Chernobyl Disaster and Radiation Risks

During those 10 days, the area around the Chernobyl plant experienced the most significant uncontrolled radioactive release in human history. How dangerous was Chernobyl's radioactive fallout? And can it really be dangerous for millions or even billions of years? Radioactive waste that's produced 30 tons every year from every nuclear power plant in the world will last For a million years must be isolated from the ecosphere for a million years, which is a physical and scientific impossibility You may feel like the show had almost nothing to do with your real life. After all, it's about a tragedy that took place a long time ago, all the way across the world in a different political system. And if this radioactive death cloud was measured all over Europe, how dangerous was it? in real terms. But could it happen here? To understand the likelihood of a meltdown in the U.S., Wired caught up with nuclear historian Kate Brown from MIT. And further, if when Chernobyl melted down, it melted down into a blob which is then solidified on cooling. My name is Kate Brown and I'm a professor of science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And I study environmental history and that cracks a pool of the water. drains out these spent fuel rods will start to heat up and once they start to heat up they'll start to perhaps go critical and they could cause explosions explosions that would you know make Chernobyl look like a picnic. How could this possibly poison a continent? To burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead. Well in order to understand this you've got to understand how radiation gets you and once you understand that it's actually pretty easy to avoid it. being gotten. So first of all, I'm going to give you a rough energy scale. Your body mostly runs on chemical bond breaking type energies. Those are about electron volt or something. Don't worry too much about what it is. It's just a yardstick. So splitting a nuclei here can release about a million times more energy than this, about a mega electron volt of energy or enough energy to break a million chemical bonds. Now, a factor of a million. is actually quite a lot. That's the difference between traveling at the speed of sound, at 300 meters per second, and the speed of light, about 300 million meters per second. Or it's the difference between saying the average lifespan of a human is about 70 years, or 70 million years, which would mean that the people who were born in the age of the dinosaurs would only just about now be dying out. So a single radioactive decay like. like this can break about a million chemical bonds. Now that's actually pretty bad news for biology because those high energy particles breaking a million chemical bonds can damage your cells enough to cause cell death. Now that's not a showstopper for your body. You have cell death in your body all the time. So what happens is those cells spill their guts into your body and your metabolism cleans it up. The problem is if you get too many cells dying, at once. It really is just in many ways like a regular burn. A little burn, no real problem. Your body will just clean away all the dead cells and you'll grow some new ones and you'll be okay. And the same is more or less true with the radiation burn, is that if you actually survive the burn, your body cleans away all the dead cells and you grow some new ones and you're okay. However, if your burn is too big, it can overwhelm your body and it can kill you. So if you just found out that radiation burns are just like regular burns just not confined to the surface of your skin then consider giving this video a thumbs up and subscribe to stay tuned for more like this. So how much does it actually take to kill you? Well about 500 rads will give you acute radiation sickness and kill most people. Two bars of weapons grade plutonium. All i have to do is bring these together criticality 5 000 as a whole body dose will always kill you and the only way you'll survive it is if it's only like you get your finger irradiated by a massive amount of radiation in which case your finger will sort of die and fall off but the rest of you will be mostly okay as a whole body dose forget about it and 50 will almost never kill you i mean you'll get some radiation burns some acute radiation sickness but it's unlikely to be fatal so how close to a nuclear bomb do you have to be to get 500 rads okay just so we know what we're talking about this is what would happen if you would drop a one megaton nuke on Manhattan. So that there is the fireball and that's complete destruction. Airblast 20 psi, that'll flatten basically anything. That's the radiation, the 500 rads. Then you get into the five bar pressure wave which will destroy most buildings and kill an awful lot of people. Then all the way out here. You're looking at third-degree burns if you're in the open. So yeah You've got to get pretty close to a big nuke to get the fatal radiation dose So with a megaton nuclear explosion of all the things that are immediately released by that explosion Radiation really isn't an issue the things you've got to really worry about if the nuclear explosion of the flash and the blast However, that's not the only thing that you got to worry about, because when you actually split up a nucleus, you get two decay products, two fission products, and those things are also radioactive and can give off a mega electron volt type particle. However, the nuke gave off all of that energy in a microsecond. For the decay products, it can take a variable amount of time from fractions of a second to millions of years for them to decay. and become a stable isotope. Now at this point we can do a cute little ballpark calculation of the total extra radiation that's created by nuclear power. So to a first degree approximation you start off with a radioactive nuclear say uranium-235. Now sure in this case it can decay several times on its own this big radioactive particle but we're going to ignore that for the sake of argument and we're going to split that up in a reactor and we're going to get two of them. fragments, both of which can release mega electron volt type particles. So in absolute terms, almost the worst case scenario is you're creating about twice as much radiation as you had to begin with. However, if you look at it in more detail, you find that the uranium, if you just left it in the ground, would generate a dozen or so mega electron volt type particles. However, if you burn it in a reactor, you split it into two and you harness the energy from that and the two particles that you're left with the fission products will decay once and then they'll be stable so in absolute terms of the total amount of radiation released you'll actually be reducing the total amount of radiation that will be released on earth and if you're thinking that's an interesting angle that i've never heard before then you can thank the patrons of this channel for supporting independent scientific media and if you want to join them in supporting this channel I'll leave some links below. However there's a twist here for the uranium it takes a billion or so years to release about half of that radiation. You know the uranium that you used to make the reactors or the bombs in the first place was dug out of the ground where it sat there for the entire earth's history without decaying once. I mean a half-life of a billion or so years. It's not that active. However, if the half-life is comparable to the human lifespan, it's going to give you a little more radiation. Now, further at this point, I should point out that, you know, there are different sorts of radiations. There are alphas and betas and gammas. Alphas and betas, which are typically the things given off by these decay products, are stopped. by a relatively small amount of shielding, whether it's a few meters of air or a few centimeters of soil, that sort of thing. They really don't have that much penetrating power. Gammas, on the other hand, have lots of penetrating power, but on the flip side, they don't interact with you much. So, you know, you can get gamma rays that go through your body and don't interact with you at all. But the downside is you can't screen them very easily. So outside of your body, These two key products are not that big of a deal if you get say covered in radioactive dust You know what you do is you take your exposed clothes off have a shower and you're more or less done. It's Not like HBO's Chernobyl where the slightest hole in your shoe and you're done comrade. Exceptional tracking shot that plays out in real time. The young man we focus on grows visibly weaker with each piece of graphite he disposes of. Uh, no. In reality, if you were getting that high of a dose that you're displaying symptoms within seconds, not only are you dead already, you'll be- doing well to get off the roof or out of the building at all. In reality, none of these people died from acute radiation sickness. So we know their dose was much lower than the 500 or so rads that is normally a lethal dose. And even at that, it would take hours to display any symptoms. Just when it looks like he's in the clear, the soldier notices a tear in his boot. It may be a small rip, It may have been a short amount of time, but at Chernobyl, even the tiniest mistake can spell out doom. Now, you take off your shoes and wash your feet and you'll be fine. I mean, the worst case scenario, there is a limit to how lethal a radiation burn on your toes can be. You're done. You see, by far the bigger concern here is getting radioactive material inside your body. because then you get that full whack of the radiation. So this is either you breathe the dust or you get it into your digestive system somehow, you eat or drink it. Well, not breathing it is fairly simple. You don't wanna breathe the dust, you just wear a respirator. And of course, once you get a certain distance from the plant, from the Chernobyl disaster, you find that there isn't that much dust because it's not that mobile in the environment, especially... once it's rained once or twice. I mean the dust really isn't that big of a deal now. Now not eating and drinking the stuff gets a little trickier. Obviously you're not going to eat the dust but what if that dust has been rained on and that's dissolved out some of these radioactive products? Well that's where the interesting stuff begins because once you split up the uranium you get these decay products and those behave like their element. So for instance radioactive cesium-137 behaves like regular caesium. Except sometime in the next 30 years, about half of it will radioactively decay. And the same is true with radioactive strontium, iodine, and barium. Well, there's something interesting about all of those elements. They're all pretty reasonable solids at room temperature. And sure, most of these things won't exist as the element, even in the reactor, but mostly as oxides or salts, which are even more solids than the elements you know cesium iodide is pretty much like rock salt the stuff you put on your potato chips you can put it on your kitchen table and it will sit there in perpetuity without really going anywhere so how did this spread all over europe well when chernobyl melted down it got really hot up to about 2000 degrees or something and at this sort of temperature things like cesium or cesium ions and iodine ions Become fairly volatile and they'll turn into gas really quite quickly, but almost immediately on leaving that hot mass They'll start to solidify so only a meter or so away from the core They will have cooled down enough since they'll start to condense as little particles and those little particles can be lifted up from the updraft from the hot reactor in fact if you want a nice example of how far things will go that boil at say a Thousand degrees when they get really hot I recently visited Marburg University where they distilled some rubidium which boils at about a thousand degrees and even under vacuum you get an idea of just how far these things will go when heated up to a few hundred degrees but if you want to see the full video of that I've got it up on the voice of thunder channel links below. Now what they found in things like Three Mile Island is most of that volatile nasty stuff actually doesn't go that far if you've got a secondary containment building. It all starts to condense out on the secondary containment. However the Russian design for Chernobyl was so socialistically perfect that they didn't need a secondary containment. So when Chernobyl blew up, most of that volatile stuff actually got out of the reactor. But just so you know, most of the uranium oxide stuff doesn't boil or get volatile at these sorts of temperatures. So it just sits there as a molten mass. But let's just say for the sake of argument that some of that uranium oxide got out. as dust too. Chernobyl is on fire and every atom of uranium is like a bullet. So these are now the nasties that we're going to look at that came out from Chernobyl. The radioactive cesium, strontium, iodine and let's say a uranium too. The uranium is just a complete non-event. It's got a half-life of about a billion years meaning that it's really not radioactive at all. But even if it were, uranium oxide is insoluble as death in almost everything. I mean, that's not that different from the rock you dug out of the ground in the first place, which, you know, where it had sat as a rock for probably millions of years to begin with. Unless you're literally eating the dirt, it's not so easy to get that in you. And even if you did, you have to eat about 100 grams of pure uranium. to get a sort of lethal radiation dose and at that point the chemical toxicity of uranium, which is similar to lead, will have killed you a long time before the radiation does. So a half-life of a billion years is really no problem. A half-life of one year means that it's about a billion times more radioactive, meaning the fatal dose isn't now 100 grams but about 100 billionths of a gram. Now The half-life of cesium isn't a year, it's about, let's say, 10 years. So that means that the lethal dose of cesium-137 is going to be about a millionth of a gram. This is why a lot of the people who died in the Chernobyl accident were the firefighters who ended up sort of poking around the exploded core. And at that point, it really isn't that far off a salt grain-sized particle of this sort of thing will kill you. So how much cesium... was released from Chernobyl? Well at this point we're going to switch to a unit called becquerels which is basically enough to give one disintegration per second. So they think that about half of the entire cesium-137 that was in Chernobyl was released into the environment which is some 80 000 terabecquerels. One gram of cesium releases about three terabecquerels so that's about two and a half thousand grams 25 kilos. 25,000 grams. But wait, I was just telling you that the lethal dose of this stuff was a millionth of a gram. One gram can kill a million people. So one kilogram could kill a billion people. So that means that there was enough cesium released from Chernobyl to kill about 25 billion people via acute radiation poisoning. That's twice as many people as live on Earth. What? have we done? Well, no, not quite so much. For more or less the same reason that nerve agents aren't as dangerous as you think. So you can take enough nerve agent to kill 30 million people and disperse it in the middle of a giant city. How many people do you think got killed? About eight. I did a whole video on why nerve agents really aren't as dangerous as you think they are. So most of that cesium-137 didn't go that far from the reactor because it falls out fairly locally and that gets high into the atmosphere that gets blown around much further and eventually it'll get washed out when it rains and that sort of thing. But let's take the worst case scenario where we disperse all of that 25 kilos of cesium-137 over Ukraine. Just the Ukraine. I want to dilute it too much. So you recall that the fatal radiation dose for acute radiation sickness of caesium-137 was about one microgram. So how much is now on average on one square meter of the Ukraine? About one twentieth of a microgram. So you would have to get every single atom of caesium-137 from 20 square meters, get it all into one place and then eat it all in one go to get a fatal radiation dose. And I should stress this is the absolute worst case scenario using very pessimistic ballpark numbers. You go through the calculations using the real numbers and you get a fatal dose of cesium that's nearer to one thousandth of a gram rather than a millionth of a gram. Yeah it's actually quite easy to lose an order of magnitude or two when you're making crude assumptions like all radioactive decays give off about a mega electron volt particle. So with the accurate numbers, you find that you would have to get every single cesium atom from something like three soccer or football fields and get all of that together in one point and then eat that to give yourself a sensible chance of dying from acute radiation sickness. But of course, it wasn't evenly spread over just the Ukraine. It was very localized near Chernobyl. So near Chernobyl, there are some really quite hot spots, but for almost everywhere else. The cesium is detectable, but almost non-existent. So just to put this all into perspective, you'll see in the bottom right-hand corner there, there is a scale in becquerels per square meter. In order to get up into the acute radiation sickness levels, you don't need levels of a thousand becquerels per square meter, which is the highest level shown on this map, but about a billion becquerels per square meter. Basically, the radiation levels need to be about a million times higher than the highest levels shown on this map the burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead which is why the only people who really got acute radiation sickness here were the people who were moving through the exploded core of the reactor so let's briefly touch on some of the other isotopes iodine-131 is nasty it's volatile it bioaccumulates in humans Cesium, not so much. It's pretty much like salt, you know, sodium, potassium, cesium. They're all very similar in their behavior. You eat the stuff and you sweat it out and you piss it out. It doesn't bioaccumulate. Iodine, on the other hand, bioaccumulates in your thyroid. In fact, it's actually, ironically, one of the ways that you treat thyroid cancer is, if someone's got thyroid cancer, you give them radioactive iodine. It accumulates in their thyroid. at which point it gives you a selective radiation burn in your thyroid, which helps destroy the cancer. But what if you don't have thyroid cancer and don't want some released radioactivity from Chernobyl irradiating your thyroid? Well, it turns out there's a simple bypass to this one is you saturate your thyroid with regular iodine. You take an iodine tablet and once your thyroid is saturated, you really don't take up iodine-131 anymore. You just excrete it. regularly. Further, iodine-131 has a very short half-life of about eight days. So every eight days, it halves its activity till about two years later, there isn't a single nucleus of the radioactive isotope left. Strontium, it turns out, is also nasty because it's very similar to calcium. So if you get strontium-90 in your body, it tends to stick in your bones like calcium does, and that's bad news. because that means you're going to get the full whack from all of the strontium that you've taken in. However, the flip side is that like calcium in the environment, it's just not that mobile. Most of it sort of precipitates out where it essentially stays there as a rock. And this is why at this point after the disaster, the only thing that people really worry about is the cesium 137. And almost the only reason that you can get a hot spot of it now is certain mushrooms and actually bioaccumulate cesium and then the wild boars eat it. So periodically you'll get an article like this. The most radioactive boar found in Sweden. So they actually give some numbers in becquerels. 13,000 becquerels per kilogram. I mean, wow, that's so high. Why hasn't this boar died from acute radiation sickness or cancer? Well, what's the average radiation of a human body? You know, the human body contains some naturally occurring radioactive potassium and carbon, and that gives off some 4,000 to 5,000 becquerels. And that constitutes only about 10% of the total radiation your body gets exposed to from the natural background. So ballpark numbers-ish, your body gets the equivalent whack of about 40,000 becquerels-ish. So that's that's our benchmark for background Well, how much radioactivity would your body be giving off if you were as radioactive as this bore of a body of say? 100 kilos. Well, it would be giving off about a million becquerels ish Which is about 30 times background, which is definitely to be avoided But also bear in mind that you get a dose of about 30 times background when you get on a plane Radioactive stuff. So background's about 0.1, 0.2, that sort of thing. I think the US shipping rules are it's got to be less than 0.5 on the surface. It's all kind of bloody stupid anyway, because when I was on the airplane, this went up to 4. This is why you should never turn these things on during a flight. They are absolutely crazy. But of course, this is the worst case scenario where you're doing nothing but eating a diet of 100% of the most radioactive boar ever found in Sweden. But anyway, what would the actual fatal dose of eating this radioactive boar be? You know, the sort of thing that will give you a reasonable chance of dying from acute radiation sickness. About a hundred tons. Thank you so much for chatting with us. This has been really enlightening and terrifying. Which is why no one who wasn't actually at the plant itself or sifting through the exploded remnants of the core got acute radiation sickness. But what about the long-term hazards? The cancer? Well, elevated radiation is certainly a cause for an elevated cancer risk. However, there's a problem with low radiation levels. There really isn't enough statistical data to work out whether that's still causing cancer. So, for instance, there are people who live in naturally radioactive areas where they don't have a significant increase in the risk of cancer, which suggests that there isn't a direct linearity. between the exposure to radiation and the chances of getting cancer. So basically the worst case scenario is the no low threshold limit, which is basically the more radiation you get exposed to, the higher your chance of getting cancer. And if you go for the worst case scenario, then you get a death toll from Chernobyl in the tens of thousands, but it's spread over such a wide area and over such a large timeframe that it's actually lost. in the noise. Hell, even if you take the most clear-cut case of the liquidators, you know, these guys. So what are the follow-up on these guys? You've got the biggest whack from the Chernobyl radiation show. Studies of 66,000 liquidators from Russia found no increase in the overall mortality in cancer or non-cancer causes. However, a statistically significant dose-related excess mortality risk was found for both cancer and heart disease. Or, Another study of 10,000 liquidators from Latvia and Estonia found no significant increase in the overall cancer rates among specific cancer types. Statistically significant increases in both thyroid and brain cancer were found, although authors believe that these may be a result of better cancer screening among liquidators for thyroid cancer or a random result for brain cancer because of the very low overall incidents. So even for the liquidators, the actual health effects are difficult to detect. It may be a small rip, it may have been a short amount of time, but at Chernobyl, even the tiniest mistake can spell out doom. You're done. So how does the fallout release from Chernobyl compare to, say, the fallout release from a nuclear bomb? So here we are, back. on Nuke Map and this is our megaton bomb which we dropped on New York and now I've turned on the fallout option so you can see the fallout this is for a 50 mile an hour wind the fallout will depend on which way the wind is blowing obviously the dark red area here is a thousand rads per hour so this is a fatal dose in about half an hour you Anyway, you're gonna survive is if you get down into a basement or something where there is Where the dust can't get down to the alternative is you've got to drive out of the path of the fallout So obviously driving down when this is a very bad option You have to get out of the path of the fallout and the whole thing is really dependent on Which way the wind is playing and how strong it's blowing but if you're actually upwind of a nuke You're fine. If you're downwind the areas have devastated by the fallout is significantly bigger than the actual nuke itself and this is because essentially what you're doing here is is The this is Chernobyl apart from your dumping all of the waste products Into the atmosphere at a very high level so they can spread out over a large area with this You don't get the thing where that you did in Chernobyl where the whole thing just melts down and only the volatile things come out. Here, all of the products are dispersed into the atmosphere. But like I've said in my previous videos, you can actually get your own radiation device for a couple of hundred bucks Amazon affiliate links below which will very easily show you what the Radiation levels that you're being exposed to are and unless this thing is going absolutely crazy You really don't have that much to worry about. So if you like that, yeah, I'll show this video some love and give it a thumbs up And subscribe if you want to see more. If you want to see cool stuff like Distilling Rubidium, there's the Voice of Thunder channel. And if you want to support this channel directly, you can do it through Patreon. And I'll leave the links below.

Radioactive waste that's produced 30 tons every year from every nuclear power plant in the world will last For a million years must be isolated from the ecosphere for a million years, which is a physical and scientific impossibility You may feel like the show had almost nothing to do with your real life. After all, it's about a tragedy that took place a long time ago, all the way across the world in a different political system. And if this radioactive death cloud was measured all over Europe, how dangerous was it?

in real terms. But could it happen here? To understand the likelihood of a meltdown in the U.S., Wired caught up with nuclear historian Kate Brown from MIT.

And further, if when Chernobyl melted down, it melted down into a blob which is then solidified on cooling. My name is Kate Brown and I'm a professor of science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And I study environmental history and that cracks a pool of the water. drains out these spent fuel rods will start to heat up and once they start to heat up they'll start to perhaps go critical and they could cause explosions explosions that would you know make Chernobyl look like a picnic.

How could this possibly poison a continent? To burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead. Well in order to understand this you've got to understand how radiation gets you and once you understand that it's actually pretty easy to avoid it. being gotten.

So first of all, I'm going to give you a rough energy scale. Your body mostly runs on chemical bond breaking type energies. Those are about electron volt or something. Don't worry too much about what it is.

It's just a yardstick. So splitting a nuclei here can release about a million times more energy than this, about a mega electron volt of energy or enough energy to break a million chemical bonds. Now, a factor of a million. is actually quite a lot.

That's the difference between traveling at the speed of sound, at 300 meters per second, and the speed of light, about 300 million meters per second. Or it's the difference between saying the average lifespan of a human is about 70 years, or 70 million years, which would mean that the people who were born in the age of the dinosaurs would only just about now be dying out. So a single radioactive decay like.

like this can break about a million chemical bonds. Now that's actually pretty bad news for biology because those high energy particles breaking a million chemical bonds can damage your cells enough to cause cell death. Now that's not a showstopper for your body. You have cell death in your body all the time.

So what happens is those cells spill their guts into your body and your metabolism cleans it up. The problem is if you get too many cells dying, at once. It really is just in many ways like a regular burn.

A little burn, no real problem. Your body will just clean away all the dead cells and you'll grow some new ones and you'll be okay. And the same is more or less true with the radiation burn, is that if you actually survive the burn, your body cleans away all the dead cells and you grow some new ones and you're okay. However, if your burn is too big, it can overwhelm your body and it can kill you.

So if you just found out that radiation burns are just like regular burns just not confined to the surface of your skin then consider giving this video a thumbs up and subscribe to stay tuned for more like this. So how much does it actually take to kill you? Well about 500 rads will give you acute radiation sickness and kill most people. Two bars of weapons grade plutonium. All i have to do is bring these together criticality 5 000 as a whole body dose will always kill you and the only way you'll survive it is if it's only like you get your finger irradiated by a massive amount of radiation in which case your finger will sort of die and fall off but the rest of you will be mostly okay as a whole body dose forget about it and 50 will almost never kill you i mean you'll get some radiation burns some acute radiation sickness but it's unlikely to be fatal so how close to a nuclear bomb do you have to be to get 500 rads okay just so we know what we're talking about this is what would happen if you would drop a one megaton nuke on Manhattan.

So that there is the fireball and that's complete destruction. Airblast 20 psi, that'll flatten basically anything. That's the radiation, the 500 rads.

Then you get into the five bar pressure wave which will destroy most buildings and kill an awful lot of people. Then all the way out here. You're looking at third-degree burns if you're in the open. So yeah You've got to get pretty close to a big nuke to get the fatal radiation dose So with a megaton nuclear explosion of all the things that are immediately released by that explosion Radiation really isn't an issue the things you've got to really worry about if the nuclear explosion of the flash and the blast However, that's not the only thing that you got to worry about, because when you actually split up a nucleus, you get two decay products, two fission products, and those things are also radioactive and can give off a mega electron volt type particle. However, the nuke gave off all of that energy in a microsecond.

For the decay products, it can take a variable amount of time from fractions of a second to millions of years for them to decay. and become a stable isotope. Now at this point we can do a cute little ballpark calculation of the total extra radiation that's created by nuclear power. So to a first degree approximation you start off with a radioactive nuclear say uranium-235. Now sure in this case it can decay several times on its own this big radioactive particle but we're going to ignore that for the sake of argument and we're going to split that up in a reactor and we're going to get two of them.

fragments, both of which can release mega electron volt type particles. So in absolute terms, almost the worst case scenario is you're creating about twice as much radiation as you had to begin with. However, if you look at it in more detail, you find that the uranium, if you just left it in the ground, would generate a dozen or so mega electron volt type particles.

However, if you burn it in a reactor, you split it into two and you harness the energy from that and the two particles that you're left with the fission products will decay once and then they'll be stable so in absolute terms of the total amount of radiation released you'll actually be reducing the total amount of radiation that will be released on earth and if you're thinking that's an interesting angle that i've never heard before then you can thank the patrons of this channel for supporting independent scientific media and if you want to join them in supporting this channel I'll leave some links below. However there's a twist here for the uranium it takes a billion or so years to release about half of that radiation. You know the uranium that you used to make the reactors or the bombs in the first place was dug out of the ground where it sat there for the entire earth's history without decaying once.

I mean a half-life of a billion or so years. It's not that active. However, if the half-life is comparable to the human lifespan, it's going to give you a little more radiation. Now, further at this point, I should point out that, you know, there are different sorts of radiations.

There are alphas and betas and gammas. Alphas and betas, which are typically the things given off by these decay products, are stopped. by a relatively small amount of shielding, whether it's a few meters of air or a few centimeters of soil, that sort of thing. They really don't have that much penetrating power.

Gammas, on the other hand, have lots of penetrating power, but on the flip side, they don't interact with you much. So, you know, you can get gamma rays that go through your body and don't interact with you at all. But the downside is you can't screen them very easily.

So outside of your body, These two key products are not that big of a deal if you get say covered in radioactive dust You know what you do is you take your exposed clothes off have a shower and you're more or less done. It's Not like HBO's Chernobyl where the slightest hole in your shoe and you're done comrade. Exceptional tracking shot that plays out in real time.

The young man we focus on grows visibly weaker with each piece of graphite he disposes of. Uh, no. In reality, if you were getting that high of a dose that you're displaying symptoms within seconds, not only are you dead already, you'll be- doing well to get off the roof or out of the building at all. In reality, none of these people died from acute radiation sickness. So we know their dose was much lower than the 500 or so rads that is normally a lethal dose.

And even at that, it would take hours to display any symptoms. Just when it looks like he's in the clear, the soldier notices a tear in his boot. It may be a small rip, It may have been a short amount of time, but at Chernobyl, even the tiniest mistake can spell out doom. Now, you take off your shoes and wash your feet and you'll be fine. I mean, the worst case scenario, there is a limit to how lethal a radiation burn on your toes can be.

You're done. You see, by far the bigger concern here is getting radioactive material inside your body. because then you get that full whack of the radiation.

So this is either you breathe the dust or you get it into your digestive system somehow, you eat or drink it. Well, not breathing it is fairly simple. You don't wanna breathe the dust, you just wear a respirator.

And of course, once you get a certain distance from the plant, from the Chernobyl disaster, you find that there isn't that much dust because it's not that mobile in the environment, especially... once it's rained once or twice. I mean the dust really isn't that big of a deal now.

Now not eating and drinking the stuff gets a little trickier. Obviously you're not going to eat the dust but what if that dust has been rained on and that's dissolved out some of these radioactive products? Well that's where the interesting stuff begins because once you split up the uranium you get these decay products and those behave like their element. So for instance radioactive cesium-137 behaves like regular caesium. Except sometime in the next 30 years, about half of it will radioactively decay.

And the same is true with radioactive strontium, iodine, and barium. Well, there's something interesting about all of those elements. They're all pretty reasonable solids at room temperature. And sure, most of these things won't exist as the element, even in the reactor, but mostly as oxides or salts, which are even more solids than the elements you know cesium iodide is pretty much like rock salt the stuff you put on your potato chips you can put it on your kitchen table and it will sit there in perpetuity without really going anywhere so how did this spread all over europe well when chernobyl melted down it got really hot up to about 2000 degrees or something and at this sort of temperature things like cesium or cesium ions and iodine ions Become fairly volatile and they'll turn into gas really quite quickly, but almost immediately on leaving that hot mass They'll start to solidify so only a meter or so away from the core They will have cooled down enough since they'll start to condense as little particles and those little particles can be lifted up from the updraft from the hot reactor in fact if you want a nice example of how far things will go that boil at say a Thousand degrees when they get really hot I recently visited Marburg University where they distilled some rubidium which boils at about a thousand degrees and even under vacuum you get an idea of just how far these things will go when heated up to a few hundred degrees but if you want to see the full video of that I've got it up on the voice of thunder channel links below.

Now what they found in things like Three Mile Island is most of that volatile nasty stuff actually doesn't go that far if you've got a secondary containment building. It all starts to condense out on the secondary containment. However the Russian design for Chernobyl was so socialistically perfect that they didn't need a secondary containment.

So when Chernobyl blew up, most of that volatile stuff actually got out of the reactor. But just so you know, most of the uranium oxide stuff doesn't boil or get volatile at these sorts of temperatures. So it just sits there as a molten mass. But let's just say for the sake of argument that some of that uranium oxide got out.

as dust too. Chernobyl is on fire and every atom of uranium is like a bullet. So these are now the nasties that we're going to look at that came out from Chernobyl.

The radioactive cesium, strontium, iodine and let's say a uranium too. The uranium is just a complete non-event. It's got a half-life of about a billion years meaning that it's really not radioactive at all.

But even if it were, uranium oxide is insoluble as death in almost everything. I mean, that's not that different from the rock you dug out of the ground in the first place, which, you know, where it had sat as a rock for probably millions of years to begin with. Unless you're literally eating the dirt, it's not so easy to get that in you. And even if you did, you have to eat about 100 grams of pure uranium.

to get a sort of lethal radiation dose and at that point the chemical toxicity of uranium, which is similar to lead, will have killed you a long time before the radiation does. So a half-life of a billion years is really no problem. A half-life of one year means that it's about a billion times more radioactive, meaning the fatal dose isn't now 100 grams but about 100 billionths of a gram.

Now The half-life of cesium isn't a year, it's about, let's say, 10 years. So that means that the lethal dose of cesium-137 is going to be about a millionth of a gram. This is why a lot of the people who died in the Chernobyl accident were the firefighters who ended up sort of poking around the exploded core. And at that point, it really isn't that far off a salt grain-sized particle of this sort of thing will kill you.

So how much cesium... was released from Chernobyl? Well at this point we're going to switch to a unit called becquerels which is basically enough to give one disintegration per second. So they think that about half of the entire cesium-137 that was in Chernobyl was released into the environment which is some 80 000 terabecquerels. One gram of cesium releases about three terabecquerels so that's about two and a half thousand grams 25 kilos.

25,000 grams. But wait, I was just telling you that the lethal dose of this stuff was a millionth of a gram. One gram can kill a million people.

So one kilogram could kill a billion people. So that means that there was enough cesium released from Chernobyl to kill about 25 billion people via acute radiation poisoning. That's twice as many people as live on Earth.

What? have we done? Well, no, not quite so much.

For more or less the same reason that nerve agents aren't as dangerous as you think. So you can take enough nerve agent to kill 30 million people and disperse it in the middle of a giant city. How many people do you think got killed?

About eight. I did a whole video on why nerve agents really aren't as dangerous as you think they are. So most of that cesium-137 didn't go that far from the reactor because it falls out fairly locally and that gets high into the atmosphere that gets blown around much further and eventually it'll get washed out when it rains and that sort of thing. But let's take the worst case scenario where we disperse all of that 25 kilos of cesium-137 over Ukraine. Just the Ukraine.

I want to dilute it too much. So you recall that the fatal radiation dose for acute radiation sickness of caesium-137 was about one microgram. So how much is now on average on one square meter of the Ukraine? About one twentieth of a microgram. So you would have to get every single atom of caesium-137 from 20 square meters, get it all into one place and then eat it all in one go to get a fatal radiation dose.

And I should stress this is the absolute worst case scenario using very pessimistic ballpark numbers. You go through the calculations using the real numbers and you get a fatal dose of cesium that's nearer to one thousandth of a gram rather than a millionth of a gram. Yeah it's actually quite easy to lose an order of magnitude or two when you're making crude assumptions like all radioactive decays give off about a mega electron volt particle. So with the accurate numbers, you find that you would have to get every single cesium atom from something like three soccer or football fields and get all of that together in one point and then eat that to give yourself a sensible chance of dying from acute radiation sickness. But of course, it wasn't evenly spread over just the Ukraine.

It was very localized near Chernobyl. So near Chernobyl, there are some really quite hot spots, but for almost everywhere else. The cesium is detectable, but almost non-existent. So just to put this all into perspective, you'll see in the bottom right-hand corner there, there is a scale in becquerels per square meter. In order to get up into the acute radiation sickness levels, you don't need levels of a thousand becquerels per square meter, which is the highest level shown on this map, but about a billion becquerels per square meter.

Basically, the radiation levels need to be about a million times higher than the highest levels shown on this map the burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead which is why the only people who really got acute radiation sickness here were the people who were moving through the exploded core of the reactor so let's briefly touch on some of the other isotopes iodine-131 is nasty it's volatile it bioaccumulates in humans Cesium, not so much. It's pretty much like salt, you know, sodium, potassium, cesium. They're all very similar in their behavior. You eat the stuff and you sweat it out and you piss it out. It doesn't bioaccumulate.

Iodine, on the other hand, bioaccumulates in your thyroid. In fact, it's actually, ironically, one of the ways that you treat thyroid cancer is, if someone's got thyroid cancer, you give them radioactive iodine. It accumulates in their thyroid.

at which point it gives you a selective radiation burn in your thyroid, which helps destroy the cancer. But what if you don't have thyroid cancer and don't want some released radioactivity from Chernobyl irradiating your thyroid? Well, it turns out there's a simple bypass to this one is you saturate your thyroid with regular iodine. You take an iodine tablet and once your thyroid is saturated, you really don't take up iodine-131 anymore. You just excrete it.

regularly. Further, iodine-131 has a very short half-life of about eight days. So every eight days, it halves its activity till about two years later, there isn't a single nucleus of the radioactive isotope left. Strontium, it turns out, is also nasty because it's very similar to calcium. So if you get strontium-90 in your body, it tends to stick in your bones like calcium does, and that's bad news.

because that means you're going to get the full whack from all of the strontium that you've taken in. However, the flip side is that like calcium in the environment, it's just not that mobile. Most of it sort of precipitates out where it essentially stays there as a rock. And this is why at this point after the disaster, the only thing that people really worry about is the cesium 137. And almost the only reason that you can get a hot spot of it now is certain mushrooms and actually bioaccumulate cesium and then the wild boars eat it.

So periodically you'll get an article like this. The most radioactive boar found in Sweden. So they actually give some numbers in becquerels.

13,000 becquerels per kilogram. I mean, wow, that's so high. Why hasn't this boar died from acute radiation sickness or cancer?

Well, what's the average radiation of a human body? You know, the human body contains some naturally occurring radioactive potassium and carbon, and that gives off some 4,000 to 5,000 becquerels. And that constitutes only about 10% of the total radiation your body gets exposed to from the natural background.

So ballpark numbers-ish, your body gets the equivalent whack of about 40,000 becquerels-ish. So that's that's our benchmark for background Well, how much radioactivity would your body be giving off if you were as radioactive as this bore of a body of say? 100 kilos. Well, it would be giving off about a million becquerels ish Which is about 30 times background, which is definitely to be avoided But also bear in mind that you get a dose of about 30 times background when you get on a plane Radioactive stuff. So background's about 0.1, 0.2, that sort of thing.

I think the US shipping rules are it's got to be less than 0.5 on the surface. It's all kind of bloody stupid anyway, because when I was on the airplane, this went up to 4. This is why you should never turn these things on during a flight. They are absolutely crazy. But of course, this is the worst case scenario where you're doing nothing but eating a diet of 100% of the most radioactive boar ever found in Sweden. But anyway, what would the actual fatal dose of eating this radioactive boar be?

You know, the sort of thing that will give you a reasonable chance of dying from acute radiation sickness. About a hundred tons. Thank you so much for chatting with us. This has been really enlightening and terrifying. Which is why no one who wasn't actually at the plant itself or sifting through the exploded remnants of the core got acute radiation sickness.

But what about the long-term hazards? The cancer? Well, elevated radiation is certainly a cause for an elevated cancer risk.

However, there's a problem with low radiation levels. There really isn't enough statistical data to work out whether that's still causing cancer. So, for instance, there are people who live in naturally radioactive areas where they don't have a significant increase in the risk of cancer, which suggests that there isn't a direct linearity. between the exposure to radiation and the chances of getting cancer.

So basically the worst case scenario is the no low threshold limit, which is basically the more radiation you get exposed to, the higher your chance of getting cancer. And if you go for the worst case scenario, then you get a death toll from Chernobyl in the tens of thousands, but it's spread over such a wide area and over such a large timeframe that it's actually lost. in the noise.

Hell, even if you take the most clear-cut case of the liquidators, you know, these guys. So what are the follow-up on these guys? You've got the biggest whack from the Chernobyl radiation show. Studies of 66,000 liquidators from Russia found no increase in the overall mortality in cancer or non-cancer causes.

However, a statistically significant dose-related excess mortality risk was found for both cancer and heart disease. Or, Another study of 10,000 liquidators from Latvia and Estonia found no significant increase in the overall cancer rates among specific cancer types. Statistically significant increases in both thyroid and brain cancer were found, although authors believe that these may be a result of better cancer screening among liquidators for thyroid cancer or a random result for brain cancer because of the very low overall incidents. So even for the liquidators, the actual health effects are difficult to detect.

It may be a small rip, it may have been a short amount of time, but at Chernobyl, even the tiniest mistake can spell out doom. You're done. So how does the fallout release from Chernobyl compare to, say, the fallout release from a nuclear bomb? So here we are, back. on Nuke Map and this is our megaton bomb which we dropped on New York and now I've turned on the fallout option so you can see the fallout this is for a 50 mile an hour wind the fallout will depend on which way the wind is blowing obviously the dark red area here is a thousand rads per hour so this is a fatal dose in about half an hour you Anyway, you're gonna survive is if you get down into a basement or something where there is Where the dust can't get down to the alternative is you've got to drive out of the path of the fallout So obviously driving down when this is a very bad option You have to get out of the path of the fallout and the whole thing is really dependent on Which way the wind is playing and how strong it's blowing but if you're actually upwind of a nuke You're fine.

If you're downwind the areas have devastated by the fallout is significantly bigger than the actual nuke itself and this is because essentially what you're doing here is is The this is Chernobyl apart from your dumping all of the waste products Into the atmosphere at a very high level so they can spread out over a large area with this You don't get the thing where that you did in Chernobyl where the whole thing just melts down and only the volatile things come out. Here, all of the products are dispersed into the atmosphere. But like I've said in my previous videos, you can actually get your own radiation device for a couple of hundred bucks Amazon affiliate links below which will very easily show you what the Radiation levels that you're being exposed to are and unless this thing is going absolutely crazy You really don't have that much to worry about. So if you like that, yeah, I'll show this video some love and give it a thumbs up And subscribe if you want to see more.

If you want to see cool stuff like Distilling Rubidium, there's the Voice of Thunder channel. And if you want to support this channel directly, you can do it through Patreon. And I'll leave the links below.

Transcript for:Chernobyl Disaster and Radiation Risks

Transcript for:
Chernobyl Disaster and Radiation Risks