Pre-Chernobyl History: Rise of the RBMK (1954-1973) 

17:07 heavy-hitters :) 24:00 There is no "also". His recollections just differ somewhat. 24:05 "for some reason at proatom" was never meant to be said in the video 27:18 what is less UNcertain So in other words, there is uncertainty around the military application of RBMK reactors, although it may have factored into design decisions. What is MORE certain, on the other hand, is that safety was traded off for economy. 28:00 What follows is a quote from Karpan's book. 31:19 The absolute self-own. That was the one part that shouldn't have been shown. lmao I am no fair use expert, however, and this is an educational video... The second video should come in two weeks. Next week is Chernobyl Week and That Chernobyl Guy is preparing some special content for you all.

"It's cheaper" (Valery Legasov)

Reminds me of the old contractors joke: Cheap/Good/Fast. Can only choose two.

You only lose your hair when you undergo chemotherapy. Cancer doesn't make your hair just fall out. It's also totally possible to be diagnosed and only have a few months to live, especially in the early 70's when detection and treatment were 50 years less advanced.

What's even better than a regular saturday night ? A radioactive saturday night from That Chernobyl Guy !

Funny. Weasel or not, Legasov clearly had a skill in speaking with a great deal of gravity. Those lines from the tapes...skillfull. Considering that Nuclear cleanup is a matter of radiochemistry, not reactor design and that they needed an apparatchik and skilled speaker to lie for them in public...... i realize more and more why they got him involved with the cleanup. Perfect choice, really.....

A colleague of mine just went from working (heavy physical labour) to diagnosis to death from cancer in under a month.

Let's be honest, we're all here because deep down we all want an early Nuclear Princess phase.

Looking forward to the 2nd part of this video. Very much appreciated, high quality content.

You deserve many more subscribers. Your sources are really good, and your voice has a certain charm to it. And when you mention victims you treat tehm with the respect they deserve

Khrushchev, as his party career started in Donetsk, of course was supporting coal mining to an extent. Also, Mayak incident kept party officials somewhat sceptical about nuclear enegy in early 1960s Add: Novovoronezh. I bet you could never pronounce it right)

Great day when he uploads

For a guy who invented the best reactor ever for its size and output, he sure underestimated human stupidity in pushing the reactor to the most insane levels humanly possible and even disabling every safety features. In fact, from simulation its frankly scary to think about that tiny minuscule window they hit to make the reactor go critical, if you want a class A freak incident, look no further than Chernobyl, its surprising that DPRK was gonna build several of RBMK reactors with help from USSR but Kim Il Sung was so freaked out by Chernobyl, he genuinely forbade nuclear reactors to be built.

The name of that reactor, when translated directly, sounds like a doge meme: "Reactor, much power, channel-type" 😅

18:55 this photo is pure vaporwave. I love the aesthetics of this building, this black and white futuristic design

Really appreciate this level and depth of context

So Polonium tea was a thing even back in the 70's

22:59 The «export flaw» of RBMK is that it allows the extraction of the fuel elements at virtually any point of the fuel campaign. Thus, you can operate it in the mode that gives you a lot of plutonium but very little electricity. USSR was very meticulous about nuclear proliferation (remember the fuss about ‘the creative use of CANDU’ in India). Thus, VVER - the Russian vision of PWR seemed a better option in terms of non-proliferation. What is more, VVER had and has better potential for integration with I&C systems for PWR

Sellafield/Windescale should be warning enough against graphite moderated reactors. The decrease in reactivity with temperature should not be trusted as the lone negative feedback. Any reactor with a positive void coefficient should have more than one negative feedback factor. In fact, modern reactors are safe, and molten salt thorium reactors have the potential of being intrinsically safer.

Don't be too hard on the baby boy dressed as a girl. This was quite common practice at the time across Europe. There are many pictures of British boys before puberty dressed in a dress during the Victorian period.

Well, you did it again, another fine video. 33 minutes of RBMK history goodness no less. All these reactor-y details I mostly know, but still there were a few new gems for me to discover in there. The funny thing is I'm actually reading the Sonja D. Schmid book right now^^. It was gifted to me not too long ago. Very interesting reading material, I have to say. Can't wait to see part 2 of this. You are spoiling us rotten. Your "Novovoronezh" could do with some spit and polish, though😅

Inexpensive design that could be mass produced. It produced a lot of power and was good at making weapons grade plutonium as it could be reloaded while in use. The mker design is an evolution of the rbmk that was never built.

I like your videos of Chernobyl❤

I took a class Physics of Nuclear Reactors. Several textbooks were provided for the class. Highly recommend to use these textbooks for technical references. A lot of information about materials, sizes and etc physics.

My god russian intellectuals have top beard game o.o

The EBR-I in Idaho was the first electricity generating NPP, wasn't it?

Great episode! Perhaps Chernobyl would not have happened if the Soviets had continued development rather than have a 10 year pause. This has been fascinating to see the background behind why reactors with no containment were built.

great subject. more of this please!

Feinberg suddenly presenting with a presumbably stage 4 cancer and dying within a month is not so very improbable. That kind of thing still happens today... all too frequently sadly. A lot of cancers are asymptomatic until they get really, really bad and beyond the ability of modern medicine to treat, nevermind 1960s medicine. Not suprising either when you consider the high lifetime dose someone working at the heart of the early Soviet nuclear programme would have probably accumulated.

RU-vid algorithms: Engaged Thanks for the upload!

Do a review of the mker reactors that were designed but never built - based on the rbmk😊

It’s kinda funny that I’m listening to this while playing stalker shadow of Chernobyl

You can absolutely die of cancer within a month of diagnosis. It isn’t that uncommon, especially in haematological malignancies. The median survival today for sufferers of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, for example, is six weeks in the event they cannot for some reason be treated. The treatments used today were not available in the early 1970s: in fact the initial trials for them (in the USA and Europe) were published in 1981. In 1973 only children had a reasonable chance of survival. (Needless to say, the 1981 trials form the basis of today’s treatments, but are far from the whole story.)

I still feel that RBMK was a fine piece of value engineering in an engineering sector that has suffered economically crippling over engineering. The design required considerable amounts of hubris and stupidity to make fail. I would postulate that such levels of stupidity would likely cause the demise of most designs. Operating instructions and procedures are as integral a part of plant as the physical steel steam pipes themselves. Ripping out a procedure will cause a failure just as certainly as ripping out a coolant pipe. We tend to forget about the amount of energy required to enrich uranium and when power is at a premium that matters. There were four reactors at Chernobyl and three of them had uneventful lives and it took gross negligence and I flawed management structure to destroy one of them.

Where has the second part gone?

"I'm an engineer; I fix stuff..."

This informs me partially of some possible motive for Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Soviet era fanboy Putin may have been accustomed to think of Donbass as well as Crimea key parts of the Soviet empire, Donbass coal, Crimea for beaches and ports that don't freeze. I wonder if he likes tea?

7:35 Novo-Vorozhnez?

7:14 Profitability? That only started to exist in the USSR under Khrushchev

Cancer doesn't make someone's hair fall out. Chemotherapy does.

The irony is that it took massavie user error to cause the accident

Fuck yes. RBMK porn surprise Saturday morning release. I’ll take it and willing to continue living 2 more weeks. Are there any videos of an actual build, installation and configuration of the inside components and detailed video of the actual pressure vessel per say I guess the whole housing or whatever makes up the reactor pit and all the cool shielding and the crazy amount of pipes and pipes all doing different jobs. I can’t find anything. There is a short 32 min black and white YT video that shows some but really nothing. I think I am obsessively interested in there not being a large reactor vessel that houses everything together and will safely depressive In emergency SCAM and safe shut down. But the RBMK and the never disappointing Soviet crazy unsafe engendering and work conditions is fun to watch. The great High Channel type reactor (loose translation I think) with its individual pressurized fuel channels and all the rest. I think they thought they were clever because NO ONE else would or did or thought that would be a good idea. I need to see with my own eyes a reactor being built with that absolute massive black graphite block stake towering over and hundreds of fuel cells with the energetic and terrifying but beautiful, unmatched and undefined Uranium 235 waiting to quietly and efficiently do its job non stop for years on end. Clean safe energy that never happened because of unfortunate accidents and hysteria and fear mongering the public using lies and manipulation and fake information to achieve their agenda. Probably ungodly rich oil tycoon’s that own everybody and just buys people whenever needed. They can’t loose and the people that loose are us smucks that live simple but honest lives and are good people. The salt of the earth. If we could come together and work as one and talking and hashing out the fine print and disagreeable parts. That being called compromise and having everyone win. The American public making real changes because they can’t ignore 200 million adults that are nicely and coherently voicing our demands and not taking no for an answer. Can we get everyone to focus and care about one important improvement we expect from our government that is there to serve us and at the end of the day that should be the accomplishment we all feel good about. We could actually do that tomorrow if we fucking tried and no one brought their pride and ego to the meeting. Everyone could boycott the thing and they would fix the problem yesterday because we know they can and they have the money. Every single product I buy and when I go shopping has turned to a bad miserably experience no matter where I go. I have never felt this is 33 years. When Going out to buy just the essentials to stay alive turns into an existential crisis of how can I make it somehow work this week or seeing the price of basic everything slowly go up every week year on end and the quality actually noticeably going down as well and NO ONE doing a damn thing about it is fucking wild to me. We could change that trend. big biss really feels like they can add sneaky fees and surgcharge or raise price repeatedly for no logical reason, shrinkflate, AND take a Couple Doritos out of my cool ranch bag!? The corporations and fat cats definitely are taking advantage of the fact they can literally do whatever they want to profit and make their lives probably I imagine pretty damn fantastically euphorically amazing a lot of the time. Why are we letting them openly abuse and mock and to be completely honest let them laugh and think we are stupid and inferior cattle that they own and continue to profit from and do you know where all this started from and continues to this day stealthy destroying and dividing and pulling apart the very fabric that makes and endorses and holds America together. If that goes. If communities start to isolate and pull away and put their defenses up and have no desire to even understand or come to some agreement with their fellow citizens, us the US public, the good guys, you know we are all on the same damn side. It pisses me off. We could come together with a singular purpose which is for the greater good and humanity and forget the individual just for a little while…I have faith it would turn out nothing but positive and righteous. The big win win for everybody. If any sees this try to think how can this be done. Spread the word that we are tired of being taxed and old people you never met and don’t particularly like or even think isn’t allegedly doing evil things normal people can’t understand or even comprehend in their spare time spend our hard earned money on stupid shit and things we don’t want and don’t agree with. We want to invest that money 80% back in solely to making America 🇺🇸 the USA the greatest country in the history of time better. We would love you to use the trillions you print and the constantly lost or misplaced trillions flowing freely through the pentagon of all places. We will no longer stand by and enable the old corrupt geriatric and barely functioning but rich as hell politicians laughing and partying it up in Washington. We are talking action. We are bigger and also just massively bigger than you .think about it

Why did the Soviet Union use pencils instead of pens in space? Because their engineers couldn't afford the gravity of the situation!

Alexandrov resembles Aleister Crowley.

There was technically a railfanning clip in here. Based.

Infants are not crossdressers.

First Russian nuclear power plant.

What is going on with Russian nuclear physicist beards? That's the real question 🤔

Kurchatov was not "the father" of. He was "the stepdad". His value was just the ability, to correctly read the tons of documents and plans stolen from Manhattan project. Not a neglible thing after all.

Suggestion for you. October ends ' song is goinna go viral. React to it and join tthey hype train!

Great documentary. Right up to the point where you decided you had to bring American politics into it. Bye bye.

I was really enjoying this until the snarky ridicule of Donald Trump had to be included. How stupid and immature in an otherwise informative documentary.

Many incorrect and fictional "facts" like with any video of yours.