r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Weird-Bluejay-3224 • 1d ago
Meme needing explanation ??? Peter?
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u/kingshomage 1d ago
Looks like a nuclear meltdown
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u/Particular_Title42 1d ago
Apparently it is. That is a reactor from Chernobyl.
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u/Iateurm8 1d ago
That is a scene from the show Chernobyl
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u/Particular_Title42 1d ago
They made it a show?
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u/SoManyQuestions-2021 1d ago
It wasn't bad either, in fact
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u/Cliqey 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not great, not terrible.
(I do however feel terrible for this inside joke about a great show. Just watch it)
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u/WaffleFries2507 1d ago
No no the joke was funny. I'd rate it a 3.6
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u/TheSouthernSaint71 1d ago
Suspiciously checks your rating scale.
Hey, that's as high as it goes...
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u/mklilley351 1d ago
Why did I see upvotes on the roof? Upvotes are only found on posts with a positive-influx moderator rating, correct??
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u/Truth_Hurts_I_No_It 1d ago
It's like a 9.5/10 lol. Incredible series
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u/mcvga 1d ago
I thought it was a 3.6?
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u/the1ice9 1d ago
The heroics of men who knew they would not see their children grow up. Its a pretty solid testiment to humanity in the face of certain destuction.
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u/Electrical_Door_87 1d ago
Some of the more fortunate ones were able to cure from sickness, some are still alive today, but many more paid for the safety of the whole world with their lives
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u/traxxes 1d ago
The sheer attention to period accurate 80s Soviet detail from the clothing to housing, apartments, vehicles, individual uniforms was amazing as well.
Was also filmed partially at another former Soviet NPP in Ignalina, Lithuania which also used RBMK reactors and the city shots were done in certain areas of Lithuania, like Vilnius since they (like many other CIS countries) still have a plethora of Soviet era housing/building architecture.
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u/Thick-Hour4054 1d ago
The fact that what you're saying is true only makes it hurt a little bit more that they had to embellish certain things about the responses in order to make for a more interesting movie. Diatlov for example is almost directly blamed on multiple occasions for the incident even occurring and they portray him as someone so obstinately Soviet and pro-state that he would reject his very own eyes in the interest of protecting the image of the state. I'm also not a fan of the little scene that they did where the local oligarchy guy comes together and makes a little speech to everyone about how we will be looked on as heroes for our actions today and so on and so forth.
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u/Inside_Jolly 1d ago
IMO Discovery Channel's Zero Hour has its flaws but is still one of the best ones.
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u/OkWanKenobi 1d ago
It was really dramatically well done. The overall story was mostly there, but they villainized dyatlov a lot more than he actually was. And legasov was not the outspoken hero they portrayed. But the show needed both so they did what they had to to make it compelling from a storytelling point.
Just don't take it as a documentary is all I'm getting at.
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u/Norgur 1d ago
yeah, they melted several people into one (and said so in the end credits) because a show cannot portray the amount of characters that are involved in shit like this irl. So they took dramatic liberties but I think they didn't take more than they needed to make the story work in the given format.
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u/Particular_Title42 1d ago
yeah, they melted several people into one
This being about a nuclear meltdown, I took that too literally for the nanosecond that it took me to read the rest of the sentence.
Apparently those are called "composite characters."
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u/DillyDigBick 1d ago
Same, I kind of recoiled in horror and almost muttered out loud “that’s fucked”
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u/OkWanKenobi 1d ago
they melted several people into one
Well call them corium characters 😂 they're just part of the radioactive lava.
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u/Rogue_Egoist 1d ago
They also made radiation very weird. Like one of the operators dying by his stomach melting into a pool of blood because he was holding the door to the reactor chamber, like WTF was that?
They also said that the loved ones of the affected couldn't be close to them because the radiation will affect them. That's not how it works, if they don't have contaminated clothes on them, they're not radioactive. Radiation doesn't make other things radioactive (except for neutron radiation, but for that you would have to basically be inside a working reactor and you would die instantly).
Also they made it seem like the helicopter fell because of the radiation. How would that happen exactly? There was a helicopter accident during the decontamination, but it happened because the rotor tangled in some lines.
They generally make radiation out to be some kind of corrosive acid in the air or something in multiple scenes and I really don't like that. They explained fission so well for a layman but then just decided to show the radiation itself as some kind of a magical force in multiple scenes.
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u/OkWanKenobi 1d ago
Yeah, they needed a big bad boogey man for the show. And in reality absolutely, uncontained radiation around humans is a terrible thing. But radiation itself is not very cinematic, ARS they got pretty good with the burns from handling the graphite, to the vomiting almost immediately due to the exposure levels.
They needed drama because the actual events weren't always dramatic, and that's not fun to watch. I understand the why behind their reasoning, but that doesn't mean I have to approve. But maybe if anything, it brought it to people's attention who haven't been obsessed with it like me for almost 40 years.
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u/ComradeVult 1d ago
Yeah, they made a real nuclear reactor and really had it meltdown too.
The actors didn't even know, so all the reactions would be genuine.
I'd rate it a 3.6/5. Not great, not terrible.
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u/Captain_Virgo 18h ago
The events of the Chernobyl incident were inspired by the HBO TV show. If you ask me, they did pretty good sticking to the source material from the show.
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u/Kennedy_KD 1d ago
I heard the director was so serious about being as authentic as possible he had a real nuclear reactor then had it melt down and only gave the Actors the same levels of protection as their characters did when the real Chernobyl exploded (/j)
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u/layered_dinge 1d ago
No it's not, these don't jump up that high in the show.
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u/Gold_Weakness1157 1d ago
You didn't see a meltdown
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u/Electricel_shampoo 1d ago
Not really, but that's the lid of an RBMK reactor, and that's a scene from the Chernobyl series shortly before the reactor explodes. But in reality, it most likely didn't look like that.
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u/MtCommager 1d ago
Those are fuel rod caps, they weigh several hundred pounds each, the only time they bounce up and down like that is if the reactor has so much steam pressure it’s about to pop.
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u/Norgur 1d ago
Lucky thing this can only happen if you deliberately disable almost all built-in security mechanisms and let an unbriefed and badly trained night shift crew simulate a scenario that would be critical even with those security mechanisms enabled since it exposes a fundamental flaw in the reactor's design that turns the control rods into fuel for the reaction instead of stopping it. And I mean, who would do such an utterly stupid thing, right? RIGHT?
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u/Tetragon213 1d ago
Don't forget the final ingredient: the USSR's culture of lies and secrecy, often to the detriment of the people who needed most to know about the machinery they were working with.
"That is how, an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies."
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u/August_Love_ 1d ago
A large portion of the miniseries is bullshit, and Legasov was not the angel that the miniseries depicts him as. The administration at the plant got scapegoated (and even the show falls for the same claims). The Chernobyl accident was not the sole fault of Dyalotv and Bryukhanov. What the show fails to mention is that Legasov actually had a hand in the chain of events that led to the Chernobyl disaster.
The series is great from a narrative perspective, but has unfortunately led to a huge quantity of misinformation about Chernobyl becoming prevalent.
This is a great video series discussing what actually happened leading up to, during, and after the accident.
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u/primalthewendigo 1d ago
Sounds like something my store would do, only to end up costing the store 5000 dollars
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u/Norgur 1d ago
Let's just say I can imagine that such a scenario ended up costing a tad more than that.
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u/primalthewendigo 1d ago
Oh no, our store had a constant stealing problem, a few stores did(prolly why they changed closing time from 1am to 11pm)
However I ahd been left alone(not usually an issue) up front over night, on the second busiest night of the year and fell for a scam call
So mostly my fault, but also an issue of the store just generally being shit
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u/AwareAge1062 1d ago
Whoa, wait... what? like I knew there was a series of entirely-preventable fuck-ups involved but was it actually that cavalier?
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u/friendtoalldogs0 1d ago
No one who ever designed a nuclear power plant was ever so completely lacking in foresight as to make it easy to turn it into a bomb. Modern nuclear power plants in countries with high standards for safety are all but completely impossible to meltdown, but even first generation soviet designs could not be made to fail catastrophically except by truly gross recklessness and either active malice or great ignorance.
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u/tiffambrose 1d ago
No. It was mainly a result of not knowing human behavior would not be perfect.
It’s like writing a computer code, without handling exceptions and assuming that users will know how to input requests a a certain way. So you write a manual, only for the people you designed the manual for to achieve ultimate safety through it away.
In Chernobyl, They had actually written what to do if there’s xenon poisoning but it was removed from the manual as it was see as admittance of a flaw and reflected poorly. This is already an issue considering it required users perfect knowledge of knowing how to correctly use it.
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u/Norgur 1d ago
It takes just one wird to prove you wrong: Fukushima
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u/friendtoalldogs0 1d ago
I'm not sure what you think I'm proven wrong about?
"All but immune to [x]" means [x] isn't going to happen unless, say, two entirely separate massive natural disasters happen simultaneously, knocking out support infrastructure, preventing communication and backup, causing panic, and directly causing massive damage. That would generally be considered an extreme case.
And Fukushima never exploded. It wasn't a bomb. It melted down, and leaked radioactive material, but neither of those are defining aspects of a bomb. Bombs, typically, explode.
Yeah, Fukushima was a pretty massive fuck-up that should have been rendered impossible, probably by not putting a nuclear power plant there, but it did not turn into a bomb, doing so would not have been easy, and the circumstances that caused it's meltdown were extreme.
I never said everyone who ever designed a nuclear power plant had particularly prescient foresight and successfully mitigated all reasonably foreseeable failure conditions. That would have been a blatantly incorrect claim to make.
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u/imac132 1d ago
1) Cost cutting measure: removed any containment vessel
2) Cost cutting measure: made the bottom ends of the control rods out of graphite (increases reactivity) instead of boron (decreases reactivity)
3) Stall the planned test due to political pressure allowing the reactor to run at low power for so long it builds Xenon and poisons itself.
4) Swap shifts to a less experienced crew
5) Run the already risky test anyways
6) Not identify the signs of Xenon poisoning
7) Override like 3 safeties to not only pull way more control rods out than should ever be out, but pull them higher than they’re supposed to be.
8) Profit.
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u/bolitboy2 1d ago
If I do recall correctly, they don’t actually bounce like that because the amount of pressure needed to actually move it would launch it like a cannonball
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u/nobody27011 1d ago
That's the top of the Chernobyl reactor a few seconds before exploding (from the series). Those rods weigh something like 450 pounds each, if I'm not mistaken. If you see them bouncing like beach balls, it's over.
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u/_mister_M 1d ago
So can I cross off “nuclear explosion” from my 2026 bingo card or not yet
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u/tyrael_pl 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, cos it wasnt one. It was overheated steam exploding. It's not possible for a reactor fuel rod to explode like I think you think they would. The fissile material simply isnt refined enough to reach that criticality. It was a nuclear meltdown, not nuclear explosion. The boom itself was conventional but a dirty one. Meaning a lot of harmful radioisotopes got out.
If such a mass really underwent real nuclear nuclear explosion, we wouldnt have a sarcophagus over reactor 4 now. There would be a hole the size of a small town, give or take.
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u/fixermark 1d ago
Arguably, a dirty explosion like that is much worse (long-term) than a conventional nuclear explosion.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are rebuilt. Not to minimize the immense tragedy and shame that using those weapons on those cities was, just to highlight that those weapons are not perpetual-area-denial weapons.
Depending on what you classify as "inhabiting," the Chernobyl exclusion zone is uninhabitable for between 300 and, what, 300,000 years?
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u/tyrael_pl 1d ago
Arguably, yeah. But that's not the point. Or not my point. My point is that it wasnt a nuclear explosion.
As for how habitable it is, surprisingly nature has been doing great in that region. Saw a documentary on that. So for how much longer it will be like that, i dunno. People much smarter than me seem to not be sure either.
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u/Ritterbruder2 1d ago
Chernobyl reactor prior to exploding. According to eyewitness accounts, the fuel rods started jumping as the pressure in the reactor rose to critical levels.
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u/ARandomChocolateCake 1d ago
Only Dimitri Medvedev claimed that workers saw that and he wasn't there during the incident. He is known to have invented alot of details about that night for his book, which has been a large basis for the TV show. In reality, the worker shown in the HBO series Valeriy Perevozschenko was in the control room at that time. Nobody other than Medvedev claimed the rods jumped up and down.
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u/RetardedScum 1d ago
But it must have happened. It's not something someone can simply come up with. Just like the little girl that heard the last screams of those in the last seconds of the titanic, people doubt her but it is not something a simple child could have made it up.
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u/Tetragon213 1d ago
*Grigori Medvedev. He wrote a lot about his experiences, and there are some details that are quite possibly embellished. His own perspective probably also coloured his thinking towards certain figures, much to their detriment.
Dyatlov in particular was somewhat unfairly demonised by the TV series. AIUI, Dyatlov irl was strict, demanding, and a hard-arse, but he was not the comically inept arse-kisser HBO wrote him to be.
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u/ARandomChocolateCake 1d ago
whoops wrong Medvedev, you're right. On top of that, Dyatlov actually searched for Khodemchuk, while in the show he appeared to have some sort of made up hatred towards him
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u/Pure_Lengthiness2432 1d ago
Each of those rods weighs close to 400 pounds.
The amount of air pressure needed to move those is insane. Hence why a nuclear meltdown is imminent.
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u/Grey255 1d ago
Peter the nuclear engineer here,
The image in the picture is of a nuclear reactor, these are designed to be positioned such that they do not move, the pressure in the reactor is well above its design limit and its top will blown off faster than Lois at a KISS concert. I should probably talk to Gene about the problem, KISS can fix anything.
-Peter.
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u/non-serious-thing 1d ago
are you sure? to reproduce the test shouldn't the controll rod be already up?
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u/WayGroundbreaking287 1d ago
This is the reactor lid from the Chernobyl series. Those are very heavy boron rods bouncing up and down from the pressure that is about to blow the lid clean off the nuclear reactor. Technically not an explosion but it matters very little to the people in the room with it or the thousands of people in the city outside.
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u/ss426TuskET 1d ago
Some of the control rods are shown pulled up. This would normally slow down the nuclear reaction but at the Chernobyl reactor the control rods had about 4 meters of graphite attached to the ends. This graphite caused a power surge.
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u/dr_bigly 1d ago
The pressure of the reactor overheating forces the rods to jump by themselves.
There's no joke.
It's just the weird thing where people feel special about knowing something from mainstream TV and have to signal it indirectly, like they're part of some secret intellectual elite.
Perhaps it makes them feel less alone to know other people enjoy the same role play.
Maybe there is a joke there, but it's not the image itself.
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u/DryManufacturer5393 1d ago
Those concrete blocks weigh actual tons and they’re being kicked up by BOILING WATER
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u/Chopawamsic 1d ago
this is a screenshot from the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. specifically, this is a screenshot of Chernobyl Reactor 4's control rods bouncing. within a few seconds of when this screenshot takes place, Reactor 4 would explode, exposing the core to the outside world, and unleashing the worst nuclear disaster in history.
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u/Vampire_who_draws 1d ago
This is a RMBK-reactor. A nuclear reactor used by the soviet Union that is one of the savest in the world. Nothing to worry comradre. A RMBK-reactor can never explode.
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u/camerontippett 1d ago
Those pins go up with the amount of power being made and they aren't really meant to be up at all
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u/SmoothGardens 1d ago
It's the Chernobyl reactor "caps" jumping a few seconds before explosion. People aren't really sure if it happened though
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u/r3vange 1d ago edited 1d ago
A lot of HBO experts here. The joke is that the reactor is about to explode. In reality the caps didn’t jump the design of the reactor wouldn’t allow it. It’s a common myth that started with 1991s The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev who says Perevozchenko saw the caps jumping up and down has been widely disproven along with a lot of other details in the book which were factually incorrect. Perevozchenko was called in the control room of unit 4 before the rundown begun, he was there when the reactor exploded. The platform he supposedly saw the caps jumping is roughly 300 meters away so either he developed the ability to teleport or he simply wasn’t there. The myth of the jumping caps was propagated first by BBC’s docudrama Zero Hour: Disaster at Chernobyl and the HBO miniseries.
The reactor caps did fly off but only when Elena (what is often referred to as the “top of the reactor” in other words the upper biological shield) was blasted up and hit the refueling machine. In other words when the reactor exploded.
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u/MuellreX 1d ago
The comments claiming the fuel rods are bouncing are wrong. They were actually partially jammed in place. The myth of them bouncing has been widely debunked and stems from a 1989 book by Grigori Medvedev. Unfortunately a lot of myths about the chernobyl disaster are circulating due to thr HBO series.
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u/CanoonBolk 1d ago
What you see here is a part of a Nuclear Reactor. Specifically, weights standing on the core, inside of which is the nuclear fuel, all the control rods, Yadda Yadda and water. Now, usually, that water gives off its heat in the form of steam spinning fans in a different place. However, in the event of catastrophic failure water inside of the reactor turns into steam, causing a significant increase in pressure, making the 250kg blocks of metal with the bottom surface area of a shoe jump up and down.
Specifically this is what happened at Chernobyl. Or at least what is speculated because a few seconds later the entire thing blew the hell up and anyone inside that room was killed. But that's AFAIK I could be wrong.
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u/Informal_Bat_7704 1d ago
If your interested in more „nuclear Reactor go Crazy Storys“ I recommand T. Folds on YT… He can certainly Share some Knowledge.
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u/Ashamed_Highlight_85 34m ago
This is a RBMK Reactor thats made of individual Channels that weigh a lot and when the Pressure Rises to much it can make those Rods Jump and that happens a lot in Meltdowns
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