Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "The Atomic Age" channel.

  1. There's a question about this at Physics Stackexchange question 480113. According to the answers there, the physically correct total energy is more like something between from 0.2 to 4 kilotonnes TNT equivalent (because all the water has already been converted to steam with that amount of energy). So the megatonne claim was exaccerated about 1000x (or up to 500000x). However, the scene may accurately Vassili Nesterenko, a nuclear physicist that worked in Chernobyl aftermatch, actually said in the meeting because of his (mis)understanding of the situation.
    1
  2. Here's is a nice lecture about the technical details of Chernobyl accident: What Technically Happened at Chernobyl https://youtu.be/YRPuO1RhbKo
    1
  3. A highly simplified way to describe nuclear reactors is to say that nuclear reactors have special kind of rocks close to each other under water, which boils the water and you can use the steam to make electricity. And the power is adjusted by moving those special rocks closer or further from each other. And Chernobyl was result of putting a lot of those rocks too close to each other because operators didn't understand putting all those rocks too close to each other could be dangerous. In addition, the reactor core emergency shutdown system (called SCRAM in modern reactors) was poorly designed and didn't work correctly when the operators finally tried to activate it.
    1
  4. I think the idea behind dropping sand was that if the reactor core is hot enough, it will melt the sand and create glass surface which would be hopefully gas-tight.
    1