Is that what they said? Steam explosion (and subsequent further release of radioactive materials), I can see that, but critical assemblies have a tendency to… self-disassemble, in the worst case like a nuclear fizzle, so if you want your “multi-megaton explosion” you need to construct a staged H-bomb.
No, they don’t say that. They say the explosion will make uninhabitable for 100 years a very large area and kill a lot of people. I think by spreading radioactive material.
2 to 4 megaton explosion with a 30 km radius, if I remember correctly. More destructive than most nuclear weapons.
If I understood correctly, the explosion would not have been from the radioactive material in the wreckage of Reactor 4, per se, but from the fact that that material (which was being referred to as, effectively, radioactive lava) was on the verge of burning through the floor of the facility, and falling into a large water storage tank beneath it.
Had it done so, as I understood it, it would have caused a very large steam explosion, which would have then ejected radioactive material high into the air, and leading to it spreading over a very large area.
My Dr Strangelove calculation says that even a 4-megaton explosion (which we are not going to have, not even a 0.001-megaton explosion), would induce third-degree burns out to 20 km, tops, so if that’s what they said it makes me not want to trust them.
That’s correct, it was a steam explosion, not a nuclear core explosion, and it could and most likely would eject extremely hazardous radioactive material over a large area.
That’s historically accurate, the numbers are just exaggerated. And the claimed 30km radius was for the blast. The fallout would cover a much wider area (also said in the episode).
That would be the “elephant’s foot” - the “radioactive lava” is called “corium” and the concern was it reaching the water table beneath the plant. Fortunately, it never got that far but the thing is still in the bowels of the building. Solidified now, but still warm from its inherent radioactivity. The radioactivity has dropped off thanks to the phenomena of half-life, but standing next to it for more than a few seconds to a few minutes would still almost certainly be fatal. Eventually it will all decay into bismuth and lead. Eventually. So far in the future you might as well consider it deadly forever.
Actually, the tanks under the plant. Here’s some of the dialogue from that emergency meeting, which I transcribed just now:
He then says they have only 48 hours, or 72 at most, before this happens–unless they send some workers on a suicide mission to drain the tanks. Those guys, who volunteered, are true heroes.
But as I say, I had no idea anything this extreme was on the table.
Apparently some scriptwriter is bullshitting for dramatic effect, which is the exact opposite of what one needs with a serious subject like this. Even an actual 4-megaton bomb detonated on the ground or underneath would fail to destroy “everything within a 30 km radius”, though it would definitely be fallout shelter time for everyone in the path of the debris plume.
Actual risks seem to include the aforementioned steam explosion as well as the melted core reaching the water table, further nuclear chain reactions, cleanup of the immediate area and erecting a containment sarcophagus ASAP to prevent further release of highly radioactive materials. Even so, a lot of long-lived, dangerous radioactive isotopes were released into the environment.
“Ulana Khomyuk” is what we might call not a real guy, but Legasov was, and I think all of us remember the news after he topped himself.
Yeah, the idea that a nuclear reactor could explode like a nuclear bomb is bullshit. The way it works is not similar at all. The risk was a steam explosion that could release much more radioactive material into the surrounding area and that would’ve been horrific enough, there’s no need to make up bullshit about the plant going off like a multi-megaton bomb.
Did they actually tell them outright that it would be a suicide mission? Or did they tell them it would be highly hazardous but survivable…i.e. put it in some terms that would be more encouraging? In the show, the volunteers were told that they’d be paid a stipend by the government for their service, so I guess it was implied that they could theoretically survive. But it was unclear whether the volunteers truly understood that it was a suicide mission.
Also, I can’t remember exactly who the guys were who volunteered. I mean, the group of guys who had been assembled and asked to volunteer - were they technicians who worked at the plant? Were they firemen or military servicemen? I can’t remember.
It was a senior engineer-mechanic who knew where the valves were, another senior engineer, and the shift supervisor. And they did survive.
The first guy claimed in interviews at the time that he was told he could refuse the assignment, but he reasoned that “how could I do that when I was the only person on the shift who knew where the valves were located.”
As mentioned above, this was all in the interest of averting the possibility of multiple additional steam explosions.
That’s too bad that Mazin exaggerated it. He talks on the podcast about all the books he read, adds other details that don’t make it on screen, etc., so he’s conveying the *impression *of scrupulous attention to detail and accuracy.
ETA: Although he did allow that Khomyuk (who is a “she” BTW, played by Emily Watson) was a composite character to represent a group of maybe dozens of physicists who were advising Legasov.
The way it is presented in the series is that if one plucky physicist from Minsk hadn’t put 2 and 2 together and bluffed her way past a few roadblocks to save the day half of Europe would be a radioactive wasteland today.
In reality the people working on containment knew they had to deal with all the water below the molten core and did.
Yes, they sent some guys on a potential suicide mission to drain the tanks, after which there were worries about hitting the ground water. I’m not talking about the show, which I haven’t seen, but about the accident in reality.
There’s no way the accident would have resulted in a 4 megaton explosion. It would have been a “nuclear fizzle” at worst. That is still a big boom, could still create one hell of a mess and render parts of the landscape uninhabitable by humans. Deinococcus radiodurans would probably be just fine, and Cladosporium sphaerospermum, Wangiella dermatitidis, and Cryptococcus neoformans all use radiation to generate chemical energy for growth. All found in the area affected by Chernyol. So it wouldn’t even be a sterile landscape although folks tend not to get excited by scenery composed of bacteria and fungus. Otherwise, you get a Red Forest far more extensive than what actually happened with a much longer recovery time. You still get a lot more radioactive isotopes lofted into the air. It’s still a greater disaster than what actually happened. You still wouldn’t want to drink the water or eat food from the area. I don’t want to trivialize the consequences but what is described by your post is an exaggeration for dramatic effect that shouldn’t occur in a docudrama trying for reality.
People use “nuclear fizzle” to mean a nuclear weapons test that has a lower than expected yield. The conditions required for a nuclear explosion (a fission detonation) are not present in a reactor.
The show so far has spent a lot of time addressing the culture of the communist party in the USSR. Specifically, they show people in charge of energy who arrived at their positions through party loyalty as opposed to being an expert in the field, and they show how people at the plant are unwilling to deliver bad news to those party officials out of fear. So what you’re describing at the plant where everyone says “we did everything right” is presented as BS – I’m not sure if they’re going to go into detail about all the things they did wrong (they haven’t after 2 episodes), but clearly we the audience are to understand that “we did everything right” is equivalent of “please don’t throw me in the gulag” combined with a heavy dose of denialism.
(FWIW, I believe this tendency to downplay to the scope of the catastrophe when reporting up the chain is exactly the same thing that happened at Fukushima, so the parallels are interesting).
Nothing so far has struck me as anti-nuclear propaganda, I’d relax your hackles for now.
I think what we’re talking about is a prompt-critical assembly, undesired in nuclear reactors because it is uncontrollable and will tend to overheat the core and blow the reactor apart. E.g., SL-1 released the equivalent of 32 kilograms of TNT in a few milliseconds.
Further criticality excursions could release dangerous bursts of radiation and energy, which is why they were dumping boron into the core to act as a neutron poison.
Absolutely. I just wanted to draw out the important distinction between excursion/meltdown/fire/steam explosion/radiation/contamination/other untold horrors and a “nuclear explosion”.
To be clear the show did not conflate those events.
Craig Mazin specifically said on the podcast that the events leading up to the accident will be explored later in the miniseries.