Should You Hide In A Fridge During A Nuclear Blast?! MYTHS DEBUNKED

it's a lovely red hot summer's day not a cloud in the sky except one and it looks like a mushroom it's a nuke and it's gone off big-time the fireball and your life flashed before your eyes and in that split second you remember the disappointment of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull nuking the fridge hell it worked for Indy so it might work for you right there's no time to think about it you dive into your temporary home and wait it out holy piece of cheese to keep you company what are the chances of survival pretty though if you eat that cheese as for the nuclear blast omelette Indies creator George Lucas explained the odds of surviving that refrigerator from a lot of scientists are about 50/50 so when his argument hold any weight he's surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge less science fact and just more of Lucas's trademark science fiction I'm Stu this is debunked and we're head sawed the truths in the myths and the facts from the misconceptions this video is made possible with the support of the great courses plus an on demand Learning Resource with courses led by the world's greatest professors okay since Indiana has provided us with a nice example we'll use his scenario to base our argument around first things first how powerful is the bomb we're talking about here well the movie is set in 1957 and depicts an American nuclear test this would coincide with the real-life operation bloom Bob which saw the u.s. drop 29 bombs in the Nevada desert in order to study their effects one bomb in particular code named smoky seems a good candidate as it was mounted on a tower like the bomb in the movie smokey wasn't exactly a small leak either it had a yield of 44 kilotons for reference that's about three times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and twice that which landed on Nagasaki in World War two in our hypothetical scenario anything within 360 meters of Ground Zero is incinerated by the fireball I'm not sure there's a fridge on earth that can keep its contents ice cool in the face of temperatures reaching millions of degrees Celsius imagine climbing into a fridge and then hurling it directly into the Sun it's not likely to go well but maybe a refrigerator could prove handy when dealing with other pesky elements of a nuclear blast namely the shock wave and radiation now there is evidence to suggest that an appliance could survive in such trying conditions back in 1955 another American test called Operation QED saw the US government build an entire model village similar to the one in Indy for an optimistically named it survival town interestingly for us one concrete house located 1.4 kilometers away from the center of the blast had a big chest freezer in it which was packed with food rather than archaeologists it's a bit more spacious than in Dee's fridge and would have been a lot cooler but as a rule life point reference is not a million miles away after the test was complete a fair chunk of survival town was blown to kingdom come remarkably the freezer was still there in the house according to the official report overpressure had creased the freezer door sprung the springs and broken off the plastic lining on the bottom side of the freezer door essentially it was fine however before you go jumping into fridges or freezers when the apocalypse arrives we need to take a closer look what happened down in survival town for a start the bomb dropped that day it was noticeably less powerful than the one we proposed in our scenario the operation q nuke was 29 kill attacks which would have produced a fireball reaching 300 meters from the center the most intense part of the shock wave from such a detonation would have only stretched as far as point six seven kilometers within this zone the additional pressure are the Y's known as overpressure from the blast would be enough to destroy most buildings and they'd be hurricane-force winds we're talking around 800 kilometers per hour and fatalities will approach 100% collapsing roofs and flying debris do have a tendency to cause casualties even heavily built concrete buildings would likely be demolished or severely damaged so why did the freezer survive on this occasion there are two key factors here the overpressure caused by the shockwave which is measured in pounds per square inch and is anything above normal atmospheric pressure would likely have dissipated at 1.4 kilometers going from 20 psi to around 5 psi or lower at this point even with such a substantial drop wind speeds would likely have been around 260 km/h and damage would be significant with most residential buildings tumbling down however there is a chance that solid concrete buildings would survive in this area of the shockwave and this is exactly what happened to our freezer in survival town there were five different types of houses and the freezer was placed in my father's a single-story rambling made of precast lightweight concrete walls are joined by steel look it was one of only two buildings that weren't demolished at the 1.4 kilometer range this was one lucky freezer it's also worth bearing in mind that from 3 psi of overpressure or below wind speeds would peak at 160 km/h and while serious injuries might be common the risk of dying is reduced diving into the freezer at survival town probably wouldn't have made much difference to your chances of survival because it was already a reasonable distance from the blast and snuggly inside a concrete house going back to our original scenario a 44 kiloton nuke would produce a 20 psi shock wave up to naught point seven seven kilometers away from ground zero with the smaller but still deadly 5 psi shock wave stretching up to one point six two kilometers from the center of the blast jumping in a fridge here really won't help you unless you want to be buried in a refrigerator you'd be battered to death inside as it was carried along by the shock wave but let's be positive let's say you jump in a fridge the building you're in gets obliterated but the fridge doesn't fall over trapping you inside even then you'd be stuck in the middle of a nuclear blast area with radioactive fallout raining down and courtesy of a mushroom cloud how long are you going to have to stay inside let me put it this way within an hour the radioactive fallout would have decayed by 50% and within 24 hours you're looking at 80 percent hell after 2 weeks 99 percent of that annoying radioactivity will be gone aside from the fact that there probably wouldn't be enough food and water inside your fridge to last 2 weeks there's also the troublesome supply of air to worry about assuming you have an airtight seal you'd only have a few hours of oxygen before you suffocate it to death the smaller you are or the bigger the fridge you're in the more time you have but either way eventually you'd have to step out into nuclear fallout that was still dangerous that puts you at risk of acute radiation sickness and potential death for those of you wondering what would happen to Indy well his airborne escapades inside the fridge wouldn't have even taken place according to molecular biologist dr. David sheshna estimating that India was naught point 6 kilometers away from the blast Chechnya claims that the force required to lift the fridge and accelerated to speeds showed move wouldn't have lifted it at all stead we would have crushed it then some the pressure would have been 47 times greater than the pressure required to liberate a railway car from its track and crush it so a tiny fridge no chance right so getting into a fridge is just killed in D and hasn't really helped you deal with a massive shock wave either but what about offering some protection from the radiation well our freezer in survival town certainly did the trick the report noted all samples from the freezer were free of induced radiation and went on to conclude samples from the freezer were found to be entirely safe for human consumption portions of these frozen foods were used to prepare a meal under emergency conditions the freezer would definitely have been inside the radiation radius of the bomb which would have reached one point five kilometers from the detonation point for our larger bomb smokie that radius would have been 1.6 kilometers so from this point on we'll treat them both the same to keep things simple anyone caught inside this zone would be in serious trouble we're talking death rates of 50% at best 90% worst if you were lucky you might die in a few hours others could linger on for weeks but if the freezer kept the food safe then maybe you think that lead-lined fridge would have done the same for Indiana Jones well think again a 2016 entry in the Journal of physics special topics titled Indiana Jones and the fridge to freedom calculated that then link lining would have been too thin to protect him we conclude that it is unlikely Indiana would have remained unharmed from the gamma radiation as the minimum thickness of lead needed is four point five eight centimeters which is likely to be greater than the thickness of the lead lining within the fridge to make matters worse for indeed a nuclear bomb the size of smoky would actually require five point seven four centimeters of lead to provide a safe level of shielding these days LED line fridges are generally used to store radio pharmaceuticals and other radioactive material but even though only tend to have a lid lining around no point three centimetres thick so nope jumping in a household fridge wouldn't have saved his cells from an unhealthy dose of radiation now I know what you're thinking how come the food in the freezer was okay then well I don't know whether it was lead-lined naught but working on the assumption that it wasn't it all comes back down to the house it was in yep concrete is a pretty decent thing to have between yourself and an oncoming nuclear blast approximately 60 centimeters of concrete will reduce gamma radiation by a factor of a thousand and just six centimeters of concrete will have it if you want to be really safe two meters of concrete will reduce it by a factor of a billion without knowing exactly how thick the walls were in survival towns concrete house it seems like that might explain whether food states safe either way unless you have a fridge with an extremely generous lid lining it's probably not going to make much difference to your odds of surviving Judgment Day so what should you do in the event of a nuclear attack and early we've already put together a few tips that might just save your life should the worst happen but before you start learning about that our sponsors have an entire course available that can further your understanding of the exciting world of nuclear physics we begin with a detailed examination inside the atom itself explaining the structure function and forces of nuclear particles the great causes plus is an on-demand learning resource that has thousands of courses covering everything from history and literature to travel in cooking all led by the world's greatest professors and just in case you've had your fill of nukes and atoms then check out any of these courses on the theme of myths and misconceptions and get ready to debunk some widely held beliefs about science and culture fans of debunked can get a free trial by visiting the great courses plus com forward slash debunked support from partners like the great courses plus enable us to keep making videos so please head on over and check out this incredible learning resource thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Debunked

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Keywords: debunked, debunk, in a nutshel, explained, myth, fact, mythbusters, science, education, nuking the fridge, survival, physics, atomic, nuclear, urban legend, discovery, discover, truth, wrong, fail, fallout, how to survive, apocalypse, indiana jones, fridge, test, experiment, indestructible, how to, nuke, hide from a nuke, survive a nuke, shockwave, nuclear blast, nuclear explosion, surviving, nuclear attack, nuclear bomb, in a fridge, hide in, survive in, compare, ww3, armageddon, nuketown, call of duty

Id: DAI1eIGUn94

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 24 2019