Let's talk about the most expensive disaster of all time! The meltdown at Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. A safety test that was anything but 'routine' ended in an explosion of radioactive material, and everything became poison. We'll talk about the USSR, Nuclear Power, the disaster itself, and the aftermath. This is episode 200!! We are so excited to have gotten this far, thank you so much for listening!!
Let's talk about the most expensive disaster of all time! The meltdown at Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. A safety test that was anything but 'routine' ended in an explosion of radioactive material, and everything became poison. We'll talk about the USSR, Nuclear Power, the disaster itself, and the aftermath.
This is episode 200!! We are so excited to have gotten this far, thank you so much for listening!!
Sources:
The Chernobyl Disaster [Ben Fogle] - Parts 1-3 (Documentary 2022) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsr3vxsgjnA
'This is my home': Life inside Chernobyl’s exclusion zone | VOANews - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MokT_Y0YDhw
Chernobyl: Flourishing lives in the dead zone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYxO7iGO6b0
Chernobyl mini series - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7366338/?ref_=ttch_ov_i
Midnight in Chernobyl / Adam Higgenbotham - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Chernobyl
Chernobyl: Minute by Minute | Full Film - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGw3kRGX35s
Inside Chernobyl's Abandoned Ghost Town | Pripyat - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_3DFTm8ioA
Frequently Asked Chernobyl Questions - https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs
Exploring Chernobyl: A Stalker's Unseen Journey Inside The Exclusion Zone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-ef7wi_TQ
The Elephant's Foot - Corpse of Chernobyl - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIWu8rbWLGo
Cary Elwes's memoir,
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride
.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
Taylor: Parents can be tired. You're tired for the life you're living
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
>> Farz: Moment. Hi, Taylor.
>> Taylor: Hi, fathers.
>> Farz: I just squeaked a little bit. How are you?
>> Taylor: Good. How are you?
>> Farz: I'm good. I'm good. You know, I was thinking about this, about how I almost feel like I don't have a right to tell parents that I'm tired because they know what y' all endure.
>> Taylor: No. You know, I was tired when I was 20. You're tired. You're tired for the life you're living.
>> Farz: But I also.
>> Taylor: No idea what it's like. But you also can be tired.
>> Farz: I did listen to a podcast where somebody was talking about how to harness the energy of a parent and how it's like a weird superhuman capability given how much running around you have to do, along with balancing job and household and all that stuff. And what they were articulating was like, yeah, but it's different because you get that energy from something else. Like, you're not dwell. You're not pulling from the same reservoir.
>> Taylor: Exactly.
>> Farz: Because you have an obligation to keep another thing alive. And so it's just a. I guess parents, I guess you're kind of superhuman in some way. So.
>> Taylor: Thank you. Yeah, we're so busy that I wrote on the calendar that they can ask me new questions on Thursday. I wrote, you may ask mom new questions on Thursday. Because we have so many activities between last week and this Thursday that I'm not taking any new requests.
>> Farz: Miles is like, mom, can I have a hot dog?
>> Taylor: It's like, no new questions Thursday. Talking about on Thursday.
>> Farz: Nothing.
>> Taylor: Spend for yourselves. Oh, my goodness.
Doomed to Fail brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Doomed to Fail. Fars is tired. I'm actually not that tired. We bring you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. And I'm Taylor, joined by Fars.
>> Farz: I'm joined. And you go, no, no, please.
>> Taylor: This is episode 200.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah, that's what it is.
>> Taylor: There's a firework sounds.
>> Farz: Can't see it, but Taylor's doing the firework hands sign. The. The international sign for fireworks with her hands.
>> Taylor: Isn't that exciting?
>> Farz: It's kind of crazy.
>> Taylor: I know.
>> Farz: It's a little nuts.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Like, what are we doing? It's super fun.
>> Farz: Like, we've been doing this while.
>> Taylor: Think of all the stuff that we didn't know.
>> Farz: Yeah, I know, I know. Like, ultimately, like, I. That's the one Thing that besides our accountability structure to one another that keeps bringing me back is like, unless you just snap out of like your day to day life a little bit and be like, I'm going to research something I don't know a lot about or I haven't looked at in a very long time and it's just going to break up the week into something else that. That could be interesting. So that's been very, very fun.
>> Taylor: Yeah, it has been fun.
>> Farz: It's a lot of work though, I will admit.
>> Taylor: I. Oh, I just got. Actually, speaking of books, I just got Abundance from the library. Let me check it out. I have to like check it out or it's going to go away on my phone. I will read that.
>> Farz: I did buy Abundance recently as well.
>> Taylor: Good for you. Okay, let me have to check it out. They're gonna take it away from me. Oh, no, I think I got it. No, I'll read that this week. It is short. Oh, I have another one doing 14 days. Oh, Libby's so stressful. I read like a stupid meme that was like, I lived it all. My Libby holds came in at the same time. Because if you like have a bunch of stuff from the library, it all comes at the same time. Then you're like, I don't have 100 hours this week to listen to books, you know.
>> Farz: Is your library really busy?
>> Taylor: Actually, it must be because I actually pull from two libraries. I pull from the LA library and the San Bernardino County Library. So yeah, they're both pretty busy. I don't really know how it works with licensing, you know, but they can like, you know, give out three copies of @ a time, you know, So I have.
>> Farz: I will admit right now that I've never been to the Austin one. That's downtown. I'm positive Blair has and just probably told you about it, but apparently so. The outside of it's gorgeous. It's very cool looking very modern. It's got like a great greenscape outside of it. And I hear there's like a bar on the rooftop. A rooftop that you can hang out and read it. It's supposed to be one of them. Also, were you the one that told me or did somebody else tell me that you can check out Seeds? Okay, somebody else.
>> Taylor: That's cool. Yeah, yeah, you can check out all sorts of stuff. They get like lawnmowers and video cameras and.
>> Farz: Yeah, guess how many gumballs are in the gumball jar.
>> Taylor: It's really fun. You can do so many cool things. The library. The library is the best I get. Yeah, you can do canopy. You can watch movies for free. You can do, obviously, books I used to do when we lived in la, we lived next to the library or we worked next to the library member. And I used to, like, order books. And no matter where in the LA county your book was, they would bring it to that library. You could just go get it.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: So you didn't have to go. Like, it was really fun.
>> Farz: One of the better resources that we spend public funds on.
>> Taylor: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. We have a little tiny one. It's like one little room, but it's really cute and I really like it.
>> Farz: I have one that's pretty close to me. And it does look like I looked at it recently because. Because I talk to you all the time. And so I was like, I need to go check out the library that's near me because I ride my bike by it. And having gone yet, but it is dramatically smaller than the one that's downtown. But if you've been to the downtown Austin one. Yeah, tell me about it, because I hear it's awesome.
>> Taylor: And they're all connected. So, like, if something's not at your library, like, they'll find it from another library.
With the new iPhone, you can remove unwanted people from photos
You know what I mean? Like, this is like, there's a talk to a librarian message at New York University. It's like an AIM chat with someone. Like a chatbot. Not whatever. Not a chatbot's a human. And I was on the COVID of NYU Today when I graduated from college in 2004. Like, in the fountain. There's a fountain in Union Square that you jump in after graduation. So it was me and my friend Lonnie and then my ex boyfriend and then like, our friend Frank. And I'm like, okay, now I feel like I have the technology to remove my boyfriend from the photo and then I can get it printed because I don't want him in there. He looks stupid and he's dumb, so I don't want him in there. So I was like, how do I get this digitized? Because I have it, but it's, like, big and like, it's 20 years old. So I was, like, chatting with librarian and just like, this person who works at the library, and she was so cute, and, you know, she's 20 years younger than me and was like, okay, here's what you do. You go here, you tell them you want this, this, and this, and then they're going to get it for you and then they can digitize it. And like, librarians just, like, want to help you. It's lovely, Taylor.
>> Farz: I just learned this today because I went to the Apple store this weekend and I was tinkering with the new iPhone and apparently with the new iPhone, if you take a picture that is AI thing where you can like circle a person or thing you don't want in the picture and it removes it.
>> Taylor: Yeah, you can do that.
>> Farz: Anybody can do that.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: I did not know that was a thing.
>> Taylor: Isn't that amazing? I feel like I just. There's so many pictures where I like. You would have to send it to a guy to Photoshop it and it would cost like 100 bucks. Now you can just like do it.
>> Farz: The age where we're all out of jobs is coming pretty soon.
>> Taylor: Yeah, whatever. Cool.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster cost $700 billion US dollars to clean up
Well, anyway, go to your library.
>> Farz: Read books for your library.
>> Taylor: Super fun. I did read a book for this one, but I read it like a long time ago and I was like, I'm not reading it again. So I did other things to prepare for this, but I told you I'm going to do a big one because I did a big one last time. I did the Donner party and you.
>> Farz: Didn'T end one last time.
>> Taylor: Oh, I did Enron last time and then did the dinner party before that. So two big ones. And I'm going to do. I'm gonna now I'm gonna have you guess what is the most expensive disaster in human history.
>> Farz: It's gotta be 9, 11.
>> Taylor: No good guess. This one is the total and it's ongoing is $700 billion US dollars to clean up contain.
>> Farz: Oh, Chernobyl.
>> Taylor: Yes.
>> Farz: Wow.
>> Taylor: It's also the worst nuclear disaster in history, obviously. So all of that. I have a ton of sources. I'll put them in our notes. I watched like a bunch of YouTube, like little documentaries. I also watch the TV show. You've watched that, right?
>> Farz: I've not Rachel's try to get me to watch it. I've gotten halfway through. But again, this is one of those things where I. I've been obsessed with this.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: And the TV show adds like drama that I'm like, I don't. I don't know if I need.
>> Taylor: Well, I think it's super good and I also think it's really helpful. Like, I think I saw this before with other things where if you watch even like a dramatized version, at least you have like a person whose face you can picture even though it's not like the real person, but you can like kind of picture to their mannerisms and be like, oh, it was that guy, you know, that's that guy.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: So that I feel like that helps me when I' trying to visualize these things because I'm just like, oh, it's.
>> Farz: It'S faceless gray non player characters in your mind.
>> Taylor: And yeah, like I can make them up in my mind but I can be like, oh, this is how they move. Like I can, I can kind of merge them together and so freaking HBO Max changed their name back to HBO Max. You heard this?
>> Farz: It's so ridiculous.
>> Taylor: Who cares? So my brother in law works there and in this constant change that they're having, they took away the friends and family to get free HBO plan. So I couldn't watch the last episode that is not amused, but I was still mad.
>> Farz: Amongst the many issues HBO is having.
>> Taylor: I was like, I'm not paying for this ridiculous. So I watched most of it this time, but it was great. So essentially what happened is on April 26, 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, which is way worse than a regular explosion. If your house explodes, it's not great if like in the LA fires and in 9 11, so there's fire and there's stuff in the air that is not great. You know, I think we talked about this after the LA fires. I was like, where is everything? You know, and it's in the air. It just gets like reduced into particles and all of that's bad, but it is not as bad as radiation. The radiation was like 400 times more than the bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Just literal poison, invisible poison in the air.
>> Farz: Taylor. I learned because my mom was telling me probably conspiracy theory about how there's microplastics in our brains now.
>> Taylor: Oh, they're everywhere. I heard that too.
>> Farz: And so I researched it and we do have a blood brain barrier which only allows oxygenated blood through. But apparently microplastics can also get in. And so I think it's real.
>> Taylor: Well, I heard that they tried to do a test and they couldn't find anyone that didn't have microplastics in them to test on.
>> Farz: Oh my God.
>> Taylor: Like they tried to do an experiment and there was no control because there's no one who is not affected.
>> Farz: Our brains are like half Mattel.
>> Taylor: I mean I'm just like it sometimes. So a fun story before we get to the horror of it, of it all.
Did you ever see the Princess Bride? Yes, we watched it recently
Did you ever see the Princess Bride? Yes, we watched it recently. It's so good. My kids loved it. It holds up. It's very, very fun. I also read Carrie Elwes's memoir called as yous Wish, Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride. It was like, inconceivable. It was like, silly. Like, there's really fun things. Like, at one point, Rod Reiner told him not to get on, like an ATV with Audrey the Giant. He was like, don't do it. And Carry Ellis was like, totally. I'm not going to do it. And he totally did it and broke his ankle. And he had to pretend that his ankle wasn't broken. And Rob Reiner was like, it didn't you? And he's like, I did, yeah.
>> Farz: How would you even fit with him on there?
>> Taylor: But I bring it up because a few weeks after the Chernobyl disaster, Carrie Elwes was filming a movie in East Germany, and Rob Reiner and the other producer, Andrew Scheinman, had to go to see him for his last audition. And they almost didn't go because they were so scared to go to East Germany because of the radiation in the air. Andrew Scheinman, like, ran from the. Like, left his. Like, left stuff in the cab, ran to the hotel, wouldn't even drink the bottled water. Was like, we gotta get out here as fast as humanly possible. So I think that's fun.
>> Farz: I mean, it's got to be terrifying. Yes. I'm sure, you know, they're. That they survived, but.
>> Taylor: Yeah, they survived, but that story always is. I think it's fun.
The Soviet Union was the largest country on Earth from 1922 to 1991
So anyway, I have some context and we're going to talk about, through the whole thing, the USSR as a country, nuclear power radiation, the Chernobyl power plant and the city around it, the disaster. And then what's happening now, because it still exists, obviously. Like, these are disasters that are like thousands of years. Like, it's not going to be clean anytime soon. Like, you can't. It's area ruining forever.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah.
>> Taylor: Time is insane. So we're in Cold War USSR. So the Soviet Union existed from 1922 to 1991, and it was the largest country on Earth, which comes with a lot of problems because it's hard to, like, communicate over that big of a piece of Earth. Especially like before, like, super modern technology. It also borders a ton of countries, like 15 countries. So you have to, like defend like all these borders, all these different countries. Russia now and the USSR all had 11 time zones, which is just insane amount of time zones. So you could be on one side and the other side, and there's 10 hours between places in the same country. Yeah, sounds which makes Things difficult also. So the USSR is like, once it fell apart, other countries spun off of it. And two of them that we're going to talk about today are Ukraine and Belarus, mostly in Ukraine. The Chernobyl was in Ukraine, but also Belarus was super affected as well. This is also, obviously a very, very socialist society. So the culture of the USSR is that we can do anything, and we are doing it. So we can do satellites, we can go to space, we can do nuclear power plants. Like, we are strong. We continue to do things. And you very much like Enron, you can never go backwards. You're always pushing forward. You cannot admit mistakes. You cannot say that anything is going wrong. You're just like, yes, things are going well. And even though, like, you may know as a person this is not going well, you say yes.
>> Farz: Anyway, was this cruise under. This was Khrushchev, right?
>> Taylor: Gorbachev.
>> Farz: Ah, okay. Yeah.
>> Taylor: So Gorbachev was like, just. Just new. He was like his first year doing it. So they keep pushing forward. And, you know, you can't keep pushing forward forever. But one of the big things that the USSR wanted to do was have the most nuclear power plants in the world. So they built a handful of them. So a nuclear power plant. Do you know how nuclear power works? Far as me, I do know how it works.
>> Farz: So it's steam power. And the steam is generated in perpetuity by inserting, I want to say uranium rods, but I could be mistaken on that.
>> Taylor: I think there's uranium or plutonium, either.
>> Farz: One, into a reactor which contains water, which is heated up and generates steam, which turns turbines, which creates electricity.
>> Taylor: Correct.
>> Farz: Thank you.
>> Taylor: Correct. So it takes a lot of water to keep it cool because it's, like, insanely hot. The reaction is insanely hot. And then the water is constantly going into it, cooling it, creating the steam, turbines and all of it.
>> Farz: You know what's funny is like, in this 200th episode out of 20 times you've asked me if I know something, I say no or I say yes, maybe, like, once. And it just happened to be about nuclear fission and reactions.
>> Taylor: Good for you, everyone. You know this.
>> Farz: Thank you.
>> Taylor: Yeah, good for you. And so, yeah, and I feel like also there's like. I don't know. I haven't heard about radioactive waste in a long time. But I feel like in the 90s, that was like, the biggest thing was like, where are we going to put all this waste? It just generates other problems. But it is like, it does generate a lot of electricity. Electricity.
So obviously during all that, there is radiation. And radiation itself is particles, that energy travels through space
So obviously during all that, there is radiation. And radiation itself is particles, that energy that travels through space. This is like super dumb science corner time. But there's like alpha, beta and gamma particles. Gamma is the one that's like pure energy, highly penetrating. You have to have like lead or concrete. Like, it's really, really tough. And that one's the one that's really going to kill you. The units that they're in, like, historically there's been. Rhodogen has been the amount of radiation like unit. But now people usually use columns per kg or grays, which is GY to like measure how much you're absorbing of the radiation. You also. There's also a unit called a sievert, which is how much radiation is coming into your body. So for example, if we're looking at like a milli. A millisievert, which is like the tiniest amount, like one of the tiniest amounts that you can get. If you get a dental x ray, it's 0.005 millisieverts. So like very small amount. And then, you know, natural background radiation, by being outside like per year, you're going to get like two to three of them per year. Like just gonna happen depending how much time you're outside. And then a fatal radiation dose is gonna be 4,000 to 5,000. So if you get like super hit with radiation, you're gonna die pretty quickly.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: In the really gross ways.
>> Farz: Yeah. You remember? Ouchie.
>> Taylor: No. What's that?
>> Farz: In last pod, the worst ways to die, he got hit with like a million sieverts.
>> Taylor: Yes.
>> Farz: And then like his heart would stop, but they would keep him alive. And they. There was pictures of him with his. Like he was just like a skeleton man with like a brain and a heart.
>> Taylor: Yes. Actually was reading about that a little bit. That was in Japan in an accident where he got like. With the radiation, all the sieverts.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: Yeah. And then like they kept him alive. Yeah. For a while and it just like. So it like ruins your body. And I think I have more of it later. But it basically stops your cells from being able to grow. So you can't build red blood cells, white blood cells. It changes your DNA. Like it just.
>> Farz: Which is why they say roaches will survive in a nuclear blast is because their cells are like stupidly slow splitting. And so because of that it doesn't. The impact of radiation doesn't get felt felt for like a very long time compared to human cells that split constantly.
>> Taylor: Right. Like several generations. They don't have to worry about it. Good for them. So some ways that you can measure radiation, like, in the air, there's obviously like the Geiger counter, it says Geiger Mueller. So I feel like Mueller's probably mad because we know it's a Geiger counter, but it clicks. So there's a gas filled tube inside of it, and when radiation hits it, it ionizes the gas and causes a spark, which is the click. So if you do spend time watching Chernobyl documentaries, you're just going to hear that click constantly. It's a very.
>> Farz: I can literally hear it in my head right now. Yeah.
>> Taylor: Yeah, it is like, basically, like, you're fine, too. You're going to die. You're like, holy s***. Like, do you want to be anywhere near that? So there's also little things like a dosimeter. There's some that, like, if you work in a nuclear power plant or somewhere around there, you might have one like on your ID card. And maybe if you're even like. Even if you're, like, doing, like, dental X rays, you might have one. If you're exposed to too much radiation, it will. It will darken and let you know that you're close to it. And then there's others that will, like, glow and give you a reading just like, how bad. How bad it is right now. So they're not like, stopping it from happening, but they're telling you how much happens if you get radiation sickness, you're gonna vomit, you're gonna lose your hair, you're gonna get a fever, you're gonna get burns. And, like, it's so interesting because you're like, I didn't touch anything, you know? But then all of a sudden you have, like, burns all over your body. It's just like the air is poison again. Yeah. It's killing your ability to make new cells. Your red blood cells, they can't carry oxygen. Your white blood cells can't fight infection. And there's like a day where you might feel okay, and then a day where, like, you're. You melt essentially. Like you're everything. It's. It's really gross.
>> Farz: We've all seen. Is it U571, Matthew McConaughey submarine, where the kid goes into the nuclear reactor without any protective gear on, and he comes back and is. He's like, melted.
>> Taylor: I haven't seen that one. But I, My, my example was the Stand. Do you ever see the Stand?
>> Farz: No.
Stephen King's book about nuclear power takes place in Ukraine in 1983
>> Taylor: Okay, so the Stephen King book. And like, in the very. Okay, essentially everyone, FYI, it's the end of the world. There's a disease. And then also God is there and the devil. And all the good people go to Boulder, Colorado and all the bad people go to Las Vegas. And then there's this crazy guy who like blows up St. Louis and he finds a nuclear bomb and he knows that the devil's in Las Vegas. And he rides the nuclear bomb on the back of a truck and brings it to Las Vegas. And by the time he gets there, he's melting off. It's great.
>> Farz: Metal. Metal.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah. So all of that is like stuff that happens in the background. So we're in the ussr, they really want to have nuclear power and they're doing it. So they build a big plant in Ukraine. It is the Chernobyl plant is located 16 miles northwest of the city of Chernobyl. That is in, that's in Ukraine. But that's not the city yet. That's the city of Chernobyl that they build index to. So basically what where you are is like forests. And they build the city, the Pripyat city. If you, you have to do the Pripyat, can you do that?
>> Farz: How many ruples you gotta squint when you do it for some reason.
>> Taylor: So they build city prepat, like you said, out of. No, out of nothing. It's like build it out of. Out of nothing. All of a sudden, you know, in a couple years, 50,000 people live there. There are schools. It's meant to be like a really perfect socialist city. And they build that city two miles from the plant so you can work there. You're two miles from work, you can ride your bike to work. Sounds nice. You know like you live in this like beautiful city. There's these high rises. They're the high rises that like in the United States and in the UK I feel like they're projects.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah, it's. It's like concrete was brutalist structure.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah. But that was like the idea was it was like a perfect Soviet socialist place. It's a very, very young city because it's young families. You know, the dad works at the plant, the wife stays home, they have a couple kids. There's, you know, a lot of, a lot of children. There's fairgrounds, so I'm sure you've seen this far. But like there are in the ruins of. It is the Ferris wheel. Yeah, the Ferris wheel is huge. So you can definitely see that it's still standing. So yeah, it's very nice. By 1979 it's a full a** city. 50,000 people live there and they start building the plant. A man, and I'm sorry to all of our Russian listeners, but a man named Victor Brukanov. He is the first director. When he starts. He's 34 years old. He's the only director. He. He's there with that, but he is 34 years old. He had never worked at a nuclear power plant, but he had, like, been like an engineer and, you know, been a director before. So they let him take this job. He is. If you do watch the show, he's the guy. The actor is named Khan o' Neill. He has, like, a really rough voice. He's also like one of the police officers in the Penguin. And he's in our flag means death. Like he is. If you know who I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about. It's like a really.
>> Farz: It sounds like he fits the role.
>> Taylor: Yeah. So he's this guy, and his job is to get it up and running. It takes seven years to turn reactor one on. So it's not like a quick thing. It takes a long time. But they have. Reactor one takes seven years. And the plan is to have six reactors. So each reactor doing its own thing, pushing power into parts of the ussr. They start with one, and they're going up to six. The one that we are going to talk about is number four. Number four is built in 1983. And the way that they would tell you if you asked them in 1983, how is it going? They would say it is going fantastic. Like, everything is going great. Everything is perfect. We have had absolutely no problems, but there were already problems. And part of the reason that the problems were hidden is another part of the ussr, which is the kgb.
So what are you looking up? You look very interested in something
So what are you looking up? You look very interested in something.
>> Farz: Well, I'm looking up a map because I'm trying to get a sense of where. I should know this, but I'm trying to get a sense of where Ukraine is amongst Russia's. I don't know what you block the Soviet bloc.
>> Taylor: Mm. It's very. It's very north. It's very close to north.
>> Farz: Thank you.
>> Taylor: Sweden. Yeah.
>> Farz: I'm like. I'm like, all over the map here. I should know this.
>> Taylor: It's northwest.
>> Farz: Okay. Northwest.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Well, the reason I'm trying to. Next to Sweden. Wow, this thing is huge.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Russia is huge.
>> Taylor: Right. That's also what I'm trying to say. Like, how do you governing that area? Like, you know, remember when Catherine the Great, like, went on a sled ride all over Russia to try to meet new People. Because she's like, how am I supposed to govern these people? They are. Are, you know, 85 days away or whatever. However long it takes you to slide across Russia.
>> Farz: Yeah. So basically, if you have this thing in. Okay, if you have this thing in Ukraine, you can basically power most of the Western Soviet blocs. You got Belarus, latvia, Estonia, Moscow, St. Peter. So, like, there's a strategic reason why it was in Ukraine.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Okay.
>> Taylor: Yeah. All right. Moscow is pretty west. West. Westerly as well.
>> Farz: Yeah, it's like. It's, like, pretty close to the border with Ukraine.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. So, yes.
KGB documents say they knew about the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1983
So as I was saying, they would tell you everything was going great, but it was not going great. And now that things have been declassified and we know things aren't going. Weren't always going great, but the KGB is like the spies on each other of the Soviet Union. And so someone is always following you, and someone's always following them, and someone's. You're always, like, supposed to pretend everything is okay because if you don't, you're going to get in, like, such an immense amount of trouble that, like, you pretend everything's okay. So there's a part in the Chernobyl show where the main guy, he's there. He's been there. He's been in Chernobyl for, like, one day. The disaster's already happened. And he knows that, like, he's going to die because he's standing there, like, all these things, but they're not doing anything about it yet. But he's in the bar of the Pripyat Hotel, and there's a couple, and they're like, anything we should know about? Should we worried? And he's like, oh, no, everything's fine. And they're like, good. And they're the kgb. Because if he said, no, everything's not fine, then he would go to jail for saying that everything wasn't fine. Because everything's supposed to be fine.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Which is not how you solve problems. But now we know that there was a report in 1983 that reported there were 27 accidents and a ton of failures leading up to this. In September 1982, there was a partial core meltdown in reactor one due to a faulty cooling valve, and it had to be offline for eight months. So in release, KGB documents that from 1984, they said, quote, they knew as early as 1983, quote, that it was one of the most dangerous nuclear power plants in the ussr. So they knew that it wasn't going well. And a lot of that was due to construction and, like, not doing every detail that you needed to do. Yep, we'll talk about that. So unit four is an RBMK reactor. There's 17 of them in the USSR, so it's not the only one. There's a bunch of them. And it is built by December 1983. So the last thing you need to do when you build a nuclear reactor or, like, I imagine a car or something else, is a safety test. Like, it's done. Let's make sure that it'll work and no one's going to die. But in the way that it worked is you got your bonus in December of the year that you were in, and you wouldn't get your bonus for all the work you did on the reactor if it wasn't done by the end of the year. So they had to say that it was done because a lot of people were, like, counting on the bonuses and, like, the promotions and the things that would happen after it was finished. So it had to be finished. There was no option to say, let's just wait until next year. So the director signed off and said it was done at the end of 1983, but they never did the safety test.
>> Farz: It's interesting. It's like everybody knew that something was amiss, and we're turning a blind eye to it. And then disaster struck.
>> Taylor: You just don't say anything. Exactly. I know. So now it's 1986, and they have to do the safety test. It is like, there is no more waiting. It's been online for a couple years. They have to do it by a certain time, and the day that they have to do it by is May 1st. So May 1st is May Day, which is a big deal in the ussr. It's like Labor Day. But, like, everybody, everything's a labor party. They're super, super excited. Everyone will be on the street. It's like Lennon's big party. Big picture linen. Everyone has a red flag. Everyone's excited, and they're going to do it by then. Because the holidays coming up, everybody wants. Nobody wants to work. They all want to go do the holiday. It's spring. There's this, like, beautiful illusion of everything being fine. And they're like, let's just complete this test before Mayday so we can go party.
>> Farz: Yeah, makes sense.
>> Taylor: You know, so. So hold on. I'm gonna pause and sniff.
>> Farz: I'm gonna take a note on something I want to bring up later while you're doing that.
>> Taylor: Oh, thank you.
April 25, 1986 nuclear test in Georgia triggered massive steam explosion
Okay, so far, it is April 25, 1986 and you. We have to do the test today. Today is the day and what we need to do for the test is to. And I'll have more details, but essentially turn the power down and make sure that if there is a blackout that the reactor will be able to stay cool and protect itself, because the worst thing that can happen is the cooling systems fail and it explodes.
>> Farz: Exactly what happened at Fukushima.
>> Taylor: Yes. We should do that one too.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: That was so recent, too. So you're not testing at full power, you're testing at like half power. And then it's just making sure that things work. So they. They pull power from parts of the reactor and bring it back slowly and they use power from outside source to make sure that it would work again. If it's not cooling, it's very, very bad. So they started in the morning of April 25, and then part way through the day, another nuclear reactor 300 miles away got shut down for another reason. And because of that, they had to pull it back to full power because they needed the power from the other reactor being shut down.
>> Farz: This I did not know.
>> Taylor: So that's. They would have done the test during the day with more qualified people if this hadn't happened. But part of the problem, part of thing that happened is that the test was done in the middle of the night by the graveyard shift. And they're just like kids. They just started, you know, they don't have, like. I don't know if like, more experienced people could have necessarily stopped it. It was like something was bound to happen probably. But, like, part of the problem is you have these people working at one in the morning who have never done this before. They assumed it would be over. They didn't know they were going to do this when they came to work today.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: You know, so had to pull it back up, keep it going. And then they start the test again at 11pm so it should have been done by now, it should have been over, but instead they're starting super, super late. So because of this, because they went up and down with the power, there's xenon gas created and growing inside of the reactor, getting hotter and hotter that they don't know this is happening. So that's going to contribute to the explosion as well. This, like, added gas that they didn't know was going to come.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: So here's what happens. Partially, it's partially shut down, which we know, and there's eight cooling rods, like you're talking about the rods that are working, and there should be 15. But we have eight working because we're doing this test. And at 115, they do, like the final part of the test and there's a sudden surge of power and they hit the emergency button. So it's a. A baby named Leonid Tuptanov. He is like, what's happening? Like, everything's going crazy. The temperature is rising like crazy. So he has this emergency. Emergency button. He hits the button and that's when it explodes. Like the core itself explodes. And the reason that exploded is because he hit the button and the fuel rods went in and they had different. They had like, graphite tips on them. That caused more reaction than it should have.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. I recall this where, like, there was something defective about the. Because the rods. When you insert the rods, they control the reaction. So you can slow it down or speed it up. There was something defective within the rods that caused. I mean, it's. It's like the Swiss cheese bottle where, like, everything aligned to go wrong.
>> Taylor: Exactly. Because they were like. They've been using the rods successfully for a while. It didn't. It wasn't just like, it was. It just happened because it was so, so hot. And it was so, so hot. Because they're doing the test and because they had paused the test. Exactly. That like, all the different things that happened. So he hit it and this huge steam explosion, it destroys the building. The building that the reactor is in is like a 17 story building. And now it has a hole in it. And that means the core is gone. But that has never happened before. Like, no one knows this. Like, it has just. It isn't something that has happened.
>> Farz: And wait, real quick, Taylor, are you gonna go into. Because this is the scariest part to me is the core aspect. Are you gonna go into details of what the containment was and all that?
>> Taylor: I'm gonna do what they do afterwards. Or do you mean like right now?
>> Farz: Well, when this happens, the scary part to me, which is the elephant foot, ultimately.
>> Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. I'll get to that at the end.
>> Farz: Is that the core has like. I forgot how many tens of feet of concrete between it. And like being exposed to the outside world, that's how hot this thing got.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Is like it burned all the way through the entire containment. It's like crazy. The magnitudes. Like, you can't. I forgot how many. Do you know what the temperature was? It was like as hard as the sun or something.
Two people died instantly and the official death toll is 34
Like, it was insane.
>> Taylor: Yeah. It's like thousands of degrees and. Yeah. So it's so. Yes. So I forgot to Mention that there's a nuclear engineer there and he's the boss at this time. His name is Anatoly Dyatlov. And a lot of it, A lot of it is him, like, not understanding what's happening and not knowing what's happening. But he keeps saying, keep putting more water into it. You have to keep the core cool because they thought that something else happened. Just like the building exploded, not the core, because the core has never exploded before. But like you said, it's not just encased in the concrete, it's encased in graphite and like all these minerals and things that are supposed to be able to. To handle all this heat and that explodes. And so you have like this graphite, which is this rock that is black and looks like a rock, and it is as hot as the sun and it is going to kill you. And it is in the air.
>> Farz: It's freaky.
>> Taylor: Yeah. So DLF again, he's like this, like, what. Why keep it cool? Like, what's happening? Like, this has never happened before. This cannot happen. But it was over inside. They were like, are we being bombed? Like, is it the Americans? Like, what is happening? Like, you don't really understand what is happening. Two people died instantly and the official death toll is 34. But, like, we know that that is not correct.
>> Farz: Yeah, there were babies being born like 10 years later who had, like, defects.
>> Taylor: Exactly, exactly. They also had these, like the disseminators and the readers that they had something that they talk about a lot in the show. Not everything in the show is like 100 true. You know, it's drama. Like the. There's a. One of the main characters in the show is a woman scientist from. From Belarus. And she's not a real person. She's kind of like a bunch of people made into one character, you know, so there's like, things that, like, are true and aren't true if you watch that. But one thing that is true is that they had. Their disseminators went to a certain point, so they were like, oh, we have this much radiation. But, like, it's because it couldn't go any higher, you know, like you're, You're. If you're thermom. If you have like a hundred, 200 degree fever, your thermometer is gonna tell you you have 110 degree fever because you don't have a 200 degree thermometer, you know, so. So they're trying to figure out what's going on. I have a couple quotes. One of one person from the night Shift. Alexander Akamov, He. His final words were, quote, I am guilty. I feel guilty. We did everything wrong. He was one of the ones who went down into this, into the core, to try to put more water into it, like into the building. And he died two weeks later from radiation. But he was basically like, this has to be our fault. You know, what is going on? So outside, the roof is partially on the ground, so it didn't, like collapse, like, exploded out. So still parts of the roof that, like, exist. And then all the graphite is on the ground and it is on fire. But it is like, like you said, the hottest fire you've ever seen. Like, you don't even know what to do. And they call all the firemen from your pet to come in. What? Help us. What do we do? The hoses are melting. Their shoes are melting to the ground. There is no water because it just turns to steam immediately.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: You know, you can't.
>> Farz: It's too hot. You can't do anything to it.
>> Taylor: Yeah, it's way too hot. And the firemen start vomiting, like, almost immediately. So they're also getting sick, like, right away from it, and there's just like, nothing that you can do. Like I said, It's 400 times more radiation than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. So just like, you're going to die from this already, and it's going to kill you sooner or later. But also, they don't know, you know, so they. They just are there doing their job. They have no idea what's going on.
>> Farz: Also, the. The interesting part is that this isn't even all the radiation. What they're taking in is a residual kickoff. The core is burnt into, like, four levels beneath it, away from them. This is just like the residual stuff that just happens.
>> Taylor: Oh, yeah, you can. You can't go next to it.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: You know, like, if you're next to it, you die immed. Yeah, there's no. You can't, like, get that close to it. Yeah, totally. It's like lava. Like, you can't get next to lava.
The reasons that it happened were partially because of some RBMK reactor design flaws
Catch on fire.
>> Farz: Yep, yep.
>> Taylor: Like, you're gonna.
>> Farz: I've heard that before. That's an old tale made sale. Yeah.
>> Taylor: So. And Dyatlov, the supervisor, he knows he's going to jail. He's like, I'm f*****. We're f*****. This is. Everyone's gonna go to jail for this if I don't die immediately. Which he didn't. One fireman said, quote, we had no idea it was dangerous. We just thought it was a regular Fire. We didn't even wear protective gear. The flames were strong though and blew like gas. We threw water at it and stood right on the roo. The roof of reactor four, which is like, you're not supposed to do that. But they just were like trying to, trying to pour water on it to cool it down, which was impossible. The, the director and other like bureaucrats basically are in a bunker underground which they had built as a crisis center just in case they got like nuked by the Americans. All the things. So they're trying to figure out what's going on. But it's also a lot of being like, we have it under control. Congratulations comrade. You know, because they're not going to admit that they don't have under control. There's a part in the very beginning of the show where they all clap at each other like, great job handling this, dis everyone.
>> Farz: But also like, like this had never happened. That's the thing that when something is unprecedented, precedented, like you don't know how you can react. Like you're like, what the, what is going on?
>> Taylor: Like, I mean most people are like, what is going on? Yeah, they have no idea. So, but they're starting to see people sick and starting to see things happening. And then the fire is like not going out. But by 2:15am they blocked the road so you couldn't get out of prepet or the surrounding area. So they kept everybody in. They're like, everything is fine, everybody just stay here. And then the police officers are blocking the roads also not in protective gear. Everyone should have had that. And they sent some of the firemen who are the first responders via helicopter to Moscow. They went to Hospital Number 6 in Moscow where they died a few weeks later. I have a quote from a nurse who said, quote, they arrived in clothes soaked with radioactive blood. We were told not to touch them without gloves, but we were nurses, we couldn't just let them lie there. So we held their hand. They died one by one. They just like didn't. It couldn't help them. Way too late. So again, a lot of the detectors didn't go as high as it could be. There was just so many things. So some of the things that happened that got us to the explosion. So there were definitely operational errors during the safety test and they decided after. So after the, you know, after this is like over contained and there's a trial. The reasons that it happened were partially because of some RBMK reactor design flaws. So it was a Soviet designed water cooled graphite moderated reactor, and it had no containment structure, so had some, like you said, the concrete outside and the graphite. But like in other parts of the world, they had a much more robust containment, but they didn't have other. Yeah, and one thing it had is it had a positive void coefficient at low power, which means that the reactor increased instead of decreased with the. With the steam. So that made it hotter than it was, which was not what they expected it to happen. So that was something that was like having unexpectedly. Also, we talked about the rods had the graphite tip on them. So when the graphite hit the core first, it momentarily reacted to it and made it hotter. So they should have, like, essentially spent more money and had different, different rods. But they didn't. They did this because it usually is fine. You know, like at the regular temperature of the core, which is still really f****** hot, it's okay to have a graphite tip. But when it's exceptionally hot, because this test is happening and all of the gas that's in there, they didn't expect to happen. It's going to explode.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: But they didn't know because they never happened before, like you're saying. And then there was also, like, at the low power, there was just like, not as much safety things as they should have had. And they also should have done this test a long time ago. You know, it had been working for a very long time. It was a weird day, all sorts of things. So that was like, the human error is like, they shouldn't have done it after having to turn it back, move back up again, all those things, you know.
>> Farz: Yeah, of course.
>> Taylor: So it's the middle of the night and then now it's the morning and it's a nice day and everybody in prepared is acting like it's a normal day. And the children are out going to school. They. There's people pushing. There's like so much stock footage of women pushing strollers. Like, that's. You'll see that in every single one. But there's people just outside living their life, getting ready for May Day. About 10 hours later, they try to clean up the streets with soap. But it didn't really help stop the radiation. But they try to, like, do a little bit, a little bit of that. But they're like, it's fine, everything's fine. The next day, they tell Gorbachev that it happened. Like, they haven't told him yet. And they say, you know, we had a little problem, but everything's fine, everything's under control. Don't worry about It. And he was like, cool. Not gonna worry about it. But the thing with a nuclear disaster is that people are going to find out because in the air, you know.
In Belarus, people detected a ton of radiation and that like already the first day
>> Farz: Geiger counters in California were going off.
>> Taylor: Yeah. So in Mink, in Minsk, which is the capital of Belarus, people detected a ton of radiation and that like already the first day, they were like, stay inside, wash your shoes, close the windows. Like, everybody be careful. And then other countries, excuse me, outside of the USSR started to. Started to feel it as well. So one story that I thought was super fun is in Sweden, like we talked said is close, but there are some guys that worked at a nuclear plant there. And they walked to work that more morning and it was raining. So they walk to work and it's raining and they get to work and there is a radiation detector which is like at the door. And it's meant to be when you're leaving work to make sure you have no radiation on you. You know, like, that's, that's why it's there. But they go into work and it goes off and they're like, what the h***?
>> Farz: Not good.
>> Taylor: We're just outside, you know, it doesn't make any sense. So. So that's how they knew something was happening. And they knew that it was coming from, you know, they knew that it was coming from Chernobyl because of like, like the type of thing it was. And they're like, what's going on? And the Russia was still like, not wanting to tell the world it was happening when it's definitely like a world event. Like you can't keep to yourself. It's very similar. I feel like we talked about volcanoes with like the smoke going into like the atmosphere and like hitting the jet stream. And then you're like, crap. Yep, everyone knows. So finally, in April 27, they announced that people had to leave prepaid. They had to like, leave. You have an hour to get your stuff and to leave. They said, you will be back. Just bring a little bit of stuff and then it will be. Everything will be fine. So what they did is I'm gonna. I'm gonna tell you what they said because this is a. It's. I wrote, it's a f****** miracle of Soviet efficiency. Within a couple hours, they evacuated 53, 000 people from the city on buses. They said, bring a suitcase. You will come back. They never went back. So this says they do this in the show and they do this in a bunch of the documentaries and they do it in Russian, obviously, but I'm going to read it to you in English, because I don't speak Russian. But this is the. This announcement is way too long and, like, very weird and calm, but over loudspeakers coming from, like the loudspeakers in town, they said, quote. Attention, attention.
An unfavorable radiation situation is developing in the city of Pripyat
Dear comrades, the City Council of People's Deputies informs you that due to an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, an unfavorable radiation situation is developing in the city of Pripyat. Measures are being taken by the Communist Party, its organizations and the armed forces to deal with this. Nevertheless, to ensure complete safety, especially of children, a temporary evacuation of the city's residents and nearby settlements is required for this purpose. Starting from 2pm today, April 27, buses will be provided for each residential block escorted by police officers and city officials. It is recommended to take documents, essential personal belongings and food for a short stay. The administration of enterprises, institutions in the city has determined the personnel who will remain to ensure the city's continued functioning. Dear comrades, when temporarily leaving your homes, please make sure to close windows, turn off electrical and gas appliances, and shut off the water. Please remain calm, orderly and disciplined.
>> Farz: There's something so eerie and creepy about the way you read that. I feel like you. I'm watching, like, not Resident Evil. Oh, my God, I'm forgetting the name of the. Whatever. Raccoon City. I picture you announcing this in Raccoon City.
>> Taylor: Yes, yes. Like, everything's fine. Take a walk. You're, like, not fine. So again, they never go back. The keep getting pushed out farther and farther. Eventually, there will be a 30km out from Chernobyl exclusion zone, which I'll talk about more later. But it's 26,000 square kilometers. You can safely live there in 24,000 years.
>> Farz: We'll start planning.
>> Taylor: It'll go back to the way that it was, you know, in 20,000 years. So they get everybody out, which is really incredible. But all around the ussr, it's still Mayday in a couple days, and there's tons of people out in the streets. And these people are going to. Eventually, you know, like you said, like, children are going to be born with cancers. People are going to get cancer. You know, that's going to be a big part of it. And I'll tell you more about that actually later, too. Other bad news that I did not know is that they did a thing called Operation Cyclone, which is a secret operation where they sent jets over the area where the clouds were because the wind is starting to move towards, like, Mother Russia, like, it's moving east towards Mother Russia. And they're like, we don't want this s*** over here. So they take planes and they go into the clouds and they shoot the clouds with silver iodide to create rain. And it rains radioactive rain on Belarus, and there's parts of Belarus that will never recover. Because really, they were like, we don't want this s*** in Moscow. We gotta stop it. So they make it rain radiation over Belarus.
>> Farz: I've never heard that.
>> Taylor: I know. Isn't that wild?
>> Farz: That isn't. I can't believe they had the technology to do that back then.
>> Taylor: Yeah. So they were like, we gotta stop it before it gets to us. So they did that, which is f***** up. So in the plant, they're not telling people about the full danger. Obviously, there's helicopters dropping sand and boron and other things into the core, but you can't get that close to it either because the radiation destroys machinery. So there's, like videos of helicopters getting close and then just tipping over.
>> Farz: Wild.
>> Taylor: Which is very sad. And what they've been putting it in is actually making it hotter. Like all these things are happening and it's going to start to melt into the groundwater below. So you're right that it melted down, but it hasn't, like, hit the actual, like, groundwater yet. But let me tell you about that in a second.
So in the show again, you should watch it. The star is a guy named Valerie Legoslav
So in the show again, you should watch it. The star is a guy named Valerie Legoslav. He's a nuclear physicist. He knew that nuclear power wasn't safe. He was the kind of a person who would, like, actually say stuff and like, talk to. Talk to people about it. And so they called him in to help. And basically, what his studies had been like before, this is like, the infrastructure for this and the people working in it are both getting old. What do we do? Which, like, kind of reminds me of air traffic controllers.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: You know, and.
>> Farz: And all, like, banking and air traffic software, which is lisp. And nobody knows how to write lisp.
>> Taylor: Yep, exactly. So he's. He's. He's bringing this up and he's like. He's saying, like. Like, you know, they're very. It's hard, very hard to innovate in the Soviet society. And he's always. He's been talking about this a while. So they bring him in, he brings in some things like what they should put on the fire. And, you know how the green. He's, like, really helps this. He ends up testifying in, like, a council in Vienna they're not going to get to. But, like, he dies by suicide a couple years later. Like, he just this, like, ruined his. Him. He knew he was going to die from being there for so long because he was, like, there helping, like, in the days after. He knew that it was cutting his life shorter and shorter, but he was still, like, really upset by it.
There was a movie in 1979 about stopping the China Syndrome from happening
So the thing that you were talking about the core melting down is something that they thought might happen. And it's called the China Syndrome. Have you heard of this?
>> Farz: It sounds familiar, but I don't know what it means.
>> Taylor: So it's actually from. It's like not a real thing. It can't. Probably can't really happen, but.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah, it melts from the US all the way down into China.
>> Taylor: Into China. Yeah, exactly. Which would be bad for everyone. But there was a movie in 1979 called the China Syndrome about stopping this from happening in the United States. So that. And that movie came out, like, three weeks before the reactor at Three Mile island had its accident. So we talk about that someday, too, the one that we had in 1979. So, you know, so basically meaning, like, the core could melt all the way to China, like you said. So they needed to put a heat exchanger underneath it because actually it's not going to melt through the entire planet, but if it hits the groundwater, it will create an explosion that is the equivalent of several megatons of tnt. And it would just have destroyed a big part of Europe. Like, actually destroyed it. Not like radiation in the air. Like it would have exploded.
>> Farz: Yeah. So it's why when your windshield is froze, you don't throw hot water on it because it just reacts badly.
>> Taylor: Yes. So it's. It's that. So what they do Is they get 400 minors from around the country. Not young people, men who mine, you know.
>> Farz: Thank you for explaining.
>> Taylor: Some of them may have been in their teens, I don't know. So I feel like if you've ever seen a joke where it's like, no minors, and then like, they like, pan to a guy with like, covered in coal being like, I really want to be. Please give me a beer. So funny. So stupid. So they dig a hole underneath it, try to do this heat exchange to move it out, and said that they didn't need it, but they did it anyway as a precaution. So of those 400 miners, a lot of them are going to get sick later, but they worked in, like 120 degree heat because they're underneath it. And a lot of them did it naked and with no protection because there's nothing they could do. They just, like, had it they had to do this hole. All they had to do. So they were doing that. One thing that I didn't know until I watched one of the many. Many, like, short documentaries that I watched on. On YouTube. But. So in hospital 6 in Moscow is where the people are going afterwards if they, like, are sick enough that they can't help anymore. But they're not dead yet. They helicopter them over to Moscow to hospital 6. And the USSR calls an American doctor from California named Dr. Robert Gale for help. And this guy is so California, he's super, like, blonde, and he's wearing, like, a polo shirt. When they interview him now, when he's older, but they have pictures of him, and he looks exactly the same. He's wearing a polo shirt with, like, a sweater around his thing. Very 80s. Like a very 80s California doctor. They call him in the middle of the night, and they say, we need you to come help in. In Ukraine. And they say, pack a bag. They put him on, like, a big plane, just him and the pilots and, like, a couple Russian guys and a stewardess, and they fly him over to Moscow because he is, like, the number one bone marrow transfer specialist in the world. And they knew that the something with the bone marrow that was, like, transforming inside people's bodies because of all the radiation. And he goes there, and he sees that their bone marrow has been irreversibly destroyed, like, it cannot be. Cannot be saved. But he had invented something new with hormones to stimulate bone marrow, but it wasn't out on the market yet because it had never been tested on humans. But they knew he was coming, and so they said he told them what he had, and they were like, okay, have you done it? Like. Like, how does. How does it work on humans? He says, I don't know. We've never done it on humans before. And then they were like, well, we don't know if we want to do it. And he said, I'll do it. I'll do it. And so he put the hormone treatment into his own body, and he. Nothing happened to him. Everything was fine. So he was the first person that they did it on, and they said, okay. And they did it with the response. With the first responders, and they were able to save more than 90% of them from dying, like, immediately with. From that. With that bone marrow hormone treatment that this California doctor had.
>> Farz: Wait, so they. They can reverse radiation poisoning?
>> Taylor: I think it was, like, specifically in the bone marrow. And if, like, hadn't gone to, like, another part, then, like, it was okay.
>> Farz: That's wild. I didn't know that.
>> Taylor: Yeah, that was wild. So now that, like, people are out of the area, all of that, there's a cleanup operation. It's called. They're called liquidators. There's 500,000 young men across the area are going to be brought in to help clean up. And a lot of it is going to be stuff like in the plant itself, they need to build a sarcophagus around it. Like a big heavy thing that can stop the radiation. They need to build it. Before they can build it, they have to clean everything up and clean up the roof. On the roof, there are pieces of that graphite that was like, around the core. And it's so radioactive that they can't use machines to push it over the edge.
There's a huge health crisis after Chernobyl
They're trying to clean up the roof. They're pushing all the graphite into the core. They can't do it. All the machines die. So they get people to do it. They call them human, they call them bio robots because it's just people. And they have 90 seconds at a time. They go onto the roof and they scoop up graphite, throw it over the edge, and then run back. Because you can't be them longer than that.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: So they. It. Some of them would, like, drink vodka, be like, it's gonna help us, you know, of course I would do that as well. I mean, of course you take a shop before you do that. So. There's a very, very sad helicopter pilot in one of the documentaries I saw who just is crying the entire time. And he's pretty much like, maybe that cleaned them. Like, I don't know, like, whatever works. And he was just like, very, very sad because he's just like, watching people kind of go to somebody that's going to.
>> Farz: Yeah. Like, suicide.
>> Taylor: Decrease their life. Yeah. And, you know, thousands of people did it. They also have to clean up the exclusion zone. So there's a bunch of small towns around this area that need to be evacuated. And even then, like, they do, they spray things on the buildings that. That attracts radiation to bring the radiation onto the buildings. And then they destroy the buildings and bury them. But it's still there. You know, they have to, like, till all of the land and flip it to bury all the radiation. And then, like, hopefully, like, it doesn't come out again. That's what they're doing these places. There's an entire episode of the Chernobyl show where it's just a guy shooting animals. I fast forward through it, don't watch it.
>> Farz: Why is he shooting? Oh, oh, oh, because the animals have the radiation.
>> Taylor: So they have to kill all the animals in the. In the area and just remove all of the livestock and. And the wildlife. Here's the health crisis. So after this, after these guys go through and they bulldoze these towns and they, you know, shoot all these animals and have to do all these, like, really devastating things, there's a health crisis amongst the liquid. They assume that they're going to get cancer, which they are, but they assume that their life expectancy is so much lower that they just, like, don't take care of themselves at all.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: You know, they take more risks. They, you know, are like, you know, they drink constantly, they smoke constantly. Also everybody's smoking constantly anyway because it's like the 80s and. And so they have, like, drastically lower lifespans, like, not just because of the radiation, but also because of their lifestyle choices. Because after that, you feel terrible. You know, from that, about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer will come up. That's going to be the biggest one, especially if you're, like, drinking the milk and, like, eating the food in the area. Thyroid cancer is the one that most people are going to get after this. There was one elderly resident, I have a quote that says they came in trucks, told us to leave everything. Our goats, our icons, our houses. I told them I was born here, I will die here. I dug a bowl with my husband. I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of leaving my land. So people like, you know, that's very traumatizing.
>> Farz: Party people.
>> Taylor: Yeah. So now it's September, a couple months later, and they need to start turning on the rest of the reactors because the rest of the reactors are like, have still been working and like, all this other stuff has been happening. But by November 1986, they've built the sarcophagus, which is like the COVID inside the sarcophagus, it's obviously, like, covered in radioactive dust. And it's obviously like, constantly just getting more and more deteriorated because everything's happening. And because of the heat from the. What's left of the core, which we'll talk about, and the water inside the sarcophagus, it's constantly raining radioactive water.
>> Farz: So crazy.
>> Taylor: Isn't that crazy? So it's, like, not great in there. And of course, afterwards, that's like, part of the cleanup stuff. Of course, afterwards, there is a trial. The director, Victor Bradford, he is going to go to a labor camp for five years. He was. He was sentenced to 10, but he served five. The chief engineer got 10 years and Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, one who was there, who kept saying that nothing was wrong and that they needed to cool the core. He got 10 years and served five. He never admitted any guilt. He said that he did everything that he was supposed to do. Other engineers were reprimanded or investigated. They did the trial near the Chernobyl plant to be kind of be like symbolic about it, but it was like there's so many systematic flaws that it's kind of like there's so many people who are at fault. But they, you know, like you said Swiss cheese. Who knows, you know. Yeah, but they're going to blame the people who designed it. They're gonna blame people who are there, they're gonna blame the test, they're gonna blame this, they're gonna blame that, all of that. So now, today, or I guess around the area after this. So after that, the sarcophagus is on and we're starting to kind of move on. There's still. People are going to start getting cancer, like you said. Children are going to be born with, like, bad reactions and bad things are happening. The first generation of animals, there were some cases where the animals lived, and there were some stories of like three eyed dogs, stuff like that, but that was just like the first generation. And then it seemed to be okay after that. So one group of people that I watched a documentary about are the babushkas of the area. Do you know what a babushka is, Grandma? The rama. It also means the scarf. They're so freaking cute, it's insane.
There's plenty of starvation in the area; there's also wildfires
So the cute little scarf tied around them, and a lot of them didn't leave, or they went back and they said like before, they said, radiation doesn't scare me, starvation does. Because that's a big thing in that area as well. Because we talked about, like, the siege of Leningrad. There's plenty of starvation in the area. So they are both likely all dead by now because this documentary is from 2009. But they lived longer than the older people who left their villages and stayed, like, in Kiev, because they got to live on their land and they got to like. They're like. One of the women is like, why would I go to Kyiv and live in a s***** apartment and eat processed food and breathe car exhausts when I can live here and fish in my lake and milk my cow and, you know, grow things in my garden where I've lived my whole life and my whole family's literature forever? So I'm going to stay here. And a lot of them lived longer than the women and the older people who went to the cities because they were just, like, living a healthier life in other ways.
>> Farz: You know, there's something about the enrichment experience of being a human that is not quantifiable, that I'm convinced does something for longevity.
>> Taylor: Absolutely, Absolutely. So they are living in, like, these little houses together, and, like, there's like, one to two women, like, in, like, a little village, you know, and they. They have been through so much. They just want to stay. And so there's, like, one really cute woman who, like, lets this documentary guy into her house, and she, like, gives him this, like, moonshine that she's made, like, by herself, you know, and she's, like. Makes food for him, and she's just like, I live here. I like it. You know, and they're. They're very sweet. And they, you know, like I said, out outlives others that had that relocation trauma. So the grandmas are. They lived and they had. They had a good time there. Obviously, Prepet itself is abandoned. And I watched a video, and I couldn't find it this time. But a long time ago, I watched one that was so sad. This woman, like, got to go back to her apartment and expected it to, like, be there, but it wasn't because people have, like, raided it, you know, and, you know, taking stuff out of it, which is bad because that stuff had radiation on it. And, like, all the windows are broken, and, like, the rain has come in, and so it's, like, very destroyed. But that. You can, like. You can watch videos of going through, like, the schools where there's, like, you know, open textbooks, talking about social pictures of Lenin. So weird. So. So eerie. And the weather and the animal and the plants have taken over. So actually the wildlife is flourishing. You know, there's. I wouldn't necessarily like eating venison from that area or lived here or, like, a bear, but, like, the animals are okay and they're living there, and then the vegetation is kind of taking over. And you. There have also been wildfires, which is not good for anyone if those. If that area catches on fire. So that's happened a couple times since then. You can visit. You can take a bus tour if you want to. Maybe not. I wouldn't say go on vacation to Ukraine today, but didn't Russia attack? I'm gonna get to that. Yeah, I'll get to that. So, but you. Yeah, but you take a bus tour there. On December 15, 2000, the last reactor in operation was shut down. So people have still been working there, 2,000 people work there. They go in and out. They take, like, a special train there from a city that they built, like, a little bit outside of it, because you can't just, like, like, turn them all off.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: You know, so it still exists. It's in the process of being decommissioned right now.
Another thing that you mentioned before is the elephant foot at reactor four
Another thing that you mentioned before is the elephant foot, which is at the bottom of reactor four. It's kind of like what is left. It is like the melted core. It is made of a element called corium, which can only be formed in a nuclear meltdown. So, yay, we made a new thing. It is that.
>> Farz: So the pictures of it, everything about it is just so nightmare inducing.
>> Taylor: Yeah, it is, essentially. So the corium we have created as people in Three Mile island in Chernobyl and three times in Japan.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: So we've created it a couple times. But, yes, you're right. It's like. It looks like black lava. It looks like an elephant's foot. Exactly. It's like a big blob. We have pictures of it, but the pictures are, like one guy, like, threw a camera down, took a picture, and took it back up. If you're around it for more than 200 seconds, you're dead.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: Like, there's no nothing about it. It's still incredibly hot. It can still melt concrete. So it'll be hot for, I don't know, all time until the old ends. It's all super hot. So the sarcophagus itself that they built started to deteriorate. So in 2010, there was, like, a world collaboration effort to cover it again, and they built a new one. So it is something that is like. It's like a. It's like a. An archway over it, and they built it, like, a little bit further away, and then they scooted it on top of the existing sarcophagus. Like.
>> Farz: Like railway feet a day.
>> Taylor: Yeah, like, really, really slowly. And in 2016, it got put in its right place, but it took a really long time because, like, sometimes you could only work on it for five minutes a day.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: Because you had to leave, which is wild. So once it was on, the radiation levels in the area fell by 90%, just, like, in the air. So that was really good. It's not completely sealed because people still have to go into it to maintain things. Things. So there are, like, doors you can get to.
>> Farz: We can go in there. I did see a documentary where some YouTuber was on a tour, and he got into the sarcophagus, the new one, and that's where you can see the old one.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: And it is terrifying to look at. And you're able to kind of go into where the reactor area was, but there was, like, this giant new cement wall that was put into place next to it. But on the other side of it is where it all took place. It's very scary. It's a very creepy. Like, you can. You can find it, I'm sure, if you just YouTube it. Yeah.
>> Taylor: Maybe a million Chernobyl people, like, sneaking in, too. You know, I watched one of, like, some dudes, like, singing overnight in one of the apartments and, like, trying to sneak around. There's plenty of that.
>> Farz: It's crazy people.
>> Taylor: So that new cover is supposed to last at least 100 years, if not more. So that's good. The guy who built it said it'll probably last longer, so that's on there now. And then this is what you mentioned. If you are driving a tank, for example, from Russia to Ukraine, and you want to get to Kiev, you have to go through the exclusion zone, which is bad because that is radioactive. And so in 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine for the first time, they got there via the exclusion zone, which kicked up a s*** ton of radioactive dust by, like, rolling their tanks through as one part. And then they did take over the plant because people were still working there, and held them hostage for, like, eight days. And, like, could you. Like, if I was held hostage and told to do my job, I would, like, send weird, slack messages like, nobody would die, though, you know? But these people were under all this intense pressure to, like, keep everything maintained while there's, like, guys with. With guns to their head. So, you know, so crazy. They also have bombed it recently. Like, also not good. Leave it alone. Let us just. Let us just keep that little bit by itself. So.
There are Russian soldiers who don't know about Chernobyl
But this is my last thing. One part of that that I thought that I learned researching that little part is there are Russian soldiers who are, like, in their 20s who don't know about Chernobyl.
>> Farz: Yes. Yes.
>> Taylor: You know, because of. Because that culture of, like, we've never done anything wrong, that was part of the USSR is the culture in Russia. And, like, they just don't learn about it.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Isn't that wild? So, like, they would go there and they don't know. They don't know the story. It's, like, right next door. It affected their parents and, like, all these people. But, like, there's parts of Russia where they never told them.
>> Farz: Yep.
>> Taylor: So they just didn't know.
>> Farz: So crazy.
>> Taylor: Which is crazy.
>> Farz: Yeah. It's a horrifying situation and it's one of the, it's one of those few stories that like I constantly go back to over and over again because it's just like such nightmare fuel. And we're lucky it doesn't happen again. Except when it did with Fukushima.
>> Taylor: I know I gotta go back in and learn a little bit more about that one. That one was. And also I watched a movie about Three Mile island here in the US and that one was so sad because like they didn't evacuate the town around it, but like you can't sell your house.
>> Farz: I mean, that one was a near meltdown that it didn't actually happen.
>> Taylor: Yeah. And this isn't a full meltdown. There's an explosion like started melting down. But also like.
>> Farz: Well, I think a meltdown is anything where the core escapes containment. And in this case it absolutely escaped containment. That's what the elephants foot's sitting on the ground in a basement. Like you can see in pictures that like it's a, it's a basement. Like it's not being pictured through a stethoscope in like a concrete bunker. Like, it's literally like. No, no, we walked around.
>> Taylor: Yeah, no, it's like out of, it's out of the containment. Yeah. So. But in Three Mile island, like all those people got cancer, you know, like all like their kids. Like you like imagine knowing that like your kids are going to die, like you're gonna, you're all gonna get it. So super scary.
>> Farz: But I still think nuclear powers in theory the safest.
>> Taylor: I know. And I feel like I've heard a lot of that as well. So it's like as long as one thing doesn't happen.
>> Farz: Well, I think the measurement there is in units of energy produced versus deaths or like costs incurred due to disaster. But yeah, I, I'm very poorly qualified to make further statements.
>> Taylor: I know, I've heard that as well. But I want to know if anyone knows. I'd love to know a little bit more about that because I think that's super interesting. Like, what are we supposed to do?
>> Farz: Yeah. When you were talking and I took notes, I was thinking about the Deepwater Horizon was like, man, I really want to research that.
>> Taylor: That.
>> Farz: But yeah, and I also want to like research what the handover was between Lenin and Stalin, because I don't totally understand that.
>> Taylor: That's fair.
>> Farz: But that is a very fun story and I. You know What? You're the 80th person to tell me to watch the Chernobyl documentary. Documentary and. Or not documentary. The hbo and I think. I think I need to finally bite the bullet on this.
>> Taylor: You really should. It's really, really good, man. One thing also, looking this up. Lennon about Lennon. Like, they have his picture everywhere, like, in the show. He has such a great f****** portrait that they use, like.
>> Farz: I mean, his mustache is legendary.
>> Taylor: What a great picture. It's really, really good. Yeah. Wild. And he feels so. It's so. It's so those societies like the USSR and like North Korea, where, like, you're not being told everything. And like, I know we're not being told everything, but I feel like we, like, aren't being like, that's like North Korea. You think that there's no other countries, you know?
>> Farz: Yeah. You're not being actively deceived to that extent. Did you hear about that ship that they tried to launch? North Korea built like some new giant battleship or something, and they tried to launch it, but they messed it up and the thing fell on its side in front of like, Kim Jong Un and like everybody else. And he immediately was like, this is like a huge crime, like a state level crime. They arrested four people today, apparently.
>> Taylor: Today.
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Whoa.
>> Farz: Yeah. Those poor people are gonna get blown to bed.
>> Taylor: Exactly. I think it's exactly that. Like, maybe they knew something was going on and weren't allowed to say anything, you know?
North Korea arrested senior official over warship launch failure
>> Farz: Yeah.
>> Taylor: Wow, that's interesting. That's so sad. Those poor people. Oh. 19 hours ago, North Korea arrest senior official over warship launch failure.
>> Farz: Oh, yeah, they're.
>> Taylor: They're. Kim called it a criminal act, severely damaged the country's dignity and pride. Who knew?
>> Farz: She's not wrong. But still.
>> Taylor: I know.
>> Farz: Poor, poor those. Those bastards. And their families.
>> Taylor: Yeah, and their families, everyone.
>> Farz: Well, that was a fun start to the 200th episode.
>> Taylor: I know. I'm like. Definitely had, like. Oh, during. On Tuesday, we had a softball game and I had just watched like a three hour, three hour documentary about it. And then it started to smell like burning rubber. And I was like, guys, I gotta go. Everybody was like, what is that spell? Are they doing asphalt push or. They were just doing like a road somewhere, you know? But I was like, I just watch. I need to go home. Close my windows.
>> Farz: Can't do it. Very cool. Well, thanks for sharing and doing that research and yeah, I'm probably gonna watch some documentaries tonight, so I'm excited.
>> Taylor: Do it. You can hear that. That guy Connor ticking your dreams.
>> Farz: I do want to watch that guy again who went inside the sarcophagus, because I remember seeing that and was like, this is so scary. I was like. I was, like, in bed watching. I was like, I don't even want to go to sleep.
>> Taylor: Yeah. No. Terrifying. Yeah, terrifying. Terrifying. Well, thank you, Fars. Thank you, everyone. I have some good ideas that Morgan and Justin had sent me this week, too, so I'm excited to dig into those. And thank you, everyone, for listening. This has been a really fun 200 episode.
>> Farz: Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Thanks for hanging with us.
>> Taylor: Tell your friends we have a Patreon. I'm gonna put out a press release. I've never done that before, but I'm gonna email some people and be like, hey, we have 200 episodes. I don't know.
>> Farz: Yeah, why not tell people?
>> Taylor: Tell people.
>> Farz: We gotta be our own motors.
>> Taylor: Yeah. And then we have Patreon. We're at doomed to fail pod on all the social media. And if you just found us, we have a whole bunch of stuff in the archive. So take a look.
>> Farz: Dun gmail.com d the doom to fail pod on all the socials. Taylor is hyperactive on there, so. Yeah, find us where you can find us.
>> Taylor: Miles is here, too.
>> Farz: Miles is here, too. Hi, Miles. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Taylor: Miles can listen in about 10 years because he's 8.
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. We gotta make it age appropriate.
>> Taylor: Cool.
>> Farz: We'll go in and cut things off. Anything else, Taylor?
>> Taylor: That's it. Thank you.
>> Farz: Sweet. We'll go in.