That movie is named after a (at the time hypothetical) nuclear meltdown. The name is applied to the original context here, not really named after a movie about the phenomenon.
What you are saying sounds like “oh, I found this old wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic, I think I’ll name it Titanic after the 1997 movie”.
A hyperbolic phrase meant as a warning – if you allow a nuclear reactor to meltdown, it will burn through its containment structure, the concrete below it, down through the earth, and eventually "all the way to China."
Can I just add that I find it weirdly funny when scientists give such specific or unitentionally hilarious names to such terrifying objects.
"Oh, it's that super deadly new substance? Where did it come from the core? Weeeeelllll let's name it either "Corium" or "MeltYourFaceOffium", let's shoe a raise of hands"
(Also, kind of puts the lie to all those people who criticize Sci fi stuff like Star Trek? --"who would name a substance "explodium" soooo unrealistic...."
Used that word for 30 years restoring old cars when a part can’t be found anymore we’d say it’s made of unobtainium. Laughed my ass off when Avatar said that with a straight face.
Definitely heard the same thing from some folks IRL doing the same stuff you were. Such a comical "element" name when you know the context of it's colloquial use beforehand.
It’s intentional. The term originated among aerospace engineers in the ‘50s (maybe earlier) for materials whose performance requirements are beyond those of any known material.
Today, the most famous of all Unobtainiums, the one that’s the most un-obtainable of all (with the exception of things that are doubted to exist, like stuff with negative energy density or whatever) and one of the few unobtainiums to remain unobtainable in the past seventy years, is a room-temperature superconductor, which is exactly what unobtanium is in the movie (hence the floating islands)
I have a feeling some engineering type consult was brought in, who probably made some offhand comment like “yeah just say this stuff has wild properties, that it’s basically unobtanium, that’ll justify the economics” and someone writing notes took it literally. I really wish I knew where the lost in translation effect happened!
The elephant's foot, or any corium so to speak, can not be any more radioactive than a given number of nuclear fuel rods.
However the Elephant's Foot is treated as if its the worst piece of radioactive material on planet earth when, the peak official measurement is 8,000 roentgens per hour. Corium at Fukushima has measured over 20,000 roentgens per hour. Nuclear fuel rods can be even up to 50,000 roentgens per hour.
It also is not even close to being the biggest or most radioactive object or piece of corium inside Unit 4. It is only famous because it was the first to be found, and everyone went "ooo scary solidified radioactive blob" as it was reported to the media while other findings were not published. If we assume everything is proportionally radioactive, using radiation figures taken on similar dates, the Upper Heap in 012/15 would have measured about 10,000 roentgens per hour when the elephant's foot was measuring 8,000.
The most radioactive, a GIGANTIC LFCM covering an entire corridor in the 210 steam distribution levels, The China Syndrome, would at its peak be measuring around 14,000-18,000 roentgens per hour at one of the steam outflow drums in 210/7 , when the elephants foot was found. It also reaches over 10,000 in several other rooms. Take these numbers with a grain of salt however, as they are estimations.
So, what is The China Syndrome?
It formed of course shortly after the explosions where it pooled into the room 305/2 OTM +9.0, directly beneath the reactor. Large amount of corium separated and went East into what is known as the great horizontal flow, including the elephant's foot. Our corium, went down, into the large vertical flow. As it burst the pressure membranes in the floor of 305/2, it traveled down pipes intended for the emergency discharge of steam, and flowed out the steam drums in the Steam Distribution Corridors of 210/7 and 210/6.
The most radioactive of these is seen in Photo 1, coming out of the most southwesterly of these drums.
Not much is known about its discovery other than the complex expedition found it, a wall had to be dug through to reach it, and it was found long after the discovery of the Elephants foot. It is noteworthy for being the largest and most radioactive mass, about 10x as large as the foot by Volume, and weighs 230 tons. It also has an average uranium content higher than the peak uranium content found in samples of the elephant's foot. The China Syndrome name only came into use a few years ago when it appeared on a website by Ppitm where it was popularized. He says the name is supposed to represent how it is the vertically flowing corium, like the China Syndrome movie.
It would likely be far more radioactive if Concrete was not pumped through these corridors in 1986.
Picture 1: Most radioactive part of "The China Syndrome." 3460 Roentgens Per Hour in 1997, meanwhile the Foot, had 700, around the same time. Located in 210/7.
Picture 2: Opposite side of the same drum, different corium outflow.
Picture 3: Corium filling about a meter of an entire corridor.
Picture 4: (map)
Picture 5-12: Black corium in 210/6
Picture 13-16: maps
Feel free to ask questions, or for a source. There are more Chernobyl corium photos to be found in the Chernobyl Archive discord. https://discord.gg/7vtJNnjh6x
The Elephant's Shit is technically still part of The China Syndrome, it's just in another corridor and is much less radioactive. I marked the most radioactive point with A, and the shit with B.
Fascinating... I wonder, would you feel anything walking/crawling arround there? Would it feel strange in some way? Would it be hot, or just plain murky old moldy (destroyed nuclear plant) hallway?
Maybe moldy? There are a lot of fungus that tolerate high levels of radiation and have been found near the reactor. Deinococcus radiodurans is a bacteria that proliferates around the reactor in very high areas of radioactivity.
I'm curious if you have specific knowledge about microbial life near china syndrome or the elephant foot.
Walking in an area of 10k rem/hr photon radiation flux would start to burn your skin pretty quickly and you’d be dead within an hour. It’s hard for us to say exactly what the sensation would be like, but ionizing radiation rips apart cells at a microscopic level, and damages the nucleus of cells too which is how it causes cancer and more long term damage. All the different types of radiation being emitted from those materials have a fuck ton of energy, and they’ll deposit it into whatever they hit first. The more radiation, the more heat, so it would most certainly burn you alive on the outside and inside
It's a lot less radioactive these days than it was right when it formed. The most recent measurements has it at ~6-10 mSv per hour (similar to a CT scan every hour) which would mean you'd need to hug it for several weeks to get a potentially lethal dose.
It's down to less than 1/10.000th of its original radioactive emission level - despite it still containing a lot of uranium which has a very long half life. But uranium by itself is not very radioactive, it's the isotopes it breaks down into inside a nuclear reactor that are extremely radioactive - like cecium, iodine, xenon etc. All of which have half lifes measured in hours and days, rather than millions of years like uranium.
You can even safely touch brand new unused uranium fuel rods. They get delivered to powerplant by regular trucks.
Once they've been brought up to criticality inside a nuclear reactor, and start breaking down into those isotopes, that's when they get dangerous and has to be stored in cooling pools to shield you from the radiation even after they have been spent.
Probably closer to 2 hours today but regardless I was talking about the initial reaction, which OP seemed to downplay just because something worse was around the corner.
Random question not directly related, but if say a team of advanced robots harvested all the radioactive material in these buildings would it be useful? Like could it be turned back into proper fuel and how much fuel?
So, that's a theoretical future, but not one that we're likely to see. There are nuclear recycling programs in development, but most of those programs aren't perfect at the re-refining process, and thus they're only used as tiny, thermoelectric generators so far.
Added part, the perfected recycling process may end up consuming more power than can be made using the material anyways. We'd only find it useful if we can use it akin to a battery, not as a net power source.
No, as it has degraded over time. There is no reason to try "harvesting" this when they can just.. make new fuel rods? We aren't even close to running out of uranium
Well the reason to harvest it would be turning an ecologically dangerous mass into a not the most efficient energy source. I assume the energy gain is just a small bonus of successfully neutralizing the material as a danger
In theory you could, reprocess it. You can reprocess spent nuclear fuel which is basically what corium is, but mixed with other things such as graphite. You would end up with ‘fission products’ which would be even more dangerous but more concentrated.
The only reason you couldn’t do it is if the mix vitrified. The other issue is that unlike used nuclear fuel, it’s got other things mixed in, and it’s unlikely to be a consistent mix, so it will be technically very challenging to separate out.
Just messing with these materials is insanely complicated and dangerous, so starting to distill such a lump into its various components just sounds very unprofitable.
It was based on a rumour/urban legend that once a nuclear reactor melted down, it would simply keep melting down through the earth - until it eventually came out the other side of the planet (in China, lol).
That stupid theory always infuriated me. It's so grossly ignorant of both a) the temperature of a runaway reaction in a mass the size of a NPP core, and b) the incredible capacity of the earth's mass to absorb thermal energy. It was concocted by hysterical anti nuclear activists to scare the general population with lies, because the reality is that nuclear power is comparatively safe and boring. Chernobyl was basically an absolute worst case scenario, and it took Soviet-grade indifference to safety and human life in favor of cost and convenience to make it happen.
Not to mention that it would make sense for corium to drop into the planet core, but then what could possibly cause it to start moving up towards China after it reached the center of the earth?
Further to u/celestial-oceanic, notionally, the molten core will burrow its way right to the other side of the planet, which is figuratively held to be in China.
“The China Syndrome” also refers to attitudes towards nuclear energy after the 3 Mile Island nuclear incident that, coincidentally, occurred just after the movie The China Syndrome made its debut in theaters. It was a movie about (you guessed it) a nuclear power plant that was malfunctioning.
Ok now it makes alot more sense why they spent all that time making the giant hangar over chernobyl if the elephants foot it the least of our worries. I didnt realise there were rooms and corridors full of radioactive slag.
Yea I remember a documentary on Chernobyl where a lead operator was being interviewed about when they drilled into the core to see what was going on. they were surprised to find not much except twisted metal pipes and wondered where the core material had gone. Apparently that was the impetus to explore the lower areas of the plant to find the missing core material.
This was part of Borovoi's expedition. Most rooms had been explored, including these, however the room directly beneath the reactor wasn't as it was deemed too dangerous and it was filled with concrete. So they dug a hole in the wall to enter it.
They built the NSC for kind of this reason. The old sarcophagus and the unit 4, as well as this corium, is deteriorating and even turning into dust. Not very radioactive dust but if it gets inside you, it will not leave and you will accumulate a dose over time. And so when they deconstruct unit 4, dust will get EVERYWHERE, so they built a giant dome so the dust stays inside.
The name comes from the hyperbolic idea that a big core meltdown could have the corium melt through the ground underneath until it comes out on the other side of the Earth, in China.
In the film at least, they didn’t actually think it would go all the way through the earth. The worry was that it would melt downward until it hit ground water causing both a huge steam explosion and catastrophic contamination of the water supply.
Nuclear stuff is so ominous. Literally silent killer. The idea that there is a place on earth, an object even, that is so toxic just being close enough to focus your eyes on it is a death sentence. Wtf
I love the whole "radiation is an eldritch horror" concept. An invisible killing light blasting us from stars, making space travel dangerous and able to corrupt what it touches.
Cobalt 60 used in irradiation chambers is scary as fuck too imo. People have died from 90 seconds of exposure....after 100+ days in hospital having limbs removed and everything. Supposedly if you're vomiting blood within an hour of exposure you're going to die no matter what.
I worked for a company that used rice hulls (the shells from rice processing) in an animal feed additive. It was just cheap plant matter safe for animals to eat that we could adjust the potency of the whole bag of additive with.
We shipped the product all over the world and Australia/New Zealand specifically required the rice hulls to be irradiated. It didn’t matter that it was essentially just waste cellulose. Any foreign agricultural material had to be irradiated before crossing over the border into their tightly regulated ecological zone.
We thought it was such a huge waste paying for literal tons of the cheapest plant matter in the U.S. to be sent to an irradiation facility. An engineer very briefly looked into what it would cost to build and commission our own irradiation equipment, but quickly dropped it.
I recall him saying it was scary as hell, and despite the irradiation chamber being relatively small, you needed a shit ton of concrete all around it and a big conveyor hall leading into and out of it.
HBO's series on Chernobyl despite not beeing 100% accurate is still one of the best of all time tv shows in my opinion. I still don't understand how it took me 2 years to see it, but thats pure cinema and does a really good job showing how close we were to fucking the world up (or at least Europe).
I understand this because it is a good tv show. However, That show has been completely shunned by the Chernobyl community, everyone despises it. It reversed 20 years of clearing up misinformation just to put the public back to square one.
The book "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" which was written by Alexey V. Yablokov, along with Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko, is the source for most of the ludicrous exaggerated claims that appears in the HBO show.
Worth knowing about that book, is that it was originally based on a GreenPeace International report from 2006 - and the following book was commissioned and funded by GreenPeace. Alexey V. Yablokov himself was a co-fonder of GreenPeace Russia.
So there's obviously a very strong anti-nuclear agenda and bias in the source material used for the show, which they at no point even address or seemingly consider.
I'm surprised, I thought I've read the show is about as accurate to real life events as a historical drama of its type can be. I remember seeing that the most egregious thing they did was showing a big blue radioactive beam of light shooting up into the sky from the collapsed section of Chernobyl when in reality that wasn't really a thing, and that no helicopter crashed from flying over the building like the one does in the show.
It makes up more than that, like the bridge of death scene, when the families were watching the burning reactor. Which never happened, its a myth and there is no proof of it.
Though the helicopter thing actually happened, though not like in the show. The show seems to imply it happened because of radiation, while in reality it got too close and clipped a cable (well, they show the cable if you pay attention but the way its shot and acted it seems like a radiation accident). But in reality it happened like 8 months later, the show makes it seems like it was a few days or a week afterwards IIRC.
There are other examples, those are just the 2 off the top of my head.
And the show is still historical in nature, its not entirely false, it gets the broad strokes right. The only problems come from those who want it to be 100% accurate, and to be fair I kind of get it. These are real people for the most part, its kind of weird to take a real guy who is still in living memory and turn them into characters.
Like IIRC Dyatlov, the guy in charge of the reactor who is conducting the test, isnt exactly the villain he is written to be in the show. Legasov's suicide in the first scene is depicted as him killing himself exactly a year, to the second, from when the reactor blew up. His character is almost entirely fake (in the show he dies alone in a small apartment, IRL he had a family and a big mansion), he was a life long party member, who was sent to chernobyl to help the coverup, he wasnt involved in the cleanup in the same way the show says at all. The tapes he sends out were found and distributed post death, he wasn't some insider trying to spread the truth in the same way the show insists. The character of Ulana, the woman from Minsk who helps them doesnt exist at all, its a made up character who is a stand in for other people.
To be clear, I really like the series. It just that IMO it presents itself as a little more factual than it is
They character assassinated a man called anatoly dyatlov whom was a hero and instead ruined his legacy. Actually HBO ruined several peoples legacies, if not there lives. Thats why it's banned here in ukraine. It literally rewrote the history of the accident, its causes, and who was to blame.
Pretty sure the three mile island Netflix doc came out right around the same time. I remember feeling like it was some kind of anti nuclear psy op at the time. I still enjoyed the shit out of Chernobyl though.
Deanna (at least through the first few seasons) is so obnoxious. "Captain, I'm detecting that the aliens are very upset!" "Oh really Counsellor, you think so!?"
We thank you, oh Monolith, for revealing the cunning plans of your enemies to us.
May your light shine down on the souls of the brave soldiers who gave their lives in service to your will.
Onward warriors of the Monolith, avenge your fallen brothers, blessed as they are in their eternal union with the Monolith.
Bring death to those who spurned the holy power of the Monolith.
The question I’ve always had is was it liquid when it exploded/whatever happened to it? Like how did something now solid travel down that much, and how liquidy(water/medicine thick substance, etc) did it get to flow down in all those areas? I’ve ALWAYS wondered and no one has ever answered that question.
Ontop of that, is this stuff underground? Isn’t there some sort of radiation thing keeping it contained?(I know very little about all this so respectfully answers are appreciated)
the other guy is slightly wrong, it didnt get hot enough to become totally liquid, and it didn't melt through anything. it reached a lava like consistency as estimated by the complex expidition
It was a solid at first but when it became super critic it's temperature went in the thousands of degrees. That's enough to make it as liquid as water. On top of that it generates his own heat. Like an acid it eat everything. Like an acid the more it melts things the more it start the become impure so the temperature drop. As it's dropping in temperature it becomes solid. That's why it looks like it was flowing like water that froze suddenly.
(I know there is a lot of mistakes, tried my best to describe how i see it, ad English is not my first language)
How do they decide on the names? The elephant's foot makes sense because well, it kinda looks like an elephant foot. But China syndrome? Where did they pull that one?
The thought was that a reactor core meltdown would just keep boring through the earth, digging a hole to China.
There's a 1979 movie called The China Syndrome - came out just weeks before the 3 Mile Island meltdown. The combination of those two made for a massive public backlash against nuclear power in the US.
No it's not. Its 6 meters above ground/3rd floor, It's not that heavy and is less than 1 degree celcius above room temp. The government commission did fear this but only in the first 2 weeks after the disaster. As it turns out, most of the corium didn't melt anything.
I’ve always been fascinated by the pure and simple truth that this building is and will forever be death. No human,insect,animal or plant life can be near it for too long or else they would immediately just fizzle out like the smallest flame from a lighter compared to the absolute inferno that is Chernobyl and the hideous sins that have seeped into the very soul of that land. It’s kinda why I love fallout and stalker so much because it explores the possibility of stuff like this spreading to the wider world.
The China syndrome was first mentioned at Three Mile Island, because of a movie of the same name being released that said a melted core could melt through the earth to China.
It’s not a place, it’s not an official name for anything.
Nobody going to comment about “The Elephant’s Shit” title they gave it?
I gave it that, and it's kind of sticking. The China Syndrome actually appeared on a fan website a few years ago and it also stuck.
Even the Elephant's Foot was a fan given nickname.
I thought at forst you were talking about the Jane Fonda movie, so maybe it was named after that.
It is named after that movie
That movie is named after a (at the time hypothetical) nuclear meltdown. The name is applied to the original context here, not really named after a movie about the phenomenon.
What you are saying sounds like “oh, I found this old wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic, I think I’ll name it Titanic after the 1997 movie”.
Except the titanic isn't hypothetical. It would be more like finding an alien and naming it Alf
Ah, that’s a better example!
Why is it called "China Syndrome"?
A hyperbolic phrase meant as a warning – if you allow a nuclear reactor to meltdown, it will burn through its containment structure, the concrete below it, down through the earth, and eventually "all the way to China."
it gets fun when it starts turning your groundwater into a plume of radioactive steam that blows everywhere
Maybe they aren’t sure where China is
I keep thinking about this and it wouldn't, it would simply dig down to the centre and mess us up from there.
Once it's innthe centre gravity is no longer pulling it through but holding its self in place.
It wouldn't even get that far, just hit a nice warm bit of mantle and it'll come back up.
Also the Earth's core is plenty radioactive already, that's what generates a lot of the internal heat.
According to the person who gave it the name;
In the movie China Syndrome, corium melts through the earth all the way to China.
And in 1986, the government commission feared corium would melt through the baseplate and poison the groundwater.
This corium is the best example of corium moving straight down.
Can I just add that I find it weirdly funny when scientists give such specific or unitentionally hilarious names to such terrifying objects.
"Oh, it's that super deadly new substance? Where did it come from the core? Weeeeelllll let's name it either "Corium" or "MeltYourFaceOffium", let's shoe a raise of hands"
(Also, kind of puts the lie to all those people who criticize Sci fi stuff like Star Trek? --"who would name a substance "explodium" soooo unrealistic...."
Avatar - unobtainium
Used that word for 30 years restoring old cars when a part can’t be found anymore we’d say it’s made of unobtainium. Laughed my ass off when Avatar said that with a straight face.
Definitely heard the same thing from some folks IRL doing the same stuff you were. Such a comical "element" name when you know the context of it's colloquial use beforehand.
It’s intentional. The term originated among aerospace engineers in the ‘50s (maybe earlier) for materials whose performance requirements are beyond those of any known material.
Today, the most famous of all Unobtainiums, the one that’s the most un-obtainable of all (with the exception of things that are doubted to exist, like stuff with negative energy density or whatever) and one of the few unobtainiums to remain unobtainable in the past seventy years, is a room-temperature superconductor, which is exactly what unobtanium is in the movie (hence the floating islands)
I have a feeling some engineering type consult was brought in, who probably made some offhand comment like “yeah just say this stuff has wild properties, that it’s basically unobtanium, that’ll justify the economics” and someone writing notes took it literally. I really wish I knew where the lost in translation effect happened!
Engineers in the 1950s - unobtainium
Sorry man I’m only reading 3.6, I think you’re overreacting.
Go get the good dosimeter, the one in the safe.
It’s broken too.
See this is what Moscow does
Lock the thread. No one comments. No one shares. Contain the downvotes.
Prevent Redditors from undermining the fruits of their own scrolling
OPs in shock, get him out of here
OP didn't see any graphite on the ground because it wasn't fucking there!
Dumbledore said calmly
THE LID IS OFF THE STACK IS BURNING I SAW IT
I don’t believe you! RBMK reactor cores don’t explode!
Russian for “Really Bad, mmkay?”
Tell me.. how does an RBMK reactor explode
Theyve never exploded, so they cant. Perfect logic
You're confused, RBMK reactor cores..
From the feed water I assume?..
He’ll be fine. I’ve seen worse.
Yeah there’s not even any graphite.
The reactor totally overreacted!
3,6 not great, not terrible
Not good, but not bad.
Not great, not terrible*
The elephant's foot, or any corium so to speak, can not be any more radioactive than a given number of nuclear fuel rods.
However the Elephant's Foot is treated as if its the worst piece of radioactive material on planet earth when, the peak official measurement is 8,000 roentgens per hour. Corium at Fukushima has measured over 20,000 roentgens per hour. Nuclear fuel rods can be even up to 50,000 roentgens per hour.
It also is not even close to being the biggest or most radioactive object or piece of corium inside Unit 4. It is only famous because it was the first to be found, and everyone went "ooo scary solidified radioactive blob" as it was reported to the media while other findings were not published. If we assume everything is proportionally radioactive, using radiation figures taken on similar dates, the Upper Heap in 012/15 would have measured about 10,000 roentgens per hour when the elephant's foot was measuring 8,000.
The most radioactive, a GIGANTIC LFCM covering an entire corridor in the 210 steam distribution levels, The China Syndrome, would at its peak be measuring around 14,000-18,000 roentgens per hour at one of the steam outflow drums in 210/7 , when the elephants foot was found. It also reaches over 10,000 in several other rooms. Take these numbers with a grain of salt however, as they are estimations.
So, what is The China Syndrome?
It formed of course shortly after the explosions where it pooled into the room 305/2 OTM +9.0, directly beneath the reactor. Large amount of corium separated and went East into what is known as the great horizontal flow, including the elephant's foot. Our corium, went down, into the large vertical flow. As it burst the pressure membranes in the floor of 305/2, it traveled down pipes intended for the emergency discharge of steam, and flowed out the steam drums in the Steam Distribution Corridors of 210/7 and 210/6.
The most radioactive of these is seen in Photo 1, coming out of the most southwesterly of these drums.
Not much is known about its discovery other than the complex expedition found it, a wall had to be dug through to reach it, and it was found long after the discovery of the Elephants foot. It is noteworthy for being the largest and most radioactive mass, about 10x as large as the foot by Volume, and weighs 230 tons. It also has an average uranium content higher than the peak uranium content found in samples of the elephant's foot. The China Syndrome name only came into use a few years ago when it appeared on a website by Ppitm where it was popularized. He says the name is supposed to represent how it is the vertically flowing corium, like the China Syndrome movie.
It would likely be far more radioactive if Concrete was not pumped through these corridors in 1986.
Picture 1: Most radioactive part of "The China Syndrome." 3460 Roentgens Per Hour in 1997, meanwhile the Foot, had 700, around the same time. Located in 210/7.
Picture 2: Opposite side of the same drum, different corium outflow.
Picture 3: Corium filling about a meter of an entire corridor.
Picture 4: (map)
Picture 5-12: Black corium in 210/6
Picture 13-16: maps
Feel free to ask questions, or for a source. There are more Chernobyl corium photos to be found in the Chernobyl Archive discord. https://discord.gg/7vtJNnjh6x
Very interesting thanks!
So my first question has to be:
Why haven't you mentioned 'The Elephant's Shit'? haha
The Elephant's Shit is technically still part of The China Syndrome, it's just in another corridor and is much less radioactive. I marked the most radioactive point with A, and the shit with B.
https://preview.redd.it/nlr4q11t9m6g1.png?width=840&format=png&auto=webp&s=229df04237890b7a2bb787662a799826da0559f3
Explains it perfectly thank you 😊
I just saw the name on the photo and wondered if it was an alternative name but can see it's different.
is the elephant foot close to these?
On the same floor, about 36 meters to the east, through 4 walls.
https://preview.redd.it/ez35osn3tm6g1.png?width=313&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b2f6e1b1b3092cd6486f680edcfa89931621d9d
The China Syndrome is on the red dot in 210/7, the elephants foot is just below the red dot in 217/2
ahh nice thanks! great post!
That’s a lot of shit.. must’ve been explosive
Fascinating... I wonder, would you feel anything walking/crawling arround there? Would it feel strange in some way? Would it be hot, or just plain murky old moldy (destroyed nuclear plant) hallway?
eyes prickling, taste like metal, smell of ozone
Haunting
Maybe moldy? There are a lot of fungus that tolerate high levels of radiation and have been found near the reactor. Deinococcus radiodurans is a bacteria that proliferates around the reactor in very high areas of radioactivity.
I'm curious if you have specific knowledge about microbial life near china syndrome or the elephant foot.
i cannot live, i cannot die, trapped in myself, body my holding ce-yeeellll YEYAH
Someone needs to make that into a haiku.
Eyes prickling with fear,
Taste like metal in the air,
Smell of ozone stark.
There you go
I feel like tastes like metal is more Haiku ish at the end.
Smell of ozone stark
Our eyes are prickling and dry
It Tastes like metal
idk
Ending with the most prominent sensual indicator of radiation is pretty foreboding though.
Mom's spaghetti
Yeah that's horrifying
What about temperature? Does it self-maintain a temperature due to the radiation?
No, it is less than 1c above room temp.
Walking in an area of 10k rem/hr photon radiation flux would start to burn your skin pretty quickly and you’d be dead within an hour. It’s hard for us to say exactly what the sensation would be like, but ionizing radiation rips apart cells at a microscopic level, and damages the nucleus of cells too which is how it causes cancer and more long term damage. All the different types of radiation being emitted from those materials have a fuck ton of energy, and they’ll deposit it into whatever they hit first. The more radiation, the more heat, so it would most certainly burn you alive on the outside and inside
Well, I mean, they weren't wrong.
Just to be clear, the radioactive blob is still scary and the reaction was warranted. Exposure would kill you in minutes.
I'm curious how that would play out and I wish I wasnt.
google acute radiation syndrome. one poor guy went through it all, painkillers don’t work and you can feel your body falling apart
edit: his name was Hisashi Ouchi
That is a deeply unfortunate name for someone who suffered an awful death
Mister Ouchi
Not living the dream
The worst bone density that I've ever seen
Can't turn off the life machine
Mister Ouchi please do not scream
WHAT THE HELL did I just read
Ouch-i
Ironically, his surname seems mild, compared to what he would have endured.
The Lia accident IAEA files show it graphically how it goes.
Louis Slotkin has entered the chat...
Would have, not today. Iirc some of the estimates say it would be around 5 hours or so to get a lethal dose.
It's a lot less radioactive these days than it was right when it formed. The most recent measurements has it at ~6-10 mSv per hour (similar to a CT scan every hour) which would mean you'd need to hug it for several weeks to get a potentially lethal dose. It's down to less than 1/10.000th of its original radioactive emission level - despite it still containing a lot of uranium which has a very long half life. But uranium by itself is not very radioactive, it's the isotopes it breaks down into inside a nuclear reactor that are extremely radioactive - like cecium, iodine, xenon etc. All of which have half lifes measured in hours and days, rather than millions of years like uranium.
You can even safely touch brand new unused uranium fuel rods. They get delivered to powerplant by regular trucks. Once they've been brought up to criticality inside a nuclear reactor, and start breaking down into those isotopes, that's when they get dangerous and has to be stored in cooling pools to shield you from the radiation even after they have been spent.
What is "it"?
The most recent measurement of the elephant's foot is from 2016, and it is 100 roentgens per hour.
Probably closer to 2 hours today but regardless I was talking about the initial reaction, which OP seemed to downplay just because something worse was around the corner.
Yeah ngl that shit is crazy, gotta bring that up to my students when we get to the Cold War era in my World History class
Yeah I’m not sure what’s up with this thing we’re people write interesting cool info, but it has to be to the tune of ‘everyone’s dumb’.
OP took this comment personally lmao
Random question not directly related, but if say a team of advanced robots harvested all the radioactive material in these buildings would it be useful? Like could it be turned back into proper fuel and how much fuel?
So, that's a theoretical future, but not one that we're likely to see. There are nuclear recycling programs in development, but most of those programs aren't perfect at the re-refining process, and thus they're only used as tiny, thermoelectric generators so far.
Added part, the perfected recycling process may end up consuming more power than can be made using the material anyways. We'd only find it useful if we can use it akin to a battery, not as a net power source.
This sounds like fallout lol.
Straight up, the cars in fallout are why I ended up researching this part in particular lol
No, as it has degraded over time. There is no reason to try "harvesting" this when they can just.. make new fuel rods? We aren't even close to running out of uranium
Well the reason to harvest it would be turning an ecologically dangerous mass into a not the most efficient energy source. I assume the energy gain is just a small bonus of successfully neutralizing the material as a danger
The process would probably be more ecologically damaging than leaving it. It’s also a one off, where mines can keep producing.
In theory you could, reprocess it. You can reprocess spent nuclear fuel which is basically what corium is, but mixed with other things such as graphite. You would end up with ‘fission products’ which would be even more dangerous but more concentrated.
The only reason you couldn’t do it is if the mix vitrified. The other issue is that unlike used nuclear fuel, it’s got other things mixed in, and it’s unlikely to be a consistent mix, so it will be technically very challenging to separate out.
Just messing with these materials is insanely complicated and dangerous, so starting to distill such a lump into its various components just sounds very unprofitable.
Why is it called the China syndrome?
It was based on a rumour/urban legend that once a nuclear reactor melted down, it would simply keep melting down through the earth - until it eventually came out the other side of the planet (in China, lol).
That stupid theory always infuriated me. It's so grossly ignorant of both a) the temperature of a runaway reaction in a mass the size of a NPP core, and b) the incredible capacity of the earth's mass to absorb thermal energy. It was concocted by hysterical anti nuclear activists to scare the general population with lies, because the reality is that nuclear power is comparatively safe and boring. Chernobyl was basically an absolute worst case scenario, and it took Soviet-grade indifference to safety and human life in favor of cost and convenience to make it happen.
Not to mention that it would make sense for corium to drop into the planet core, but then what could possibly cause it to start moving up towards China after it reached the center of the earth?
Don't you know, diluted corium becomes an anti gravity device once mixed with planet core material... Duh.
Sounds like someone slept in chemistry.
It also ignores the fact that no part of China is antipodal to the United States.
According to the person who gave it the name;
In the movie China Syndrome, corium melts through the earth all the way to China.
And in 1986, the government commission feared corium would melt through the baseplate and poison the groundwater.
This corium is the best example of corium moving straight down.
Further to u/celestial-oceanic, notionally, the molten core will burrow its way right to the other side of the planet, which is figuratively held to be in China.
(Except, presumably, in China.)
It's a movie about nuclear meltdowns.
“The China Syndrome” also refers to attitudes towards nuclear energy after the 3 Mile Island nuclear incident that, coincidentally, occurred just after the movie The China Syndrome made its debut in theaters. It was a movie about (you guessed it) a nuclear power plant that was malfunctioning.
Ok now it makes alot more sense why they spent all that time making the giant hangar over chernobyl if the elephants foot it the least of our worries. I didnt realise there were rooms and corridors full of radioactive slag.
Yea I remember a documentary on Chernobyl where a lead operator was being interviewed about when they drilled into the core to see what was going on. they were surprised to find not much except twisted metal pipes and wondered where the core material had gone. Apparently that was the impetus to explore the lower areas of the plant to find the missing core material.
This was part of Borovoi's expedition. Most rooms had been explored, including these, however the room directly beneath the reactor wasn't as it was deemed too dangerous and it was filled with concrete. So they dug a hole in the wall to enter it.
Do you happen to remember what documentary that was?
They built the NSC for kind of this reason. The old sarcophagus and the unit 4, as well as this corium, is deteriorating and even turning into dust. Not very radioactive dust but if it gets inside you, it will not leave and you will accumulate a dose over time. And so when they deconstruct unit 4, dust will get EVERYWHERE, so they built a giant dome so the dust stays inside.
So what you're saying is that this is not great but not terrible?
Can I join that discord?
https://discord.gg/7vtJNnjh6x
Are there any estimates on how radioactive it is today?
Estimates? Sure, around 300 roentgens per hour.
China be like - what do we have to do with it?
The name comes from the hyperbolic idea that a big core meltdown could have the corium melt through the ground underneath until it comes out on the other side of the Earth, in China.
In the film at least, they didn’t actually think it would go all the way through the earth. The worry was that it would melt downward until it hit ground water causing both a huge steam explosion and catastrophic contamination of the water supply.
Correct the term was always meant to be a tongue-in-cheek sort of a joke. Even as a fictional concept based on real events.
Rad.
Hmm, apparently gravity works differently than I think it does.
You may have missed out on the valuable physic lessons on Loony Toons.
I don't even feel safe looking at these photos.
Same. I found myself holding my breath.
I'm still clenching my butthole.
If you need a break, I can clench it for awhile.
(This is a joke)
Nuclear stuff is so ominous. Literally silent killer. The idea that there is a place on earth, an object even, that is so toxic just being close enough to focus your eyes on it is a death sentence. Wtf
I love the whole "radiation is an eldritch horror" concept. An invisible killing light blasting us from stars, making space travel dangerous and able to corrupt what it touches.
When you hear about those little accidents at Los Alamos it really seems that way
Demon core demon core demon core
Cobalt 60 used in irradiation chambers is scary as fuck too imo. People have died from 90 seconds of exposure....after 100+ days in hospital having limbs removed and everything. Supposedly if you're vomiting blood within an hour of exposure you're going to die no matter what.
I worked for a company that used rice hulls (the shells from rice processing) in an animal feed additive. It was just cheap plant matter safe for animals to eat that we could adjust the potency of the whole bag of additive with.
We shipped the product all over the world and Australia/New Zealand specifically required the rice hulls to be irradiated. It didn’t matter that it was essentially just waste cellulose. Any foreign agricultural material had to be irradiated before crossing over the border into their tightly regulated ecological zone.
We thought it was such a huge waste paying for literal tons of the cheapest plant matter in the U.S. to be sent to an irradiation facility. An engineer very briefly looked into what it would cost to build and commission our own irradiation equipment, but quickly dropped it.
I recall him saying it was scary as hell, and despite the irradiation chamber being relatively small, you needed a shit ton of concrete all around it and a big conveyor hall leading into and out of it.
why was the product required to be irradiated to begin with?
to sterilize it from foreign pests that can wreak havoc to the isolated australian ecosystem.
Very insightful, Christmas_Queef. I appreciate it.
Imagine how crazy this would have looked, glowing pipes pouring molten corium.
Yeah, I'd absolutely love to see that(ignoring the part where it'll horribly and painfully kill you if you're close enough to see anything)
I’m getting radiation just by seeing this photo
That also pops in my head whenever I look at photos like these haha I get a genuine flash of thought
HBO's series on Chernobyl despite not beeing 100% accurate is still one of the best of all time tv shows in my opinion. I still don't understand how it took me 2 years to see it, but thats pure cinema and does a really good job showing how close we were to fucking the world up (or at least Europe).
I understand this because it is a good tv show. However, That show has been completely shunned by the Chernobyl community, everyone despises it. It reversed 20 years of clearing up misinformation just to put the public back to square one.
Where can I read an overview of said misinformation? Genuine question.
This article is pretty good for a summation.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong
(I still love the show after reading the article)
Can you cut and paste the article? (There’s a paywall)
Spreading disinformation at a time like this... Disgraceful
Youtuber "that chernobyl guy" has 2 whole series of videos on it.
The book "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" which was written by Alexey V. Yablokov, along with Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko, is the source for most of the ludicrous exaggerated claims that appears in the HBO show.
Worth knowing about that book, is that it was originally based on a GreenPeace International report from 2006 - and the following book was commissioned and funded by GreenPeace. Alexey V. Yablokov himself was a co-fonder of GreenPeace Russia.
So there's obviously a very strong anti-nuclear agenda and bias in the source material used for the show, which they at no point even address or seemingly consider.
Is there an actual documentary that is recommended?
No, sadly.
Chernobyl in real time on youtube might be good..
I'm surprised, I thought I've read the show is about as accurate to real life events as a historical drama of its type can be. I remember seeing that the most egregious thing they did was showing a big blue radioactive beam of light shooting up into the sky from the collapsed section of Chernobyl when in reality that wasn't really a thing, and that no helicopter crashed from flying over the building like the one does in the show.
It makes up more than that, like the bridge of death scene, when the families were watching the burning reactor. Which never happened, its a myth and there is no proof of it.
Though the helicopter thing actually happened, though not like in the show. The show seems to imply it happened because of radiation, while in reality it got too close and clipped a cable (well, they show the cable if you pay attention but the way its shot and acted it seems like a radiation accident). But in reality it happened like 8 months later, the show makes it seems like it was a few days or a week afterwards IIRC.
That doesn't seem very dramatised in my opinion.
There are other examples, those are just the 2 off the top of my head.
And the show is still historical in nature, its not entirely false, it gets the broad strokes right. The only problems come from those who want it to be 100% accurate, and to be fair I kind of get it. These are real people for the most part, its kind of weird to take a real guy who is still in living memory and turn them into characters.
Like IIRC Dyatlov, the guy in charge of the reactor who is conducting the test, isnt exactly the villain he is written to be in the show. Legasov's suicide in the first scene is depicted as him killing himself exactly a year, to the second, from when the reactor blew up. His character is almost entirely fake (in the show he dies alone in a small apartment, IRL he had a family and a big mansion), he was a life long party member, who was sent to chernobyl to help the coverup, he wasnt involved in the cleanup in the same way the show says at all. The tapes he sends out were found and distributed post death, he wasn't some insider trying to spread the truth in the same way the show insists. The character of Ulana, the woman from Minsk who helps them doesnt exist at all, its a made up character who is a stand in for other people.
To be clear, I really like the series. It just that IMO it presents itself as a little more factual than it is
They character assassinated a man called anatoly dyatlov whom was a hero and instead ruined his legacy. Actually HBO ruined several peoples legacies, if not there lives. Thats why it's banned here in ukraine. It literally rewrote the history of the accident, its causes, and who was to blame.
I reccomend a youtuber called that chernobyl guy.
Also Legasov is basically what Dyatlov was IRL, and Dyatlov in HBO is what Legasov was IRL
Afaik the helicopter crashed. Just in a different way than depicted in the series
Pretty sure the three mile island Netflix doc came out right around the same time. I remember feeling like it was some kind of anti nuclear psy op at the time. I still enjoyed the shit out of Chernobyl though.
You know there is an elephant out there somewhere that tells their herd about this man made leg of theirs.
Dramatization
https://i.redd.it/eklzxsq06m6g1.gif
I still can’t believe they killed her off like that…
It was devastating
Never understood killing off such a strong woman lead…she was waaaay better than Deanna
Deanna (at least through the first few seasons) is so obnoxious. "Captain, I'm detecting that the aliens are very upset!" "Oh really Counsellor, you think so!?"
She wanted to leave because sexism was holding her back
I believe there were issues between her and production
our corium
who art in reactor building 4
china syndrome be thy name
pray for me now in my hour of reontgens
thy NSC come
thy disassembly be done
In Chernobyl as it is in Fukushima
and Lead us not into ionizing radiation
but deliver us from fallout
For thine is the power, until 10 half lifes of your isotopes
Amen
We thank you, oh Monolith, for revealing the cunning plans of your enemies to us. May your light shine down on the souls of the brave soldiers who gave their lives in service to your will. Onward warriors of the Monolith, avenge your fallen brothers, blessed as they are in their eternal union with the Monolith. Bring death to those who spurned the holy power of the Monolith.
I bring you love!
I am in the middle of reading Midnight in Chernobyl. If you are intrested in this incident I would suggest you read it too.
The China Syndrome? But it says "The Elephant Shit" much better name.
The question I’ve always had is was it liquid when it exploded/whatever happened to it? Like how did something now solid travel down that much, and how liquidy(water/medicine thick substance, etc) did it get to flow down in all those areas? I’ve ALWAYS wondered and no one has ever answered that question.
Ontop of that, is this stuff underground? Isn’t there some sort of radiation thing keeping it contained?(I know very little about all this so respectfully answers are appreciated)
the other guy is slightly wrong, it didnt get hot enough to become totally liquid, and it didn't melt through anything. it reached a lava like consistency as estimated by the complex expidition
It was a solid at first but when it became super critic it's temperature went in the thousands of degrees. That's enough to make it as liquid as water. On top of that it generates his own heat. Like an acid it eat everything. Like an acid the more it melts things the more it start the become impure so the temperature drop. As it's dropping in temperature it becomes solid. That's why it looks like it was flowing like water that froze suddenly. (I know there is a lot of mistakes, tried my best to describe how i see it, ad English is not my first language)
You did well. I understand what you said and it makes perfect sense.
Thank you for explaining!
What are these Metroid ass maps
1990s and 2000s software
My brain can’t fathom what I’m looking at and how dangerous it surly us
How do they decide on the names? The elephant's foot makes sense because well, it kinda looks like an elephant foot. But China syndrome? Where did they pull that one?
The thought was that a reactor core meltdown would just keep boring through the earth, digging a hole to China.
There's a 1979 movie called The China Syndrome - came out just weeks before the 3 Mile Island meltdown. The combination of those two made for a massive public backlash against nuclear power in the US.
Isn’t the elephants foot slowly sinking through the ground with risk for contamination of the ground water? And that’s why it’s so scary.
No it's not. Its 6 meters above ground/3rd floor, It's not that heavy and is less than 1 degree celcius above room temp. The government commission did fear this but only in the first 2 weeks after the disaster. As it turns out, most of the corium didn't melt anything.
Ahh okay. I was misinformed then. Thanks!
If I could understand what any of this meant I'd be petrified
Gotta say for a big explosion those welds fucking held tight
Photo 7 says “elephants shit”
You think Drain-o could unclog those pipes?
Have no idea what I’m looking at. Looks like they a plumber.
Its so strong im getting radiation poisoning through the photo.
It was once, but enough of the highly active isotopes have decayed for it to no longer be molten radiation
Real life SCP
Humans sure make a mess wherever they go, huh
\Geiger counter intensifies**
I scrolled through all the pics and didn't see a single elephant
What are you on? The core is still intact we just need to pump more water!
wtf am i watching
I’ve always been fascinated by the pure and simple truth that this building is and will forever be death. No human,insect,animal or plant life can be near it for too long or else they would immediately just fizzle out like the smallest flame from a lighter compared to the absolute inferno that is Chernobyl and the hideous sins that have seeped into the very soul of that land. It’s kinda why I love fallout and stalker so much because it explores the possibility of stuff like this spreading to the wider world.
The China syndrome was first mentioned at Three Mile Island, because of a movie of the same name being released that said a melted core could melt through the earth to China.
It’s not a place, it’s not an official name for anything.