Nuclear Meltdowns Vs Nuclear Bombs Explained

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00:00 The 20th century saw the emergence of two of the worst human-led disasters of all time

00:05 - the catastrophic repercussions of a nuclear meltdown and the devastating firestorm of

00:10 nuclear weapons.

00:12 In just the last few decades - a blink of the eye in terms of human history - we've

00:16 sure inflicted some massive and long-lasting scars onto our civilization.

00:21 And yet, every infamous nuclear happening is clearly unique as well.

00:25 The consequences of Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Three Mile Island, Nagasaki, Fukushima - they've

00:31 all played out differently, short and long term.

00:35 The question is - why?

00:37 This is Unveiled, and today we're taking a closer look at the difference between a

00:41 nuclear meltdown and a nuclear bomb explosion.

00:46 Do you need the big questions answered?

00:47 Are you constantly curious?

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00:52 And ring the bell for more thought-provoking content.

00:55 On August 6th, 1945, an atomic bomb was detonated over the city of Hiroshima in Japan.

01:02 Dropped from the US aircraft, the Enola Gay, the so-called "little boy" weapon signified

01:08 the first use of nuclear bombs in warfare.

01:11 Around 80,000 people were killed in the explosion, 70,000 injured, and five square miles of the

01:17 once-bustling city was destroyed - almost entirely leveled and burnt away by flames.

01:23 Three days later, August 9th, and the Boxcar bomber dropped another nuclear weapon, this

01:28 time called the Fat Man, over the city of Nagasaki, 190 miles southwest of Hiroshima.

01:35 Statistics vary, but it's thought upwards of 40,000 people died, upwards of 60,000 were

01:40 injured.

01:41 Again, the city was ruined.

01:43 The before and after aerial shots of Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved just how total and merciless

01:49 the bombings were.

01:50 Fast forward three quarters of a century, though, and both cities are a far cry from

01:54 the nuclear wastelands that many once predicted they'd forever be.

01:58 Hiroshima is home to 1.2 million people.

02:01 Nagasaki is smaller, but still has close to half a million residents.

02:05 Both cities are key industrial centres for Japan, producing cars and tech products and

02:10 shipping around the world.

02:12 They're also major energy hubs, and in fact some parts now run on nuclear power.

02:17 The rebuild in itself is astonishing, but what's interesting is that there are no uniquely

02:22 different safety concerns in either location.

02:26 Those who live there today can do so without fear of things like radiation sickness or

02:30 sudden cancer spikes.

02:32 There are no exclusion zones in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

02:35 You can move freely without having to worry that you'll have, say, brushed up against

02:39 something dangerous, or inadvertently discovered a radiating remnant of the nuclear blasts

02:44 of before.

02:45 So how does that work?

02:47 We know that it isn't the same at some other locations, such as in and around the abandoned

02:51 city of Pripyat in Ukraine, notoriously left wholly inhospitable following the Chernobyl

02:57 meltdown in 1986.

02:59 But why is that a no-go zone while modern-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki thrive?

03:04 Today, the bombed cities have been able to re-emerge mostly due to the physics of the

03:09 attacks that they suffered.

03:10 For Hiroshima, the actual detonation of the nuclear weapon was at a point 580 metres,

03:16 almost 2,000 feet, above the city itself.

03:19 For Nagasaki, detonation happened at 500 metres above the ground - 1,650 feet.

03:25 Both are then referred to as "airbursts" rather than "groundbursts".

03:30 The fireball that both produced generated temperatures that you'd otherwise find on

03:34 the surface of the actual sun.

03:36 And at that kind of heat, things do vaporize.

03:40 Buildings and bodies literally disappear.

03:42 However, as devastating as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki fireballs were, they both erupted

03:48 at a significant distance above their targets.

03:51 And neither touched the ground.

03:53 And here's why both cities are now safe.

03:56 The US detonated at those altitudes - around a half a kilometre high - to maximize the

04:01 immediate damage possible with Little Boy and Fat Man.

04:04 In those two fateful moments, they wielded the power of a star.

04:08 But as quick as it arrived, the energy began to siphon away.

04:12 All out was carried, dispersed, and diluted in the atmosphere above.

04:16 While neutron activation triggered by the blast was mostly too far away from the ground

04:20 to turn everything else radioactive.

04:22 Were you to have entered "Ground Zero" at Hiroshima or Nagasaki very shortly after

04:27 either explosion, then there was certainly an increased risk of radiation.

04:31 But estimates are that that risk will have dramatically lowered within only a couple

04:34 of days - even at the heart of the explosion.

04:37 The long-term contamination levels weren't that significant - even though the initial

04:41 blasts were easily the most powerful that humanity has ever inflicted on itself.

04:46 Why then is Pripyat so different?

04:49 Again, the physics of the event are key.

04:51 Plus the location on the ground.

04:54 But there's also the sheer amount of nuclear material that the Chernobyl disaster was dealing

04:58 in.

04:59 To the untrained eye, a quietly smouldering nuclear reactor may well appear far less dangerous

05:04 compared to the blinding light and mushroom cloud of an atomic weapon.

05:08 But that's all part of the insidiousness of radiation.

05:12 After the initial explosion in the No. 4 Reactor Core on April 26, 1986, the world's news

05:17 outlets transmitted footage of the smoking Chernobyl site - along with maps covering

05:22 the rest of Europe, at times the rest of the world - to track how far the fallout might

05:27 spread.

05:28 Infamously, the USSR tried its best to cover up the threat, but eventually - inevitably

05:32 - a mass evacuation was ordered.

05:35 And those who were moved out never returned.

05:37 Today, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - otherwise known as the Zone of Alienation - stretches

05:43 for around 1,000 square miles.

05:46 The once-busy city of Pripyat - the closest major settlement to that plant - stands abandoned

05:51 and unchanged.

05:53 Everything remains almost exactly as it was when it was originally left behind.

05:57 Here, there's just too great of a risk of contamination to warrant doing anything else.

06:02 The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is, obviously, on the ground, which is reason number one

06:06 as to why the surrounding area is so much more radioactive today than Hiroshima and

06:11 Nagasaki are.

06:12 The fallout came into contact with so much more of the environment across this particular

06:17 part of the surface of the Earth.

06:19 More than that, though, the amount of fuel involved in what happened at Chernobyl is

06:23 many, many times more than what was needed for the nuclear bombings.

06:27 According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, there were 64 kilograms, or 141 pounds, of

06:33 uranium in the Little Boy bomb over Hiroshima, and less than one kilogram of that underwent

06:39 fission.

06:40 In a widely cited and incredibly frightening statistic, it's been calculated that the Hiroshima

06:44 blast was ultimately triggered out of just a little more than half a gram of matter.

06:49 On the other hand, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Chernobyl explosion

06:54 cast 400 times more radioactive material into Earth's atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb

07:00 did.

07:01 Although, really, and what's part of the enduring and sinister hold of Chernobyl, is

07:05 that it's perhaps impossible to know for sure quite how much it really expelled.

07:10 According to Soviet reports, there were almost 200 metric tons of nuclear fuel in Reactor

07:15 4 at the time of the meltdown and explosions.

07:18 And so when the facility was quietly smoldering, it was more like a nuclear river that had

07:23 just burst its banks, ruthlessly and relentlessly flooding all before it.

07:28 The death toll for the Chernobyl disaster is notoriously difficult to know, the numbers

07:32 allegedly skewed by Soviet data at the time.

07:35 However, we do know that far more lives were immediately lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

07:41 With the detonation of those two weapons, the US changed the landscape of war, and recalibrated

07:46 the rules in terms of what humanity was capable of.

07:49 There is no doubt that both categories of event are a tragedy of modern times - the

07:54 instant searing chaos of a nuclear bombing, and the slower, wider, immortal spread of

07:59 a meltdown.

08:00 Despairingly, there are cases in which the effects of both have more clearly overlapped,

08:05 such as across multiple states in America, in and around Las Vegas and the Nevada Test

08:10 Site, where a long series of on-the-ground nuclear weapons tests took place from the

08:15 early 1950s until the early 1990s.

08:18 The data is perhaps starkest across the Marshall Islands, however, where again the US has a

08:23 long history of conducting nuclear tests.

08:26 Studies show that some of the atolls are today ten times more radioactive than even Chernobyl

08:31 is.

08:32 The sobering reality is that while most of the background radiation on Earth is naturally

08:37 occurring, scientists do factor in a small amount of it as having been generated by nuclear

08:43 weapons testing and by specific disasters such as Chernobyl.

08:47 We can see, then, how events like the ones discussed in this video do have a global impact,

08:52 as well as catastrophic local effects.

08:55 But history shows that there are other things to consider as well.

08:58 The two cities that have been bombed - Hiroshima and Nagasaki - have now recovered and rebuilt.

09:04 Their history isn't forgotten, but what happened in the past doesn't physically linger as many

09:08 had once feared that it would do.

09:10 It's a wholly different story in Pripyat, though.

09:13 And that's the difference between a nuclear meltdown and a nuclear bomb explosion explained.

09:19 What do you think?

09:20 Is there anything we missed?

09:21 Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you

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