down diseases and ailments that spring up in the shadow of an event like Chernobyl, with effects that could take decades to play out. Of course, sending countless men to their deaths was not the original plan. Originally, they brought in robots, which heartbreakingly began to break down from the intense radiation. As for the liquidators, they might start with a handful of hair falling out and trouble breathing, but before long their skin is necrotizing and they're being sized up for skin grafts and blood transfusions and bone marrow trans plants. Some of these men went up on the roof as many as six times. They went blind. They died of blood infections. They had skin burns and lesions that couldn't heal. Organs shut down, genitals either swelled up or doubled or fell off. There was lots of pulmonary fibrosis, lots of leukemia. There cancers, cardiovascular diseases, logical disorders. I ask, how on earth do you do any kind of accurate body count With all of this going on. The official number never rose above thirty. The accepted number is closer to four thousand, but others suggest a death toll as high as thirty thousand. They just can't prove it. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, the accident had been caused by a remarkable range of human errors and violations of operating rules in combination with specific reactor features, which compounded and amplified the effects of the errors and led to the reactivity excursion. Reactivity excursion sounds like they're describing a field trip for poison. They shut down the safety systems. They had an inexperienced night shift crew raising and lowering control rods like they were churning butter and the whole thing blew up in their faces, so to speak. It was the sl one all over again, flowed equipment under precarious supervision, and with that this show runs full circle. The plant workers and their families now live in a town called Slavoodich, about thirty kilometers from the plant. Most everyone was moved out, except for the very elderly who simply refused to leave, who because of their advanced age, were not overly concerned with the long term effects of the radiation. Villages were buried and forests are now lined with warnings about fires. A wildfire in the US is going to release a lot of pollutants, but a Chernobyl specific wildfire is going to release radioactive particles trapped in the trees and vegetation right back into the atmosphere, which is a concern considering that the area is surrounded by forests. One lightning strike and I am doing a minisoke update for the ages. Thousands of people continued to work at the Chernobyl plant all the way to the year two thousand. The remaining react had been retired over time, and the surrounding area became a kind of a haven for wildlife. Everything from mice to wild horses roam freely, but it's not entirely free of humanity, like we said. In twenty eleven, Chernobyl was officially declared a tourist attraction, and thousands of people visit each year. Many come to stand in awe or honor the lives lost and experience the haunting surroundings. But they call it dark tourism for a reason. I've seen people fishing there. I've seen people hunting mutant boars there. Everyone from graffiti artists to metal thieves till scuba divers have made themselves at home over the years, each taking advantage in their own little ways. Following the disaster, Russia retrofitted their RBMK reactors. Reactors and safety standards were overhauled around the world because, as a listener recently remarked, safety rules are written in blood. Some people believe that this accident had been inevitable. It was the price of a Soviet economic system that came to value value over the value of human life. Well not exactly. They were just being cheap because they had to be. They had big dreams and did what they had to do to make all of them come true. So sure, sometimes human life takes a back seat to progress. Seven million people are now receiving or eligible for benefits as Chernobyl victims. There's one victim that we did not talk about. Valerie Legayisov. He was a Soviet chemist and a key figure in the response to the disaster. He was the deputy director of the Kirchhatov Institute, which oversaw the development of all things nuclear in Russia. This poor Sonoovich was tasked with assessing the situation in Chernobyl and then heading the response. His job was to diffuse a situation that no one thought was even possible. It's not like there was a guidebook for this kind of thing, and he found himself having to fight the Soviet big wigs to do it the whole way. Then when it was over, it fell again to him to air the rbmk's dirty laundry, and not just the design flaws. He went in on the entire Soviet culture of secrecy and denial, only to become a victim of the Soviet culture of secrecy and denial. The attempt was pretty ballsy considering however, all this while Legasov is quietly ill, he spent an incredible amount of time exposed to high levels of radiation at the plant, and more frighteningly, he was one of the few people with the specific knowledge set of exactly how bad things were going to be before he died. Legasov was a picture perfect example of someone too smart to be happy. We didn't even mention his incredible importance to the story till now, because if we had gotten into the reality of the impossible pressure of managing the disaster and the equally impossible task of piloting governmental bureaucracy, this story would have been at least three times as long. The work took everything out of him, whoever he was before all this began, that man already died. Legasov's experience left him severely depressed, and that can make you unrecognizable even to yourself. So Legisov records himself on tape explaining the whole truth about the house and the wives of this disaster, and then calling out the government for ignoring the truth. In his words, he said, it is impossible to point to a single culprit or initiator of all the unpleasant events that led to this crime, because it is a chain that links to itself. Two years later, in nineteen eighty eight, on the day after the second anniversary of the disaster, Legasov was found dead in his apartment, and of course all of his writings and recordings were burned and legacy was anonymously buried in a pit. Except that's not what happened. His efforts did not go unnoticed. In fact, they were felt around the world, and in time led to all kinds of nuclear safety reform that keeps all of us safer today. Valerie Legasov died not knowing that his actions would come to make us all safer. And boris the man who threatened to throw him out of the helicopter earlier. He later said that Legaysov had become a close friend. He said, Valerie was too great, and I loved him more than all the people I knew. He gave all of himself too. Chernobyl, he burnt out. There were a lot of reasons the Soviet Union finally fell in nineteen ninety one, just five years later, and most point two poorly executed reforms and mismanagement of their economy. But Chernobyl is often cited as one of the most public causes. The mishandled response and I really hate to call it that, because a lot of people made the ultimate sacrifice so that we could live safely in our homes instead of dwelling in underground caves and sewers to escape the poisoned sky from the long ago. This mishandled response exposed the Soviet Union's major flaws. We have had some high stakes episodes before, but we have never had a disaster that destroyed an entire political system. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics existed for sixty nine years and contained almost three hundred million people at the time, making the USSR the equivalent of the third most populous country in the world, behind China and India. Anatoly Dilatov was found guilty of failing to follow safety protocols, ignoring warning signs, and mismanaging the reactor during the test. He received ten years, but was out in four for good behavior, but not without dragging the chief and deputy Chief of engineers down with him. Two hundred and thirty seven people suffered from acute radiation sickness. Thirty one who were exposed to lethal levels of radiation during the immediate aftermath died within a couple of months. Several thousand liquidators would die from cancers and radiation related illnesses. It was the most serious accident in the history of nuclear energy and unique amongst the disasters that we have covered in the history of the show. This is a disaster whose toll can and will never be known. I was recently reminded that I do this at the request, the literal deathbed request, of my father, who I lost at this time last year. There weren't his last words or nothing, but I have wanted to do this story to honor him by ten telling just one of the many tales from the homeland that he was forced to flee. On that note, because my dad carried the DNA of Oga of Kiev in his veins, I remind you when it comes to New Year's resolutions, yours can be as petty as seeking revenge and disrespecting your enemies, and whatever it is you choose to do, I only want you to be safe while doing it. Speaking of I pointed out a little earlier how Ukraine had been entertaining guests since the last time we were here. They originally said they were only staying for three days, you know, a long weekend, But here we are three years later. And again, this is not a political podcast, so my feelings on the matter are completely immaterial to today's story, but it does overlap with today's topic. When Russia invaded back in February of twenty twenty two, of all the areas that they decided to occupy, Chernobyl was on the list. Now, of all the things that I know about nuclear anything, is that no part of it pairs well with bullets. Obviously, not everyone agrees, and the Russian military used the exclusion zone as a staging area and ran the plant at gunpoint. They even shelled the sarcophagus for crying out aloud, and then, to prove they don't care any more about your health than their own soldiers, they were forced to dig trenches and bunkers all around the site and they did this for about five weeks before they retreated their radiated asses out of there, taking with them only photographs and looted equipment and of course acute radiation sickness. Well that's not true. They also dragged radiation on their clothes and boots, which spiked everywhere they went. Oh, and they left behind booby traps and land mines, which makes me think if you're not a short sighted, irradiated idiot with no thought to the future, why not celebrate your genteel humanity by considering becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time, and if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really be helping keep the show going. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you are into it but are not looking for a whole relationship, you can always visit buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday to make a one time donation. And for those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. I myself think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo and now a quick but heartfelt shout out to Sammy Wheeler, Robert Shannon, Lourie, Davidson, Jake Nelson, Karen Thomas, Julie Hitchcock, Jenny Blackout, Jed and Michael Kalenda for supporting the show. You can always reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast or just fuire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you've found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. But if you could spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmeedic dot ca. On the next episode, a lot of people will say that the worst part of their trip is their time spent at the airport and I myself have never tried to bring a fire extinguisher through security, but one can only try. It's the Dusoldorf Airport disaster of nineteen ninety six we'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.