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The most dangerous place in Chernobyl? Meet the Elephant's Foot, a radioactive material that emerged after the tragic accident and that is still emitting radiation at the site today..
On the night of April 25-26, 1986, the world witnessed the worst nuclear accident in history at a civilian facility, when the explosion of the reactor at the Chernobyl Power Plant released a huge radioactive cloud over the Soviet Union and much of Europe. Although the Chernobyl tragedy is widely known, few know that there is a mysterious object hidden under the sarcophagus that covers the site to this day. In this article, we will explore this terrifying enigma that continues to worry scientists and experts, decades after the disaster, discover the most dangerous place in Chernobyl.
Understand what is hidden in Chernobyl and why it is so dangerous
We'll talk about the famous elephant's foot, a solidified flow of radioactive material similar to lava that flows from an old nuclear reactor and got its name because it looks like an elephant's foot. This lump was discovered six months after the accident and quickly became a local specialty.
However, at that time people rarely entered the steam distribution corridor without reason, as the radiation levels in this location were exorbitant.
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Being the most dangerous place in Chernobyl, being close to the elephant's foot for just three minutes without special protective equipment would be enough to cause your death within a few months from some disease caused by radiation. Even machines could not withstand this level of Gamma radiation.
During the first investigation, the equipment that measures the intensity of the gamma ray field exceeded its limits and was damaged. The machine was designed to measure 3000 MeV of radiation per hour, so the engineers prepared a more powerful sensor, placed it in a children's toy horse and placed it in the suspect room. When they finally managed to measure it, the radiation level had reached 14.500 MeV per hour.
What is the composition of an elephant's foot?
In order to at least understand the composition of the elephant's foot, which is in the most dangerous place in Chernobyl, they decided, without considering the dangers, to research this object.
To do this, a drill attached to a cart was used, but the object was so hard that the drill had no effect. In fact, not only the drill, but all electronic devices stopped working near this strange object weighing several tons.
With this, the researchers They became even more eager to collect samples of these substances, so they found a soldier who volunteered to try to break the solidified lava with an axe and collect some pieces, but things did not go as well as they expected and this volunteer had to be removed from the site because he was exposed to too much radiation.
The problem was solved by a sniper who fired an armor-piercing bullet at the object and managed to collect a fragment for analysis. What they identified is that the elephant's foot is composed of uranium and zirconium mixed with iron, chromium and nickel, as well as calcium, aluminum, sodium, magnesium, silicon oxides, among other compounds.
How the most dangerous place in Chernobyl came to be
The fuel for this nuclear power plant was uranium dioxide pellets, inserted into zirconium fuel cladding tubes.
This tube containing fuel is called fuel element and a controlled nuclear reaction is taking place inside it, but this nuclear reaction got out of control in unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but something even more frightening was happening inside the reactor as radioactive ash began to be released into the air. Temperatures in some places exceeded 2600 °C and within seconds, a third of the reactor core was reduced to a molten mass.
Then the fuel cladding melted and all the pieces were dumped at the bottom of the reactor. Over the next eight days, this lava flowed out of the damaged reactor, fusing with the reactor coil insulation shield, concrete, sand and other things it came into contact with. Because this type of lava is formed by the melting of the reactor core, it is called corium. In the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, radioactive lava leaked out of the reactor, spread across the floor of the reactor hall and entered the sub-pressure pool.
