Can You Survive A Nuclear Winter (And Other Nuclear Stories)

the earth goes through periodic cooling periods known as ice ages with the last ice age ending a few tens of thousands of years ago today we're resting comfortably in the middle of a mild climate period which means moderate winters in most places around the world and year-long sunshine in California but today we're also capable of changing the environment artificially and are already doing Sofia uncontrolled release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which are warming the planet but with thousands of nuclear weapons around the world primed to detonate that warming trend could very quickly reverse and send us straight into a man-made Ice Age hello and welcome to another episode of the infographics show today we're asking how can we survive a nuclear winter the legendary astrophysicist Carl Sagan co-authored a paper in the 1980s called climate and smoke an appraisal of nuclear winter in this earth-shattering essay Sagan and his partner James B study the physical effects a nuclear war would have on our planet and discover that not only with such a war devastate nations but it could potentially disrupt the global climate by vaporizing debris and filling the atmosphere with ash soot and aerosols a nuclear war would result in global dust clouds that would block the sun's rays for years preventing the sun's energy from reaching the surface of the planet this would trigger a cascade cooling effect which would plummet global temperatures by as much as 22 degrees Celsius turning sunny California into something more akin to blustery Seattle the world would enter an artificial ice age though recent studies have shown that sagging and pollux original estimates may have been a bit overzealous our environment is incredibly fragile and even a 10 degree drop in temperature would have a dramatic repercussions not only with lower temperatures severely shortened growing seasons for crops but all of that blocked sunlight would send weather and ocean current patterns that help keep the world mild today into disarray the North Atlantic drift is an ocean current that brings warm water heated by the Sun in the equator to northern Europe which in turn is why Europe is so far north yet enjoys mild weather and warm summers with a decline in sunshine this current will completely shut down and without warm water being circulated around here - the Mediterranean Europe would begin to see weather close to what is common in Canada today Spain and France is famous summertime beach destinations would be a thing of the past and in fact pretty much the entire Mediterranean would be far too chilly to go for a swim in but it wouldn't be just sunny beaches that are a casualty of the nuclear winter the North Atlantic drift also helps bring favourable weather for growing crops to Europe and without it Europe would experience a catastrophic crop collapse during what little growing season may be left due to all the dust in the atmosphere the east coast of the US is also dependent on ocean currents for its mild weather and a global cooling that reached the equator which shut down the Gulf Stream along the u.s. is Shores originating in the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf Stream circulates warm water up along the east coast of the US and into southern Canada helping bring mild temperatures to the area during spring and summer chilly temperatures would be hard enough to deal with but all of that block sunlight would also shorten growing seasons for crops with much reduced sunlight humanity would be unable to grow enough crops to feed everyone alive today and mass starvation would ensue if current stockpiles of non-perishable goods could be evenly and fairly distributed a doubtful circumstance in a post-apocalyptic world it's possible that the majority of the population could survive a short term nuclear winter the length and severity of a nuclear winter would ultimately depend on the amount of weapons exchanged between combatants but even a small regional exchange of just a few hundred low-yield weapons is estimated to plunge the earth into a ten year nuclear winter even with today's large stockpiles of non-perishable goods there's simply no way the majority of the population could survive a decade of famine those that do survive however would face crippling vitamin and mineral deficiencies leading to disease and illness which would further decimate humanity's plunging population in the midst of a nuclear winter you'd probably be delighted to see a few shafts of sunlight through clouds full of choking dust but beware that sunlight could be lethal that's because a nuclear war would destroy the ozone layer meaning there would be little protection from the sun's harmful UV rays unless you slather up in the most powerful sunscreen you can find basking in the Sun for too long will result in severe sunburns and answers your eyes would be especially sensitive to that intense UV radiation and it would be vital to wear goggles or sunglasses with UV filters in order to keep yourself from going blind because UV rays can damage your eyes without you feeling it your vision could become severely impaired without you realizing what is happening until it's too late a nuclear winter would be clearly a nightmare scenario but it might be survivable after all your ancestors already did that's right we're the descendant of a very small group of humans who have survived an ancient nuclear winter seventy five thousand years ago a supervolcano in modern-day lake toba sumatra erupted with a fury equivalent to thousands of nuclear bombs and was 100 times greater than the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora which resulted in 1816 a year without a summer injecting six billion tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere the eruption dropped global temperatures by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius for three years and further cooling lasting decades though scientists differ on the severity of the cooling the Toba super eruption is widely credited with the creating a genetic bottleneck in human evolution during which the human population dropped suddenly to a surviving population of only about 3,000 to 10,000 individuals so though a nuclear winter sounds bad know that you were already genetically predisposed to survive one but how exactly can you help your odds of survival first you'll want to tackle your greatest threat the cold insulating your home will be critical to keeping warm and if you don't know anything about insulation or construction now is a good time to learn at least how to use spray foam insulation materials fuel supplies will run critically low very quickly and even trees may become scarce if there's not enough sunlight for them to grow you're going to want to keep out as much cold as possible while keeping in as much heat as you can at all times secondly you'll want to secure a fresh water drinking supply a nuclear winter may paradoxically not necessarily result in snow as disrupted weather patterns and a lack of evaporation and thus precipitation may turn the world into a frozen desert even if there is snow where you are though it's likely to be highly emanated with radioactive or other particles from the trillions of tons of debris ejected into the atmosphere by the nuclear bombs emergency water filters will be critical for your health as well as water purification tablets and possibly iodine pills for radiation poisoning it goes without saying that intense radiation will also be a hazard but you are in fact not very likely to be irradiated in a nuclear winter to stay out of ground zero blast zones that's because a nuclear weapon is designed to air burst or explode several hundred to a few thousand metres above its target this is because if the bomb were to explode on the ground the blast wave would be mitigated by terrain and buildings severely limiting the explosive potential of a nuclear bomb high up in the air though a blast wave can spread for several miles without being dampened by the hilly terrain or dense clusters of buildings an airburst detonation will also ensure that the majority of the radiation from an explosion will actually be projected upwards into space while a ground burst detonation willa radiates millions of tons of soil which will be carried by the wind so stay out of large craters and you shouldn't be turning into a fallout style ghoul any time soon your third concern will be to secure a food supply this may be trickier than finding water or keeping warm as even perishable goods will quickly become scarce and with most nuclear weapons aimed at major manufacturing and distribution centers it's unlikely you'll find much that will be safe to scavenge without irradiating yourself hunting and fishing may seem a viable alternative but the world operates on a complex food web with organisms feeding on each other and at the very bottom of that food web sits the Sun it doesn't matter if you're a polar bear or an Antarctic leopard seal the food you eat inevitably eats food that in turn needs something that grows thanks to the Sun polar bears for instance hunt seals who in turn hunt small fish who in turn feed on krill or plankton which depend on the Sun global food chains will collapse in evitable but with a severely diminished population you just might be able to eke out enough hunting and fishing to survive if not well there's always billions of freshly barbecued human bodies lying around a nuclear winter would decimate civilization and possibly drive humanity to the brink of extinction but this isn't a threat we haven't faced before as the Toba supervolcano showed us we as a species have what it takes to survive and thrive in the face of any disaster and with these catastrophes acting as genetic bottlenecks our children will be even more capable of surviving whatever the future throws at him my name is Sasha give chenko and I'd like to tell you the story of how I survived one of the worst man-made disasters the world has ever seen on April 25th 1986 I was working at the heart of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when the number-four nuclear reactor exploded the blast was huge in itself and one of my colleagues was pretty much vaporized instantly what happened after that has become one of the world's worst real-life horror stories but let me start from the beginning it was evening at the plant where I've worked which was located near the town of Pripyat in northern Ukraine the sky was a radiant blue it was warm and when my colleagues and I clocked in for our night shift at the plant we were in good spirits I remember the conversation was all about what we were gonna do for the May Day holidays and little did we know the near future would be very different from how we imagined it would be my wife Natasha was at home with my two year old I was 24 at the time with a new family and everything to look forward to that night we were told that we were gonna have to run a test on reactor number four this didn't go down well with a lot of guys because we weren't really sure how to do it we had no choice though a command is command we argued about the right power level we should start the test at and little did we know that there was a design flaw in the reactor this would prove to be what you might call a fatal design flaw what we were basically testing was a simulation of an electrical power outage you can probably guess that such a thing if it were to happen would be very dangerous but if there was an outage that generators would kick on the problem was this would take about a minute to gain full power and you just don't have a minute because the water that's pumped in the reactor to keep it cool would not get pumped and too much heat would be generated so the theory was that the electricity could be taken from the rotational energy of the steam turbine this would in theory power the cooling pumps for that minute so to do the test we had to simulate this power loss and see if this theory worked we tried this twice before but both times the tests failed third time lucky is not exactly how things turned out so we dropped the power levels that didn't go well and suddenly the reactor became dangerously unstable we also ignored and were told to ignore some of the vital safety mechanisms we knew something was wrong but we were told to go ahead and keep testing we removed something called control rods so that we could get back the power but that didn't turn out well either it was also against safety procedures those rods are like a fail-safe they prevent the reactor from generating too much power power then began to rise and then rise dramatically we weren't sure what was happening and the reactor steam was building up you could say what we had then was a pressure cooker of enormous proportions we knew then we had an emergency on her hands we pushed the scram button which was the emergency shutdown we then reinserted the control rods but they jam what we didn't know is that the graphite tips on those rods caused more power to surge at 123 and 45 seconds a.m. the pressure cooker then blew the 1000 ton roof was blown right off in a fireball blasted in the sky the air was filled with dust pieces of graphite were flung everywhere radiation spilled into the atmosphere it was hell on earth in the literal sense we were all shocked in the room the boom was so big we thought a war had happened the walls shuttered the whole place felt so unstable trust me I'm a huge man and I'm not afraid of much but at that point I felt tiny at the mercy of something terrible I then went looking for my buddy because he must have been closest to the explosion it was dark in the corridors dust was everywhere all I could hear was a hissing sound he'd been too near the pumps he was dead I saw the roof had been blown off and in the night sky I could see the stars and then I saw something that looked quite wonderful ethereal like God shining down on us it was a beam of light that beam was something more malign than I was aware of it was radiation and that radiation would kill a lot of people I then went with some colleagues to the reactor hall but the heavy door was jammed as I said I'm a big man some people say a bear of a man I managed to get the door open while my friends went inside the hall and tried to understand just how much damage had been caused those guys would all die in the coming days and weeks from radiation poisoning at the time we knew radiation levels were high because the device used to tell the level the dosimeter was showing a needle that was off the scale still at the time all we thought was there goes our job in the nuclear energy business we had no idea of just how catastrophic that explosion was after about an hour though I knew something was wrong and I mean wrong with me I started to throw up and then I got a sore throat outside firefighters were already on the scene they didn't know either about the dangerous levels of radiation and many of those brave guys would die slow horrible deaths in the town nearby people stood outside mesmerised by this great big beam of light some of those people would also die from radiation poisoning but as I said no one really knew about the danger they were in I had a good idea as time went on because at about 6 a.m. I couldn't even walk I felt deathly ill the Grim Reaper of radiation was inside me slowly trying to relieve me of my life my kid my loving wife I was taken to the hospital and there a few of us talked about what was happening to us just how much radiation had we been exposed to one guy seemed to know what he was talking about and he said if you throw up like that so quickly well it's a lot we might even die in fact I later learned that vomiting after radiation poisoning means death for most people I found out I'd been exposed to 4.1 sievert of radiation you don't know what that means of course but let me tell you that it was about 650 times above the level that workers at a nuclear plant should get exposed not in an hour but in a year it's 5,000 times more than the average person should be exposed to in a whole year I knew I was in trouble some of these guys I talked to at the hospital died horribly in a way you could say they melted from the inside then things got more surreal when the KGB came to the hospital and started to talk to me I was then told I had to go to Moscow and that's where they took me without even informing my wife 128 of us made that trip and I believe five people in this group died I mean died soon of course God knows who died as a result of being poisoned in the years to come I got to Moscow and one of the first things they did to me was shave my head this was no time to care about appearances and anyway in a week all my body hair just fell out most of us were having trouble breathing our eyes hurt our noses hurt everything seemed to hurt then we were given bone-marrow transplants I had many in fact what's really weird and chilling is the fact that me and a lot of guys suddenly felt a lot better what we didn't know was with radiation poisoning at such high levels there's kind of a rest period a hiatus in the chaos happening inside you think you're getting better but then the worst stuff starts to happen for me a low point was pulling back my bedsheets one day and seeing my ulcerous skin dead the worst parts of me where my shoulders my hip like half and that's because when I held that door those parts were exposed to really high levels of radiation had I gone inside well that would have been game over for me parts of my body just seemed to be eaten alive bits of me just turned black it was awful to see I was turning into a monster a kind of radioactive mutant but I was lucky I went through my operations and had lots of skin grafts I wasn't dead but when I was told I might lose my arm I was a bit upset they saved it but it stayed covered in bandages for the next seven years of my life even these days I might occasionally see ulcerations on the parts of my skin that were most exposed to the radiation one of the things that saved me was the fact that they sent me to Berlin to have micro surgery where blood vessels were transferred from my leg to my arm like I said I was lucky I'm a fortunate man one of those guys that worked close to me had similar surgeries he went blind and then within a month of his exposure he died what had happened to him and to the rest of us his bone marrow cells had been destroyed from the radiation and this caused a drop in white blood cells when that happens you can't fight off infection and that's when you slowly start to be eaten alive from within I spent in total one year inside hospitals and then four years after I had to regularly go back for rehab they told me I shouldn't have another child because the chances of that child developing leukemia were very high now and again I get more of it and think when will the worst happen but so far my good old body has been excellent at preparing itself my wife has stood by me and it wasn't easy at times people knew about what had happened to me and thought I was a walking time bomb they'd cross the street when they saw me because they thought I'd passed the poison on to them I was one of the monsters of Chernobyl to them walking around with her radiation hazard sign on my back but I'm here and I'm happy I think I can now safely say that I survived Chernobyl my name is Sasha Glencoe and that's my story nuclear reactors are not pieces of equipment you come across everyday they're designed to produce thermal energy that can be used for its own sake or converted into mechanical energy and most of the time into electrical energy they work by maintaining a chain reaction producing a steady flow of neutrons generated by the fission of heavy nuclei the most common of which is uranium-235 that produces the thermal heat there are many different types of nuclear power reactors but you certainly can shop for one online however there was one kid who was determined to get his hands on a reactor for himself welcome to this episode of the infographic show the boy scout who tried to build a nuclear reactor imagine opening your bedroom curtains one day and looking out of your window to see a strange green glow resonating from your neighbor's shed and then noticing government trucks being loaded with barrels marked radioactive by men dressed in hazmat suits outside your home you might think you had been transported onto the set of the latest Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster but in 1995 for the resident of golf Manor Michigan this was no made-for-tv drama a young teenage boy had built a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed a crazy idea he thought up while working on his atomic energy merit badge in an attempt to earn Eagle Scout status the boy's name was David Charles Horne who not surprisingly is sometimes called the radioactive Boy Scout or the nuclear Boy Scout so how did teenager David Hahn go from being an everyday goofy school boy to nuclear reactor developer ken Silverstein is an American journalist who used to be the Washington editor and blogger at Harper's Magazine he met David in the late 90s to try and figure out exactly what happened by hearing the story from the proverbial horse's mouth he described David as oddly dispassionate though polite until they began to discuss his nuclear adventures then for five hours David became enthused as he talked about working in his backyard laboratory he explained to silverstein that he used coffee filters and pickle jars to handle deadly substances such as radium and nitric acid whilst working on developing his reactor David was a shy teenager and so had only confided in a few friends about his crazy and ambitious project but never allowed anyone to witness his experiments he said to silverstein I was very emotional as a kid and those experiments gave me a way to get away from that they gave me some respect as David became more and more preoccupied with science he had less and less time for friends though during his high school years he did have a girlfriend Heather about debt Heather was three years younger than David and she says he was sweet and caring but not always the perfect date Heather's mom described David this way he was a nice kid and always presentable but we had to tell him not to talk to anybody he could eat and drink but for God's sakes don't talk to the guests about the food's chemical composition but how did David advanced from being this somewhat geeky experimenting student to a boy with a reactor David was a boy scout and Eagle Scouts must earn 21 merit badges 11 are mandatory such as first aid and citizenship in the community the final ten are optional and scouts can choose from dozens of choices ranging from American business to wood work of course David chose to specialize and earn a merit badge in atomic energy he was awarded his atomic energy merit badge on May 10th 1991 five months shy of his 15th birthday to earn the badge David visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about the medical uses of radioisotopes he made a drawing showing how nuclear fission occurs but most importantly David built a model reactor using simple household apparatus including a juice can coat hangers soda straws matches and rubber bands the scouts were impressed but David had far greater ambitions he got to work with writing as many as 20 letters a day pretending to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School this budding young entrepreneur approached groups in his merit badge pamphlet such as the do e the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or NRC the American nuclear society the Edison Electric Institute and the atomic industrial forum the nuclear power industries trade group he obtained all sorts of information the NRC was by far the most helpful and David managed to engage the agency's director of aissatou production and distribution Donald erb erb provided tips on isolating certain radioactive elements he gave a list of isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction and imparted a piece of information that would soon prove to be vital to David's plans nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium the NRC had now given David all the information he required to build a reactor and he just needed to source the raw materials he typed up a shopping list of items that contained very small amounts of the 14 radioactive isotopes required for the first step americium-241 he discovered could be found in smoke detectors radium-226 in antique luminous style clocks uranium-238 and minut quantities of uranium-235 in a black or called pitch blende and thorium-232 in Coleman style gas lanterns David created a neutron gun and was ready to irradiate he thought that uranium-235 which is used in atomic weapons would provide the biggest reaction but getting your hands on uranium is no simple task he hunted hundreds of miles of Upper Michigan looking for hot rocks with his Geiger counter but all he could find was a quarter trunk load of pitchblende a radioactive uranium rich mineral on the shores of Lake Huron he also posed as a professor again buying materials for a nuclear research laboratory he obtained a few samples but not enough he eventually decided to switch from uranium and instead hunt down some thorium-232 which when bombarded with neutrons produces uranium-233 david knew from his merit badge Boy Scout pamphlet that the mantle used in commercial gas lanterns is coated with a compound containing thorium-232 he bought thousands of Lantern Mantle's from surplus stores and using a blowtorch reduced them into a pile of ash so he could extract the thorium-232 next David needed radium he knew radium was used in the paint on the faces of clocks automobiles and airplane instrument panels until the late 1960s so he began visiting junkyards and antique stores in search of radium coated dashboard panels or clocks once he had enough david secured a sample of barium sulfate from the x-ray ward at a local hospital and used it to concentrate the radio now 17 he made significant progress and David plan to build a model breeder reactor but he needed at least 30 pounds of enriched uranium to sustain a chain reaction he was determined to get as far as he could by trying to get his various radio isotopes to interact with one another David said no matter what happened there would be something changing into something some kind of action going on there he monitored his mini reactor at the golf Manor laboratory with his Geiger counter the level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly I know I transformed some radioactive materials even though there was no critical pile I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minut extent he said it was 2:40 a.m. on August 31st 1994 when the Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential neighborhood apparently stealing tires from a car when they caught up with David they discovered over 50 foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder in the trunk of his car small discs and cylindrical metal objects Lantern Mantle's mercury switches a clock face ores fireworks vacuum tubes and assorted chemicals and acids the police must have been baffled they called in the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad to examine David's car and the State Department of Public Health or DPH to supply radiological assistance state radiological experts found aluminum pie pans jars of acids Pyrex cups milk crates and other materials strewn about in David's makeshift shed laboratory much of it contaminated with excessive levels of radioactive material especially americium-241 and thorium-232 how high you're wondering a vegetable can for example registered at 50,000 counts per minute which is about 1,000 times higher than normal levels of background radiation after determining that no radioactive materials have leaked outside the shed state authorities sealed it and petitioned at the federal government for help unfortunately David went into a serious depression after his laboratory was shut down years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried deep underground students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him radioactive boy and when his girlfriend Heather sent David Valentines balloons at his high school they were seized by the principal who apparently feared they had been inflated with chemical gases David needed to continue his experiments david had hoped to pursue a career as a nuclear specialist but he ended up enlisting in the Navy EPA scientists believe his life expectancy may have been greatly shortened by his exposure to radioactivity particularly since he spent large amounts of time in the small and closed shed with large amounts of radioactive material David died on Tuesday September 27 2016 at the age of 39 his father confirmed that the cause of death was not from radiation exposure but alcohol poisoning we are exposed to radiation on a daily basis most commonly via energy from the Sun but heavy doses can be hazardous or even fatal particularly radiation given off from the disintegration of nuclear and atomic waste today we're going to be exploring places on our planet in the radioactive red zone we're looking for the worst of the worst places to avoid in this episode of the infographic show most radioactive places on earth at number 10 is the Mediterranean Sea that surrounds the Italian peninsula and it's Islands its waves break the coasts of 22 countries in Africa Europe the Middle East and Asia this idyllic area has been used as a disposal site for radioactive and other toxic wastes for nearly 30 years the Italian mafia has also been accused of dumping hazardous waste into the Mediterranean and 40 ships carrying loads of radioactive materials have gone missing since 1994 so it's worth taking a full bodysuit if you're planning on going snickering in this area and the Italian mafia doesn't just dump waste in their own backyard and number nine we have the Somali coast during the 1980s numerous Swiss and Italian companies secretly dumped hazardous waste along the coast an Italian crime syndicate sank at least 30 ships loaded with waste off the shores of Somalia the United Nations Environment Programme believes that the rusting barrels of waste washed up on the Somalian coastline during the 2004 tsunami were dumped as far back as the 1990s birth defects and cancer are still common in the area to this day number eight is the Hanford Site in Washington USA this place was an integral part of America's atomic bomb project and manufactured the plutonium used to produce the first nuclear bomb used at Nagasaki during the cold war production ramped up and Hanford supplied the plutonium for most of America's 60,000 nuclear weapons it has since been decommissioned but the area is still home to a huge amount of nuclear waste and will continue to be a risk area for many years to come at number seven is my act in russia's northeast the industrial complex of MIAC has had a nuclear plant for decades and in 1957 was the site of one of the world's worst nuclear accidents at the Karachi miok a poorly maintained storage tank exploded releasing 50 to 100 tons of high-level radioactive waste experts believe that Karachi may be the most radioactive place in the world and over 400,000 people have been exposed to radiation from the plant lake karachi is so tainted by the nearby nuclear facilities that in 1990 just standing on the shore for an hour would give you more than enough radiation to kill you on the plus-side lakefront property there is likely very inexpensive at number 6 is Sellafield located on the west coast of england Sellafield is where in the early 1950s a facility produced the plutonium 239 required for the UK's first nuclear bomb in 1957 the plant was the site of the worst nuclear accident Great Britain has ever seen the Windscale fire blazed for three days releasing radioactive gases it has been linked to 240 cases of cancer the plant releases some eight million litres of contaminated waste into the sea on a daily basis making the Irish Sea the most radioactive sea in the world and it is home to one of the largest inventories of untreated waste including 140 tons of civil plutonium the largest stockpile in the world and enough to make hundreds of nuclear weapons number 5 is another site in Russia this time Siberia where a chemical facility is packed with nuclear waste sitting in uncovered pools are thousands of liters of liquid waste and 125,000 tons of solid waste in 2000 The Guardian newspaper reported that a joint team of Russian and American radiation monitors assessed rivers in the area of a top-secret Russian nuclear weapons complex in Siberia reaching the conclusion that contamination had reached staggering levels the worst ever monitored and was out of rational control at number four is Milo sue Kyrgyzstan from 1946 to 1968 the zapatti mining and chemical combine at Milo sue produced and processed more than ten thousand tons of uranium ore mostly to supply the USSR s nuclear weapons program with fissile material by 2006 it was considered one of the top ten most polluted sites on earth as was mentioned in that year's blacksmith Institute report today thirty-six waste dumps are scattered throughout the area with just under two million cubic meters of unsecured radioactive mining waste and number three we have the polygon in Kazakhstan this place was the Soviet Union's primary location for testing its nuclear weapons during the Cold War and holds the record for the largest concentration of nuclear explosions in the world and unnerving 700,000 people live in the area and though the impact of the radiation exposure was kept under wraps by the Soviets until the facility closed in 1991 scientists today estimate that over 200,000 people have health conditions resulting from the radiation at number two is one of the world's worst and most well remembered nuclear accidents Chernobyl the Chernobyl accident in 1986 was the result of a flawed reactor design the accident released 100 times more radiation than the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs it caused over 6 million people to be exposed to radiation and estimates as to the number of deaths that will eventually occur due to the Chernobyl accident range from 4,000 to as high as 93 thousand even today the word Chernobyl conjures up horrifying images of human suffering and finally at number one is Fukushima Japan fresh in our minds in March 2011 a massive earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 triggered a tsunami along the east coast of Japan the tsunami wave flooded the Fukushima nuclear plant causing three nuclear meltdowns hydrogen air explosions and the release of radioactive material this led to uncontrollable fires and their releases of radioactive steam and hundreds of thousands of liters of contaminated water The effect of the Fukushima earthquake in Japan is said to be the longest lasting new we're danger in the world the Fukushima disaster was the most significant nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster and the second disaster to be given the level seven event classification of the international nuclear Event Scale on the 8th of November in 2017 American Secret Service agents and their Chinese counterparts were involved in a brief altercation over the American nuclear football while entering China's Great Hall of the People a Chinese agent blocked president Trump's aid tasked with carrying the football only for chief of staff and retired US Marine Corps general John Kelly to announce we're moving in and brush past the Chinese guards a guard grabbed Kelly who quickly shoved the guard off and immediately a US Secret Service agent tackled and subdued the Chinese guard though the scuffle was over in a flash it highlighted the importance of this little black briefcase that must always accompany the president no matter where he goes but just what is inside of that top-secret briefcase hello and welcome to another episode of the infographics show today we're asking what is the nuclear football the head of the Chinese security detail would go on to apologize for the misunderstanding as apparently the guards had not realized that the aid carrying the nuclear football must always be within easy reach of the US president while some might think the American response was an overreaction it only takes a moment to see it from the Secret Service's point of view to see why they felt the need to respond immediately and with overwhelming force the US President had just been removed from the nuclear football while in a foreign nation and the nation to boot who is a potential nuclear adversary were something to happen to the US president while he was away from the football and China watched a pre-emptive first strike against the u.s. there would be no way for America to respond in time with its own weapons a far-fetched scenario to some but US Secret Service agents must constantly entertain the most extreme possibilities as potential realities every single day for that is the only way to avert a potential and surprise catastrophe thus it's a standard operating procedure that the nuclear football never be removed from the immediate physical vicinity of the US president so just what does the nuclear football do exactly and what's inside of it this nuclear command and control tool is officially known as the president's emergency satchel and is aluminum briefcase encased in black leather details are difficult to ascertain given the extreme secrecy of the device but it is widely believed to be bulletproof and resistant to explosive damage it weighs approximately 45 pounds and is equipped with powerful satellite communication gear to ensure the president is always in contact with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as nuclear arsenals grew in the Soviet Union and the u.s. it became clear that the nation to launch first would have an immediate and possibly war-winning advantage such a first strike might even render the defending nation unable to launch its own nuclear counter-attack making the possibility of a nuclear first-strike extremely attractive to the aggressor with ICBMs moving at thousands of miles an hour it became vital that the President of the United States be able to order an immediate nuclear counter-attack in the case of a sudden war yet after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 the president John F Kennedy post several questions to his staff doubting the effectiveness of the current nuclear command system his most pointed question however was how would the person who received my instructions verify them this one question led to a complete rethink annuitant was to order a nuclear attack or retaliation and highlighted a major flaw in the system set in place for the president to do so while out of the White House thus the modern iteration of the nuclear football was born a mobile device the nuclear football contains satellite communications gear that lets the president be in contact with the Joint Chiefs of Staff no matter where in the world he is it also contains four individual items the black book as it is known contains all retaliatory options available to the president this can include a full-scale nuclear response against one or all of America's enemies or a limited response which might be just a single cruise missile strike with a low-yield warhead it's rumored that attack plans also include an option to launch a no harm nuclear strike high above a nation in the atmosphere delivering an electromagnetic pulse that wipes out most of a nation's electrical infrastructure if you're a fan of conspiracy theories it might also include a plan to nuke the reptilian aliens hiding out in the Dark Side of the Moon a second book contains a listing of classified presidential nuclear shelter locations or places that the president could be taken to in case of a major nuclear emergency these are typically hardened locations deep underground could survive direct nuclear strikes a manila folder with eight or ten pages that give a description of the procedures to initiate and use the emergency alert system both for early warning and for post strike communications with the nation lastly a three by five inch card with printed authentication codes these codes ensure to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the person ordering a nuclear attack is indeed the US president and while they typically stay within the football some US presidents such as President Reagan actually preferred to physically carry his cards in his pocket during the assassination attempt against Reagan when he was rushed to the hospital not only was he physically separated from the football but as his clothes were cut off in surgery the nuclear codes were haphazardly discarded by medical staff and later found stuck in his shoe well just how does the football actually work and what process would the president have to undergo to launch a nuclear strike or retaliate against one firstly only the current President of the United States is authorized to launch any form of nuclear attack whether that's as retaliation or an escalation during the middle of a full-blown war should the president be incapacitated or killed that responsibility falls to the vice president and so on down an established chain of command second the president is patched into a conference call with his top civilian and military advisors whom all recommend a course to follow if enemy launches are detected this call can last a shortest thirty Seconds communications between the president his advisors and top military leadership are all relayed via the USS Milstar satellite network a highly Jam resistant constellation of satellites that keeps US forces linked together around the world as a redundancy or in the aftermath of a nuclear attack u.s. military forces could still use the Takimoto airborne communication system to stay in contact basically a fleet of airplanes packed with communications gear that is also extremely resilient to jamming the TAC omocha munication system was designed to keep a nation ravaged by nuclear war in contact with its military forces around the world once an attack plan has been decided on by the president the senior officer in the Pentagon war room must authenticate the president's identity by issuing a challenge code using the military alphabet such as Charlie November the president then references his authentication codes card known as the biscuit and reads the appropriate response and emergency war order is then broadcast to all the u.s. nuclear alert forces via several communications networks to ensure receipt the order is typically about 150 characters or the length of a Twitter message and contains the specific war plan to execute launch time and authentication codes needed to unlock the missiles before firing seconds later cruise around the world based in missile silos alert hangers and submarines deep underwater all open locked safe which contains sealed authentication systems or SAS codes which are prepped by the National Security Agency they compare their SAS codes with those contained within the launch order to verify the authenticity of the launch order any discrepancies whatsoever will result in a no go or no launch release of nuclear weapons we launched from a submarine the captain executive officer and two other senior officers authenticate the order about 15 minutes later the missiles are ready for launch land launched ICBMs are housed in underground silos with five launch crews each controlling up to 50 missiles each launch crew is made up of two officers and the individual teams are housed miles apart from each other in highly secure underground complexes to ensure their security each team receives their orders and compares their SAS codes with those sent by the wardroom once authenticated the crews enter the war plan number into the launch computers which retarget s-- the missiles from their peacetime targets in the middle of the ocean to their wartime targets on land at the designated launch time the crews all turn their launch keys simultaneously which sends five votes for launch to the missiles because the missiles need just two votes for launch failure to authenticate or mutiny by three other crews will not stop the launch of all 50 missiles missiles launched from airborne platforms follow a similar method with their individual SAS codes being verified against those sent by the war room during the Cold War the US and Russia both kept nuclear alert forces in the air at all times 24/7 365 days a year and these crews would then immediately proceed on a vector to their assigned targets once SAS codes are authorized missiles are immediately fired anywhere from five to 15 minutes after a presidential order is given intercontinental ballistic missiles will be blasting off into the sky to rain death down on their assigned targets and once released there is no way to recall them disarm them or reprogram their carries the responsibility of carrying the nuclear football is staggering as is the responsibility of the man entrusted by the u.s. to use it properly while many have criticized the entire system and once senior American general was even discharged for asking how do I know the president given me the order to fire my weapons is same it remains the best system for ensuring continued nuclear deterrence Fukushima the name alone is enough to conjure fear in the hearts of anyone living along the west coast of North America or on the eastern seaboard of Asia too many Fukushima is our generations Chernobyl and a reminder of the deadly consequences of tapping into the almighty atom to fuel our modern lifestyles following the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant some surveys have shown that public opinion on nuclear power is dropping in Europe and many countries are now planning to decrease their reliance on nuclear power in the u.s. the public remains almost evenly split after taking a tumble from almost 60 percent in favour for nuclear power pre Fukushima and yet while the overall health effects of Fukushima were far less than expected and certainly far short of every alarmists worst predictions the world at large remains extremely fearful of the nuclear monster starting construction shortly before the Fukushima disaster though Russia's floating nuclear power plants will be fired up this fall predictably it has come under intense international opposition from groups such as Greenpeace who fear another nuclear disaster polluting the ocean with radioactive waste but are these fears well-founded and is Russia flirting with a disaster that could leave its northern coasts barren of life for decades or more displayed boldly on its side the academic and Lomonosov sports a diagram of an atom the International symbol for nuclear power with the hall that's 474 feet long and the displacement of 21,000 500 tons the academic is the world's only floating nuclear power plant nuclear power has been used at sea before notably the Soviet Union created battle cruisers and icebreakers fueled by nuclear power and the US Navy has for decades relied on nuclear power to operate its mighty aircraft carriers both the Russian and American Navy as well as a few other navies all operate nuclear-powered submarines yet the academic differs in that its sole purpose is to serve as a floating our plans rather than power the ship it's installed on the ultimate destination for the academic is the northern port of havoc deep in the Arctic Circle their power cables will be run to the vessel and the nuclear reactor will power the port and town built around it though a land-based nuclear power plant already exists there the academic will replace that facility and allow the decommission of its aging reactors those are not the only plans for the academic though as the Russians see the floating nuclear power station being sent to other port cities and industrial plants to provide much needed electricity eventually Russia plans on building a small fleet of these floating nuclear power plants and use them to power remote facilities and even offshore gas and oil platforms with a power output of 70 megawatts just one of these ships can provide enough electricity for 100,000 people yet even within Russia there's been stiff opposition to the academic and both foreign and even Russian cities lodged complaints over the initial route that the academic was going to take forcing a new route and delay in its delivery greenpeace meanwhile has collected over 11,000 signatures in russia alone all calling for the plant to be scrapped altogether similar opposition in the u.s. scrapped plans to build a floating nuclear power plant off of new jersey shore back in the 1960s but the russian government has not shown any signs of shutting down the academic so could the academic Lomonosov be a floating Chernobyl first the academic uses a new generation of nuclear reactors which enjoys the benefits of vastly updated safety systems the KLT 40 reactor on board the academic differs greatly from the reactors used in either the Fukushima Daiichi power plant or the Chernobyl nuclear power plant which was itself a disaster caused by completely avoidable human error in fact the reactor used aboard the academic is similar to those used aboard Russia's nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines and as has been shown in the past these reactors are able to be sunk to the bottom of the sea and raised then put back into operation safely in fact for a nuclear reactor to pose a serious environmental hazard a slew of very specific catastrophes must take place in order to breach the containment vessel and the greatest fear facing the academic that of a tsunami sinking the ship it's Houston simply could not lead to such a breach the klt 40 reactors aboard the academic have the same features of most other nuclear reactors such as control rods which can be lowered in an emergency in order to absorb neutrons and the stop the nuclear chain reaction at the heart of the reactor as a pressurized water reactor though the KLT 40 also features three additional different methods of achieving a termination of nuclear fission by flooding the reactor with cooling water impregnated with boron from three different sources compare that with the boiling water reactors at Fukushima which were designed in the 1960s and featured only a single source and method to cool the control rods that stopped nuclear fission but it's a tsunami in the Arctic even possible well given its remoteness it's no surprise that there's very little data available on Arctic tsunamis and their frequency what is known is that the Arctic is considered one of the most stable undersea geologic regions in the world with very infrequent earthquakes which peak at about a magnitude of 7.5 the greatest threat of tsunamis come from undersea landslides with scientists discovering evidence of a particularly powerful tsunami occurring eighty two hundred years ago with waves estimated at 20 metres other tsunamis have occurred in Arctic regions such as the 2017 Greenland tsunami which killed four people yet this was a tsunami generated by a huge landslide across a fewer from the village it struck and it was not generated by undersea activities such as happen in Fukushima with no mountains across the water from the academics planned location there's no risk of a similar event striking the ship even if it did those tsunamis are very rarely ever dangerous to ships and in the famous 2004 December tsunami that struck East Asia thousands of boaters and even recreational divers a mile or two from the shore barely even noticed the passing tsunami that's because the energy of the tsunami wave passed by in a column a few feet wide under the surface and was channeled into a mighty wave by the increasingly shallow coastline as it neared land if the academic was caught in a tsunami it would likely barely even notice the passing wave beneath it all in the end nuclear power has been used at sea in far riskier applications for decades now powering military warships all around the world several disasters at sea in the loss of nuclear craft have all proven the safety of nuclear power and these were exclusively ships that were operating in extreme circumstances the academic will be required to perform no such hardships and will instead sedately sit anchored offshore for years at a time fears of the academic harboring a nuclear disaster are greatly misplaced and in fact the use of nuclear power will help ensure that global warming coal oil or gas plants are not needed to power remote ports along Russia's northern coast new developments in spent nuclear fuel recycling also promised to eliminate nearly all of the most long-lived radioactive elements requiring safe storage of spent fuel for decades rather than centuries or more as is currently the case as the world faces the now uncertain effects of global warming nuclear power promises to help fill the gaps between renewable sources and accidents such as Fukushima should serve as a call to action to upgrade any remaining in obsolete reactors not to ban nuclear power altogether volcanoes are nature's nuclear bombs the biggest was 10,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb blast a terrifying reminder of what can happen when earth blows its top and then there are super volcanoes that can cause eruptions of more than 600 cubic miles of magma these are rare with the last eruption happening at Toba in Sumatra Indonesia 74,000 years ago Yellowstone National Park is actually situated over a supervolcano it has had three massive eruptions the first of which occurred some 2.1 million years ago so what if we combine this force of nature with a man-made destructive force that's what we'll find out in this episode of the infographic show what would happen if we detonated a nuke in Yellowstone Volcano in 2015 a Russian geopolitical analyst Konstantin sick of who at the time was the president of the Academy of geopolitical problems based in Moscow was quoted in the Russian press VPK News as saying the best way to attack the United States is to detonate a nuclear weapon and trigger a supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park or along the San Andreas Fault Line on California's coast it sounds like a Hollywood movie style tactic but would it actually work Yellowstone National Park sits right on top of a massive volcano it's categorized as a supervolcano but why well for one the Yellowstone Caldera is a crater measuring a huge 45 miles across if a nuclear bomb was detonated above the mouth of the volcano then it might cause a little damage to the edges of the crater but it's unlikely it would ignite an eruption because the blast radius of the bomb is too small to reach the pressurized chamber of magma but the bomb would produce a fireball and incinerate everything in its near vicinity and with all the rubble produced it's possible that landslides would follow onlookers would also witness the signature mushroom cloud and there would be a high-pressure air blast that would knock down trees and concrete buildings if the nuclear bomb was one Megaton in size the blast radius would be fifty seven hundred feet across and the shock wave three miles beyond that at 50 seconds after the explosion when the fireball is no longer visible the blast wave would have traveled about 12 miles at around 784 miles per hour and anyone who survived the blast would suffer a lethal dose of thermal radiation resulting in third-degree burns to the skin okay so that's some destructive stuff but what if the bomb was actually fired directly into the chamber Yellowstone has two magma chambers the shallower one stretches from three miles to about ten miles beneath the surface and is about 55 miles long and 25 miles wide the chamber is mostly solid with only about 5 to 15 percent melt the deeper chamber extends from 12 miles to 30 miles beneath the surface even though the deeper chamber is about four and a half times larger than the shallow chamber it contains only about 2% melt if a nuclear bomb was somehow transported and detonated in one of these chambers it could create enough heat to vaporize the magma at Rock within the chamber leading to an eruption the magma is in a semi solid semi liquid state but the initial flash from the bomb would boil this quickly dr. Robin Andrews a volcanologist from the University of Otago New Zealand explains it would heat up so quickly that it would turn into a vapor so what you get is an enormous vapor cavity like when you shake up a bottle of coke but it's just one massive bubble instead of loads of little bubbles it's hard to imagine a sensible volcanologist coming up with the idea of dropping a bomb into a volcano however in 1992 Mount Etna erupted and it's lava posed a serious threat to the nearby buildings one of which was the astronomical observatory so scientists developed a plan for diverting the flow they first used concrete blocks to stop the flow by diverting it around the town but because the basins to store the lava were filled too quickly they then used explosives to make a new route for the lava the lava eventually ended up four and a half miles away from the small town of Zafaraniyah located on the slopes of the Sicilian giant which was safe we did a bit more digging and surprisingly found an example of a volcano that had been bombed Hawaii has several shield volcanoes capable of causing serious damage to the islands inhabitants the most dangerous is mount Aloha the world's largest terrestrial volcano which has also been quite active in the 20th century at one point it's lava threaten to cause destruction in the town of Hilo leaving the population without water as well as wiping out the surrounding tropical forests that grow on the volcano's slopes the United States attempted to divert lava flows with explosions by dropping bombs in 1935 and 1942 but neither of these attempts were successful then in the 1970s the US Air Force worked with scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory to run some test bombings bombs were dropped on an old inactive lava field but the experts concluded that though bombing can destroy the top of the lava tube it has no real effect against the deep magmatic channels okay so it seems that it might be possible to trigger an eruption but only if a nuclear bomb was somehow magically detonated inside the magma chamber which is deep underground if yellowstone dinner up it's not only the lava flow that would be a problem the ash that spills out for hundreds of miles around is also very dangerous it would destroy crops and lead to health problems by reducing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere it would even disrupt air traffic and we already mentioned the blast wave well in the case of a Yellowstone supervolcano it would kill and injure people at a distance of up to 100 miles from the epicenter

Channel: The Infographics Show

Views: 3,048,787

Rating: 4.7444329 out of 5

Keywords: nuclear winter, nuclear, nuclear fallout, fallout, what to do, radiation, radioactive, education, science, the infographics show, infographics show, nuclear blast, carl sagan, nuclear power plant, nuclear reactor, nuclear fusion, winter, atomic bomb, nuclear explosion, nuclear bomb, us military, cold war

Id: o4YO_3-MIvA

Length: 54min 53sec (3293 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 21 2019