The Chernobyl disaster is a very complex topic. As many of the people who frequent my channel know well, and as often arises with these icebergs of information, countless myths and legends have spilled into the public zeitgeist, oftent times dramatically changing the story. As new information comes to light, these myths then often die out and are filled in by the truth. But Chernobyl is unique here as oftent times the myths prevail. Be it because they are more dramatic, more interesting or just because the myth has become so ingrained that it has become near impossible to unwind the untruthful tales. And so without further ado, here are 21 myths you probably still believe about the Chernobyl disaster. Myth one, the RBMK was built because it was cheaper. This myth seems to be everywhere. that the RBMK was chosen and became so widely used in the Soviet Union because of its cost savings appears in countless documentaries, dramatizations, and books that you would assume it is to be one of the most important factors in discussing the disaster. And yet, it couldn't be further from the truth. There are a couple ways to think about this. First of all, consider how large an RBMK nuclear power plant actually is. Some parts of it may be similar among other nuclear power plants like the turbine hall. But then there are components specific to the RBMK such as the graphite blocks, all 1,885 tons of them, the 2,000 ton steel and serpentine upper biological shield, and the almost 1,600 ton corresponding lower biological shield. Unit 4 of Chernobyl cost an eyewatering 60 million rubles when it was launched in 1983 and the whole nuclear power plant cost 210 million. But how does this compare to alternative options in the Soviet Union at the time? Let's wind the clock all the way back to the end of September 1967 when decision-making on the reactor type that was meant to be used at Chernobyl was made. There were three designs in contention. The first was obviously the RBMK. The second was a gas cooled RK1000 reactor and the third was the VVER 10000, the Soviet equivalent of a PWR reactor. In their final findings, the commission decided that the RBMK was in fact the most expensive option. So why did Chernobyl end up with RBMKs? Well, a few reasons. First of all, the VVER reactor pressure vessel could only be built at the time at just one factory in Lenningrad. At the time, no VVER 10000 pressure vessels had ever been made, nor had they attempted to make one, and the factory was inundated with orders. It was simply impossible to consider making a VVER 10000 nuclear power plant in the time frame they had where they needed to build two. Furthermore, they would have to transport this pressure vessel to the site of the nuclear power plant and they lacked the critical infrastructure to do so. In contrast, the framework for constructing the RBMK power plant was already there. They'd had significant experience already in developing graphite moderated reactors, both from their industrial reactors going all the way back to the 1940s and their ongoing construction of the Leningrad nuclear power plant. The RBMK was chosen not because it was the cheaper choice, but because it was the only feasible choice they had. Nowadays, a factory purpose-built to produce the large VVER pressure vessels exists along with the ability to transport the pressure vessels along the river dawn by river vessel where they can be loaded onto cargo ships in the Black Sea and transported globally. Myth two, the Leningrad event and Vulov's dismissal. There are a huge number of myths and legends surrounding the Leningrad accident of 1975 and a further myth claiming that the dismissal of a scientist named Vulov was linked to this with Vulov trying to expose the causes of the accident. I've already covered this in a video before, so I will instead give a brief summary here. Yes, it is true that in 1975 there was an accident at the Leningrad nuclear power plant which suffered a significant fuel channel rupture. However, what is claimed in popular media is generally the opposite of reality. The myth is that in response to the accident, the moment they pressed the Az 5 button, the power went up for a few brief seconds instead of down. This did not happen. In fact, it's the other way around. The reactor power spontaneously accelerated twice with the final one causing the fuel channel rupture and subsequent shutdown. However, there was no power surge after AZ 5 was pressed. The reactor was shut down and eventually repaired and put back into operation. While the underlying causes of the accident and the buildup to the final moments are similar between what actually happened and the myth, those final crucial seconds are completely different. As for Vulov's dismissal, it is true that there was a man named Volov dismissed for investigating a power surge after an AZ 5 press, but it was the power surge that destroyed Chernobyl unit 4 in 1986. On May 1st, 1986, Volov sent a letter to the chief designer of the RBMK, Anatoli Alexandrov, and to the leaders of the Soviet Union 8 days later. sharing his findings which indicated significant design flaws in the reactor were the main contributing factors to the Chernobyl disaster instead of operator fault. Obviously, telling the chief designer of the nuclear power plant that just exploded that it was his design at fault, especially when he employs you, is not a good idea. and he was swiftly removed from his position. Myth three, Vladimir I Lenin nuclear power plant. A lot of people seem to think that Chernobyl nuclear power plant was not the real name of the site when the disaster occurred. Instead, they think it was Vladimir Ilich Lennin nuclear power plant and then repeat this to everyone else to sound smart, not realizing they're actually repeating just another myth. When the plans for the nuclear power plant were being drafted up in 1970, there was a debate back then on what the name would be. A few of the suggestions included Western Ukraine at Atomic Energy Station, the North Kiev atomic energy station and the Pryyat atomic energy station. Keep in mind AES is generally translated instead to nuclear power plant in English. It's just customary. The ultimate decision for the name of the site came down to Vladimir Shabitzky. The chairman of the council of ministers of the Ukrainian Communist Party at the time. And on February 20th, they decided the name would be Chernobyl. This was signed into law. So where does Lenin come from? It comes down to the naming on the main administration building. If you look on the roof, you can see this phrasing which translates to Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station named Vi Lenin or so it would seem. Sure, in Ukrainian it can just mean name or named, but alternatively it can mean named after. What's actually happening here is Chernobyl MPP is being given an honorific title. The title was bestowed in 1983 to mark the completion of unit 4. It wasn't the only nuclear power plant to get this title. Leningrad nuclear power plant was also bestowed the title of VI Lenin. So does this mean there are two Vladmir Ilich Lenin nuclear power plants? No, just Lennengrad nuclear power plant and Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Myth four, graphite tips. There's a lot of confusion among many about the nature of the graphite fixed to the control rods, oftent times called tips. This myth appears everywhere with even university lecturers referring to them as just 6 in on the end of a control rod. In reality, they're not tips. Of course, they're far from it. Actually, the control rods of an RBMK are made of two sections connected by a telescoping rod that is fully extended when the control rod is withdrawn and compressed when the control rod is fully inserted. The upper section of normal control rods is the bore control rod itself, 6.2 m long at the time of the disaster. This is lifted out of the core when the control rod is withdrawn and sitting in the middle of the core when fully inserted with a little space either side. Underneath the boron absorber section is the graphite displacer. This structure was around 4.55 m long at the time of the disaster. And when the control rod was fully withdrawn, the graphite displacer sat symmetrically in the middle of the reactor. It's not a tip. It's almost the size of the boron section of the control rod itself. So, next question, why is it there? Ironically, despite being the overall cause of the Chernobyl disaster, the graphite displacers are a safety feature. The logic is simple. Control rods absorb neutrons. And in an RBMK, due to the large amount of moderation by graphite, the absorption of neutrons by water is more significant than its moderating properties. So when you extract a control rod, you are replacing neutronabsorbing boron with neutronabsorbing water. Not good. So, what you need is something that won't absorb neutrons to sit there when the control rod is withdrawn to create a significant difference in reactivity between an inserted control rod and an extracted control rod, increasing the rod worth. It could have been made of anything that didn't absorb neutrons, but graphite happened to be the first choice. The problem is that when the control rod is inserted in this configuration, the graphite displaces water at the bottom of the core, removing absorption. This is a common mistake that people make where they specifically blame the graphite for accelerating reactivity. Not only is this not how moderation works, for example, you can over moderate a nuclear reactor and the RBMK was already slightly over moderated in the first place. It was instead removing absorption by water that caused an increase in vision leading to a temperature increase high enough to flash the water in the bottom of the core into steam. The positive void and positive power coefficients cause the runaway from there. Myth five, incompetent operators. Quite a few people seem to think that the operators that night were simply not qualified for the job. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Let's take Leonid Toptonov for example, the person that many accuse of not having the experience or knowledge to operate the reactor. Now, Toptonov was a graduate student of the prestigious Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in Nuclear Engineering, where before he graduated, he won a competitive 6-monlong internship at Chernobyl MPP, where he pioneered a method of identifying defects in the graphite stack of Reactor 4 using acoustics. He was considered so intelligent and hardworking that they kept him on and trained him as a senior reactor control engineer. Topanov undertook 2 years of training, passing vigorous exams, and then in September 1985 was allowed to shadow the operations of a reactor control engineer in unit 4 until February of 1986 and then operated the reactor single-handedly. It wasn't two or so months of experience, but years. Topanov was considered so competent he already had future reactor control engineers for unit 5 shadowing him on that night. And on top of that he was also being assisted by Yuri TGU a shift supervisor who also had experience controlling the reactor and his own shift supervisor Alexandra Kimov. Neither of these two individuals were underqualified. All in all, Toptonov wasn't underqualified. Topenov is not unique here. Akimov and Tub and the others all had years of experience operating at Chernobyl and not just in the control room. Akimov started in the turbine hall before moving to the control room and eventually studying and working his way up to shift supervisor. Okay, so now that we've established that the operators are not inexperienced, we must consider that they're also accused of making several errors that set the reactor on the path to destruction. We've already done many, many videos going over how this isn't true, so let's try and speedrun it as quickly as possible. The widespread claims of operator error are based on the INSAG1 report created by the IAEA which is based on the testimony that Soviet scientists gave in Vienna in August of 1986. This report has been widely discredited and has been scrubbed from the IAEA website. The operators were accused of six major violations that led to the disaster. The first of these was knowingly violating the minimum number of control rods in the core, otherwise known as the operating reactivity margin. Not only were there no ways to observe this in the control room, meaning they could not knowingly violate it unless they were able to calculate the insertion of 211 control rods with respect to local differences in power. But the violating value of 68 instead of the minimum permissible value of 15 was taken at 12230, more than a minute before the shutdown button AZ 5 was pressed. This data was recorded during a sudden influx of colder feed water into the core which necessitated the removal of control rods to compensate for reduced boiling in the core. After this ended, boiling in the core resumed and control rods were inserted to compensate. Furthermore, during the process of the rundown, a further reduction in the flow of water through the core would result in more control rod insertion to compensate for increased boiling. By the time the AZ 5 button was pressed, the OM was likely close to, if not greater than the minimum value of 15. The second violation they were accused of was going below the minimum power value specified in the rundown program of 700 megawatt which was supposedly banned because it made the reactor more unstable. Neither of these statements are true. The value was chosen because the program was essentially a copy paste of the same rundown experiment procedures going back to 1983 during which other experiments required the power to be at around 700 megawatt. The claim that going below 700 megawatt was banned came from speeches by Soviet scientists who never provided physical documentation of it. This is because they made it up and there was no minimum power level. Hell, regulations actually dealt with scenarios where power went below 700 megawatt. 700 megawatt also did not make the reactor more unstable. Based on this report, this value appears in countless official documents that the power coefficient of an RBMK turned positive at low powers, as in a change in power would result in a further change in power in that same direction. In fact, the power coefficient was recorded as positive in Chernobyl unit 4 at 3,100 megaww less than 48 hours before the explosion. The third violation is the connection of all main circulation pumps which while following the program of the experiment supposedly broke several rules and the forces inside the pump caused by the increased flow rates caused them to approach cavitation. Like the power reduction violation, this supposed rule was not actually in any documentation. Soviet scientists just made it up to accuse the operators of another violation and make them look more guilty. Violation 4 is the blocking of a turbine trip protection signal at 1234 a.m. to prevent the reactor shutting down during the rundown. They even attached a note in inagan that the trip would have saved the reactor. Not only was this not a violation and actually a requirement in the official documents and procedures, they also moved the timing of the blocking of the trip from 41 minutes past midnight to less than a minute before the explosion to make the operators look more guilty and appear as if the scientists had put every possible roadblock in the way of the disaster. Violation five is the blocking of protection signals for the water level and steam pressure going below the set point in the separator drums. A mouthful, I know. As it turns out, the opposite is true. They didn't enable them, which was, you guessed it, in accordance with operating procedures. It turns out that the designers had instead not created an automatic shutdown for the steam separator level values because they expected the operators to manually control the set point to prevent shutdowns. And the values they reached that night did not breach any rules. Yet again, they moved the timing of this from 36 minutes past midnight to 19 minutes past 1 to make it look like they were breaking every rule the designers had put in their way. Lastly, the operators were accused of disabling the emergency core coolant system, a system that dumped cold water in the core to mitigate a severe accident to prevent it from interfering with the experiment. claiming it would have reduced the scale of the accident. Yes, they did disable this protection, but even in Insag 1, they admit it had no effect on the disaster. And in SAG 7, it was further clarified that no emergency signals were ever registered that would have triggered the emergency core coolant system to be activated, rendering it redundant in the scale of the accident. Furthermore, the operation regulations allow the ECCS to be disabled if the chief engineer of the power plant gave permission, which he did by signing off on the rundown experiment, which requires it. Leaving it out of operation for almost 12 hours before the rundown began due to the 2pm key of delay was not in the operating procedures and probably does count as a violation but not a violation against those accused of being incompetent such as Toptonov Amov and the others on the shift stall your Chuck and Kersian bomb and everyone else in the room. And that's time. I can't see how long that was right now, but probably longer than I hoped. For those who don't know, the videos that cover this sort of information are written not by me, but by Bobby. Bobby, I hope I haven't upset you with this speedrun, but in case I have, here's a picture of the questioning cat. Alongside claims of the incompetency of the operators is that the man supposedly running the room that night, Anatoli Diatloof, was pressuring them into committing these heinous acts that brought the reactor to an explosive end. As you can tell, these heinous acts don't exist. But let's dedicate a few minutes to examine how Diatlov is not the evil person that history and especially popular media have prescribed him to be. First of all, there are claims that Diatlov was in charge of running the room that night. Simply put, he wasn't. Despite being the deputy chief engineer, Diatlov was not actually able to influence the controlling of the reactor. It all fell to Akimov. There are reports that there was an argument between Diatlov and Akimov just after midnight, but this comes from one person, Yuri Treub, who never actually heard what was said. So, let's look at some witness testimony from the control room specifically about this. Some from TUB and some from another witness, Sergey Gazin. Yuri Tub. Up until the accident, there were no conversations in a raised voice with individuals of the operating staff and no dissatisfaction expressed with the power drop. There were also no attempts to remove Leodin Topnov from operation and he carried out his official duties for the duration of the shift. After the drop in power, the automatic regulator was switched on and per the command of the unit shift supervisor, Alexander Akimov, who I believe was in agreement with you and the station shift supervisor, the increase to 200 megawatt was commenced. I did not notice anything that could be interpreted as disagreement over the increase in power. Sergey Gazin. Before the accident, I didn't hear any words spoken in a raised tone of voice, only instructions regarding the experiment per the program. During the power drop, I approached the SIUR panel and saw that as far as I could tell, Toptonov was working hard to raise and stabilize power. I saw nothing resembling attempts to remove or replace Leonid Toptonov or pressure from you on Alexander Kimov and Leonid Toptonov allegedly refusing to raise power after the drop or discontent as a result of the drop. I believe such a situational conflict in the control room would not be unnoticed. To this day, nobody from the control room that night has ever given any testimony that Diatlov pressured anyone to do anything. And why would he? Their actions were deemed not to be in violation of procedures, and if anything, the logical thing to do with the challenge they faced that night. Diatlov was innocent and simply scapegoed by the Soviet government as the highest ranking person in the room at the time. So, where did the myth come from? It turns out that like many myths we're going to encounter further on, this came from a man named Gregori Medvidev, who was part of the government commission that handled the liquidation of the Chernobyl disaster and as mentioned earlier covered it up. Medvidev was at the time a researcher at the Hydra Project Research Institute who also took up writing fictional novels about nuclear power and especially nuclear accidents. Flash forward to the late 80s when the Insag 1 scenario was already in mass contention in the West without the work of Insag 7 which fully debunked it. They needed a good story that they could publish to the masses. So they turned to Gregori Medvidev, already an author and involved with the coverup, who creates, in my opinion anyway, an incredible story. The story requires the operators to mess up and Datloff to pressure the operators because it is interesting, because it makes the story make sense. Akimov and Toptonov were both dead and Datalov was in jail at this point in time. They were unable to defend themselves. And so Medvidev's book, The Truth About Chernobyl, rocketed into popularity and critical acclaim, winning prizes around the globe, including the Los Angeles Times. That same month it was published in the west. April of 1991, the Steinberg commission that formed the basis of the debunking of the last myth was published in the USSR, effectively debunking Medvidev's book. It wouldn't be published in English as part of Insac 7 until November 1992, one year after Medvadev's book won the LA Times's Prize for Science and Technology. But it didn't matter because that story had taken root and went on to serve as the basis for many other major books about the disaster. Perspeds a blaze, Andrew Lever's Chernobyl 12340 and Adam Higinovven's Midnight in Chernobyl all ground their buildup to the disaster in this book. And so the lies keep getting repeated and translated into films and TV shows and documentaries and repeated in classrooms around the planet. Myth seven, the power surge before AZ 5. To cement the myth that operator incompetence led to the disaster. Instead of designer error, it is necessary for the power surge to be moved back in time before the operators press the shutdown button. And so this myth gets bundled in and perpetuated with the others as part of the story. This myth can be simply debunked by asking the operators in the control room if they witnessed a power surge before or after AZ 5 was pressed. According to Datlov, he saw Leonid Toptonov press the AZ 5 button and then the emergency signals for the power surge appeared. That is also another hole in the myth as any emergency signals would trigger an automatic scram without operator intervention at which point the reactor would explode. But I know people are still likely not to be 100% trusting of Datlov. So let's ask some other people. Here's another witness. When the revolutions of the turbo generator slowed to the level called for by the program, Akeov made a command to shut down the reactor, which was done by the control panel operator. After some period of time, how many seconds passed, I don't know. I don't remember. A humming noise started. How about the testimony of another person in the control room, Gennedy Meteno? With turbine revolutions at 25,500, the SIB gave the command to shut down the reactor. About 20 seconds later, with revolutions at 2100, the explosion occurred. In another interview with the KGB, Metleno stated he actually meant a Kimov, the shift supervisor, not Staluch. PS Iub corroborating the testimony of Datlov and Davletv. How this myth was created and sold to the world is fascinating. The Soviets did not actually fabricate any data when they presented it to Vienna, but they did manipulate an excise some that didn't fit their narrative. Victor Demitriv, one of the investigators of the Chernobyl disaster from 1986, actually showed how this was done. This is a graph showing the reactor power recorded in an analog fashion on what is called the SFKRE device. Let's clear it up a bit. Okay, what do you see? The power is stable until AZ 5 is pressed and then there's a dip down just before the power surge. This is after AZ 5 is pressed. The initial insertion of the control rods causes the power to decline before the graphite displacers cause the power surge and eventual explosion. So, let's zoom in. If you look almost imperceptible and certainly invisible when zoomed out, there is what appears to be a subtle rise in power just before the dip down. So the government commission investigators working for the Kachart Institute cut off the initial decrease in power by zooming in more. And suddenly it looks as if the power was growing just before the AZ 5 button was pressed. Boom. You have an intense power surge that makes the operators look guilty and was the result of actions just before AZ 5 was pressed. Myth eight, the control rods jammed. Okay, this myth was originally not going to be in the video. However, I decided to include it when this appeared on Reddit while I was making the script. I'm not exactly sure where this myth comes from, but I know it, for example, appears in the HBO TV miniseries where rupturing fuel channels destroy the channels that the control rods move in, preventing them from moving further downwards. The consequence of this is the graphite is stuck in the core, causing endless acceleration. Keep in mind that all of this is wrong. It's just average HBO misunderstanding. So, let's take a look at a few things here. Number one, the control rods in an RBMK move at a very slow speed, 0.4 m/s. The graphite displacers are themselves 4 and 1/2 m long. This means it would take more than 10 seconds for the displacers to fully descend. And even then, there's 40 cm of the top of the displacers still in the core. So, the idea that the control rods jammed and made the scenario worse is completely bogus. But how could the control rods become jammed in the first place? Let's look at the layout of the core real quick. The control rods are in different channels to the fuel in individual blocks of graphite. That's 25 cm of solid graphite that the fuel channel needs to shatter through in such a way to precisely crush a control rod channel and prevent downward movement. It's unlikely for one to occur, let alone so many that it has a significant impact on the power surge. And for the record, I'm not claiming that a fuel channel didn't rupture, as this did certainly occur. It's just the consequences of it that I think have been muddled up. Let's look at it another way. The control rods were observed by witnesses to have descended somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way in before the explosion at which point they froze. According to the recording instruments in the control room, these cellins here. Now, it takes the control rods almost 18 seconds to descend fully. 1/4 of 18 is 4 1/2 seconds and 1/3 is 6 seconds. Makes sense. We know that the reactor was destroyed between those two points in time. 4.5 and 6 seconds after the AZ 5 button was pressed. In other words, those control rods kept moving down all the way into those 4.5 and 6 seconds before destruction. They didn't stop moving because they were jammed. They stopped moving because they and the control rod drives lowering them into the core no longer existed to keep moving. The irony of this myth is that it makes the Soviet design look safer. As if the control rods jamming due to the power surge caused it to reach explosive levels. And if the control rods had just kept moving, it could have been avoided. In reality, those control rods kept moving until the end, but it just wasn't fast enough. Myth nine, bouncing reactor caps. Everyone here has heard of this. Peravoschenko is supposed to have looked down upon the reactor core and saw the caps over the reactor bouncing up and down and then he runs to warn the control room. This story is just completely untrue. In reality, Peravoschenko was in the control room minutes before the experiment began, which is corroborated by several people. Witness testimony on screen now. Nobody was in the reactor hall to see them bounce, and it is also physically impossible to do that as described. If we look under the caps, we can see why. There are two things you will find down here. The large objects are the drives of the control rods. These are secured to a plate above the reactor with an airtight section for the belt used to raise and lower the control rod and the aluminium support stem of the control rod. At this time, water is being pushed out of the channel by the graphite displacers, reducing the amount of pressure in the channel. For the caps to bounce, the control rods would have to be completely destroyed and the plate above the reactor fail. Keep in mind that this is not the upper biological shield and is protected from the pressure and stress inside the reactor. The smaller pipes are the tops of the fuel channels. Now, these here may seem like it is possible for the caps to bounce, but above the fuel rods is a steel plug that is used to seal the channel when they're not being refueled. This prevents the pressure from escaping. So, if it was to become damaged, you wouldn't see the cap itself bouncing, but a continuous stream of pressure being released, looking like a geyser. But if you really want to debunk the story, you need to look no further than the supposed sole witness of the event, Valeri Peravoschenko and his now infamous run. If Peravoschenko looks down from above on the reactor a second after AZ 5 is pressed and sees the caps bouncing, he has to run all the way to the stairwell at the opposite end of the reactor hall, descend it, and then make his way to the closest exit out of the reactor hall. All in 4 seconds or so before the reactor explodes. After consulting the floor plans and some images of the reactor hall, we can roughly estimate he would have to run 150 m in 4 seconds or he'd be dead in the explosion. This is about 37 1/2 m a second or 11% the speed of sound. There are no doors up here to escape off and I don't fancy his odds of jumping that far down, not breaking his legs and still escaping through a doorway. Myth debunked. Where does this myth come from? You guessed it, Gregori Medvidev. He clearly didn't think that the story of the explosion was interesting enough and so decided to move the timing of the explosion to 12358 in the morning about 10 to 13 seconds after the reactor was completely destroyed according to seismic data as well as the computers in the reactor building and placed Peravoschenko in an unservivable situation for the drama. The problems with this story must have become apparent to the writer of HBO, Craig Maisin, when he was making the miniseries. Per the original script to episode 5, the story of Peravoschenko is amended to have him jump dramatically through a doorway in the reactor hall during the explosion, which somehow doesn't vaporize him. Anyway, however, when they went to film the scene, poor Peravoschenko didn't have a door to jump through from the balcony, so instead he must run dramatically for the stairs. Somehow, Medvidev completely bungled the layout of the building as well. Myth 10, the blue beam. After the explosion, many people seem to think that a giant beam of blue light, almost like a search light, was emanating from the reactor hall. What this was, nobody seems to know. Some say the tranov effect, others say radiation ionizing the air. None of them certain. This myth comes from a misinterpretation of what one man saw. This man is Alexander Yvchenko who was having a smoke break during the explosion and wound up thrusted into a rescue operation trying to save two men that night, Gennady Rosenowski and Valeri Hodomchuk. Between these, Yvchenko also helped try to restart the emergency core coolant system which they abandoned due to the rising water in the room. Then they looked outside and saw what he later described as this. From where I stood, I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light caused by the ionization of the air. It was light bluish and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. So, case closed, right? Myth confirmed. Not exactly. Ychenko was stood about here, very close and very low to the building. This severely distorted his perspective of the disaster, making it hard to discern how high up the beam was. Compare this to the description given by firefighters who arrived to battle the blaze. Leonid Chavey described what he saw a few seconds after the explosion as this. So the station is fully lit. From the block itself, a red pillar, further a blue-shaped one, and above a black mushroom cloud. Gregori Hamel, who arrived at the power station around 20 minutes later, saw that the flame was burning like a cloud, a red flame. And by the time Major Leonit Talynikov arrived, taking command over from Pravik, he does not see any red clouds. Despite climbing up on the roof to have a look himself, the roof was on fire at the top in one place, another a third. When I got up, I saw that it was burning in five places on the third block. The eyewitness GN Petro a Pryyat resident who worked at the power station drove up to only a 100 meters away from unit 4. When he arrived he described that quote the flame was higher than the stack. That is it reached a height of about 170 m above the ground. End quote. He later says that objects at the top of the building, like the steam separators, were reflecting a red glow, giving us a color to the flame. At this point, it should be apparent that the blue glow seen outside the building was a very short-lived thing. Not a giant death ray or a laser beam, but likely some form of air ionization from the pulverized fuel of the reactor being thrown up during the explosion. carried away by the wind and the hot air rising up from underneath. After that, the blue glow was confined to the reactor hall, visually seen by firefighter Vladimir Pravik and plant worker Valeri Peravoschenko. the giant blue beam debunked. But there is some semblance of this big beam, just not as described exactly and not in the early hours of April 26th, but the late ones. This beam was not blue, but purple. This was witnessed by several people both from the government commission and residents of Pryyat, but I think it was best described by none other than Valeri Lagassov, who saw it as he and a convoy of vehicles drove by the scene on their way to Pryyat that evening. When we were just nearing Pryyat, about 8 to 10 km from it, I was struck by the appearance of the sky. It was like mulbury or even crimson maybe glowing above the station which made it absolutely unlike how it should be in a nuclear power station. It is known that nuclear power stations are very clean and accurate with all their facilities and pipes which usually don't output anything visible into the air. And a nuclear station for a specialist is usually an object that doesn't produce any gases. This is its distinctive feature if we exclude some specific facilities. But this one looked like a metallergical factory or a giant chemistry plant with a huge crimson glow over half the visible sky. This was very disturbing and made the situation very unusual. In a later interview, Legassovv attributes this to the reflection of glowing graphite. More on that in another myth. Myth 11, the bridge of death. A lot of people retell the story of the so-called bridge of death, a railway bridge at the entrance to the city of Pryyat. The legend goes that in the early hours after the explosion, many of the residents of Pryyat gathered on the bridge to watch the nuclear power plant burn through the night. This is also closely tied to the previous myth. But as we know, the people were not seeing a giant laser beam of death. To this day, not a single person has ever actually claimed they were on that bridge that night, nor that they know someone who was on the bridge. There are stories of people going on other bridges throughout the day. But nobody specifically mentions that bridge, and they refer to others further east or south. On the morning of April 26th, people did walk over it, but to catch buses. A police officer on the bridge had his clothes measured for radiation, recording several runons per hour. However, the overall radiation levels on the bridge were much lower, at most 300 millron per hour. So, why did nobody actually go look? I know most people like to go watch things burn from a distance. I am British and we do have bonfire night. But apparently Pryat slept through the powerful explosion at night and just didn't know until morning. Turns out that's just how people lived around RBMK power plants. Every time the reactors were shut down, steam would be discharged out of the building, accompanied by a loud bang. When you live next door to an RBMK with semi-frequent shutdowns, the bangs stop being out of the ordinary. And when everyone knows someone who works at the power plant and that unit 4 is going to be shut down in a few days. Well, that's even less reason to be concerned. Quick fun fact, or not so fun, actually. The name The Bridge of Death seems to predate the disaster. According to former residents, the bridge earned its name due to frequent vehicle accidents caused by the steep ramps up to the bridge in both directions and a particularly nasty motorcycle accident. There is also a story of unfortunate stalkers, the illegal visitors to the exclusion zone who were looting Pryat and unfortunately were ran over by a military vehicle entering the city through that bridge. May they rest in peace. Myth 12, a botched evacuation. A lot of people criticize the evacuation of Pryyat as being slow and needlessly exposing people to harmful amounts of radiation. It is completely true that residents were exposed to elevator levels, some more than others. Remember Mr. Petro from the Blue Beam myth? Later that day, one of his neighbors decided to go sunbathing on the roof of the apartment building and came back down for a drink later, surprised at how well he was tanning and how his skin was giving off a burning smell. Needless to say, he was taken by ambulance to Pryyat Hospital number 126 that evening, joining the growing number of Chernobyl MPP workers, first responders, and other residents who were unfortunate enough to receive a significant radiation dose. However, they were anomalies. Overall, radiation levels in the city of Pryyat were significantly lower than they could have been, owing to the wind directions on April 26th, blowing far west of Pryyat and into mostly uninhabited marshland before turning north. Radiation levels were so low, in fact, that the representatives of the Ministry of Health refused to sign an evacuation order on April 26th as they were far below the legal requirements that mandated evacuation. Eventually, the head of the commission at that time, Boris Shabina, overruled them and ordered the evacuation. Before then, however, the residents of Pryyat were not being kept in the dark about the accident. That would be impossible given how many people worked or knew someone who worked at the power plant. The local government had already taken action to spray down the streets to wash away contamination and lower the radioactivity. For example, when children were sent home from school at lunchtime, they were given iodine tablets and people were advised to close their windows at home, not to eat the food they bought that day, and deep clean their apartments. To complete the evacuation, the government commission called on every resource available. To put it into perspective, 1,390 buses with 195 in reserve, 223 cars, several trains, and hydrooils on the Pryyat River were all organized to transport the residents of Pryyat in just a few hours. At 10 minutes past 1, a message was broadcast announcing that residents had to prepare for evacuation at 2 p.m. And by 4:30, 49,360 residents of the city of Prepyat and 254 from the nearby village of Yaniv had been completely evacuated from the city. This evacuation was one of the quickest and most successful evacuations of its time, especially when compared to other nuclear accidents. For example, let's look at the evacuation following the 2011 disaster at Fukushima Dichi. As has been reported in analyses after the fact, the evacuation of the surrounding area was crippled by miscommunication, lack of planning, and especially no proper evacuation plan for the sick or elderly, which is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 2,22 people, while extending the average lifespan of the evacuees by an estimated less than 12 weeks. In comparison, the 80 patients at Pryyat were evacuated by a convoy of ambulances and buses. The Soviets had experience in these mass evacuations from, for example, the Kishtim disaster, but they did make one significant mistake. They parked their buses right next to the nuclear power plant and on the bridge of death, which caused the buses to become contaminated. and trains were also not decontaminated after the fact, leading to radioactive particles from Chernobyl to be carried across the country with not insignificant levels being reported. [Music] Myth 13. Bombing the reactor actually accomplished something. For several years after the disaster, the Soviet Union maintained that the heroic actions of the helicopter pilots helped save the day by burying the reactor in sand and boron, suppressing the release of radiation from the building. This is referenced in several official reports on the disaster, from the 1986 Soviet report to the 1991 international report on the consequences of the disaster. As it turns out, the bombing runs were actually almost completely useless for several reasons. First of all, they were coordinating these helicopter runs from the roof of the hotel in Pryyat, several kilometers away. The pilots couldn't spend a long time over the destroyed building for obvious reasons, and so they turned into runs where they couldn't afford to line themselves up or go for a second attempt. The drops were therefore highly inaccurate and some missed the reactor hall entirely. One, for example, crashed into the roof south of the vent stack, creating this hole liquidators would later use to access the roof. Another one punched a hole straight through the roof of reactor hall 3, seen here. But most importantly is that the helicopter pilots weren't even aiming for the reactor. For days after the disaster, a large area of glowing material was visible inside the reactor hall. What this was remains to be confirmed. It was either some smoldering graphite or the remains of the flammable bitchmen roof still light. It became known as the red glow. And on the evening of April 26th, it is assumed that this is what turned the sky crimson. The glow was in fact almost a dozen meters away from the upturn lid, but was confused for being the glow inside the reactor. And so the glow became buried under tons of material and has never been identified. Even if the pilots had been aiming for the reactor, it wouldn't have accomplished much. The inside of the core was completely shielded by the upturn lid, preventing material from entering the reactor core. In other words, their attempts would ultimately be entirely in vain, something that several scientists on site would remark in despair. Until 1989, workers inside the sarcophagus searched for any trace of the lead that the helicopter pilots dropped before concluding that none of it actually reached the nuclear fuel. The Soviets would first accidentally admit that the bombing runs failed in a BBC Horizon documentary where the narrator says, "The military attempted to bomb the reactor with neutron absorbers and other chemicals. Several pilots flew straight through an invisible plume of radioactive particles and died soon after. Despite their valiant efforts, almost no neutron absorbers got into the core. Despite scientist and author of many articles on the disaster, Alexander Boravoy confirming in 1990 to the IAEA that the bombing runs had no effect. the IAEA instead maintained that the bombing runs were effective and successfully suppressed the release of radiation. This has led to growing confusion over the decades since the disaster. In the end, the unfortunate truth is that all that bombing the reactor did was needlessly expose helicopter pilots to high doses of radiation. And that is hardly an accomplishment. Myth 14. The megaton explosion. A very common myth that appears in so many books and documentaries and shows about Chernobyl is the myth of the megaton explosion. The story goes that scientists believed the melting fuel at Chernobyl would enter the flooded steam suppression corridors, otherwise known as bubbler pools, under the reactor. The commission was terrified, believing that when the fuel entered the water, it would result in a sudden mass evaporation, causing an explosion larger than a megaton bomb. The explosion would vaporize the other reactors, dispersing most of their radioactive contents across much of Ukraine, Bellarus, the Baltics, Western Russia, and most of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia in general. In short, one of the worst events to occur in the history of humanity. To stop it, the scientists called in three engineers to help drain the pools, at great risk to their life and saving the world. Despite claims they all died, all three survived after hospitalization, and two of them are still alive today. As it turns out, only the ending of this frankly terrifying tale is true. First of all, scientists at Chernobyl were not concerned of a giant explosion. Apparently, this myth has been floating around since the first year after the disaster with even Valeri Lagassov saying in his tapes, quote, I want to stress that out once more. We remove the water just to avoid massive evaporation. It was absolutely clear to us that no explosion was possible. Only evaporation that would carry out radioactive particles. That is all. This mass evaporation is what they actually feared. The fuel hitting the water and causing it to boil. The steam taking with it large volumes of radioactive particles and causing a necessary evacuation of the site. As it turns out, they were too late to prevent the fuel hitting the water. Anyway, we know this because of some very special corium, the solidified remains of the nuclear fuel mixed with the sand that once shielded the reactor around the sides and concrete. When it hit the water, it instantly cooled into a pummus-like rock and floated on the surface of the water until it was drained. When workers investigated these rooms, they found these masses in places where it would only be possible if they had bobbed over to them. The three divers were not actually at risk, it turns out. Aside from a possible brief encounter with cororeium on their way to the valves, the water they waited through to reach the valves was in fact not that radioactive, the values were so low that one diver, anenko, literally forgot the number. Furthermore, due to the fact that firefighters had drained most of the water out of the area, the water level was below their knees, and they were able to walk along a pipe to keep it below their ankle for the most part. There were other divers who did face much deeper waters during the Chernobyl disaster. Before Anenko, Baspalov, and Banov drained the bubbler pools, one of their superiors, Igor Kazachkov, who actually supervised the day shift of unit 4 on April 25th, waded into water up to his chest to confirm the valves were there and not damaged in the explosion. And there have been other diving operations at Chernobyl going all the way back to April 26th. These heroics are largely ignored by history. Myth 15. The miners prevented a worse disaster. Another big myth about the disaster is that the work of the miners was critical to preventing a worse disaster by mining under the core to install a nitrogen-based heat exchanger, preventing the fuel from escaping under the plant and into the groundwater. The IAEA praised their actions, mentioning that the heat exchanger helped to stabilize the situation, which the Soviets in 1986 also claimed. In reality, the heat exchanger had been reduced to a simple water-based one and was never actually turned on because by the time it was finished and ready for use, it was June 28th and the meltdown itself had ended on May 10th, a little over 7 weeks earlier. Perhaps a bigger indictment of how useless this was is that they began mining around May 13th after the meltdown had ended and at which time the government commission already knew it had as the radioactive releases had long since ended. The tunnel was then filled in with concrete. The pipes were tested with water to see if they could withstand the pressure and wouldn't leak. And then the heat exchanger was abandoned under the building. Perhaps some irony in this myth can be found in that it occurred because of another myth. You see, before the miners were called in on May 4th, Legassov had officially been replaced at Chernobyl by Evan Ryazansv who brought along with him another man, Evan Valhov. The two men, Leassov and Valhov, were bitter rivals, but that is for a different video. Anyway, it turns out that Valhov was obsessed with the American movie The China Syndrome and had become fixated on the idea that nuclear fuel could make its way through the bubble of pools and into the ground leading to a contamination of the groundwater. Despite knowing that calculations showed this could not happen unless the nuclear fuel was fisioning in a relatively compact area which by that point was impossible. Valhov pushed Ryazansv to begin mining under the reactor. According to Legassovv in his memoirs of the accident, most people in the commission were only on board with the idea solely to use the miners as guinea pigs. It would allow them to set up decontamination sites and practice cleaning vehicles, create infrastructure for building a shelter over the destroyed reactor, and get experience working on the site, knowing which vehicles could be used and which could not. And so in went the miners, watched over by Mikail Shadow, the minister of coal and a veteran miner, who did his best to ensure the safety of those working under the building. Even after the miners were sent in, Valhov was still obsessed with the idea and proposed digging under the debris in front of unit 4 to create another massive plate there just in case there was a large amount of fuel there that could burn through into the groundwater. Valhov suggested they bring in 10,000 subway miners to bore under there and create a new concrete plate. At this point, the rest of the government commission wrote several strongly worded letters to Rya Zansv and the project was abandoned. And then Valhov decided that because groundwater could be contaminated on the site and then escape into the Prepyat River nearby, they had to construct a giant concrete rectangle underground around the site. Instead, they dug nearly 1500 wells around the area and quickly determined the groundwater was never contaminated. Myth 16, Legassov, the truth teller. We've been mentioning Legasov a lot during the myths video, but it's time to turn on the myth that he told the truth, specifically about the causes of the disaster. As we all know well in Vienna, Legassov did not tell the truth about the disaster. However, many people believe that he did this unwillingly or worked until his death to create meaningful changes to improve the safety of the RBMKs. Neither of these claims are true. First of all, Legassov willingly lied to the Vienna meeting in 1986 and was in fact effectively the architect of the cover up to the West. This began before the meeting where the Soviets learned that the planned outcome of the Vienna meeting would have involved the Soviet Union effectively shutting down all RBMK reactors and paying reparations to the countries that the radiation cloud passed over. This would have effectively crippled the Soviet Union and brought its downfall 5 years earlier than it did in real life. In response, Legassov said they must fight it, which he did. He is one of the principal architects behind the myth of operator incompetence we debunked earlier and maintain these claims until his death, mentioning them in his famous tapes he recorded a little under a year before he died. And as we know, his speech at Vienna was successful. When he returned to Moscow, he ran up the steps of the Kachart Institute, his place of work, shouting victory. However, the government itself was not particularly interested in him after that, seeing him as having served his purpose. While Legato did not think they understood or appreciated what he had done for them, Legassov played no role in the attempts to make the RBMK safer. These were design choices quickly implemented from already existing plans and design choices less than a year after the disaster due to concern among the government of RBMK's blowing up across the western USSR. More on this in a bit. Legassov had no role in this and his colleagues at the Kachart Institute in fact rapidly turned against him. Why? Well, as one senior scientist at the Kachardov Institute put it, after Legassovv's death, Legassov was a clear representative of the scientific mafia whose political leanings instead of scientific leadership led to the Chernobyl accident. Reporters in the West dismissed this as jealousy. However, it is now known from other employees such as Alexander Ramyv at the Kachart Institute that Legasov actively and quite emphatically suppressed research into the RBMK and its behavior despite being told they were at risk of severe accidents. Myth 17. The sarcophagus was fully sealed. A number of people seem to have misinterpreted the purpose of the sarcophagus, believing that it is a sort of fully enclosed shield designed to prevent any radiation escaping the collapsed structure. This is not true. Its purpose was primarily to allow the other reactors on site to start up and reduce the exposure to the environment. When the structure was undergoing construction in 1986, one of the primary concerns was the decay heat produced by radioactive decay. This heat is what causes melted nuclear fuel to stay hot and be able to burn through concrete. If the sarcophagus had been a fully sealed structure, the heat would have built up and caused structural damage and some speculated even a meltdown. While a second meltdown was and still is nearly impossible, these risks were taken seriously. And the sarcophagus was designed with plenty of holes to allow for air to pass through the structure through convection. Some of these holes are so large that you could drive a car through them and allowed water to enter the building as well. When time came to build the new safe confinement, the amount of nuclear decay had significantly decreased and the goals shifted to the complete dismantling of reactor 4. This meant they could afford to create a hermetically sealed design, which was effective until the Russian drone strike in February of 2025. It is also worth pointing out that this drone strike has not resulted in local radiation increase despite concern. Myth 18. The USSR took years to update the RBMK's after the disaster. Semi-related to myth 16 here. A lot of people believe that it took years for the RBMKs to be modified and upgraded to prevent another Chernobyl style accident. In fact, RBMKs were constantly going through updates and modernizations. And one of the many upgrades making its way through the system was the addition of control rods that insert from the bottom to the emergency protection system, which calculations have shown would have prevented the disaster. When it became apparent that deficiencies in the reactor design were responsible for the Chernobyl disaster, the government commission acted fast and shut down the other reactors to implement major changes. The first of these was preventing the control rods from being fully extracted to remove the water columns at the bottom of the core, which prevented the reactor runaway that caused the explosion. Rules were tightened and a measuring device that showed the operators how many control rods were in the core was finally installed in the control room, giving them a live reading. Operating rules were tightened to prevent operation at low powers and limit other factors that contributed to the explosion and measures were taken to increase subcooling in the core. All of this was done in 1987 before the gasov's death. For the operators, this gave them enough information to work out what happened in the control room and that the government was lying to them when they claimed it was operator error that was responsible. It's difficult to say where this myth comes from other than that it makes Legasov's death more important to the story of Chernobyl sanctifying him as a hero and casting shadowy KGB officers as villains in the story people who don't exist fully clearing the names of the scientists to avoid any culpability in the mind of the public. Myth 19. The core is still full of fuel. After the disaster, a lot of people believe that the reactor core was itself full of nuclear fuel, melted altogether at the bottom of the core like it was after the 3mile island accident or the Fukushima disaster of 2011. This couldn't be further from the truth, which came much to the shock of the people exploring the inside of the building. After the discovery of the elephant's foot, the scientists inside the sarcophagus began to hypothesize that more of the fuel actually escaped the reactor vessel like this. To confirm it, they decided to drill more than 70 holes into the concrete walls around the reactor. This took place over a period of 3 years. The operation performed slowly to prevent structural risk. And while they were doing this, they took bets on what they would find in there. Everyone agreed they would find most of the fuel still inside the reactor core. Of course, a lot of damaged fuel rods and the like, similar to what they'd seen in previous accidents, but no significant damage to the reactor, aside from the upper biological shield being blown off. When the bore holes were complete and they could finally look in the reactor, what they saw instead was an empty reactor core. Almost everything had been either ejected upwards in the explosion or melted and flowed out in the subsequent meltdown. In fact, the lower biological shield had fallen downwards 4 m through its own supports and 1/3 of the steel and serpentine structure that made it up around the southeast was melted completely through. What is peculiar about this is what was in the core instead. Aside from a few graphite blocks, there are these concrete panels which actually came all the way from up in the reactor hall. Somehow, these panels that once divided the reactor hall and steam separators were blown inwards during the explosion and landed inside the reactor before the upper biological shield came crashing back down on top. because they're lying on the lower biological shield. We can also assume that the graphite blocks and fuel that was once there was either entirely thrown out of the reactor during the explosion or escaped underneath. Given these cover almost all of the lower biological shield, it's safe to say that most of the fuel and reactor itself disappeared during the explosion, or these concrete panels would probably have been melted. What actually happened in those last couple seconds is a huge mystery. Some papers suggest that the nuclear fuel pulled together in that melted third of the lower biological shield for several days. And when it burned through the lower biological shield, it melted the supports as well, causing it to collapse on its own base. Others, including veteran sarcophagus workers, believe that the lower biological shield was forced down and melted through during the disaster, with much of the fuel ending up in the sub reactor space. Regardless of which theory is true, we can confidently say that after 1:24 a.m., there was almost none of Chernobyl reactor 4 still inside the reactor shaft. Myth 20. Radioactive mutants roam the exclusion zone. Tales abound of monsters that roam the now almost abandoned Chernobyl exclusion zone. Their DNA mutated by prolonged exposure to radiation. This varies from the dogs that live around the nuclear power plant to the wolves and bears and moose and deers and the horses that all live in the area. Studies, however, suggest otherwise. First of all, they're not typically significantly radioactive. For example, in this study of the radioactive contamination of dogs in the exclusion zone, more than half did not have detectable levels of cesium 137, which according to the paper is the only radioactive isotope associated with Chernobyl that they can detect. For those that are contaminated, it has been calculated that the risk they pose to humans is negligible. The most common mutation that animals are likely to pick up tend to be an adaptation to cancer or the radiation. We see this in the wolves where studies have shown that over several generations there have been an increase in the number of animals in the population expressing genes associated with cancer resistance in humans. Frog species have seen an increase in melanin, turning them a darker shade. These are not mutants. They're ordinary animals adapting to the environment. Overall, as you can see, it's not true to compare these animals to radioactive mutants. These animals are simply animals adapting to changes in their environment, not monsters. And of course, a lot of the supposed monsters caught on camera are fake. Perhaps the most famous fake mutant is from a now deleted YouTube video from years ago of what appears to be a headless moose running across the train tracks under the bridge of death. The comments were very diverse in opinion on what it could be or what the explanation was for this video. Some think that the animal was just facing away from the camera, had been injured in some way, or really was a mutant that had lost its head. You can even see several content creators comment on this, believing the last option to be the case. It's not actually a mutant, of course. The truth is, this is simple video editing. The original clip is from a 2005 tour of Chernobyl, still uploaded on YouTube. However, because the video is not in English, it is rather hard to find alongside the edited clip. Anyway, it turns out that the moose does have a head after all, the lucky animal. To create the clip, they reversed the first shot of the sarcophagus and then simply remove the fronts of the animals. The video continues to cycle on numerous video platforms and social media sites despite it being possible to debunk with a simple online translator if you don't know Russian and a quick YouTube search. But most people take information at face value or don't know how to properly research information. Which leads us onto myth 21. The elephant's foot is still melting. The final boss of modern Chernobyl myths. Many videos and factsharing pages online claim that the elephant's foot is still not only hot, but so hot it is burning through the basement of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. And when it does, it will find itself in the groundwater, causing either an explosion or contaminating the drinking water and causing another catastrophic nuclear disaster. First of all, the Soviets did prevent groundwater contamination all the way back in 1986 when they installed the concrete pad under the reactor. It's impossible for the elephant's foot to get down there. Second of all, the elephant's foot isn't in the basement of the building. It may be below the reactor, but the elephant's foot itself is 6 m above ground and has been since 1986. It's not dropping through the ground at all. And third of all, the meltdown ended in 1986, and since then, the radioactivity of the elephant's foot has only decreased as successive half- lives pass and radioactive atoms decay. As such, the elephant's foot is now effectively room temperature. That's not high enough to melt through the concrete or soil. In fact, as many overlook, the elephant's foot is falling apart today as beta decays alter the structure of the Cororean mass. Today, the elephant's foot is a shell of its former self, collapsing into a pile of sand and dust. These sorts of myths serve only to perpetuate fear about Chernobyl. They don't educate. They just scare and misinform. But that fear is what makes them so successful. And that's it. That's all 21 myths. From heroes to villains, mistakes and forgery, myths take all shapes and sizes. There are many, many more that I haven't covered, but I hope this teaches you that you should always verify information and to make sure that the next time you decide to share a piece of information that it's not another myth snaking up on the truth.