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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00:55 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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