Pre-Chernobyl History: Trouble Under the Surface (1975-1986) 

The only nod to this information in the HBO series is in one of the trial scenes when Legasov says "No one in the room that night knew the shutdown button could act as a detonator. They didn't know it because it had been kept from them." He goes on to admit he wasn't the only one to keep the secrets. Then he blames the KGB and the Central Committee but given the information in this video it looks like it was very much the fault of Legasov and the Kurchatov Institute. It was one of those of moments in a movie where I wondered why they didn't explore such an admission more deeply.

@30:40 threw people under the bus and “didn’t realize the bus would come back for him too” 😂 love the graphic haha another excellent enlightening video, thank you!

Oh what an interesting subject! I've always wanted to hear more about pre chernobyl events. Keep up the good work bud! This is definitely my favorite chernobyl channel now!

I love the detailed research you do. In terms of cultural impact of the cleanup on the USSR. Despite the scale of the disaster, I don't think it was psychologically enough to end the soviet union. 1.The clean up of the Exxon Valdez increased the US GDP. This is sometimes called a war time boom. 2. In 1986, most people had heard the word radioactive, but all they knew was it was some complicated thing they would never understand, like rocket science or brain surgery. They knew radiation was bad, but so was smoking, and everyone smoked. Since it was a regional explosion, the bulk of the soviet union didn't know enough to worry about it. There were so many other problems in the USSR, its collapse fate was inevitable, At most Chernobyl may have sped things up. Point 1 has no reference, point 2 is the opinion of an 8yr old growing up in the cold war in Canada.

Dear TCG, I wanted to thank you for a wonderful piece of work, and for all you personal efforts. Like any airline disaster, modern systems that we ALL depend upon for Life, Safety, Food, and Health are dependent upon tens, hundreds, even thousands of interlocking processes. Any one failure could be overcome, but lashed together they create a raft of disaster. "....Nuclear Power is Not For This Generation..." is perhaps the most interesting statement in this entire piece, a statement emerging from a deeply insightful nature of the economic and political forces that existed at the core of the desire to possess such power, and a knowing of them to be too immature to manage properly or safely. Like an good crime novel, the reader looks for one culprit or villain, and disappointingly Chernobyl NP 4 does not have one, instead it has at its roots a system and an army of individuals who all bear a portion of the blame. It is important to look deeper into this, the Western capitalist based systems that are generating nuclear power have their own limitations and faults, and to some degree they are even more complex and less visible, but mostly defined not by power, or politics, but by shareholder profitability.

Too bad I can only give this one "like". What an absolute banger of a video! Filled to the brim with all kinds of detailed RBMK goodness in terms of technical information. Thanks to your always present source list, my RBMK library has grown substantially over time. The only thing I would really like to get my hands on are these 2 Russian RBMK books, but thus far I have come up empty. On to the next video!

Fuckujima reactor accident also occurred because of cost cutting during construction. We never learn. See Boeing

Control rods were shortened to maximise breeding of Pu-239 in the lower zone of reactor... Soviet Union had enough concrete, but never enough plutonium. Even Mr. Brykhanov said that there were rooms in which he had no access at Chernobyl NPP. The cause of chernobyl disaster was deliberately dangerous design for simultaneous production of weapons grade plutonium end electricity. Maybe someday we will read the documents about Pu-239 production on RBMKs reactor, there were many secret experiments.

Thank you for the time and effort put into researching and making these.

Babe wake up, new Chernobyl Guy video just dropped

Very interesting topic! I became hooked on your videos :) Only thing I would suggest is not putting white text on top of mostly white photos. Maybe add text shadows to increase contrast?

Good job. This is an important video.

I love your channel ! i find nuclear history super intresting and find your videos on of the most detailed secondary sources there are. keep up the good work love it

Your dedication to research is mesmerizing! Your channel is perfect!

The operation of all the cooling pumps was a destabilizing effect of the rundown test. As per INSAG-7 5.2.3: "The reactor was operated with boiling of the coolant water in the core and at the same time with little or no subccoling at the pump intakes and at the core inlet. Such a mode of operation in itself could have led to a destructive accident of the kind that did ultimately occur, in view of the characteristics of positive reactivity feedback of the RBMK reactor." Are the exact dimensions of the water column in the reactor control rod channels +/- 20cm more of a contributing factor to +beta then the lack of subcooling caused by the rundown test conditions present at the time of the accident?

great video :) hopefully views come with it,found this channel 3 weeks ago and I already saw them all vids

Will the real design of Chernobyl unit 4s control rods please stand up

It’s a good day when Chernobyl Guy drops a video. ❤

I love the vid keep it up

Your videos got me into Chernobyl, thanks for all the information and research!

I absolutely love your channel and the no nonsense truth telling, I would like to see a episode or more of the miners, they get shoved to the side I feel........please

Hi mr Chernobyl guy. I have somewhat recently discovered your channel, and I gotta say, exceptional knowledge. From that one question from me arises. I’m a programmer, and also a person who adores nuclear power, I have somewhat recently started writing a nuclear reactor simulatior, and the reactor I decided to simulate is the RBMK1000, it’s just so unique in its design, it’s hard not to love it haha. However, from your videos you seem to posses a much more complete knowledge on the functionality and design of the reactor than most people, so I wanted to ask, could you point me in the direction on where you get all that information? I’d greatly appreciate it, it’d help me make a more complete and realistic simulation. Thank you!

Excellent work. Exceptional research. The best Chernobyl resource. Thank you

What a mess. One wonders two things: (1) If they knew that lowering control rods could add reactivity, why wasn't there a little bit of computer code that would lower only some of the rods at a time? and (2) Why not some warning alarms implemented in software that would warn and prevent the easy insertion of all the rods all at once?

I think the lesson to be drawn from all of this is humans are too fallible to be relied upon to operate such a comlex machine, they all have their speciality but they dont know the full picture and the risk of operating on guess work was unacceptable. the pool of knowledge available operating these reactors was widely dispersed and not easily available when making decisions, a core program is essential to any complex machine and as time went on they must have realised this was a very complex machine. PS ( well done again for the amazing insight by your research).

i wish you guys could go over the whole hbo show, minute-by-minute and explain everything wrong with it and most importantly, say what they should've showed instead smh

In May 1986, during planned shutdown of reactor No.4, electrical scheme of action of AZ-5 button supposed to be changed. Being depressed, it should initiate not only movement of 211 control and safety rods from top position down, but in addition 24 shortened boron rods should to move up from bottom position ( reverse mode of servomotor operation ) to compensate " positive effect of reactivity " when water is being displaced on bottom zone by graphite displacer. Also, some fresh fuel rods should replace burn out fuel rods and, as result, side absorbers supposed to be installed in addition to the existing one, that would automatically made working of reactor more stable on low loads. After fulfillment of these actions, Toptunov could press AZ-5 ten times, nothing bad would happen. April 26 1986 was the last day when reactor No,4 could be killed.

Normally I'd believe government experts however reactor went BOOM.

Wow.

I think my biggest question in all of this is why before the disaster did the soviets have so much faith in the rbmk design was it propaganda or were people lead astray. I genuinely want to know why they had so much faith in this

Well i know this, I know we don't know the exact changes/ modifications that were in the #4 reactor. Therefore to assume xenon poisoning And/or the shutdown. What's the direct cause of the chernobyl, I'd say that's clearly not the case! God know!

Not great, not terrible.

The more of your content I watch, the more I begin to think that Legasov was actually at fault for Chernobyl. I don’t have any evidence of this per se, but all of the various narratives that have come out, all paint Legasov as a hero. And all of these narratives are blatantly false. Do the actual tapes that Legasov made still exist? I would love to see a video on them

Savages!

Nuclear reactions are a million times more energetic than chemical reactions! BE VERY CAREFUL

no views

Yeah a crappy Soviet reactor

I wonder just how much time and effort he put in to basically saying what they said in the hbo miniseries

Blame it on Xenon-135?... No! Blame it on stupidity, sorry Russia, but you tried your best! But you couldn't resist that political cronyism/favoritism, kinda like what we're facing today within the echo's of Affirmative Action in America!

587 views bro fell off

Hey, I have a tangential question for you. There seemed to be a fairly intense debate on if Chernobyl Unit 4 reactor went prompt critical or if or if it managed to blow up in a purely delayed critical state. With all of the Chernobyl interest spawned by the mini-series, the intensity of the debate seems to have faded, but its still difficult to find much in the way of nuclear pundits stating that the reactor went prompt critical. You are pretty unambiguous that it did. Do you think that the issue of prompt vs non-prompt warrants its own video? Also is Beta Effective the same as the units of Dollars for reactivity? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_(reactivity)

Nerd😅