Shorts Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot: What Hardened in the Corridor Beneath the Reactor
본문
In a lightless corridor beneath the Chernobyl reactor lay a wrinkled, dark mass said to be so dangerous that minutes beside it could be fatal. What was it?
This short traces the story of the Elephant's Foot, melted core material that flowed down to the floors below and hardened in place.
What the video covers
- A black-and-white photograph of the Chernobyl plant taken from orbit by the French satellite SPOT-1 after the accident
- The top of the Unit 2 reactor, which shares Unit 4's design
- How heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius melted fuel, cladding, sand, concrete and metal into a lava-like material
- December 1986: a wheeled camera cart sent into the steam distribution corridor (room 217/2), where no one could safely go
- A hardened mass about 2 meters across, and the uranium-bearing zircon crystals found inside it, called chernobylite
- The huge steel arch known as the New Safe Confinement, being built in 2016 to cover the Unit 4 building
- Its state today: weaker than before, still dangerous, and said to be slowly crumbling under its own radiation
The satellite photograph and the Unit 2 reactor-top footage are real archive material. The cutaway and melt-flow scenes are conceptual re-creations, not real recordings.
We remember everyone who lost their lives or was harmed in the accident.
This short traces the story of the Elephant's Foot, melted core material that flowed down to the floors below and hardened in place.
What the video covers
- A black-and-white photograph of the Chernobyl plant taken from orbit by the French satellite SPOT-1 after the accident
- The top of the Unit 2 reactor, which shares Unit 4's design
- How heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius melted fuel, cladding, sand, concrete and metal into a lava-like material
- December 1986: a wheeled camera cart sent into the steam distribution corridor (room 217/2), where no one could safely go
- A hardened mass about 2 meters across, and the uranium-bearing zircon crystals found inside it, called chernobylite
- The huge steel arch known as the New Safe Confinement, being built in 2016 to cover the Unit 4 building
- Its state today: weaker than before, still dangerous, and said to be slowly crumbling under its own radiation
The satellite photograph and the Unit 2 reactor-top footage are real archive material. The cutaway and melt-flow scenes are conceptual re-creations, not real recordings.
We remember everyone who lost their lives or was harmed in the accident.