[Music] this is Chernobyl the side of the world's worst nuclear meltdown and it's so
radioactive that it'll be uninhabitable to humans for thousands of years this is
Hiroshima and this is Nagasaki two cities in Japan that were attacked by nuclear weapons
much more powerful than the Meltdown at Chernobyl yet fast forward 70 years and
both cities are beautiful thriving metropolises but why I've thought about this for far too long
and today let's see if we can't figure this out together I'm Ricky and this is Two bit daVinci
this video is brought to you by delete me it's the 12th of April 1945 a day that would alter
America's history the nation's leader President Roosevelt surrendered his last breath to an
unanticipated heart attack merely 82 days after his presidential inauguration suddenly the mantle
of leadership fell upon Harry S Truman the wheels of governance didn't pause and by April
25th Harry Truman was already deeply engrossed in forming the United Nations on one such busy
day Secretary of War Henry Lewis Dimson discreetly disclosed to the newly appointed president about
a secretive Endeavor the Manhattan Project their attempt to harness the destructive power of the
atom fast forward to July President Truman is having conversations at the potom conference
when he finally receives the news he had been eagerly awaiting the first nuclear test code
named Trinity was a resounding success the US threatens Japan with a new powerful weapon in
the potom Declaration urging its leadership to surrender but they choose Defiance sealing their
fate in the early hours of August 6 1945 Colonel Paul tibit and his crew embark on a Deadly Mission
aboard the b29 super Fortress anola gay headed for Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. the first atomic bomb
little boy was unleashed decimating the city and immediately claiming nearly 880,000 lives
with thousands more succumbing to the effects of radiation 3 Days Later Nagasaki suffered a similar
fate with the detonation of the second bomb fat man marking the end of the war and thrusting the
world into to the atomic age 5,000 m away and 41 years later deputy chief engineer anat DLo
is looking at the dashboard in front of him making sure that everything is in order for the reactor's
safety test by now mankind has mastered harnessing the power of the atom for more peaceful purposes
it is April 25th 1986 everything looks good so they shut down reactor 4's core cooling system
at 2 p.m. in preparation for the test at 11:10 p.m. the less experence night crew of operations
takes their shift and yet love gives the operators a thumbs up to proceed with the test before in the
test at 1228 a.m. power plummets in the reactor so the inexperienced operators remove the control
rods in an attempt to bring the power back up it is now 1:23 a.m. on April 26th with the control
rod still removed the operators began the test by shutting down the turbine and cutting power to the
reactor's cooling pumps there's a power surge The Operators panic and try to insert all the control
control rods to shut down the reactor but they Jam moments later they hear a series of explosions a
dumbfounded DLo who is in the control room refuses to believe that the reactor has exploded and
orders the chief of reactor control to climb to the roof and inspect it once on the roof senkov
cannot believe the hellscape unfolding before him reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is
gone magnitude of the explosion and the fires of the Chernobyl power plant is nowhere near that of
the atomic bomb yet the aftermath is much worse making it the worst nuclear disaster in human
history we live in a golden age of information access it makes creating these videos possible but
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the description huge thanks to delete me and you for supporting the show after Chernobyl a radius
of 19 miles around the reactor was designated as an exclusion Zone because of the heavy radiation
contamination ation the nearby city of prat had to be evacuated as well as several other towns near
the power plant radiation killed everything in the four square miles directly around the
reactor the trees exposed to the radiation died and turned a Ginger Brown earning at the
nickname the red Forest even today almost 40 years after disaster the place is still deserted and a
nuclear Wasteland but Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the complete opposite I visited hoshima in 2019
and it's an absolutely gorgeous place there's no radiation and no exclusion Zone other than the
protected Atomic dome which is in a UNESCO world heritage site and part of the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Park I was curious about how long it took for the radiation to disappear from Hiroshima and
it turns out that it wasn't long at all 80% of the residual radiation from the blast in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki had burnt out in the first 24 hours and a week later it had already decreased to 1 millionth
it was so short in fact the Reconstruction began almost immediately and hasn't stopped since check
this out this is a graph of the population of hoshima and Nagasaki from 1940 right before
the war to today that sharp dip you see was the consequence of the bomb but after that
it's been a steady uphill growth well except for that second dip in the '90s for Nagasaki
and the 2000s for Hiroshima but that's something else entirely I'll get back to that at the end
of the video now look at the population graph for the town of prat next to Chernobyl that's
quite the difference isn't it it's just flatlined scientists estimate that it'll be another 20,000
years before Chernobyl is habitable again but why why the difference how is it possible that the
aftermath of an accident could be worse than that of a nuclear bomb I pondered this question for a
long time so I did what any good engineer would do I started researching we dug deeper and deeper to
try to find any evidence that would help explain why this is I looked at everything the magnitude
of the explosions the fuel Mass the blast radius the fuel type and any other data point I could to
try to figure this out so this is what we know all three events are related because they all involve
nuclear fusion energy right so let's see how that works nuclear fision literally means splitting
the nucleus some atoms are unstable and naturally break apart those are the radioactive isotopes but
we can also force them to split by bombarding them with other particles like neutrons for
example that initial fision also releases three other neutrons that can make three other atoms
break apart and so forth and so forth causing that dreaded Chain Reaction the only difference
is that in power plants we want that reaction to be slow and controlled while in bombs we want it
to be fast and violent I remember reading once that there was a debate in 1945 about what fuel
to use in the atomic bomb and that part of the reason for the two bombs horribly as it may sound
was to test two different detonation mechanisms and two different nuclear fuels so this got me
thinking could it be that the difference between Hiroshima Nagasaki and Chernobyl was the fuel so
I looked into it little boy was made of uranium 235 it turns out and fat man was made of plutonium
239 that's not encouraging despite the different fuels both cities recovered just fine from the
radiation okay so what was used in Chernobyl it turns out that the power plant also worked on
uranium 235 like the bomb dropped on Hiroshima so that couldn't be the reason what about the
magnitude of the explosion there we could start to see the beginnings of an answer because there is a
clear difference between the bombs and Chernobyl both nuclear blasts were roughly 100 times more
powerful than the explosion at the power plant but I'll get back to that in a moment because
there was something else that I found that sets these nuclear events apart which really caught
my attention when I first saw it the detonation altitude both bombs were detonated almost 2,000
ft above the ground when I saw that I was like wait what really at first I thought it was a
typo so I went and corroborated it with different sources but no that's actually true so I thought
then maybe it was a glitch in the detonation mechanism but it turns out that that explosion
at 2,000 ft was completely intentional I had no idea I always pictured the bomb hit in the ground
and Le a massive crater but that's not how it happened at all I had to look deeper and so I did
and it turns out that you can choose to detonate a warhead from four different heights depending on
the effect you're looking for leading to four very different outcomes you have high altitude bursts
which are mostly used for the ionizing radiation and strong EMP pulse to disrupt Communications and
advanced electronics then there's subsurface burst used to create a large crater and a powerful shock
wave that can destroy hardened targets like bunkers missile silos or tunnels then there
are surface bursts where you can concentrate most of the blast and thermal energy in and
directly around the detonation site but if you want to cause as much damage as possible to the
buildings and infrastructure on the surface a surface burst doesn't really cut it because the
buildings themselves around the epicenter act like a shield that reduces the blast radius but
if you detonate it above the ground which is called an air burst that doesn't happen this
maximizes the blast radius and the damage on the surface and that's exactly what the US was looking
for not only that it also turns out that besides maximizing destruction Air Bursts also minimize
the radioactive fallout of the explosion that was the Eureka moment for me so apparently the
reason why there wasn't so much nuclear fallout in Hiroshima compared to Chernobyl is that the
explosion was deliberately planned that way but why is that why does an air burst minimize Fallout
while a surface burst doesn't I dig a little bit deeper and I found it's because in an air burst
the fireball never touches the ground which means that it doesn't suck up any soil water or other
materials that could become radioactive and fall back down to Earth the only radioactive byproducts
of an air burst are the fishing products and the weapon debris which are dispersed in the
atmosphere by the expanding blast and are carried away by The Wind by the time they do fall they're
so diluted that radiation is minimal this is the complete opposite of what happened in Chernobyl
there the explosion wasn't just a ground level but it was inside a containment vessel that blew up
while it was nowhere near as powerful as Hiroshima the Chernobyl explosion spat out large and small
chunks of the highly radioactive nuclear reactor core even worse the fire in the reactor produced
tons of radioactive smoke that was carried by the wind far beyond the borders of Ukraine into
bellarus and other countries and the rest as they say is history so that's it K's closed not quite
because there's at least one more difference in the table that I had to look at let's look
at the table again notice anything particularly eye-catching let's focus on the amount of nuclear
fuel in each case there's a big difference between little boy and fat man little boy carried 64 kg of
uranium while fat man contained only 6.2 kg of plutonium when I looked into why that was
it was only because of the different detonation mechanisms you see for an atomic bomb to explode
you need a critical mass of nuclear fuel so that you can get a runaway Chain Reaction that's sort
of like YouTube videos that need a critical mass of viewers like you watching sharing smashing the
like button and subscribing to tell the algorithm to go viral anyway in a bomb you can't have the
critical mass of fuel together in one place well because it'll go off so what you do is separate it
into two subcritical masses and the detonation mechanism puts them back together to make it
explode Fatman used an implosion type mechanism that proved to be way more efficient than little
boy gun type the bomb dropped over Nagasaki only needed a tenth of the amount of fuel to yield 40%
more explosive power but that's peanuts compared to the amount of fuel in chernobyl's fourth
reactor it had and this is not a typo 190,000 kg of uranium and at least 5% of it ended up in
the atmosphere and the surroundings after the explosion that's almost 10 tons of radioactive
uranium fuel rods with high concentrations of vision products and other radioactive voice spread
out in pieces these fishion products include iDine 131 cium 137 strong tm90 and plutonium 241 I D 131
is the most dangerous of all but it has a very short halflife and there is virtually none of
it left at this point in troville the story is very different for cesium 137 strontium 90 and
plutonium 241 these last for decades and they're highly dangerous sources of radiation it was a bit
strange to see that most of the sources I checked comparing Chernobyl and Hiroshima overlook this
obvious difference between the two it's not just that the Fallout in Hiroshima Nagasaki was milder
because of an air burst it's also the sheer scale of the amount of radioactive material released in
Chernobyl and this brings me back to the magnitude of these detonations remember a minute ago when we
noticed how the explosion at Chernobyl was around 100 times less powerful than either atomic bomb
yet the reactor held 29,000 times more nuclear fuel than fat man and 3,000 times more than little
boy how does that add up well the only reasonable explanation is that Chernobyl wasn't in fact a
nuclear explosion it was nuclear meltdown which are two very different things the explosion was
caused by hydrogen buildup inside the reactor not by a runaway nuclear Chain Reaction if that
had been the case Lord knows how large the crater would have been that's an interesting distinction
because when many of us think about nuclear meltdowns we immediately default to the image
of a big mushroom cloud over the power plant and the surrounding City being obliterated from what I
found out it turns out that really can't happen because the uranium and the fuel rods are too
diluted it's never enough to reach a critical mass so no not even putting Homer Simpson in charge of
a nuclear power plant will result in a nuclear explosion there's one last thing that came up
during my research for this video that deserves mention it only a few weeks after the bombing
and even after surrendering unconditionally Japan was attacked once again but this time
it wasn't a foreign Nation it was Mother Nature on September 17th 194 5 typhoon makurazaki hit
the island of Japan causing massive flooding and washing away Bridges all over Hiroshima Nagasaki
and other cities the typhoon took another 2500 lives however the floods also dragged much of
the residual radiation out to sea so is that good luck bad luck I'll let you decide sound off in
the comments below so hoshima and Nagasaki aren't ready to active wastelands basically because the
bombs are detonated over 1,000 ft above the ground maximizing destruction but minimizing
Fallout the air dragged most of the radioactive debris away before it could settle on the ground
and while little did fall on the ground was washed away by a giant typhoon in Chernobyl
the story was different that said it's important to note that radiation levels in Chernobyl have
decreased to about 10% of what they used to be at the time of the accident except for the Red
Dead Forest the exclusion Zone surrounding the remains of the Chernobyl power plant is
actually teaming with both plant and animal life in fact you can even visit the site for a short
time without risking your life I'd love to know what you think about that does that sound like
a bucket list destination for you now we spoke a lot about Chernobyl as the worst nuclear disaster
in human history but the second worst disaster was fukushima's meltdown in 2011 and if you want
to learn more about the Fukushima disaster and all the Fallout from that watch this video next