re: Blinking meme guy Chernobyl documentary

That sarcophagus really is impressive. It's fricking huge. Inside, it has structure and cranes capable of lifting up to 50 tons and a waldo with all kinds of demolition tools on it. There's a radiation shielded operators' cab and they're going to demolish and begin decontaminating and disposing of the site and ruined reactor completely from within the sarcophagus until the pieces are small enough and decontaminated enough to safely move to a site for long term burial. The fate of the fuel elements and other high-level waste is unknown. It's likely they'll remain on site. Interestingly enough, it's not sealed, meaning it's not a containment structure. The goal is to capture all solid particles. Gaseous radioactive particles from a fission chain tend to be hot, but they also tend to be lighter than air and decay rapidly to a stable element, so they just let those float away and focus on confining the solid particles and keeping water away from the ruined reactor to limit how much can seep into the ground.

Chernobyl 4 is still fricking hot, too. If a worker spends 12 minutes on the roof of the existing sarcophagus, they get their radiation dose for the year. At the elephant's foot, you're dead in about five minutes. It's far less radioactive than it was immediately following the accident when just looking at it directly meant you had a very good chance of dying from receiving a fatal dose of radiation. 30 seconds, and you were 100% worm food.

Wanna see a picture of a guy with bigger balls than any of you can ever hope to have?



This picture was taken somewhere about 10 years after the meltdown, so that elephant's foot is still radioactive as hell. The graininess of the shot is because the radiation is fricking with the film.

Awesome video, thanks for sharing

I was shocked they allow tourism like this.

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elephant's foot

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What’s this?

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I'm a bit ignorant to this, but is there still a chance that tourists could get cancer from visiting??

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They don't take you to the really hot areas. Only a few places outside the sarcophagus have a high enough radiation field to make you acutely ill or really start to increase your lifetime cancer risk, and they don't take you there. You'll get a larger dose of external radiation on the flight to Ukraine and back than you will spending 12 hours in the exclusion zone.

Now, if you start touching everything, straying from the known "safe" areas, eating and drinking things while there, not wearing the protective booties and such that they give you, etc., your stupidity may move something you don't want from your outside to your inside. They're extremely keen on throwing your arse out if you don't follow their rules, so if you do something as simple as sit on the ground (because it increases the chances a hot particle will stick to your butt), they'll boot your arse and put you on a van straight out of the zone. When you leave, everything you intend to take out with you is scanned. If they pick up radiation from a hot particle, they'll try to decontaminate the item. If they can't, well, I hope you weren't too attached to that item because it's not leaving. After all that, even if you manage to get a hot particle inside you while you're there, the chances are pretty small that it'll cause you any problems.

Long term cancers are a risk of visiting the Exclusion Zone, though. But so's having natural rock countertops in your house (they often have veins of radionuclides that decay into radon that you breathe into your lungs) or eating bananas (Potassium-40 delivered straight to the gut), or medical scans (literally shooting radiation at you or injecting you intravenously with radioactive substances). But, people are familiar with granite and x-rays and bananas are delicious, so they're not scared of them. People, in general, are ignorant about radiation outside those few familiar exposure sources they're used to encountering, so they freak out about things like going to the areas surrounding Chernobyl. Their lack of knowledge makes them unable to appreciate the level of risk associated with it and the proper place they should be on the spectrum between "run away" and "lick the ground"

I'd totally take a day trip from Kiev to Pripyat.

The Elephant’s Foot is a mass of corium formed during the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986. Once deadly radioactive, its danger has decreased with the decay of its radioactive components.

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It is still very deadly.

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True, but it has actually been visited and photographed by a human though. I just read that a lethal dose of radiation would come after 300 seconds of exposure from the elephants foot today. After the accident, it was only 30 seconds.

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Now, if you start touching everything, straying from the known "safe" areas, eating and drinking things while there, etc., you might pick up something you don't want.

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All the firemen's radioactive clothing and equipment is still in the basement of the hospital.

I saw a YouTube video of some guy who went down there recently and took readings and he was picking up some very high levels of radiation coming off their clothes. I'd imagine this area is not part of the standard tour.

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I saw a YouTube video of some guy who went down there recently and took readings and he was picking up some very high levels of radiation coming off their clothes. I'd imagine this area is not part of the standard tour.

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Noooo, I don't think it is. I watched that video last week. It's the Veritasium guy. He starts off somewhere in Australia with a lot of background radiation from the rocks in the area and works his way up to a trip to Pripyat, all the while measuring the external field with his Geiger counter.

He goes up to those firemen's boots and the counter just goes off the scale.

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In the most recent episode of the HBO show, they put in a scene with the hospital workers taking the clothes off the firemen and taking it all down to the basement with no protection. No thanks.

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Yeah, that one nurse knows what happened and when she saw her hand with beta burns just from handling the clothes, she knew they were all pretty fricked.