Transcript:
Even though Chernobyl was a huge disaster, few people really know what happened that day, so let's get into it. You might know that on April 26th, 1986, they were ironically performing a safety test on reactor for Chernobyl.
But in the process, they made the reactor super fragile, including taking all the control rods, which was supposed to moderate the reaction. Now these controllers were born carbide, but they had cheaper graphite tips. Cool, cool. No big deal. Graphite just accelerates nuclear reactions. So when the reaction started to get out of control, they pushed all the control rods back in at once to moderate the reaction. Except nope.
The graphite sped it up, causing the explosion. It's hard to put into words just how massive that explosion was, but let me try. It blew off the thousand ton plate covering the reactor core. There was no safety container around the reactor, so isotope fires raged for weeks. The very few survivors reported seeing a bluish light in the reactor hall, which came from the ionization of the air.
They said it "flooded into infinity." Nearby residents almost immediately experienced vomiting, headaches and a metallic taste in their mouth. That's just the immediate effects. We'll get into the aftermath later.