The Damaged Chernobyl Reactor

The containment facility for the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor being built back in 2014

[mind-of-neo]

i want youtube to start automatically linking the full video from which a short was extracted. EDIT: i know they've added this feature in since i made this comment. thank you

[firstcynic]

FYI, they moved that shell into place in November 2016. Yes, this video is over 6 years old.

[Ed_Snaider]

"Mistakes don't last forever"
My mistakes:

[MissesWitch]

Amazed we're just being recommended this now!!

It's been in place for a long time now!

[everything-narrative]

U238 may have an obscenely long half life, but that also means it has an extremely low level of radioactivity (it'll kill you faster by chemical toxicity!) The actual problem with the Chernobyl reactor are all the stuff in it that has a much shorter half life, and therefore is outputting much more powerful radiation. Think of it like a lightbulb: if you have a set number of kilowatt hours, you can shine a little bit for a long time or a lot for a short time. U238 is a tiny LED, some of the stuff in the Elephant's Foot is a floodlight.

[logicplague]

To this day, Chernobyl's reactor 4 is nowhere near as toxic as Twitter.

[garye]

In 5 billion years they’ll still be trying to reach me about my car’s extended warranty.

[luckyapps]

A man who has been teaching his entire life to make this world a better place to live. Thanks Derek

[dr_sriraviteja]

This dude sounds & stares into my eyes like my uncle who'd scare me that I'd end up homeless, eating out of trash at 21 without a job because i got a B+ on a surprise math test.

[Basshr]

In about 4000 years some Archaeologists will talk about the curse of this tomb.

[Vitaliuz]

*My mom, presenting my room to the guests:*

[codyott]

Thank you for your somber delivery.... Reminds me of kyle hills channel, and his half-life videos.

I really love them

[jaimecastells]

This is rather overstated. The radiation danger mostly resides in the fission bi-products and the danger is because they produce lots of radiation by decaying quickly. That means the danger does not persist for billions of years, but it does persist for hundreds of years.

I find this sort of hyperbole very annoying because it obscures and confuses the substance, and in this case the substance is very, very serious.

[baksatibi]

This is from Derek's documentary series _Uranium – Twisting the Dragon's Tail_ from 2015. The construction of the New Safe Confinement was officially completed in July 2019.

[austinsalters]

That got way too intimate at the end 😂

[missedinformation]

Yet in 100 years, robots will dig up the radio active material and use it for pudding.

[fordsfords]

Uranium 238's half-life is not a problem. U238 is not highly radioactive and is not difficult to manage. The problems are the plutonium and the fission products. For instance, strontium-89 and strontium-90 are produced in similar quantities in fission, and each nucleus decays by beta emission. But 90Sr has a 30-year half-life, and 89Sr a 50.5-day half-life.

[zi.]

this man really said im giving you an existential crisis today

[sethfletcher]

You make the end sound so beautiful. I love it.

[jcolinmizia]

People don’t seem to grasp that a half-life of 4.5 billion years means that it’s extremely not radioactive. The bigger problem is the fission products, which have half-lives of 100-ish years, which means they will put out nearly all of their radioactivity in a few hundred years.