Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Kyle Hill 'The Elephant's Foot - Corpse of Chernobyl'

Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Kyle Hill "The Elephant's Foot - Corpse of Chernobyl"

[TheEmpatikOne]

The lightning patterns come from the high reflective parts of the suit the worker wears that are moving while the shutter is open. The high reflectivity of the tissue then dwarfs the intensity of the rest of the picture, making the picture seem dimmer than it should.

[wcdeich]

Sadly, I doubt the liquidator who died for that photo had a radiation briefing. Apparently the USSR told some men in the army "you can serve in Afghanistan for 4 years or shovel radioactive waste in Chernobyl for 4 minutes." But most of them died of radiation sickness. That's what I heard.

[LucasWills]

The “lighting bolt” you ask about at 18:35 is glare from his flashlight, melted together because of the shutter speed

[martenkahr]

The short and mildly simplified explanation for the technical reasons behind the ghostly image (including the lightning bolts). Cameras work by exposing a patch of photosensitive material incoming light from the environment. Since the changes are predictable, they can be inverted to reproduce the initial impression made by the incoming light. In modern cameras, this patch is a reusable digital sensor that captures the photon impacts and composes them all into an image file on the fly. Back in those days, it was all done with a reel of physical film that was chemically photosensitive and produced an impression of the real image on the film as it was hit by photons from the scene. The chemical transformation of the film takes time and stable exposure, though. The further back in the history of photography you go, the less sensitive the film would be: the earliest cameras in the 19th century sometimes needed literal minutes of exposure to produce an impression, and this is where shutter speed comes in: it's the time that the shutter of the camera is open and exposing the photosensitive element to photons.

The other factor, besides the sensitivity of the film, is overall light level: a darker environment means fewer photons moving around and reflecting from the shot and into the camera. In dark conditions, you'd need to keep the film exposed for longer than normal to have enough photons hit the film to create an accurate impression: therefore, an intentionally slower shutter speed to allow the photons to accumulate on the film. But what happens when there is movement, such as people, while the shutter is open? Basically, it all gets registered in the same frame and piles up, creating superimposed images. The clear positions of the two men are positions that they held long enough to be clearly captured in the darkness, and the lightning bolts are an intense source of photons (a flashlight) organically moving in the hands of the men and leaving a lasting impression on the film much faster darker, less illuminated elements of the image.

[Loki_Trickster]

8:10 Ahhh Chernobyl's rapid disassembly shut down procedure.

[amyg]

I would to see you react to the video he made about the New Safe Confinement. The title is "I Got Access to Chernobyl's Deadliest Area." The NSC seems like a pretty spectacular feat of engineering and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as an engineer.

[themetalfusionologist]

I’ve been infatuated with Chernobyl since I was young.
Something about it has always sparked my interest, so I really enjoy your vid on it.
Studying it so much had brought some fear of “nuclear” power, but ironically I ended up working as a welder/fabricator for over 20 years building nuclear plants, several other items related to controlling & handling fuel rods, even the reactors themselves.
I stumbled upon your channel and have been hooked ever since.
Keep the content coming!

[bluewhalestudioblenderanim]

for comparason even the hottest lavas ever to flow on earth's surface were 1, 600celsius, this ammount of heat curently detectable only on a handful of volcanoes of jupiter's moon "Io", the modern basalt lavas are just 1, 200celsius

so 2, 000c is more comparable to heat inside planetary cores than material exposed to the enviroment

[ehsnils]

I remember that the first indication of the nuclear disaster was actually an alert from the nuclear plant in Forsmark, Sweden that even got out on national radio. They had detected what they suspected to be a radioactive leak. A bit later they realized that the radioactivity inside the plant was lower than outside and that the isotopes weren't the normal leak from an uranium reactor. It didn't take long after that to figure out that it was a foreign event that was really bad.
Three days after the explosion Landsat 5 got pictures where there was a bright red spot where reactor 4 was. Ten days after the explosion the SPOT 1 satellite got pictures of the area with a better resolution than what Landsat had.
I realized that at the time when the fallout was spreading it passed right over where I was, but the weather was fine in the area I was so the fallout in that area was minor while a bit later the fallout was washed out from the air by a rain and that caused a lot of contamination over northern half of mainland Sweden and southern Finland. At least for many years meat from wild animals should be avoided as food.

[nathanking]

The lightning bolt is the trail of light from his flashlight and low shutter speed.

[swokatsamsiyu]

This is one of the Half-life videos I'd hope you would do at some point. It is really very well researched, and beautifully put to video.

One could say that the Elephant's Foot is literally a part of Reactor 4's 'corpse'. A very dangerous, and deadly corpse, but a corpse nontheless. The way they put that poor reactor through the wringer...unbelievable. And once again, your addition made the whole thing even better. Keep up the good work!

[Old_Man_Fire]

the "lightning streaks" on the "ghost scientists" elephant's foot photo are the guy's torch as seen in the long-exposure photo. see, there isn't any light in the room where the foot is, so the only way to be able to see it is to put a camera next to the door and leave it's shutter open and then do the other task that he was sent down there to do and go and take a sample (apparently he wasn't successful because the ceramic was too hard to be penetrated and none of the surface had flaked away yet) and the lighting in the photo is that from his hand-held shiny thing. story is that he was in the room for maybe 25 or 30 seconds but at the time lethal dose was a minute of standing over the thing, a distance he was only at for maybe five seconds of the time as he feebly probed at the foot with a steel bar

[jessica_in_japan]

Your commentary is so fascinating, thank you. I'm always interested in hearing more about these nuclear accidents and how they could have been prevented. I grew up very close to Three Mile Island, was born just a couple months before Chernobyl and lived in Japan when the tsunami hit the Fukushima plant. I still remember staying overnight in Fukushima prefecture maybe 4 months after the accident and having my entire family in the US freak out about me getting hit by the radiation, even though I was nowhere near the coast, where the plant is.

[zachmiller]

Having graphite tipped control rods seems kinda like having a fire hose full of gasoline that has to get sprayed out before you get any water.

[madmax]

18:26 "the time lapse like streak from the flashlight", thats the lightning like effect you're seeing. That is a side effect of shutter speed, the longer the shutter is open the more of this kind of effect can occur.

When you lengthen the time the shutter is open it'll allow in more light in, when in a dark area with little light you lengthen the time the shutter is open to gather more light, if you do this outside the image would be so blown out by light the image would be nothing but white.

So when you move a light source in front of a camera that has its shutter open that long the light will generate a streak like lightning effect.

[El_Rey_]

Appreciate the added commentary and expertise. Especially with referencing studies or statistics beyond the scope of the video, that's the sign of a grade-A reaction video.

[oculusangelicus]

The one thing that most people do not truly understand. Russia's Nuclear reactor design is BAD. The fact that a government was willing to actually build this reactor and use it for power generation, shows just how much important the communists were willing to sacrifice to make it look, from the outside, that they were a progressive society, even though we know that communism causes a society to stagnate and slowly decay into a condition that breeds bad decision after bad decision, while the whole time completely disregarding the importance of life and keeping it's citizens safe. Now I am not an engineer, but when I learned about how unsafe the Russian reactor design truly was, it made me livid that any government would be willing to put such a thing into use. Even today, after Russia has been so long without a communist government, the entire country is unerringly scarred for the rest of it's existence. Russia was so blatantly unsafe with it's radioactive materials that where ever there was a former military base, there were either orphaned sources or radioactive waste just left out in buildings that had no kind of shielding of any kind and left a HUGE MESS for the countries that had been occupied by the Russian state. When Chernobyl happened, Russia had more than 28, 000 sources of ionizing radiation spread out all over Russia as well as ever occupied nation within it's former sphere if influence. Since the 1990s western organizations have helped recover and contain 14, 000 of them. (these numbers might not be wholly accurate but in general Russia was creating self powering sources for weather stations and sensors for national security that they made and then abandoned out in the wilderness all over the Eurasian continent, and they are for certain in the multiples of 10s of thousands, the 14, 000 sources recovered and contained was accurate at the time of an incident where three Czech scrappers had discovered an open source and had been poisoned by it because they had used it as a heat source while camping in the winter)

[fbiagentmiyakohoshino]

7:10 a better way to put it would be a major hurricane (lots of rain, high winds, storm surge, flying debris) stalling over an area, like what happened to the bahamas in 2019 with hurricane dorian (185 mph winds)

[ceanOfStorms]

Rønten-stråler (rønten-rays) is actually what we call xrays in norwegian (and pbb other nordic countries as weel). So when you get an x ray done you go get a rønkten.

[zeross]

i had another video queued to watch while eating and this pop up. i have to change my plans now <3