The Elephant's Foot - Corpse of Chernobyl

200 seconds. 200 seconds next to it would lead to a relatively quick death, which is better than many alternatives. Spend just 30 seconds near it and dizziness and fatigue would find you a week later. Two minutes of exposure and your cells would soon begin to hemorrhage. Four minutes. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Fever. 200 seconds in its presence and you would have just days to live. By the fall of 1986, emergency crews fighting to contain the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant made it into the basement. They turned a corner into a steam corridor beneath failed reactor number four and found not steam, but black lava that had oozed out of the core, eaten through meters of concrete, and settled on the floor. The largest and most famous formation in the corridor was a two-ton wrinkled mass that their radiation sensors firmly told them not to approach. With cameras pushed in from around a corner, the workers documented the dimly lit mass. According to readings taken at the time, the still hot portion of the molten reactor core was putting out enough radiation to give anyone within three feet of it a lethal dose in just 200 seconds. This is the true story of the elephant's foot. During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant experienced a power surge born of The shutdown did not work. The attempt to manage the surge in power and alarming increase in the core's temperature caused an even larger power surge of 12,000 percent. Control rods that are used to manage core temperature were inserted too late. A gross safety violation, there weren't even enough control rods in the core to begin with. Their insertion into the increasingly hot core caused the rods themselves to crack and fracture, locking them in place. Heat and power output continued to rise until the water that was used to cool the entire reactor began to vaporize, generating massive amounts of pressure. The first explosion from the steam inside the reactor was large enough to send a four million pound lid of the reactor assembly through the roof of the building. The reactor now fatally damaged, the remaining cooling water from broken channels seeped into the reactor as well, flashing directly into steam as it touched the soon to be glowing hot nuclear fuel rods. A second even more massive explosion followed shortly after the first, belching core material into the air, spreading fire and radioactive ash. It is estimated that the fires that rage in reactor four spread 400 times more radiation than the nuclear blast that wiped Hiroshima off the map. Over 160,000 square kilometers of Russia and Europe were eventually contaminated. With a glowing heart no longer shielded by tons of steel and concrete, the core could no longer be cooled. It began to melt. When you hear about a nuclear reactor melting down, it's not simply illustrative language. Without proper cooling, radioactive materials used as fuel get hotter and hotter due to their close proximity and continuous emission of high energy particles. Nuclear fuel literally heats itself up until it melts, turning into what is arguably the most dangerous substance on earth. If you wanted to know what the most dangerous material ever created was, corium would be a good answer. At Chernobyl, the loss of coolant caused a meltdown of the uranium fuel, up to a third of which was scattered into the atmosphere. Estimates vary, but up to 160,000 kilograms of uranium, radioactive in many thousands of degrees, melted and flowed into the bottom of the reactor vessel. Eight days later, the flow had melted through the reactor's lower shield. Oozing through basement pipes, pooling in steam corridors, and eating through two meters of steel and concrete, the radioactive lava flow from reactor number four eventually cooled enough to solidify in the basement. Thousands of kilograms of molten uranium oxide, sand, metal, silica glass, and other materials, a composite monstrosity dubbed corium. In addition to being the world's arguably most dangerous material, it might be also the rarest artificial material. Corium is only formed in a nuclear meltdown. Corium has only been created accidentally five times. Once in the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, once at Chernobyl, and three separate times during the much more recent Fukushima-Dachi nuclear disaster. Now I say accidentally created, because there are scientists and engineers who study corium and create it on purpose. For example, this is a video of molten uranium oxide, like what would have been found beneath Chernobyl, bubbling and boiling at around 2,000 degrees Celsius at Argonne National Laboratory. Remember, this heat is self-generated. All by itself, corium can get half as hot as the surface of the sun. Corium is never pure nuclear fuel, rather it's a radioactive Frankenstein of fuel rods, fission products, the control rods in the core, concrete from the floor, steel from the surrounding structures, and the chemicals created when blazing uranium reacts with air, water, and steam. Here you can see a simulation of what corium actually does, easily disintegrating concrete as it escapes confinement. In the lab, corium is still terrifying, but controlled and mesmerizing in a way that lava and its destructive capabilities can often be. It's almost beautiful. At Chernobyl, there was no such beauty. After the corium was done flowing, the result was an ominous collection of stalactites, stalagmites, steam valves clogged with hardened radioactive lava, and the large gray mass that would later be dubbed the elephant's foot. The elephant's foot could be the most dangerous piece of waste in the world. Of the five accidental corium creations, only Chernobyl's has escaped confinement. Radioactive atoms are unstable atoms. While something like hydrogen is just fine with a nucleus consisting of a single proton, radioactive elements like uranium, the most common isotope of which contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons, are not so happy. Photons, electrons, protons, and neutrons are randomly ejected from the nuclei of these large atoms, transforming them until something like plutonium degrades over time into a stable element like lead. Particles emitted from radioactive atoms are a form of ionizing radiation. That is, they have enough energy to rip apart the atoms and molecules they crash into, changing how they interact with other atoms and molecules, ionizing them. Non-ionizing radiation, on the other hand, like the kind emitted by your cell phone, does not have enough energy to break atomic bonds. Ionizing radiation, then, directly causes the terrible symptoms of radiation sickness by simply smashing through enough molecular machinery in your body. DNA can be repaired, new cells can be generated, but with enough nanoscopic damage, cells start to function irregularly or die outright, leading to cancer or organ failure, respectively. Because of the way radiation damages human cells by knocking atoms and molecules out of place, death by radiation is a, relatively speaking, slow one. Fever, nausea, confusion, cancer, organ failure, up to a point over time, treatment does help, but extremely high doses of radiation, like the kind that would be delivered by close contact with the elephant's foot, are always a death sentence. The more radiation released from a mass of atoms, the more dangerous it is. Reports from Chernobyl estimate that immediately after formation, the elephant's foot was emitting nearly 10,000 roentgens per hour. It only takes about one-tenth of that rate to kill a person. A single hour next to the elephant's foot would expose you to the equivalent of over four and a half million chest x-rays all at once. Shortly after the Chernobyl meltdown, nearly 600,000 workers descended on the site to help contain the escaping radiation. Knowingly or not, many of these workers were making the greatest sacrifice. 134 were hospitalized with acute radiation syndrome. 28 of them died within months following the incident, and current estimates put the total number of deaths from related cancers due to the contamination across Russia and Europe somewhere between 9 and 16,000. After the nuclear fires at Chernobyl were finally controlled, a feat which took nine full days, workers scrambled to contain the invisible dangers of the failed core. In May of 1986, construction began on the sarcophagus, a gigantic concrete enclosure built to seal off the radiation from the outside world. But the ruins would never be entirely contained, even after the installation of a much larger tomb in 2016. The Chernobyl sarcophagus is outfitted with access points, allowing researchers to observe the core and workers to enter. In December of 1986, researchers discovered the elephant's foot. It was a couple of meters across, over 4,000 kilograms, and put out enough radiation to prevent anyone from getting near it for more than just a few seconds. But despite the dangers, we have pictures, like this one, of the deadly mass. Well, from a safe distance, workers, or liquidators as they were called, rigged up a crude wheeled camera contraption and pushed it, slowly and from around a corner, towards the elephant's foot. This photo, almost never seen in discussions of the elephant's foot, was taken in 1990, four years after the incident. The slide the photo is on was given to Dr. Bill Zoller at the University of Washington's Department of Chemistry. The caption reads, quote, this is a slide I obtained from the Russians. It shows what is called the elephant's foot. The Russians obtained this picture by sending a man down there with a camera. He took one picture and then came back up. I was told that he died from the radiation he had received. This picture cost a man his life. End quote. When this photo of the elephant's foot was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the elephant's foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had been. Still, merely 500 seconds of exposure at this level would bring on mild radiation sickness, and a little over an hour of exposure would be fatal. Another photo, a timed selfie by Russian nuclear inspector Artur Korneev, is arguably the most famous and most disturbing photo of the elephant's foot. According to an investigation by Atlas Obscura, the ghostly image of Artur is likely not due to anything spooky, just the shutter speed, as is the time lapse-like streak from the flashlight. But the graininess, the grittiness you see in the photo, that's from the radiation. Over time, the elephant's foot has decomposed. It has puffed dust while its surface cracked. But more than 30 years later, it is still quite dangerous. In 2001, levels were measured that would give you a lethal dose of radiation in under 60 minutes. Extrapolating from how radiation sources degrade over time, today that deadly limit is probably a few hours. And today, the elephant's foot, once nuclear lava eating through the corpse of Chernobyl, is still hotter than the surrounding air temperature and environment thanks to the radioactive heat pulsing inside of it. Born of human error, continually generating heat in the basement of a failed power plant, the elephant's foot is still melting into the base of Chernobyl, albeit very slowly. If it hits groundwater, scientists still worry that it could trigger another explosion like the one that killed the core and lifted 4 million pounds like it was a paperweight, or it could leach radioactive material into the water that nearby residents drink. Long after bleeding from the core, this unique piece of waste continues to be a terrifying testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power, even though nuclear power as a whole is safe. Until it is finally removed, if it ever is, the elephant's foot will be there for centuries, sitting in the dark basement of a concrete and steel sarcophagus, a symbol of one of humankind's most powerful tools gone wrong. Until next time. If you want to drape on a silky white lab coat, talk every day with me on Discord, get behind the scenes stuff, and get episodes early, you can go to patreon.com slash Kyle Hill and join the facility staff today. And hey, if you support us just enough, you get your name on ARIA here each and every week. And as you can see, there's literally hundreds of you, so I have no idea how I'm going to pass the... I kind of have to take responsibility for this one. So I know it's going to sound like I'm tooting my own horn or reading into it, but my essay in 2013 about the elephant's foot on Nautilus got millions and millions and millions of views, the most read thing they ever had on their website. And I believe, looking to Google search results and trends, that bringing the elephant's foot back into public consciousness was kind of my doing. So I'm part of the legacy too, which is... fine? Hey, look at us. Thanks for watching.