This Lake is MORE CONTAMINATED than Chernobyl? - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Kento Bento

[toby]

The burning of the houses is unnecessary for the radiation but it is necessary for the humans. It prevents people from sneaking back into the evacuated villages to keep living there, which is obviously very likely to happen if they aren't being told the real reason they have to leave

[unscinfinity]

aww man kento bento such a throwback used to binge watch him once a year before he disappeared.

[taitano]

The thing about the CIA not telling anyone, is that A, it was so far behind contemporary knowledge and safety standards that it was a bit of a moot point, and B, they might have passed the lessons on without telling where they learned them. If an organization like the CIA is giving safety advice, you know that something has happened that they don't want you to know about. Be it in some other nation, or right here in the US. 😬

[superlexaan_]

Not really a nuclear contamination situation, but there are 2 towns in Russia that have absurd levels of contaminants in the atmosphere that are arguably worse than Kyshtym because the problems were never really solved, Dzerzhinsk and Karabash.
There was a chemical plant that may have produced chemical weapons in Dzerzhinsk, there have been chlorine gas leaks as late as early 2000s and the town has several "landmarks" (there have been efforts to clean them up though): the "Black Hole" - a pond with an absurd amount of heavy metals in it, the "White Sea" - a giant alcali dump. The air in Dzerzhinsk contains high amounts of phenol, bensopyrene and formaldehyde.
Karabash on the other hand posesses a copper smelting plant that regularly emits clouds of toxic smoke to the point where residents have to regularly check if the wind is blowing in their direction and close their windows if it does. The local river's turned brownish-red like bromine with its banks colored yellow like sulfur. The local mountain near the plant lost most of its grass cover.
Most of those problems come from soviet manufacturing methods that were never properly modernised. It's hard to believe that soviet nuclear fuel manufacturing was any different, though the information about it is obviously more restricted

[I_Stole_A_BTR-]

4:00 Other than "Kytshym" (fair enough though, "Kyshtym" is just one of those words that can make anyone dyslexic), I don't think those names are butchered at all. Russians have this weird letter "ы" which apparently very few of us foreigners can pronounce truly right, but is generally represented as "y" and it's seemingly pronounced as the "i" in "tin".

(Going into rant on poor standardised transliteration efforts now, absolutely nothing to do with the video)

Russian Cyrillic to Latin script transliteration is a wild thing though, that "ы" is sometimes represented in romanised texts as "i", despite there being another letter represented as "i" which sounds like the "ee" in "cheese", and becomes even more confusing with "soviet". Because the american pronunciation "soh-vee-uht" is wrong and the british pronunciation "sov-ee-uht" is also wrong because the cyrillic letter "e" is pronounced "yeh" and the "i" in "soviet" is representative of that "yeh". The proper pronunciation being "sov-yet".


This also brings up another problem as the letter "й" is transliterated as "y" because it's "y", yet the "ы" from early is (as stated previously) also represented by "y". So really the "й" should probably be replaced by "j" so that the "ee" can be "i" and the "ы" "y". But for some reason this weird constantly changing system is used instead, presumably so it's slightly more pallatable to english speaking eyes as a "j" for "y" would seem German (and somewhat fairly so).

TLDR: Tyler's pronunciation is essentially right and Russian Cyrillic is the only true way to experience Russian place names.

And a slight addendum or whatever: Russian works like English in that the word "Mayak" (for example), while spelt "M-A-Ya-K" (that weird backwards R you always see in "Russian" fonts is that "Ya"), essentially takes that "y" from "Ya" to make "May" (M-eye). This does also go for basically every other vowel and a letter that is/contains y before the rest of the sound, although "oo" and "y" becomes "oy", for some reason.

I'm not some master linguist though, this is just some basic Russian rules I know (as well as listening to different Russian bands), if someone in any way smarter than me has a correction, best to listen to them.

[Argiopocalypse]

Is there ANYTHING in the nuclear plant that's green!? Not even waste, like...can you bring us a green pen from someone's desk? Lol

[MakooWallinen]

My favorite Kento Bento video. And you made a video that expertly shows the safety measures any "normal" place would put in place.

[StormsparkPegasus]

The waste they're talking about is not the same as the used fuel that's stored in dry casks. They're talking about the waste from plutonium separation. There's a LOT more of it, and it's not bits and pieces of metal. It's a mixture of acids and organic compounds with various radioactive salts in solution. The US has issues with that too. They stored it in underground tanks at Hanford and Savannah River, and a most of those tanks are leaking. If you want to know the kind of stuff the Russians were dumping in Karachay, look up the Hanford tanks. It's MUCH MUCH worse than you think.

[dwwilde]

Tyler, I’d love to see your reaction to “Atomic Homefront”. It chronicles the radioactive contamination of St Louis from processing material for the Manhattan Project.

[bakedbeings]

Here in the first minute, I wonder is Tyler using the term "accident" with generosity.

[paulisfat]

You may consider trying to get in touch with the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. They have quite an overlap in subject matter. I bet they would be more than happy to have you on for an episode.

[keeha]

Two things: Hanford initially was open cycle, and Windscale was open cycle and air cooled. Nuclear weapons projects left safety to the side to get the weapons built as quickly as possible.

[dand]

I have heard of this place when I was young. This was an evil place.

[matsv]

13:00 While the secondary loop is a closed system in all PWR that is really due to how the turbine works. In a Coal power plant the look is also closed. The main reason for the close loop is to benefit from the sub ambient pressure of condensing

[bami]

The wonders of open cycle nuclear reactors.

[dragade]

I'm sure this is a typo but google maps has Lake Karachay marked as a swimming lake. All you can see are truck tracks and an otherwise dry bed of water. The satellite image is from 2023, September.

I do hope no one swims here.

[IvanBaAl]

Nuclear safety was the least concern compared to potential nuclear war. Also exchange of any information was far more limited. It's not like Soviet scientists could easily get any answer from American ones.

As they said, safety rules are written in blood.

[Merennulli]

Really glad to hear your take on this one. To me it's a great reminder that nuclear weapons are the real disaster even when we're not testing or using them in war.

[monti]

A YouTube channel named azeal made a video about a nuclear incident and I really would like to hear you thought about it

[AmaroqStarwind]

10:46 This is also why capacitors in old consumer electronics always explode and leak. They were based on an incomplete, stolen formula which then got spread really far. Meanwhile, the comparatively ancient capacitors which don't explode and leak, are based on the actual complete formula.