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Podcast: Timesuck with Dan Cummins
Episode: 79 - The Chernobyl Disaster: What, Why, and How Bad Was it?
Description: On Friday, April 25th, 1986, the Soviet city of Pripyat, built to support the local nuclear power plant Chernobyl, had 13,414 apartments, a hospital, a movie theater, an art school, a central park with a giant ferris wheel, and over 50,000 residents. And then, at 1:23AM on Saturday, April 26th, 1986, the number 4 reactor heated up to more than 100 times its usual operating power. Which is very, very bad. After a few explosions and a lot of radiation kicked out to the atmosphere, by April 30th, the population would be zero. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers died in the following days and...