HBOs Chernobyl: BUSTED!

ah so HBO have made a series on Chernobyl I wonder what it's like for scientific accuracy when the lava enters these tanks it will instantly superheat and vaporize approximately 7,000 cubic meters of water causing a significant thermal explosion who have me worried there for a second there I thought about to imply that there was going to be a nuclear explosion we used to meet between two and four megatons oh that's not just a thermal explosion that would just be the expansion of gas that's a thermonuclear explosion yes you only get those out of hydrogen bombs five megatons that's a third of the size are the biggest thermonuclear device ever detonated by America everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed hopefully caught why did they build a nuclear power plant that could blow up like a nuclear bomb including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl the entirety of the radioactive material in all of the cores will be ejected at force and dispersed by a massive shockwave oh my god this is truly apocalyptic how bad is this going to be approximately 200 kilometers and likely be fatal to the entire population of Kiev as well as a portion of Minsk it destroys city 200 kilometers away is that all the release of radiation would be severe and will impact all of Soviet Ukraine Latvia Lithuania Belarus you know so bone tell her to stop as well as Poland Czechoslovakia Hungary Romania and most of his Germany what do you mean impacts yes what does impact me be truly it's not gonna render it uninhabitable for a nice round number of years for Lucia and the Ukraine impact means completely uninhabitable for a minimum of 100 years you've got anything else for us for much of the area a nearly permanent disruption of the food and water supply steep increase in the rates of cancer and birth defects what you're looking at here is a scene from HBO's Chernobyl and it's probably as inaccurate a thing as has ever been said in something claiming to be a docudrama based on real events it's off by a factor of about a million which puts it in the league of making a documentary about the space race in 1969 and topping it off with Neil Armstrong landing on Mars that's off by a factor of about a million indeed HBO's Chernobyl has very creepy similarities to this clip from e years ago even the heat managed to crack the cement slab only 1,400 kilograms of uranium and graphite mixture to hit the water to set off a new explosion the ensuing chain reaction could set off an explosion comparable to a gigantic atomic bomb now our experts studied the possibility and concluded that the explosion would have had a force of three to five Megaton we estimate between two and four megatons which is 320 kilometers from Chernobyl and Europe rendered uninhabitable it looks like even HBO had to turn out the scaremongering from this video look this isn't just impossible turning air in the cold amiracle it's utterly utterly impossible this thing is just pure fiction in fact the degree to which it's pure fiction can be highlighted by bite see what a five Megaton nuclear explosion would actually look like and how much damage it would do to Minsk it's gonna raise it really which is 320 kilometers from Chernobyl cool so that's the Chernobyl nuclear plant there these are the actual reactor buildings and so what we're going to do is we're going to detonate a 20-kiloton nuke on nuke man boom and we're going to move that right over the Chernobyl plant to see just how much damage that we could actually do so the the white circle here is the fireball which are actually not that big it's only uh a few hundred meters and then you've got the high air blasts which is 20 psi ours over an atmosphere which will destroy most heavy buildings although it's only going to be said that's knocking them over if you come to things like reactors your Mangalam but you won't vaporize anything by the only thing that's really gonna be vaporized in all of this is the actual nuclear weapon here most of what you're looking at here in terms of damage is air blast some by the time you get out here yelling to lethal doses of radiation and this is the thermal radiation which basically if you bit hard burns if you're if you're in the open and this is the air blast where it's gonna be breaking windows that sort of thing so rather tell me this far away it's it's not that big of a deal so as you can see 20 kilotons that's the size that sort of flattened hiroshima in there it's a big bomb but it's not smooth ginormous by any means of the imagination that by the time even in Chernobyl the actual town if it's you wouldn't notice that match but um II Atlanta Kiev you certainly wouldn't notice that much and by the time you're over in Minsk all the way over here that's your definition so let's Jack this up to a thermonuclear device a large dome a nuclear device five megatons now you'll notice these circles have changed somewhat in size and shape so the fireball is now significant it's two and a half kilometers for the fireball the the high air blast ease their significant bigger and this is where you destroy most residential buildings light buildings I mean it used knocking them over and this is now with the big nukes they they get very high in the sky but the atmosphere is only so thin so the air blast doesn't tend to go out as far with bigger nukes so now you'll see that the air blast and the thermal radiation are actually at about the same distance so this is the air blast where you're merely breaking windows but that's also about the distance where you're getting third-degree burns if you're in the open there's a sort of scorched area that now that point you know Kiev will probably know something is he's a little funny but means he says this is gonna destroy Minsk I mean damn if I drop that on Minsk maybe but not of this sort of distance and the Ilia this is gonna contaminate the whole of Europe he's just crazy so let's Jack this up to the largest nuke that we in detonate with this thing which is a hundred megatons so now we are getting into fairly large fireballs there yeah you you into the kilometers and you're flattening you know heavy buildings at a significant distance residential buildings you now to the point where you'd be destroying Chernobyl and you'll notice that the air blast and the radiation are now very comparable so this is what I was saying the atmosphere is only 100 kilometers thick or something and these go up a long way and they put off a lot of light so they're gonna scorch things out in the open but Minsk yeah probably gonna tell you something's funny you know rolls of distant thunder or something but this is the point where you're merely breaking windows and so by the time you get out to hear a distant rumble of thunder probably maybe not even there which is 320 kilometers from Chernobyl have been raised and Europe rendered uninhabitable it's it's not that just mint wouldn't be raised it most people in Minsk wouldn't even have the slightest clue that a hundred Megaton you had gone off 300 kilometers away a which point you might be thinking why would swap be making such gargantuan ly over-the-top predictions about how big a disaster Chernobyl could have been thank God it didn't happen there were trains with over a thousand cars in Minsk Cornell and Kiev ready to evacuate the population well we'll come back to that at the end of this video after we've covered Han house we say the sum of facts you see it's probably people's greatest fear of nuclear reactors is they're gonna blow up like nuclear bombs after all they've probably got nuclear in their name they both get their energy from nuclear reactions but all of this is predicated on the basis that you cannot just get a nuclear explosion out of a reactor but a thermonuclear explosion to which the answer ease and no but this myth has been going on for ever I remember watching this video as a kid in the 80s dancing with tears in our eyes and the theme of the video was reactor goes critical boom everyone's gonna die in a big explosion which so far so recent doesn't knock over the flowers but hey you know it was the 80s it didn't have to make sense and everyone just dies in the radiation and our hero gets him to spend his last night where they killed all that sort of thing and I sat there thinking that's a really strong argument why are we building these nuclear reactors if they can just explode and kill everyone well it turns out that they can't it's impossible it just cannot happen it's like the looking at the energy dense deep in your gasoline and finding out that it's got a higher energy density than TNT and worrying that your car is going to explode with the force of an entire gas tank full of TNT it just cannot happen so let's start with how nuclear bombs and reactors get all that energy in the first place certain big nuclei are unstable and if they get hit by a neutron the break up and give off a lot of energy these particles are coming off at about the speed of light both the atomic fragments that are left after the nucleus splits and the neutrons that come off too as well as some high-energy photons like x-rays and gamma rays and if you use those neutrons to hit other large unstable nuclei you get even more energy given off now nuclear bombs are typically all about getting as much of that energy off in as short a period of time as possible meanwhile nuclear power stations are all about getting a large amount of energy off but at a constant simmering type rate where you can use that heat to boil water and drive turbines now one of the nuclei that has this rather special type property is uranium-235 now the thing is that uranium actually comes with different isotopes they're the same chemistry they just have different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus and are the main nuclear available 235 will do this but 238 won't now separating nuclei like this he's a very expensive business you may remember some time ago I had this highly enriched potassium 41 now separating that potassium 41 from regular potassium was very expensive it cost about 70 million dollars per kilogram well and it's gonna be so fairly comparable to the price of separating out your uranium-235 which means just for the 10 also kilos you would need for the nuclear bomber you wanted to drop on Japan it would cost in the region of 700 million dollars now sure you might want to scratch a zero or so off that the economies of scale and the such like but this is the league that you're in or if you want another bead on this most power reactors don't run on highly enriched uranium because it's all your leslie expensive and makes your reactor design more difficult however certain research reactors use the stuff because it it's good for generating high fluxes of neutrons so a core is several kilograms of uranium and they'll burn two or three of them a year so let's say about 10 kilograms per year and that requires a budget of about 6 million euros for the fuel cycle right so the bottom line is you don't use highly enriched uranium in a power reactor and further it's not usually asked the metal because the metals harder to work and all source is usually handled as the oxide in fuel rods so the uranium is all spread out in the reactor plus it's not very enriched which means the or your density of these u-235 atoms the ones which are going to sustain your chain reaction a split up you see for the reason that bombs are almost impossible to make you've got to get back to how these things work when you split a nuclei here a load of energy off and some more neutrons and if you use those neutrons to split more nuclei you get more energy out and if you absorb those neutrons say with a control rod or those neutrons fly out of the core and they don't get absorbed by another nucleus or if for any reason whatsoever they just hang around for long enough that the neutrons decay on their own as long as those neutrons don't find another u-235 atom that's it you're not gonna get any more energy out of this chain reaction so the energy that we release is dependent on how many nuclei we split up in a unit time now if you're running a reactor you want to get as much power out of it as possible but you don't want it to run particularly hot because it's gonna start to melt so you'll have this big block which can often be tens of tons with a load of holes through it and that's the block that you're gonna heat up with your your nuclear fission and that's gonna heat up the water to hundreds of degrees something in that sort of lead and that's gonna boil water and run the turbines and it's gonna burn that core over the period of months to years however if you want to make a bomb you've got to release all of that energy in as short a time as possible which means rather than burning Decor over a period of a few months you want to burn as much of it as possible in as short a time as possible not seconds not milliseconds but microseconds and this is why you need the highly enriched uranium the stuff in power reactors just cannot do this you see the thing is in the early stages of a nuclear explosion first of all yeah block of uranium is going to get up to a hundred degrees than a thousand degrees about this point the uranium if you just left it there wouldn't melt that's no good so you're gonna hold it in that critical configuration while more decays are going on and the temperature gets up to about 4000 degrees at which point to uranium that would boil and that's again a big problem because if it turns into a gas you're going to lose this crucial critical configuration which basically means the neutrons that you're giving off by splitting a nuclei aren't going to be finding other u-235 atoms to split which basically means your nuke stops producing energy so absolutely everything about making a nuke is holding this critical mass together for as long as possible which is measured in millions of a second now eventually of course once again some to millions of degrees pretty much everything in the bomb is turning into gas and it just moves apart like a regular expanding gas and you lose the criticality and it stops generating more energy however if you were really successful in holding it together for long enough although splitting of nuclei has released a load of x-rays now those x-rays are absorbed by the surrounding air which then gets up to sort of plasma type temperatures and it just expands like a regular big ball of hot gas which is actually what causes the blast wave that kills most of the people in the nuclear explosion most yeah mostly what kills people in the nuke is a pressure wave so let's take a look at some actual nuke footage boom look at that now it's actually fairly difficult to get our feel of how quickly and how big what you're looking at is fortunately although these things were Declassified recently by Lawrence Livermore labs and what this is is it's a nuke of about 40 kilotons which is comparable to the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima and it's on a 500 foot Tower and if you take a look at the bump that comes with all this you'll find that they claimed it it was filmed with the multiple cameras capturing these events at about two-and-a-half thousand frames per second so half a millisecond per frame which means that remember what I was telling you that the the actual new clothes off in millionths of a second not in milliseconds so you can actually go through the new frame by frame here each frame here is about one two thousand five hundredth of a second so we approach time this is the counter here this is t0 and it's basically all over all of the energy for the nuke has already been released these by the way are smoke rockets they used they're there to help track the blast and you can see the tower is 500 feet so the initial fireball the this is the plasma ball that so accessible off is not actually that big that's the bit that sort of vaporized as it were and we can go through this frame by frame you'll notice all these spikes come out now what the hell are those spikes well the tower which you can see here very clearly he's actually held up by guylines and the huge photon flux coming off this thing actually turns some of that into plasma which is pretty luminescent and so that's why you got these spikes coming out at the bottom of your nuke and we actually scroll forwards a bit here and you find that by about I'm gonna coat for 42 this is a great number by frame 42 these nuke has now gone the entire length of that tower so that's what account how fast that was actually going so it's a 500 foot tower which I'm going to convert into meters by dividing by 3 ish so it's about 150 meters that sort of thing and the camera was doing was at 2,400 frames per second which means that one frame is about half a millisecond don't and it took 42 frames to get to the bottom so how long is that it's 42 times pi the time per frame it's about a hundredth of a second maybe two hundredths of a second it takes that blast to go all the way down to the tower and get to the ground so obviously if it's going that many meters in that many seconds which means that that's the velocity it's about ten kilometers per second which is about the speed that things that really detonate go out so that's a lot far that's the basically the speed of sound of the speed of sound in a solid which is much faster than the speed of sound in the gas which is about 300 meters per second so if we were to look at this in terms of multiples of the speed of sound in air I can see now it's about thirty times but it's about thirty times the speed of sound that that fireball is expanding at so you get the initial fireball and after that is basically just an expansion of gas now this is going thirty times the speed of sound at the moment so there's no way you can get a subsonic pressure wave off it however eventually it'll slow down to the speed of sound and at that point you'll actually get the the pressure wave comes off this thing traveling at the speed of sound and I think this is it here I think this this bit here on some of them you see it fantastically well ah yeah they you see it see it moving the smoke rockets watch here and you'll see the smoke Rockies have done their job you know she'd track where the blastwave is look at that what's this boy here so this is actually what they're all in for you know it goes backwards and for it might be yeah so I think that's the fresh wave which is essentially the blast wave that does a lot of the destruction of nuclear weapons so merely to get this small beginners level nuclear explosion you need a very precise configuration of highly enriched uranium all in this configuration that holds it together for as long as possible oh and I forgot you also need a neutron spark plug because if you don't have any neutrons to get the ball rolling it's perfectly possible that not Lots can happen and if you've got it all right you're gonna get an explosion of about 20 kilotons out of it which is actually not that big for a nuclear explosion so let's compare this to HBO's assessment of the molten core of Chernobyl well yesterday between two and four megatons everything within a thirty kilometer radius will be completely destroyed it's not highly enriched uranium so that kills it there and there it's not in the correct designed geometry so that kills it again and further it's actually a melted down reactor which means there isn't any more fission going on anyway but let's just assume that was you would still be looking at an upper limit of getting about a 20-kiloton explosion out of this thing and he says that you're looking at five megatons over a hundred times bigger [Music] sorry but the only way you get that sort of yield out of a nuclear bomb is to make it thermonuclear which is an even harder to construct device so not only do you need a highly enriched uranium in the precise configuration the neutron sparkplug and so forth now you've got a bolt an additional device that turns some of that x-ray flux to compress fusible material outside the bomb to enhance the yield in reality all you had it Chernobyl was a molten core in that you see this is the problem with the reactors so the business end of a nuclear past station is a little different than the business end of a coal or oil or gas power station you're essentially just using heat to boil water and spin turbines however you only can't overheat a coal or a gas power station that easily because it doesn't burn that hot and it's very easy just to turn off the valve or not put more fuel into the power station with a nuclear power station you can actually give it quite a lot hotter and therein lies the problem you want to run these heating things at $1,000 ish degrees but by $2,000 degrees stuff starts to melt and that's only a factor of about two remember that number for later further once your reactor has melted all right the fission stuffs gonna stop pretty quick because it's once it's mostly melted it's gonna melt down into the concrete which will dilute it pretty quickly and kill any further fission from going on and that's what produces the lion's share some 95 odd percent of the heat generated but the decay products from the fission on a freshly run reactor are still capable of generating quite a lot of heat and eating this stuff to maybe a couple of thousand degrees but again as it melts into the concrete it dilutes and sings it's only got a finite capability of generating heat the more dilute it becomes the cooler it becomes and eventually it just solidifies so at this point if it runs into water it's gonna look more like this but then the [Music] this second explosion would have been accompanied by a terrible shock wave the only difference is this lava would continue to be a heat source and would eventually boil the water but unless it's a sealed system you're not gonna get a pressure explosion off of this you're gonna keep boiling off the water in fact let's talk about for a second how did Chernobyl explode in the first place because Chernobyl clearly did explode there's a big hole in that well ironically at the time it blew up they were doing home safety tests and then managed to pull out enough the control rods that the reactor was in a position where it wouldn't just generate twice as much energy as it normally did but 10 times the power levels that normally would if they had a well designed reactor you wouldn't be able to do this at all and if that actually followed their own procedures they wouldn't have done this either anyway not only it was the reactor in this configuration where it could generate 10 times the the regular amount of power they got it into the position where it was generating 10 times the amount of regular power at which point that energy spike overheats the water in the cooling system which over pressures this sealed system it just blows up on exactly the same principle as a dry ice bomb too much pressure in a small system or is in this Mythbusters video of an exploding water boiler we said again eighty five and a half thousand pounds of pressure pushing against the bottom of the heater you would fail too now that was actually a second explosion there were two explosions that were heard the first one we think was a steam explosion nobody knows what that second one was they speculated it was a second steam explosion others speculate it was hydrogen nobody really knows well he's an interesting speculation for you but more than a thousand degrees one of the first things to melt will be the zirconium casing for the fuel rods which will then run down into the water at the base of the reactor and he'll take a wager that molten zirconium this sort of temperature react with water in a Coulomb big explosion in a very similar way to which sodium-potassium alloy explodes in water is 25 degrees yeah here filmed at 10,000 frames per second that's one tenth of a millisecond per frame the whole reaction is over before it even started however if you stop and go through it frame by frame not much happens and then in one ten thousandth of a second the drop turns into a Hedgehog now of course got big hole in the reactor and it's on fire because there is graphite moderator in this thing which will burn at this sort of temperature and that spreads all the decay products from the nuclear reactor out now most of this reactor of course is just a molten blob that just sits in the ground and they can't really do anything because it's like lava you know it doesn't doesn't doesn't spread itself around Europe on its own so where the hell does this treat a five Megaton explosion stuff come from well this is just my opinion let's just say you had a really bad design for a nuclear reactor these are just a list of the differences in summary of between us reactors and the Russian reactors as I said they're very different they can never be licensed in this country which do to something for the incompetence they deactivated that I said the emergency core cooling system the ECC s prevent complications during the test led to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history how do you turn that into the selfless comrades of the USSR saving Europe well clearly the more people they save by sacrificing themselves the more heroic it is so let's turn the molten core getting into the water tanks something that would probably look more like this than this into how three valiant selfless comrades from the Soviet Union saved Europe which is 320 kilometers from Chernobyl and Europe rendered uninhabitable your apparent mind this is days after the initial meltdown there's no more fusion going on this thing all you've got is a bunch of decay products that are keeping this stuff pretty toasty but do you know how they normally keep spent cause cool in a swimming pool now don't get me wrong draining the water was still a good idea in that if this stuff did get into the water it would have probably boiled some of the water and that is a transport mechanism but this is more something that would make the worst nuclear disaster in history slightly worse not something that threatened to destroy Europe and of course you've got to say that they knew there were almost certainly gonna die a kamikaze mission rather than they actually all survived and for the most part lived happily ever after I've gotta admit it's a good story and it's small wonder that it gets told again and again and again so we need to find three plant workers get to the sluice gate valve here and give us the access we need to pump out the tanks we're asking for your permission to kill three men I mean it makes for great drama we used to meet between two and four megatons everything within a thirty kilometer radius will be completely destroyed it's just not true so if you want to know just how pervasive this myth is just type in three man who saved Chernobyl okay and what do you yeah Chernobyl how three volunteers prevented our far bigger nuclear disaster three men who saved millions at the Chernobyl suicide squad three men who prevented yada-yada-yada 30 years ago three minutes enable saved millions of lives the real story of the Chernobyl divers the Suicide Squad three men who saved millions and so it goes on now one of the reasons I don't get all hysterical about radioactivity is because I know it and with the right tools how easy it is to detect and avoid so this is my Gama Scout which will happily detect alphas beat his gammas date log and all sorts of other fancy stuff it's a pretty decent Geiger counter however from firsthand experience I can tell you if you get one of these things the first thing you'll notice is there really isn't that much radiation around I mostly use this to find the uranium mines that created the us's first nuclear bomb a little toasty roasty Oh father this uranium absolutely everywhere around it so you sit under a plant somewhere and immediately goes on the high radiation well that's 50 times background a hundred times background 120 times background and of course it's all completely perfectly natural but of course a lot of these ralpherz so there yeah you get off the ground and it drops down by a lot and of course you know you walk ten feet away and and all of a sudden bear in mind freeze about what you've got an airplanes going up to ten is like saying three times what you get an airplane so me to being down there for oh whatever you know ten minutes or something only the same as a half hour plane flight other than that it's pretty hard to get this thing to give any other reading than a background unless of course you take it on a plane you're absolutely crazy however in the exceptionally exceptionally exceptionally unlikely event that there is a release of radiation of some sort this thing is worth its weight in gold because you've been very easily detect what's contaminated and what's not so if you have fun see one of those I'll leave links to these in my ABS install below so thanks for watching if it's subscribe link before the lava running into the sea kraits another Megaton thermonuclear explosion well even better hit the notification bell to make sure you don't miss out on new content and as always this channel is supported by the kind donations of patrons and if you want to become one of those I'll leave the links below [Music] you

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 379,134

Rating: 3.7668214 out of 5

Keywords: HBO, Chernobyl, nuclear, accident, radioactivity, radiation, disaster, reactor, explosion, critical, criticality

Id: SsdLDFtbdrA

Length: 37min 3sec (2223 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Jtktomb]

Can someone TL;DR me what's wrong with it ?