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Chapter 1: What humorous perspective is shared about Chernobyl's aftermath?
Thank you.
Welcome back fatsoes to the final part of our epic Chernobyl series. I'm with Horatio Gould. Hello there. And we, listen, it's all gone to shit. Yeah. It's all gone to hell in a hand basket. A massive nuclear core has exploded in Ukraine. The biggest bust of all time.
Oh!
The city of Milton Keynes has been evacuated. Only two people have died at this point, which is actually fine. Yeah. But they have... Many firefighters are suffering from ARS. Yeah.
Chapter 2: How did the Chernobyl disaster impact local wildlife?
Which is acute radiation syndrome. This is in 1986. Yeah. We haven't done any soundscapes. It might be nice just to do a soundscape of the actual events of... The evening of 26th of April. Charlie, you could be the actual, the reactor. Yeah. And then you'd be the Geiger counter. And I'll be some Russians. Or, well, Soviets, whatever. Okay? Yeah. What's happening in number four? Oh, my.
Chapter 3: What are the long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster?
Oh, my. Oh, my. Oh, no.
The reactor is looking unstable.
Stop the test. Oh, my. It's exploded. It's exploded. Come on, please. What? What? Sir, the reactor is behaving very different. It seems to be playing Take On Me by A-Ha. Sir, the reactor is emitting really sick beats. Why are these beats so sick?
Chapter 4: What role did Soviet bureaucracy play in the Chernobyl incident?
It's the world's first nuclear beatbox, dude. So that was, we were in control room four there. And, well, they're having a great time, it sounded like. So it wasn't too bad. No, it sounded like they were having a great time. And it's nice to know that even under the most stressful of conditions, people can still enjoy A-ha. That's what they said as the theme. Aha! It's the Geiger beat pad.
The Geiger beat pad. In all seriousness, people's skin have fallen off. The world could have genuinely been wiped out. But there were some burly men from the Donbass who came in, and in the series, they all look like Red Richardson, and they built a massive concrete slab underneath the power plant to stop... Hygiene syndrome. Yeah.
Chapter 5: How did the Chernobyl disaster affect international relations?
So by the summer of 1986, the fires are largely out. The worst of the immediate submissions have subsided, but there is still a risk. Reactor 4 remains shattered. A shattered, unstable mass of fuel, graphite and twisted metal. Am I talking about Charlie's toilet on holiday? Yeah. No. It's still dangerous. Twisted metal. A shattered, unstable mass. Dangerous, hot and leaking radiation.
It does sound like your toilet. Your ski's shallow.
I don't want to talk about it anymore.
The reactor needed to be entombed to seal off what was left of the core.
Chapter 6: What lessons can be learned from the Chernobyl disaster?
Yeah, so after our ski holiday, the cleaners had to be on a shift pattern where they could only be going to the toilet for 40 seconds at a time. And 4,000 cleaners had to be used. Yeah, for 90 seconds at a time. And they nicknamed the toilet after a Russian woman called Masha. Yeah, and what they found in there they called the elephant's foot.
Yes, and they needed to build a structure called a sarcophagus over the toilet because they're like, we cannot flush this. It's still emitting radiation. We've just got to write this whole room off. We can just contain this room. Contain the toilet. The official name for the sarcophagus is Object Shelter. Yeah.
Now, in theory, this is to encapsulate Reactor 4 in concrete and steel structure to reduce the radioactive release. In practice, it became one of the most complex engineering operations of the late 20th century... Fuck me. ...until the situation at Charlie's Toilets in the Skitch Island.
Chapter 7: How is Chernobyl perceived in contemporary discussions?
This is beef to the dads right here. This is... Yeah, this is engineering red meat. I guess it's like a man of a certain age. You're viewing yourself... When you read about this, you're thinking of yourself as the guy who sorts it out. That's why every dad has a fantasy that something like this happens and they have to work something else. Sheila, I've got to go. I'm needed.
They need someone with my brain. Finally, my brain, that is always at odds with yours, is useful. Finally, the fact I've ruined every Christmas might save humanity. The interior of the core, the blown-out core, is too radioactive for prolonged human presence. The actual blueprints of the plant are way out of date. No one actually knows the measurements. Yeah, it's of a different place.
Chapter 8: What are the humorous anecdotes shared about life post-Chernobyl?
It's just sort of a beach shack. Yeah, so they build a massive sort of structure. Do you know what? It's a babushka doll. Yeah. They need a bigger one around. Yeah. And they put another one. Another one on top of that.
To contain all the radiation. Yes.
So do you think in the film, they're all scratching their heads and then he just sees a Russian doll and he's like... Of course. It was so simple. The answer was there all along. Many operations are limited to seconds or minutes. So it's like a colony of ants basically having to do it in shifts. It's passing a bucket of water along a line to put a fire out.
Equipment breaks down under the exposure to the radiation. So you've got men who are like erecting supports, pouring concrete, welding, but they can only do it for a few seconds and then they have to tap out. There's this thing called the elephant's foot. This is the name given to the infamous mass of core beneath reactor four. So that is...
that's like a lava-like mass that flowed from the core and solidified into the shape that we're looking at now. Which does look like an elephant's foot. It does look like an elephant. I mean, yeah, but an elephant. So is that one of the most radioactive parts? Well, that's the core, isn't it? Is that the core, right? So that is molten nuclear fuel, graphite, concrete and sand fused together.
Christ. And that's what they found in Charlie's toilet at the ski shallow.
LAUGHTER
because he was trying to get rid of the smell by just pouring sand on, but he couldn't get over the smell. That's all the noise Beebe was hearing. Helicopters flying, but they kept missing because you can't get over it because it's too smelly. He's pouring boron on it. I don't know where he got that from. So this was first identified in late 86, and it's so lethal.
It's lethal if you get anywhere close to it. So people to take photographs would run in quick. I don't know why they need to photograph it like that, but anyway. It's one of the most dangerous things on earth, that elephant's foot there. And so they create this exclusion zone. Now we're looking at this map. This is a map of radiation from Chernobyl.
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