I have huge respect for people who save lives, like firefighters, medical doctors, etc. But these three are whole class above.

If there ever were people who saved millions of lives, that was them.

I personally would not be alive right now if it were not for them.

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Why the hell have I not heard of these guys before?!

The report did not mention if the men suffered any ill effects.

Good old Soviet secrecy.

There are men and women who willingly risk their lives for the greater good every single day.

These three men saved millions, knowing for certain that it would cost them their lives.

These men are heroes, in every sense of the word.

When my sister took gymnastics, her coach gradually was going blind from enduring radiation effects from the time he was a firefighter and went into Chernobyl.

Victor, is the only name I ever knew him by- he was a very, very good man, and gifted gymnastics coach. Even when he couldn't see. And kind, which is frankly rare as hell when it comes to Russian gymnastics coaches.

Impressive man.

They deserve a movie.

Did the government or people step up and help their families or anything?

Corium is some serious shit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_%28nuclear_reactor%29

Can we get a comparison picture for size difference?

...drained to where?

I read somewhere that their eyes changed color, like from Brown to blue after their dip in the water.

I don't drink much so didn't bother going out of my way tonight but I decided to open a beer and toast all three of them. Cheers, fellas.

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Where are you getting the claims that millions would have been killed and half of Europe would have been uninhabitable?

Seems like hyperbole. Without a doubt these men are heroes, but those details seem sensationalized.

I am 99.9% sure that at least one of the divers (Valeri Bespalov) is still alive and well in Ukraine. I saw him 3 years ago when I visited Kiev, and he is quite well. I know for sure that this is the same Valeri Bespalov since my family has known him for decades, and the story checks out -- he was a high-level engineer at CNPP and was heavily involved with the cleanup in subsequent years, only retiring recently. See here for Wikipedia folks doubting authenticity of divers' deaths.

I can shoot him an email and get a first source account, if there is interest.

This is the kind of disaster scenario you see in ridiculous movies and TV shows, but to think that it really happened is insane, much less that these 3 guys died to stop it and most people have no idea it ever happened. They ABSOLUTELY deserve to be remembered.

this ladies and gentleman is what you call a hero. actually, heroic is an understatement. i definitely dont think id have the balls to do this. id probably just do my best to evacuate my family and i from the country

Is there a diagram or cut-away that shows all of this

Would love to see a movie about these guys and all the planning that went in this.

Stories like these should be better known ....a superhero movie based on a true event.

Please tell me that they earned the title of Hero?

Edit: Apparently they did not :(. That is sad. Such a deserved titled

why didnt they just put a pipe in their and drain the water out?

I'm not trying to invalidate their bravery by saying this, but they probably reasoned that they were dead either way.

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I salute these men but I would have had someone nearby with a firearm to shoot me dead right after I completed the mission because I can't think of a more agonizing death than what they endured.

It's kind of messed up that in my 30 years of life, I've never heard of these guys until now. True heroes.

Alexie Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov

We should be building monuments and holding holidays in name of these martyrs

Why isn't there a statue of these three guys in every major European city? Fighting for your country, going to war, there is still hope, these guys marching to their slow painful deaths willingly and fully understanding it, Jesus fuck.

thank you for giving their names.

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I think I see this post about every 2 months, but its one of very few I don't mind seeing because its just such an amazing story. The humanity these three men must have had, the true meaning of the "greater good" they portrayed. Just amazing.

Sorry, but your post is simply not true about the potential dangers of the steam explosion. See my above comment, and the following

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident/

Please stop spreading sensationalized untruths.

More than exceptional humans.

why the hell isnt there a national holiday for these 3 men!? These 3 guys are the true meaning of heros!!

Why don't we know more about these heroes?! Thanks for bringing this to light!

I question the validity of these claims without a vessel to contain all the water and pressurize to extremely high pressures the heat would just boil the water and should not cause an explosion. There may be hydrogen explosions but I don't see why any of these explosions would be larger than the initial explosion.

Thank you for sharing. While some heroic actions are remembered for centuries others are unknown, please always share such stories so that everyone knows heroes who sacrifice there lives for others, this is least we could do for them...

Someone needs to make a movie about this.

With all due respect - these guys truly are underappreciated heroes.

However, given that this was published by ITAR-TASS in May 1986 - soon after the disaster, I'm thinking that their self-sacrificing heroism might not actually be as self-sacrificing as the old news state:

• they could have been "volunteers" - not volunteers. Remember that this happened in Soviet Union in the 80's. It was almost two years later that Gorbachev's Glasnost is introduced. i.e. Either you dive now and live another 2 weeks or we shoot you right now and quite a few people in the neighbourhood die when the corium decides to take the dip. (I admit: this is more unlikely than the publicly proclaimed version)
• all three worked at plant; it is possible that they received a lethal dose of radiation earlier on and chose to volunteer because they already knew that they were walking ghosts
• combination of the above - they knew they had a lethal dose (and were having their latent perioid) and the officials told them that if they did dive, they would be acclaimed as heroes but if they didn't -> no press releases (and a possible steam explosion)

Very much reminds me of a smaller scale but equally heroic act of human spirit.

Following the Japanese nuclear explosions, older folk volunteered to clear up the mess to prevent the young generations being exposed to lethal nuclear material.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607

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They do actually!

That one is dedicated to the 3 divers

This one is dedicated to all the 600,000 'liquidators' that helped clean up the contaminated areas including the plant

The liquidators who were a mix of military and civilian workers also received medals dedicated to their work as well as veteran status which granted them social benefits. Many also received awards as either hero of the Soviet Union or Ukraine's order of courage. Sadly the 3 divers were not recognised at the time or even included in the official list of deaths.

They also have others built by the locals that dedicated to fukashima and Chernobyl.

I don't think I'd have the courage to do it.

Radiation poisoning, no matter how heroic that act may be, is the most horrific way to die.

Despite the severe burns (that can literally boil an egg), you'd literally be falling apart molecule by molecule

I cannot help but try to imagine the thought process that led these brave men to come to that conclusion. Saving lives, millions of lives, including those of your immediate and distant family, is a powerful motivator, but knowing that you will definitely, and not likely, lose your life as a result can make any individual balk. How did they rationalise going into their deaths? What convinced them so strongly to do it? It truly boggles my mind to merely think about that.

There can be no greater sacrifice.

They should have a statue at the UN or something.

From what I've read they already knew they were dead men. By that time they had easily received enough radiation and wanted to save others. I would rather die from EXTREME radiation exposure than dying over the course of weeks in a hospital with skin and muscle falling off the bone.

I totally would; not sure if I'd hesitate. That's the interesting part about being suicidal; I dont value my life anymore but I would like my death to mean something

I think most people there had enough exposure to be killed eventually or horrible injured forever, so it makes it an easier choice. You're not swapping a lifetime of 'normal' life for a week of painful death, rather a longer time of pain for shorter one.

I wouldn't of been the last either, I would of either already been leaving the area or I would be quitting my job, self preservation is too high on my list.

Ananenko was asked by his boss to go into the contaminated water, but also was told he could refuse the hazardous assignment. "But how could I do that when I was the only person on the shift who knew where the valves were located,'' Tass quoted him as saying.

If I knew where the valves were on that shift, I would either describe where they were to a willing volunteer or get someone who did know where they were from another shift if they wanted to do it. The one thing that would get me to sacrifice myself would be if my family is getting a fat check after I die, if not and a hero doesn't come forward than we are just going to have to section off half of Europe.

Eh, it's easier when you got nothing to live for I suppose. I know I would gladly do it without a second thought. Better than anything I have going for me at the moment

I'd probably do it, but only if the government made sure my family would be set for life.

i would. knowing i spawned children and their lives depended on my sacrifice - i would begrudgingly do it. just contemplating it makes me weary; but once you're a father, it's possible. my kids need to have kids, and so do many others like myself. those three Russians are superheros to many fathers like myself

Agreed. In fact I'd likely be one of the last to volunteer.Then again if I were older maybe I'd be more willing to do it.

An Oscar-worthy film would be a great way to tell the story, imho.

That is also something I'm curious about. As far as I know, suffering from radiation sickness is prolonged and may take some time before it can manifest itself after exposure. But I should think the concentration and level of radiation down there must have easily been off the roof. If you were to swim into water contaminated to that level, would you immediately feel your skin burning off?

You can feel nausea and a headache rightaway. Hiroshi Ouchi was hit directlywitha massive dose of radiation and that is what he felt.

https://youtu.be/lFiLNc46jAM this is how i imagine it would be like, minus the thrashing around since they had a goal to accomplish.

Their first symptoms would have most likely started similar to a sunburn.

They probably visually saw "lights" in their vision that would appear like random sparks all over the place. Aside from that, I don't think there would be any immediate notice of it.

I also wonder what the temperature of the water was. Hopefully just for the sake of comfort it was nice and warm, but not too warm.

We would all be playing Fallout.

A lot worse than it is, we live in a world were they did do this, and the effects of that meltdown were still severe enough that things like this are a thing. The UK was relatively unaffected compared to some areas, as can be seen on this plot of the radiation levels for the 12 days following the incident.

Please note that this article is an archived article written 10 days after the incident, in 1986. It says things like "The report did not mention if the men suffered any ill effects", even though we know they died horribly painful deaths of radiation poisoning 2 weeks later.

There would be a lot more superheroes.

I don't know, seems that (superintelligent) AI will surpass humans on every front given the opportunity.

The Soviets had lots of truly massive industrial accidents. Including several nuclear ones.

For this one, they covered it up by making several hundred square miles a 'nature preserve'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

They also had little opsies with biological weapons - anthrax and smallpox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_smallpox_incident

If the wind had been blowing a different direction in the anthrax incident, hundreds of thousands probably would have died. It has been asserted that if a particular train hadn't been forbidden from stopping at the infected area during the smallpox outbreak, a couple of cities would have been infected.

The Mayak nuclear bomb factory incident contaminated an area the size of Europe.

Oh fuck. Is this true? I just... Christ.

At least they had some clean ass skin yo.

The water (as in H2O)/hydrogen peroxide itself was not radioactive. It requires multiple neutrons to be absorbed for either hydrogen (2) or oxygen (3) to reach unstable isotopes. Per wikipedia "Thus water is relatively difficult to activate." There may have been neutron activation of sodium and chlorine though. Also relatively little of the water would be turned into peroxide (the stuff is nasty enough at sane concentrations, at high or pure it is incredibly nasty), the ammount of radiation necessary to do that would be even more absurd than being that close to a melting down reactor already is.

My recommendation is The Truth About Chernobyl by Gregori Medvedev.

From Wikipedia: The Truth About Chernobyl is a 1991 book by Grigori Medvedev. Medvedev served as deputy chief engineer at the No. 1 reactor unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the 1970s. At the time of the Chernobyl disasterin 1986, Medvedev was deputy director of the main industrial department in the Soviet Ministry of Energy dealing with the construction of nuclear power stations. Since Medvedev knew the Chernobyl plant well, he was sent back as a special investigator immediately after the 1986 catastrophe.

It's an interesting read.

Id be interested as well.

This reddit post, seriously: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/33wn00/its_the_29th_anniversary_of_the_chernobyl_nuclear/

https://m.imgur.com/a/TwY6q

Full imgur album of the story by /u/R_spc

If you are interested in the human perspective on the tragedy, last year's Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is a most haunting and NSFL read. Here's a large excerpt of the English edition.

Definitive text?

Edit: ok I know what definitive text means now, it was a simple question, please no more downvotes. It's been answered.

I have no doubt that such a text would be deemed classified.

I've actually read quite a bit about Chernobyl, and I've never heard of these guys, so reposts aren't always bad.

USSR had a very good social security system

Slotin goes down in history as more of a dumbass than a hero because he performed the extremely deadly experiment using a screwdriver.

Tangentially related - there was the guy who was exposed to 64 sieverts unknowingly (highest dose a human ever received and lived): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

Except Slotin likely would have died either way, and the accident was due to his own recklessness and disregard for the established procedures, and likely also led to the shortened lifespans of several other people in the room with him.

Bruce Banner doesn't count.

I sure as hell do since Youtube gave me a copyright warning immediately after uploading the video;

Video title: Chernobyl - Counting Lives

Copyrighted song: Le rocher sur la Volga

Claimed by: [Merlin] IDOL and Koch Entertainment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgQWOeL2LLA

Утёс (The Cliff), by Leonid Kharitonov.

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Petrov did not save us from a nuclear war, nor did he have the power to accidentally start one.

You know that video is a reenactment, right?

I saw people complaining about this the last time this TIL was posted and I honestly don't get it.

The difference from all those other examples is that they all featured one person, this is three people. Saying 'three men' flows better and gets readers' attention more effectively. And then they click the link and read the names in the article. Their names are not lost to history just because they're not in a Reddit post title.

These people's names are not well known. The people you mention are well known for a number of things already (at least Mandela and Churchill). Since we don't know their names, it's important to tell who they were to draw us in. We can read their names in the article.

You expect me to remember THREE names?!

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How is it even possible that peoples sentiments can't come from their own thoughts rather than literal copy and paste.

Radiation spread quite far across Europe at the time. It's implied that it would have been much larger amounts of radiation at far longer distances.

I was just a young 8yr kid at that time but I remember that in Italy (1000miles/1600km) we were told not to eat salad and similar vegetables from our gardens and at school we were not doing the gym hour outside in the courtyard as we used to do before

I understand the danger of having been rendered uninhabitable convinced Germany to phase out nuke power.

Check it out. It was more than a little nerve wracking.

Total exaggeration. Sure, you can still detect some traces of Chernobyl fallout if you know where to look. That's precisely the reason we use radioactive compounds in medicine as markers: they are ridiculously easy to detect even when they're present only in itsy bitsy teeny weeny amounts.

It's totally another thing whether such trace amounts have any practical or detectable health or environmental effects. (Hint: unless you eat hundreds or thousands of kilos of "contaminated" meat every year, they won't.)

But we have an industry of fear-mongers who either don't know the difference between "contains detectable trace amounts of radioactive elements" and "dangerous" - or don't care. Fear sells, after all.

Like anything dealing with nuclear power, I'm 99.99% sure that it is grossly exaggerated.

Firstly, As I understand it, if the corium would have entered that basement at most there would be a classsical, ordinary hydrogen explosion (such as in Fukushima). In no way would 3 km be flattened by that.

Probably there would have been more radioactive pollution, but the original release of radioactive material was already huge. And according to the WHO only 50 people died directly from the disaster and "only" 4000 from cancer aferwards. If the second explosion would release 10 times as much (and assuming death toll is proportional to it) you wouldn't even get neat the millions of deaths...

The original Cernobyl dust spread over most of Europe, apparently mushrooms in eastern Germany are slightly radioactive because of it. But for the rest you only had to wash the vegetables grown in your own garden.

And an other thing, 90% of the time there is a western wind in Europe, so Russia would likely have most of the trouble.

Ironically its not really that big. The bigger thing is how many people that would have fucked.

Like really it's insane.

The suits you see people wearing (the yellow or white sealed up deal with the mask) are anti-contamination suits. They do nothing to protect you from existing penetrating radiation, but they do a very good job (when used properly) at preventing the spread or ingestion of radioactive material (particularly particulates). If you stay in a field of radiation long enough to receive a lethal dose no suit will help you.

The radiation levels were so high the suits wouldn't have done much, if anything at all. I'm not an expert, but from I do know, these men basically volunteered on a suicide mission. Brave souls the lot of them

There was so much radiation near the reactor that no level of protection would save you.

We don't have radioactive proof suits now, depending on how much radiation is being emitted the only way to really protect yourself is behind meters of concrete, water, and lead. Gamma rays can travel through all materials (water, concrete, and lead are the best at slowing it down or reducing it's intensity) you can only lower your exposure but never fully eliminate it. The sun for example irradiates you during daytime

What about space suits? Aren't they designed to block radiation in the upper atmosphere and in space?

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There are reducing suits, but you need quite some amount of lead (3 cm?) to reduce it to a manageable level

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray#Shielding

To block out such huge amounts of radiation, you'd need massive lead walls. No suit would possibly protect you.

That's why radiation is so deadly. Gamma rays penetrate almost everything if not everything. Having hundreds of thousands of gamma rays penetrating a human body is pretty bad.

This guy accidentally caused a prompt critical nuclear fisson reaction which resulted in hard radiation. Blue glow (air ionization), heat wave, sour taste in mouth, intense burning sensation. Several moments later, vomiting. Massive and irreversible damage by the time they got to the hospital. Agonizing radiation-induced traumas over nine days; blisters, gangrene, total disintegration of the body.

That was probably less radiation than what these three suffered.

Had to look it up bc I was curious too. I frightened myself more than I expected. http://gizmodo.com/5928171/what-nuclear-radiation-does-to-your-body

It's the infamous "china syndrome", which would have been especially disastrous with the RBMK type reactors which were simply massive, tonnes of molten corium at thousands of degrees celsius collapsing the floor and falling into millions of gallons of water, turning it almost instantaneously into steam, without a doubt would be an incredibly massive explosion. Like this, but with much hotter stuff, and much more of it, and instead of a single drop of water, it would be millions of gallons of water:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGoYFBHLucA

And not killing half of Europe, but killing a million, and then making the surrounding area so radioactive that nothing could be grown or eaten or possibly even lived in without risk of cancer. It would all depend on which way the wind was blowing that day.

My dad was 2 short years too young at that time. Feels like a narrow escape, knowing what might have happened.

Really basically, the suits stop contamination. They allow you to exit the area and remove contaminants with ease. The respirators stop particulate matter entering the lungs.

There is nothing you can wear that will stop gamma radiation at such a high level. Shelters are made of steel and concrete for that reason.

1.) No time. 2.) Those suits even now are incredibly heavy and cumbersome. Swimming in it would be almost impossible. And I'm pretty sure they aren't waterproof. Plus they can only withstand so much radiation before they fail and the filters deteriorate.

Well, there are at least numerous accounts that these men were given the offer to refuse. Although I recall reading that one of the men, Alexie Ananenko, said something along the lines of "How could I refuse? I was the only one who knew where the valves were". And it's true that even asking someone to do this, even if you gave them the offer to refuse, is certainly putting them in a hell of a position. They couldn't possibly refuse, knowing that they would be regarded as a coward, that millions of lives, even their own, might perish because of their cowardice.

I had never even heard this story until I watched this BBC docudrama. They absolutely should be honored, but most people don't know about them. The only thing the west knows about molten nuclear corium hitting water and exploding is from the infamous movie The China Syndrome.

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Chernobyl disaster was because of an explosion in the reactor core that set fire to radioactive material, spreading it into the atmosphere and surrounding area. Meltdown was just a natural byproduct of exposed nuclear core without neutron absorbers or cooling, but not the disaster in itself.

3 Mile Island was a simple meltdown. And it could have been very disastrous, but at least they had a concrete containment building.

It's linked in the description on the youtube video - BBC's Surviving Disaster - Chernobyl Nuclear. And yes, all 55 minutes of it are this good.

Well they certainly tried back then, and all their robots failed, even the moon lander robot they tried to use to sweep up the reactor roof, and that was hardened against cosmic radiation. I don't know if our robots today are more radiation resistant.

"Radiation" is also vague.

Even if you got so much lead as to make it impossible to swim, it still wouldn't have helped. Some of the other liquidators who had to clean off the roof got lead suits and they still got cancer and radiation poisoning, and that was far far less radiation than what these guys had to endure.

That's not an exaggeration

As a starter: I work in the field of radiological protection for a governmental agency in the UK.

There's always one on Reddit ;)

It's strange how you can claim to work in the field of radiological protection and yet disagree with every nuclear physicist that has studied this sort of thing?

It sounds to me like you're coming at this from a reactionary place of "oh no they're making nuclear power sound bad".

I was once extremely skeptical of nuclear power, but the more I read about it, the safer I understood it to be. The fact that you're even talking about Hiroshima or Fallout 4 suggests you're probably sick of the anti-nuclear nutjobs. And don't worry, so am I.

But the fact is, back then, with their poor design of nuclear containment structures, the infamous "China Syndrome" was a real threat, and everyone's best estimates put a steam explosion at Chernobyl giving over a million people cancer, and rendering something between "Half of Ukraine", "An area the size of Pennsylvania", and "Half of Europe" uninhabitable, depending on whether you mean "You can't even walk there without risking cancer" or "You probably can't eat the food and drink the water from there for 20 years without risking cancer".

It absolutely baffles me how you can say these two things in the same paragraph:

but it would not have doomed Europe the slightest. It would have been an even bigger release, which would have contaminated even larger areas with Cesium with consequences that would have been exponentially more dire; but "that's it". A much larger controlled zone, a much bigger area locked down for a hundred year or so, but no massive deaths.

First of all, it all depends on how quickly all the neighboring cities would be evacuated. Roughly a million people wouldn't be killed instantly, but rather slowly, over decades, with difficult to trace cancer. Then of course it depends on which way the winds are blowing. You're right that there would be "A much larger controlled zone, a much bigger area locked down for a hundred year or so", and that's exactly what I'm saying. Maybe you misread the title?

Now it's one thing to quell irrational fears of nuclear power, and I'm glad you come from that standpoint. But I see this exact same sort of reactionary knee-jerk response to disaster in almost every industry - when a report comes out that "counterfeit parts" are being used in the aviation industry, you have every pilot jumping to say it isn't true, and it's just a scare tactic that's going to rile people up and make them afraid of flying. It is true, and it needs to be seriously considered, but that doesn't mean you should just lie to protect your own industry.

I could totally see it as a reference in the games. Like, maybe you go into a flooded basement with tons of rads, and there's three skeletons with oxygen tanks at the bottom, or something.

The roads are the dustiest.

Way back home.

It wasn't the Stalin administration anymore. Gorbachev was the least worst of the Soviet leaders, and the Perestroika was kicking in.

I don't think they work well in water, or in that much radiation...

They mostly just stop you from breathing in particles, IIRC.

It was the Soviet Union in 1986, not in the 1930s.

Perestroika, comrade.

A radiation suit would have helped too.

More like "Yes but we will save millions of lifes so it will be worth it."

The fuck? Are you 12?

They did, the radiation cooked it.

EDIT: Apparently they did, it was destroyed in the initial explosion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#China_syndrome

However, the initial explosion had broken the control circuitry which allowed the pool to be emptied.

Seriously? Don't you think it's a bit late to be armchair quarterbacking this disaster?

Radiation cooked everything, plus explosion, lava/corium melting everything, etc. Probably damaged it too