Hey everybody welcome back to explain that from fire. The part that story takes the questions you always wanted to ask and talk about them in a way that's easy to understand. We're your hosts, I'm Tim. And I'm Kevin.
So Kevin today we're talking about nuclear power. And the first question is how do countries get rid of their nuclear warheads when they decide they no longer want them or need them? Well, what they do is they basically take them apart and mix all that plutonium with a ceramic forming something called a fuel pellet. And these pellets are then actually shipped to the correct type of nuclear reactor and basically use the nuclear fuel.
You know, in fact, a lot of Soviet and American warheads that were dismantled to the treaties end up as fuel in Canadian nuclear reactors as the two major powers didn't trust each other. It is interesting how both bit enemies trusted Canada. Oh yeah, that's right. A lot of dismantled Soviet warheads ended up in US reactors and a lot of the international US warheads end up in Japanese reactors too.
So how are nuclear weapons tests that are done underground conducted without destroying all the land around them or the facilities in which they are conducted? So you're talking about underground nuclear tests. What they are is they're essentially a bomb in a very, very deep hole or mine shaft. When it goes boom, a portion of surrounding ground is vaporized and a lot more is what they call super heated.
So if the hole is deep enough and very well should be as we've done this sort of thing for a while now, although basically all the radio activity and the blast is contained underground. So it's kind of like having a very, very, very tiny balloon pop in your hands. If you can imagine that. So you know, the noise is muffled.
The rubber doesn't go anywhere and everything is cool. I see. Now, there are two nuclear disasters which people often reference and compare and trust. My question is how come Hiroshima today as a city has a population of over a million people, I believe, and it isn't a complete dead city in comparison.
A city like Chernobyl still has a 30 kilometer exclusion zone. Oh, really, really great question. So the two instances, the two examples are actually very different. That's because Hiroshima was destroyed by a nuclear blast while Chernobyl wasn't actually destroyed at all, but it was irradiated by a complete nuclear power meltdown.
Now bombs are designed to use up as much of the radioactive material as possible in a split second. Any less would be a waste of destructive power. So while Hiroshima was certainly more physically destructive, the destruction was caused by a rather small sphere of nuclear material. You know, there simply isn't enough of it in a bomb to contaminate as much of the area as when you have a whole power plant.
On the other hand, power plants are designed to use up fuel over long periods of time. And don't take it wrong way. It's still really bad. I'm just speaking in terms of comparing it to Chernobyl.
Okay, so perhaps we can elyphive what happened at Chernobyl then? Yes. So Chernobyl was a nuclear power station and it had tons of radioactive material on site. And when it lost containment, it was immense amounts of radiation pouring out of it.
And it did contaminate a very large area despite not having much physical destruction. So how about we put some numbers against it? The Chernobyl reactor contained about 180 tons of nuclear fuel consisting of 2% or 3600 kilograms of total uranium while the amount of nuclear fuel released is estimated at 7 tons corresponding to about 200 kilograms of uranium. You know, fission products increased longer than fuels used.
Okay, I got it. 600 kilograms of uranium of which 200 kilograms underwent fission. How about the Hiroshima bomb? Now, the Hiroshima bomb only contained about 25 kilograms of uranium and about 1 kilogram of that underwent nuclear fission.
So about all around more than 200 times smaller. Wow, that does give a sense of the scale difference. Now they said at Chernobyl, the water made it all much worse. And there's something people described as the elephant's foot.
What is that? You know, it sounds really, really dangerous. Very dangerous indeed. It's quite difficult to actually express in words just how radioactive and dangerous the elephant's foot was or is.
In some circles, it's known as the Medusa Stone because if you've seen it with your own eyes, well, you're basically a dead man. One second of exposure guarantees basically deadly cancer across your entire body within five years and 10 seconds reduces that to one year. I got the picture. But in the story, there were also some heroes.
Yes, indeed. Three men saved the world on that day despite knowing that it almost meant certain death. Valerie Bespelov and Alexei Edenko, who were engineers from the plant and Boris Berenov, who worked as a technician, volunteered to dive down and open a release valve. They swam through waters that the radiation had boiled into hydrogen peroxide in order to do this.
Every man will be in a child on a planet probably older lives than these men. So sometimes you hear that cockroaches are resistant to nuclear radiation. How would this be the case if their bodies have DNA just like ours? Oh, so it's actually a little bit of a myth that cockroaches are especially resistant to radiation.
While they are more resistant than humans, studies show that susceptibility to radiation scales with size and that the most resistant is probably the tiny fruit fly. Radiation is only a problem if you're growing since DNA is kind of like a blueprint. It's not a problem for the fully grown cockroach, but still a problem for the species as making new ones obviously requires the blueprints. Now as humans, we lack a shell, so we cover ourselves with disposable skin and hair, which gradually falls and flakes off.
This means we need to be constantly growing new skin and hair to keep all of our insides in, right? So our bodies are constantly referencing the blueprints and we'll start building whatever mess they see on the coffee stains. This leads to random mutations which could theoretically result in new superhumans, but mostly results are very painful there. Got it.
So you see an explosion in the movies. You typically see the same type of shape from a nuclear explosion. Why is this? And one further detail is, I've noticed that footage of nuclear explosions often come with these white vertical stripes falling to the ground.
Can you explain that as well? Sure. What you're referencing is often called the mushroom cloud. And it's a pretty distinctive mushroom shaped cloud of debris, smoke, and usually condensed water vapor resulting from such a large explosion.
The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but actually any sufficiently energetic detonation or deflagration will produce the same effect. So the other thing you're talking about, I believe, are smoke trails from smoke rockets. Before nuclear tests, they would sometimes fire smoke rockets up into the air near the blast location, which would allow them to monitor the blast shockwave by basically watching how the smoke trails move in response to it. So there for testing purposes, that's very interesting.
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