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Disastercast: A Stroll Through Chernobyl · Hocus Pocus Lack Of Focus

• 0:21
  Private E dabro for Chalibot Hawkins Porsky Like a Porsky,
• 0:25
  The very gorgeous podcast that mixes Hammer and Siegel under
• 0:29
  banner of Red. Today's episode is what we call
• 0:32
  in Soviet Union, the Ukrainian oopsky dusky Chernobyl.
• 0:37
  I am dusky. I was born in 19 and 85 under a
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  cloud of nuclear fallout, which explains the ADHD ski.
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  I am joined as always by our Empress with the most ample
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  chest. She is so cold as a Siberian
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  winter. But if you are medium ugly guy
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  with a rat face, her underwear will drop like Berlin Wall.
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  It's Dansky Thomashev. And our very special expert
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  joins us to remind those people actually perished and this intro
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  is in very poor taste. Ski.
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  It's Oshinsky, Bernesev. Thank you for having me,
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  Nastrovier Danny. Any Russian?
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  Nah. She probably knows some like
• 1:20
  Russian hockey players like that's probably.
• 1:23
  I know a few, yeah. No, I don't know if.
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  No, no Russian at all. Uncultured swine.
• 1:32
  Alexander Ovechkin is is Russian and funnily enough my alien.
• 1:38
  I can use an alias in work because they don't want
• 1:41
  customers to know your real name.
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  So mine is Ali Ovechkin. I did not tell you guys that
• 1:45
  though. Well done.
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  I'm telling everybody in this podcast so.
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  No one knows where I. Work.
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  It's fine with me. And Ocean.
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  That's two people who now know that.
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  Yeah, well. And nobody knows where I work.
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  What are you talking about this week?
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  We're talking about Chernobyl from the Oopsie episode.
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  Right, so I went down a rabbit hole about this ocean.
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  I think you'll agree my notes were very good.
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  Very thorough. And I watched a bunch of like,
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  count as a documentary if it's just a man sitting in his room.
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  But yeah, basically, I had no idea the amount of stuff that
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  they overlook prior to everything.
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  Like they had been warned so many times that it wasn't up to
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  par and that there was so much wrong with it.
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  There was so much more testing that needed to be done before
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  the actual test. And basically it was kind of at
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  that time you could not question them.
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  It was like, yeah, basically didn't tell any of their
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  employees anything. It was kind of seen as like, I
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  am Team Blair. I don't ask questions.
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  I just push weapon. And yeah, it's because there was
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  there was political pressure from like, you know, the higher
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  ups because like the Soviet Union at the time was like layer
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  upon layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy.
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  And each layer had to report to the layer above it that yes,
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  everything is fine, everything is good.
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  So it's going to be a lot of actions.
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  A OK. So, you know, like what?
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  Like they just rather than the responsibility of doing things
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  right and reporting things for what they really were, the
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  responsibility was you have to report that everything is OK
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  because if you say that something has gone wrong, the
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  thing that's gone wrong is your fault and you will be punished
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  for that rather than, hey, let's find a problem and fix it.
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  So there was political pressure from much higher ups than the
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  people who ran the, uh, the, the nuclear power plant.
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  And they were told you have to do the test when we tell you to
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  do the test because we've told you to do it at this time.
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  And the fact that you'll be able to do it at this time means that
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  things are running efficiently. Everything is running as it
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  should be. And for them to say, Oh no, we
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  want to delay by a few hours is just a complete and utter
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  failure, which the layers of bureaucracy just would not
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  accept. So like the pressure was coming
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  from the they like they knew they were in trouble.
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  They knew they were in trouble because like the, the explosion
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  happened in April of 1986, in February 1986, there was a minor
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  issue that happened at the plant that was detected, you know,
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  1000 kilometers away as well. And but that was just simply
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  ignored. It was like, oh, that's a little
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  hiccup. That's not a problem.
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  That's not going to be a bigger problem than the line because it
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  would have just created embarrassment.
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  And that's it was like the ultimate insult if you were to
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  embarrass someone on the level of bureaucracy above you.
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  I think that would be how I would run things though, like.
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  Honestly, you would cause a lot of explosions.
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  No, that's, that's an Irish mummy thing.
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  When you say like, if you're after finding something wrong,
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  what do you have to do? And it's like fucking do
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  anything. It's.
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  Like it'll be grand. Like what's the Russian version
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  of? It'll be grand.
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  Bronsky, I don't. Know I don't I don't think they
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  haven't it'll be grand because Russia is not an optimistic
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  place. I think, I think what we've got
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  in in Russia instead of it'll be grand is eh, is saying nothing
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  no matter what. Like it's like you like, because
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  like even did this same type of reactor or like there's multiple
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  reactors, but this this type of plant was already built in
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  Stalingrad and like they had multiple issues with that with
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  the one that was in Stalingrad before they they built the
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  Chernobyl plant. And still everyone was like, no,
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  it's like, there's no problems. There is no problems in Soviet
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  Union. Yes, that's that's the whole
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  thing as like North Korea. Approach.
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  Basically. Yeah, I like.
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  But even at that, I think with North Korea, the the whole thing
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  is like it, it is of the sad. But in in Russia, everyone has
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  to believe that there is no problems because if there's
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  problems, I'm in trouble. And I think that's that that was
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  what was happening in in Russia, like at the time, it was like,
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  no matter what cat eh, like, eh, a nuclear meltdown, that's a
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  capitalist problem that would never happen in Soviet Russia.
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  That's, that's there was almost a cockiness to them as well,
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  because there's eh like won the space race by sending fucking
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  Yuri Gagarin into, into space. And now this whole nuclear thing
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  was coming along like eh, where the, the, the arms race they
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  lost obviously, like the, the Americans had already shown what
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  they can do with like eh atom bombs and hydrogen bombs.
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  And then the Russians were like, OK, So what we can do is have
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  the superior and the superior, or like not even the superior.
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  We, we, we want to get in first with nuclear technologies.
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  So, so the, the Russians were like, OK, we've made nuclear
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  technologies. So now let's start building
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  plants. But the problem with like the
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  Soviet plants were they got they, they met, they figured out
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  how to do it, but they didn't refine the technology to make it
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  safe. Whereas the Brit, the, the Brits
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  and the Americans were like, let's not rush into this and
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  let's figure out how to not make an unsafe reactor.
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  And that's how like the, I think the British built a reactor that
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  was similar to the one that was in standing ground and Chernobyl
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  with, eh, with graphite. And they realized that graphite
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  was so reactive that there was going to be an issue.
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  So they changed the whole system like they, they eh, stripped
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  back on the graphite and eh, the Soviets were like, no fires
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  happening in the, in nuclear power stations.
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  That's a capitalist problem that would never happen in in Soviet
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  Russia. And that's like, that's a real
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  thing. Like they were, they were saying
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  it like, oh. Yeah, it was the, it was the
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  most spectacular type of denial. You know, they're just like, you
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  know, Soviet reactor is best reactor.
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  Soviet methods are best methods. Every other nuclear method is
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  inferior to Soviet. Vladimir Lenin is most handsome
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  man. Just put it in H. 300 hectares
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  on a single can of kerosene, no more, no less.
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  But yeah, like that's, I think no longer exists, but I, I think
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  we're like, umm, with, with the likes of what was happening
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  there. What, what I, I suppose we're
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  just getting straight into it before we like go, before we get
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  north and go to like a timeline or whatever.
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  But like what, what happened with like what we're saying here
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  is that like there's a there's a pride, there's a denial and
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  there's the need to be better than the West and all of that
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  kind of confluenced in this kind of cluster folk of there's
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  obviously going to be a problem. What what people have said about
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  Chernobyl is that this wasn't a freak accident.
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  This was an accident waiting to happen.
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  Yes, exactly. And this was also like, this was
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  in the dying days of the Soviet Union.
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  Like the Soviet Union was on its knees at this point.
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  Yeah. Which obviously, you know, they
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  were never going to admit at the time that they were even in,
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  like, a little bit of economic trouble.
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  But like, this was, you know, only a couple of years before
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  the Soviet Union fell. And this is this.
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  Was the red nail. Really.
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  Yeah. This was the direct country
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  contributor to the end of the Soviet Union because like,
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  despite all their, like, you know, attempts to claim to be
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  like, you know, the leading world power in so many ways, the
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  levels of poverty that Soviet people were living through at
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  the time was absolutely incredible.
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  You know, you had, you know, people were queuing around the
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  block for flour and for bread. They were queuing around the
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  block for basic vegetables. Like if a department store had,
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  you know, some like what we would consider in the West, even
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  in 1986 as like basic staples, like, you know, jeans, Western
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  clothes, shirts, electronics, like radios, there would be
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  hundreds of people who would queue outside the store.
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  But because the, the communist, well, the version of communism
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  that the Soviets did, the levels of corruption were like
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  breathtaking. So like, if a, if a department
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  store got, let's say, 100 radios, all the like, local
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  government, like officers in that city would be like, they'd
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  call them up and go, right. My wife is to go in there first.
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  She is to get the dress. She used to get 4 dresses.
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  She used to get 6 radios because she's going to give them to her
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  friends and everyone's going to know how powerful she is and
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  how, like, how well connected she is.
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  The levels of corruption make what's going on in America now
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  look like fucking amateur error. Yeah.
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  Like the levels, as you were saying earlier on, like you so
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  many levels of bureaucracy and each, each one of those levels,
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  like everyone was getting their little kind of the brown
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  envelope or like everyone got their, their breadboard.
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  Yeah. And it was, it was so hard to be
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  like the umm, the, the, the kind of proletariat underground in
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  Russia, like the, the kind of the, the plebeian who was just
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  out queuing for bread had no options.
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  You couldn't you couldn't like succeed upwards in Russia, Like
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  the, the, the system was there to be made so that the guys in
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  power would always benefit and nobody would be able to come
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  upon them. Like it's a lot of ladder
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  pulling as they're as they're going up the the rankings like
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  a. 100% I just wonder, I want to take this moment to recommend a
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  book. And this is a book that I listen
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  to a podcast and this woman was interviewed and she grew up in
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  like Stabia, Russia, and then moved to America.
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  It was like the real it was like, you know, something out
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  like a 1980s movie of, you know, like fish out of water, leaving
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  communist Russia, coming to capitalist America.
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  It's called growing up in Russia, memories of a Soviet
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  girlhood. And her Russian name is E
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  Katarina Young, and she kind of anglicized it to Kathy Young.
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  And in the book, she like she talks about, you know, the
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  levels of corruption, the struggle to get the absolute
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  basics, the denial, like the denial that like her, her
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  parents it, well, her parents were kind of like rebellious,
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  but the denial that her parents had to pretend to feel and to
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  communicate to everyone around them.
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  Because if there was also this like layer of layers of paranoia
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  in their society that like, if somebody taught that the
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  government was like a big pile of shit, someone would hear them
• 13:08
  say it. And they would call their local
• 13:10
  like representative and be like, oh, you know, like Vladimir down
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  in like #28 he said you're, you know, you don't know what you're
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  doing. And then, like, there would be
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  punishments. There would be, you know, some
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  way to, like, make that person's life even more miserable.
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  Yeah, apparently like snitch culture was massive over there.
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  Yeah, for I, I kind of don't get because like like over here,
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  like if you saw like the TV license inspector knocking into
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  your next door neighbor, you'd be like, are they moved out ages
• 13:40
  ago? There's no one living in there
• 13:41
  now. Like even if the lights were on,
• 13:42
  you'd be like, fuck, get out. Like fuck off.
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  Like, Oh, no, I think he's dead, Yeah.
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  Like we had a funeral. Daughters, and they're tearing
• 13:49
  out the place. But like over there, it was like
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  if you said like, you know, yeah, just this Stalin guy, you
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  know, I don't know if he's as good.
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  Next minute you're in the fucking gulag.
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  I think I think mustache is fake and then just like you know, a
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  guy that kicks your front door in straight away.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just I just a crazy
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  culture, but I think it might actually go back to like the
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  umm, didn't they have a system of kind of eh before like the
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  Soviet Union back when it was actually like an empire and they
• 14:25
  had a system that was like there was a lot of in like in
• 14:29
  endangered servitude. I think they were called turfs
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  back then. So like the people surfs.
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  Sorry. It was like the the old, eh?
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  Like medieval style. So, yeah, they like they did
• 14:39
  like more or less lived on the land and they were like, eh,
• 14:44
  dark They were yeah, there were servants, servants to like they
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  goes a little secure system. Yeah.
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  So, so like, I think it comes from there that there were
• 14:53
  always like, like, like even with Ireland now, I think we
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  kind of have had in the past like, you know, fucking eh
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  Millennium that like we kind of have this downtrodden kind of
• 15:08
  eh, eh, like, you know, the Brits came and then when we got
• 15:11
  rid of the Brits, we had to let the Catholic Church in.
• 15:14
  And then we, we got rid of the Catholic Church.
• 15:16
  Then like we let corrupt fucking eh, politicians kind of take
• 15:22
  over. And we're very kind of eh, we,
• 15:24
  we don't get up like the French and fucking ask for heads to
• 15:27
  roll down the fucking. Streets.
• 15:29
  You know, and yeah, but I, I think that's, I think that's a
• 15:34
  similar way where with, with the Russian people, I think Russian,
• 15:38
  like obviously Russian people are strong people.
• 15:41
  Like individual, yeah, individually, I think like these
• 15:44
  fuckers are, they're like, I wouldn't like to say like that
• 15:48
  they're a weak, like individual person, but I think the, the,
• 15:52
  the strength of character when it comes to the ideology of eh,
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  eh, like people in charge, you know what I mean?
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  Like an authority figure that they really do kind of bow down
• 16:07
  and roll over in like on mass to to like an authority.
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  But then when when shit gets nasty, they love a revolution.
• 16:18
  Oh yeah, but like. Their revolutions are like, you
• 16:21
  know, bloodbath. Historically, but like when?
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  When was the last, like, big revolution?
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  Like, I don't think we're going to see a Russian Revolution.
• 16:31
  It's like 1918. Was that when?
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  That would have been, yeah, when the the Empire was overthrown,
• 16:36
  wasn't it? And I should notice that because
• 16:39
  it would have been when, like King Nicholas the Second, I
• 16:42
  think he's Nicholas the Second when him and his family were
• 16:44
  were murdered by, like, you know, most of Saint Petersburg.
• 16:49
  Yeah, did they like the whole city went up and like took the
• 16:53
  whole family out and fucking done and.
• 16:55
  So as I revealed in the last episode, I was on another little
• 16:59
  tidbit is that I've also been to Russia and I've been to Moscow
• 17:02
  and Saint Petersburg. And we went to the Winter
• 17:05
  Palace, which is the palace that was like the straw that broke
• 17:08
  the camel's back for the Russian people because like, they
• 17:11
  couldn't afford rags. Like, you know, they just
• 17:15
  couldn't. And the Winter Palace is like
• 17:18
  this absolutely enormous palace that is beyond opulent inside.
• 17:24
  And, you know, word got out as just the type of life that they
• 17:28
  were living in there. And like, I think there's like
• 17:30
  1000 rooms or just 900 rooms in there.
• 17:33
  And we did the tour where they bring you through like just the
• 17:35
  most like, you know, outlandish, garish rooms.
• 17:38
  And it is like dripping in gold. Are they all on suite?
• 17:43
  Oh yeah, absolutely shitter in every room.
• 17:47
  Just fucking hell. Imagine that.
• 17:49
  Just the logistics of pipe work. Like that's what I we think of.
• 17:52
  It's one thing that the Russians got right.
• 17:54
  It's pipe. Work a country.
• 17:56
  As we know, a country of tradesmen, You want a plumber,
• 17:59
  He's Russian. You want an electrician, he's
• 18:01
  Russian. But yeah, like Saint Petersburg
• 18:07
  is like, it's a beautiful city. Moscow is amazing.
• 18:11
  And yeah, we were actually there like 3 months after we were in
• 18:16
  Ukraine. It was back in 2019 before the
• 18:19
  current war and like great places to visit.
• 18:22
  And, and it's like, it's a terrible pity that like no one's
• 18:25
  going to be able to visit there for a long, a long time.
• 18:28
  And but like we were in the room where Rasputin was more, well,
• 18:33
  one of the attempts on his life was made.
• 18:35
  Yeah. And many days, but they do in
• 18:39
  such a weird way you're being like shown through this, this
• 18:42
  like building and you went to a room and they have a waxwork
• 18:45
  model of, of Rasputin just sitting there.
• 18:47
  And it's like really good waxwork model.
• 18:50
  So automatically correct. Down to the floor man.
• 18:53
  Like fuck me so. Not any museum.
• 18:57
  And allegedly it's in, it's in a glass jar in like, like in an
• 19:02
  alcohol glass jar or somewhere. But they, they bring into this
• 19:06
  room and you have this like really scary, like, you know,
• 19:10
  wax work of Rasputin. And there's like, Oh yeah, this
• 19:12
  is where we shot him five times. And then he was poisoned.
• 19:15
  Oh, no, he was poisoned already at that point.
• 19:17
  And then they like brought him, they brought him outside.
• 19:19
  They stabbed him a bunch. They I think they wrapped him in
• 19:22
  a carpet and threw him into the river.
• 19:24
  Like he got out of the river and then died in pneumonia, wasn't
• 19:26
  it? Yes, like you can just imagine.
• 19:30
  What a dude. This like maniac I love.
• 19:31
  Him. Giant man like who was from like
• 19:34
  the the Orals, I think like which is like the rough
• 19:38
  mountains like he is like a mountain man and he was like a
• 19:41
  wizard and you know, he came down and was like, you know,
• 19:45
  promised that he could fix the blood disorder that the tsar's
• 19:48
  son has and was allegedly like in the Serena's pants as well
• 19:54
  like. Yes.
• 19:55
  And I thought on him would be awesome.
• 19:57
  Yeah, like I've, I've, I've listened to so many fucking
• 20:00
  podcasts on Rasputin because it's so like, it's so
• 20:03
  interesting. We get like again, we can do a
• 20:04
  full one. But like, it's the most
• 20:07
  interesting thing I find about apart from the fact that he was.
• 20:11
  Basically a mountain man who like ascended to basically like
• 20:15
  the worm tongue of the fucking Czar and but like.
• 20:20
  Priest at the end, wasn't he? Like he was, he was more than
• 20:24
  just a priest. He's a wizard, a magician.
• 20:25
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, like he was.
• 20:28
  Yeah, exactly. They thought he had magical
• 20:29
  mystical powers. And like to be honest with you,
• 20:33
  if you get a shot like 5 times, stabbed a bunch of times,
• 20:36
  poisoned, eh thrown into a river and then you fucking stand back
• 20:39
  out a river and eventually just pneumonia gets you and you are.
• 20:45
  But like, could you imagine like being that that group of men who
• 20:48
  like, you know, poisoned them and like he's, he sat there like
• 20:51
  laughing at him when he was poisoned.
• 20:53
  Then they shot him and he fell outside into a courtyard, like
• 20:57
  cursing them, like ready, like, you know, threatening to murder
• 21:00
  them. And then they all like, it was a
• 21:01
  bunch of like noblemen. And then they were like stabbing
• 21:03
  him with their like, you know, fancy, like dress swords and all
• 21:07
  this kind of stuff. And then like, you know, he
• 21:09
  collapses. They throw him into the river
• 21:11
  and then they're just watching like him float down the river
• 21:13
  and they see him climb out of the river and you can imagine he
• 21:16
  gets out of the river and he's like cursing their names, ready
• 21:20
  to kill them again. You would be terrified.
• 21:24
  You would be scared shitless of that man.
• 21:26
  And he had a Mickey on him like the leg of a piano.
• 21:28
  So like. I heard his last act is that he
• 21:31
  beat a cow to death with his Dong.
• 21:35
  What does the cow do? It was just there.
• 21:38
  To prove it, he. Talked the cow.
• 21:41
  He talked the cow. Looked too Ukrainian.
• 21:48
  Anyway, back to. To the.
• 21:50
  Ukraine OK, back to the. Ukraine.
• 21:52
  Let's let's yeah, let's. Oh, that's a good segue right
• 21:55
  there because Danny, take us in, take us into the build up.
• 21:59
  I'm going to take you over the actual reactor and we talked a
• 22:03
  little bit about it, but just to go into the design itself uh, so
• 22:09
  unit 4 used in or BMK, as mentioned, 1000 reactor design
• 22:14
  unique to the Soviet Union and it had some major inherent
• 22:17
  dangers that essentially set the stage for the accident um,
• 22:22
  positive void coefficient. So this is the big one.
• 22:25
  In most western reactors it's a cooling water turns to steam,
• 22:29
  the reaction slows down. In the RBMK, whoever the
• 22:33
  graphite used as a moderator meant that if cooling water
• 22:36
  turned to steam, the reactors power would actually surge and
• 22:39
  increase. Which is, you know, the the
• 22:42
  opposite of safe. I don't know how many times I
• 22:46
  had to fucking read this term. Graphite tip control rods.
• 22:51
  Oh yeah, the control. Rods.
• 22:53
  Are supposed to be the brakes, but they had graphite tips
• 22:57
  attached to the boron carbide absorber words.
• 23:02
  When the operator hit the emergency shutdown button, for
• 23:04
  the first few seconds the graphite tips would momentarily
• 23:07
  displace water from the bottom of the core before the main
• 23:11
  absorbers entered. In certain low, low power
• 23:14
  conditions, this displacement of water was enough to cause a
• 23:17
  spike in reactivity, which is the final fatal surge.
• 23:22
  Lack of containment structure. Unlike most reactors globally,
• 23:25
  the RBMK did not have a robust steel reinforced containment
• 23:29
  building surrounding the core, which meant when the explosion
• 23:32
  happened there was nothing to stop the massive release of
• 23:36
  radioactive material. So on the like the control rods
• 23:41
  and you've said they're like it's the the AZ 5 and the AZ 5
• 23:45
  was the button that they would press to release the graphite
• 23:47
  shot shafts into the reactor. And what they would do is they
• 23:52
  would. It.
• 23:53
  Sounds like Russian porn. Release the graphite shaft into
• 23:58
  my reactor. There probably was a parody, a
• 24:02
  Chernobyl parody of a porno. Of course, if you can think of
• 24:06
  something terrible, the Internet has done it.
• 24:08
  Yeah, And but so the the the AZ 5 button releasing the graphite
• 24:14
  rods into the reactor, this was a known problem with the RBMK.
• 24:19
  This was something that they knew about.
• 24:20
  And like you've even put in the notes, like the AZ five problem.
• 24:23
  This was something, you know, when this was being built in all
• 24:26
  of the other RBMK reactors, they knew that like if there was a
• 24:30
  series of events that led to a point and you press the AZ 5
• 24:34
  button, you are creating a bigger problem.
• 24:39
  But typical Soviet there was like, but this will never
• 24:42
  happen. It will never get to.
• 24:44
  This. I've been.
• 24:47
  Practicing my Russian accent all day.
• 24:49
  I can't wait until we do the Pol Pot episode and I can do my
• 24:52
  Chinese accent. Danny, you get practicing.
• 25:00
  No, because I can actually do a really good one.
• 25:05
  You're from Ireland. No, you can't.
• 25:08
  I. Can like dudes, accents don't
• 25:11
  have colours guys, we can do what we want.
• 25:13
  Let's. Yeah, exactly.
• 25:18
  I'm using that all the time. I get pulled into Hey shore.
• 25:20
  Just don't have colour. And if anyone says anything
• 25:23
  about me using the accent, I'll just say listen guys, me so
• 25:26
  sorry. Oh.
• 25:28
  God. We.
• 25:29
  Flopped A dicky wrong time. I'm not going to join in.
• 25:35
  I'm not going to join. In bad.
• 25:36
  Accents. I will not.
• 25:37
  I will. I will mock various Europeans
• 25:40
  but not Asians. I was doing the the Borat accent
• 25:44
  in work the other day. Well, a few of us were.
• 25:48
  My boss was like, I don't think that there's anyone in the
• 25:50
  office that's from Kazakhstan, but please stop.
• 25:53
  Like. It's not even a Kazakhstan
• 25:55
  accent. No, I was like.
• 25:57
  People do the Irish accent all the time back to me and I don't
• 26:01
  find the defensive. That's different.
• 26:04
  I was like, oh, it's different when it's the Irish.
• 26:05
  Got it. OK, that's fine.
• 26:07
  Whatever. It's because we're cool and we
• 26:09
  can take a joke. That is true.
• 26:11
  But did I tell you so? There's a guy that I work with
• 26:13
  and when I first started, my trainer did the whole like, oh,
• 26:18
  there's another Irish person here.
• 26:20
  You have to meet him like. And I was just like, Oh yeah,
• 26:22
  grand, like. A Betty, You know him.
• 26:27
  Second cousin. Sure, there he is.
• 26:31
  No. So he was like Hall on in here,
• 26:36
  like was like. Did you call him?
• 26:38
  And he came in and he was like and like walked straight
• 26:40
  beelined over to me. I was sat at my desk and he sat.
• 26:43
  He got down on the floor by my desk and he was my name is
• 26:46
  Kahal, but you know that he thinks it's tall and it's just
• 26:48
  like. That's all funny.
• 26:50
  All right. And then we were shot in the way
• 26:51
  and then that was fine. I was upstairs a few weeks
• 26:54
  later, one of the guys think, oh, do you know Cat Hall?
• 26:56
  I was like. He was like.
• 27:00
  And he was just kind of, he sat for a second, he was like 7
• 27:04
  years and he's never corrected me.
• 27:07
  And I was like, that is an Irish thing to do.
• 27:09
  I'd be like, yeah, whatever. I used to let people in BT call
• 27:12
  me Sally that's talking on the phone.
• 27:14
  I'd be like Danny, Danny, Danny, Sally, yeah.
• 27:21
  I think we should do with England.
• 27:23
  We should build the wall around England and fill it with water.
• 27:26
  That's what I think. Build that wall.
• 27:32
  Right. Anyway, so the disaster happened
• 27:35
  during routine safety tests planned before a maintenance
• 27:38
  shutdown. The test was, ironically, to see
• 27:40
  if the residual rotational energy of turbines could
• 27:44
  generate enough electricity to run the essential cooling pumps
• 27:48
  until the emergency diesel generators kicked in.
• 27:52
  So I have a breakdown over the night of what happened.
• 27:59
  Yeah. I went in on this.
• 28:01
  So one O 6:00 AM the reactor power starts to be reduced for
• 28:05
  the scheduled maintenance shutdown and test, and then 2:00
• 28:10
  PM emergency core cooling system is intentionally disabled to
• 28:15
  keep it from interfering with the test.
• 28:19
  Power reduction is unexpectedly delayed by a grid dispatcher in
• 28:22
  Kiev for 9 hours to meet evening electricity demand. 11:10 PM the
• 28:29
  power reduction resumes. 12:28 AM The next day, the operators
• 28:34
  accidentally overshoot the minimum required test power
• 28:38
  level, which was 700 megawatts and the power plummets to a
• 28:42
  dangerously low level, which is near 200 megawatts.
• 28:46
  And then about approximately 1:00 AM the to counteract the
• 28:50
  Xenon 135 and raise power back up for the test, the operators
• 28:54
  withdraw almost all control rods, likely violating any
• 28:58
  safety limits that they had had in place during this.
• 29:02
  Again, like. Doing something this go on.
• 29:04
  Sorry, go on machine. Yeah, so doing something this
• 29:07
  stupid, like they all knew that this was, you know, likely
• 29:11
  violating a safety limit. It was likely doing something
• 29:14
  that was going to create a bigger problem.
• 29:15
  But again, because of the top down pressure that they were
• 29:19
  experiencing, they were just like, fuck, we we have to do
• 29:22
  this. We have to happen.
• 29:23
  OK, It's gone way too low. How do we get it up quickly?
• 29:26
  Well, we can take out all the control rods and then we'll
• 29:28
  manage it from there. It'll be fine.
• 29:31
  We we can do this and it just, it was like, you know, mistake
• 29:35
  after mistake after mistake. So the core cooling system, then
• 29:38
  when that was intentionally disabled, that was a violation.
• 29:43
  This wasn't strictly necessary for the test.
• 29:46
  What was done to avoid an automatic shutdown, which ended
• 29:49
  up severely worsening the the eventual outcome.
• 29:54
  And then when you go down to the test so they overshot 700 and
• 30:03
  the power plummets to 200. Running the RBMK at such low
• 30:08
  power is unstable and unsafe, leading to a buildup of ZN 135A
• 30:13
  neutron poison that absorbs neutrons and kills the chain
• 30:16
  reaction. And then when it goes to them,
• 30:21
  basically withdrawing all the control rods.
• 30:24
  This left the reactor in an extremely unstable and volatile
• 30:27
  condition. Virtually, eh?
• 30:29
  Unbreaked and highly susceptible to the RBMK's design flaws.
• 30:33
  Danny, all this information, eh, it's, it's perfect, it's great,
• 30:36
  it's perfect and all that. But I've got ADHD so and we all
• 30:41
  know this and it's very hard for me to focus on that.
• 30:43
  So could you do either a funny accident or take off your top or
• 30:46
  do something that will get me to like?
• 30:50
  Russians take it all. Rod Bad.
• 30:53
  OK, Right. Yeah.
• 30:54
  I think that could that sums it up.
• 30:58
  Alex, could you cut down this whole episode to that one
• 31:00
  sentence? Do you know what's, you know
• 31:02
  what's wild about this, right? Is that like, I was looking up
• 31:05
  like diagrams of like the, the reactor, you know, and I think
• 31:09
  internal there's 4 central reactors.
• 31:11
  So you have like the one that exploded is reactor #4 And I was
• 31:16
  looking at diagrams of like how it works and I was trying to
• 31:18
  understand it. And basically what these
• 31:22
  reactors do is they create steam to turn turbines.
• 31:28
  They're steam engines. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 31:31
  We have not moved on beyond the steam engine because like
• 31:33
  nuclear reactors, more modern ones still create water vapor
• 31:39
  steam to turn a turbine which generates electricity.
• 31:42
  We are still at the steam engine.
• 31:44
  Yeah, I I get what you're saying, but I.
• 31:46
  Love that. They're harnessing the power of
• 31:49
  the sun to to make like, well, not like, not like harnessing
• 31:55
  the power of. So they're recreating something
• 31:58
  that has a nuclear power of the sun to make it to make steam.
• 32:03
  So basically the thing you do with your cattle, these guys are
• 32:07
  using uranium to do that. Yeah, yeah.
• 32:10
  Yeah, yeah. Which is, yeah, it's kind of
• 32:13
  fucked up. It's so mad that like, we're
• 32:15
  still, we're still at steam engines.
• 32:18
  Does is there like, I suppose this is what I would say is like
• 32:23
  the argument here is if we had like safe nuclear power that the
• 32:32
  world would be a much better place because do we know to be
• 32:37
  less fossil fuels and all that kind of stuff?
• 32:39
  If this stuff could be contained and like you know, would never
• 32:42
  react like nuclear power is the cleanest energy that you could
• 32:48
  think of until one thing. Until it.
• 32:51
  Goes on and then it's the worst possible outcome like.
• 32:54
  And nobody has skin anymore. Yeah.
• 32:56
  So like is like the argument is then is it worth it?
• 33:00
  Like obviously let's take it like that.
• 33:03
  The Soviet Union didn't come in with their kind of half arsed,
• 33:09
  although they thought they were doing it right, kind of way of
• 33:12
  doing it. And like you had, like the
• 33:15
  Americans say, who have been using nuclear power for a long
• 33:20
  time and with very little issues.
• 33:23
  They had Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island, of course.
• 33:28
  1979 but like that's the worst that they've had and when you
• 33:31
  look at like the number of nuclear plants that they have
• 33:34
  versus, you know, the number of accidents they've had like, you
• 33:38
  know, statistically is very safe.
• 33:40
  Same in Russia, like, you know they had all these like RBMK
• 33:42
  reactors which were like really dangerous.
• 33:44
  And you know, like I said earlier, like, you know, the
• 33:47
  Chernobyl reactor 4 had an issue and you know two months before
• 33:50
  the explosion, but the other ones were running fine.
• 33:54
  The other models they had were running fine and there weren't
• 33:56
  really any issues. Fukushima, the Japanese one like
• 34:01
  that only had an issue because there was a tsunami, you know,
• 34:04
  like. Natural disaster and natural.
• 34:06
  Disaster, which is like, you know, the design of it,
• 34:09
  unsurprisingly for the Japanese is fantastic.
• 34:12
  And it was a natural disaster that caused us, you know, so
• 34:15
  like, statistically, it's still like incredibly clean,
• 34:18
  incredibly efficient. And, and, you know, there's,
• 34:22
  there's still always plans to like, create like, you know,
• 34:24
  small reactors in several places around countries.
• 34:28
  But people just get the shits of them because they're like, Oh
• 34:30
  yeah. Like, you know, Fukushima and
• 34:32
  Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and, you know, I don't want to
• 34:35
  have six years. That's not what I want to
• 34:37
  happen, you know, And it's just there's all this like
• 34:39
  scaremongering. Oh, tinfoil hat.
• 34:42
  They're scaremongering because the fossil fuel industry don't
• 34:45
  want us to think that nuclear power and nuclear reactors are
• 34:49
  safe and clean. They want us to still burn coal
• 34:52
  and burn, you know, oil until we destroy the Earth.
• 34:57
  Yeah. All just so that so that some
• 34:59
  people can yeah, like a big oil are basically it's a thing yeah
• 35:06
  they're they're basically umm like they're they were
• 35:13
  scaremongering against solar panel or said solar power.
• 35:17
  Nice scaremongering, but like telling people that we're
• 35:20
  putting out like misinformation. Yeah yeah, yeah.
• 35:22
  How like it it couldn't ever work.
• 35:24
  And you know that's that's eh you couldn't like a light bulb
• 35:29
  with fucking you know, a field of solar panels and the same
• 35:32
  with wind energy and stuff like that.
• 35:34
  Like the fact that like the world at this point is still
• 35:39
  dependent on fossil fuels so much is incredible.
• 35:44
  Like again like we've we've got again.
• 35:48
  I know what people will say, eh, when it comes to like wind
• 35:52
  turbines and stuff like that, we're like, oh, you're going to
• 35:54
  ruin the natural beauty. But we have, we have in Ireland
• 35:59
  enough, umm, enough. Like we've got the largest
• 36:03
  because of where we're situated. We've got the largest coastal, I
• 36:09
  was going to say the land, but it's not land, but like, eh, our
• 36:13
  territory is massive outside of our, we could put wind turbine
• 36:17
  turbines out into the Mid-Atlantic and we could eh.
• 36:21
  This is what some experts from Scandinavia came down to us, eh.
• 36:25
  But like to have a look eh, in Ireland to see like what we can
• 36:29
  do to improve umm, our like cabin footprint and what we can
• 36:34
  do to, to power Ireland, eh, without relying on fossil fuels.
• 36:39
  And they said if we had your coastline, we'd be able to power
• 36:43
  mainland Europe and maybe like we'd make money, we'd be the
• 36:47
  richest, heck, we'd be the richest country on the planet.
• 36:50
  And this is like guys from Norway.
• 36:51
  So like. And like, the Scandi countries
• 36:55
  have like, crazy oil reserves, and they're just like, no, we
• 36:58
  don't need that, Yeah. It's incredible.
• 37:00
  All the all the rigs are up there and I talk about the oil
• 37:03
  rigs on every fucking episode, but that's they're all up that
• 37:05
  way like in the North Sea and all are in that way.
• 37:10
  Umm, right, so final. Back on track here, Danny.
• 37:13
  I don't know why I went down that.
• 37:15
  Really. That makes fun.
• 37:18
  It's already. Was it?
• 37:19
  Was it? Was it?
• 37:19
  No. I actually I have AI have like a
• 37:22
  little bit about Sweden later on.
• 37:23
  So like, it's good that we brought up Scandinavia.
• 37:26
  Sweden. Umm, well, I will.
• 37:29
  Just I'll put it back just a little bit.
• 37:30
  So with everybody freaking out about it, this did lead to like,
• 37:34
  global protests, which we'll get into a little bit later.
• 37:37
  I'm like, I can't focus. There's a Chihuahua here.
• 37:41
  She's a puppy, and her name is Abby, right?
• 37:44
  OK, where am I now? I've lost my place.
• 37:48
  I am now looking at the Chihuahua and I like I was close
• 37:52
  to that dog. I would steal that.
• 37:53
  Like I love them so much. It's like.
• 37:57
  It's the eyeballs bigger than everything.
• 38:01
  Else it's so cute. I do you want to hear some
• 38:02
  Chihuahua facts? Let's do.
• 38:05
  It literally yesterday I watched and because me and my beautiful
• 38:11
  Eastern European non Soviet girlfriend, he listened.
• 38:15
  To this podcast, that's why he sucks her Dick on.
• 38:17
  Every. Episode we, We were transferring
• 38:22
  eh like, you know, videos and stuff and my algorithm became
• 38:25
  very Chihuahua central and and just automatically it was like,
• 38:32
  eh, how Chihuahuas happened and I was like, no fucking way am I
• 38:36
  going to see how Chihuahuas happened from wolves.
• 38:38
  And it just got into the whole like how the South Americans
• 38:44
  like more or less worship these dogs.
• 38:47
  It got very dark when the fucking Spanish came over as is.
• 38:50
  As happens. Yeah, what it was it was day
• 38:54
  back to like, eh, The to like, obviously, apparently,
• 39:00
  apparently. I'm just going to put rabbit
• 39:02
  ears up here because every expert says but I'm a conspiracy
• 39:05
  theorist. Eh, dogs were in that that
• 39:08
  domesticated from wolves 30,000 years ago.
• 39:10
  Now you're telling me it took 30,000 years to get from a wolf
• 39:13
  to a Chihuahua? OK, all right, that's what I'm
• 39:15
  supposed to believe. But anyways, apparently
• 39:18
  Chihuahuas are like only like about 3000 years old and they
• 39:23
  got they got bred to be pets. There wasn't like most dogs.
• 39:28
  They like you, he like to get they get bred some.
• 39:30
  Of our working dogs, yeah. Exactly.
• 39:32
  The whole like little dogs are normally like rat catchers, but
• 39:36
  these things were basically just bred to be pets.
• 39:39
  They were bred and obviously you have a darker Chihuahua and, you
• 39:44
  know, more power to her sister, but most Chihuahuas were bred to
• 39:48
  be to be like yellow. So that apparently yellow was
• 39:56
  like the colour of the dead and it was associated with death.
• 40:02
  And because they worshipped the sun, it was supposed to be like
• 40:05
  this great thing because like when you died, you went back to
• 40:08
  to to be one with the sun and stuff.
• 40:10
  And Chihuahuas like kind of represented that.
• 40:13
  And very sad. The Chihuahuas were so like
• 40:18
  ingrained with a person like that.
• 40:20
  When you died, your Chihuahua was sacrificed, put into the the
• 40:25
  burial chamber which and Janice, it was what the Chihuahua was
• 40:30
  there to guide you to the afterlife.
• 40:32
  To the underworld and all. That Yeah, yeah.
• 40:33
  Which is like, you know, it's horrible to say, but like, they
• 40:36
  were so revered that this little fucker and was like, like
• 40:44
  everything, the culture. Yeah.
• 40:48
  And then the Spanish came over and those fuckers just started
• 40:52
  eating everything. They're almost at 2 hours out of
• 40:55
  existence like when they Christ, yes, I know it's crazy Like we,
• 41:00
  we talk about like cultures that eat dogs, but the the Spanish
• 41:04
  came over like look at the size of the little dog.
• 41:06
  We're going to eat it. And eh, they almost got rid of
• 41:09
  the Chihuahuas because apparently like like when you
• 41:13
  look at. Avid got eaten in.
• 41:15
  Them. Yeah, there is some, but like,
• 41:16
  not a lot of meat again. Yeah, but like, they're eating
• 41:19
  trouble over there, you know what I mean?
• 41:21
  Or whatever the fuck they're eating.
• 41:22
  Guinea pigs like in Peru, like, you know what I mean?
• 41:24
  Like. Guinea pigs are big though man.
• 41:27
  Like those wild ones over there are pretty big.
• 41:30
  Like. Guinea pig Chihuahua.
• 41:31
  Like, come on, guys. Yeah.
• 41:33
  It's true. I got fully grown chihuahuas
• 41:35
  like, you know, 4 or 5 kilos. Yeah, well, like you're telling
• 41:39
  me Guinea pig is more than four or five kilos.
• 41:41
  Danny, Google that. We don't have a producer.
• 41:43
  You're get on it. Danny, bring that up.
• 41:46
  Danny, bring that up. And but yeah, so that's that's
• 41:52
  kind of like the there's more obviously more information, but
• 41:55
  I'm riddled with ADHD and it's not going to work.
• 41:57
  I don't know if I've mentioned that I've got ADHD in this
• 41:59
  podcast. I.
• 42:00
  Don't think so. No, no, no. 1.5 to 2.6 lbs
• 42:05
  again. OK, that's that's tiny.
• 42:08
  Yeah, that's ridiculous. Like it's 2.2 lbs per 2.2 lbs Is
• 42:12
  it? 900 grams to 1000. 100 grams.
• 42:18
  OK, let's get back on track So. A snack.
• 42:21
  Maybe on a meal, but certainly a snack.
• 42:23
  Next week we're going to do a three hour long episode on
• 42:26
  Guinea. Pig.
• 42:26
  Guinea pigs, right? OK, so.
• 42:32
  I was talking about disaster happened during a routine safety
• 42:36
  test planned for a maintenance shutdown.
• 42:37
  I've read this part. I do apologize, I'm distracted.
• 42:40
  The final moments were a terrifying sequence of events
• 42:43
  where the operator actions, the unstable core state, and the
• 42:47
  fatal design flaws converged. So 1:23 AM.
• 42:52
  The test begins by tripping the turbine, switching off steam
• 42:55
  flow. Turbine rundown starts reducing
• 42:59
  power to the main pumps and thus reducing coolant flow.
• 43:04
  Reduced cooling causes the water and the pressure tubes to heat
• 43:07
  up and turn to steam. Design flaw activated because of
• 43:12
  the RBMK's positive void coefficient.
• 43:15
  This steam increase causes a massive uncontrolled power
• 43:18
  surge. Justy, are you with us?
• 43:20
  Yeah, so basically the thing that is supposed to stop the
• 43:26
  steam creates more steam. It does like this is the exact
• 43:32
  opposite of what we wanted to have.
• 43:34
  It's like when they send that paedophile out to space and it
• 43:37
  turns out there was a child on board.
• 43:41
  So the operator hits the emergency shutdown button in a
• 43:44
  desperate attempt to stop the surge.
• 43:47
  The graphite tips of the control rods enter the bottom of the
• 43:50
  core and displace the remaining water, causing a final
• 43:54
  catastrophic spike in reactivity and power, which led to the
• 44:00
  first explosion. The rapid power surge ruptures
• 44:04
  the fuel channels resulting steam flash boils causing a
• 44:08
  massive steam explosion that blows thousand ton reactor lit
• 44:11
  1000 tons this. Little the the the reactor lid,
• 44:17
  the thousand ton reactor lid is it's all of the rods that are
• 44:20
  joined together. They're in hexagonal shapes like
• 44:23
  a like a honeycomb. And apparently just before the
• 44:27
  explosion, someone was there like this is like one of the,
• 44:30
  the like oral accounts of it. And each rod which weighed, you
• 44:35
  know, like a couple of 100 kilos each was dancing up and down.
• 44:39
  So like each one of these and you're talking like there's like
• 44:41
  100 of these in this kind of circular shape.
• 44:44
  And each of the rods were like bouncing up and down, like, you
• 44:47
  know, a couple of feet at the time.
• 44:49
  And then the whole thing blows and you have a 1000 ton lid
• 44:55
  flies off and the explosion was the steam like it was a steam
• 45:00
  explosion. Which like you can look at so
• 45:02
  many industrial accidents over the year years and steam is
• 45:07
  absolutely terrifying because it just destroys everything.
• 45:11
  If it explodes, you are done I. Don't know why that when you
• 45:15
  said, when you said it looked like a honeycomb, just remind me
• 45:18
  of I don't even know what that is.
• 45:20
  I know it's a quote from Futurama, but it's like
• 45:22
  honeycombs big. Yeah, yeah.
• 45:24
  It's not small. No, no, no.
• 45:26
  What is that from? Your brain.
• 45:30
  No, it's it. They did it in Futurama.
• 45:33
  There is a Futurama episode where there is a load of like
• 45:36
  very large bees and they have this like honey that they eat
• 45:40
  that makes them go into this like deep.
• 45:41
  Sleep the dream, the dream the dream.
• 45:43
  Episode, yeah, but I don't know what it's parting.
• 45:46
  Yeah, I don't know what the reference is.
• 45:47
  Yeah. And they're.
• 45:48
  Talking about the planet and he's like.
• 45:49
  Honeycomb. Small.
• 45:50
  Yeah, no. Honeycomb bee?
• 45:51
  No. No.
• 45:52
  Did you know? Did you know that the writer
• 45:54
  room for Futurama that has the most PhDs for any TV show?
• 45:59
  That's completely, completely believable.
• 46:02
  Makes sense because a lot of their science, a lot of their
• 46:05
  science checks out. Yeah, yeah, there's a little
• 46:07
  ADHD one for you, Justy. No, no, I love that.
• 46:10
  I love that as well. An episode not so long ago on
• 46:14
  like the kind of hidden hidden things in the in The Simpsons
• 46:18
  and Justy. Where is that?
• 46:20
  Are we? Different.
• 46:22
  We uploaded that one. Did we?
• 46:24
  I don't think, I don't think that one bad.
• 46:26
  Is it not? No.
• 46:27
  So you're. Gonna have to go back to but
• 46:29
  like basically it was you tell him that the fucking quantum
• 46:32
  physics theory thing that. Oh, the Higgs boson that Homer
• 46:36
  did. Yeah, yeah.
• 46:37
  He he got like they they don't an equation on the the
• 46:41
  chalkboard and it was umm, well, again, it was one of these
• 46:45
  writers that they got to to to do it.
• 46:48
  He. Knew what he was doing, yeah.
• 46:49
  Yeah, like he, he ended up eh, writing for eh Futurama anyways,
• 46:54
  but he eh, it's not that he ended up he was writing for both
• 46:57
  Simpsons and Futurama, but eh, he got really close to solving
• 47:03
  the Higgs boson in like years before they actually figured out
• 47:08
  eh, well, give us. A.
• 47:09
  Cool looking equation but on on the board to make Homer look
• 47:13
  smart and then it turns out it was like almost dead on
• 47:16
  basically. Yeah.
• 47:19
  He was just really cool. Umm, sorry, I keep getting off
• 47:23
  track here. OK, and I just wanted like so on
• 47:25
  the timeline as well. So from when they shut down the
• 47:28
  reactor, I'm just looking at your notes here because this the
• 47:31
  the timeline is wild. So the test begins by tripping
• 47:34
  the turbine switch, which turns off the steam clock.
• 47:36
  This is 123 and 4 seconds. The first explosion is 123 and
• 47:42
  44 seconds. This is so quick.
• 47:45
  Within a minute, like it's fucking crazy, like how quickly
• 47:49
  it happened. So yeah, core is exposed, the
• 47:53
  roof is destroyed and the core is exposed to the atmosphere.
• 47:57
  Second explosion then is 1/23/58.
• 48:03
  So few seconds later, well, a second powerful explosion,
• 48:08
  likely from the build up of hydrogen gas occurs, throwing
• 48:12
  hot graphite moderator chunks and pieces of the highly
• 48:15
  radioactive core material high into the sky.
• 48:18
  This initiates the fires and sends massive amounts of
• 48:21
  dangerous radionuclides into the environment.
• 48:25
  So when when the first explosion happens and the core is exposed,
• 48:32
  this is like the worst possible scenario for any nuclear
• 48:37
  scientist because they never envisaged any situation where a
• 48:45
  nuclear reaction that would be exposed to the open air.
• 48:49
  They had put in so many safety measures, even though they
• 48:51
  weren't implemented, implemented and used correctly.
• 48:53
  But they put so many safety measures in place that the
• 48:57
  thought of a core that was reacting, being exposed to the
• 49:01
  world, like, they couldn't even tell you what that would look
• 49:04
  like, you know, like. There was so much preventative
• 49:08
  measures but no reactive measures.
• 49:11
  Exactly because they were, they were just like, we will never
• 49:13
  allow this to happen. This is too dangerous.
• 49:15
  Because if it starts reacting at like there was, there was
• 49:19
  theories that like it would react with the atmosphere, it
• 49:22
  would set the atmosphere on fire that the reaction would never
• 49:26
  stop. And that was the like in the
• 49:27
  cleanup, which you know, we'll cover in the cleanup.
• 49:30
  They were just like, what if this never stops?
• 49:34
  How do we stop this from spreading?
• 49:36
  Because like, this is just. And again, it was just like
• 49:38
  Russia. Well, the Soviet Union will be
• 49:40
  blamed for, you know, the the atmosphere being set on fire.
• 49:45
  And it is, it is mental that like they obviously hadn't
• 49:50
  prepared for any of it. So the first responders, the
• 49:52
  firefighters, they're not trained to deal with anything of
• 49:55
  this magnitude. Like they all respond.
• 49:58
  To the. Firefighters.
• 49:59
  Regular fire like they're not trained to deal with anything to
• 50:02
  do with fucking nuclear power plant exploding basically.
• 50:05
  And in the in the show, the HBO show Chernobyl, they so good.
• 50:10
  It's it's amazing 5 episodes, you know, 100% in Rotten
• 50:14
  Tomatoes. It is phenomenal and.
• 50:16
  There's nothing bad about it. Like there's John, it's just
• 50:19
  from start to finish. It's harrowing.
• 50:22
  But it's so like. Fucking good.
• 50:23
  They they have, they try to show what it would look like.
• 50:27
  So it explodes and you see half the building is just
• 50:31
  obliterated. And then they just have this
• 50:34
  like, you know, image of like this light pouring out of like
• 50:38
  it's almost like a white light that is also flame shooting out
• 50:42
  of the building. And it's like they were trying
• 50:43
  to visualize how it would look if you were to be standing above
• 50:47
  it looking down into the reaction, which, you know, like
• 50:51
  we could not know human eye could see that because you would
• 50:55
  just disintegrate. And it is.
• 50:58
  And even at that, they were just like, we don't know if it would
• 51:00
  look like this because we it's like forces that like we don't
• 51:05
  understand. Well, they do understand.
• 51:07
  But like, if it was to be in such an uncontrolled state,
• 51:10
  would it be, you know, this bright light that was shining
• 51:13
  out up into the sky? Or would it be more
• 51:16
  terrifyingly, completely pitch black and just radiation like,
• 51:20
  you know, this silent violent force coming out from like this
• 51:25
  hunk of melting metal that you've you, you don't even have
• 51:29
  like a bright light to warn you of the danger.
• 51:32
  It's, it's kind of like a Schrodinger's explosion, really.
• 51:36
  Like you, you don't know what it is unless you like, witness it.
• 51:40
  But if you witness it, you can't tell anybody what it is.
• 51:43
  Like. Yeah, it's, it's basically like
• 51:45
  it's a real kind of metaphor or allegory, whatever you want to
• 51:50
  call it for death. Like the people who are always
• 51:52
  chasing what happens after death but like you could never explain
• 51:56
  it without dying like you have like.
• 51:59
  It's like love, crafty and mixed with like real science.
• 52:02
  Yeah, you know. If you if you look upon us, you
• 52:05
  will be driven insane. Yeah, that's pretty good.
• 52:08
  That's that's that's that's a good way of looking at a love
• 52:10
  crafty and without the inherent racism, but.
• 52:15
  Yes, that is correct. Well, it's in Russia.
• 52:18
  There's probably a lot of racism.
• 52:21
  But yeah, and like they did go into that like a little bit on
• 52:24
  on the show and we'll we'll talk about that in a second as well.
• 52:28
  Nobody was particularly worried because they knew nothing.
• 52:32
  It was just an accident that happened at the plant.
• 52:35
  Nobody knew the extent of it for a a long time after it fucking
• 52:39
  happened. Didn't even alert like the the
• 52:41
  local town. Maybe close your windows a
• 52:45
  little bit. Like at first they were like
• 52:48
  people were still going to work and kids were.
• 52:50
  Still, so the, the explosion was like hurt and everyone was like
• 52:54
  roused from their beds and everybody went out to look
• 52:58
  towards the plant because the plant was on fire.
• 53:00
  And so the, the nearer the, the city that's near, it's called
• 53:03
  Crippias and proofias was built just for the people who work at
• 53:07
  the nuclear power plant. Like it was one of a very like
• 53:10
  Soviet thing of like, we're going to build these plants,
• 53:12
  We're going to build cities around them.
• 53:14
  We will have families living there.
• 53:15
  There will be schools, theaters, are, you know, it will be
• 53:18
  perfect society that will revolve around these plants.
• 53:21
  And so they all just went out to like, look at this explosion and
• 53:26
  to look at the the reactor on fire because they're like, oh
• 53:29
  shit, I worked there. You know, what the hell is going
• 53:31
  on? And there was a particular
• 53:32
  bridge in previous where a lot of people gathered because it
• 53:36
  was the best view of this building on fire.
• 53:38
  And they were like several kilometers away and there was
• 53:42
  like ash that was raining down on them there.
• 53:46
  And like that ash was highly radioactive, but they kind of
• 53:51
  just thought it was like, oh, it's just ash from the fire,
• 53:53
  which like. Yeah, but they're really.
• 53:55
  It did pick today. I was like little kids putting
• 53:57
  their hands up, being like that's.
• 54:00
  Really like what what they what happened?
• 54:02
  Like the the people who were on that bridge were exposed to like
• 54:06
  an absolutely unfathomable amount of radiation.
• 54:11
  That's incredible. And then it's like anything, so
• 54:14
  I know it's it was in the show, like for dramatization,
• 54:18
  whatever, but just there's this young woman, she's pregnant,
• 54:21
  she's like just moved there with her like firefighter husband or
• 54:24
  whatever, expecting their first child and he's just going off
• 54:26
  like routine fire like all. That's not for dramatization,
• 54:30
  Danny. I know, but I'm just saying
• 54:32
  like. Legit, legit people.
• 54:34
  There were real families there like, you know, people, people
• 54:36
  were told come to prepare, have your family, you know, have 10
• 54:40
  kids, you know, you know, like it's good for the motherland.
• 54:43
  And, you know, like, you know, you had these young families,
• 54:46
  you had schools there, you had nurseries.
• 54:49
  And the firefighters just thought like, they got the call
• 54:52
  out. There's, there's a fire at the
• 54:54
  nuclear power plant, nothing. And they were just like.
• 54:56
  No protect, extra protection, nothing.
• 54:58
  No safety measures. They hadn't.
• 55:00
  Trained. They went out there with fucking
• 55:02
  hoses. People were handling like they
• 55:05
  they were handling the nuclear material with their bare hands.
• 55:08
  Like they you. Know what I mean?
• 55:10
  They had no idea. But if you imagine like these
• 55:14
  these people on on the ground who are being told that Russia
• 55:18
  is superior, you know, like the, the information they're being
• 55:21
  fed about everything is that Russian technology is superior.
• 55:25
  The Americans are dogs and they're capitalist pigs or
• 55:29
  whatever it is that they're being told and that these guys
• 55:32
  are big, stupid, fat Americans, not wrong.
• 55:34
  And then like, eh, they're being told that like, oh, nothing can
• 55:39
  go wrong in Soviet Russia. We're superior.
• 55:41
  We send fucking dogs the space. We've, we, we're the first
• 55:45
  people with this technology. We're the best people with this
• 55:47
  technology. And then when something does go
• 55:49
  wrong, people are just like, oh, time to go to work and put out
• 55:52
  the fire. But you're not putting out the
• 55:53
  fire, you're putting out the uranium.
• 55:55
  And that's a big difference. Yeah, you're gas lit into
• 55:59
  thinking that like as as bad as it is, it's gonna be fine.
• 56:03
  It's OK. Yeah, it just happens like.
• 56:05
  Which is so the, as I I mentioned in the last episode of
• 56:09
  the song, which led to this episode is the first responders
• 56:12
  who got there like they were like blasted, blasted with
• 56:17
  radiation. And they just turned up with
• 56:20
  hoses. And they were like, you know,
• 56:21
  handling these chunks of graphite from the rods that have
• 56:24
  exploded. And they were kind of moving
• 56:25
  them out of the way, shoveling them out of the way.
• 56:27
  And the parts of the building that were on fire, they were
• 56:30
  just like aiming streams of water at it.
• 56:32
  Like it was a regular fire. But the reaction was like, in
• 56:37
  full flow was just completely like, you know, it was in a way,
• 56:41
  it was mostly aimed up, but radiation just, you know,
• 56:45
  spreads out in all directions. And they were just like, like,
• 56:51
  torn apart by the radiation. And so when they started to get
• 56:55
  sick very quickly, like, you know, within, like, you know, an
• 56:59
  hour of being there, they were brought to a local hospital and
• 57:02
  they were stripped of their clothes because, like, they were
• 57:05
  already showing like, burns on their skin.
• 57:08
  Kept developing as well, didn't they, The Burns?
• 57:10
  Just over like the things. Showing off randomly while we're
• 57:13
  treating them. There's a, there's a really
• 57:16
  horrible visceral word for this. And like, eventually, like the
• 57:20
  radiation like burns became so intense that their skin was just
• 57:24
  like sloughing off of them, you know, like it was just falling
• 57:28
  apart in like in like you could watch it fall apart and like
• 57:33
  liquidate and. All they could do was clean
• 57:35
  these these burns try and. Clean them.
• 57:37
  They were just they were trying to treat it as like a burn
• 57:40
  rather than like their DNA has been broken down, you know, like
• 57:44
  they're the the skin cells has been has been torn apart by this
• 57:49
  silent terrifying force that like no one in the hospitals
• 57:54
  knew what they were dealing with.
• 57:55
  Like all the the hospital staff were exposed to massive amounts
• 57:58
  of radiation because when these guys came in, they had absorbed
• 58:01
  so much radiation that they were emitting more radiation.
• 58:05
  And their firefighter uniforms, as I said last time, was
• 58:08
  stripped from them, thrown into a room in the basement.
• 58:11
  And this is in the the, the Chernobyl TV show.
• 58:14
  And those uniforms are still there because?
• 58:17
  Radioactive. Completely radioactive and will
• 58:20
  be for something like 10,000 years.
• 58:24
  Yeah, like, the safest thing you can do with them is leave them
• 58:27
  where they are and never touch them.
• 58:29
  But like I said last time, there's like urban explorers who
• 58:32
  like to go into there and some guy, some idiot, grab the glove,
• 58:35
  brought it out of the basement and put it on the reception desk
• 58:38
  of the hospital, which is you can stand outside the hospital
• 58:42
  and the tour guide is like, you see, glove, glove, very
• 58:45
  dangerous. And you're like, it's a fucking
• 58:46
  glove. I know my gloves.
• 58:49
  And then, you know, they tell you this story and it's like,
• 58:52
  Oh, no, Like that glove is one of the most radioactive things
• 58:54
  on the planet. Did you used?
• 58:56
  To be able to go in before that glove was there or.
• 59:01
  They would bring you closer to it, but they wouldn't bring you
• 59:04
  in because like the basement is just so risky.
• 59:07
  Like, you know, there's you have that room full of clothes that
• 59:10
  is just like, you know, you have a room full of killer clothes.
• 59:13
  It's it's crazy. And then like, you know,
• 59:14
  everything else in there is quite radiated as well because
• 59:17
  like those men, the beds they were in were radiated.
• 59:20
  The you know, like the rooms they were in were radiated.
• 59:24
  So I've seen the episode of Dark Tourists where they did it.
• 59:28
  So there are like kind of like back alley, like poor guides
• 59:33
  that will take you like into the kind of like the old apartments
• 59:36
  and stuff and basically almost Airbnb you up in those
• 59:40
  apartments. Yeah.
• 59:42
  And they do give you like protective gear and stuff.
• 59:44
  They take you like a lot closer. But you're dodging police and
• 59:47
  security guards the entire. Time.
• 59:48
  Oh yeah, like there was a, there's a full time like
• 59:52
  military presence. And so you have your 30
• 59:55
  kilometer exclusions on your 10 kilometer exclusions on then
• 59:58
  previous and the Chernobyl like reactors.
• 1:00:01
  And there are there's military everywhere.
• 1:00:04
  And it's to stop people from getting in and being stupid
• 1:00:07
  because like you have like pretty as the main like town or
• 1:00:10
  city, but then like out in the countryside was all these just
• 1:00:12
  like, you know, houses that people lived in, like, you know,
• 1:00:15
  country folk. And a lot of those people didn't
• 1:00:17
  want to leave because, because they were just like, No 4
• 1:00:20
  generations of my family have lived here.
• 1:00:21
  Like I'm not leaving. And there was this distrust of
• 1:00:24
  government. So it's like, I'm not leaving
• 1:00:26
  because you are telling me to leave.
• 1:00:28
  I know you're trying to steal my land because that's what the the
• 1:00:31
  communist did X number of years ago.
• 1:00:35
  It's just I'm sterile, right, baby doll?
• 1:00:36
  Yes, dear. From the nuclear plant.
• 1:00:41
  Beautiful. But like, so if you how do you
• 1:00:46
  go about like we will get back on topic, but how, how do you go
• 1:00:51
  about like even booking that trip?
• 1:00:53
  Do you know what I mean? Like.
• 1:00:55
  So. Obviously are there different
• 1:00:57
  like tiers are there like you can go certain places if you pay
• 1:01:00
  more? Oh, yeah.
• 1:01:01
  So, so there's, there's like tour companies that do this
• 1:01:04
  because like, you know, it's it's disaster tourism, you know,
• 1:01:07
  like all over the world, people will pay to go to a dangerous
• 1:01:10
  place. And we like we had watched the
• 1:01:14
  show and we had read some books and, you know, being children of
• 1:01:20
  Ireland from the 90s, we were very familiar with the Chernobyl
• 1:01:24
  disaster because a lot like Ukrainian kids came over to
• 1:01:28
  Ireland in the 90s and it was like this whole exchange.
• 1:01:32
  And and so we. You're from you're from close
• 1:01:36
  enough to me ocean that do you remember the guys that actually
• 1:01:39
  ran the Chernobyl aid Ireland? There was a woman called AD
• 1:01:43
  Roche, and she she head up the whole thing and she ran for
• 1:01:46
  president at one stage, Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:48
  Yeah, yeah. I remember guys coming to to our
• 1:01:52
  school and I just remembered the one guy was one of the most
• 1:01:56
  enormous human beings I've ever seen him.
• 1:01:58
  Like big friendly. I I just wonder like is it the
• 1:02:02
  same like like that? I'd say the guy either diabetes
• 1:02:06
  or a heart attack must have gotten by now because it was
• 1:02:08
  like fucking 30 years ago and he was a just a humongous human
• 1:02:11
  being. But I just remember when they
• 1:02:13
  came around and that it just seems like there was so much
• 1:02:19
  empathy in Ireland for stuff like that that was happening
• 1:02:22
  because like, we obviously had Trocra and a lot like in Ireland
• 1:02:26
  is famously like the most generous country in the world
• 1:02:29
  when it comes to foreign aid. And I think Chernobyl seemed to
• 1:02:35
  be something special that kind of invoked in Irish people a lot
• 1:02:41
  of sympathy. There was a lot of, eh, like
• 1:02:44
  relatability to Ukrainian people because like they were like,
• 1:02:48
  Ukraine was essentially a farm for the Soviet Union.
• 1:02:53
  So there was a lot of like, you know, there was a lot of
• 1:02:56
  farmers, there was a lot of like working class people.
• 1:02:58
  There was a lot of working class struggle.
• 1:03:00
  And Irish people looked at that and, you know, they were like,
• 1:03:04
  oh, that's us. Like, you know, we, we can see
• 1:03:06
  ourselves in that. And that's something that like,
• 1:03:08
  you know, historically that we have been quite good at just as
• 1:03:12
  a people. We can, we can picture ourselves
• 1:03:15
  in the situation that other people are in and kind of go,
• 1:03:19
  Oh, we know what that feels like.
• 1:03:20
  And we, we will try to help. Like, you know, famously we sent
• 1:03:23
  money to to the Cherokee. And.
• 1:03:27
  And then they like reciprocated during like during the famine.
• 1:03:31
  And, you know, you look at like Ireland's, you know, our general
• 1:03:34
  support for Palestine because we are like, Oh yeah, like we know
• 1:03:38
  what that's like. And so which are noble.
• 1:03:41
  We just saw this like society that was close to us, like, you
• 1:03:43
  know, that was us in like culturally that was very close
• 1:03:46
  to us in the 80s, you know, like very, very like, you know, in a,
• 1:03:51
  an economic tough spot, very like agricultural, very like
• 1:03:54
  tough times. But you know, this kind of
• 1:03:57
  indomitable spirit that they had.
• 1:04:00
  And then, you know, like it was, it was a bunch of sick kids.
• 1:04:03
  So we were just like, oh God, like, you know, we, you know,
• 1:04:06
  same with Troker. You see sick kids and you're
• 1:04:07
  like, fuck, you know, they're just kids.
• 1:04:09
  You want to help? Yeah, I suppose if there's any
• 1:04:13
  listeners out there that are from only there is any listeners
• 1:04:17
  out there. But if there's any listeners out
• 1:04:18
  there that are from like further afield than Ireland, it's like,
• 1:04:24
  I don't know if we're famous around the world for it, but
• 1:04:26
  like, definitely like statistically we are the most
• 1:04:31
  generous nation when it comes to foreign aid.
• 1:04:34
  And I wonder like, like as you say, like we've, we've, there's
• 1:04:40
  all these kind of points where we've been downtrodden so that
• 1:04:44
  we automatically empathize with like the likes of the
• 1:04:48
  Palestinian, 'cause as you say, the, the eh Cherokee and Choctaw
• 1:04:55
  no Cherokee. Yeah, it's a Choctaw nation.
• 1:04:57
  It could have been Choctaw. Nation.
• 1:04:58
  Yeah, that was it. Yeah, I think I've just been
• 1:05:00
  accidentally very insensitive there.
• 1:05:02
  Yeah, fucking all the same fucking.
• 1:05:06
  Native Americans, Native Americans.
• 1:05:07
  We were supportive of Native American, Native Americans.
• 1:05:09
  And I've, I've, I've I'll practice my Native American eh
• 1:05:13
  accent for for next week's eh apology to the Choctaw Nation.
• 1:05:20
  Do yourself a favorite turn around.
• 1:05:24
  That's pretty good. But yeah, you just need to kind
• 1:05:27
  of point out, I'm not just saying out of nowhere to like to
• 1:05:30
  to to the barn list is like, oh, Ireland, aren't we great?
• 1:05:33
  I'm just saying, like there seems to be something in our
• 1:05:37
  culture that is very kind of we have empathy for the downtrodden
• 1:05:41
  because we have been dead downtrodden.
• 1:05:43
  We have been that. We've been that person.
• 1:05:45
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just as a as another
• 1:05:48
  complete and utter aside. And then, Danny, please get back
• 1:05:51
  on track. Do you remember in Ireland there
• 1:05:53
  was a pizza chain called Apache Pizza?
• 1:05:56
  Yes, it is. So Apache Pizza.
• 1:05:59
  Yeah. Oh, it's still OK.
• 1:06:00
  So Apache Pizza used to have a radio ad where it was like
• 1:06:04
  clearly an Irish voice actor doing like a Native American
• 1:06:08
  accent. Yeah.
• 1:06:12
  And was, was singing like, you know, Apache Pizza happy days,
• 1:06:15
  Apache Pizza, happy days. And I remember at the time, it
• 1:06:18
  was just this, I'm not doing this.
• 1:06:20
  It was just this like, you know, it was just.
• 1:06:23
  How did it go? It was just this like really
• 1:06:27
  dumb ad and you know, it's one of those things where you look
• 1:06:30
  back on it and you're just like, oh fuck, that was really racist.
• 1:06:35
  Yeah, well, like, you know, they had the Washington Redskins for
• 1:06:39
  long enough before they changed it.
• 1:06:41
  So like, yeah. OK, Danny, please get us back in
• 1:06:44
  track. I wanted to combinate from
• 1:06:49
  American accents, right? OK, so.
• 1:06:51
  Right after the explosions. Do yourself a favor, don't look
• 1:06:55
  around. I told you not to turn around.
• 1:07:02
  No firecrackers on your reservation?
• 1:07:06
  That's crazy talk. No, it isn't.
• 1:07:09
  He's right outside. No, that's my cousin.
• 1:07:10
  Crazy. Very good.
• 1:07:13
  A little worried about it, OK. So.
• 1:07:16
  Within minutes. Locals, local Fire Brigades
• 1:07:22
  arrived. They rushed onto the roof of the
• 1:07:24
  adjacent Turbine Hall and Unit 3 fighting fires caused by burning
• 1:07:30
  machine help. It's human bitumen.
• 1:07:33
  Bit bitumen. Bit bitumen.
• 1:07:35
  Oh, the. Ocean help is basically.
• 1:07:36
  Help my family are tar people now I was going.
• 1:07:39
  To say, aren't you a roofer? I I technically I am a roofer
• 1:07:43
  and yes, we would have used bitumen on roofs, but my
• 1:07:48
  historically my family are Rd. men and I'm not talking about
• 1:07:51
  fucking Canada goose wearing fucking idiots from all we're
• 1:07:54
  talking about the war. I'm talking about people who
• 1:07:56
  literally put fucking tire on the road.
• 1:07:59
  Now bitumen is the black stuff in tire, which is basically what
• 1:08:04
  you might call pitch as well. So like where you have stone
• 1:08:08
  shippings in the black stuff, the black stuff is bitumen and
• 1:08:12
  this stuff is. Fucking.
• 1:08:14
  Ridiculous to put on the roof of something that you don't want to
• 1:08:17
  go on fire because yes, very black, very shiny, looks like
• 1:08:22
  venom Venom. And it's, it's the, the stuff
• 1:08:27
  that you know, when it gets really hot, eh, in the summer
• 1:08:31
  and you can see the road bubbling.
• 1:08:33
  The road melts. Yes.
• 1:08:34
  Yeah, that's, that's the bitumen.
• 1:08:35
  That's the bitumen. So the bitumen is like a real
• 1:08:37
  refined version of the tire that you will see.
• 1:08:39
  Like they use it to seal the sides of roads and they also use
• 1:08:43
  it to eh, put on roofs to seal roofs in as well.
• 1:08:46
  Like you'll see it on a lot, eh, not on like umm high pitched
• 1:08:51
  roofs, but like, you know, flat roofs that will be like 15 to to
• 1:08:54
  like 10 to 15° like dead be eh bitumen basically.
• 1:09:00
  And it just seals things in, but not very good when it comes to a
• 1:09:03
  fire. It's.
• 1:09:05
  They did put in in brackets. This is a week ago.
• 1:09:07
  I so I forgot flammable roofing material.
• 1:09:10
  Yes, it based basically, eh, it's not it's it's not that it's
• 1:09:14
  like really reactive. It's just that if there's a fire
• 1:09:17
  and this and the fire goes on, this thing gets nice and hot,
• 1:09:21
  melts all over the place and will spread fire a lot of
• 1:09:24
  places. And keeps burning like it keeps
• 1:09:26
  it stays on fire for a long time.
• 1:09:27
  Exactly, Yeah. So they managed to prevent the
• 1:09:31
  flyer from spreading to the neighboring Unit 3, which was
• 1:09:34
  critical, but they were completely unaware that they
• 1:09:36
  were standing right next to the open core of a nuclear reactor
• 1:09:40
  absorbing lethal doses of radiation.
• 1:09:43
  Many of these brave heroes died of acute radiation syndrome, or
• 1:09:46
  ARS, in the following weeks. Initial cover up and confusion.
• 1:09:52
  So plant management and Soviet officials were in massive
• 1:09:55
  denial. I don't think you can call it
• 1:09:57
  denial. I think lying.
• 1:10:00
  I think denial was was a point as well.
• 1:10:03
  Absolutely like they they were just like, no, this, this can't
• 1:10:06
  happen. Like, you know, they this it
• 1:10:07
  can't happen because we are great.
• 1:10:09
  And and like this went like this went straight to the top baby.
• 1:10:14
  Like Gorbachev was president for like less than a year at this
• 1:10:18
  stage. Yeah, he was just.
• 1:10:20
  In brand new. Yeah.
• 1:10:22
  And like, this went to him. Like there were phone calls to
• 1:10:25
  Gorbachev going. There's been an explosion, but
• 1:10:28
  it's fine. And it was.
• 1:10:29
  They were so scared of him because he was the top dog that
• 1:10:32
  they were lying to him. And like he had other people
• 1:10:35
  kind of advising going we think they're lying.
• 1:10:37
  And he was just like, God fucking damn it.
• 1:10:39
  If you guys are lying to me, I swear to God, they were like,
• 1:10:41
  no, it's fine. It's a fire.
• 1:10:43
  It's just a fire. See the guy with the the port
• 1:10:46
  Weinstein on his head. Yes, he is not as good as
• 1:10:51
  Brezhnev, who had the most dynamite eyebrows you could
• 1:10:55
  possibly imagine. Oh yeah.
• 1:10:57
  Brezhnev. What was the what was the real
• 1:11:00
  drunk one after Gorbachev? Fuck he because he was so drunk
• 1:11:07
  when he he landed in Ireland and he was too drunk to get off the
• 1:11:11
  plane. And I was in.
• 1:11:12
  Shannon in Ireland, yeah, yeah. And his plane, his plane landed,
• 1:11:16
  I think it was in Shannon. And because they were refueling,
• 1:11:19
  the Irish government tried to have like a little diplomatic
• 1:11:22
  moment and his his assistants came off, came off the plane and
• 1:11:27
  they were just like, no, he can't get off the plane.
• 1:11:29
  He's. Why can't I think of his name?
• 1:11:31
  Does it start with a? Why?
• 1:11:33
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeltsin.
• 1:11:37
  And, and they basically said, Oh no, he's, he's too drunk, he
• 1:11:40
  can't get off. What about?
• 1:11:41
  They told him that they're like, you're Irish, you'll get it.
• 1:11:45
  Yeah. And we would have like, you
• 1:11:47
  know, the Irish would have been like, yeah, we would have been
• 1:11:49
  like, it's fine, we're drunk right now.
• 1:11:52
  It's good. Come on, we'll have a new. 1.
• 1:11:59
  Right. So are we.
• 1:12:01
  Yeah. So they initially reported to
• 1:12:03
  Moscow that the reactor was intact and the explosion was
• 1:12:08
  merely a fire, which is merely A flesh wound.
• 1:12:12
  But the highest reading, the oximeters that's probably not
• 1:12:16
  how I pronounced that were either destroyed or had a limit
• 1:12:19
  for far below the actual radiation level.
• 1:12:22
  Many believe the official low readings which cost them
• 1:12:25
  precious time and lives. So this is something that's that
• 1:12:28
  they cover in the in the show where like you have the
• 1:12:32
  dosimeter and say it's set at the maximum level is five.
• 1:12:36
  So they're using it and they detect 5 and they're like, oh,
• 1:12:39
  well, 5 isn't that bad. And Sheldon's Skaersgaard
• 1:12:42
  character kind of, you know, smells a rat with it.
• 1:12:45
  He gets like a higher threshold detector and then he detects it
• 1:12:49
  and it's like, you know, a million.
• 1:12:51
  And he's just like, oh, we are so fucked.
• 1:12:54
  Yeah, that's a. Real thing like it's in the
• 1:12:56
  show, but that is like literally a real thing where they were
• 1:12:58
  like using the wrong equipment to detect it they.
• 1:13:01
  Love. Over over that show as well.
• 1:13:03
  Like I'm not going to say spoiler alert because it's a
• 1:13:06
  fucking disaster that happened like fucking 40 years ago, but
• 1:13:08
  whatever. It's so that whole show was
• 1:13:12
  basically Stalin skiers, guard and then the other guy, the
• 1:13:15
  reporter who plays the reporter or we still.
• 1:13:18
  Jared Harris. Yes and and they're basically
• 1:13:22
  dying over the course of this show and it runs over multiple
• 1:13:26
  years after this. If you haven't seen it have to
• 1:13:31
  see it even if you don't have no TV, it's worth getting no TV.
• 1:13:35
  Just get a trial, watch this and.
• 1:13:38
  It's one of the. Best things you'll ever watch.
• 1:13:40
  It was so good. So we, after unit 3, which was
• 1:13:44
  right next door, continued to operate for a few more hours but
• 1:13:47
  was shut down by 5:00 AM. Units one and two were shut down
• 1:13:51
  the following morning. So half of it was still fucking
• 1:13:54
  up and running while all this was happening.
• 1:13:56
  Because of the level of the night, yeah.
• 1:13:58
  Yeah. So could you imagine like
• 1:14:02
  working in those other units when all this was going on?
• 1:14:06
  I'd be like Mondays. And The thing is, like all
• 1:14:12
  those. Guys are working.
• 1:14:13
  They were working in the other reactors.
• 1:14:15
  These are nuclear scientists. You know, these are, these are
• 1:14:19
  guys who it's not, they're not just grunts.
• 1:14:22
  They're not just lads who are like working on a factory line.
• 1:14:25
  These are fucking nuclear workers.
• 1:14:27
  They know it's scientists. And The thing is, the reactors
• 1:14:31
  are literally it's four buildings side by side, and
• 1:14:33
  you're driving up to your job in reactor #2 and you look over at
• 1:14:36
  reactor #4 and half the building is gone.
• 1:14:40
  Melted into the ground. Like, yeah, you just be like,
• 1:14:43
  Oh, well, that's not good. You guys, I'm going home.
• 1:14:48
  It is bad. Is bad.
• 1:14:50
  My. Work is really melting me today.
• 1:14:54
  Sergey, is this bad? Put through annual leave request
• 1:14:59
  for rest of day. Right?
• 1:15:03
  So crisis mitigation days one to 10, so running from April 26th
• 1:15:08
  to May 6th. Once officials began to grasp
• 1:15:11
  the horrifying reality that the core was open and burning the
• 1:15:14
  source of a massive radioactive plume, they began an
• 1:15:17
  unprecedented effort to contain it.
• 1:15:20
  Airborne attack, which was fucking stupid.
• 1:15:24
  Starting the day after the disaster, Soviet military
• 1:15:27
  helicopters flew hundreds of missions directly over the
• 1:15:30
  exposed reactor core. They dropped nearly 5000 tons of
• 1:15:34
  materials in an attempt to smother the fire and block the
• 1:15:37
  radiation. The mixture included sand and
• 1:15:40
  clay. Because that's going to fucking
• 1:15:41
  stop it, isn't it? To try and suppress the fire and
• 1:15:45
  absorb radiation. Boron carbide, A neutron poison
• 1:15:50
  to prevent any chain reactions from restarting and LED as a
• 1:15:54
  radiation shield. So now these fucking whore
• 1:15:59
  bastards, the tunnel diggers, workers including coal miners
• 1:16:03
  and there is an amazing sea. This this we can.
• 1:16:07
  Just black in the shower. I'm sorry.
• 1:16:10
  Where they they? Bring.
• 1:16:12
  They basically ask coal miners for help.
• 1:16:16
  I think at that time they were such a respected, umm, group of
• 1:16:21
  people. Like that whole industry was so
• 1:16:23
  respected that they didn't order them.
• 1:16:25
  They asked them. I don't, I don't even think it
• 1:16:28
  was like it wasn't that they respected them.
• 1:16:31
  It was, did I think what they were trying to even portray in
• 1:16:36
  the the the TV show was that these guys who were considered
• 1:16:40
  the lowest of the law, the fucking, the, the, the diggers
• 1:16:44
  burrowing under the earth for coal.
• 1:16:46
  And they were feeling mistreated by the state for so long.
• 1:16:50
  Because, yeah, again, they were the ones that were kind of
• 1:16:52
  keeping this industry open, this fucking this coal mining
• 1:16:56
  industry open. And they were not getting their
• 1:16:58
  dues from the state. Because again, as we're talking
• 1:17:01
  about, there's so much corruption and so much fat
• 1:17:02
  cattery in the Soviet Union at this minute is that all these
• 1:17:06
  guys were greasing their wheels. But people that were doing these
• 1:17:09
  kind of jobs were just being shot on from a height.
• 1:17:11
  And the guys the, the the high Europe's now had to comb hat in
• 1:17:15
  hand and more or less kind of beg these guys to tunnel
• 1:17:20
  underneath to chart to stop what they thought was going to be
• 1:17:24
  like a China syndrome. So the idea was that they
• 1:17:26
  thought that this red, the radiation was going to go so far
• 1:17:30
  on the ground that was going to leak into the water table.
• 1:17:33
  And this did this water like all of Ukraine like relate on it.
• 1:17:38
  Like I don't know how many people in Ukraine, like a
• 1:17:40
  fucking 50 million, 100 million people, but like all of Ukraine
• 1:17:43
  re relied on this water so that these guys were now eh.
• 1:17:49
  I think what I portrayed really well in the the TV program that
• 1:17:53
  even though these guys were the lowest of the law, they could
• 1:17:55
  have said fucking beg, beg us to do they just they just stood
• 1:18:01
  there and with dignity, like their hands covered in coal
• 1:18:06
  dust, their faces. Just every.
• 1:18:08
  Just destroyed. And they're like a lot of them
• 1:18:09
  were kids as well. But they had a they, they, they
• 1:18:12
  had, they would have had the right to sit there with
• 1:18:15
  righteous indignation and say, fuck you, dig your own fucking
• 1:18:19
  holes and or, you know, dig your way out of this problem
• 1:18:23
  yourself. But really they were like, for
• 1:18:26
  the people, yeah, that's that's what it is.
• 1:18:29
  They're people for the people. And they said, yes, we'll do it.
• 1:18:33
  It's the, it's the noble sacrifice of the proletariat.
• 1:18:37
  Like it is the, it is the Russian dream.
• 1:18:40
  You know, you have someone who digs fucking holes with his bare
• 1:18:45
  God damn hands. He's not respected, but he is
• 1:18:48
  the backbone of this fucking country.
• 1:18:50
  And they went to them with respect because they were like,
• 1:18:54
  it's you or nothing and we are in so much trouble.
• 1:18:57
  And those guys were just like, it is also nothing.
• 1:19:00
  We'll do it. And they fucking did it.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah. And I think, I think that's,
• 1:19:05
  it's a beautifully kind of put sentiment where these guys who
• 1:19:10
  again, like we say, the red tape, the bureaucracy, all these
• 1:19:13
  fucking guys who are up there just kind of propping up
• 1:19:16
  everybody else's job, eh, when these guys who you're like, what
• 1:19:21
  you said is right. They're the backbone of Society
• 1:19:23
  of this fucking whole, eh, federation.
• 1:19:26
  And they're the ones that come out of this looking like heroes.
• 1:19:33
  Yeah, that is the Russian dream. That's, that's what, that's what
• 1:19:37
  they sell you on with Russia. But it wasn't.
• 1:19:39
  All of all of their propaganda is, you know, the, the man with
• 1:19:43
  the hammer, the man with the sickle, the woman who like she
• 1:19:47
  has like crops in her hands. And they are, you know, like
• 1:19:51
  they're portrayed as like artistic heroes.
• 1:19:54
  And this is like the real moment of like this is real.
• 1:19:58
  These people are the heroes. Yeah, these guys sitting in
• 1:20:01
  offices aren't real Russia. They've created.
• 1:20:03
  This guy, yes, this guy with the fucking hammer in his hand, that
• 1:20:07
  is. That is the fucking hero of this
• 1:20:08
  story. So these guys were brought in
• 1:20:12
  basically to dig a massive tunnel beneath the destroyed
• 1:20:16
  reactor. The goal was to install a huge
• 1:20:19
  refrigerated concrete slab to prevent the melting core
• 1:20:24
  material from burning through the reactor's foundation and
• 1:20:28
  contaminating the groundwater. And they finished the slab in
• 1:20:32
  just two months. They fucking knocked there, the
• 1:20:34
  barrel. Absolute fucking dudes.
• 1:20:37
  Yeah. You can't get a Children's
• 1:20:38
  Hospital here in fucking Dublin. A wall to stop a reactor.
• 1:20:45
  And it was, it was this kind of thing where they were just like
• 1:20:48
  we, we have people, we have people.
• 1:20:50
  And if we throw enough people at this problem, we can fix this
• 1:20:54
  problem. Heroes.
• 1:20:58
  So by May 6th, the efforts to smother the core and the
• 1:21:01
  introduction of liquid nitrogen to cool the reactor base seem to
• 1:21:06
  work. And the intense release of
• 1:21:08
  radionucleic nuclides, say. Nucleotides.
• 1:21:12
  Nucleotides. How does that stroke nucleotides
• 1:21:16
  drop sharply and then evacuation the global fallout?
• 1:21:21
  So the evacuation of people and the international consequences
• 1:21:25
  were defined by denial and delays or shame.
• 1:21:31
  To go back to your you had a point about Sweden.
• 1:21:34
  They were actually the first outside country to notice.
• 1:21:40
  What's going on? I'm looking.
• 1:21:42
  Forward to this there. Seems to be something in the
• 1:21:44
  air. Because I, I am, I wrote a
• 1:21:47
  little piece about this because like, this is like a really
• 1:21:50
  interesting part of this history.
• 1:21:51
  So on a cold morning in Sweden, unsurprisingly, the engineers in
• 1:21:56
  Forks market nuclear power. Plants.
• 1:21:59
  Got damn right, got into work to find their radiation alarms
• 1:22:02
  going off. Sweden, as with all of
• 1:22:04
  Scandinavia, had a less entrusting relationship with
• 1:22:07
  Russia, so their detectors were calibrated to detect radiation
• 1:22:10
  in the direction of the Soviet Union.
• 1:22:12
  In February of 1986, as I mentioned earlier, their
• 1:22:14
  instruments detected a higher radiation, detected higher
• 1:22:17
  radiation levels than expected, and concluded that it had come
• 1:22:21
  from Chernobyl. But the levels were low enough
• 1:22:24
  that it wasn't an immediate emergency.
• 1:22:26
  The levels that were detected on April 26th were a four alarm
• 1:22:29
  fire. They thought that their own
• 1:22:32
  plant had melted down. The radiation levels were so
• 1:22:35
  high when they discovered it wasn't straight away, they were
• 1:22:38
  just like God damn Soviet Union. They thought that the whole
• 1:22:41
  nuclear, they thought the whole like all four had exploded.
• 1:22:45
  The levels were so high. This was escalated to the
• 1:22:49
  Swedish government who picked up the phone to the Soviet
• 1:22:52
  government, who of course denied that anything had happened.
• 1:22:56
  Because again, like I said earlier, they're like Soviet
• 1:22:58
  reactor is best reactor, Soviet methods are best, you know,
• 1:23:02
  they, they were just complete utter denial.
• 1:23:06
  So the Forksman nuclear power plant detected ZR95 leaking from
• 1:23:12
  the direction of Chernobyl at catastrophic levels.
• 1:23:15
  Chernobyl was 1000 kilometers away and they were detecting it
• 1:23:19
  at like levels that they thought it was coming from next door.
• 1:23:23
  So ZR 95 is a radioactive isotope of zirconium, which was
• 1:23:28
  part of the cocktail of metals in the nuclear reactor in
• 1:23:31
  reactor 4. I'm not going to pretend that I
• 1:23:33
  understand how nuclear reactions work.
• 1:23:35
  Like when they combine all of these metals together and they
• 1:23:38
  dip it into water and create steam.
• 1:23:40
  It may as well be fucking magic as far as I'm concerned.
• 1:23:44
  So the Swedes on undeterred, threatened to report the Soviet
• 1:23:49
  Union to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which
• 1:23:52
  would have been an utter humiliation to the Soviet Union,
• 1:23:56
  and only then did Russia admit that something had happened.
• 1:24:00
  OK, small accident we think American saboteur attacked
• 1:24:04
  reactor. Really.
• 1:24:07
  The Soviet misinformation machine really did try to accuse
• 1:24:10
  an American capitalist saboteur. They even used the March 28th
• 1:24:15
  1979 Three Mile Island incident in America as proof that the
• 1:24:20
  Americans were just creating and spreading anti Soviet
• 1:24:24
  propaganda. Like.
• 1:24:27
  Yeah. Get over.
• 1:24:28
  Yourself. Like.
• 1:24:30
  I'm very not pretty good. Get over yourself, Russia and.
• 1:24:36
  Legit though like literally no one gives a fuck like.
• 1:24:42
  I don't know. I love the idea that like, so I
• 1:24:46
  was kind of listening to a thing this morning where they explain
• 1:24:54
  the kind of the morning that this guy he was having in Sweden
• 1:24:59
  where I was like, he was just going to work.
• 1:25:01
  And then he walked through a machine and all kinds of alarms
• 1:25:05
  went off like, but that was like he was going to work.
• 1:25:09
  So like this is the machine that like detects that if you're
• 1:25:12
  radioactive coming out like but you're going in the same way the
• 1:25:14
  machine goes off and he was like, well, that machine is
• 1:25:17
  obviously faulty fucking. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:20
  And then so he, he went in and eh, his job for today was like
• 1:25:25
  checking like, eh safety, eh levels or whatever in his
• 1:25:30
  reactor. And it was only like later that
• 1:25:33
  day when he came out and he noticed that there's a shit lot
• 1:25:35
  of people standing around like the guys who were like, as he
• 1:25:38
  was in first and like all the guys that were coming to work,
• 1:25:41
  we're now setting off this machine.
• 1:25:43
  And he was like, ah, this machine, like, what the fuck?
• 1:25:45
  So he went off and got like, eh, the, the handheld and not the
• 1:25:49
  guy you don't want. He was like, oh, we are all
• 1:25:53
  radioactive. What is going on here?
• 1:25:55
  And that's, and he was like, OK, ring off that starts ringing up
• 1:25:58
  the lane. And that's in Sweden.
• 1:26:00
  We're like, OK, yeah. But it was like, let's figure
• 1:26:04
  out like they went and they like, contacted like here
• 1:26:07
  Finland, are you guys OK? And for like, yeah, we're hold
• 1:26:10
  on, we're going to check as well.
• 1:26:11
  And like, they were all checking.
• 1:26:12
  And it was like, where's the wind coming from?
• 1:26:14
  And there's like, OK, let's go out and check this thing that we
• 1:26:16
  have directly pointed at the Soviet Union because these
• 1:26:19
  fuckers can't be trusted. And it was like, yes, such
• 1:26:22
  strong winds were coming. Like it was one of those that
• 1:26:25
  like if it was a calm day, they probably wouldn't have figured
• 1:26:30
  out like as but like there was such strong winds blowing up
• 1:26:34
  westerly that like, eh, the guys are like, as you said, they were
• 1:26:39
  like we're having a meltdown in our plant because these levels
• 1:26:42
  are so high. But nobody knew how high levels
• 1:26:45
  could even get, because this it was never.
• 1:26:48
  Unprecedented. Yeah.
• 1:26:49
  And like, you know, that once they had checked with like, you
• 1:26:51
  know, their next door neighbor, like they checked it like, you
• 1:26:53
  know, Norway, Finland, you know, that they were all just like
• 1:26:56
  fucking Russia, fucking Soviets. He just knows that.
• 1:27:02
  Those guys from 4 doors down. Doors very good, Danny.
• 1:27:10
  That's that's perfect. That's very good.
• 1:27:12
  No, no. So, so like with that wind, the
• 1:27:14
  way that it's spread across Europe, so like, so the, the
• 1:27:19
  location of the Chernobyl plant is like on the Belarusian border
• 1:27:23
  and the, the cloud blew like up into Belarus and across Europe
• 1:27:28
  and into Scandinavia. And to this day, to this day,
• 1:27:32
  12% of Belarus is contaminated 39 years later.
• 1:27:39
  That's insane. That's crazy.
• 1:27:42
  Yeah, it's so fun. I love as well.
• 1:27:45
  It's like somewhere like I hate America anyway, but like when
• 1:27:51
  all this was going on, I love that like America with their own
• 1:27:54
  Three Mile Island, everything like that, they were like, well,
• 1:27:56
  you know, Russia's kind of problem just really takes a
• 1:28:00
  safety very seriously. And all this.
• 1:28:02
  She's a messy bitch. Like, I mean like, I like her.
• 1:28:05
  I just think. And it's like.
• 1:28:08
  Basically just there was the first like we should go to like,
• 1:28:10
  like what was the, I don't know, the world police Team America, I
• 1:28:14
  don't know whatever the fuck they went.
• 1:28:15
  The UN. There you go.
• 1:28:19
  Daddy. Fucking.
• 1:28:21
  Fucking. Fucking I was going to say.
• 1:28:23
  I was going to say like the World Health Organization was
• 1:28:26
  like, that's not right. If the world police, what's it
• 1:28:29
  called? Brilliant.
• 1:28:32
  Right. So April 27th at 2:00 PM,
• 1:28:36
  evacuation of Kripiat more than 36 hours after the six hours
• 1:28:41
  they let these people just fucking go about their lives.
• 1:28:44
  Fade in radiation. Yeah, but 49,000 residents of
• 1:28:48
  the nearby city of Kripiat began to be evacuated.
• 1:28:53
  Residents were told it was temporary and only to pack light
• 1:28:56
  essentials, and they never returned.
• 1:28:58
  This delay led to significant radiation exposure from iodine
• 1:29:04
  131. April 28th.
• 1:29:08
  Then the world finds out. So monitoring stations in Sweden
• 1:29:12
  detected abnormally high levels of wind, transported
• 1:29:16
  radioactivity, and demanded an explanation.
• 1:29:19
  I can't. I can't imagine Sweden demanding
• 1:29:22
  anything of any. It's like the most polite demand
• 1:29:25
  you could imagine. I just can't imagine them being
• 1:29:29
  like angry at all. The Soviet government was forced
• 1:29:33
  to publicly admit that there had been an accident at Chernobyl,
• 1:29:37
  triggering an International Crisis.
• 1:29:40
  The 30 kilometer exclusion zone was established, evacuating over
• 1:29:44
  one 115,000 people from the surrounding towns and villages.
• 1:29:50
  The zone remains largely uninhabited today.
• 1:29:53
  Now it even came to like local rivers and things like that,
• 1:29:58
  Like all fishing had to come to a halt.
• 1:30:01
  Obviously all farming, everything like that just shut
• 1:30:05
  down. A lot of people lost their
• 1:30:06
  livelihoods because you just couldn't fucking do anything for
• 1:30:10
  miles and miles around, basically.
• 1:30:13
  So a lot of the radiation that like spread out it like spread
• 1:30:16
  out in the air and then like it like settled into the ground.
• 1:30:20
  And so one of the clean up operations was that they would
• 1:30:23
  dig up the earth, you know, a couple of feet and then just
• 1:30:28
  kind of turn it over. Yeah.
• 1:30:30
  And it was like you're just burying the radiation because
• 1:30:33
  the the radioactive materials were say, like in a couple of
• 1:30:36
  inches of soil. So they would dig up.
• 1:30:39
  A couple of feet of it, they just turned it over.
• 1:30:41
  They irradiated more earth because they mixed yes it was
• 1:30:45
  yeah. It's crazy the I like even the
• 1:30:48
  idea of them when we're when you were talking Danny, eh, they
• 1:30:52
  were bringing the the the helicopters overhead, like
• 1:30:55
  obviously murdering anyone who's in that helicopter, but also
• 1:30:59
  when like it's again, as you said, this all unprecedented.
• 1:31:03
  So they didn't know. So they were figuring out like
• 1:31:05
  and when they were dropping like sand and clay and boron on to
• 1:31:09
  this reactor, that basically insulated the reactor, which
• 1:31:13
  made it hotter. Yes, yeah.
• 1:31:16
  And it's, it's like every kind of step they took, it was like
• 1:31:19
  just one bumble fuck after another of like a miss, not even
• 1:31:24
  mismanagement, but like just not knowing what you're doing, just
• 1:31:29
  like throwing darts at the wall and hoping that you hit the
• 1:31:33
  right fucking answer. And a lot of these things that
• 1:31:36
  they, they, they ended up responding with was the
• 1:31:40
  completely wrong thing. Like they, yeah, turning over
• 1:31:44
  the soil and radiated the soil even further, fucking it up for
• 1:31:47
  like, you know, you had two inches of soil that was going to
• 1:31:50
  be 24,000 years irradiated and now you're like mixing it into
• 1:31:54
  two foot of soil. Yeah.
• 1:31:56
  And eh, the same, same thing with now like we want to, to, to
• 1:32:02
  cover this up so that we contain it.
• 1:32:04
  But really you're just creating an oven for a fucking nuclear
• 1:32:08
  reaction. It's, it's like it, it just,
• 1:32:12
  it's, it's like seeing like a kid drowning and being like
• 1:32:15
  quick throw to break like it's, yeah, just doesn't work, you
• 1:32:19
  know? And the the elephant's foot is
• 1:32:21
  still there and is still reacting.
• 1:32:24
  Fucking. Creepy looking as well.
• 1:32:26
  Yeah, yeah. Like it's, it's still reacting.
• 1:32:28
  And like, that's one of the things that was like really like
• 1:32:33
  an unknown about when Russia invaded Ukraine, they went
• 1:32:37
  towards Chernobyl and they were like.
• 1:32:39
  How they took over, They took over.
• 1:32:41
  Yeah, yeah. And they had also like, shelled
• 1:32:44
  around it. And it was very much like, we'll
• 1:32:47
  bomb this fucking this plant that blew up, we'll bomb it
• 1:32:50
  again. And so the Ukrainians there were
• 1:32:52
  just like, OK, Jesus Christ, like, we'll let you in.
• 1:32:55
  Stop throwing bombs at the nuclear power plant.
• 1:32:58
  And, you know, the Russians were just like, don't care.
• 1:33:01
  They did go for. Smaller ones as well, though,
• 1:33:03
  haven't they? Like, yeah, yeah, that little
• 1:33:06
  kind of ones. That they wanted the power
• 1:33:07
  infrastructure, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:33:10
  But it, it just, I think at at that stage with the Russians
• 1:33:14
  that kind of showed how desperate they were at that
• 1:33:18
  stage because like, like their ground assault on the Ukraine,
• 1:33:21
  not to get into this whole fucking thing now, like we'll
• 1:33:23
  bring it back. But their ground assault, the
• 1:33:25
  Ukraine, they're kind of it was a fuck around and find out kind
• 1:33:28
  of thing where they went in and realized, Oh, the, the the
• 1:33:31
  Russian army wasn't this fucking incredible machine used to be.
• 1:33:37
  And the Ukrainians pretty much were like this, these guys who
• 1:33:42
  are like one of the biggest countries in the world who once
• 1:33:45
  were like a global superpower. We're actually fending them off
• 1:33:49
  at our own border. And the Russians, the the
• 1:33:52
  Russians actually got very desperate with stuff and like
• 1:33:57
  taking over like Chernobyl are threatening to bomb.
• 1:34:01
  Chernobyl was a real kind of a kind of.
• 1:34:04
  Like they're holding a gun to their own head.
• 1:34:07
  Russia, that's exactly. It like, yeah, like, I mean,
• 1:34:11
  there is even when it came to like the tanks and stuff and
• 1:34:14
  nobody fucking knew what they were doing with them.
• 1:34:15
  They were just aging closer to the border and everyone was like
• 1:34:19
  Putin and he's like, down my tanks.
• 1:34:22
  I can leave my tanks here if I want to.
• 1:34:24
  And then it's just like just getting closer.
• 1:34:26
  It's like, dude, then he's like, I'm not doing.
• 1:34:29
  Anything but even when like the tanks crossed the border and
• 1:34:34
  Ukraine was kind of like, I'm not saying they were caught off
• 1:34:37
  guard because they there's always a threat.
• 1:34:39
  Everyone saw it coming, yeah. But like, yeah, but like when
• 1:34:43
  the Ukrainians are like, oh, like after about two weeks of of
• 1:34:46
  this shit, the Ukraine's are like, oh, these guys are fucking
• 1:34:49
  morons. Like the Russians.
• 1:34:50
  A lot of the the Russian soldiers were dropped and Warren
• 1:34:53
  told where they were just like right fight for Russia.
• 1:34:57
  And they were like, we didn't know we were in Ukraine.
• 1:34:59
  And the Ukrainians just went and spray painted all like over all
• 1:35:03
  the road signs. And the Russians in the world of
• 1:35:07
  GPS where there's satellites in the sky telling you where to go,
• 1:35:14
  like right now, pick up your phone and it will tell you where
• 1:35:17
  you are. These guys got lost because they
• 1:35:19
  were painting over the road in. Russia, you direct GPS.
• 1:35:26
  Very good. And yeah, sorry, I took us off
• 1:35:28
  track there with with the whole fucking.
• 1:35:29
  Danny can bring us right back. And so this next part's really
• 1:35:34
  cool. So well, that's that's a
• 1:35:36
  horrible disaster, but clean up. So the liquidators this.
• 1:35:44
  Sorry, I went to the regulators there.
• 1:35:46
  Sorry, that's how my brain works.
• 1:35:49
  That was really that was too fast for it for me, for my brain
• 1:35:51
  to register that. Sorry there.
• 1:35:55
  You go now I'm caught up. So the term liquidators refers
• 1:35:59
  to hundreds of thousands of civil and military personnel who
• 1:36:02
  risked their lives to clean up the disaster.
• 1:36:05
  Their tasks were terrifying yet essential.
• 1:36:08
  Feeling hot? I can help doing highly
• 1:36:12
  radioactive debris, including chunks of graphite off the roofs
• 1:36:17
  of adjacent reactor buildings, often with mere shovels as
• 1:36:20
  machinery failed due to radiation decontaminating
• 1:36:25
  villages burying heavily contaminated forest.
• 1:36:29
  The red Forest. Did you go there machine?
• 1:36:32
  Yes, we drove through it. That's really cool and you
• 1:36:37
  couldn't get out or anything, right?
• 1:36:38
  No, no, no, like that part we just drove through and like it
• 1:36:41
  was like I was saying before, it was like our visit there was
• 1:36:44
  like this really misty day and it was like it was like being in
• 1:36:47
  Silent Hill. So you just had this like
• 1:36:50
  absolutely haunting forest that was just like, you know, like
• 1:36:55
  skeletons is like you're just looking at these skeletons for
• 1:36:58
  like kilometer upon kilometer. I've.
• 1:37:01
  Heard there's like no wildlife for in there at all either.
• 1:37:04
  No, no, there's, there's tons of wildlife like there's yeah,
• 1:37:07
  yeah. Like the, the animals have
• 1:37:09
  basically evolved to live with the background radiation.
• 1:37:13
  Like the radiation that's there is much lower because like a lot
• 1:37:17
  of the the things that they did to reduce the radiation, like a
• 1:37:19
  lot of time to reduce radiation, you simply just wash a building
• 1:37:22
  down. Like you, you hose it down
• 1:37:24
  because all of the radio radioactive dust gets washed
• 1:37:27
  down. And then you like, you know,
• 1:37:28
  wash it into a drain. But then like, you know, your
• 1:37:31
  sewers are like insanely radioactive.
• 1:37:32
  But up on the surface it's not so radioactive.
• 1:37:35
  So the animals are there have essentially evolved in a way to
• 1:37:41
  like live with this like low level radiation.
• 1:37:44
  OK, did you can I, can I if if we're if we're going to go down
• 1:37:48
  on this, like do we want to circle back to this?
• 1:37:50
  Because I have kind of a there's AI want a conspiracy theory, but
• 1:37:55
  like there's a kind of a weird theory of the animals aren't
• 1:38:02
  evolving to deal with eh radioactiveness.
• 1:38:05
  They're actually their genes, eh, that have been dormant
• 1:38:10
  inside their DNA are reactivating because.
• 1:38:15
  Men theme tune starts. So not like so right, They're
• 1:38:20
  the the idea, the idea behind this because we talk about the
• 1:38:25
  the animals. It's mostly what they've been
• 1:38:27
  studying are looking at was eh, was wolves and how the, the wolf
• 1:38:34
  population over there is actually thriving now because
• 1:38:37
  like obviously there's no people over there and eh, there's a lot
• 1:38:41
  of prey animals. And at the start of this, like
• 1:38:43
  when animals were like proper radioactive, like it was, it was
• 1:38:49
  bad. But now that like, as you say,
• 1:38:51
  ocean, the radioactivity has died down and nature has kind of
• 1:38:55
  taken over. There is this obviously fucking
• 1:38:58
  level of radioactiveness. That's why none of us are
• 1:39:00
  allowed in there. But but these animals, So there
• 1:39:05
  were, there's talk of them evolving, but like the real kind
• 1:39:10
  of put your tinfoil hat on is that they, they've got eh genes
• 1:39:16
  that we all have apparently, eh, these these crackpot guys,
• 1:39:23
  pseudo scientists are talking about.
• 1:39:25
  We all have this kind of a gene inside of us that eh can absorb
• 1:39:33
  and use this eh, the the elements from the iodine and not
• 1:39:40
  so much the iodine will fuck you up at high levels, but the
• 1:39:43
  uranium obviously also will like, you know, fucking
• 1:39:47
  disintegrate you. But like these low levels of
• 1:39:49
  uranium in the soil, they've checked and like, like, I don't
• 1:39:55
  know if it's a billion, 2 billion years ago, you know,
• 1:39:57
  fucking once you're out there in the billions of years, like I've
• 1:40:00
  watched the planet 4 1/2 billion years old.
• 1:40:02
  But once you're out there in the billions of years.
• 1:40:06
  It's kind of like, you know, like if what are your 500
• 1:40:10
  million years or a billion years ago, it doesn't really matter.
• 1:40:13
  But there has been these eh, uranium signatures that we've
• 1:40:18
  only gotten from eh, that we know from like nuclear, like
• 1:40:25
  fusion, man made nuclear fusion. They've they've discovered this
• 1:40:29
  like billions of years ago. Now, I'm not getting into, OK,
• 1:40:32
  that's an ancient civilization that was making nuclear fusion.
• 1:40:35
  I'm just saying something naturally was happening.
• 1:40:37
  I think it was like where Africa is now.
• 1:40:40
  Like again, I'm not sure if it was Pangea or what kind of
• 1:40:43
  supercontinent it was at the time, but in like I, I, I can't
• 1:40:50
  fucking remember, again, fuzzy brain, a head full of scorpions.
• 1:40:55
  But these uranium deposits had nuclear fission would have
• 1:41:03
  happened. So some kind of reaction
• 1:41:04
  happened. So that nuclear reactions, and I
• 1:41:06
  think they found seventeen of them in total that would have
• 1:41:10
  happened billions years ago. There's residue that they can
• 1:41:12
  actually find from this nuclear fusion from years and years ago
• 1:41:16
  that would have contaminated a lot of the, the, the earth at
• 1:41:21
  the time. And again, they're saying that
• 1:41:25
  animals back then had to deal with this, so that like
• 1:41:30
  whatever, whatever fucking was existing at the time had to deal
• 1:41:34
  with this. And so they, their DNA was
• 1:41:37
  there. And then over so many years
• 1:41:40
  we've evolved from whatever from fucking axiotls to fucking
• 1:41:46
  lizards into small mammals into whatever the fuck we're after
• 1:41:50
  coming from, and all these genes would have gone dormant because
• 1:41:54
  nothing like that would have ever happened again until April
• 1:41:58
  26th, 1986. This fucking reaction happens,
• 1:42:03
  eh? Sends nuclear fallout fucking
• 1:42:07
  all over the place. The earth gets irradiated and
• 1:42:10
  these animals again, who are going through generations, their
• 1:42:14
  genes start opening up. And it's the the theory there is
• 1:42:21
  what else is dormant. So like people are talking about
• 1:42:24
  if we were to to live in that area and open ourselves up to
• 1:42:30
  that same radiation, would we evolve and how far would that
• 1:42:34
  evolution go? Like if we start like letting
• 1:42:38
  ourselves get a little bit of gamma radiation, you get.
• 1:42:41
  Me, it's a little. Bit of radiation.
• 1:42:43
  A little bit. Well, well, the, the, I think
• 1:42:47
  the fact of the matter is, umm, I think, I think the fact of the
• 1:42:52
  matter is like, again, these animals are just dealing with
• 1:42:58
  what's happening there. But like this wonderful kind of,
• 1:43:02
  eh, weird billions years old genes.
• 1:43:05
  Like it's a great story and it's a great kind of like, Oh, this
• 1:43:07
  thing could have happened. And, but like, I think the
• 1:43:10
  reality really is these animals are just kind of dealing with
• 1:43:14
  what's the, what the, the hand that they're being dealt and
• 1:43:17
  like, their, their bodies are, eh, like adapting.
• 1:43:22
  Yeah. I mean, it's like I think you've
• 1:43:25
  said Jean so much now that just reminds me of that Sydney
• 1:43:28
  Sweeney ad stuck in my. Head.
• 1:43:31
  Still surpassed on from her and soft frank like it's just stuck
• 1:43:34
  in my head but I have a friend who went to Auschwitz visited
• 1:43:42
  the the museum not actually went to did.
• 1:43:46
  You get a tattoo. Oh, here's a.
• 1:43:48
  Keepsake. But she now she.
• 1:43:51
  Fucking she took a selfie in the bathroom which I thought was in
• 1:43:54
  poor taste. You did tell me about this
• 1:43:57
  selfie in the bathroom before, yeah.
• 1:43:58
  That is incredibly fucked. Yeah, and basically so she, and
• 1:44:04
  now I've heard this before, like my dad, like so my dad was a
• 1:44:08
  like a long haul truck driver and like he'd have days off as
• 1:44:11
  he he delivered all like cross Europe and stuff.
• 1:44:14
  So he'd have days off. He'd just go and do shit and he
• 1:44:17
  went to Auschwitz and he had said, and I've heard from a few
• 1:44:19
  people before that there is like no wildlife, the sound of no
• 1:44:22
  wildlife at all. And it's because the amount of
• 1:44:25
  chemicals that were used during that time, allegedly.
• 1:44:37
  The fake news. The fake Jews.
• 1:44:39
  I believe in a billion year old X man, but I will not believe
• 1:44:43
  that they use mustard gas. What was the what was the gas
• 1:44:48
  that they use in the gas stream? Wasn't it like Zykon or Zyklon?
• 1:44:52
  Yeah, I think I had a number as well, but yeah.
• 1:44:55
  Zykon 4. I'm definitely fucking this out.
• 1:44:58
  If the listeners of the podcast can e-mail Danny and correct and
• 1:45:02
  correct correct me on the name of the gas, I'll Google it
• 1:45:05
  afterwards and feel like an idiot.
• 1:45:08
  Well, yeah, apparently there's no there like there's no
• 1:45:13
  wildlife, you can't hear any wildlife.
• 1:45:15
  No one goes within like a a certain radius of of that place.
• 1:45:19
  Yeah, it's like the the like the mythology around the aftermath
• 1:45:26
  of it, like where people talk about like there's strange
• 1:45:30
  energy there. Is that what it is?
• 1:45:32
  They can be, they talk about like, you know, they're being
• 1:45:35
  strange energy there because such such a crime against nature
• 1:45:41
  was committed there that like even the birds don't fly
• 1:45:43
  overhead. You know, it's this really like
• 1:45:45
  incredible mythology created around it.
• 1:45:48
  But it's like, and again, we're off topic, but not really.
• 1:45:53
  I've said this on the podcast before, so I don't know if you
• 1:45:56
  ever had a chance to visit Lofts Hall in Wexford.
• 1:46:00
  There is whole thing where it's so it's this massive mansion on
• 1:46:05
  the coast by hook Head where apparently the devil appeared
• 1:46:10
  blah blah blah. Danny, it's the devil.
• 1:46:14
  Sorry, I apologize, but apparently, apparently umm,
• 1:46:24
  there are no birds or anything around that.
• 1:46:28
  There are two Ravens though at all times.
• 1:46:30
  I know I don't know if they're the same fucking Ravens, but
• 1:46:34
  I've been there a bunch of times and I've seen 2 Ravens in the
• 1:46:36
  90s and the last time I was there I did.
• 1:46:39
  It's awesome. Fucking jackdaws and you
• 1:46:41
  probably. Turn the corner, all the Ravens.
• 1:46:43
  They're fucking. Huge.
• 1:46:45
  Ravens, would you come up out with a fucking long grass and
• 1:46:48
  down out with the clouds? Danny, you saw you saw Swans and
• 1:46:52
  you can't identify birds. Anyway, umm, I was just going to
• 1:47:00
  say. There's no birds that Loftus
• 1:47:02
  Hall, a bunch of fucking dark birds in there getting fingered
• 1:47:04
  every. Fucking weekend.
• 1:47:07
  In there before, right? So where am I?
• 1:47:11
  Oh, oh, do you want to hear? I have another animal.
• 1:47:14
  Funny animal story? Yeah, OK, funny.
• 1:47:19
  I keep forgetting this is about like.
• 1:47:22
  Notable broadcast. Now just go with it.
• 1:47:27
  But the David Abreu. Do it in the David Attenborough.
• 1:47:30
  Have you ever heard of the Blue Dogs of Chernobyl?
• 1:47:37
  Do Rolf Harris. Please don't. 2 little boys get
• 1:47:42
  into me van and what was. The blue that he.
• 1:47:48
  Did it was was it just? RSPCA.
• 1:47:51
  No, I don't. Know.
• 1:47:53
  Can you guess what it is yet? It's a penis.
• 1:47:56
  Yeah. Umm wow Jesus the people in the
• 1:48:00
  UK really got on board, but Ralph Harris and.
• 1:48:04
  Unsurprisingly. Do you ever know?
• 1:48:06
  I was like, if, if you umm, there's, there's levels of
• 1:48:09
  paedophile and here we go, right.
• 1:48:13
  If you wrote Thriller, you get away with everything.
• 1:48:17
  If you write Tiny Kangaroo Down, you'll get away with nothing.
• 1:48:20
  And that's just the way it goes. It's about the level.
• 1:48:24
  You're yeah. You can listen.
• 1:48:29
  To it now though, because all of their all of the royalties for
• 1:48:32
  that song go to the victims so we can listen to Ignition again.
• 1:48:35
  So I I have heard people defend still listening to Michael
• 1:48:39
  Jackson's music because the music was written and produced
• 1:48:42
  by Quincy Jones. And they're just like, I'm a
• 1:48:45
  Quincy Jones fan and I'm just like, you're a full of shit fan.
• 1:48:48
  I'm separating. I'm separating the air.
• 1:48:50
  Is that the non Salam? That's the non Salam.
• 1:48:52
  There we go, There we go. We have to check in some, eh,
• 1:48:58
  anybody who comes up with that? I I'm listening to Michael
• 1:49:01
  Jackson because Quincy Jones produced it Like guys.
• 1:49:05
  Ladies and gentlemen, we have a hard drive to check.
• 1:49:07
  Yeah, let's check a hard drive. But it's it's like a people are
• 1:49:12
  like, Oh yeah, Ian Watkins is dead now we can listen to
• 1:49:14
  fucking rooftops again. No.
• 1:49:17
  No you fucking can't because Last Train Home was their Best
• 1:49:20
  Song so you can listen to that. Hot take All of their songs
• 1:49:24
  suck. They suck a bag of.
• 1:49:25
  Shit band, I saw them live. Never heard that song.
• 1:49:30
  I. Yes, you have.
• 1:49:32
  I've honestly like true all of this in Watkins stuff.
• 1:49:36
  I was like, I've never listened to these people.
• 1:49:38
  Really. Burn, Burn.
• 1:49:41
  No. It was in football, it was on.
• 1:49:43
  I think it was on like a Pro Evolution Soccer 6 or something.
• 1:49:47
  I could have. I could have heard that.
• 1:49:50
  Yeah, you probably. Heard it on.
• 1:49:51
  Pro evil. You would have heard it on Pro
• 1:49:53
  Evil. Yeah, let's let's, let's talk
• 1:49:56
  about something better than that and let's.
• 1:49:59
  Paedophiles of Chernobyl. Let's go back to to like wrap
• 1:50:02
  up. Chernobyl.
• 1:50:03
  Wait, wait, wait. No, no, the Blue Dogs.
• 1:50:05
  That's what I was getting around.
• 1:50:06
  The Blue Dogs, OK. The Blue Dogs of Chernobyl.
• 1:50:08
  So this team of scientists were like, we're, we're, we're going
• 1:50:14
  to study the animals and the radiation levels and how the
• 1:50:18
  animals are adapting to this radiation level and oh, there's
• 1:50:21
  a little fucking Chihuahua. What do you call it?
• 1:50:25
  The pest dog Chihuahua. Melancholy, Ryan, you get
• 1:50:33
  melancholy. All right, take a picture of
• 1:50:37
  that dog and I'll talk about the blue dogs on the.
• 1:50:39
  Camera. Oh, she's winking.
• 1:50:42
  And this is the cutest thing that I've ever seen.
• 1:50:45
  And you people at home, all 2 of you, yeah, you don't get a.
• 1:50:50
  Picture to Alex. Alex will post it and then you
• 1:50:52
  can see. Yeah, and all the people on your
• 1:50:54
  Instagram who are just there for the tits and not there for the
• 1:50:57
  podcast are going to see a Chihuahua I.
• 1:50:59
  Haven't posted tits in a long time.
• 1:51:01
  Well, Danny, maybe get your fucking.
• 1:51:03
  I was going to say get your finger out, but get your get
• 1:51:05
  your tits out for the lads and. Patreon.com Hocus pocus lack of
• 1:51:11
  focus. I actually had a guy who sent me
• 1:51:17
  a message and asked if he could pay me to look at his Dick.
• 1:51:23
  Take the money. Yeah, no, we.
• 1:51:26
  Still look at it for like videos and and pictures are just like I
• 1:51:30
  was like. Sure, I'll take a look.
• 1:51:31
  And you also do an. Album and I was like no.
• 1:51:34
  Didn't you get paid to watch a guy come on his own face?
• 1:51:37
  I did. Nice.
• 1:51:38
  I wish that honestly, if a guy said that, but out there right
• 1:51:43
  if there's anybody listening and say it wants to give me money so
• 1:51:45
  that I'll watch a video of them coming on their own face me uh,
• 1:51:50
  what I imagine is a straight man.
• 1:51:52
  I will also do that for money. I don't he was.
• 1:51:54
  Hot though the guy who came on his own face.
• 1:51:57
  Like, if you're ugly, I'm not doing any of that for you.
• 1:52:00
  If you're hot, I'll do it. And back to the Blue Dogs of I
• 1:52:04
  Keep forgetting. He bought me and my friend
• 1:52:07
  dinner and paid for all of our drinks and stuff as well.
• 1:52:10
  All of our drinks. Who's he?
• 1:52:12
  And fuck me so. The blue dogs The blue dogs for
• 1:52:17
  these. These scientists got to
• 1:52:19
  Chernobyl. It's not even going to be worth
• 1:52:20
  it now got to Chernobyl. They had a look around.
• 1:52:23
  They were like, we are going to study the the animals around
• 1:52:26
  here shit loads of dogs because they left all the dogs.
• 1:52:29
  This is very actually the the very sad part about eh this that
• 1:52:32
  we didn't get into was like within a couple of days show.
• 1:52:35
  The show when they. All yeah, they came in and just
• 1:52:37
  started shooting all the dogs because they were afraid that
• 1:52:40
  all these people's dogs, that they were leaving Rome free
• 1:52:44
  because like everybody had now left and the the city and the
• 1:52:48
  outlying areas and they just let our dogs run.
• 1:52:51
  Last time I all cut you off, the scene where the young, the young
• 1:52:55
  soldier goes in and he can't do it because it's like a mommy dog
• 1:52:59
  and her puppies. When he comes out and he can't
• 1:53:01
  do it in the senior officer is just like fine, fuck off I'll do
• 1:53:05
  it. And even the senior officer is
• 1:53:06
  having like a hard time doing it.
• 1:53:07
  That was that scene just fucking broke me.
• 1:53:10
  And that's young officer, is Barry Kuhn as well.
• 1:53:13
  That's like. That's very cool.
• 1:53:15
  Yeah, You got emotional for Barry Kong Fucking.
• 1:53:18
  I hate that fucking. You.
• 1:53:20
  Well, just see, she loves ugly men.
• 1:53:24
  He's not rat faced bastards. He's open, eared and my normal
• 1:53:28
  type. Though.
• 1:53:29
  He's. He's a rat faced little fucking
• 1:53:31
  rat. He's a double rat.
• 1:53:32
  Weird. Looking I like Guinea pig.
• 1:53:34
  Man, you know, rat man. I love Guinea Pig man because
• 1:53:40
  that's all will be called I love Guinea Pig Man, the Chernobyl
• 1:53:43
  story. So the Blue Dogs.
• 1:53:47
  Blue dogs, bunch of bunch of saying just come along.
• 1:53:50
  They look around, they go holy fuck, there's blue dogs.
• 1:53:53
  They how, how is this happening? What is going on?
• 1:53:57
  And they studied and followed these blue dogs for fucking days
• 1:54:00
  before they realized that these blue dogs found a porta potty
• 1:54:06
  that was leaking and rolled around in the blue dye.
• 1:54:09
  Yeah, the brother, it sent them for like weeks.
• 1:54:14
  They were talking and they were sending back this.
• 1:54:16
  You won't believe what's happening.
• 1:54:18
  There's blue dogs in turnover and the dog.
• 1:54:19
  They're turning the dogs blue. They're turning the dogs blue.
• 1:54:26
  Alexi Jones Alexi Jones on like, you know, public radio.
• 1:54:31
  Alexi Jones. Alexi, Alexi Joneski and yeah,
• 1:54:38
  so that's that's it wasn't worked, but that's the Blue Dog.
• 1:54:41
  Story it lose. You fucking hell.
• 1:54:45
  So, Danny, let's bring it home. Let's put a pin on this.
• 1:54:48
  Hang on, I'm posting a picture of Abby.
• 1:54:50
  Fucking hell. OK, I'll let me I'm I'm going to
• 1:54:53
  just derail this one more time because this is.
• 1:54:56
  Talk about your dogs. This is hocus pocus lack of
• 1:54:59
  focus. So let's get into the hocus
• 1:55:00
  pocus part of this, I feel. Like we cover ourselves with the
• 1:55:04
  title. Well, I, I tried my best to kind
• 1:55:08
  of find some sort of an angle on eh, like, oh, what like is there
• 1:55:13
  like the ghosts of Chernobyl, this or this like any kind of
• 1:55:17
  story of like, you know, a shadow people or anything like
• 1:55:20
  that ass or it's because you hear a lot of this stuff like
• 1:55:22
  when it comes to, to natural disasters like this, that like
• 1:55:28
  you'd hear something afterwards. But because the Soviet Union is
• 1:55:30
  so locked down at this point, and obviously even like now it's
• 1:55:34
  very hard to find any kind of like, you know, eh, witchy hocus
• 1:55:41
  Pocus kind of stuff now with the Soviet Union and it, there's not
• 1:55:46
  anything like, and obviously the whole place was evacuated.
• 1:55:49
  So there's not much stuff afterwards, but something very
• 1:55:51
  interesting I heard. Again, not Baba Yaga and her
• 1:55:56
  fucking chicken leg house. Please don't derail me because I
• 1:55:59
  will talk about that house for another hour.
• 1:56:02
  But where people were talking about a weird sighting that
• 1:56:05
  happened in and around eh Chernobyl and their surrounding
• 1:56:11
  areas a few days beforehand, and people were talking about seeing
• 1:56:16
  this figure that they were calling their Chernobyl crow.
• 1:56:21
  A large black winged creature with glowing eyes.
• 1:56:27
  Now a large black winged creature with glowing eyes that
• 1:56:31
  shows up just before a disaster. We know him as the Mothman.
• 1:56:39
  The man God fuck, it's goddamn Mothman.
• 1:56:42
  It's he's bad baby. So again.
• 1:56:47
  Myself a giant Mothman build-a-bear and he hit for
• 1:56:52
  Christmas and he has AT shirt that says live laugh alert I'm
• 1:56:56
  like I would get that T-shirt for me but it was definitely it
• 1:56:59
  was moth man he appears before everything shit happens I.
• 1:57:03
  Knew you would. You would 100% jump into the
• 1:57:05
  moth man, eh? I see.
• 1:57:09
  With that one, eh? So yeah, again the the story
• 1:57:12
  goes that this figure was seen, but in Soviet Russia they don't
• 1:57:18
  know about Moth Man. Mothman's you?
• 1:57:23
  In in Soviet Russia, man moths you and so, yeah.
• 1:57:30
  So the idea is that they don't actually know anything.
• 1:57:33
  There's no stories of the Mothman, eh, in in the Soviet
• 1:57:37
  Union. So they call this thing the
• 1:57:39
  Chernobyl crow because it was this big black thing that looked
• 1:57:44
  like a crow. Which by the way, I don't think
• 1:57:46
  the moth man should be called a moth man.
• 1:57:47
  Number one, I hate fucking moths.
• 1:57:49
  And #2 he's not a moth, Danny. He's a big winged man, it looks
• 1:57:54
  like. A.
• 1:57:56
  Moth, He doesn't look like a moth.
• 1:57:57
  He was just a Dick. He was a he's usually.
• 1:57:59
  Just a silhouette as well, like he's just.
• 1:58:01
  Like a silhouette? Yeah.
• 1:58:02
  Do you think he looks like a crow?
• 1:58:06
  Danny, I've never seen this man. In fact, no one has.
• 1:58:12
  But yeah, so that's the idea. So, yeah, there's the thing.
• 1:58:17
  So Mothman, eh? That's the only kind of
• 1:58:19
  supernatural link to Chernobyl apart from these blue dogs that
• 1:58:23
  I could find, eh? While I was trying to dig into
• 1:58:27
  this. Like supernatural elements to
• 1:58:30
  it, Yeah. Trying trying to find something
• 1:58:31
  that will tie it to our podcast. What?
• 1:58:33
  No, here we are. I've got one thing.
• 1:58:35
  I've got Blue Dogs and a Mothman probably.
• 1:58:40
  Yaga probably using like radioactive ingredients and
• 1:58:43
  spells or something we could say.
• 1:58:44
  Well, maybe that's what happened to our house.
• 1:58:46
  That's why it sprouted legs. That's why she's, yeah, that's
• 1:58:48
  why she's a chicken with a house bed now.
• 1:58:52
  Danny, let's wrap this. So bring this home.
• 1:58:55
  Bring us home, Danny. OK, so where do I leave off the
• 1:58:59
  red Forest? OK, so eventually the eventual
• 1:59:02
  construction of the sarcophagus. This fucking terrifies me.
• 1:59:08
  So estimates vary what that between 600,000 and 800,000
• 1:59:15
  people were involved. They were exposed to a high dose
• 1:59:18
  of radiation and their health consequences, including
• 1:59:21
  increased cancer rates and other long term illnesses are a
• 1:59:24
  lasting tragedy. So the sarcophagus, did you get
• 1:59:29
  to see this machine? Yes, I did.
• 1:59:32
  We stood like within 50 meters of it.
• 1:59:35
  It's it's enormous. Like it is such an impressive
• 1:59:39
  structure. It's like this big kind of like
• 1:59:42
  arch, like, you know, rounded top arch.
• 1:59:44
  And it's like like as long as the building is so it's just
• 1:59:48
  this kind of arch shape, like a cylinder.
• 1:59:50
  And then we're just caps at the end and then there's an entrance
• 1:59:53
  and an exit on it. And it's just this like steel
• 1:59:56
  reinforced, umm, like brutalist and object that's just like
• 2:00:03
  sitting over it. And eventually they're going to
• 2:00:05
  have to replace it. And the bet the best way to
• 2:00:07
  replace it is to build a larger sarcophagus.
• 2:00:10
  Over top of it. That's insane.
• 2:00:12
  Like. It's like they reckon that
• 2:00:14
  that's going to be in the next, like, like, century.
• 2:00:17
  Yeah, like. Maybe, maybe with maybe less
• 2:00:20
  like, you know, I like, I like our tour guide said, Oh yeah,
• 2:00:23
  like in 40 years or, you know, like 40 to 50 years.
• 2:00:26
  Yeah. Because like it, it appears to
• 2:00:28
  be breaking down at a faster than than anticipated rate.
• 2:00:32
  It's essentially. Rotting from the inside out,
• 2:00:35
  isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
• 2:00:37
  You know, it could be that the radiation is breaking down the
• 2:00:39
  cement, Yeah. That's fucking crazy.
• 2:00:43
  And it's like, it's actually so terrifying.
• 2:00:45
  That's like, it was such a great disaster that the solution is to
• 2:00:51
  like, all right, just leave it there.
• 2:00:52
  Everybody fucking get out of the way.
• 2:00:54
  Do you know what I mean? There's no, there's nothing else
• 2:00:56
  you can fucking do. You can't like exactly just you
• 2:01:00
  can't fix it. Like you just have to wait the
• 2:01:02
  few thousand years before you can fucking go back.
• 2:01:07
  Which is. Hundreds. 1000 years.
• 2:01:09
  Yeah, but you know what? I mean.
• 2:01:11
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get. Fucking.
• 2:01:13
  Fuck. Like.
• 2:01:15
  Part of the earth beyond repair in this lifetime and many other
• 2:01:20
  lifetime stick up. So you know how you were trying
• 2:01:23
  to find a supernatural element to this?
• 2:01:26
  So we were told this on the tour.
• 2:01:29
  And so Chernobyl translates into a Wormwood and it's like the the
• 2:01:36
  name of the the local area, it means Wormwood.
• 2:01:40
  And there is a reference in the Book of Revelation in the Bible
• 2:01:44
  to Wormwood. And so now I'm going to quote
• 2:01:47
  the Bible, which is like the most Irish thing we can do.
• 2:01:50
  And so in the Book of Revelation and the Wormwood reference is.
• 2:01:57
  And the third Angel sounded, and there fell a great star from
• 2:02:01
  heaven, burning, as it were, a lamp, and it fell upon the third
• 2:02:05
  part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters.
• 2:02:09
  And the name of the star is called Wormwood.
• 2:02:12
  And the third part of the waters became Wormwood.
• 2:02:15
  And many men died of the waters because they were made bitter.
• 2:02:20
  It's in Revelations, people. How many rivers are near
• 2:02:26
  Chernobyl power plant? I'm going to imagine.
• 2:02:28
  There's three. There's three as.
• 2:02:31
  As someone who does practice witchcraft, I have a jar of
• 2:02:35
  Wormwood there. You only ever use that in
• 2:02:38
  painful work and like hexing and like souring things as well.
• 2:02:43
  Like, let's not make about witches.
• 2:02:44
  Let's get back to the Bible here.
• 2:02:45
  I'm just saying the herb itself. The name is in the herb.
• 2:02:48
  Like fuck you. Or anyway.
• 2:02:50
  Yeah. So like.
• 2:02:51
  The local guides. But is is the fact it says a
• 2:02:54
  star comes down So like is this a reference to the fact that
• 2:02:59
  nuclear fusion is what makes a star?
• 2:03:02
  Yes, exactly. That's that's what the the
• 2:03:05
  theory around it is that you have harnessed the power of the
• 2:03:08
  sun and that's what the star is. That's insane.
• 2:03:12
  Sorry that Danny, I I really didn't mean to cut you off on
• 2:03:15
  the worm one being the massacring.
• 2:03:17
  I was just because I just wanted to get into that starting.
• 2:03:20
  It is absolutely like just it's, it's a perfect, umm, you know,
• 2:03:25
  kind of Nostradamus esque kind of conspiracies.
• 2:03:28
  I was gonna say yeah. Yeah, that's.
• 2:03:31
  Mental, but OK, let's Dchaikovkis.
• 2:03:36
  By the end of 1986, just six months after the accident, the
• 2:03:40
  Soviet Union completed the colossal temporary confinement
• 2:03:44
  structure over the destroyed reactor, known as the
• 2:03:47
  Sarcophagus or the Shelter Structure, a massive hastily
• 2:03:52
  constructed concrete and steel shield designed to limit further
• 2:03:55
  release of radioactive material. Eventually this temporary fix
• 2:03:59
  was replaced decades later by the impressive New Safe
• 2:04:02
  Confinement, the NSC, the huge arch shaped structure you often
• 2:04:07
  see in modern photos, which was completed in 2019.
• 2:04:12
  And that's when I was there. Yeah, yeah, to to better secure
• 2:04:16
  the site for the long term. And they're already talking
• 2:04:19
  about replacing that. Like and that was 2019.
• 2:04:24
  Yeah, yeah. That's incredible.
• 2:04:28
  That's crazy. So like I have that's all I
• 2:04:32
  basically have on the actual disaster itself.
• 2:04:35
  Or Shane, can you tell us a little bit about just the
• 2:04:41
  experience being there? And like I I'm really curious to
• 2:04:46
  know like. How big were the groups of like?
• 2:04:50
  The groups that you went in when you were visiting, like I
• 2:04:53
  imagine they have to keep them quite small for obvious reasons,
• 2:04:56
  but. So we were on a bus of like 12
• 2:04:58
  people and our driver was our tour guide, but there were like
• 2:05:04
  10 or 12 other buses, you know, because you know, tourism, like
• 2:05:09
  obviously before Russia's invasion, like tourism is such a
• 2:05:13
  huge and important industry for them because like they're, you
• 2:05:17
  know, they're still like struggling from the hangover of
• 2:05:20
  being in the Soviet Union. Like they're, you know, they're,
• 2:05:22
  you know, they're still kind of trying to move away from being
• 2:05:25
  an agricultural based economy to something a bit more modern.
• 2:05:29
  Ukraine prior to Zelensky had like it's one of the most
• 2:05:34
  corrupt leaders in Europe. And the country was just, you
• 2:05:41
  know, kind of just really struggling economically.
• 2:05:44
  So tourism was a big push for them.
• 2:05:46
  And you know, Chernobyl is obviously one of their most
• 2:05:50
  famous, you know, things for people to go see.
• 2:05:55
  So, you know, we went over there to see it.
• 2:05:57
  Like we flew in, we stayed in Kiev and we, we booked the tour
• 2:06:01
  like long before we flew in. And it is just bus after bus of
• 2:06:07
  people going in. And they just.
• 2:06:08
  Like how long is it from your hotel to?
• 2:06:12
  So it was, it was about like a 2 hour drive.
• 2:06:16
  And it's, you know, it's mostly true countryside.
• 2:06:18
  Like once you get out of the city, you're just into like, you
• 2:06:20
  know, long straight roads through the countryside, you
• 2:06:24
  know? Driving in Ireland, basically.
• 2:06:27
  You know, man made forests and then like you reach like these
• 2:06:30
  gates, that's the 30 kilometer exclusion zone and you they
• 2:06:35
  check your passport, they check that you have like permission to
• 2:06:38
  be there. Did your tour guide handles all
• 2:06:39
  that? And then like, as you drive
• 2:06:42
  along, like they do stop off at different points and they're
• 2:06:44
  like, oh, this is a little village that like, you know, has
• 2:06:46
  fallen into disrepair because everyone had to move out.
• 2:06:48
  And they drive you along and you see like, you know, an old
• 2:06:51
  petrol station that's been abandoned.
• 2:06:52
  And then you get to like the 10 kilometre zone.
• 2:06:55
  And again, like, you know, everything gets checked, you
• 2:06:57
  know, then your papers are checked, all that kind of stuff.
• 2:07:01
  And then you just drive into prepias.
• 2:07:04
  And then you, you get out of the van, you walk around with your
• 2:07:08
  tour guide and they bring you in.
• 2:07:09
  They're like, oh, this is, you know, this is the sports hall.
• 2:07:11
  This is like the Olympic level swimming pool that we built with
• 2:07:16
  Olympic diving boards. Because Olympic sports were such
• 2:07:20
  a massive thing in the, the Soviet Union.
• 2:07:23
  And they had like theaters, they had libraries, they had
• 2:07:26
  supermarkets. And it was they had built these
• 2:07:30
  cities near the nuclear reactors as like, look, we can build
• 2:07:35
  these like idyllic cities where everything is close to
• 2:07:39
  everything. It has all the amenities you
• 2:07:41
  want. Look how great the Soviet Union
• 2:07:43
  is selling the dream, basically. Yeah.
• 2:07:46
  Like there is a there's a fairground, like famously
• 2:07:49
  there's a fairground there and there is a Ferris wheel.
• 2:07:51
  And we walked through the fairground.
• 2:07:54
  So like, you have, you know, Walters, you have bumper cars.
• 2:07:58
  You have, you know, the the carousel, you have the the the
• 2:08:02
  wheel. That's so creepy to.
• 2:08:04
  See, and it's. It's all like rotting and
• 2:08:08
  rusting and falling apart and that like plant life, has
• 2:08:10
  overgrown it. So what's, what's the kind of
• 2:08:13
  good rule kind of feeling you are having while you're
• 2:08:17
  experiencing this walk through such like it, like let's say
• 2:08:20
  like you're going through an abandoned amusement amusement
• 2:08:24
  park in an abandoned city in like this Soviet, like I can
• 2:08:29
  imagine like even just looking at the Soviet architecture and
• 2:08:32
  stuff like that, that. So a kind of from what you're
• 2:08:35
  used to. And the top of all, like the,
• 2:08:38
  the official buildings are like Soviet symbols.
• 2:08:41
  You have the hammer and sickle. You have like the Crest of
• 2:08:44
  Russia. You have like all of these
• 2:08:46
  symbols of like, you know, this is great because it's Russian
• 2:08:50
  was very much the, you know, like the, the intended use of
• 2:08:53
  all the symbology above all these buildings.
• 2:08:56
  And when you're walking through it, like it, you know, this is
• 2:09:00
  such a, like, millennial reference point, but it just
• 2:09:03
  really feels like a video game. Yeah.
• 2:09:06
  You know, because you're just there with a group of people.
• 2:09:08
  And, you know, we were all, like, spread out.
• 2:09:10
  It was like me and my wife and, you know, just like groups of
• 2:09:12
  other people. And we were there with another
• 2:09:14
  couple that we're friends with that we travel with.
• 2:09:16
  And we'd all just like, spread out.
• 2:09:18
  And you're just kind of like walking through.
• 2:09:20
  And it's like a full, you know, it's like a small city.
• 2:09:23
  And all of the buildings are completely derelict because over
• 2:09:26
  the years, people have gone in there.
• 2:09:27
  All the windows are smashed. All the doors are ripped off the
• 2:09:30
  hinges. It looks like it would remind
• 2:09:34
  you of like, you know, when you're watching like a World War
• 2:09:36
  2 movie and they're in like some bombed out French city.
• 2:09:39
  Yes, yeah. It would remind you of that, but
• 2:09:42
  with less people. So like, there's just this
• 2:09:43
  really like eerie isolated feeling in there and.
• 2:09:49
  And obviously you're saying like you've got that Silent Hill kind
• 2:09:51
  of a day that's going on as. Well we had this fog where our
• 2:09:55
  visibility was like 20 meters like maximum, so like as day.
• 2:10:00
  Like. So as you're walking along,
• 2:10:03
  everything is like coming out of the fog and it just, it really.
• 2:10:08
  Oh yeah, it like it was. I love that.
• 2:10:10
  It was incredible because like it added to the mystique and it
• 2:10:14
  added to, you know, the, the sense of how you're in a ghost
• 2:10:19
  town and it really felt like a ghost town.
• 2:10:22
  I would imagine it feels like that anyway.
• 2:10:24
  But there was just this kind of really eerie cloudy weather that
• 2:10:28
  came in and, you know, you're walking along and all of a
• 2:10:32
  sudden this like Sports Complex comes out of the of the fog and
• 2:10:38
  you can see into it. There's like a pool that is that
• 2:10:41
  was built to train future Olympians.
• 2:10:44
  And you're like, you know, they really were trying to build this
• 2:10:48
  kind of mini utopia for these people.
• 2:10:50
  And they it's. A shame that they didn't leave
• 2:10:52
  one or two people in because if they grew an extra leg they
• 2:10:55
  probably would have had a real advantage in the Olympics.
• 2:10:57
  I think that's that's happened to Michael's.
• 2:10:59
  Special Olympics. But the extra Special Olympics,
• 2:11:04
  it's the option of the Olympics. Well, that's what they're doing.
• 2:11:07
  Next year. They're doing the enhanced.
• 2:11:08
  Games. Enhanced games, Yeah, that's
• 2:11:10
  going to. Be I'm so excited for that.
• 2:11:14
  I want to see someone run 100 meters in four seconds and then
• 2:11:17
  they're hard to explode. It's all that all.
• 2:11:19
  You can take whatever drugs and enhancements you want.
• 2:11:21
  Oh, I hate that kind. Of hell yeah.
• 2:11:24
  But now what I what I was going to say about the wheel and
• 2:11:26
  stuff, I don't know if you've played The Last of Us 2.
• 2:11:29
  Which is. Like 1 of.
• 2:11:30
  My all time favorite games, but the basically the even the
• 2:11:35
  opening graphic to the game is the massive Ferris wheel that
• 2:11:39
  they have. It's actually there by an
• 2:11:42
  aquarium in Seattle. It's where it's set and it is
• 2:11:45
  all just derelict around that. And that's there and it's like
• 2:11:49
  there, there's like a little playground around it before you
• 2:11:51
  go into like, and it's just, it's kind of like a weird, like,
• 2:11:57
  like an innocent innocence lost kind of thing, which.
• 2:12:00
  Is like, I was just about to say something similar to that, like
• 2:12:03
  that the fairground is kind of used in like a lot of these
• 2:12:08
  media, eh, like a lot of media, yet exactly to depict the kind
• 2:12:13
  of eh, emptiness and as you say, lack the loss of innocence as
• 2:12:19
  well. Like where families and kids
• 2:12:21
  would have been. And now it's this dystopian or
• 2:12:23
  even this horror kind of an area.
• 2:12:26
  I can only imagine. It's like walking through like
• 2:12:29
  like a Soviet like from the 80 as.
• 2:12:35
  Well. It has, it has so many elements
• 2:12:38
  from like reference points from like our childhood and from like
• 2:12:41
  pop culture of like, you know, it's the particular type of
• 2:12:45
  architecture, it's a particular culture, It's a particular event
• 2:12:48
  in history. It's a particular way that we
• 2:12:50
  relate to it. And then when you're there
• 2:12:52
  standing in in the middle of it, So just on the like the point of
• 2:12:56
  like the loss of innocence, of course there were schools there
• 2:13:01
  and famously hear these stories. It's like, Oh yeah, the kids
• 2:13:04
  were pulled out of the schools. So like the, the classrooms are
• 2:13:07
  still there and there's books on the tables and they bring you up
• 2:13:10
  to like one of the buildings and like you look into a classroom
• 2:13:14
  and there's books on the table. The teachers table is full of
• 2:13:18
  books and notebooks and pens and rulers and, and it is, it is a,
• 2:13:22
  it is a classroom from your childhood from like from
• 2:13:25
  Ireland. You have tables at the back,
• 2:13:28
  you've posters on the wall, and it's all like, you know the
• 2:13:30
  times tables, you know stuff about other languages,
• 2:13:34
  geography, posters, and they're all still there as if you know,
• 2:13:39
  as if you could expect a classroom of kids to walk it.
• 2:13:42
  Was that little wooden map of Ireland there where all the
• 2:13:44
  counties are different colours? Surprisingly, no.
• 2:13:48
  No, that was just offensive. That's another, another thing
• 2:13:51
  that I, I'd like in one of the things that I watched and it was
• 2:13:55
  basically like you go into all of these, like it's the high
• 2:13:58
  rise apartments and stuff that they call families.
• 2:14:00
  And I was like, still like there were still meals on the table.
• 2:14:04
  There was still like, you know, and there's like fucking
• 2:14:07
  skeletons with their pets left behind or wherever.
• 2:14:09
  But there's like wedding dress hung on the back of the door and
• 2:14:12
  it's. One of them because when they
• 2:14:14
  when they eventually pulled people out, it was just like,
• 2:14:16
  you have an hour, you know, and the buses are outside.
• 2:14:20
  And there were notes left as well-being like I'll be back,
• 2:14:23
  can you? Yeah.
• 2:14:25
  Like. Yeah, I think like you.
• 2:14:27
  Know what I mean? I think people's immediate kind
• 2:14:30
  of issue was who's going to feed my dog for three days?
• 2:14:35
  Because they were told like where you're gone, you're going
• 2:14:37
  to be gone. For three days, you're gone.
• 2:14:38
  Yeah, and a lot of people like, eh, were actually excited to get
• 2:14:44
  a holiday for the first time in a long time, like you're in so
• 2:14:46
  I. Wonder where they're taking us?
• 2:14:48
  Like, yeah, yeah. It was kind of like, oh, we're
• 2:14:50
  actually getting we're going to the woods.
• 2:14:52
  We're not going to work for three days as well.
• 2:14:54
  Like a lot of them were taken to Kiev and, and they, there was
• 2:15:00
  this kind of like cultural, umm, pushback against them because
• 2:15:04
  like, at first it was like, OK, all these people have come in
• 2:15:07
  from another city and they were made to live with people in
• 2:15:10
  Kiev. Like it's not like they were
• 2:15:11
  pointing to hotels or anything. You know, they were just told we
• 2:15:14
  have arranged you're going to go stay with, you know, Svetlana
• 2:15:17
  who lives on, you know, like Vladimir Lenin St. all this kind
• 2:15:21
  of stuff. And so they ended up being like,
• 2:15:23
  Oh, yeah, it'll first be for a few days.
• 2:15:24
  And then like, it was, Oh, no, it's going to be a bit longer, a
• 2:15:28
  bit longer. And these people ended up like,
• 2:15:30
  living with him for like, a long time.
• 2:15:32
  But then the people who were from pretty out in the
• 2:15:34
  surrounding areas, they were just in limbo.
• 2:15:37
  Like, their whole lives just became limbo.
• 2:15:39
  And there was this like resentment of like, oh, you
• 2:15:43
  know, the government has forced these people to come and live
• 2:15:45
  with us. There was like a good sense of
• 2:15:47
  community about it as well. But like there was this kind of,
• 2:15:51
  you know, there was a little bit of abrasion between the two
• 2:15:53
  communities because it was like, well, why the fuck is my life
• 2:15:56
  being disrupted? Because like, what's going on in
• 2:15:59
  that plant? And then the people were just
• 2:16:01
  like, it's not my fault. Like, you know, we were told
• 2:16:04
  we'll be back in three days. And they believed it.
• 2:16:07
  They fully believed it. It's.
• 2:16:09
  Crazy. Fuck insane.
• 2:16:12
  I can't even. Imagine that.
• 2:16:14
  Like just having to like just not knowing what's going on.
• 2:16:17
  It's kind of like, I would say the worst, the worst.
• 2:16:20
  Not being not being fed any information like like the the
• 2:16:24
  the I still to this day like the the Soviet eh, well, like
• 2:16:29
  obviously the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore.
• 2:16:31
  Well, but like like the the Russian stance is still like 31
• 2:16:41
  official deaths. I think that's the number they
• 2:16:43
  use. It is, yeah.
• 2:16:44
  The official death toll to this day is 30.
• 2:16:48
  But like and. Yeah, like the, the stuff that
• 2:16:51
  comes from like even like a we talked about that the iodine has
• 2:16:55
  been proven to have accelerated thyroid cancer in children and
• 2:17:01
  that like, has been like a serious problem because of this.
• 2:17:05
  Like they, they, some people have said like the real number
• 2:17:10
  is anywhere between 3005 thousand people who would have
• 2:17:14
  died and then eh, there's other people who use the numbers
• 2:17:17
  anything like people's lives between 10,000 and 100,000
• 2:17:22
  people would have had their lives shortened because of what
• 2:17:25
  has happened. They're.
• 2:17:26
  Not fact they didn't factor in any long term effects at all and
• 2:17:29
  that was like that's another part of the show that they do
• 2:17:33
  really like selling scars guards character who I know every
• 2:17:37
  fucking every TV show and movie that's telling scars guys done
• 2:17:41
  he he has a cough into a tissue and there's blood there and in
• 2:17:44
  TV Land that's when you know your folks but.
• 2:17:46
  You're fucking. Scars guard.
• 2:17:48
  He played King in the crown as well.
• 2:17:52
  There's like a cough and then there's blood in the tissue.
• 2:17:55
  Like I'm trying to get us to watch the crown, nanny or not.
• 2:17:57
  Move. It's never.
• 2:17:59
  It's never going to happen. It's so good though.
• 2:18:02
  No, no, Danny, it's about the British royal family.
• 2:18:04
  It's not good. Yeah, but it's not nice about
• 2:18:06
  them. It doesn't matter.
• 2:18:09
  It's not good. But Gillian Anderson plays
• 2:18:11
  Margaret Thatcher, and I swear to God, I I've always.
• 2:18:14
  I don't want to sexualize Margaret Thatcher, and Gillian
• 2:18:17
  Anderson will do that for me. She doesn't.
• 2:18:20
  She won't. It takes you out of the she
• 2:18:22
  plays her so. Well, you're wrong.
• 2:18:24
  You're wrong. I I have seen Gillian Anderson.
• 2:18:27
  In person, never forget Gillian. Anderson.
• 2:18:29
  Yeah, I have seen her in person and if I were to see, No, no, I
• 2:18:34
  just saw her filming something on the street in London once.
• 2:18:37
  She was actually at a boast in Chernobyl with me once.
• 2:18:42
  Was she? Dressed as Margaret Thatcher.
• 2:18:44
  Yeah, thankfully. No, she was just like wearing
• 2:18:47
  fashionable looking clothes. No, look, I will.
• 2:18:50
  I will not. I will not.
• 2:18:52
  No, genuinely. Involved in the conversation
• 2:18:54
  that could sexualize Margaret. Thatcher.
• 2:18:56
  Would you not fuck Gillian Anderson if she was like
• 2:18:59
  dressed? If she was in character is
• 2:19:01
  Margaret Thatcher, but she was still Gillian Anderson.
• 2:19:03
  Would you not fuck her if she give up?
• 2:19:06
  To you and she was. If she was regular.
• 2:19:08
  Gillian Anderson, she was like, I'm filming The Crown right now
• 2:19:11
  as Margaret Thatcher, but she wasn't like talking like, like
• 2:19:14
  Margaret Thatcher. I've I've often said I've only
• 2:19:17
  got 1 sexual boundary and that's poop.
• 2:19:21
  Now I have two sexual boundaries and that is.
• 2:19:24
  Poop. And someone dressed as Margaret
• 2:19:27
  Thatcher trying to have sex with me.
• 2:19:28
  We. Can't we can't talk about we
• 2:19:30
  can't talk about that oh shit Oh no we can't talk about it.
• 2:19:35
  I was talking to a man recently and then had to stop talking to
• 2:19:40
  him because he's into. I bet he's ugly as well, Danny.
• 2:19:49
  Like what does this guy have going on for him?
• 2:19:51
  Actually. He's actually not.
• 2:19:53
  Like this is your standard. This is your standard you look.
• 2:19:56
  You. Look at a man who looks like he
• 2:19:58
  was a first responder at Chernobyl, and you're just like,
• 2:20:01
  yeah. They're ugly as fucker he wants
• 2:20:04
  to be shot on. Those are the 2 levels of men
• 2:20:07
  that. Just.
• 2:20:10
  That looked like there was some kind of industrial accident.
• 2:20:14
  This was hocus Pocus lack of focus.
• 2:20:16
  I've been just see she's been done.
• 2:20:22
  So much, so much others, right? Ladies and gentlemen, I like,
• 2:20:27
  have we put a pin in it? We could talk about how
• 2:20:29
  Chernobyl, Chernobyl still continued open till I think it
• 2:20:33
  was like 2000. It was 1999.
• 2:20:38
  What was that? The reactors.
• 2:20:40
  Yeah, the reactors. Are still going they're.
• 2:20:42
  Still going well. Well, they they, they, no,
• 2:20:46
  they've shut them down guys, according to the one podcast,
• 2:20:52
  not the. Man who's been there just.
• 2:20:55
  The. Podcast, I'm not going to take
• 2:20:57
  20. 19 I was in 2019 and the other ones were active, but I
• 2:21:01
  remember there was talk that they were planning on winding
• 2:21:03
  them down because they were just like, OK, that's enough of that.
• 2:21:09
  So, yeah, the, the, I think, umm, the idea was that like
• 2:21:15
  Ukraine was 100% against nuclear power after this, obviously, but
• 2:21:22
  they were so poor, as you've pointed out, or Sheen, that they
• 2:21:24
  were so poor, they were dirt poor that they couldn't afford
• 2:21:30
  to run any other form of power. And they had the.
• 2:21:34
  Infrastructure was there, so they had to use what they.
• 2:21:36
  Got to use what was yeah, yeah, and but since they found like
• 2:21:40
  all these fucking minerals in the in the Ukraine and they're
• 2:21:44
  like, oh, like we actually have got a shit load of resources.
• 2:21:47
  So like, you know, umm, I was going to say like things could
• 2:21:51
  be looking up for Ukraine, but and.
• 2:21:52
  Putin was just like, wait, what did you find?
• 2:21:58
  And so, yeah, I, I also love the fact that this is a, a just a
• 2:22:03
  very short one that like this was kind of the linchpin that
• 2:22:07
  was kind of pulled out of the Soviet Union and the collapse
• 2:22:11
  started. And I love again, Ireland being
• 2:22:15
  a fan of an underdog. I love the fact that it was
• 2:22:18
  Lithuania that was like this little Republic that decided
• 2:22:24
  that they were going to be the first to pull from the Soviet
• 2:22:27
  Union. And when they, when they pulled
• 2:22:30
  from the Soviet Union after, eh, the, the Chernobyl incident,
• 2:22:34
  they were like, like, if they can't ruin a power plant, how
• 2:22:37
  are they going to ruin all of these smaller States and leave
• 2:22:41
  Russia for Russia. And Lithuania pulled out and it
• 2:22:44
  was like the smallest domino that you could flick to start a
• 2:22:49
  chain reaction. Not the worst chain reaction
• 2:22:51
  that would have happened at the time, but to to start a chain
• 2:22:55
  reaction that would have been that like every like other
• 2:23:00
  country, just one by one started being like, OK, we don't want to
• 2:23:04
  be part of this union. We don't want to be part of this
• 2:23:06
  union. But the fucking eh.
• 2:23:10
  Berlin Wall drops in 89 Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,
• 2:23:16
  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this. Wall and you can just you can
• 2:23:20
  just see this one enormous natural disaster, eh like that
• 2:23:29
  the whole day they tried to hide from the world that they
• 2:23:32
  couldn't hide from the world was this kind of lifting off the
• 2:23:36
  Iron Curtain to show a very small pair of balls that the the
• 2:23:40
  the Russians actually had. And it took Lithuania to be
• 2:23:44
  like, guys, we can be independent and all these other
• 2:23:48
  countries. Are chance, yeah.
• 2:23:49
  Yeah, yeah. And it just, it was like Dick
• 2:23:51
  it. Was the House of Cards, yeah.
• 2:23:53
  Yeah, exactly. That's the, you know, I was
• 2:23:55
  looking for an analogy there. That's the perfect one.
• 2:23:57
  It was a House of Cards. They're still fucking psychotic
• 2:24:00
  as a nation though. They are like absolutely insane
• 2:24:03
  still. And I think like, I don't think
• 2:24:06
  that the idea, I think that they're still in the headspace
• 2:24:10
  of having that much power back then even today that they don't
• 2:24:15
  have. I just don't think that that
• 2:24:17
  will ever leave kind of their mentality.
• 2:24:21
  I think Putin's just like the greatest company in the world.
• 2:24:25
  Putin, like full on wants to re establish the Soviet Union. 100%
• 2:24:29
  he's. He has, he has said so like he
• 2:24:32
  has said that is that is well, like he is in his 70s and This
• 2:24:35
  is why he's invaded Ukraine now because like his, his lifelong
• 2:24:39
  dream is to, you know, re establish the greatness of the
• 2:24:42
  Soviet Union. He wants his legacy.
• 2:24:45
  He wants it to be his legacy. He's thinking of like, you know,
• 2:24:47
  what will I be remembered for? And he wants to be remembered
• 2:24:50
  for I reunited the Soviet Union. And meanwhile a lot of the like,
• 2:24:55
  more westerly states, they're all just like, absol fucking
• 2:24:58
  lutely not. Yeah.
• 2:25:00
  Like he's a fucking psycho. But like, it's, it's the whole
• 2:25:03
  thing of where like, you know, all the rumor that he's got
• 2:25:08
  everything on Trump to take Trump down.
• 2:25:11
  He's the only one that can basically leak everything.
• 2:25:14
  And that's why Trump was. Like let's do an entire episode
• 2:25:17
  on the emails. We, I want to.
• 2:25:19
  We'll do. That but like.
• 2:25:20
  Basically, it's like he had said like, and, and half the reason
• 2:25:24
  why he was apparently so horrible to Zalenski at that
• 2:25:27
  meeting and everything was that he was just like, he's basically
• 2:25:30
  Putin's bitch at this point because he has everything to
• 2:25:35
  lose to this man. And yeah, I think he's just.
• 2:25:41
  I think that's at the same time, though, kind of one of the only
• 2:25:44
  scraps of power that Putin actually does have.
• 2:25:48
  Yeah, there is a there's a whole episode that could be done on
• 2:25:51
  Trump's ties to Russia. Like he has been heavily linked
• 2:25:55
  with them since the 1980s. Like the Russians have been
• 2:25:58
  grooming him. And, you know, there's all these
• 2:26:00
  rumors that he's like Agent Krasnov or, you know, all this
• 2:26:03
  kind of stuff. And but there are very real
• 2:26:06
  links and evidence like, you know, he wants to put Trump
• 2:26:09
  Tower over there and Russian money has bailed out some of his
• 2:26:13
  bankruptcies. Like they're, you know, it's,
• 2:26:15
  it's real, real facts that are. There and the actual Russian
• 2:26:20
  tampering with the, the fucking 2016 election and like it's I, I
• 2:26:31
  just, I think there's so much there and.
• 2:26:36
  There's even when you mention that election that wasn't
• 2:26:41
  supposed to happen. He wasn't supposed to get in the
• 2:26:43
  1st place. But it was like a lot of there's
• 2:26:47
  like a well, the theory go was basically that they wanted
• 2:26:51
  Hillary to get in and that they didn't think that anyone would
• 2:26:55
  vote for Trump. So they put in the fucking least
• 2:26:57
  likely person that the public would vote for, but they
• 2:27:01
  completely underestimated how fucking stupid.
• 2:27:05
  I've heard this one as well, that the Republicans are like,
• 2:27:07
  we need to do a revamp, like a whole reboot of what our party
• 2:27:13
  is. And then Trump came along and
• 2:27:15
  they were like, OK, let's just troll Trump perfect at the now
• 2:27:18
  and he's going to lose and then we can get rebuild.
• 2:27:22
  Whatever way we want, yeah. And there's like they, they've
• 2:27:24
  analyzed the video of basically like when it's announced that
• 2:27:27
  he's won, he's hits himself and he's looking at his team and his
• 2:27:31
  team are looking at Hillary's team.
• 2:27:33
  And him and Hillary are like, like, just like, like it wasn't
• 2:27:37
  supposed to happen. And.
• 2:27:40
  They like when you lie on your resume and still get the job
• 2:27:43
  basically like that, that kind of thing.
• 2:27:46
  And then there's his his ties to Putin, like who?
• 2:27:49
  He basically let Putin like hook him in front of his entire
• 2:27:54
  fucking country. So like, there's no way.
• 2:27:58
  And Trump is a fucking bollocks and he throws his fucking cock
• 2:28:00
  around as much as he can when it comes to any other politician.
• 2:28:04
  With Putin, he was just a good little boy.
• 2:28:06
  Oh yeah, like he tucks his Dick back like a little bitch.
• 2:28:08
  Yeah. Like he's.
• 2:28:10
  Terrible back. Have you seen South Park?
• 2:28:18
  There's a, there's a lot we can go into.
• 2:28:19
  We can, we can do a whole episode, as you said.
• 2:28:22
  But for now, I've been Justy. She's been Danny, I guess.
• 2:28:28
  Thank you. Everyone for making glorious for
• 2:28:32
  making glorious podcast ski. Podcast.
• 2:28:36
  For Motherland. Focus.
• 2:28:38
  Focus is you. Thank you for hanging out with
• 2:28:42
  us for a spell. Stop.
• 2:28:46
  The only. Russian I know is that.
• 2:28:49
  I don't know how to stop recording.
• 2:28:50
  Well, we're still. Recording so Oh, and there we
• 2:28:54
  go. That makes.
• 2:28:55
  Sense, OK. OK, goodbye.