The Chernobyl Disaster: What Really Happened at 01:23:40 on April 26th, 1986

The Chernobyl Disaster: What Really Happened at 01:23:40 on April 26th, 1986

Kyle Risi: [00:00:00] Every country in the world is then on a connection or asking questions, trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Meanwhile, Moscow, there're being suspiciously quiet. It's

Adam Cox: like, is it you? No, it's not me. Is it you Denmark? No, it's not me. Uk. Nope. Not us

Kyle Risi: Russia. Is it you? They're like, no, not us.

Adam Cox: Um, yeah, I dunno what you're talking about.

Kyle Risi: Eventually they're forced to admit that actually there was an incident at the Chernobyl plant.

Oh,

Adam Cox: that one. Oh God. Yeah. Um, it's just minor. Don't worry about it.

Kyle Risi: Yes. But they just insist that there's only been two casualties and everything is under control.

[00:01:00] Welcome to the Compendium and Assembly of Fascinating Things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

Adam Cox: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your ring master for this week's episode.

Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, the Burns specialist for this week.

Kyle Risi: Okay, so Coron last week burn specialist this week. Explain, explain to me.

Adam Cox: Well it's usually the first two rows that you know, there's a good chance they're gonna get burnt.

By who? By by people in the circus? The, The fire dancers. Oh, the Fi I guess there's aren't,

Kyle Risi: yes, that's true. They, they keep spitting their like little fiery liquid. I dunno. It's a corn syrup or something. I dunno, It's not petrol, is it?

Adam Cox: I don't think so. They would combust completely.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. But whatever they are putting in their mouth is combustible. So what difference does that make compared to petrol?

Adam Cox: I dunno. I feel like petrol they would just explode.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. And there's surely must be something that's safe to put in your mouth, right? You think it's gotta be. I never really thought about it. No, me neither. I wonder if any of our freaks know. I [00:02:00] don't know. We should definitely find out. Before we jump into today's episode, we want to take a moment to welcome some of our newest Patreon members to the family.

This week we have a huge shout out to make to Nan. That's all we have there is just Nan, what your Nan, it might be, it might just be my Nan, Angela, l Nicholas, Tom, Maria. Ray. Marty. Marta, Oliver. Hepworth. Felicia. Amy Bushong Victoria. Ate Patty, Mandy, Panda. Jessica Sue madison Poin and Janine Elizabeth. You guys are officially inducted into the Freaks family and we absolutely love you for it.

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Adam Cox: Okay, Kyle, so enough of the housekeeping. What are you serving up for us today,

Kyle Risi: Adam? Today on the compendium, we are diving into an assembly of bad science, blind orders and a burning insatiable truth.

Adam Cox: Okay, so I don't know. Doctor's malpractice, maybe science.

Kyle Risi: I'm loving the intuition there. Not quite though. Adam, [00:04:00] let me ask you a question.

Have you ever stopped to think just how fragile. Our modern world really is

Adam Cox: all the time, actually. I often ponder when I'm at the park or, taking a stroll.

Kyle Risi: Okay. You're railroading me here. Okay. I, you asked me a question. I'm gonna go straight into the intro, but Okay, fine. Let's talk about you at the park.

Adam Cox: I just like to be outside,

Kyle Risi: Adam. Imagine waking up one day, just like any other day. Kids are riding their bikes, friends are chatting, dogs barking, grandmas are hanging up their washing.

It feels just like a perfectly ordinary day, except it isn't. In fact, the air around you has been silently poisoned. The water contaminated and the very ground you walk on is now deadly, but nobody knows it just yet. Life continues, blissfully unaware.

By the end of that same day, the place you called home will be a ghost town emptied, abandoned, frozen [00:05:00] in time, never to be lived in ever again.

Adam Cox: Ah, I think I might know what this is. This sounds like a nuclear disaster, right? Oh my

Kyle Risi: God. Your intuition is really good, Adam. This is exactly what happened in a city called Priya in Ukraine in April of 1986.

Adam Cox: Oh, is this the Chernobyl incident,

Kyle Risi: correct. Ah, yes. Basically a nuclear reactor, one that supplied power to millions of homes across the USSR exploded in the middle of the night. And the tragedy here is that nobody ever imagined that such a thing could even happen in the first place.

The USSR was so hell bent on making people believe that an explosion was impossible. That in order to align on this illusion, there were no safer protocols. Not even training was handed down in the event of such a disaster. And the thing was, why would they need to, when the official line was an explosion was impossible.

But the truth was, Adam, that [00:06:00] Moscow knew the risks, the engineers knew the risks, but nobody dared to speak up

Adam Cox: Wow. So I thought this was just like a freak accident. So you're suggesting that it could have been prevented?

Kyle Risi: I mean it was an accident, but Yes, 100%. It could have been prevented.

What is really interesting when I was researching the story is that it really eely rhymed with the events that took place during the Challenger disaster where there were huge flaws in management and how information was being passed up from the lower levels right up to the very top. And the reality was the people that were making decisions weren't the experts that knew better.

And that's eerily something very similar to what's happened here in the Chernobyl disaster .

Adam Cox: Really? So all these employees are saying that something's wrong, something bad could happen. And yet they just weren't listened to.

Kyle Risi: Except the difference is when you live in the USSR, like the fear of speaking out or even challenging your superiors, there's severe consequences to that. [00:07:00] You could lose your job, you could be relocated to another part of the USSR or you could even lose your life.

So the stakes are high, so nobody spoke up.

Adam Cox: Yeah. So completely different than just speaking up at NASA in a way.

Kyle Risi: There's a little bit of rhyming there. Maybe you won't lose your life, but you could be shunned from that next promotion. You know what I mean? Right.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Within hours of this disaster, Adam, radioactive ash rained down across the region. Soldiers in protective suits, roamed the deserted streets, and hundreds of thousands of lives were changed forever on that night.

Adam, today on the Compendium, I'm gonna be telling you about the Chernobyl disaster. I'm gonna tell you exactly what happened, why it happened, why it went so tragically wrong, along with everything else that followed.

So what do you know about this story?

Adam Cox: Um, I think growing up you hear about the disaster or that nuclear, energy is dangerous versus actually it's really clean and safe. But then it's this kind of nightmare sort of horror story of the worst case scenario [00:08:00] that could happen. Yes. And that, I think obviously that the town, basically, like you said earlier, no one was able to live in it. And

Kyle Risi: I think what a lot of people will remember from the story are the photographs of Chernobyl, like classically the derelict Ferris wheel in the carnival. That's it. Just kind of sitting there rusting away, old effigies of Mickey Mouse, fading away in amongst the vegetation,

Adam Cox: the whole town is kinda like a time capsule now, isn't it?

Exactly.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. And also people can't return back and they're unlikely to be able to turn back for tens of thousands of years because the ground that you literally walk on is still radioactive.

Adam Cox: Really that far into the distance. I thought it was only like a hundred odd years. No,

I thought

We were watching a show called, Dark Tourist and someone was able to visit. Are you able to like visit in a short burst of time or a certain area, which is perhaps safer than

Kyle Risi: quite possibly.

Yes. You certainly wouldn't be able to visit the actual power station itself.

Adam Cox: Sure.

Kyle Risi: However, what is crazy is that the power station was still in operation until the year 2000.

Adam Cox: Really? Mm-hmm. They were [00:09:00] still able to use it.

Kyle Risi: They have multiple reactors. Right? Right. It was only one of the reactors that melted down, but because those other reactors were still intact, they continued to run the plant and it wasn't properly decommissioned until the year 2000.

Adam Cox: But people can have been on site though, right?

Kyle Risi: They were, yeah, I guess there are risks and I think along with those risks you are compensated quite majorly I guess.

Adam Cox: Wow. Did not know that

Kyle Risi: In preparation for this, I actually rewatched the Chernobyl miniseries which basically dramatizes this entire story because it's a dramatization of an historical event, you're never quite sure how much was fabricated and how much was dramatized for television.

But the Chernobyl miniseries actually nails it in terms of historical accuracy. There's this, uh, YouTube physicist, a guy called Scott Manley, who says that the HBO series itself is better than any other documentary that exists on the subject itself. Really? Mm-hmm.

Adam Cox: Is it a case that the story is just unbelievable in a way that they didn't need to like add any [00:10:00] additional drama to the story?

Kyle Risi: The USSR are so known for their secrecy in hiding things and covering things up, that it was Really difficult to accurately know what actually went on. So they really had to get good experts in to unpick the facts from what was just fabrications from the USSR.

Adam Cox: Did, um, Did anyone get into trouble for coming forward and talking about it?

Kyle Risi: Of course. And we'll go into some of those people a little bit later . But I think the best place for us to start is with a guy called captain Sergei Verodin, who worked for the Soviet Air Force.

Sergei started flying helicopters out of Kiev in 1976, mainly ferrying bureaucrats around the Soviet block. He'd always had a passion for flying. But he was also very much a tinkerer. He was really fascinated with gadgets and radios.

And he was deeply interested in radiation he would often switch on the built-in dosimeter in his helicopter, which is basically a device very similar to a Geer cancer capable of detecting radiation in the air. [00:11:00] But in his entire career, not once does his dosimeter ever spring to life.

Until one day in April of 1986, out of the blue, while Sergei and his crew were conscripted onto a standard rescue shift around the Kiev region. They received orders to head North to take a radiation reading.

Sergei had never been asked to do this before, and so this would be the first time that he would get to use his helicopter's dosimeter in an official capacity.

The area where he was sent to was a town about 60 miles north of Kiev called Pripyat.

And Pripyat was extremely important to the USSR. It was home to the Vladimir.

Lenin Nuclear power plant, or as we know it today, Chernobyl, the plant supplied more than 30 million apartments across the USSR So just for perspective, that's half of the US SR'S population in 1985.

Really?

So this power station is responsible for a lot of homes getting [00:12:00] power. And here's the thing, prop was considered a utopian workers paradise. It was like the jewel of the USSR. It was a purpose-built nuclear town, designed to house 3000 plant workers and their families.

Everything in the city was state of the art, a model for modern urban living. And many people wanted to live there because it offered such a high standard of living more than anywhere else in the USSR.

The town was also a cultural and social hub as well. it had sports facilities, it had Olympic sized swimming pool, it had shooting ranges, stadiums. They were really big on sport,

basically .

Adam Cox: It sounded like a new town. So was it only been going for a couple of years? or

Kyle Risi: It was purpose built to support the Chernobyl power station, which had been running just a few years at this point.

Right, okay. It was so lively. It was the opposite of what you'd expect from a stereotypical kind of Soviet city. this was essentially a thriving bustling town, like there were theaters, clubs. It was a really great place to live.

Adam Cox: I think when we did the, Tetris episode when the guys from America went over there that he described just being [00:13:00] in Russia, just being incredibly bleak.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. You get that sense, don't you?

And because nuclear tech at this time, especially in Pripyat, was so cutting edge, most of the people working at the plant were fresh outta university. The average age of a Pripyat resident was just 26 years old, and that number was falling as those people started having kids of their own.

Mm-hmm.

But today, Pripyat is nothing but a ghost town.

When Captain Sergey followed those orders, redirected his helicopter towards Priya, he saw the Chernobyl Power Station two miles away in the distance, spewing thick black smoke into the crystal blue sky down Below the scene looked completely normal. He could see kids riding their bikes. People walking their dogs, grandmas hanging out their laundry. It was as if nothing was wrong.

As his helicopter entered the airspace, the dosimeter that had been silenced his entire career. Suddenly sprang to life as he flew directly over the city, the needle slammed to the far edge at first he [00:14:00] thought

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: So for a second He fiddled with the dials confused when suddenly an army major burst into the cockpit, pale and frantic, screaming at Sergei, calling him a murderer and yelling at him.

And he had just killed them all.

The major knew exactly what had happened because by flying over their plant, he had just condemned them all to death.

Adam Cox: So they didn't know that this was gonna happen? by flying over. Like, I'm might be confused not about that.

Kyle Risi: you only get told what you need to know, right? Mm-hmm. But when Sergei flew into kind of the radiation cloud that's when this major just freaked out and burst in to then tell him, you've condemned us to death.

Adam Cox: But should, if someone should have told him to go, yeah, when this meter starts to go up, pull back or don't go as close. Yeah. It seems if someone had told him that he probably could have avoided this situation,

Kyle Risi: this will be a running theme throughout this entire episode because in the Soviet Union, you are only told what you need to know, and people are terrified to tell anyone anything, just outta [00:15:00] fear of being reprimanded or persecuted or losing their job.

Sure.

Adam Cox: So what was Sergei told then?

Kyle Risi: Sergei was told that they were heading north and that he needed to take a dosimeter reading. That's all he knew.

Adam Cox: And he did that and by doing that, he's killed them all apparently. Wow.

Kyle Risi: Basically, the moment that I'm describing here is in the immediate aftermath of what we know as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

We all know that this was some kind of nuclear meltdown, but honestly, not many people, including myself, actually know what happened, what physically caused Chernobyl's Unit four reactor to explode.

And for a long time, neither did most people, not even those working in the actual Power Station itself.

The only reason we think we know what happened is thanks to a book by a guy called Andrew Leather Barrow called Chernobyl 0 1 2 3 4 0.

Now, that timestamp is very important because that is the moment that that reactor actually exploded in the middle of the night. And the thing is though, Andrew isn't a scientist or a physicist, but he's considered one [00:16:00] of the foremost experts on the disaster. It's this book that was used as the backbone to the HBO Chernobyl miniseries . Because the USSR were notorious for hiding the truth. They told conflicting accounts or just basically just outright lied about pretty much everything.

Adam Cox: It's interesting because that's a running theme that still happens today, right?

Kyle Risi: Oh yeah. they? They Have a history of lying to the world and also to their own people, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah, absolutely.

Kyle Risi: And the thing is though, it's been almost 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster, actually happened, and the truth is that we may not fully ever. Know what truly happened that night, but Andrew did spend five years trying to uncover everything that it could. He interviewed survivors, scientists, engineers, tourists, anyone who had anything to say about Chernobyl.

And he turned all that research into now what is considered the definitive account of that disaster. And it's this book, that formed the backbone to the HBO miniseries.

So to really understand what happened at Chernobyl, we need to start with a history lesson, a time we've [00:17:00] actually visited before on the compendium when we covered the radium girls.

Do you remember that episode?

Adam Cox: Yes. The group of women that accidentally poisoned themselves.

Kyle Risi: So basically a French physicist called Rell placed some uranium crystals on top of some photographic plates, then tucked them away into his drawer. When he developed the plates, he saw that the uranium had caused an interference..

Scientists then began studying this mysterious new phenomenon, and there's actually Marie Curie who actually coined the term radioactivity and discovered other elements like Lon and of course radium in 1898. But soon after this, we went wild experimenting.

Do you remember some of the products that they actually infused with radium?

Adam Cox: Wasn't it something weird like toothpaste or something?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, bottled water as well. I think they would also put it in mouthwashes, why did they put it in water? I can't remember now. Basically The idea was that all of this was being marketed as a miracle Hal tonic. Mm-hmm. Apparently it could cure all sorts of ailments. But eventually it then started making its way into other products [00:18:00] like glass making but famously they use it to actually paint the dials of various watches.

Adam Cox: Yeah. So they'd grow it in the dark, isn't that right? And they would hold the brush they'd be painting it on with, in their mouth. .

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Because of course they're painting onto small, tiny little watch faces, you need to get a real sharp point with your paintbrush. Yeah. So they would dip that into the radium paint on the watch style. And then once that was done, they would then lick it again.

Adam Cox: Yeah. To get another point. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: To get another point. And then slowly they just ended up bloody eating a shit ton of bloody radium

Adam Cox: And didn't it, really negatively impact them? Didn't they get like cancer around the jaw and stuff like that in their teeth ?

Kyle Risi: molecularly there's very little difference between calcium and the radium. So when you ingest the radium, your bones start getting infused. And what ended up happening to these girls is like they started getting toothache and then before you know it, their jaws were literally falling off.

Adam Cox: That was it. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: One of the girls went to the dentist and the next thing he was doing was pulling out chunks of her jaw Out of her face.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Geez.

Kyle Risi: In the [00:19:00] end, all these girls started dying one by one and they all has to be buried in these lead line coffins just to stop the contamination from reaching into the groundwater. Mm-hmm. So it's really horrendous stuff.

Radiation essentially is what happens when atoms get far too big. So a good way to imagine it is imagine an onion, right? the bigger the onion, the more layers it physically has, and it's the same with atoms, unstable atoms or big atoms. They want shed some of those layers so they can be a little bit more stable, right?

Mm-hmm. They're like, oh, I'm a little bit fat. It'd be really great if it was a little bit slimmer, so they can be stable and feel confident and be steady. right? Now, that is a very simplistic way of describing it, but when they are shedding those pounds or those layers, that is essentially radiation.

Sometimes the radiation of course, can be very helpful, like with x-rays and radiotherapy, but sometimes it can literally kill everything it touches.

Eventually, scientists realize that they could start harnessing this process to create clean energy through what they called, nuclear fission, basically smashing [00:20:00] big, unstable atoms together to break them apart, and then you can release an enormous amount of energy.

The thing is though, early attempts at this was super risky. It wasn't safe at all, and it was completely uncontrollable.

That was until the USA, the UK and Canada all came together to build the first atomic bomb, and that's when scientists discovered how they can sustain a controlled nuclear chain reaction, in a safe ish kind of way.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Oppenheimer, right?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. It's all within that remit. And now suddenly the world had a new source of cheap clean energy, but Joseph Stalin, who was running the USSR at the time, he was kind of slowly keeping his ear to the ground. He gets wind of this, and so Soviet research completely disappeared behind closed doors.

They isolated themselves and they pushed to beat the west into trying to perfect this new way of generating tons of clean nuclear energy. Eventually they succeeded and they basically built what we now know as a [00:21:00] nuclear reactor to generate electricity.

Adam Cox: So they were the first to do that then.

Kyle Risi: We both arrived there round about the same time, but in very different ways. So their reactors, they use, employ a very different design, but it's all to do the same thing. And that is to create these runaway chain reactions.

Adam Cox: Isn't it interesting how, I guess it's all part of the Cold War, but, you've got both the US and the USSR developing nuclear energy.

Kyle Risi: It's an arms race essentially.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And then, uh, the space race as well. Mm-hmm. It's so strange how they're all kind of competing for the same things.

Kyle Risi: Oh, it's 'cause they're all spying on each other probably for intelligence.

Adam Cox: Of course.

Kyle Risi: So basically the way that they discovered how to do this is, I'm gonna try and keep this as simple as possible. Like I said, Adam, I'm taking you back to a level science.

What they understood is that atoms mostly contained empty space. It has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons with basically electrons zipping all around it. So you've kind of seen that classic image, like on the Big Bang theory when they do the transitions you see the atom fizzing around.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Of all the sciences, physics was never my best. It was not. [00:22:00] No.

Kyle Risi: Well. By the end of this, you're gonna be an expert.

Adam Cox: I doubt that, but carry on.

Kyle Risi: So each element basically has its own unique number of protons, and this is what actually determines an atoms position on the actual periodic table.

But when atoms have a different number of neutrons, these actually become what we call isotopes. So an isotope is basically an upgrade of an existing atom.

A good way to describe it is like all Kias are Kias, right? Your Kia might be a standard Kia, but your mate's Kia might have an upgrade of LED lights and rear spoiler. Still the Kias, your mate's one is just modified.

But imagine for a second that your Kia knows that he has been modified and he hates the fact that he's been modified.

Adam Cox: Okay?

Kyle Risi: So he desperately wants to become a standard kier. Again, so some of these mods that your key has, he can easily just shake them off. Right? He can just kind of zoom really fast and it'll fling off, and that is just natural radiation.

But others not so easy. So he might actually need to crash himself or have [00:23:00] something crash into him in order to kind of shake loose the rear spoiler that he's been modified with,

Adam Cox: okay, So he doesn't like his new self. He's trying to shake off these extra bits that make him fancy.

Exactly. And just get back to being him at one with the earth.

We're personifying Kia, the car. Just for clarity.

Kyle Risi: So basically this is exactly the same with isotopes, right?

So take for example, uranium 2, 3, 5, uranium 2, 3, 5 has got 92 protons and 143 neutrons. Yeah, I knew that. So there's an imbalance between the protons and the neutrons. That's what makes it an isotope. And so he has loads of modifications. He wants to shake all of those modifications off but he can't do it on his own.

So he needs some help. If we slam uranium 2, 3, 5 atoms into something that's us helping him, he can then split and release all those modifications. And basically when he release those modifications, that's energy. And when he does this, he will then hit another uranium 2, 3, 5 atom, which also then splits and releases more energy.

Basically, it becomes this [00:24:00] chain reaction. It's a pile up.

Adam Cox: Like a domino effect. Yeah. They just all hit each other and knock each other down or whatever.

Kyle Risi: Perfect.

Adam Cox: Yeah,

Kyle Risi: that's it.

So it's a real basic, simple concept, right? Mm-hmm. So in effect, all you need is a small amount of energy to kickstart the process of generating a whole lot of energy in the form of heat. We then harness that heat to create steam, and that steam will then turn a turbine, which will then generate

Adam Cox: electricity.

I see.

Kyle Risi: Now, while nuclear reactions can generate a ton of clean energy, and by clean I mean that it does not emit any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They do, however, leave behind fission products, and these are basically byproducts of the reaction that can't be split again, but they are still dangerously radioactive.

Adam Cox: Right. It's like the waste product.

Kyle Risi: It's exactly that. So we can't reuse 'em again. And also we can't easily get rid of that. So most early reactors, what they used was graphite in the core to help slow down those neutrons and absorb those wasted kind of atoms or isotopes. Think of it like a sponge, right? [00:25:00] Soaking it all up, making it easier for us to then manage and then dispose of.

the way that we keep this whole process safe is by doing everything inside a nuclear reactor. And to make this even safer, we usually reinforce the reactor with concrete. We might then house it in a pressure tight containment dome designed to withstand kind of major explosions or meltdowns.

And these days we will even build them into these impregnable kind of metal containers that we call kind of pressure vessels. Mm-hmm. At Chernobyl. However, they didn't have any of that.

Adam Cox: Had they just not discovered what they needed to do to make it safe?

Kyle Risi: no, no. They knew exactly what they needed to do. It was all about cost.

Adam Cox: So going into making Chernobyl, they knew that this is something they should be doing. Mm-hmm. But they didn't do it because to save money.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly. Now, the reactors at Chernobyl, they're called the RBMK reactors and they just use a single reinforced concrete wall around the core. So they have an understanding of what protections are needed, right? They just didn't go the full hog.

In the years leading up to the [00:26:00] Chernobyl disaster, there'd already been two accidents at that same plant.

Adam Cox: Two. And were they the same issue essentially, or the completely separate issue?

Kyle Risi: No, they were roughly the same issue. Really. It's all about kind of small design flaws in the reactor. Mm-hmm. The first one that happened was in September 1982, where the reactor fuel got so hot that it literally melted the containment kind of equipment Investigators managed to trace it back to a single faulty coolant valve, which just failed to close.

So it's terrifying to think that an entire meltdown could have been caused by one single tiny valve in this huge monster reactor.

Adam Cox: Right. And what kind of like safety precaution or checks would they do? Should they not be checking this like daily or weekly or whatever?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, but the belief was that these reactors just could never explode.

After that meltdown, the Institute of Nuclear Research recorded radiation levels a hundred times higher than the permissible limits. So that is super, super serious. But the USSR, They just reported no danger. They logged this as a minor technical issue, which [00:27:00] technically it was.

It was also a minor issue that caused a fucking meltdown.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

It feels like they're really underplaying this, it's almost like they've wrote something in the accident book. but not really done anything with it.

Kyle Risi: And because of this official classification has been a minor instant. There were no reforms, there were no consequences, and there were no lessons learned. It just stayed in the little accident book as you said.

Adam Cox: Yeah. See if it was probably anywhere else in the world. Actually, that's probably, no, that's not fair. Because there's plenty of negligence in the rest of the world.

Kyle Risi: Oh. We learned very quickly about the limitations and the issues with reactors. And we implemented those changes. I think that they call it, the Manhattan Project. Mm-hmm. Where basically there was a partial meltdown at one of the nuclear reactors there.

And from there we passed loads of reforms. We implemented loads of safety precautions. Russia, they'd had all these incidents already, and they did nothing because across the Soviet Union, there'd been 29 other shutdowns in just four years. Not just at Chernobyl, but across all of their power plants. Right. And it was [00:28:00] all tied to the same tiny floor in these RMBK reactors.

Adam Cox: So all nuclear power plants. Mm-hmm. You'd think that many, incidents, they would've gone, do you know what we need to rethink this?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. That's over four years. So that's about one a month.

Adam Cox: Yeah, that's, that is pretty poor from them.

Kyle Risi: So to sum up Moscow, they knew that changes needed to be made the recommendation was to completely redesign their reactors. But actually doing so would actually slow the race down as they try to outpace America. So this just was not an option at all.

Adam Cox: They didn't wanna lose face. Regardless of anyone else's safety. Yeah, they're very prideful people and that's fine, but just think of the people that you're killing God.

Kyle Risi: Instead, what they did do is they proposed that they would reinforce the cooling system by wrapping them up basically in these big giant metal jumpers. It's like those old school boilers, sometimes they've got those little jumpers that they wear and that's keep them insulated. It's kind of similar to that.

Adam Cox: It feels like this is gonna be like a bandaid. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Essentially. The crazy thing is that people running nuclear plants across the [00:29:00] USSR, they knew that RBMK reactors were risky, but they were willing to take the risk.

And the reason why is that, yeah, you could partly say it was that rivalry with the West. but mostly it was fear, right? You didn't wanna be the one reporting bad news to your boss because you might either be reassigned to some miserable corner of the USSR, you might lose your job, or you could potentially even lose your life.

So you could have a PhD in nuclear fission from the top university in the country, which many of these people did, especially at Petri. You could understand every single risk. But if the government said that RBMK reactors cannot explode, you did not question that, even if you knew it was a lie.

Adam Cox: Wow, that's, that must have been scary because these people knew something was up and yet they couldn't do anything about it. Scary, isn't it? So what did people, they just knuckled down and carried on. Did they try and put in anything like themselves?

Kyle Risi: Well, listen, That proposal to fit the cooling systems with those jackets never happened [00:30:00] because. Chernobyl happened,

Adam Cox: right?

Kyle Risi: So Let's take a quick break and when we get back we'll go into all of that. Okay. So Adam, we're back. Tell me, what have you learned so far?

Adam Cox: We've learned about isotopes and how they're fancy atoms mm-hmm. That just don't wanna be normal. Yep. Or that they want to be normal. That's

Kyle Risi: right. They want to be normal. They wanna shake off all those modifications that they've been fitted with straight out the factory.

Adam Cox: Yep. and that's what creates this heat. And then there's chain reaction, which is what nuclear power is all about. And we know that the Russians in the race against the West have developed their own way of doing nuclear energy mm-hmm.

Across all of the USSR. But they have basically taken some shortcuts, and not put in certain safety measures, which is what's gonna cause the incident at Chernobyl.

Kyle Risi: Correct. So, Adam, we're now gonna step into the early hours of April the 26th, 1986, and meet the workers whose night will change history forever.

On April the 26th, 1986, there [00:31:00] were 176 men and women working at the Chernobyl Power Plant just a hundred meters away. There were another 286 builders working on the construction of their fifth reactor.

The engineers were led by deputy chief engineer and totally dilo, who were preparing for a safety test of the unit four reactor.

The test was supposed to happen earlier that day, but the plant's director postponed it. He didn't want there to be a dip in energy production while everyone was kind of awake and using the electricity.

So this seems minor, right? Mm-hmm. We'll postpone it. We'll do it at a less busy time, essentially. But that decision changed everything because now the test was gonna be pushed to the night shift, a team with far less experience and no real prep on how to run the test properly.

Now, the purpose of the test was to determine whether in a power outage, unit four could use its spinning turbines to generate electricity long enough to keep the cooling pumps running for just 90 seconds, buying them enough [00:32:00] time for the diesel generators to kick in.

Adam Cox: Okay.

And the diesel generator is almost like a backup generator for when the power goes down. So they just need to make sure that window, it stays cool.

Kyle Risi: 100% correct? Yes. Here's a wild part. That test was supposed to happen actually years earlier before the reactor was even turned on, but they skipped it because they needed to hit targets.

So again, another example where this rhymes with what happened in the challenger disaster, right?

It was all about hitting targets and staying ahead to schedule

Adam Cox: Yeah. But even waiting two years. it feel Like, okay, you've got a deadline, maybe , this is health and safety, you shouldn't be cutting that, but fair enough, they've done that to get it live, and then they've waited two years to do this.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. There is some logic in why they're waited and I'll get onto that in just a second. But basically before they could even start the tests, they need to make sure that certain conditions were met.

None of those conditions were met. The day shift did hopefully leave behind an instruction manual, but it was covered in handwritten notes, scribbles, and various crossouts. So much [00:33:00] so that the night shift didn't know which set of instructions to actually follow.

Adam Cox: It feels like someone's left a post-it note on something quite serious.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, 100%.

So they tell the outlaw that they should probably wait till morning, but he insists that they have to do it now, otherwise he would get in trouble from his superiors. Okay. So again, it's another situation that we have very similar to the Challenger disaster.

So the engineers that make a decision, they are going to just completely ignore the handwritten notes and they're just gonna follow what is printed in the book to the letter.

At this point, the reactor was nearly at the end of its fuel cycle. the reactor usually has a mix of old and new fuel inside them. So for example, when we drive a car, we fill it up with fuel, all of that fuel gets used up and emitted as carbon dioxide and other gases, and that gets released into the air, right?

Mm-hmm. But in a nuclear reactor, when that fuel gets used up, the fuel is actually turned into other things, and that stays inside the reactor, right? So it's basically like rather than your petrol being emitted as, carbon dioxide, it's turned into water which stays in the tank.

Adam Cox: Okay?

Kyle Risi: [00:34:00] So at this point, two years, in about 75% of the usable fuel in that reactor was used up, meaning that 75% of what was left in the reactor was essentially fission products, nuclear waste.

of course, as we know, that's extremely dangerous, making the actual reactor itself very unstable and really hard to manage.

So inside the reactor there are basically these control rods and these control rods act to regulate the chain reaction happening inside the core, acting basically to slow things down or to speed things up. a good example would be when it's peak hours, you want energy to serve the population, right?

Mm-hmm. You want loads of it, but when it's the middle of the night, you want less energy. And the reason this helps to regulate the output is because those control rods are made of a substance called boron, which essentially slows down the chain reaction.

Adam Cox: Right? Okay. And does that allow for the reactor to last longer then? Or just that it needs to do this? So it's not always on max power all the time. It's

Kyle Risi: just powering down. the way that I imagine it is, like you've got those old, [00:35:00] oil cookies, right?

Where you fill 'em up, the oil, you can never turn them off because there are nightmares to turn back on. So what you do is you just power them down to the running on low, essentially. Ah, I see. I think it's like that. I could be wrong. I'm not a physicist, but I am schooling you today. I mean, it's on physics.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, it's enough information. I believe you. If it is good,

Kyle Risi: as long as you believe me, that's all that matters. That is the whole purpose of this entire podcast

Adam Cox: is just to educate me, is to

Kyle Risi: tell you lies so to carry out the test, the engineers first needed to ensure that the reactor was generating 700 megawatts of power at this moment in time, is currently generating 1,300 megawatts.

Adam Cox: And that's bad.

Kyle Risi: It's not bad. It's just too high.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: So they need to bring it down just a little bit. So knowing what we know about control rods, they basically start inserting a bunch of these rods into the reactor, and that's gonna help draw the power down from 1,300 megawatts down to 700. But here's where they make their first big mistake.

Because the system has been switched from automatic to [00:36:00] manual control, this basically means that the rods are able to drop further down into the core than they're supposed to. We don't know if this is something that would've been mentioned in those handwritten notes that the day shift had left behind.

We can only assume that it must have been there. But remember, they chose to ignore all the handwritten notes and just focus what's in the manual.

Adam Cox: I feel like in these notes, they're gonna be things like, don't press this button. don't turn these keys and all this kind of thing. Don't flick this switch.

Think like it's more again, go back to the car example. Like you have a 20-year-old car. It has a personality of its own, right? So you're when you're selling it, you're gonna say, oh, by the way, like when you're filling up the petrol, you You gotta kinda like jiggle it slightly and that will get it better into the tank.

Kyle Risi: Do you understand what I'm trying to say there? Yeah.

Adam Cox: That's how you get Sheila running Y Yeah. And so you have to like, give it a kickstart and sometimes you have to run with it down the road. Yes. Whilst you're turning the ignition and then she's, she goes like a smooth engine.

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

I think these are all just personality notes that were scribbled all over these manuals. Right. Which they just couldn't work out for themselves

either way, the reactor was in manual mode when [00:37:00] they inserted the rods. It causes the reactors power output to just plummet. It drops all the way down to 30 megawatts per hour. That is dangerously low, and it's also too low for them to run their tests, also for those cooling pumps to be able to function properly.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: As the power drops, a substance called xenon begins to build up in its core now, normally at high operating levels where there's loads of power going into it, that xenon will just burn off naturally. But at these low levels, it just ends up accumulating.

And as it does, it starts to suppress the chain reaction even further, right? So it's already running a 30 megawatts, it's making it even run even slower than that. So it's dropping.

So what you need to do now is boost the power back up just to burn off that xenon that's accumulated in the reactor. And to do that, what do they have to do?

Adam Cox: Well, I assume they need to lift the rods out to turn the energy up again.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. And this works, but only to an extent because the xenon has built up to such a severe level it only lifts the [00:38:00] power up to 200 megawatts. So it's still far too low. Even to do the test, They need 700.

So they make the decision to remove even more rods. Logical thing to do. 'cause it's gonna increase the power, right? Mm-hmm. Now here's the thing.

They had already removed, the maximum number of rods that was considered safe. Removing any more rods would make the reactor dangerously unstable.

Adam Cox: So what I'm getting from this is they can obviously lift the rods in and out, but there's obviously a time allowance that they need to do these things and by lifting them now out too quickly is gonna make it unstable. Is that right?

Kyle Risi: To a degree, yes. Ordinarily, if the xenon hadn't been built up so much in the reactor, if they pulled out just the same amount of rods that they just did, it would lift the power up, right?

Mm-hmm. But because it's suppressing the power it's. Acting as if there's more rods inside the actual reactor. suppressing everything.

Adam Cox: Right? And so really what they should have done was to wait before doing this.

Kyle Risi: The perfectly reasonable thing to do at this point is just shut everything down and everything would've been fine.

Oh, so they should called it [00:39:00] to turn it off and on again. Exactly. But lov, of course, he would be in serious trouble if they missed this test. So he orders additional rods to be removed. And as those rods come out, the space that's left behind is instantly filled with water, which is far less effective, absorbing kind of neutrons than the boron.

This causes the reactor reactivity to spike way too fast. There is a sudden surge in heat and steam. The turbines that are taking in that steam just cannot keep up fast enough. So all this steam is now building up.

To make things worse.

Without the operator even realizing one of those turbines, that's turbine eight disconnects itself from the reactor, and now all that extra steam has just got nowhere to go. It's already struggling at this point, but now it's just building up even more

Adam Cox: and this is what's gonna probably lead to the explosion, right? It's

Kyle Risi: gonna certainly account for it. Yeah.

Adam Cox: I imagine if you're there, you're looking at all the meter readings and I can imagine the needles just flicking back and forth.

Yeah, going crazy. There's smoke coming out or steam coming out [00:40:00] from these machines and someone's going, yeah, I'm sure this is fine.

Kyle Risi: So all these steam pockets, by the way, they're forming these pockets inside the actual core. And this creates what they call a positive void coefficient. Basically, it's where steam creates reactivity, which then creates more heat, which then creates more steam. It's basically a runaway effect And at this point, there is no turning back

at 40 seconds, and 23 minutes past one in the morning. The shift supervisor. Alexander AOV makes the decision. They needed to conduct an emergency shutdown, brilliant thing to do. What they do is they call this acra. it shuts everything down. What's going to happen, essentially is that it's instantly gonna insert all the control rods back into the core.

Adam Cox: Okay. That's a good thing.

Kyle Risi: Yes. Because as we know, those control rods, they slow down the reactivity.

Adam Cox: Makes sense. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But the RMBK reactor has one fatal flaw. Those tips of those rods are made from graphite. As the graphite reenters the core, it just [00:41:00] momentarily displaces some water this spikes the reactivity.

That's usually okay. Because all we need to do is just wait for them all to be inside the actual reactor itself, and then it will kind of buzz down. But the reactivity is really high at the moment, so it's gonna have one more spike and then hopefully it's gonna all settle down.

Adam Cox: Okay. And because of the graphite and the water, they react? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. It's

Kyle Risi: It's a flaw in the actual reactors themselves. But as those rods are reentering the reactor with those graphite tips, half submerged, all of the rods get stuck.

Adam Cox: Well, that can't be good news. It's not.

Kyle Risi: Which means that they've got this spike that's happened at a point where the reactor is like generating all this heat and all this steam and that last safety measure is just failed. Right.

Adam Cox: Right. Okay. And so they're just not lowering the machine stopped working.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, so they hear knocking sounds echoing from the reactor hall. AOV tries to release the clutch of the rods, hoping that the gravity will just pull the rods down into place.

They do not budge. They're [00:42:00] still just stuck half in, half out, and from there the heat just rises even more. Steam starts bursting through the pipes one by one. The system components all start failing.

The lid of the reactor is shaking like a boiling pot atom, and inside of that reactor the temperature skyrockets to 3000 degrees Celsius and the pressure is just enormous.

Then just like that, the reactors lid blows clean off,

Adam Cox: oh my word.

Kyle Risi: This massive blast sends a huge surge of oxygen rushing into the core. This oxygen then reacts with the zirconium cladding causing a second explosion, far bigger than the first. What the second explosion does is rip half of the building to absolute smithing, 50 tons of vaporized nuclear fuel. That's all absorbed inside that graphite is launched into the sky and solid radioactive debris, is now just raining [00:43:00] down on the plant for miles.

Adam Cox: Wow. So this is massive explosion. Yep. And there must have been people that were caught in this, just in the initial explosion, right?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Crazy. Like half of that building is just ripped to Smith Greens. So when you see pictures of this, it's shocking. But in a bunch of the residents are all woken up by the explosion,

many obviously go outside to kind of start watching this brilliant, beautiful glow that's emitting from the actual site of the power plant. A bunch of them gather on a bridge to get a better view of it. And that bridge later becomes known as the bridge of death.

it's said that everyone who stood on that bridge that night was exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and they all died

Adam Cox: so it would've been safer to stay indoors, essentially?

Kyle Risi: I guess so at this point.

Adam Cox: Yeah. But

I guess, did these people know though, that they, uh, friends or family are gonna be working at this nuclear plant? They must know just how dangerous, like people know about Hiroshima and everything. So yeah. What made them think that was okay?

Kyle Risi: They were under the belief that these [00:44:00] reactors were impossible to explode.

Adam Cox: But then they're seeing a giant fire in the sky.

Kyle Risi: That's right. the second explosion emits 30,000 roachs per hour of radiation, which is an instant fatal dose. Right. That's the equivalent of 1,200 Hiroshima bombs. Not the blast. 'cause of course, when we think about Hiroshima, we think about that big mushroom cloud. It's just the radiation that gets emitted.

It's 1,200 times the amount that Hiroshima released.

Adam Cox: Oh, that is a lot.

Kyle Risi: The wild thing is, is horrendous. And as devastating as that is, the glow that they see from the actual blast is actually really beautiful.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I, I like this eely haunting glow.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: Didn't they say that about the radium girls that they would have like a glow mm-hmm. In their bodies basically because they had absorbed so much radium into their bones. Yeah, they,

Kyle Risi: they. Not on their bodies. It would be on their skin because it was a powdered paint.

Oh, that's that they would then have to mix up. So that dust would settle down on their clothing and their skin. So at the end of the working day, they would all go to the speakeasies and the [00:45:00] clubs and they would kind of be called the ghost girls. Yeah.

Because they would be like, wow, look at her. She's glowing. And that was a big element of pride for being a rating girl. Is that you? You were just very distinct. You

Adam Cox: glue in the dark.

Kyle Risi: You glue in the dark. People will say that they would see them walking home at night and they'll be glowing like a ghost.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That's it. So yeah, I imagine very similar kind of that kind of magical or mystical kind of glow.

Kyle Risi: I think it's more of the glow from the fire that's enraging at the moment against kind of the horizon, the backdrop. Mm-hmm. That looks quite pleasing against the night sky. So it's not glowing like Homer Simpson kind of does when he's got his little radium rod

Adam Cox: with you. Fair enough.

Kyle Risi: Remember that 30 thousands of radiation, that is just from the actual blast itself, it does not account for the radioactive debris that has now been scattered all across the region from the explosion. 'cause that's all coming crashing down inside of this graphite.

So this bit blows my mind because Gilo and the others inside the control room, they have [00:46:00] no idea that the building has just been blown apart.

Adam Cox: What did they think that noise was?

Kyle Risi: They think it was just a small oxygen and hydrogen explosion. They have no idea the building is missing.

Adam Cox: I thought makes me feel like they aren't qualified to do this.

Kyle Risi: It's crazy, Adam. So basically they just keep working as if the core is still intact because they truly believe that an explosion just was not possible.

Adam Cox: That's stupid.

Kyle Risi: So Dilo sends two trainees down to the reaction hall to try and manually lower the rods that they think are still obviously suspended inside the core. It's not, it's gone in the HBO series, the trainees don't even make a past their reactor hall. You see them opening up the steel door and just stare directly into the glowing heart of the reactor.

The one that they believed couldn't possibly explode. And as they look into the void, you just see their skin just darken as the radiation just starts burning them.

Adam Cox: Is that what happens? I thought maybe you catch a light, or

Kyle Risi: it's like a sunburn at this stage where they are, if they were much closer, it could be a lot more severe, but essentially they're just [00:47:00] getting a wicker tan

Adam Cox: and then dying.

Kyle Risi: And then dying, which is exactly what's gonna happen.

Eventually they stumble back into the control room, obviously sunburnt and shaking. They tell the outlaw like the core is gone, but he refuses to believe them.

He insists that it was just a hydrogen oxygen explosion in the emergency tank. And he just completely ignores the fact that there are two men standing in front of him that have literally changed color within the last five minutes.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And they must not feel well at this point, right?

Kyle Risi: No. Basically they're gonna be dead within the next week. Do you even know the full extent of what radiation does to you?

Adam Cox: Um, not properly. I'm imagine it's gonna just infect all your cells and break down and you just can't supply, I dunno, oxygen or the right stuff to your body.

Kyle Risi: Basically. You've gotta spot on there in terms of like your cells start to rupture. It's probably one of the most horrific ways that you can possibly think to die.

Obviously, after your cells start to rupture, your organ start to swell, blood starts leaking from all of your orifices, like I'm talking your eyes, your ears, your nose, your [00:48:00] urethra, even your belly button can start to unravel and reopen up. Wow. You then obviously get violently nauseous. Your skin starts to blister.

It starts to peel off in like literal sheets. It's almost like removing a glove or a, a sock, except it's your skin.

Adam Cox: That's just your whole body just breaking down into nothing, essentially.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, of course.

Then it starts to attack your nervous system. That starts failing. It's excruciating in terms of the pain, because your brain gets flattered with all these false signals of pain, and your body just goes into complete chaos.

There is a phase that they call the Walking Ghost, for a few hours, even possibly for a few days, you might appear and even feel like you might be recovering. You start to feel really lucid. You might even think that you're going to be okay, but then your organs just shut down and then you just die.

Adam Cox: What? What is that? Why does your body trick yourself into feeling better

Kyle Risi: then? Maybe That's exactly it. It's it's fine. It's fine. Nothing's going on here, and then you die. Ooh. It's like grandma, right? She gets sick, she gets a little [00:49:00] bit sicker, she gets better, and then she dies.

Adam Cox: Yeah, that's what they say.

Kyle Risi: There's this horrific case from the guy in Japan in 1999. His name is his Shahi Ochi, which is an unfortunate name. Considering what's about to happen to him.

Basically, he was working at a nuclear facility when a critical incident expose him to what they believe is the highest dose of radiation that a human being has ever experienced.

Adam Cox: And this is in 1999.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, so

Following that, he was rushed to the University of Tokyo Hospital. And doctors basically discovered that literally every single one of his white blood cells had been eliminated, which meant that he had no immune system whatsoever.

Eventually, his skin starts melting off of his body. His body swells uncontrollably. And Throughout all of this, he keeps crying out for his mother. He's a fully grown man. And you know when a fully grown man does that, that's dire, right? Yeah.

He keeps going into cardiac arrest like constantly day in and day out, just keeps having these heart attacks.

At this point, they should have just let him die, but they don't. They keep him alive because they wanna study the effects [00:50:00] of radiation poisoning on the human body. Adam, they keep him alive for 83 days.

Adam Cox: How? Just on on life support and

Kyle Risi: on life support. They keep resuscitating wherever they can. They just do not let this poor guy die.

Eventually he goes into cardiac arrest and they can't resuscitate him. So eventually he does die. But it's just horrific that's what they did to him.

There are images but I warn you, do not. It is horrific.

Adam Cox: And did he catch this again from a nuclear plant or something like that? Yeah,

Kyle Risi: he was working at a nuclear power plant at the time.

Adam Cox: And what about the people that are treating him, because surely he's giving off radiation.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So I guess they're all in hazmat suits and he's behind like curtains and things like that. It's horrific.

The back of Chernobyl, an engineer is found unconscious and trapped underneath the girder. His friend manages to pull him out and carry him to safety. When doctors remove his shirt, he's so badly burnt except for one area where his friend was carrying him.

Like you can see the exact hand print on his back where his mate was holding him. That's how quickly the [00:51:00] radiation will penetrate and attack you. Mm-hmm.

Meanwhile, back of the plant. Staff are dropping their flies all over the place. People are vomiting, they're bleeding, they're passing out Midt task. And even at this point, Gilo, he just refuses to believe that the core has now been exposed And I just, do not understand why

Adam Cox: just get those people out of there. Although it's probably too late.

Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But what is his thinking? Why? I, yeah.

Adam Cox: I like He can't cover this up. No, there's no way he can cover this up.

Kyle Risi: I don't know man. Perhaps maybe it was just like he was too afraid to give up and be reprimanded, possibly stubborn. He that it pride idiot. Possibly. I mean, some psychologists do say that maybe it was this kind of phenomena core group think that's a play where kind of people subconsciously reject any outcome that threatens their stability or their reality. Because obviously the truth would be way more horrific than actually what's going on.

Adam Cox: Maybe he knows he's gonna die and so he's just trying to carry on, I dunno,

Kyle Risi: possibly. Maybe it's a combination of all of those.

The outlaw eventually sends men into the lower chambers to try and see if they can open up the water valves to [00:52:00] basically cool down the reactor, they have to weigh through knee deep radioactive water for up to an hour, and in the end they can't even open up the valves, so they're fucked.

At 2:30 AM Diat Love finally calls his boss, a guy called Victor. I dunno how to pronounce his surname, but basically he's the plant director and when he arrives, he calls a meeting in the emergency bunker.

And even though multiple members of staff have told the atlo to his face that the call has exploded and it is gone, he stands there and he tells Victor that the call is intact.

Adam Cox: How I don't, I just don't get this guy.

Kyle Risi: It's crazy. Victor just replies, well then the solution is simple, idiot, just add more water. He also tells 'em to call the fire brigade to help them put out the flames and also to kind of like splash the reactor with water

Adam Cox: so he knows there is a fire. Then at least

Kyle Risi: they know that there's a fire. They just believe it is just an oxygen and hydrogen fire.

That's all they believe, right? Mm-hmm. And he says, do you know what? Just be safe. Also take some radiation readings. That would be helpful. So This is a nuclear power plant, right?

So easy enough to find one, you would think. Yeah. [00:53:00] The only one they can find is one that maxes out at a thousand micro roachs per second, which is high. It's just not fatal. What they don't know though is that the actual reading is 8 million,

Adam Cox: so they've only got one reading that they can find to do this. Mm-hmm. Which is bizarre. And two, it's not the one you should read. It's not reliable reading.

Kyle Risi: No. That's so stupid. Basically what they were doing is they're trying to take the temperature of lava with a thermometer that kind of records water temperature and going, oh look, it's a hundred degrees Celsius.

Oh, that's manageable. Basically idiots. Once again, we're seeing that kind of psychological group think, assuming the best case scenario, because of course the alternative is way too unthinkable.

So Victor sends the word up to Moscow. He tells them that there has been an incident, but everything is under control.

Eventually, an operator does find a better meter reader. This time it maxes out a 200 Roachs, not micro Roachs, 200 Roachs, right? So that's 2000 times more.

Adam Cox: [00:54:00] Okay.

Kyle Risi: Now they've got two different readings because that one's maxed out all the way to the end,

Adam Cox: they look at it and go, oh, that's actually quite bad.

Kyle Risi: It's really bad. But because they got one reading on one, and 200 roachs on the other. They just think both of them are faulty.

Adam Cox: So even if they took an average of that, that's still pretty bad.

Kyle Risi: That's still fucking pretty bad.

But Meanwhile, people start finding graphite all over the ground and all over the plant, right?

Adam Cox: They're like, oh, should this be here?

Kyle Risi: Exactly, which should have been a smoking gun because graphite only exists inside the fucking core. The only way that could have got there is that the core fucking exploded.

Adam Cox: Yeah, someone's looking at it and going, I'm pretty sure this is the remnants of a rod.

Kyle Risi: So Gilo sees this for himself. He still denies it.

Adam Cox: Always thought that, oh, that was already here.

I saw that on the way in. It's so bad. Adam eventually, and I can't believe I'm saying this, fortunately he becomes so sick that he has to leave the actual plant. And it's only then that people start to accept what's actually happening

because they can actually talk about it and not be condemned or anything like that.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. [00:55:00] Remember, he's a superior, no one can overrule him. So just imagine how differently this would've played out if he just believed what his team was telling him in the first place.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And what did he think? He had? Just oh, I something dodgy, some dodgy chicken. I'm going home.

Kyle Risi: I think probably when he started bleeding from his eyes, he was like, okay, this is happening.

When the firefighters arrive, they're clueless about the risks. All they've been told is that they should just treat this as any other fire. So naturally they have no radiation gear, there's no training on how to deal with radiation, which just blows my mind. Like is a nuclear power plant city. The fire department exists purely to serve them, yet they've had no radiation training whatsoever.

Adam Cox: That seems bizarre. I imagine any fire station that's in a certain mile radius of any nuclear power plant in the UK or even America or wherever in the world will know how to deal with that, right?

Yes.

Kyle Risi: Like, uh, Steve. Yeah. That's a power plant over there. Mm-hmm. So we are gonna show you how to deal with shit. No. None of that. And the reason for that is because the government has always insisted that [00:56:00] RBMK reactors just can't explode.

So why would you even need training for something that just is impossible to happen?

Adam Cox: Yeah. In that case then, did they ever supply any treatment to like the residents, like worst case scenario there is a, a radiation leak. Mm-hmm. Really? Because I remember my sister, she used to live near a nuclear power plant and she was like, first priority to get any radiation poisoning. Oh, really? Crazy. Which I'm not sure how much that would've actually helped.

Kyle Risi: And what is it? I don't know. It's just a shot in the butt.

Adam Cox: I have no idea. But I remember her saying there was something that she would get like first treatment, but then yeah. How effective is that?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, God. Basically, this is what happens when your government builds its entire reality on lies, mm-hmm. Telling people, don't trust what you see. Trust what we say. Yeah. one by one, of course, the firefighters, they start collapsing again, vomiting, bleeding. They're just dying when they're brought to the hospital. The doctors, of course, they know exactly what's happening, but they don't have any power to tell anyone or even give any orders.

So they just keep working until they themselves just cannot because these people are coming in, [00:57:00] they're radioactive, yeah. So of course it's going to start affecting the doctors as well.

Adam Cox: And so they can't even like say, um, no, we need to quarantine these people. We can't treat them just with exposed skin.

They just have to carry on.

Kyle Risi: I think they're just carrying on. Yeah.

Adam Cox: Wow.

Kyle Risi: So the chaos rages throughout the night, but outside of the plant, nobody knows what's going on. Not even Moscow at this point, they're still being told that everything is fine. It's not until 129 of the most heavily radiated victims are airlifted to hospital number six, which is basically a facility equipped for radiation kind of injuries.

It's then that Moscow finally realizes that something must be wrong. At what time is this then? So this is within hours. Mm-hmm. So maybe the really early hours of the morning, the next morning in Pripyat, it's basically Saturday morning, life just continues as normal.

People get up, they go to work, people are attending weddings. One guy, he goes up to his apartment roof, he's sunbathing on his roof and he's like, wow, I'm getting a fucking wicked tan today, man. Yeah. Only for a few hours later. He's just [00:58:00] projectile vomiting everywhere. Ooh.

Meanwhile, what's left of the fire department, they are still trying to fight the flames, but when the water hits the reactor, all it does is just turns to steam.

Adam Cox: I was gonna say, yeah. That, that's not doing anything right. No,

Kyle Risi: even worse than that, in some places where the water hits where it's really, really hot, it actually splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. And again, if that gets ignited, there's gonna be a third explosion.

Adam Cox: Surely there should be like a specific type of liquid that they should be using on this fire, right?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Not maybe a liquid. It's more something to kind of smother the fire.

Adam Cox: Like a foam, right?

Kyle Risi: Not a foam. Oh, boron. And graphite, which we already know will slow down this reaction.

Adam Cox: So it's less of a, like a, a cannon or anything. They just need to like airdrop some stuff on it.

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

So Adam, we've joined the night crew. We've watched the ill fated safety test. We've seen the rods mishandled and all at xenon buildup and endured the initial blast as trainees and firefighters face the reactors deadly [00:59:00] steam.

Now is the perfect time for us to take a quick break, and when we get back, we're gonna meet the man who's going to defy the USSR government and start taking divisive action and try and save the world.

Adam Cox: Wow. He sounds like he's the only one that's, that's smart.

Kyle Risi: Superman.

So why don't, we're back.

Adam Cox: So this guy, the hero Mm. Of the story.

Kyle Risi: So at this point, basically Moscow, they suspect that they're not being told the truth, So they send someone down to Chernobyl to see for themselves. They sent a guy called Valerie Soff.

Adam Cox: Valerie, that's an interesting name for a man. Hey,

Kyle Risi: you can't be judgmental.

Adam Cox: No, I'm not saying that. Is this the guy? Is this the hero?

Kyle Risi: He is our hero, yes. Basically. He's the deputy director of the OV Institute, and he's also a professor of chemistry. So he approaches the site. And he sees all these roadblocks just everywhere. There's dozens of them. Right. And he thinks to himself, this is, this is not how a fire is handled. Uh, we've been told this is just a basic fire.

When he arrives, the first thing he [01:00:00] does is takes a radiation reading using actual equipment that is capable of actually giving an accurate reading. Mm-hmm. Egs, 8 million rodents. It's quite literally Adam apocalyptic at this point.

Adam Cox: He must have thought I'm screwed

Kyle Risi: He immediately calls an emergency meeting, standing face to face with the Soviet officials. He tells them this is bad, this is really bad. And he warns, if the radiation reaches the groundwater or into the river, millions of people are going to die.

Adam Cox: Geez. That's everyone across, well Russia. Well and the surrounding countries.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. And it's gonna potentially also escape out into the sea if it gets into the Petri water, right?

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So from that moment on, basically it's all about damage control. They have to do whatever it takes to limit the fallout.

So Legacy of orders, a crisis team, and they began dropping bags of sand, boron, dolomite, and lead onto the exposed core through kind of the hole in the roof of the power plant. The plan was to basically just smother the fire and absorb all the neutrons.

This would essentially cool the core [01:01:00] before it kind of had a chance to burn through the actual concrete and then escape into the groundwater. Mm-hmm.

Even at this point though, Moscow still refuses to authorize any kind of evacuation. So basically Valerie, he does it himself. He arranges for flies to be delivered to literally every single home business and apartment in the city. And 11:00 AM a radio broadcast is announced that there's going to be a temporary evacuation scheduled for 2:00 PM that afternoon.

So that's just four hours away. Yeah. It's crazy. People are told to bring only the essentials, bring some food, bring a few documents, and in order to stop people from trying to pack their entire lives all at once, they tell people it's just gonna be for a few days. But of course, Adam, this is a complete lie because Valerie knows that they're never going to be allowed back in their city,

Adam Cox: and I bet he's not saying, I'll take your pets or anything like that. He's just saying, just get out.

Kyle Risi: That's the most heartbreaking thing, people describe the moment that they see their dogs chasing after those buses as they kind of left. At first. It's really playful, but then frantic as they realize [01:02:00] that they've just been left behind.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And did they generally think that they could be coming back or, mm-hmm. because they probably didn't realize the danger at this point.

Kyle Risi: You believe what your government tells you, especially in Soviet Russia.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: In alone, 160,000 people are eventually evacuated in just two hours, which is. Shockingly efficient, right? another 40,000 people are evacuated from this other surrounding areas and in total, 200,000 people are displaced from this region.

Adam Cox: So he's defied Moscow's orders. Mm-hmm. But he's managed to get, I dunno what coaches buses or just people to drive out.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. That's pretty impressive. So impressive. moscow, obviously, they do everything they can to obviously hide what's happening, this disaster from the rest of the world. But that doesn't last long because over in Sweden, a man called Cliff Richardson, which is the least Swedish name I've ever heard in my life.

Adam Cox: Very close to Cliff Richard.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, it is, isn't it? Basically, he's working at a nuclear power plant just outside of Stockholm.

He wakes up on April the 26th. He goes to brush his teeth and as he walks by, he triggers off a radiation alarm because he [01:03:00] hadn't been near the control room of his kind of power plant He just figures that the detector is broken later that day. Other workers, they also trigger their alarms as well. So Cliff takes off his shoe and he tested in a lab and it is completely contaminated, but strangely, it's contaminated with an isotope that is not used in his plant, which means that the radiation could only come from somewhere outside.

Adam Cox: And so how far away is this then, if E's in Sweden

Kyle Risi: it is crossed the Baltic Sea.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: So the Swedish officials, they're alerted, they're super confused because if there was an incident somewhere else in the world, they were certain that they would've received that news. They rechecked their own plant just in case it was a mistake.

Again, it's completely clean. Norway and Finland, they also report the same elevated radiation levels over in their airspace.

Adam Cox: I love how the USSR thought that they could keep this quiet.

Kyle Risi: No, I know. Every country in the world is then on a connection or asking questions, trying to work out what the fuck is going on.

Meanwhile, Moscow, there're [01:04:00] being suspiciously quiet. It's

Adam Cox: like, is it you? No, it's not me. Is it you Denmark? No, it's not me. Uk. Nope. Not us

Kyle Risi: Russia. Is it you? They're like, no, not us.

Adam Cox: Um, yeah, I dunno what you're talking about.

Kyle Risi: Eventually they're forced to admit that actually there was an incident at the Chernobyl plant.

Oh,

Adam Cox: that one. Oh God. Yeah. Um, it's just minor. Don't worry about it.

Kyle Risi: Yes. Essentially. But they just insist that there's only been two casualties and everything is under control. So like, why not just tell us that to begin with? Mm-hmm. But now no one is even sure whether or not to believe them because they initially lied. Just be forthcoming with that information.

Eventually the press explodes. The New York Post runs with headlines talking about mass graves with like 15,000 victims in it. Of course, none of that's true, but at this point. All eyes are in Russia.

So now they can't contain this at all. They thought they could just downplay it and all just go away. Mm. But because the media are just going wild with it, with all this speculation making way worse than it actually is at this point. Like everyone's just focused on them. I'd say it's pretty bad.

[01:05:00] It, I mean it, I'm not trying to downplay it at all. Like a grave of 15,000 people is not the reality. But what's happened is still pretty serious. Sure. So back at Chernobyl helicopters, they're so dumping all this boron and other stuff on the fights to try and quell it, but Adam is just not enough in the end. They're forced to conscript dozens of helicopters from the war that's raging in Afghanistan to redirect all of their helicopters to Chernobyl to try and assist with kind of dumping all this boron.

Adam Cox: And did they know what they were getting themselves into?

Probably not.

Kyle Risi: They probably knew something was going on. 'cause the only protection they're given is just like a thin lead sheet of metal to sit on while they're in the helicopters. Oh my God. Of course it doesn't help because they're all gonna lightly die. It's horrible.

Adam Cox: Yeah, that is bizarre. But I bet people thought that was great. I've got my sheet of metal, I'm safe. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Adam, they're told, don't worry. Just drink some vodka. It'll help.

Adam Cox: I mean, that is the answer to everything. Yeah. Shot of vodka, that'll all you out.

Kyle Risi: It's crazy. Eventually they do manage to dump enough of this mixture onto the core to seal it. You think that's a good thing? What they don't realize is that this [01:06:00] ends up just trapping the heat. The only place it can go is downwards. So it starts burning and melting through the concrete down into the basement, and now they're terrified. This is gonna get through to the actual groundwater.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: this lava that's forming, this is the core of the actual reactor itself. It ends up looking like an elephant foot. They call this the elephant foot because basically it looks like a wrinkled up foot of an elephant Once it finally solidifies, it's one of the most dangerous things on this planet.

Even today. Even today, you can't even get near it.

Adam Cox: How big is it?

Kyle Risi: Probably the size of a car,

Adam Cox: okay. Pretty big.

Kyle Risi: It's massive. You can actually look this thing up on Google. The not so thing is that it's actually really difficult to actually get a photograph of this because of the intense radiation, it ends up fucking with a camera. There's only a handful of images that actually exist of this thing inside this basement.

Adam Cox: Wow. How did they stop it from melting then and cool it down in the end?

Kyle Risi: Basically they're going to need to get some kind of refrigeration in there, but they can't use [01:07:00] water. Because remember, the water's gonna turn all of that to steam. If it gets into an air pocket, it's just gonna blast the ground apart and then it's gonna get into the ground. It's the worst thing they can possibly do.

they order for all the water beneath Reactor four to be drained. The problem is this can only be done by hand.

On May the sixth, the USSR, they find three volunteers. They were told that this was essentially going to be a suicide mission, but don't worry, you're gonna be doing this for your country. You are going to be labeled as heroes if you choose to do this.

So once this is, of course, understood, all three men, they suit up, they make their way into the darkness with nothing but torches to try and find these veils so they can drain all the water that's in the basement.

Eventually they find them, they managed to open up the valves, which is amazing. And in doing so, they believe that now they were gonna die.

The official word from Moscow is that three days later, all three of them were dead.

That actually wasn't true the USSR kind of spun this into this myth that these kind of three brave men who voluntarily chose to die for their [01:08:00] country had passed away. The reality was that all three of them managed to survive.

In fact, one of them still actually works in the nuclear industry even today. What? They were just lucky, but don't get me wrong, they weren't without their ailments and their issues, like they were sick. Some of them were crippled, but they were still alive. They didn't die three days later. Wow. And that Russia had said that they did and maintained that. They did.

Adam Cox: So why did they say that? Just because they wanted to treat them as heroes or,

Kyle Risi: I think so. I guess it was part of that Russian propaganda that they like to spew. Like doing things for the state.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And if they did that then so can you or Yeah, I guess if they survived, is that, was there like a clause in their contract that they had to have died for their families to be provided for? Oh

Kyle Risi: no. Can you imagine like you come out of this, you, you survive it, but then you get inflicted with all these different cancers and all these sorts of things, but then your family doesn't get provided for

Adam Cox: Yes. Like Dave, um, the condition was you had to die. Oh my God. And you're still here.

Kyle Risi: I wouldn't put it past the USSR to pull or something like that.

Adam Cox: [01:09:00] Yeah. You'd hope that their medical treatment would be provided for if they, had ongoing Yeah. Issues.

Kyle Risi: Crazy. So next, the USSR, they bring in 400 miners and they are ordered to dig a 150 meter tunnel about 30 meters wide, 12 meters below the actual reactors core.

The aim was that they were gonna create enough space to install a cooling system just below kind of the reactors core to cool this thing down. They do not want this thing melting through the concrete and making its way to the groundwater.

Sure. But again, this tunnel has to be completely dug by hand. Mostly for urgency reasons, but also because any mechanical equipment like drills or any diggers or anything like that, they just do not work effectively under that amount of radiation. Like I said, it just messes with all the electricals.

Adam Cox: So these 400 people are also being sentenced to their death

Kyle Risi: essentially? they are forced to work with no masks, there's no ventilation. They're literally working in temperatures that are 50 degrees Celsius. Each individual [01:10:00] minor is exposed to one Chen, or radiation every 24 hours that they are in there. It's the equivalent of having 100 x-rays per hour.

Adam Cox: And did they get any sort of compensation for their families?

Kyle Risi: First of all, they were not told the risks of what was involved and what they were doing. All they were told is that they were doing this to save their country and that essentially should have been enough for them.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Damn, get this, that cooling system. It was never installed.

Adam Cox: So they just dug a hole for nothing.

Kyle Risi: Halfway through digging that hole, they noticed that the actual core itself was starting to cool down on its own, so they just abandoned the whole thing.

Right. All those men had put their lives at risk for nothing.

It's believed that a third of those miners all ended up dying before the age of 40. Wow.

So now with the fire out and the water drained, the USSR has to begin, obviously, the cleanup process. What they do is they establish a 30 kilometer exclusion zone around the area, and within it, everything had to be completely erased.

Between [01:11:00] 1986 and 1987, the USSR, they bring in 240,000 people, but the truth was there's probably more closer to 600,000 people. And these people are basically called liquidators a grim way to describe them,

but basically their job was to decontaminate anything in everything that they could, their first job was to completely bury the forest, which had now turned completely red from all the radiation, which is how it essentially gets its name.

It's called the Red Forest.

Adam Cox: Ah, okay. So they've got what? Destroy all plant life animals and things like that, .

Kyle Risi: They just have to bury it to make sure that that dust that's accumulated on everything that's making it all red is just kind of like buried and away from the elements.

Mm-hmm. They're then ordered to scrub all the rooftops of every single building, but also they're ordered to kill everything that includes all the wildlife, all the birds, even the cats and dogs. They're chased after those buses. As their families left, all the animals had to be completely eradicated.

Most of them at this point were blind. They were all starving. [01:12:00] Most of 'em were now feral. They basically end up digging these mass dog graves, which are completely unlined and they just dump all these animals into them.

So, which means that when they start decomposing, that's just gonna leach into kind of the ground

Adam Cox: How come they didn't line it then? Because I, it feels like they went through this much trouble to stop the radiation from, going any further I would've put a lead. Coffin or something.

Kyle Risi: Maybe it was cutting costs, maybe it was urgency. Who knows? Maybe it's just so much that they needed to do,

Adam Cox: and perhaps if they're saying that this zone is basically not gonna be inhabitable for however long. Mm-hmm. Maybe it didn't matter.

Kyle Risi: The not so thing is that these liquidators were told to not have any children for five years. and If they just drank enough vodka, they'd all be all right.

Adam Cox: Okay. Interesting. They just needed to sell some more vodka, clearly. The government vodka. Oh

Kyle Risi: God. Can you imagine? I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

Adam Cox: And just going back to one thing you just said a second ago, why did they have to scrub the roofs?

Kyle Risi: Because it had this radioactive dust on it. Oh, okay.

Adam Cox: Anything that was basically covered in radioactive dust. Get

Kyle Risi: rid by November, 1986. Reactor four [01:13:00] is completely in tuned by a 400,000 ton concrete coffin. they call this the esophagus. It takes a team of 5,000 people to build. And again, it all has to be done by hand because a lot of the electrical equipment that they would normally use just didn't function under this amount of radiation, especially being so close to that radioactive call.

The years that follow the USSR, they ban all outdoor market stores across Ukraine, they make it illegal for you to own a Geiger counter,

Adam Cox: So they just didn't want you knowing about it, rather.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Wow. People couldn't test their food and I can only imagine it's because the USSR aligned to people telling them that everything is fine, that your food is fine, in reality is probably completely riddled with radiation.

Adam Cox: I remember seeing something actually on Instagram the other day. I think it was like a reenactment of what the cloud, over Chernobyl was like and it pretty much covers all of Europe really at, at one point or another.

Kyle Risi: Wow.

Adam Cox: Obviously the strength, I'm guessing is probably a lot less by the time it gets to the uk, but it did definitely cover the [01:14:00] uk.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. I mean, if it was enough to trigger an alarm in Sweden then sure. There must have been some impact.

Basically what economists say is that. Chernobyl is the real reason why the Soviet Union collapsed, just because of how much this ended up fucking up their economy

eventually, a Soviet delegation is sent all the way to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Valerie, surprisingly, he goes with them and considering that he defied Moscow and ordered the evacuation did all these things against protocol, he gets a standing ovation when he walks in across the world. He's dubbed the Soviet who spoke the truth. So I imagine Russia is not happy with him at all.

Adam Cox: No. They're gonna put a hit on him, surely.

Kyle Risi: 100% But while he might have seemed brave in that moment, the reality is he was still scared to speak out against the USSR because in his official reports, he blames the entire disaster on operator error.

And there is no mention of the reactors design flaws. [01:15:00] There's no mention of the systemic kind of secrecy. There's no mention of the oppression that the state was putting all these different kind of operators under.

Adam Cox: I guess he's never gonna admit that.

'cause that would be going against the country. If he's saying actually the whole thing's flawed. Exactly. He can now just pin it on human error.

Kyle Risi: The thing is though, that's, you are spot on there, really, because since the fall of the USSR, he says that he'll never forgive himself for not providing inaccurate reports.

So he knew, yeah. He was forced to do that basically. Mm. And I guess when your life is at risk, like what do you do, right? Mm-hmm. It's either, you probably have to make that decision against your integrity. Or whether or not you die

Adam Cox: And his family perhaps as well that he's thinking of probably. So he managed to survive. Did he have any sort of ailments and things like that?

Kyle Risi: Well, he commits suicide. Really? The thing is though, he does try and publish his findings after he puts forward his initial reports warning against the dangers of using RBMK reactors. But as Moscow often does, he is silenced, they destroy all of [01:16:00] his work.

And the sad reality is, is that on April the 26th, 1988, so exactly two years after the explosion, he kills himself

Adam Cox: So does he kill himself or does someone come after him?

Kyle Risi: Well, it's interesting that you say that because before he dies, he actually recorded a series of cassette tapes. And in that he said the incident was the crux of everything that was actually wrong in the management of the national economy. And that's how it had been for decades.

So a lot of people do think that the KGB got him. But honestly, if that was the case, then these physical tapes just wouldn't have survived. 'cause they would've got rid of them. Right?

Adam Cox: They would've destroyed them. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: but what's really chilling is that, he killed himself at the exact time, that the core exploded.

Adam Cox: How would someone know To the second though? Yeah,

Kyle Risi: Maybe it's on the recording tapes, but again, if it's just like a 1980s recording tape, he doesn't have a timestamp.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I wonder how much of that is manipulated a little bit with hearsay.

Interesting.

Kyle Risi: In 1992, the International Atomic Energy Agency, they updated their original [01:17:00] report to say that Chernobyl would not have happened if there'd been a proper culture of safety and transparency But that's really easy for them to say from the comfort of Vienna, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, like where was their voice and where was their bravery to add that into the report when the Soviet Union was still going?

Adam Cox: Yeah, you'd have thought, ' cause they're based in Vienna, why would they feel scared to say anything?

Kyle Risi: After the collapse of the USSR, many of those are BMK reactors were eventually decommissioned. But believe it or not, there's still 11 of them running even today.

Adam Cox: But have they been upgraded or will we actually know? They've

Kyle Risi: probably been upgraded, yes.

So they've probably been retrofitted with all the various kind of safety elements that they need, but there are still some vital design floors in those reactors. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know this, and I know I mentioned it at the very top of the show, but Unit three remained in operation until the year 2000. That's crazy to me.

Adam Cox: That is crazy because the people that worked there, I imagine there's people on site. There has to [01:18:00] be. Yeah, they must know the risks of what they were doing. So I don't understand. Unless you arrive and leave in some weird metal van or whatever. And you put that metal seat under in the, that metal plate under your seat,

Kyle Risi: he'll be fine. Yeah. Drinks a vodka

Adam Cox: then. Yeah. That is weird. But I guess, people need a job. I reckon there's people out there that probably would do that. Mm-hmm. And maybe you think, oh, it's in 10 years. Yeah, it's probably not as bad.

Kyle Risi: But it is a myth that there isn't any people living in the exclusion zone because there's an estimated 187 small communities And the reason why they ended up staying is actually really dark. And that's because after the Fallouts of Chernobyl, they couldn't find any work anywhere. And that's because they'd become stigmatized for being from that region.

And so what were they supposed to do? Right.

Adam Cox: You can't catch radiation off a person unless they obviously got the dust on them. I would've thought, but maybe, I don't know how that works even.

Kyle Risi: I guess maybe there's just a lot of fear and uncertainty, I guess. Mm-hmm. The official death toll still remnant from the [01:19:00] USSR, is 31 people.

Adam Cox: But am I right in thinking they're probably looking at people that died on the night or the day after?

Kyle Risi: Possibly,

Yes. So obviously that is a lie because across Europe cancer rates, they tripled mostly thyroid cancers. Since obviously the thyroid is really good at absorbing radiation infant mortality. The contaminated zones jumped from 20% to 30%, and in 2006, a census was carried out and found that one in three children have some degree of internal defect of some kind. Whether or not it's a, physical abnormality or something internal,

Adam Cox: it's

Kyle Risi: just crazy.

Adam Cox: yeah. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: There are these photographs of baby piglets that have been born with the most horrendous abnormalities, and this is even still happening today. They're still being inflicted by the effects of radiation.

All over eastern Ukraine, there are still signs in hospitals which allow Chernobyl victims to just skip the queue altogether. So it is like one of those provisions that you talked about with your sister who used to live near Sizewell. Whereby if you go to the hostel [01:20:00] and you are from that particular area, just skip the queue, come straight forward, comes to the front desk, we'll get you sorted.

Adam Cox: Wow. Even now, although, yeah, 30 years on,

Kyle Risi: yeah,

Adam Cox: 40 years on. 40 years on. Yes.

Kyle Risi: All in all, the entire cleanup operation ended up costing billions. It impacted local economies. Oil prices tanked across the entire federation. And economists say this is what accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

GI Outlaw ends up getting 10 years of hard labor, for completely failing to see the disaster for what it is.

he eventually dies, but even then he insists that it just was not his fault

Adam Cox: really. So he did survive beyond that night then? Yes, he did. I, I would've thought he perhaps would've, yeah. Come down with something sooner.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. As far as I'm aware, he at least survived 10 years, so, wow.

Yeah. The liquidators that were conscripted, tens of thousands of them would eventually be crippled by radiation exposure, and all they were given was a certificate for their service.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That's not good at all. A certificate,

Kyle Risi: captain Sergey, he eventually got a medal. In 1996, the same medal [01:21:00] was given to the firemen who died in 1986. And he told the guardian in an interview that they were awarded for dying. And 10 years later, he has now been awarded for surviving.

Sergei himself, does eventually get sick and is forced to retire. And as part of his pension, all he gets is 26 Grier per year.

Adam Cox: How much is that in pounds or dollars?

Kyle Risi: I'm not sure, but for perspective, a ity costs 35.

Adam Cox: So nothing then

Kyle Risi: pretty much. Yeah. So basically we will never really know the true number of deaths either directly or indirectly from this disaster.

The official toll is 31, but estimates range between 60,000 and a hundred thousand people.

Adam Cox: That is a phenomenal amount. And then that's not the people that are obviously still sick or mm-hmm. With it, who it's impacted. And this just goes, why, nuclear war or anything like that.

This is what could happen, yeah.

Kyle Risi: So scary. I saw a few months ago that when Russia invaded, one of the first targets that they [01:22:00] targeted was Chernobyl.

Because remember, that reactor is still there. That core is still there. It's covered by an esophagus, but they were firing missiles at it as a way of saying, don't fuck with us.

Because if we wanted to, we'd blow that esophagus right off and just cause chaos across Europe.

Adam Cox: yeah.

Kyle Risi: And Adam, that is a story of the Chernobyl disaster.

Adam Cox: I can't believe it's, yeah. 40 years on. And yet there's still people suffering with it. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the biggest events, in human history really.

Kyle Risi: And it's just crazy that it, like you said 40 years ago, but it's still an imminent threat to us, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like you have to keep replacing that esophagus that's covering. Nuclear power plant every so often. I don't know how long the esophagus is gonna last this time around, but it will need to be replaced at some point. There could be a point where maybe we're not here anymore or people don't find it important to look after it or to keep it contained.

Adam Cox: Or perhaps there's gonna be a point when people can live on that land again. And that's gonna be quite strange knowing that this land has been deserted for however many hundreds of years.

So do you feel enlightened?

[01:23:00] Yeah.

I will remember this as that isotopes are fancy atoms that are just trying to be normal.

Kyle Risi: Did you say atoms?

They're

Adam Cox: just fancy atoms. They're just fancy

Kyle Risi: atoms. Yeah.

What's me

should we run the outro for this week?

Adam Cox: Let's do it.

Kyle Risi: And that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We really hope you enjoy the ride as much as we did,

Adam Cox: and if today's episodes spark your curiosity, do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app.

It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people like you discover the show.

Kyle Risi: And for our dedicated freaks out there. Don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon and is completely free to access.

Adam Cox: And if you want even more, join our certified Freaks tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next.

Kyle Risi: We'd love you to be part of our growing community. we drop new episodes every Tuesday, and until then, remember, it wasn't the explosion that exposed the truth. It was the silence that buried it. We'll see you next time.

Adam Cox: See you. [01:24:00]