you there was no containment building all of these fission products just blew through the roof and up into the surrounding countryside this is a picture of what the core looked like from the air no building in the way nothing to stop those debris from going it's another aerial picture right after the accident of course this was quite a disaster and the world noticed some of the first people to notice we're scientists I think in southern Germany near Switzerland they had some detectors set up and they said oh oh it's gonna rain sometimes you can see the fallout from earlier atomic weapons tests and they're very sensitive detectors and when they were looking at this experiment and the rain was coming down they said oh my god this isn't from some ten year ago nuclear experiment this looks like the entire core contents of a nuclear reactor a nuclear reactor in Sweden with very sensitive radiation detection monitoring because of course you want to make sure nothing goes wrong in your own reactor the alarm starts going off because of the stuff coming in the air from outside the Soviet Union was at first very tight-lipped about this no Free Press no great way to try to describe what's happening in the world they mobilize their own fire department of course right in the local Chernobyl Fire Department and those were the fatalities the firefighters wanted to put out the fire on the building and maybe they were heroes or maybe they needed more training because by putting out those fires they absorbed enormous radiation doses and over the next few days got radiation sickness and maybe over the next few weeks perished 30 people the major effect on health from the Chernobyl incident was all of these fission products these radioactive high level waste now shot into the atmosphere because there was no containment building and what's going to happen is the wind will blow and this fallout this radioactive material will move across the countryside let's watch a video that shows where the wind conditions were on those days and therefore where the radiation plumes would go with the fallout so there is Chernobyl power plant in the northern part of the Ukraine and you can see that the immediate wind pushing the fallout was right towards Sweden in fact it was a Swedish nuclear power plant that first even noticed that some radiation was coming out because of course the Soviet Union was not big at publicity then notice that the wind shifts back going to the east and there was pollution all the way up to the lap people in Siberia we now have wind currents pushing back down coming towards covering Poland and more of Central Europe and you can always find Chernobyl because it's still spewing out radioactive material even though we're now here at May first a few days later the winds change going to the south and then pushing back to the east and one thing to note that even though it looks like all of Europe is covered this means there was detectable levels of caesium at one point but it doesn't mean just because there was fallout over a certain area that the people are all going to die or the people are contaminated the areas that have had the most coverage of red over some time will probably have quite a bit of stuff on the ground and we'll get to that in a moment but pretty soon here we're at the 4th of May 5th of May that they did finally get the reactor all covered up because you've noticed this has been a continual source and shortly here you'll see that the source stops because they finally have no longer taking more material out from the reactor here is an actual map of the actual cesium-137 the radioactive material that is actually still measurable in the ground from the Chernobyl incident and if we blow up the worst zones you can see that they are here right near the Chernobyl reactor itself and some other places that got the immediate and the most numbers of plumes the stuff that's in red on here is still a closed restricted zone a place where basically they don't let people go the people in the in the next there is a much more heavily monitored zone as well as the light pink and the yellow place is sort of back to normal yes you can measure the amount of caesium still in the ground but it's deemed low enough that people can continue their normal lives in those areas the dark red zones particularly the town of Pripyat right next to the Chernobyl reactor are abandoned to this day and they are basically empty collections of buildings because the pollution level was just too high they might wonder why are we talking about cesium 137 and also iodine 131 well the fission products from a nuclear reactor the things the uranium splits into a wide variety of different isotopes and they have different half-lives things that have half-lives of millions or billions of years well they don't decay they don't give off radiation all that often and so it's not as dangerous the things that have a very short half-life minutes hours well they're extremely dangerous if you're next to them because that's what they're decaying and giving off the radiation but they're all gone so it's the things in the middle range the thousand hundreds thousand year range that have the most potential damage particularly things that your body will take up iodine is one of those you have iodine in your thyroid and you need it so if there's radioactive iodine it will go into your thyroid and then maybe give you a much higher incidence of thyroid cancer because those gamma rays coming from it will hurt yourselves cesium can be taken up in the bone there's not a large quick replacement of material that's in your bone so those two isotopes are a good marker and a good thing to notice and to therefore avoid so if we look at what are the health effects of all of this fallout fortunately it can be measured fairly accurately the first thing is the people who were the radiation workers the immediate responders the firemen this reactor was on fire there's large glowing chunks of the core around and the people working there rushed out to fix it they rushed to their deaths of the initial 30 some firemen they did all died a very acute radiation sickness in all told there were a hundred and thirty-four people diagnosed with acute radiation sickness this is getting something like at least 200 REMS of radiation and from that 134 people that were diagnosed with acute radiation sickness 47 of them died this of course is the immediate effect what about the long-term effect of the people that were were inundated with this fallout well the economic effect was probably one of the largest because places that had the radioactive material that say the strontium or the cesium on the ground and then cow was aided in the cows gave milk all that milk had to be thrown away many of the animals had to be slaughtered and not eaten that many of the vegetables that were growing over this time period where the material would get onto the leaves or incorporated in the plant had to be thrown away so there was clear economic impact the immediate fallout wash across all of this area there are also people particularly children who are growing quickly and in Poland and in some other places I think they wisely administered potassium iodide if you think about your thyroid and it's gonna take up iodine from your diet if you suddenly eat a whole bunch of iodine not straight iodine it's poisonous but in some form that's not poisonous now the small amount of radioactive iodine you might get is very diluted so the chance of your thyroid picking it up it when you've eaten a whole potassium iodide tablet is low and that's very helpful because there clearly were a large number of thyroid cancers detected in children that normally would not of course be at that rate fortunately 98.8% survival rate of childhood cancer is quite possible and was in this case of this higher incidence of thyroid cancer just relatively rare but here of course in the fallout areas it was noticeably up maybe four thousand cases of thyroid cancer thyroid cancer being diagnosed and treated is extremely treatable ninety eight point eight percent success rate of curing or eliminating that cancer this has led so far to 15 deaths but when we not just look at immediate things we look at long-term health consequences we wonder that we'll people die sooner and then they would have otherwise there were six hundred thousand people many of these were the workers that the Army soldiers that went in to try to build the sarcophagus around the reactor or it was the people in those red zones that received quite a bit of Fallout this group is estimated to have had at least ten REMS of radiation now of this 600,000 of course some have already died but in any group of 600,000 people 20 30 years later some amount will have died and the key is to ask statistically how many more deaths will there be from this cohort then there would otherwise everyone dies and an awful lot of people maybe 1/4 of the people who die die of cancer statistically though this is a large enough dose and a large enough number that the estimate will be that maybe 4,000 excess deaths will occur from this of course we don't know this exactly we can't tell which person will be in excess cancer death but this is a fairly accepted number in this range now there clearly were millions maybe 6 million more people right that all received dose maybe on the order of one REM and the question is will this give us any excess deaths the linear hypothesis which we described says oh yes of course we get 10 times more they had 10 times last dose that should be another 4,000 people but the threshold hypothesis or maybe theory says radiation dose at a low enough level is something your body has evolved with and it's something your body can actually cure and deal with since you're always exposed to some level of radiation remember TT scan is 1.2 REM so this is not maybe that's three times their annual background over this shorter time period so will there be any excess deaths from here hard to quantify or tell well this might be the science there is very much still a psychological aspect and since our brain and our bodies are so well linked there are more potential medical problems stress disorders my gosh I was at Chernobyl I was nearby I must have received radiation I feel sick and probably really our weather had nothing to do with radiation but it's still real the other thing is in terminology this group of people the 600,000 are being monitored continuously because while it wasn't an intentional experiment at least we do have an experiment and data and tracking people to look at long-term health effects of radiation exposure this group is known as the chernobyl victims and just by that choice of words it leads people to feel that oh my gosh I'm going to have some health effects from this perhaps the term Chernobyl survivors would have been much better that's what you need to know about the health effects of Chernobyl [Music]
