S3 E8: Risky Business
Wild Thing
Foxtopus Ink
4.8 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are often what comes to mind when we think about nuclear energy. Thankfully, events like these actually very rare. So does that mean the risks we associate with atomic power are as bad as we think? How good are we at actually assessing those risks? And can we make things even less risky by removing humans from the equation? That’s how some next generation projects hope to make nuclear energy safer.
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*Season 3 of Wild Thing is produced by Laura Krantz and Scott Carney. Editing by Alicia Lincoln. Music and mixing by Louis Weeks.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi Wild Thing fans, do you have kids? Do you know any kids? Or are you just a big kid yourself? |
| 0:07.3 | Have I got some very exciting news for you? Wild Thing is no longer just a podcast. |
| 0:13.6 | It's a middle grade non-fiction book series aimed at kids between the ages of 8 and 13. |
| 0:19.9 | And the first book, The Search for Sasquatch, which is based on the first season of Wild Thing, |
| 0:25.3 | is available now. It's a beautiful hardcover book with full color illustrations, or if you like |
| 0:31.6 | the melodious sounds of my voice, there's also an audio book from Audible. My guess is you'll |
| 0:37.9 | probably want to get both. For more information on where to find it, go to wildthingpodcast.com. |
| 0:45.7 | On April 26, 1986, an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction blew a hole in the roof of Chernobyl's |
| 0:53.2 | reactor number 4. The explosion and subsequent fires released huge amounts of radioactive |
| 0:59.5 | contamination into the atmosphere, blanketing nearby towns in Ukraine and Belarus before |
| 1:05.1 | eventually spreading across Europe. And what is still considered the worst nuclear accident |
| 1:11.1 | in history can be chalked up to a series of human errors and poor judgment. For one, |
| 1:17.2 | the Soviets built the reactor using a flawed design, which scientists were aware of well before |
| 1:22.8 | the accident. The operators didn't fully understand how the reactor worked or what the safety protocols |
| 1:28.7 | were. And on the night of the accident, Soviet officials ignored signs that the reactor had become |
| 1:34.8 | unstable and kept going with the scheduled operations. Had the government addressed these issues, |
| 1:40.7 | they probably could have averted this disaster. 25 years later, in March 2011, a giant tsunami |
| 1:48.4 | triggered by an earthquake swammed the Fukushima reactor in northern Japan. While the reactors |
| 1:54.3 | safely shut themselves down, the wall of water flooded the backup generators, the powered |
| 1:59.2 | the cooling systems for those reactors, causing them to overheat and partially melt down. |
| 2:04.5 | The damage and release of radioactive material forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate |
| 2:10.6 | the area. Many experts agree that this incident could have been prevented entirely, if officials |
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