The Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl: Radioactive Corium
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Artur Korneyev, Deputy Director of Shelter Object, viewing the "elephants foot" lava flow at Chernobyl, 1996. US Department of Energy
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Duga 'Russian Woodpecker' Radar
This derelict superstructure was a very important warning system for the Soviet military.
At first glance, it’s hard to know what’s happening in this picture. A giant mushroom seems to have sprouted in a factory floor, where ghostly men in hardhats seem to be working.
But there’s something undeniably eerie about the scene, for good reason. You’re looking at the largest agglomeration of one of the most toxic substances ever created: corium.
In the days and weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in late April 1986, simply being in the same room as this particular pile of radioactive material—known as the Elephant’s Foot—would have killed you within a couple of minutes. Even a decade later, when this image was taken, the radiation probably caused the film to develop strangely, creating the photo’s grainy quality. The man in this photo, Artur Korneyev, has likely visited this area more than anyone else, and in doing so has been exposed to more radiation than almost anyone in history.
Remarkably, he’s probably still alive. The story of how the United States got a hold of this singular photo of a human in the presence of this incredibly toxic material is itself fraught with mystery—almost as much as why someone would take what is essentially a selfie with a hunk of molten radiated lava.
This picture first came to America in the late 1990s, after the newly independent Ukrainian government took over the plant and set up the Chornobyl Center for Nuclear Safety, Radioactive Waste and Radioecology (spelling often gets changed as words go from Russian to English). Soon after, the center invited other governments to collaborate on nuclear safety projects. The U.S. Department of Energy tapped the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL)—a bustling science center up in Richland, Washington—to help.
At the time, Tim Ledbetter was a relatively new hire in PNNL’s IT department, and he was tasked with creating a digital photo library that the DOE’s International Nuclear Safety Project could use to show its work to the American public (or, at least, to the tiny sliver of the population that was online back then). He had project members take photos while they were in Ukraine, hired a freelance photographer to grab some other shots, and solicited images from Ukrainian colleagues at the Chornobyl Center. Intermixed with hundreds of images of awkward bureaucratic handshakes and people in lab coats, though, are a dozen or so shots from the ruins inside Unit 4, where 10 years before, on April 26, 1986, a reactor had exploded during a test of the plant turbine-generator system.
As radioactive plumes rose high above the plant, poisoning the area, the rods liquefied below, melting through the reactor vessel to form a substance called corium, perhaps the most toxic stuff on Earth.
Corium flowing like lava through the reactor. The valve was made for steam to move through PNNL library<br>Corium has been created outside of the lab at least five times, according to Mitchell Farmer, a senior nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, another Department of Energy center outside of Chicago. Corium formed once at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, once in Chernobyl, and three separate times during the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan in 2011. Farmer creates modified versions of corium in the lab in order to better understand how to mitigate accidents in the future. Research on the substance has found, for example, that dumping water on it after it forms actually does stop some fission products from decaying and producing more dangerous isotopes.
Of the five corium creations, only Chernobyl’s has escaped its containment. With no water to cool the mass, the radioactive sludge moved through the unit over the course a week following the meltdown, taking on molten concrete and sand to go along with the uranium (fuel) and zirconium (cladding) molecules. This poisonous lava flowed downhill, eventually burning through the floor of the building. When nuclear inspectors finally accessed the area several months after the initial explosion, they found that 11 tons of it had settled into a three meter wide grey mass at the corner of a steam distribution corridor below. This, they dubbed the Elephant’s Foot. Over the years, the Elephant’s Foot cooled and cracked. Even today, though, it’s still estimated to be slightly above the ambient temperature as the radioactive material decomposes.
Ledbetter’s not...