Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast · Brad Choma

The Chernobyl Orthodox Christmasode Disaster of 1986 | Episode 79

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

The RBMK design's graphite tips and Xenon-135 buildup turned the shutdown into an uncontrollable feedback loop.

1. Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast covers the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine. 2. The host frames the story around April 25, 1986, the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and a requested Christmas disaster episode. 3. The point of the episode is to explain how a planned turbine test at Unit 4 became a reactor failure and a mass evacuation. 4. Pripyat is described as a planned town of about 49,000 people, built for workers at the plant three kilometers away. 5. The town had swimming pools, washing machines, theaters, schools, an amusement park, and an unfinished Ferris wheel. 6. The Chernobyl plant is described as a large Soviet industrial complex with four RBMK-1000 reactors, turbine halls, cooling ponds, and support facilities. 7. The plant was designed to expand to 12 reactors, and Reactor 5 was already 80% finished. 8. The host explains that RBMK reactors produced electricity while also generating weapons-grade plutonium. 9. The episode describes control rods, graphite moderators, and the reactor's 500 megawatt turbines as part of the basic physics. 10. The planned safety test was supposed to check whether the turbines could keep coolant pumps running during a power loss. 11. The reactor power dropped to 30 megawatts, and staff kept trying to raise it while the test moved into the night shift. 12. Anatoly Diletov supervised the shutdown, and the reactor later stabilized around 200 megawatts with only eight control rods in place. 13. The host says the disabled safeguards allowed heat and steam to build as the pumps slowed and the water warmed. 14. The reactor then spiked to more than 100 times its design output before the AZ-5 scram button was pressed. 15. A catwalk worker saw the control rods moving in a way that seemed impossible, and the reactor lid was blown off. 16. The explosion exposed the core, created a radioactive geyser, and led to a second blast and fire in the building. 17. Firefighters and plant workers were sent into the debris without understanding the radiation hazard, and the host describes acute radiation sickness in detail. 18. The episode also explains the Elephant's Foot, the helicopter drops of boron, sand, clay, lead, and dolomite, and the completed sarcophagus in October 1986. 19. The tone is fast, explanatory, and heavily narrated, with frequent analogies and jokes used to explain reactor mechanics. 20. Listeners who want Soviet history, disaster engineering, or Chernobyl context will get the most from this episode, while casual listeners looking for light entertainment may skip it.

As heard by us

A darkly comic Chernobyl story that keeps the danger concrete and immediate.

Doomsday turns Chernobyl into a stark, darkly comic disaster story, following the firefighters, the fire spreading around the plant, and the graphite and nuclear fuel scattered across the area.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a Christmas disaster-sode that opens on a reactor fire and gets brutally worse from there.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast