Interesting story of the corium photograph (a mega-radioactive "elephant foot" that flowed from the reactor)
this show is so ****ing good....that ending creeped me the hell out Also what is the 5 megaton explosion they were referencing? That's supposed to be impossible isn't it (with a nuclear reactor)
They were referring to the water still being pumped into the tanks througout the explosion, in which shouldve been evaporated but didnt. The neutrons were going to heat it up into a gas very rapidly with nowhere for it to go and boom with all the uranium. I think, Im no nuclear physicist.
Just rewatched it, yea they were saying "when the lava comes into contact with the water". What I'm having a hard time believing is how that explosion could have a yield of 5 Megatons (yield of an H-bomb) and destroy everything within 30km. Probably a mistake in the script, hopefully someone can explain @B-Bob. Certainly couldn't be any sort of chain reaction, reactor fuel is nowhere near that level of enrichment, let alone with the stage set for weaponized capabilities with some molten core contacting water... Edit: Seems a lot of people have called out that crazy number and it is false. Way way way off, it sounds astronomically improbable for reactor fuel mixed with everything else reaching crtical mass and leading to a thermonuclear explosion
My understanding is that THIS is the point, yes: that steam event, narrowly avoided, would have contaminated a much greater area, thrown much more into the atmosphere, and made for a potentially global catastrophe. But no, I don't think anyone meant a new nuclear reaction would have happened. Or they shouldn't have. (I haven't watch this yet so didn't see how they referenced it.)
They used the term "thermal explosion", and they did say the shockwave would destroy all their stuff for 30km *and* disperse the fallout over most of everybody else's stuff. I have no idea what the actual estimates were and no idea how close the show is to them, but I'd think that instantly introducing that much heat into that much water and vaporizing it in a fraction of a second would release a metric f***ton of energy.
Jumping in here... all Chernobyl could have done if things had gone even worse is become a larger dirty bomb spread over an increased area. A runaway critical reaction couldn't have created a fission detonation (Hiroshima/kilotons) and certainly not a fusion reaction (Tsar Bomba/ megatons).
Cheetah you are correct, it stems from poor writing and source material. The conditions necessary for a chain reaction have to be EXTREMELY precise. The Manhattan project book touched on just how difficult. It is extremely extremely extremely unlikely (like astronomically low probability) for a fission chain reaction to occur from 2% enriched U-235 mixed with a bunch of other crap contacting water. And for a fusion (thermonuclear reaction)? Yea no way. Not only that, the Tsar bomba (larged Bomb ever created) had a yield of 50 megatons while being dropped to an optimal depth for max destruction, is not really equivalent to their false 5 megaton claim—also coming from inside of a reactor. HBO following show physics just like GoT, but they have a less of an excuse here as they are basing off an actual event and actual numbers. This guy is probably the source of the false info, apparently he has propagated false numbers in the past as well.
What's as big as a house, burns 20 litres of fuel every hour, puts out a sh!tload of smoke and noise, and will cut an apple into 3 pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into 4 pieces.
My fiance was looking at me funny for laughing so hard at that! So many of the people I know from that era/region have that dark kind of humor. My favorite one I heard was still Boris: do we have anything left to drink? Ivan: only antifreeze, but it will make you go blind Boris: to hell with it! I've seen enough of this world!
For those interested in this topic, the government of Japan is currently dealing with an issue of allowing foreign workers to work at the Fukushima disaster site. They are citing the difficulties in long-term health problems and how they could hold Tepco or the Japanese government responsible. They had a situation there that was like what they showed in this series. They also had actions based off of "official readings" only to have it revealed that the equipment they were using were reading the radiation to the maximum of its capabilities.
