The site of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) remains a unique location, as what’s left of the No. 4 reactor is the only place in the world where you can find significant amounts of what is called corium. An amalgamation of nuclear fuel, fuel rod cladding and whatever materials like concrete that the molten mass came into contact with, Soviet scientists initially struggled to make sense of this material, leading them to even have it shot at to get samples.
In this video documentary by [That Chernobyl Guy] these struggles by scientists both in and outside the USSR to comprehend this wholly new material are detailed. Much like trinitite – created by a US nuclear weapons test – these are amalgamations of material combined under extreme conditions. In the case of the ChNPP accident, the botched turbine spin-up test and disabling of all safeties by the operators allowed the bottom core chain reaction to run unconstrained, producing the massive steam explosion that flipped the biosafety lid of the RBMK reactor, while also fully melting the core material that then melted through the concrete below the reactor.
Although this Elephant’s Foot is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of corium inside the No. 4 reactor, it got rather infamous for supposedly being highly radioactive and lethal. In reality it’s one of the least dangerous parts of the exposed corium, and repeated sampling attempts along with internal degradation due to radioactive decay and weathering before the NSC shelter was installed have led to it mostly turning into slightly radioactive, rusty-looking dust at this point.
Also covered in the video is how the corium in the destroyed reactor is likely to be retrieved for final disposal, with robots cutting into the sides of the reactor building rather than trying to navigate destroyed corridors and staircases. This way it might be possible to remove most of the material without the issues that stymied Soviet engineers in the 1980s during their sampling attempts.
Future safety
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-device-nuclear-material-air-ducts.html
That’s useful when everything is normal, but isn’t applicable if your reactor experiences a meltdown accompanied with depressurisation of primary loop containing contaminated borated superheated water at 160 bars and 330 °C which throws uranium oxide pellets heated to 500-1200 °C at you :)
Specs taken from VVER-1000.
With an ongoing decay of Ukraine’s statehood the most likely outcome is that there won’t be any cleanup happening and the New Safe Confinement will simply remain a stainless roof over the old Shelter Object and tons of corium, which is slowly crumbling itself into a very nasty dust.
To clean up this mess as originally intended, with robotic cranes and whatnot operating under the NSC would be very expensive and difficult even in the most stable countries like Japan or Finland.
This is war-torn Ukraine which in 2 months will be once again struggling to keep its remaining population warm and to prevent water pipes from bursting due to freezing. CHPs (combined heat and power plants) are simply worn as they are at best from 1980s and were not really maintained even before the conflict. Nowdays they are operating at 120% their capacity, which only speeds up their decay and causes ever more frequent faults. Electric infrastructure is now hack upon a hack just to keep it going from all the damage sustained in attacks. Rolling blackouts are the norm and will become even more severe during winter when thousands of people turn to use 1-2 kW electric heaters to warm themselves.
Finally, about 15,000,000 people left the country since 2022, including a large number of teens. For them it’s been 4 years of living abroad already. Many have by now finished our highschools and started studying at our universities. Most are pragmatic and won’t be returning to their failed state homeland if they can earn at least 10 times more in the EU without constant risk of being drafted to die by UAV in some mud-filled trench.
You cannot run decades-long cleanup operation when there is barely any qualified personnel left to maintain and operate all the fancy equipment, storage units blah blah blah.
I’m glad they managed to finish the “Arka” (“arch”, aka the NSC) in its current state, even if the whole cleanup is not happening. If the old shelter object collapses, hopefully the NSC will keep most of the dust… confined and we won’t get any radioactive sheep again.
And if I remember correctly, while the Europe paid for the construction of the NSC, mostly to keep itself safe from the eventual collapse of the old Shelter Object, they wanted Ukraine to pay for the actual dismantling operations. Yeah, that’s not happening anytime soon.
the Europe? 🤔
Odd that you don’t mention Russia who are the cause and could stop at any time.
Interesting how a “failed state” hasn’t been defeated by a supposed super power in 4 years. Interesting how a “failed state” is coming up with advances in weapon technology faster than any regular state. How’s your hunt for fuel going these days, or did you abandon your car and take up the old art of riding a horse perhaps?
“Interesting how a “failed state” hasn’t been defeated by a supposed super power in 4 years”
Maybe because the super-power never tried to defeat “the failed state”, and already got what they wanted 3 years ago?…
You think Russia wanted to lose over a million men, trash their entire military stockpile, and have their pants pulled down by a comedian on the international stage?
A masterful strategy indeed.
If Russia really lost around 1 million soldiers, that would mean they’ve essentially lost their whole military…making it unnecessary for the EU to declare “Russia is at the point of invading us” (invade you with what, as they supposedly don’t have enough soldiers left?). In fact, if that was true, I would bet that NATO would already be inside Russia…which they are not: they are still sitting on the sideline complaining.
I know it is difficult to get reliable information out of Russia, but most of this you can figure out just by observing what politicians do…and say.
If they’d got what they wanted, they’d have declared victory.
Unless what they wanted was a perpetual war killing all their men? As a useful distraction from their own incompetence?
…and by “declaring victory”, that would magically make Ukraine stop attacking Russia?…or the EU donating weapons for them to attack Russia with?…
Common people…use that grey matter between your ears, and stop using CNN as your encyclopedia. Deductive reasoning is a skill taught in school, and knowing the HaD community, almost all of us have it.
You people really are a special breed
can we skip the politics here at least?
coruim is not a homogenous substance, so the results of the monsters taken from the elephant foot will give you an indication at the most.
The “mysique” some people feel around chernobyl make videos like this one incredibly hammy, and probably make it a lot harder to have factual discussions about the state of the building and its materials, and the steps required to clean it up.
the only AI worth a trillion dollars is the kind being created in a live war by Ukraine — invest in that, AI bros! It’s good that we’re spelling Chornobyl the way the Ukrainians do and not the way we spelled it back in the worst decade ever, the one that gave us such songs as “The Heat is On”
Hi, a small linguistic comment:
Spelling Černobyl is not used only by Russians, but also by other Slavic countries – for example Czech, Slovakian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian. One exception are Poles who say Czarnobyl with “a” (also, they never started using carons) because they say color black as “czarna”. There is a herb called “černobýl” (wormwood) from Proto-Slavic concatenated word čьrnobylь for “black herb” – that’s where the town got its name. And when the Chornobyl town/plant became known, each country called it after their already existing transliteration of the herb.
So – yeah, Russians enforced their spelling in Ukraine (and it leaked into English), but the same spelling was used throughout most of the eastern block simply because that’s how it was logically pronounced there. How it’s written in English is somewhat arbitrary as it has no meaning in English, so you can either choose the Ukrainian original version or how most Slavs call it (about 4x more people).
Please note that I’m not a linguist, just trying to explain something from Slavic languages to English speakers :)
ugh, wormwood! though i like absinthe, wormwood is basically the same plant as mugwort, a highly invasive weed in eastern north america that my hands permanently smell like because of all of it i pull up in a desperate effort to make room for any other plant at all. it turns out it really is the chornobyl of weeds!!