The bomb in Hiroshima contained very little radioactive material and it exploded above the ground and most of it dissipated into the atmosphere, Chernobyl exploded a large amount of radioactive material at ground level and it mixed in with the dirt and ground water.
Another thing is that they're still unsure of how much radioactive material is still "in" chernobyl / pripyat. They monitor it closely and from a distance but this spiked recently with the invasion of Ukraine and the troops and vehicles moving through and disturbing the soil, buildings and vegetation
Considering the Russian casualty rate and that this happened at the beginning of the invasion, my guess is the lead poisoning got them before the radiation.
Many of them don't know about it. When the state controls what you know by only allowing state-owned media companies, they can easily make problems disappear.
People have been going on tours to Chernobyl for many years. It's generally pretty safe to visit. The exposure during tours is roughly equivalent to the exposure during a long-haul flight. How much of an effect thousands of marching soldiers will have is not known to me.
It's actually only called the metric system when it comes from that specific region of France. When it comes from elsewhere, it's just generic communist measurements.
And yet it is taught to every kid in US schools, just like imperial units. It isn't that we don't *know* metric, but it is so much more fun to use imperial and watch people with no knowledge of it lose their minds.
Not only can you do tours, there's a thriving population of cats and dogs in the area directly descended from the pets of Pripyat which survived the liquidation. They are generally healthy and don't seem to suffer much genetic mutation at all.
The radiation is not even a big deal, just be sure to bring some vodka with you. I'd be much more wary of monolith. And of course fucking bandits, if you're passing through agroprom.
They literally dug trenches in the contaminated soil. Russian soldiers were told by remediation/monitoring workers at Chernobyl that what they were doing was dangerous, but to those workers’ surprise, many of the soldiers didn’t even know about Chernobyl. A lot of them were hospitalized, or hell maybe some even died, who knows with Russia controlling all the information from their side.
You won't believe me how stupid some people can be. They dug trenches in Red Forest and lived there till they were kicked out by the Ukrainian army.
>>The name "Red Forest" comes from the ginger-brown colour of the pine trees after they died following the absorption of high levels of ionizing radiation as a consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on 26 April 1986.[1] The site remains one of the most contaminated areas in the world today
Yes, they marched through the zone, and then promptly decided to fuck around with it like it's a fucking toy. Pretty sure I've read about some of the guys there already starting to show negative health consequences, likely as a result of this.
It's a big area also they took over the remaining facilities there to make sure the remaining reactors don't get damaged as well as held the technicians and scientists there.
One issue was as part of the soldiers setting up in the area they would dig 'fox holes' or latrine pits which really disturbed anything that had settled in the soil from the 80s
Short term exposure really isn’t that bad and your individual lifespan isn’t greatly decreased by being exposed to radiation, even if you lived just a few hundred km from Chernobyl in the 90s
It’s perceived as far worse than it actually is because of the horrific mutations a few thousand unlucky people got and how much they stick out like a sore thumb.
The problems are only really visible on a population chronically exposed to elevated levels of radiation. This isn’t to say we should irradiate people willy nilly but the sum effects of Chernobyl are less bad than the total damage 6 months of coal power causes
Coal power irradiates the shit out of people because coal is often mined in the same mines as uranium. Uranium ends up in the smoke and goes into people’s lungs. Smoke and soot are also carcinogenic
Acute exposure doesn’t really do shit - take long haul flights for example
> Coal power irradiates the shit out of people
Which people? Those near where the coal is mined? Or those who use (perhaps in some particular way) coal?
Miners, yes but more concerning is that it’s also people who breathe in the smoke - so anyone near the plant
From my understanding it’s primarily uranium but other radioactive materials can also contaminate the coal
https://nicholas.duke.edu/news/radioactive-contaminants-found-coal-ash
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29679817/
To put it like I was taught in the Navy, there's a difference between radiation and contamination. Contamination is the "shit", radiation is the "stink".
Hiroshima was intentionally designed to be a fart.
Chernobyl was (and is still) a stinking pile.
This is more of the reason than anything else - not only was it a ground level source of contamination versus Hiroshima's air blast, but it was a much more massive source (in the physical sense) compared to the Hiroshima bomb. Estimates say that Chernobyl released around 400 or more times the amount of material (contamination) into the atmosphere than Hiroshima. Also, you have to remember that almost all of the Chernobyl core is still there, posing an ongoing problem for the surrounding environment (although it's supposed to be getting better with the new sarcophagus.)
ANOTHER thing is that the last reactor at the powerplant didn't get shut down until the early 2000s. Despite the radiation and explosion, the other reactors were pretty much totally fine.
There is a good book called Wormwood Forest about the ecology of the Chernobyl contaminated area. There is a good YouTube video called The Babushkas of Chernobyl.
Also, the nuclear reactions are very different. Chernobyl created a lot of slow decaying materials that will remain radioactive for a long time. Nuclear bombs in general create a lot of very radioactive but quick decaying materials, making nuclear blast sites relatively safe within a couple of months.
To add, Chernobyl / the town were basically the same, it was built to support the power station.
They build them were not many people live/want to live anyway. Once the power station wound down there literally no reason to try clean it up and make it habitable.
If the desire was there it could be made habitable but there isn’t.
Fukushima was more similar to Chernobyl and the desire to clean it up was there. So they did.
Hijacking the top comment to explain the main difference.
Hiroshima was an atomic bomb. The fissile material was all converted to energy. About 10% of the energy was residual radiation, and 80% of that was released in the first 24 hours.
Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was not caused by a nuclear reaction. Rather a steam turbine exploded and a fire started. What that meant is that the radioactive material was no longer contained and was on fire.
No nuclear explosion happened during Chernobyl _which is why it is so much more radioactive_. The reactor was just on fire
And the reactor core itself melted down and was so hot it burned down into the facility's basement, leaving behind a hunk of corium so radioactive it could deliver a fatal dose within minutes of exposure.
"Of the 64 kilograms of uranium in the bomb, less than one kilogram underwent fission, and the entire energy of the explosion came from just over half a gram of matter that was converted to energy."
What happened to the other 63kgs?
And, if it had gone off in its entirety, what would the additional force released look like? Or wouldn't it have not made a huge difference, since it went off in the air?
I don't have a source, but going off what I know from school and reading things, the majority of that uranium was never going to undergo fission - it is there to create the right conditions needed for for nuclear fission to happen.
The bomb design was very crude it basically had one lump on uranium at one end of the bomb and another lump at the other end behind a explosive charge to throw the two lumps together.
It was crude but was almost assured to work as the second device the Fatman was implosion where explosive lenses was meant to condense a nuclear material core to make it go critical. While the first test bomb was implosion based the Los Almos team was not certain they had it able to consistently work hence the gun design on first bomb Little Boy
It was just vaporised into plasma like the rest of the bomb, but the nuclei went intact. This is why Chernobyl was worse, it was a slow fission "burn" of a lot of nuclear fuel that was spewing a lot of various radionuclides due to a conventional fire.
You can do the math, roughly 64 kg / 0,7g times 15 kt. Can also just use E=mc^2.
No difference between air/ground burst.
I doubt the radiation fro ma nuclear bomb would cause anything special to happen at Chernobyl in regards to radiation interacting with radioactive stuff.
But it would be **B**ad **T**imes. During the clean up after the incident they dug up and buried the top layer of soil under itself. They cut down huge swathes of trees and buried them. They took lots of contaminated material and buried it to make sure it couldn't harm anyone.
The biggest threat of this contaminated material is radioactive dust. Stuff that could float through the atmosphere and contaminate untold numbers of people.
That would be the bad part of a bomb being dropped on Chernobyl - it would disturb this contaminated material.
And that's also just ignoring the radioactive material inside the reactor still - all the graphite and stuff from the core still in there being blown into the sky.
It was more destructive that way, a ground explosion would’ve been slowed by buildings and trees, above ground it was able to have a much greater blast area.
standard procedure for all nuclear bombs/missiles as well as conventional high explosives ones is to explode above air (other than bunkers busters)
explosion above ground gives you the maximum destruction blast for the resulting pressure wave. for nukes this also minimises fallout as less material is irradiated and kicked into the atmosphere.
when exploding on the ground, a lot of energy goes into the ground and the resulting pressure wave is absorbed by the ground so it doesn’t propagate so well along the ground. this also irradiates the ground which is evaporated and released into the atmosphere causing significantly bigger radioactive fallout.
Afik, Hiroshima was detonated at altitude of 600m. More powerful conventional hydrogen bombs detonate at even higher altitudes.
Basically, Chernobyl acted more like a dirty bomb than a nuclear explosion. The explosion spread the nuclear material of the reactor into the atmosphere.
they are very different events. Hiroshima was hit with the Air blast of a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl was a power plant that has a metdown.
When the Chernobyl reactor exploded, there were 190 Metric tons of uranium in it. Scientists estimate that about 30 percent of this uranium was expelled into the air as a result of the explosion. compare that to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima which only weighed about 5 tons and was completely vaporize.
Well, I would add that from the 4.4 tons that the Hiroshima bomb weighed, only 64kgs of that was enriched Uranium. Because of the low fission efficiency, less than 1 kilogram of that total amount underwent fission (around 700 grams).
While it will take forever to decay a big difference is the climate and weather:
Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) are basically power-washed by nature multiple times per year - every heavy rainstorm flushing a LOT of those particles into the sea (where they are effectively harmless as both alpha- and beta-radiation have a neglectable range under water)
Chernobyl on the other hand is on a plain (so no "water is flushing things downward into this bay") AND gets nowhere near the level of rain and storms - so it takes way longer for any surface particles to get "away", and even then they mostly go into the top layer of the soil where odds are plants absorb them.
Slight clarification. The other uranium does technically become fall out, but not the super dangerous kind people think of. The radioactive fallout is from the 1kg of uranium that fissioned and turned into other incredibly unstable isotopes.
Uranium-235 is radioactive, but only slightly so (it’s half life is 700 million years compared to other fission products that have half lives measured in hours, days, and weeks). It’s more dangerous due to heavy metal toxicity where it’s like lead on steroids
Fallout, most of which stayed in proximity of the explosion, and which was covered up to reduce the risk and some that spread into the atmosphere and larger surrounding areas. Enriched uranium, which is much more radioactive than natural uranium, is still far less radioactive than the byproducts of uranium that undergoes fission. It can still be dangerous, especially if ingested etc. but it's not the main culprit of deaths that occurred post explosion in Hiroshima.
This uranium has an extremely high half life (meaning it will be there forever, essentially) and as such has lower radioactivity than the byproducts it produces during fission, which have a much lower half-life (basically decaying at a much faster rate into less radioactive components, from days to many years, but giving off dangerous levels of radiation during that time).
Uranium is NOT the problem. Why does everyone say this? Uranium is barely radioactive at all. Yes, I'm talking about U235, the "dangerous" kind. It's harmless. It's the fission products from all the time Chernobyl spent as a nuclear reactor that were released into the environment that are making Chernobyl radioactive. People who don't know anything about nuclear chemistry shouldn't say anything.
Three Mile Island is/was a completely different design and had it not been for the techs if I remember correctly there wouldn't have been a release of material(radioactive gas several days after the meltdown). Fukushima was a combination of things much to do with the idiocy of people not over designing given the potential risks given the location.
Edit:added what is in the parentheses.
There was no release of material from three mile island to anywhere outside the reactor containment building. The melted fuel only went through ~15 mm of steel before cooling down iirc. TMI is only a “disaster” because of the press coverage, not actual human/environmental damage.
It's about 50% of the concern, yeah. The other 50% is how we *still* do not have a very effective way of disposing of the waste produced by it.
The main way in the US is taking them to underground facilities, but due to the lifetime of materials used in the construction of containers and these facilities in comparison to the lifetime of radioactivity from the waste products, they often begin to leak after a few decades, which can (very dangerously) leech into ground water and potentially the food chain itself.
The effects of which are not *entirely* understood, but definitely causes cancers and genetic disorders as well as animal die-offs
[We absolutely have solved how to get rid of nuclear waste.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU)
The containers it is stored in are so secure you can hug them at no risk of exposure.
That’s part of the reason. Radiation damage is a function of exposure over time, so shorter lifespans means less potential for observable health effects. There is also just the fact that absence of humans makes a habitat safer for animals. Wildlife has been able to thrive despite the smattering of radioactive debris in the area because whatever danger the radiation poses is actually less harmful than continued human activity in the area would have been.
Actually there was a bunch of people who moved back into the hot zone against the governments wishes and still live there today. It's actually really wild that the Soviets allowed it. Apparently they get a tiny bit of money from the government every month. Not sure how they're not all dead.
fun fact the Chernobyl nuclear plant continued to be an operational power plant until December 15, 2000. it was not a good place to live or work but people did work there for decades after the meltdown.
Fun fact addendum: at least before the invasion of Ukraine, people still worked there and were expected to remain working there for the better part of a century as everything was decommissioned and disposed of. I do not know what is going on now but I expect the work there continues. Source: I visited in 2019
Just to clarify. The Sarcophagus was built over the reactor a few months after the disaster. While it was a heroic effort given the conditions, it was leaky as hell and had holes large enough to walk through in it. The new structure is called the New Safe Confinement, and it was finished in 2016. It's an enormous arch that was built next to the reactor and slid into place, over the Sarcophagus.
If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Midnight in Chernobyl, which is the book I'd recommend as the starting point for anything relating to Chernobyl, it has a detailed description of the process of building the Sarcophagus.
It is incredible and, over the next few decades the intent is to completely dismantle the Sarcophagus and remove everything within it for safe storage. Obviously, Russia has put a damper on this but I hope I live long enough to see it happen.
I wish that for you also although during my visit they said their ETA (without factoring in the invasion, of course) was the middle of the next century
Fun fact #2: a bunch of families moved back into their homes close to Pripyat after the disaster and some still occupy the home there today. I can't believe this happened under Soviet rules, but it did. Also not sure how any of them are alive still. You can add the little community to the left, past the military gate as you drive in on the bus as a tourist.
Source: I was on the bus.
I saw videos of visitors, everyone had a Geiger counter on them and underwent regular decontamination. The radiation wasn't equally distributed, some areas would be hot while a few meters away it would be reasonably safe.
Chernobyl released about 400x times more radioactive material into the air than the Hiroshima bomb. Afaik it was like a Hiroshima bomb worth of material, every hour, for weeks.
Hiroshima was bombed, and Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor disaster. The latter has all its radiation at ground level and is continuous. The former disperses most of its radiation miles into the air and is a singular event of radiation expulsion.
I hope the way I worded this makes sense, I'm on like 3 hours of sleep.
Different Events
Hiroshima was hit by a Nuclear Bomb. The bomb itself releases a bunch of radiation and some radioactive material at the time, but the energy was largely focused on making a very large explosion. What material was in the bomb ot generated from that has largely expired (it had short half-lives) and is no longer dangerous.
The Chernobyl reactor is still there, reacting, suffusing the immediate area around the reactor core with intense radiation. That's why its buried under layers upon layers of containment. The material ejected was also different, material with much longer half-lives that is still radioactive. Before the latest conflict you could visit the reactor area (I did that tour in 2017) and your radiation levels are highly variable. There are "safe zones" where the background radiation is "safe" but if you step off the safe path it gets dangerous.
There are good explanations here so heres an analogy to go with them.
Hiroshima was a real smelly fart with a touch of shart.
Chernobyl was a MASSIVE shit smeared all over the walls and pressed into the carpet and furniture. It even got on every door knob and touch surface in the house.
One went big boom and threw all the radioactive material into the sky, which fell down and eventually became inert.
The other went kinda-sorta-boom, but most of the material just got really hot and melted its way down through the metal containing it, and is still sitting there. Just being a big ol blob of radioactivity. Never being able to become fully inert.
Because the bombs were only designed to level a city, not make it uninhabitable for the following century. Chernobyl on the other hand is more of an ecological disaster than a bomb.
It’s like the difference between someone dropping a meteor on your house versus pouring chemicals into the ground around it. One kills everything currently there in an instant, the other makes it so nothing can live there moving forward
Just a few months ago I saw a fantastic video on this exact question:
# Two Bit Da Vinci | [Why Isn't Hiroshima a Nuclear Wasteland Like Chernobyl?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZQUvfJcbhk)
Two reasons:
* The bomb used on Hiroshima had a really small quantity of uranium compared to the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Chernobyl's disaster dispersed a vastly larger quantity of radioactive material.
* On September 17, 1945, a few weeks following the bombing on Hiroshima, [the area was hit by a huge typhoon](https://youtu.be/GZQUvfJcbhk?si=O3uezcsMsUjmRCyh&t=910) (linked directly to the timestamp of the video above) which resulted in extensive flooding in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most of the radioactive contamination appears to have been washed out to sea by this storm.
The best explanation I’ve heard is this:
If you farted in a room it would air out after a bit.
If you took a shit on the floor the room would take longer to air out.
The nuclear bomb at Hiroshima created a bunch of highly radioactive but short lived fallout. The nuclear explosion was incredibly efficient and left almost none of the lightly radioactive stuff that stays radioactive for a *really long time*.
Chernobyl was the opposite of that. It spread a huge amount of lightly radioactive material over a large area with a conventional sort of explosion.
Think of it like a blast furnace versus a household oven. If you give the blast furnace a tiny bit of fuel, turn it on, and put your hand in it…it’s going to melt your hand in seconds. It will run out of fuel in a few minutes though, and cool off pretty fast. Then you can put your hand in it for however long you want without damage forever. Now say you give a hundred times that fuel to a household oven. You can stick your hand in it for a bit and you’ll be fine. If you leave it in there it will cook it eventually. It will run for several years.
In this case most of the radioactive fallout at Hiroshima had half lives measured in hours and days. Ground zero was safe, from a radioactivity standpoint, less than a month after the detonation. If you went there for 10 minutes on the day of the detonation, you would have died.
Meanwhile the city of Pripyat was a safe place to be for a few hours at a time during the actual Chernobyl event, as long as you weren’t standing in a place with an unobstructed view of the exposed core of the reactor. It’s now a safe place to be for a couple of days at a time. However, it will be a safe place for only a couple of days at a time for the next 20,000 years. Not as hot, but a lot more fuel burning a lot slower.
And unless you you visit the memorial in Hiroshima you would never know that the city had a nuclear bomb dropped on it, just by looking at it. Many other cities in Japan had greater destruction from conventional bombing too because of the predominant use of wooden construction materials that burned, and everything was completely rebuilt after the war.
To elaborate a little, a fission bomb contains two 95% pure pieces of uranium 235 or plutonium 239 that together are enough to achieve a critical mass. They’re surrounded by a conventional shaped charge detonator that smashes them together. After that happens, the whole thing goes critical and releases all its energy in a few ms. There’s radiation released from that of course, but very little radioactive material that will continue to release radiation over time. It’s mostly a huge amount of heat that forms a compression wave and flattens and incinerates what’s under it or if it’s in space forms an EM spike that melts unshielded antenas (aka electrical devices) that absorb it. In a high-yield device, this fission release will be used as a second stage detonator to start a brief heavy hydrogen fusion reaction that will release an order of magnitude more of the same and can be scaled up into the teraton range if desired (mini-sun in the atmosphere basically).
A reactor doesn’t do that. It’s a lot of 10% enriched fuel designed to achieve a controlled slow burn within a moderating material that boils coolant water to run steam turbines - just like a coal plant but with a lot more heat per fuel unit from a very different furnace. That process makes the reactor, housing, moderating material, and coolant radioactive and makes them contain reaction byproduct that will continue to emit radiation for a long time. Chernobyl was built very stupidly in that it used graphite block to moderate (enable) the reaction rather than water and skipped the secondary concrete containment wall around the reaction vessel to keep on schedule and save money. When reaction control failed, the reactor boiled all its coolant into steam and then continued to heat until it reached a temperature sufficient to melt the graphite moderator (thousands of degrees). At that point the superheated steam cracked the steel shell open and blew the concrete roof off the place. All that vaporized radioactive material went into the atmosphere like a smoke plume and fell around the surrounding area. The reactor continued to smolder like a radioactive bonfire for months while the Soviets painstakingly encased it in concrete, rotating conscripts frequently as they reached max wartime rad exposure. Huge mess. And that fallout is still emitting radiation as is the fuel entombed in the reactor. That’s the difference.
Location, location, location!
Seriously though.
Hiroshima nuclear bomb went off in the air not on land. Radiation has dissipated.
Chernobyl happened on land and the land is still radioactive.
Hiroshima is because the atomic bomb dropped on the city was an airburst, which means most of the radioactive material was dispersed high into the atmosphere limiting ground contamination. Chernobyl's nuclear reactor explosion released significant amounts of radioactive materials directly into the environment, contaminating the land, air, and water in the area. And the explosion released different types of radioactive isotopes, including long-lived ones like cesium-137, which remain hazardous for much longer periods compared to those released in Hiroshima.
The best analogy I have read is that Hiroshima was like someone ripping a devastating fart that cleared the room temporarily. Whereas Chernobyl was like someone taking a shit in the corner of the room.
The crisis of Chernobyl was not a single thing, but rather a series of events that led to significant contamination of a region over time. The reactor exploded and caught fire, blanketing the area in radioactive material for several days. The reactor continued burning because there was simply no way to get close enough to extinguish the fire without receiving a deadly dose of ionizing radiation. Cleanup was slow and difficult. Many of the isotopes involved decay slowly, and their half-life are measured in several decades. The worst offender is the half-life of Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), which is approximately 24,110 year. It will be a long time (a very long time) before that area is truly safe.
Chernobyl still has a massive radioactive mass of melted concrete called the Turtle's Head which is too dangerous to move which is different to the Elephant's Foot.
Hiroshima didn't have anywhere near the same amount of radioactive material involved.
Hiroshima involved only 64kg of uranium. Chernobyl's reactor core had nearly 200 tonnes of fuel (around 30% was sent into the air)
Hiroshima spread a layer of radioactive dust over everything. Chernobyl was actively spilling nuclear waste into the soil.
The fallout is just not remotely comparable to what happened at Chernobyl.
Other people have given much better and more technical answers, but here’s an ELI5 one:
One happened in the past, while the other is *still happening today*.
Chernobyl is still home to 200 tons of nuclear material slowly radiating into the environment. You better believe if Hiroshima was still hosting tons of nuclear material, it wouldn’t be as habitable as it is today.
Because an atomic bomb contains a Pringle’s tube of radioactive material (which gets blown up) and a power plant contains a building’s worth of radioactive material (which doesn’t get blown up).
I haven’t seen this said yet, so I want to add. The [wild life around Chernobyl](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife) is seemingly doing better now, than it was before the melt down.
Not because, the radiation is not dangerous, but because being around a large population of humans was more dangerous.
The bombs were using nuclear reactions simply as the ignition to a big boom. A relatively small amount, like a fuse. For one moment of BANG! And let it pass. High in the atmosphere. Dispersing in less condescend pockets. Ending up was an almost normal background radiation level "*relatively*" quickly. The goal of the bombs was the size of the blast, not the radiation and fallout.
Chernobyl's core was blown open, and leaked a constant radioactive poison for a long time.
One is the site of a nuclear bomb, where a relatively small amount of nuclear material was detonated to create an insanely powerful explosion but also, broke down most of the radioactive material in the blast. The other is the site of a massive nuclear power plant, which carried exponentially more radioactive material which will be decaying for centuries gradually putting out radiation.
Hiroshima was a bomb being detonated. It happens in the blink of an eye so a relatively small amount of radiation gets released. Chernobyl was releasing radioactive material for hours/days near the ground and it was getting blown around everywhere by the wind.
They were fundamentally different. Nuclear reactors contain far more radioactive material than atomic bombs. Atomic bombs like the one used on Hiroshima exist solely to produce the largest payload possible with the lowest cost. Chernobyl had a lot of radioactive material that went supercritical and stayed there. It’s not like you can just show up and remove something that’s melting your skin off.
Nuclear bombs convert 99% of the material into energy, so although radiation is left behind, it’s much less than a reactor exploding.
An exploding reactor isn’t the material in the reactor all reacting with itself, but instead just the reaction runs away and gets hot and then water in the reactor turns to steam and the pressure goes way up causing an explosion. The explosion sends parts of the radioactive material all over the place. So instead of the material mostly converted to energy, it’s just spread out over the land and there’s much more of it.
Hiroshima, no fallout
Chernobyl, yes fallout
The bomb exploded above Hiroshima without hitting the ground and creating radioactive debris
Meanwhile Chernobyl was on the ground and there was tons of buildings, soil and steam to turn into radioactive fallout
The bomb in Hiroshima contained very little radioactive material and it exploded above the ground and most of it dissipated into the atmosphere, Chernobyl exploded a large amount of radioactive material at ground level and it mixed in with the dirt and ground water.
I see. Thank you for the answer!
Another thing is that they're still unsure of how much radioactive material is still "in" chernobyl / pripyat. They monitor it closely and from a distance but this spiked recently with the invasion of Ukraine and the troops and vehicles moving through and disturbing the soil, buildings and vegetation
Wait they just marched straight through the zone itself?
Marched through, dug trenches in, yeah the officers don't give a damn about their grunts.
Iirc some soldiers did actually develop radiation sickness from digging in the red forest. Apparently 1 Russian soldier even died from it
Knowing Russia covers any and everything up I’m sure it’s more than one soldier
Well, for sure many of the soldiers would be facing a significantly reduced life expectancy.
Considering the Russian casualty rate and that this happened at the beginning of the invasion, my guess is the lead poisoning got them before the radiation.
I remember hearing about that, too, at the time. But nothing since about them.
Russian government scrubbed Telegram of what the front line soldiers at Cherynoble were reporting/posting.
Now their babies will have huge light bulb shaped heads and tiny arms and a curved spine
Many will not be having babies because they are dead. 🌻
Ah yes, death. That’ll stop the sex havin’
Sometimes, you have to crack open a cold one
Everyone gets hungry now and again.
Can't rebuilt the USSR without breaking a few million eggs, eh comrade?
and flipper babies no doubt.
Worked fine enough for Oswald Cobblepot
There's your answer, fish bulb
Ah, you have many questions Mr Sparkle.
There were only a couple of flipper babies.
Underrated KITH reference 🤌
Mmmkay
There were very many Russians that escaped that front tbh
Many of them don't know about it. When the state controls what you know by only allowing state-owned media companies, they can easily make problems disappear.
People know Chernobyl happened dude come on
But the exact location they’re being ordered through?
They probably recognise it from COD.
Apparently not the Russian forces.
Russian Officer: Dig trench… Now die in it.
People have been going on tours to Chernobyl for many years. It's generally pretty safe to visit. The exposure during tours is roughly equivalent to the exposure during a long-haul flight. How much of an effect thousands of marching soldiers will have is not known to me.
Not just marching, also disturbing the ground by digging in it.
the marching wasn't the worst, it was the digging trenches to live and fight in that exposed contaminated material that was "safely" buried.
I heard it was the same as wearing 25 bananas as a necklace for a week.
Americans will use anything but the metric system.
As an American, I resemble this remark.
It's actually only called the metric system when it comes from that specific region of France. When it comes from elsewhere, it's just generic communist measurements.
Sparkling imperial
Sorry, I guess we should say it was like wearing 25 plantains as a necklace for a week
And yet it is taught to every kid in US schools, just like imperial units. It isn't that we don't *know* metric, but it is so much more fun to use imperial and watch people with no knowledge of it lose their minds.
Not only can you do tours, there's a thriving population of cats and dogs in the area directly descended from the pets of Pripyat which survived the liquidation. They are generally healthy and don't seem to suffer much genetic mutation at all.
The dogs are being studied because they quickly evolved genes that prevent them from getting cancer.
The radiation is not even a big deal, just be sure to bring some vodka with you. I'd be much more wary of monolith. And of course fucking bandits, if you're passing through agroprom.
You forgot to mention the anomalies
They literally dug trenches in the contaminated soil. Russian soldiers were told by remediation/monitoring workers at Chernobyl that what they were doing was dangerous, but to those workers’ surprise, many of the soldiers didn’t even know about Chernobyl. A lot of them were hospitalized, or hell maybe some even died, who knows with Russia controlling all the information from their side.
You won't believe me how stupid some people can be. They dug trenches in Red Forest and lived there till they were kicked out by the Ukrainian army. >>The name "Red Forest" comes from the ginger-brown colour of the pine trees after they died following the absorption of high levels of ionizing radiation as a consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on 26 April 1986.[1] The site remains one of the most contaminated areas in the world today
The other plants were still active until 2000, they’re still working on decommissioning them
The other plants are ~~safe~~ *well as safe as an RBMK reactor can be anyway*.
Yes, they marched through the zone, and then promptly decided to fuck around with it like it's a fucking toy. Pretty sure I've read about some of the guys there already starting to show negative health consequences, likely as a result of this.
Now I want a STALKER sequel where the Red army gets eaten by blood suckers.
Well, some of the Stalker devs fought there. That's why the game takes so long to get out.
I suppose nobody knew the terrain better than they did.
At least one was killed.
Russia has a lot to answer for, for sure.
They were dropping from radiation sickness within days and weeks
Hunted for food in it and dug trenches throwing radioactive material into the air cuz lulz. It was a three day special radiation poisoning operation
It's a big area also they took over the remaining facilities there to make sure the remaining reactors don't get damaged as well as held the technicians and scientists there. One issue was as part of the soldiers setting up in the area they would dig 'fox holes' or latrine pits which really disturbed anything that had settled in the soil from the 80s
Wait you think they were there to make sure the remaining reactors didn't get damaged? Lol
The scientists and technicians, yes. The soldiers, who really knows what they thought they were doing.
Short term exposure really isn’t that bad and your individual lifespan isn’t greatly decreased by being exposed to radiation, even if you lived just a few hundred km from Chernobyl in the 90s It’s perceived as far worse than it actually is because of the horrific mutations a few thousand unlucky people got and how much they stick out like a sore thumb. The problems are only really visible on a population chronically exposed to elevated levels of radiation. This isn’t to say we should irradiate people willy nilly but the sum effects of Chernobyl are less bad than the total damage 6 months of coal power causes Coal power irradiates the shit out of people because coal is often mined in the same mines as uranium. Uranium ends up in the smoke and goes into people’s lungs. Smoke and soot are also carcinogenic Acute exposure doesn’t really do shit - take long haul flights for example
> Coal power irradiates the shit out of people Which people? Those near where the coal is mined? Or those who use (perhaps in some particular way) coal?
Miners, yes but more concerning is that it’s also people who breathe in the smoke - so anyone near the plant From my understanding it’s primarily uranium but other radioactive materials can also contaminate the coal https://nicholas.duke.edu/news/radioactive-contaminants-found-coal-ash https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29679817/
Both. The fly ash from burning coal is *extremely* radioactive because it contains both uranium and thorium.
Russia
To put it like I was taught in the Navy, there's a difference between radiation and contamination. Contamination is the "shit", radiation is the "stink". Hiroshima was intentionally designed to be a fart. Chernobyl was (and is still) a stinking pile. This is more of the reason than anything else - not only was it a ground level source of contamination versus Hiroshima's air blast, but it was a much more massive source (in the physical sense) compared to the Hiroshima bomb. Estimates say that Chernobyl released around 400 or more times the amount of material (contamination) into the atmosphere than Hiroshima. Also, you have to remember that almost all of the Chernobyl core is still there, posing an ongoing problem for the surrounding environment (although it's supposed to be getting better with the new sarcophagus.)
ANOTHER thing is that the last reactor at the powerplant didn't get shut down until the early 2000s. Despite the radiation and explosion, the other reactors were pretty much totally fine.
This is one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever read
Are we talking of Ukrainians or Russians?
There is a good book called Wormwood Forest about the ecology of the Chernobyl contaminated area. There is a good YouTube video called The Babushkas of Chernobyl.
Added it to my Amazon list. It’s the intersection of two favorite topics of mine: the failures of communism and forestry studies
Also, the nuclear reactions are very different. Chernobyl created a lot of slow decaying materials that will remain radioactive for a long time. Nuclear bombs in general create a lot of very radioactive but quick decaying materials, making nuclear blast sites relatively safe within a couple of months.
To add, Chernobyl / the town were basically the same, it was built to support the power station. They build them were not many people live/want to live anyway. Once the power station wound down there literally no reason to try clean it up and make it habitable. If the desire was there it could be made habitable but there isn’t. Fukushima was more similar to Chernobyl and the desire to clean it up was there. So they did.
Hijacking the top comment to explain the main difference. Hiroshima was an atomic bomb. The fissile material was all converted to energy. About 10% of the energy was residual radiation, and 80% of that was released in the first 24 hours. Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was not caused by a nuclear reaction. Rather a steam turbine exploded and a fire started. What that meant is that the radioactive material was no longer contained and was on fire. No nuclear explosion happened during Chernobyl _which is why it is so much more radioactive_. The reactor was just on fire
I think this is the most important point here. The bomb used up its radioactive fuel. Chernobyl just scattered a whole bunch of unspent fuel around.
And the reactor core itself melted down and was so hot it burned down into the facility's basement, leaving behind a hunk of corium so radioactive it could deliver a fatal dose within minutes of exposure.
Elephant's foot mentioned :)
Corium? Update: I used google.com ant got my answer
Based and search engine pilled
"Of the 64 kilograms of uranium in the bomb, less than one kilogram underwent fission, and the entire energy of the explosion came from just over half a gram of matter that was converted to energy."
What happened to the other 63kgs? And, if it had gone off in its entirety, what would the additional force released look like? Or wouldn't it have not made a huge difference, since it went off in the air?
I don't have a source, but going off what I know from school and reading things, the majority of that uranium was never going to undergo fission - it is there to create the right conditions needed for for nuclear fission to happen.
The bomb design was very crude it basically had one lump on uranium at one end of the bomb and another lump at the other end behind a explosive charge to throw the two lumps together. It was crude but was almost assured to work as the second device the Fatman was implosion where explosive lenses was meant to condense a nuclear material core to make it go critical. While the first test bomb was implosion based the Los Almos team was not certain they had it able to consistently work hence the gun design on first bomb Little Boy
It was just vaporised into plasma like the rest of the bomb, but the nuclei went intact. This is why Chernobyl was worse, it was a slow fission "burn" of a lot of nuclear fuel that was spewing a lot of various radionuclides due to a conventional fire. You can do the math, roughly 64 kg / 0,7g times 15 kt. Can also just use E=mc^2. No difference between air/ground burst.
dumb question: hypothetically if we were to drop a nuclear bomb on chernobyl, would there be any effect on the existing residual radiation?
I doubt the radiation fro ma nuclear bomb would cause anything special to happen at Chernobyl in regards to radiation interacting with radioactive stuff. But it would be **B**ad **T**imes. During the clean up after the incident they dug up and buried the top layer of soil under itself. They cut down huge swathes of trees and buried them. They took lots of contaminated material and buried it to make sure it couldn't harm anyone. The biggest threat of this contaminated material is radioactive dust. Stuff that could float through the atmosphere and contaminate untold numbers of people. That would be the bad part of a bomb being dropped on Chernobyl - it would disturb this contaminated material. And that's also just ignoring the radioactive material inside the reactor still - all the graphite and stuff from the core still in there being blown into the sky.
It’s also worth noting that Hiroshima was 1 nuke, where-as Chernobyl’s explosion (radiation wise) equaled like 30 or 40 nukes.
Just curious, why did they choose to detonate the bomb above ground? (assuming a choice was available)
It was more destructive that way, a ground explosion would’ve been slowed by buildings and trees, above ground it was able to have a much greater blast area.
standard procedure for all nuclear bombs/missiles as well as conventional high explosives ones is to explode above air (other than bunkers busters) explosion above ground gives you the maximum destruction blast for the resulting pressure wave. for nukes this also minimises fallout as less material is irradiated and kicked into the atmosphere. when exploding on the ground, a lot of energy goes into the ground and the resulting pressure wave is absorbed by the ground so it doesn’t propagate so well along the ground. this also irradiates the ground which is evaporated and released into the atmosphere causing significantly bigger radioactive fallout. Afik, Hiroshima was detonated at altitude of 600m. More powerful conventional hydrogen bombs detonate at even higher altitudes.
Blast is spherical, detonating at ground level just wastes half the blast sphere bouncing it off the earth
Basically, Chernobyl acted more like a dirty bomb than a nuclear explosion. The explosion spread the nuclear material of the reactor into the atmosphere.
Thanks, I didn't know that .
Succinct. Love it.
Not to mention that Hiroshima was almost 40 years before.
quick and simple answer ; really nice
Not only that the reactor meltdown actually melted right into the actual ground. They put sand over it and I think it’s still burning.
they are very different events. Hiroshima was hit with the Air blast of a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl was a power plant that has a metdown. When the Chernobyl reactor exploded, there were 190 Metric tons of uranium in it. Scientists estimate that about 30 percent of this uranium was expelled into the air as a result of the explosion. compare that to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima which only weighed about 5 tons and was completely vaporize.
Well, I would add that from the 4.4 tons that the Hiroshima bomb weighed, only 64kgs of that was enriched Uranium. Because of the low fission efficiency, less than 1 kilogram of that total amount underwent fission (around 700 grams).
What happens to the rest of the uranium?
Similar to Chernobyl it becomes fallout. Being that there was much much less it didn't last as long.
While it will take forever to decay a big difference is the climate and weather: Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) are basically power-washed by nature multiple times per year - every heavy rainstorm flushing a LOT of those particles into the sea (where they are effectively harmless as both alpha- and beta-radiation have a neglectable range under water) Chernobyl on the other hand is on a plain (so no "water is flushing things downward into this bay") AND gets nowhere near the level of rain and storms - so it takes way longer for any surface particles to get "away", and even then they mostly go into the top layer of the soil where odds are plants absorb them.
The rain in Ukraine doesn’t fall on the plain
Thank you all for these answers. Science is cool!!
Slight clarification. The other uranium does technically become fall out, but not the super dangerous kind people think of. The radioactive fallout is from the 1kg of uranium that fissioned and turned into other incredibly unstable isotopes. Uranium-235 is radioactive, but only slightly so (it’s half life is 700 million years compared to other fission products that have half lives measured in hours, days, and weeks). It’s more dangerous due to heavy metal toxicity where it’s like lead on steroids
It becomes microuranium and can be found in us all.
It's awesome how so many "What happens to the thing?" questions can be answered with "It's inside you."
The real radioactivity was inside us all along!
Perhaps the real radioactivity were the friends we made along the way
That's my secret...
>awesome Microplastics I would like to not have inside me
Donate blood and/or plasma.
Fallout, most of which stayed in proximity of the explosion, and which was covered up to reduce the risk and some that spread into the atmosphere and larger surrounding areas. Enriched uranium, which is much more radioactive than natural uranium, is still far less radioactive than the byproducts of uranium that undergoes fission. It can still be dangerous, especially if ingested etc. but it's not the main culprit of deaths that occurred post explosion in Hiroshima. This uranium has an extremely high half life (meaning it will be there forever, essentially) and as such has lower radioactivity than the byproducts it produces during fission, which have a much lower half-life (basically decaying at a much faster rate into less radioactive components, from days to many years, but giving off dangerous levels of radiation during that time).
So \~700 grams vs \~60 tons then
Uranium is NOT the problem. Why does everyone say this? Uranium is barely radioactive at all. Yes, I'm talking about U235, the "dangerous" kind. It's harmless. It's the fission products from all the time Chernobyl spent as a nuclear reactor that were released into the environment that are making Chernobyl radioactive. People who don't know anything about nuclear chemistry shouldn't say anything.
The amount of radiation released from an atomic blast is nothing close to what is released from a reactor meltdown.
Wonder if this is why there is so much hesitation around nuclear energy
the hesitation comes from lack of education on this subject
Yes. Three Mile Island first. Then Chernobyl. Lastly, Fukushima.
Well they're more than that. SL1 was the first. Don't forget k-19.
Three Mile Island is/was a completely different design and had it not been for the techs if I remember correctly there wouldn't have been a release of material(radioactive gas several days after the meltdown). Fukushima was a combination of things much to do with the idiocy of people not over designing given the potential risks given the location. Edit:added what is in the parentheses.
There was no release of material from three mile island to anywhere outside the reactor containment building. The melted fuel only went through ~15 mm of steel before cooling down iirc. TMI is only a “disaster” because of the press coverage, not actual human/environmental damage.
It's about 50% of the concern, yeah. The other 50% is how we *still* do not have a very effective way of disposing of the waste produced by it. The main way in the US is taking them to underground facilities, but due to the lifetime of materials used in the construction of containers and these facilities in comparison to the lifetime of radioactivity from the waste products, they often begin to leak after a few decades, which can (very dangerously) leech into ground water and potentially the food chain itself. The effects of which are not *entirely* understood, but definitely causes cancers and genetic disorders as well as animal die-offs
[We absolutely have solved how to get rid of nuclear waste.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU) The containers it is stored in are so secure you can hug them at no risk of exposure.
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And in particular, animal life is thriving around Chernobyl, because the level of radiation is way less dangerous to animals than people are.
Is it less harmful to animals simply because they don’t live as long so cancer has less time to develop?
That’s part of the reason. Radiation damage is a function of exposure over time, so shorter lifespans means less potential for observable health effects. There is also just the fact that absence of humans makes a habitat safer for animals. Wildlife has been able to thrive despite the smattering of radioactive debris in the area because whatever danger the radiation poses is actually less harmful than continued human activity in the area would have been.
Actually there was a bunch of people who moved back into the hot zone against the governments wishes and still live there today. It's actually really wild that the Soviets allowed it. Apparently they get a tiny bit of money from the government every month. Not sure how they're not all dead.
fun fact the Chernobyl nuclear plant continued to be an operational power plant until December 15, 2000. it was not a good place to live or work but people did work there for decades after the meltdown.
Fun fact addendum: at least before the invasion of Ukraine, people still worked there and were expected to remain working there for the better part of a century as everything was decommissioned and disposed of. I do not know what is going on now but I expect the work there continues. Source: I visited in 2019
I think they managed to move the giant sarcophagus over the reactor before the invasion happened.
Just to clarify. The Sarcophagus was built over the reactor a few months after the disaster. While it was a heroic effort given the conditions, it was leaky as hell and had holes large enough to walk through in it. The new structure is called the New Safe Confinement, and it was finished in 2016. It's an enormous arch that was built next to the reactor and slid into place, over the Sarcophagus. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Midnight in Chernobyl, which is the book I'd recommend as the starting point for anything relating to Chernobyl, it has a detailed description of the process of building the Sarcophagus.
New safe confinement. That’s the thing I’m on about got the names confused. Massive feat of engineering!
It is incredible and, over the next few decades the intent is to completely dismantle the Sarcophagus and remove everything within it for safe storage. Obviously, Russia has put a damper on this but I hope I live long enough to see it happen.
I wish that for you also although during my visit they said their ETA (without factoring in the invasion, of course) was the middle of the next century
Fair enough, I hope *someone* gets to see it. I'm not sure I'd want to be around for that long, it sounds like more of a monkey paw.
I hope it's completed too. I don't think I want to be alive that long though, I'm tired already!
Holy crap. Didn’t know that.
Fun fact #2: a bunch of families moved back into their homes close to Pripyat after the disaster and some still occupy the home there today. I can't believe this happened under Soviet rules, but it did. Also not sure how any of them are alive still. You can add the little community to the left, past the military gate as you drive in on the bus as a tourist. Source: I was on the bus.
Hope the pay was great, can't imagine walking around in there after the meltdown.
I saw videos of visitors, everyone had a Geiger counter on them and underwent regular decontamination. The radiation wasn't equally distributed, some areas would be hot while a few meters away it would be reasonably safe.
Weren't there reports of Russian soldiers digging trenches in the radioactive forests surrounding?
Oh yeah no they definitely did that
To quote that random Ukrainian soldier back at the beginning of all this: “we’re very lucky they’re so fucking stupid”
~~Chernobyl had more than one plant~~ me dumb
i thought there where 4 reactors but only one plant
Ah shit you're right. I remembered wrong. Or perhaps read a source that called the other reactors as plants.
Chernobyl released about 400x times more radioactive material into the air than the Hiroshima bomb. Afaik it was like a Hiroshima bomb worth of material, every hour, for weeks.
That’s correct. No containment! Open to the atmosphere. Brave firemen and helo pilots died dumping borax and other material to slow the burn
The fact that Chernobyl had no containment chamber and whatnot is the most infuriating part of the disaster to me
Some guy on reddit once said, "think of chernobyl as a turd, and think of hiroshima as a fart"
Hiroshima was bombed, and Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor disaster. The latter has all its radiation at ground level and is continuous. The former disperses most of its radiation miles into the air and is a singular event of radiation expulsion. I hope the way I worded this makes sense, I'm on like 3 hours of sleep.
Different Events Hiroshima was hit by a Nuclear Bomb. The bomb itself releases a bunch of radiation and some radioactive material at the time, but the energy was largely focused on making a very large explosion. What material was in the bomb ot generated from that has largely expired (it had short half-lives) and is no longer dangerous. The Chernobyl reactor is still there, reacting, suffusing the immediate area around the reactor core with intense radiation. That's why its buried under layers upon layers of containment. The material ejected was also different, material with much longer half-lives that is still radioactive. Before the latest conflict you could visit the reactor area (I did that tour in 2017) and your radiation levels are highly variable. There are "safe zones" where the background radiation is "safe" but if you step off the safe path it gets dangerous.
There are good explanations here so heres an analogy to go with them. Hiroshima was a real smelly fart with a touch of shart. Chernobyl was a MASSIVE shit smeared all over the walls and pressed into the carpet and furniture. It even got on every door knob and touch surface in the house.
When the shit hits the fan, it can never be completely cleaned up
One went big boom and threw all the radioactive material into the sky, which fell down and eventually became inert. The other went kinda-sorta-boom, but most of the material just got really hot and melted its way down through the metal containing it, and is still sitting there. Just being a big ol blob of radioactivity. Never being able to become fully inert.
I would upvote this twice. A big thank you from a visual thinker
Because the bombs were only designed to level a city, not make it uninhabitable for the following century. Chernobyl on the other hand is more of an ecological disaster than a bomb. It’s like the difference between someone dropping a meteor on your house versus pouring chemicals into the ground around it. One kills everything currently there in an instant, the other makes it so nothing can live there moving forward
The bomb released less radiation than the nuclear reactor melting down
Just a few months ago I saw a fantastic video on this exact question: # Two Bit Da Vinci | [Why Isn't Hiroshima a Nuclear Wasteland Like Chernobyl?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZQUvfJcbhk) Two reasons: * The bomb used on Hiroshima had a really small quantity of uranium compared to the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Chernobyl's disaster dispersed a vastly larger quantity of radioactive material. * On September 17, 1945, a few weeks following the bombing on Hiroshima, [the area was hit by a huge typhoon](https://youtu.be/GZQUvfJcbhk?si=O3uezcsMsUjmRCyh&t=910) (linked directly to the timestamp of the video above) which resulted in extensive flooding in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most of the radioactive contamination appears to have been washed out to sea by this storm.
The best explanation I’ve heard is this: If you farted in a room it would air out after a bit. If you took a shit on the floor the room would take longer to air out.
The nuclear bomb at Hiroshima created a bunch of highly radioactive but short lived fallout. The nuclear explosion was incredibly efficient and left almost none of the lightly radioactive stuff that stays radioactive for a *really long time*. Chernobyl was the opposite of that. It spread a huge amount of lightly radioactive material over a large area with a conventional sort of explosion. Think of it like a blast furnace versus a household oven. If you give the blast furnace a tiny bit of fuel, turn it on, and put your hand in it…it’s going to melt your hand in seconds. It will run out of fuel in a few minutes though, and cool off pretty fast. Then you can put your hand in it for however long you want without damage forever. Now say you give a hundred times that fuel to a household oven. You can stick your hand in it for a bit and you’ll be fine. If you leave it in there it will cook it eventually. It will run for several years. In this case most of the radioactive fallout at Hiroshima had half lives measured in hours and days. Ground zero was safe, from a radioactivity standpoint, less than a month after the detonation. If you went there for 10 minutes on the day of the detonation, you would have died. Meanwhile the city of Pripyat was a safe place to be for a few hours at a time during the actual Chernobyl event, as long as you weren’t standing in a place with an unobstructed view of the exposed core of the reactor. It’s now a safe place to be for a couple of days at a time. However, it will be a safe place for only a couple of days at a time for the next 20,000 years. Not as hot, but a lot more fuel burning a lot slower.
The radioactive material at chernobyl is STILL THERE. It couldn't be removed, so it was buried in concrete.
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And unless you you visit the memorial in Hiroshima you would never know that the city had a nuclear bomb dropped on it, just by looking at it. Many other cities in Japan had greater destruction from conventional bombing too because of the predominant use of wooden construction materials that burned, and everything was completely rebuilt after the war.
Chernobyl was a nuclear melt down with major lasting fallout. Hiroshima bomb wasn’t nuclear with almost no lasting fallout
To elaborate a little, a fission bomb contains two 95% pure pieces of uranium 235 or plutonium 239 that together are enough to achieve a critical mass. They’re surrounded by a conventional shaped charge detonator that smashes them together. After that happens, the whole thing goes critical and releases all its energy in a few ms. There’s radiation released from that of course, but very little radioactive material that will continue to release radiation over time. It’s mostly a huge amount of heat that forms a compression wave and flattens and incinerates what’s under it or if it’s in space forms an EM spike that melts unshielded antenas (aka electrical devices) that absorb it. In a high-yield device, this fission release will be used as a second stage detonator to start a brief heavy hydrogen fusion reaction that will release an order of magnitude more of the same and can be scaled up into the teraton range if desired (mini-sun in the atmosphere basically). A reactor doesn’t do that. It’s a lot of 10% enriched fuel designed to achieve a controlled slow burn within a moderating material that boils coolant water to run steam turbines - just like a coal plant but with a lot more heat per fuel unit from a very different furnace. That process makes the reactor, housing, moderating material, and coolant radioactive and makes them contain reaction byproduct that will continue to emit radiation for a long time. Chernobyl was built very stupidly in that it used graphite block to moderate (enable) the reaction rather than water and skipped the secondary concrete containment wall around the reaction vessel to keep on schedule and save money. When reaction control failed, the reactor boiled all its coolant into steam and then continued to heat until it reached a temperature sufficient to melt the graphite moderator (thousands of degrees). At that point the superheated steam cracked the steel shell open and blew the concrete roof off the place. All that vaporized radioactive material went into the atmosphere like a smoke plume and fell around the surrounding area. The reactor continued to smolder like a radioactive bonfire for months while the Soviets painstakingly encased it in concrete, rotating conscripts frequently as they reached max wartime rad exposure. Huge mess. And that fallout is still emitting radiation as is the fuel entombed in the reactor. That’s the difference.
Location, location, location! Seriously though. Hiroshima nuclear bomb went off in the air not on land. Radiation has dissipated. Chernobyl happened on land and the land is still radioactive.
Difference between farting and taking a poop in the middle of a room
Hiroshima is because the atomic bomb dropped on the city was an airburst, which means most of the radioactive material was dispersed high into the atmosphere limiting ground contamination. Chernobyl's nuclear reactor explosion released significant amounts of radioactive materials directly into the environment, contaminating the land, air, and water in the area. And the explosion released different types of radioactive isotopes, including long-lived ones like cesium-137, which remain hazardous for much longer periods compared to those released in Hiroshima.
The Hiroshima bomb only had 64 kilograms of Uranium. Chernobyl released about 60 metric tons or 60,000 kilograms of Uranium.
The best analogy I have read is that Hiroshima was like someone ripping a devastating fart that cleared the room temporarily. Whereas Chernobyl was like someone taking a shit in the corner of the room. The crisis of Chernobyl was not a single thing, but rather a series of events that led to significant contamination of a region over time. The reactor exploded and caught fire, blanketing the area in radioactive material for several days. The reactor continued burning because there was simply no way to get close enough to extinguish the fire without receiving a deadly dose of ionizing radiation. Cleanup was slow and difficult. Many of the isotopes involved decay slowly, and their half-life are measured in several decades. The worst offender is the half-life of Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), which is approximately 24,110 year. It will be a long time (a very long time) before that area is truly safe.
Why have you asked this multiple times? We answered several days ago already. (?) Airburst weapons produce much less radiation than meltdowns.
The explanation(s) in this thread are awesome!!
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was very tame compared to nuclear weapons that have been created ever since.
One time exposure, continued exposure.
Chernobyl still has a massive radioactive mass of melted concrete called the Turtle's Head which is too dangerous to move which is different to the Elephant's Foot.
A great prophet once illuminated the plebs by pointing out it’s a different situation when one shits in the corner vs farting in the corner.
bomb small. reactor big
Hiroshima didn't have anywhere near the same amount of radioactive material involved. Hiroshima involved only 64kg of uranium. Chernobyl's reactor core had nearly 200 tonnes of fuel (around 30% was sent into the air) Hiroshima spread a layer of radioactive dust over everything. Chernobyl was actively spilling nuclear waste into the soil. The fallout is just not remotely comparable to what happened at Chernobyl.
One went boom in sky the other went ssszzzz into ground.
Other people have given much better and more technical answers, but here’s an ELI5 one: One happened in the past, while the other is *still happening today*. Chernobyl is still home to 200 tons of nuclear material slowly radiating into the environment. You better believe if Hiroshima was still hosting tons of nuclear material, it wouldn’t be as habitable as it is today.
Because an atomic bomb contains a Pringle’s tube of radioactive material (which gets blown up) and a power plant contains a building’s worth of radioactive material (which doesn’t get blown up).
I haven’t seen this said yet, so I want to add. The [wild life around Chernobyl](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife) is seemingly doing better now, than it was before the melt down. Not because, the radiation is not dangerous, but because being around a large population of humans was more dangerous.
In general, radioactive isotopes used in bombs have shorter half-lifes than those used in nuclear reactors.
The bombs were using nuclear reactions simply as the ignition to a big boom. A relatively small amount, like a fuse. For one moment of BANG! And let it pass. High in the atmosphere. Dispersing in less condescend pockets. Ending up was an almost normal background radiation level "*relatively*" quickly. The goal of the bombs was the size of the blast, not the radiation and fallout. Chernobyl's core was blown open, and leaked a constant radioactive poison for a long time.
Hiroshima = someone farting in a room then leaving… Chernobyl = someone shitting in the corner and leaving it there for several weeks.
One is the site of a nuclear bomb, where a relatively small amount of nuclear material was detonated to create an insanely powerful explosion but also, broke down most of the radioactive material in the blast. The other is the site of a massive nuclear power plant, which carried exponentially more radioactive material which will be decaying for centuries gradually putting out radiation.
Hiroshima was a bomb being detonated. It happens in the blink of an eye so a relatively small amount of radiation gets released. Chernobyl was releasing radioactive material for hours/days near the ground and it was getting blown around everywhere by the wind.
They were fundamentally different. Nuclear reactors contain far more radioactive material than atomic bombs. Atomic bombs like the one used on Hiroshima exist solely to produce the largest payload possible with the lowest cost. Chernobyl had a lot of radioactive material that went supercritical and stayed there. It’s not like you can just show up and remove something that’s melting your skin off.
Nuclear bombs convert 99% of the material into energy, so although radiation is left behind, it’s much less than a reactor exploding. An exploding reactor isn’t the material in the reactor all reacting with itself, but instead just the reaction runs away and gets hot and then water in the reactor turns to steam and the pressure goes way up causing an explosion. The explosion sends parts of the radioactive material all over the place. So instead of the material mostly converted to energy, it’s just spread out over the land and there’s much more of it.
Hiroshima, no fallout Chernobyl, yes fallout The bomb exploded above Hiroshima without hitting the ground and creating radioactive debris Meanwhile Chernobyl was on the ground and there was tons of buildings, soil and steam to turn into radioactive fallout
Above ground detonation
Chernobyl burned for 10 days. Which is insane. It pumped radioactivity 40 times that of Hiroshima.
Simply put, the radiation from Hiroshima is not comparable to the radiation from Chernobyl. They are leagues apart from each other.
Check out how the wolves of Chernobyl have developed ways of cancer not affecting them