79 - The Chernobyl Disaster: What, Why, and How Bad Was it?

On Friday, April 25th, 1986, the Soviet city of Pripyat, built to support the local nuclear power plant Chernobyl, had 13,414 apartments, a hospital, a movie theater, an art school, a central park with a giant ferris wheel, and over 50,000 residents. And then, at 1:23AM on Saturday, April 26th, 1986, the number 4 reactor heated up to more than 100 times its usual operating power. Which is very, very bad. After a few explosions and a lot of radiation kicked out to the atmosphere, by April 30th, the population would be zero. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers died in the following days and weeks. And in the years since, many more have died. How many? How disastrous was this nuclear disaster? What led to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Will I say, nuclear, correctly? So much explored, examined, and evaluated in this atom bomb edition of Timesuck!

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