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Speaker 1: Imagine you're walking alone through a really dense, dark forest.

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Speaker 2: Okay, setting a spooky scene right out of the gate.

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Speaker 1: I like it. Well, just picture the air is entirely still.

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It's that kind of quiet that literally makes your ears ring.

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Speaker 2: You know, oh yeah, the sensory deprivation kind.

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Speaker 1: Of quiet exactly. And suddenly, cutting right through that silence,

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you hear this frantic, jittery sound.

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Speaker 2: Like an animal.

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Speaker 1: No, not at all. It's high pitched, almost like a

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cassette tape being played at double or maybe triple speed.

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Speaker 2: That is deeply unsettling, right.

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Speaker 1: It doesn't sound human. It definitely doesn't sound like any

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animal you've ever heard.

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Speaker 2: So you freeze, naturally, flight or freeze response yep.

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Speaker 1: And then, without a single sound being spoken aloud, a

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voice echoes directly inside your head saying don't be afraid.

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Speaker 2: Which I mean is the universal cinematic queue for absolute terror.

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Speaker 1: Totally.

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Speaker 2: That scenario plays out like the cold open of some

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mid century science fiction thriller, right before the ominous orchestral

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music swells.

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Speaker 1: It really does. But here's the chilling reality for you

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listening right now. That isn't a script from some Hollywood archive.

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That is a real reported encounter from the dense woods

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of West Virginia, which is just why it is. And

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it's just one of the countless bizarre, terrifying and someone's

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completely unexplained realities that we found ourselves tangled in ever

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since humanity decided to crack open the atom.

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Speaker 2: It really opened Pandora's box.

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Speaker 1: It absolutely did. Welcome to thrilling threads everyone, a really.

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Speaker 2: Profound topic to dissect today.

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Speaker 1: Oh for sure. Today we are taking you, our dedicated listener, who,

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by the way, sent us this massive, fascinating stack of

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declassified reports and biological surveys, on a deep journey into

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the invisible, terrifying aftermath of the atomic age.

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Speaker 2: The sheer scale of what happens when we manipulate the

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fundamental building blocks of the universe creates these ripples that

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we are literally still trying to map.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, we spent the whole week pouring over the sources

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you provide, and our mission today is to pull the

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thread on those unexplained discoveries.

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Speaker 2: The bizarre mutations, the historical tragedies.

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Speaker 1: Exactly, and the chilling, unpredictable ways that nature responds when

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humans scramble its very DNA.

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Speaker 2: Setting the stage for this requires confronting the absolute duality

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of nuclear power. I mean, we're talking about a technology

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that is in many ways a utopian dream.

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Speaker 1: Right, because it's so efficient.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, you have this remarkably efficient energy source that releases

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practically zero greenhouse gases.

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Speaker 1: Which we desperately need.

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Speaker 2: Right, And it doesn't require the massive, continuous strip mining

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of raw materials in the way that coal or natural

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gas does. It provides a consistent baseline of energy.

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Speaker 1: So on paper, it looks perfect.

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Speaker 2: From a purely mathematical standpoint, it represents the absolute pinnacle

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of human scientific achievement.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, the utopian dream that comes with a very specific

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apocalyptic fine print.

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Speaker 2: That is the perfect way to put it. The fine

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print being a capacity for destruction so profound that it

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leaves scars on the earth.

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Speaker 1: Designed to last for millennia decades just isn't enough. It

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has to be thousands of years.

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Speaker 2: Right. When the containment fails, it doesn't just create a

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localized mess. It creates environments that become actively, invisibly hostile

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to the biological concept of life itself.

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Speaker 1: I want you to picture holding an invisible poison in

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the palm of your hand.

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Speaker 2: Okay, that's a terrifying visual.

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Speaker 1: But this isn't a chemical toxin that just burns your

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skin or attacks your nervous system. This is a poison

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that actively, meticulously rewrites the fundamental instructions of life.

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Speaker 2: It penetrates your cells and maliciously edits the blueprint.

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Speaker 1: Yes, that is the reality of the atomic age. And

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when faced with an invisible threat that can rewrite reality,

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humanity tends to start where we always start.

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Speaker 2: We invent monsters.

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Speaker 1: Ween invent monsters, It's what we do.

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Speaker 2: Inventing folklore is a deeply ingrained survival mechanism. I mean,

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when a society is faced with an incomprehensible threat, something

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you cannot see, smell, or fight off with a weapon

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like ionizing radiation, we instinctively construct physical avatars to represent it.

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Speaker 1: We need something to punch, basically.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, we require a shape for our fear so that

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we can process the anxiety.

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Speaker 1: And the ultimate manifestation of this is the legend of

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the Blackbird of Chernobyl.

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Speaker 2: Oh.

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Speaker 1: If this one is fascinating, The historical facts are etched

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in stone right. Reactor IOV explodes at one point two

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three am in April of nineteen eighty six, forcing the

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paniced to evacuation of over three hundred thousand.

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Speaker 2: People, a monumental disaster.

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Speaker 1: But in the days and weeks leading up to that

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exact moment, the people living and working near the plant

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started reporting something that sounds like it flew straight out

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of a medieval beastiary.

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Speaker 2: The primary accounts described this massive, mutated bird like creature.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, boasting a twenty foot wingspan.

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Speaker 2: A vaguely humanoid torso, and piercing glowing red eyes.

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Speaker 1: The glowing red eyes are such a specific visceral detail

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in these reports, and the psychological toll on the workers

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was immediate.

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Speaker 2: They were terrified totally.

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Speaker 1: Workers claim they were seeing this creature not just in

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the sky, but intruding into their dreams. The sightings hit

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a fever pitch right before the explosion.

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Speaker 2: And then during the disaster itself. Things got even weirder.

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Speaker 1: Right after the explosion, when the Soviet helicopters were dispatched

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on those doomed missions to drop sand into the burning core,

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Several surviving liquidators claimed they saw this massive, ominous silhouette

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gliding through the radioactive smoke plumes, and then the moment

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the disaster was fully realized, the sightings completely ceased, just stopped.

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Speaker 2: The sudden cessation of the sightings is the absolute key

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to understanding the phenomenon. The creature operates purely as a

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psychological harbinger of doom, like.

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Speaker 1: A warning siren made of feathers.

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Speaker 2: Exactly. The workers at Chernobyl were living under immense subconscious stress.

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They were operating a flawed RBMK reactor in a culture

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of intense Soviet secrecy and massive quotas.

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Speaker 1: So their brains were basically picking up on the microques

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of an impending disaster.

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Speaker 2: Yes, if we look at the historical parallels and the

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sources you provided, the architecture of this myth is literally

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identical to the Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

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Speaker 1: Oh Man, the Point Pleasant case from the late sixties

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maps onto Chernobyl perfectly, it really does. Witnesses in West

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Virginia describe an almost identical entity, you know, the massive wings,

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the human like posture, the hypnotic red eyes, and.

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Speaker 2: The timing is what's crucial there too.

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Speaker 1: Exactly. The community was whipped into a frenzy of sightings

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right up until December fifteenth, nineteen sixty eight. That was

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the day the Silverbridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing forty.

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Speaker 2: Six people, a horrific tragedy.

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Speaker 1: And the second the bridge fell, the mothman vanished from

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the local zeitgeist, just gone.

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Speaker 2: So we have to analyze what these creatures actually represent.

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Biologically speaking, an environmental stressor does not cause sudden, massive

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gigantism in avian species.

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Speaker 1: Right A bird isn't going to suddenly grow a twenty

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foot wing span because of a bad reactor.

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Speaker 2: Radiation does not spontaneously generate that. But psychologically, these stories

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serve as a collective pressure valve that makes a lot

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of sense. The idea of an invisible splitting atom or

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a microscopic flaw and a bridge suspension is incredibly difficult

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for the human brain to conceptualize, let alone fear effectively.

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Speaker 1: Yes, you can't see it exactly.

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Speaker 2: A giant, red eyed harbinger of death, however, is a threat.

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We intuitively understand it provides a focal point for diffuse

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overwhelming anxiety.

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Speaker 1: But let me ask you this. If our brains are

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inventing these giant bird monsters just to process the trauma

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of an invisible threat, what happens when the actual physical

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reality of the disaster starts producing things that look exactly

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like our nightmares.

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Speaker 2: That's where it gets truly disturbing.

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Speaker 1: Because some of the stories that emerge from the aftermath

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aren't just sightings of distant birds. Some are claustrophobic, violent,

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and deeply disturbing, like the Ukrainian elevator spider from your

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research stack.

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Speaker 2: Oh, the elevator's spider narrative is a masterclass in modern

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urban legend, acting as a conduit for nuclear trauma.

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Speaker 1: It's the kind of story that makes you want to

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take the stairs for the rest of your life.

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Speaker 2: Honestly, I'll blame you.

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Speaker 1: So the setup is this brutalist apartment building in Ukraine

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in the years following the Chernobyl disaster. Two residents are

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found dead inside a stalled elevator. The coroner's report allegedly

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notes extreme blood loss. But the strange part is the environment.

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The elevator car is completely pristine, no signs of a struggle, none,

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There is no blood spatter anywhere. The victims just have

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these deep symmetrical puncture wounds on their necks, as if

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their circulatory systems had been surgically siphon.

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Speaker 2: Which naturally immediately primes the local population to suspect supernatural involvement.

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Speaker 1: Oh yes, specifically vampirism, and the terror absolutely paralyzes the building.

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Nobody will use the elevator as you would expect, so

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the local police dispatched two detectives to investigate. By the

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third day, these detectives are writing this janky, dimly lit

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elevator and it violently halts between the fifth and sixth.

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Speaker 2: Floors, the classic horror movie setup literally.

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Speaker 1: They hear a rhythmic, metallic clicking noise emanating from the

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roof of the car. They managed to pry off a

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ceiling panel, shine a heavy flashlight up into the dark,

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greasy shaft.

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Speaker 2: What do they see?

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Speaker 1: They see a foot long jet black shape scuttling rapidly

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down the cables toward them.

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Speaker 2: A massively overgrown, erected a.

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Speaker 1: Foot long spider that aggressively lunges into the car. One

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detective unholsters his weapon and fires blindly, but the spider

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overpowers his partner.

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Speaker 2: It supposedly drained his fluids in seconds.

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Speaker 1: Right when the heavily armed back up finally breaches the

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elevator doors, they find the surviving detective backed into a corner,

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completely catatonic with terror.

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Speaker 2: Understandably, his partner.

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Speaker 1: Is dead and this massive mutated spider is standing over

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the body. The police sweep the shaft and find it

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completely infested with unhatched pulsing egg sacks.

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Speaker 2: Oh that's horrific.

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Speaker 1: The local authorities supposedly had to requisition milliitary flamethrowers to

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incinerate the entire shaft.

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Speaker 2: The local lore surrounding that event immediately attributed the spider's

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monstrous size and vampiric behavior to the radioactive fallout drifting

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over from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

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Speaker 1: But let's look at the biology here. I mean, could

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an influx of ionizing radiation actually cause a common house

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spider to mutate into a foot long, blood drinking apex predator.

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Speaker 2: The short answer no, The mechanics of radiation exposure make

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that scenario entirely fictional.

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Speaker 1: Really, no giant spiders.

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Speaker 2: I know, it ruins the movie plot. We have this

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lingering cultural trope heavily popularized by nineteen fifties atomic horror

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cinema like the movie them, that radiation acts as a

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generic growth serum for insects.

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Speaker 1: And arachnets, like they just get bigger and angrier exactly.

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Speaker 2: But the scientific reality is the exact opposite. High doses

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of radiation cause fatal cellular breakdown. It just melts them, yes,

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and lower chronic doses typically stunt growth, cause severe deformities

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or render the organism sterile.

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Speaker 1: So they definitely don't grow to the size of a dog,

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not at all.

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Speaker 2: The biological constraints of a spider's respiratory system physically prevent it.

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They rely on book lungs and passive diffusion. They couldn't

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oxygen eate a body that size, regardless of their genetic mutations.

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Speaker 1: So the myth of the giant spider survives precisely because

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the trauma of Chernobyl was so massive.

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Speaker 2: It feels deeply unjust if a disaster of that magnitude

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doesn't produce tangible physical monsters.

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Speaker 1: That's a great point. We need the environment to look

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as broken as we feel inside, and we see this

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projection happening globally, not just in Ukraine. Oh, definitely look

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at the mossman sightings in Florida. Back in nineteen seventy

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eight at Red Reef Park, a couple walking the beach

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at dusk reported seeing what they thought was a man

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in a bulky raincoat.

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Speaker 2: But it wasn't a raincoat.

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Speaker 1: No. When the figure stood up, it was a seven

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foot tall, lumbering humanoid covered entirely in trailing Spanish moss

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that seemed to be growing directly out of its flesh.

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Speaker 2: Let me guess it had glowing red eyes.

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Speaker 1: It had bright red eyes. It's a recurring motif we

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just can't ignore. And it supposedly left a pungent clump

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of moss behind on the sand when it fled.

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Speaker 2: The projection of our anxieties onto the environment extends into

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the digital age as well.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like the flying flesh carrot.

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Speaker 2: The phenomenon documented around twenty nineteen on Japanese and Korean

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hiking forms exactly. It perfectly illustrates how our modern fears manifest.

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Speaker 1: I still can't get over the naming convention of the

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flying flesh carrot. I mean, it sounds so absurd.

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Speaker 2: It does, but the eyewitness accounts are incredibly eerie.

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Speaker 1: Hikers in remote deep forest trails describe seeing a silent,

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floating mass. They described it as hovering between the appearance

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of a brightly colored overgrown root vegetable and a raw,

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pulsating chunk of muscle tissues.

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Speaker 2: Disgusting.

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Speaker 1: Truly, it didn't have wings or propulsion. It simply drifted

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silently through the canopy, completely defying gravity and basic biology.

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Speaker 2: The absurdity of the name masks of very deep seated

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modern agasnxiety. Oh so well. These cryptids, the mossman, the

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hovering flesh, the giant spiders, they're all symptomatic of how

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we view the natural world post atomic age.

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Speaker 1: Like it's turned against us.

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Speaker 2: Exactly Prior to the splitting of the atom, the wilderness

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was something to be tamed or feared for its natural

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predators like bears or wolves, normal things. Right now, there

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is a subconscious expectation that because we have fundamentally polluted

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the very building blocks of the Earth, nature is no

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longer just wild. It is becoming alien.

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Speaker 1: Like we broke the rules, so now nature is breaking

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the rules.

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Speaker 2: Precisely, we expect the flora and fauna to warp into hostile,

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unrecognizable configurations as retribution for our technological overreach.

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Speaker 1: Man, we spend all this narrative energy inventing vampire spiders

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and telepathic hovering meat because we are terrified of what

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we've done. We are, but the truly sobering part of

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your research is that we don't actually need to invent

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monsters at all. No, we really don't, because what radiation

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actually does to buy all, like the microscopic, chaotic ways

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it breaks the rules of nature, is far stranger and

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infinitely more tragic than any folklore we could ever dream up.

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Speaker 2: The reality of radiation exposure is rooted in microscopic chaos,

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not cinematic gigantism.

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Speaker 1: So what actually happens.

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Speaker 2: To understand the true horror of the exclusion zones, we

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have to look at the exact mechanism of the immediate

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biological scramble.

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Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into the science of it.

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Speaker 2: We need to see what happens at the cellular level

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when a living organism is forced to inhabit a highly

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radioactive environment.

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Speaker 1: Let's break down that mechanism, because we aren't talking about

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stepping into the immediate core of a detonating bomb where

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things are instantly vaporized, right, No, we are.

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Speaker 2: Talking about the long term reality of living in the fallout.

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When soil, air, and groundwater are contaminated with radioactive isotopes

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like caesium one thirty seven or strontium ninety, they emit ionizing.

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Speaker 1: Radiation then what does that do well?

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Speaker 2: These emissions alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. They

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act like sub atomic.

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Speaker 1: Bullets 's abotomic bullets.

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Speaker 2: Yes, they possess enough energy to detach electrons from atoms

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or molecules. When one of these microscopic bullets passes through

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a living cell, it physically tears through the DNA double helix.

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Speaker 1: So it's actually severing the rungs of the DNA ladder precisely.

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Speaker 2: It causes double strand breaks in the genetic code. Now

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the cell isn't immediately destroyed.

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Speaker 1: It tries to fix itself.

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Speaker 2: It does. It recognizes the damage and frantically attempts to

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repair the severed strands through a process called non homologous enjoining.

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Speaker 1: That sounds complicated.

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Speaker 2: It's basically cellular triage, but the repair mechanism is panicked

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and sloppy. It frequently glues the wrong ends together, completely

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scrambling the sequence.

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Speaker 1: Like putting a puzzle back together blindfolded.

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Speaker 2: Exactly. The architectural blueprint that tells a plant how to

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synthesize chlorophyll, or tells an animal embryo how to develop

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a nervous system, becomes corrupted with catastrophic errors.

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Speaker 1: That cellular panic explains the bizarre agricultural anomalies documented by

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researchers who plant it excs experimental wheat inside the Chernobyl

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exclusion zone.

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Speaker 2: Yes, the wheat studies are fascinating.

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Speaker 1: The seeds they use looked entirely normal, but once planted

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in the heavily irradiated soil, the resulting growth was pure chaos.

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Speaker 2: It didn't grow like normal wheat at all.

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Speaker 1: Not even close. The wheat began mutating at a staggering

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rate up to six times higher than control crops. Some

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stalks rocket it upward, growing incredibly fast and thick well.

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Speaker 2: Others barely grew at all.

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Speaker 1: Right, Neighboring seeds in the exact same soil barely sprouted,

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producing these stunted, blackened roots, and a massive percentage of

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the crop was entirely sterile, just incapable of producing seeds

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of their own.

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Speaker 2: The persistence of those mutations is the truly alarming factor here.

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Speaker 1: Because it's still happening today.

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Speaker 2: Yes, we are seeing these chaotic growth patterns decades after

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the initial disaster. The environment inside the exclusion zone might

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appear green and lush from an aerial.

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Speaker 1: Photograph like nature is healing right.

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Speaker 2: But at a microscopicular level, the flora is engaged in

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a desperate, losing battle to maintain its genetic integrity.

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Speaker 1: We saw the exact same botanical madness immediately following the

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bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in nineteen forty five, too.

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Speaker 2: The historical records on that are heartbreaking.

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Speaker 1: The survivors the Hibakusha documented how the flora in the

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ruined city went completely haywire in the months following the.

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Speaker 2: Blasts, huge mutations.

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Speaker 1: Widespread reports of monstrously oversized sunflowers erupting from the irradiated ash.

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But they weren't just big. Their stems would fork and

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split unpredictably, growing multiple malformed flowerheads.

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Speaker 2: It's a complete breakdown of cellular organization.

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Speaker 1: And the morning lorries they are traditionally these delicate, perfectly

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symmetrical blooms, but they grew petals that were so thick

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and misshapen they look like twisted ribbons of.

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Speaker 2: Wax, a phenomenon that was meticulously documented again sixty six

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years later in the wake of the twenty eleven Fukushima disaster.

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Speaker 1: The daisies right, yes.

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Speaker 2: Roughly one hundred miles outside the primary tsunami triggered meltdown zone.

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Residents and biologists began finding fields of severely mutated daisies.

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Speaker 1: One hundred miles away, and they're still mutating.

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Speaker 2: The stems were flattened, thickened, and twisted. They looked less

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like a plant and more like a green caterpillar.

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Speaker 1: Oh, that's creepy.

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Speaker 2: The flower heads were elongated, with petals fused together in

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chaotic clusters. It gave the appearance of multiple daisies violently

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mashed into a single, grotesque organism.

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Speaker 1: And there's a specific botanical term for that mutation, which

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is fascinating. It's called fasciation, right.

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Speaker 2: Fasciation or cresting. It occurs when the apical maristom, which

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is the growing tip of the plant, usually a single

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concentrated point, becomes elongated perpendiculable.

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Speaker 1: So it grows wide instead of.

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Speaker 2: Essentially yes, it produces flattened, ribbon like or elaborately contorted tissue.

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It is a severe malfunction of the plant's hormonal growth signals.

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Speaker 1: Can that happen normally.

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Speaker 2: It can occasionally be caused by frost or bacterial infections

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in normal environments, but the sheer volume and severity. A

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fasciation observed around Fukushima clearly points to the radioactive fallout

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violently disrupting the cellular division of the plants.

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Speaker 1: I read those reports and I just think about how

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incredibly difficult gardening is under pristine, perfect conditions.

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Speaker 2: It's tough enough keeping a houseplant.

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Speaker 1: Alive, exactly. Plants are so sensitive to slight changes in

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pH or sunlight. So imagine trying to cultivate life in

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a landscape where the soil itself is actively hostile dictating

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this chaotic, monstrous, unpredictable growth.

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Speaker 2: It feels deeply apocalyptic.

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Speaker 1: It really does. And if that is what ionizing radiation

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does to a relatively simple organism like a daisy, the

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scars it leaves on the animal kingdom are just heartbreakingly visceral.

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Speaker 2: Because animals rely on incredibly complex, interconnected biological systems.

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Speaker 1: Right nervous systems, blood flow.

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Speaker 2: Intricate organ development, the embryological error is caused by radiation

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manifest as severe physical deformities. The margin for error in

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analgestation is incredibly narrow.

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Speaker 1: The most shocking examples of this and the sources was

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the discovery made back in two thousand and four at

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the Green Umbrella Nursery in the UK.

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Speaker 2: Oh the frog case.

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Speaker 1: Yes, a student was playing in the garden and found

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what they initially thought was a cluster of three frogs

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huddled tightly together.

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Speaker 2: But it wasn't a cluster no.

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Speaker 1: Upon closer inspection, it was a single, fully mature frog

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that had developed three distinct heads and six fully formed legs.

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Speaker 2: A polycephalic mutation of that extreme nature surviving to adulthood

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in the wild is profoundly rare.

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Speaker 1: A biology professor from the Open University examined the photographs

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and stated it was an almost unheard of biological anomaly.

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Speaker 2: I bet they wanted to study it.

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Speaker 1: They did. The staff placed the frog in a secure

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glass tank overnight to wait for researchers, but by morning

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the creature had managed to escape.

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Speaker 2: Of course it did.

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Speaker 1: The joke is that if you have three brains, you

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can probably figure out the latch on a terrarium. But

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the grim reality of that story is.

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Speaker 2: The geography ah location.

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Speaker 1: Look, that nursery was located directly adjacent to a decommission

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nuclear power facility.

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Speaker 2: The proximity to the decommission plant is the critical variable.

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It strongly indicates that localized environmental pollution, likely a leak

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of radioactive isotopes into the groundwater, interfered with the frog's

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embryogenesis while it was still an egg in the pond.

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Speaker 1: Because frogs are super sensitive to that stuff.

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Speaker 2: Extremely amphibians are incredibly sensitive to environmental toxins because of

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their permeable skin and aquatic developmental stages. Makes sense, and

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we have massive tragic data sets from the actual nuclear

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blast zones that corroborate this kind of catastrophic developmental failure.

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Speaker 1: Like the wildlife studies conducted in the ruins of Hirishma,

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they cataloged a horrifying array of abnormalities. The rabbits specifically, yes,

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local rabbit populations began birthing litters entirely missing their external ears,

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just smooth heads.

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Speaker 2: And the avian population suffered.

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Speaker 1: Similarly, birds that managed to hatch from irradiated egg survived

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with yearly twisted, asymmetrical beaks that made feeding nearly impossible,

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or they were born missing entirely functional feet.

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Speaker 2: The longitudinal studies coming out of Fukushima are equally grim

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and perhaps more scientifically rigorous given modern technology.

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Speaker 1: What did they find there?

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Speaker 2: Entomologists studying the pale grass blue butterflies in the region

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discovered that a staggering twenty eight percent of the population

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suffered from severe crippling.

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Speaker 1: Deformities, almost a third of them.

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Speaker 2: Yes, we're talking about malformed antenna, twisted and stunted legs,

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and completely altered asymmetrical wing patterns that destroyed their ability

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to fly or mate.

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Speaker 1: That's devastating.

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Speaker 2: Furthermore, primatologists studying the local troops of Japanese macaqus found

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that monkeys born after the meltdown possessed significantly smaller brains

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and head circumferences compared to macaques living in unaffected regions.

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They also exhibited delayed overall physical growth and suffered from

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severe chronic anemia.

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Speaker 1: The radiation acts as this brutal, invisible equalizer. It doesn't

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discriminate between a delicate butterfly and a complex primate.

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Speaker 2: It affects everything.

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Speaker 1: It seeps into every single trophic level of the ecosystem,

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completely dismantling the harmony of nature. The predators lose their

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prey because the prey can't reproduce.

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Speaker 2: And the plants lose their pollinators because the butterflies can't fly.

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Speaker 1: Exactly you end up with these massive, silent voids in

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biodiversity because the most sensitive species are simply erased from

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the map.

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Speaker 2: However, the natural world abhors a vacuum.

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Speaker 1: It does it always bounces back somehow.

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Speaker 2: Adaptation is arguably the most relentless, unstoppable force on the planet.

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While radiation undoubtedly destroys countless sensitive species. Humanity's evacuation of

470
00:23:41,799 --> 00:23:47,519
these exclusion zones leaves behind massive completely untouched habitat because

471
00:23:47,559 --> 00:23:50,359
we just up and leave right and certain robust species

472
00:23:50,359 --> 00:23:54,000
don't just survive the residual fallout. They rush in to

473
00:23:54,119 --> 00:23:57,480
exploit the lack of human interference. They weaponize the wasteland.

474
00:23:57,799 --> 00:24:01,000
Speaker 1: This is where the story pivots from tragic to absolutely wild,

475
00:24:01,160 --> 00:24:04,559
because the ultimate example of nature reclaiming a toxic throne

476
00:24:05,039 --> 00:24:06,519
has to be the Fukushima boars.

477
00:24:06,519 --> 00:24:08,240
Speaker 2: Oh, the bores are a massive problem.

478
00:24:08,440 --> 00:24:12,079
Speaker 1: When the Japanese government established the twenty kilometers strict exclusion

479
00:24:12,160 --> 00:24:16,440
zone in twenty eleven, the human population vanished overnight, and

480
00:24:16,480 --> 00:24:19,519
the local wild boars looked around, saw empty streets and

481
00:24:19,559 --> 00:24:21,599
abandoned farms and just took over.

482
00:24:21,880 --> 00:24:23,160
Speaker 2: It was free real estate for them.

483
00:24:23,279 --> 00:24:27,400
Speaker 1: In the span of just five years, their population absolutely exploded,

484
00:24:27,559 --> 00:24:31,799
rocketing from around three thousand individuals to over thirteen thousand.

485
00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:36,039
Speaker 2: The removal of their primary apex predator, which is human hunters,

486
00:24:36,640 --> 00:24:40,039
allowed them to breed entirely unchecked, and they got bold,

487
00:24:40,279 --> 00:24:44,440
very bold. Their behavior changed. They became incredibly brazen, moving

488
00:24:44,480 --> 00:24:47,440
out of the forests and making their dens directly inside

489
00:24:47,480 --> 00:24:49,079
abandoned homes and storefronts.

490
00:24:49,119 --> 00:24:52,960
Speaker 1: The economic and logistical nightmare they've caused is staggering. We're

491
00:24:52,960 --> 00:24:55,440
talking about nearly a million dollars in damage to the

492
00:24:55,440 --> 00:24:57,960
farmlands sitting on the edge of the exclusion.

493
00:24:57,559 --> 00:24:59,079
Speaker 2: Zone because they're rooting the crops.

494
00:24:59,240 --> 00:25:03,359
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these are aren't timid animals. They are aggressive, massive,

495
00:25:03,720 --> 00:25:06,480
and completely unhuntable in any traditional sense.

496
00:25:06,559 --> 00:25:07,599
Speaker 2: Look ause of the contamination.

497
00:25:07,880 --> 00:25:11,640
Speaker 1: Right before the meltdown, local hunters controlled the population and

498
00:25:11,680 --> 00:25:15,599
the meat was sold or consumed. But now, because these

499
00:25:15,640 --> 00:25:19,519
boers spend all day rooting through the contaminated soil, eating

500
00:25:19,559 --> 00:25:23,799
irradiated roots, tubers, and mushrooms, their muscle tissue is completely

501
00:25:23,839 --> 00:25:25,759
saturated with seasion one thirty seven.

502
00:25:25,920 --> 00:25:30,279
Speaker 2: Their meat is profoundly toxic. It cannot be legally sold, transported,

503
00:25:30,400 --> 00:25:31,640
or consumed.

504
00:25:31,200 --> 00:25:35,079
Speaker 1: Exactly so there is zero economic or dietary incentive for

505
00:25:35,160 --> 00:25:38,359
hunters to go after them. The local governments are literally

506
00:25:38,440 --> 00:25:41,759
forced to pay bounties to specialized culling teams just to

507
00:25:41,839 --> 00:25:42,799
keep the numbers down.

508
00:25:42,880 --> 00:25:46,160
Speaker 2: But killing them creates an entirely new logistical nightmare.

509
00:25:46,200 --> 00:25:48,559
Speaker 1: How do you even dispose of a radioactive bore?

510
00:25:48,759 --> 00:25:52,200
Speaker 2: You can't just leave a massive, highly radioactive carcass rotting

511
00:25:52,200 --> 00:25:54,200
in the woods, and you can't process them in a

512
00:25:54,200 --> 00:25:57,920
normal facility, right The government had to build specialized, heavily

513
00:25:57,960 --> 00:26:03,200
shielded incineration facilities specifically designed to burn radioactive animal bodies,

514
00:26:03,640 --> 00:26:07,279
which is a massive, dangerous and incredibly expensive headache.

515
00:26:07,400 --> 00:26:11,240
Speaker 1: That is insane, just giant ovens for radioactive pigs.

516
00:26:11,359 --> 00:26:16,240
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, we see a remarkably similar ecological phenomenon occurring

517
00:26:16,240 --> 00:26:18,920
in the waterways surrounding Chernobyl.

518
00:26:18,519 --> 00:26:19,559
Speaker 1: The catfish Right.

519
00:26:19,720 --> 00:26:23,240
Speaker 2: Yes, the reactor cooling ponds and the Pripiet River are

520
00:26:23,279 --> 00:26:28,599
heavily contaminated with radioactive sludge. From a conventional standpoint, you

521
00:26:28,599 --> 00:26:31,559
would assume those waters would be entirely devoid of.

522
00:26:31,559 --> 00:26:33,599
Speaker 1: Life because it's toxic soup.

523
00:26:33,920 --> 00:26:36,920
Speaker 2: Right, But because the water is completely off limits to

524
00:26:36,960 --> 00:26:40,559
commercial and recreational fishing, and because there are no higher

525
00:26:40,559 --> 00:26:44,880
aquatic predators left. The aquatic life that did survive has

526
00:26:44,920 --> 00:26:46,200
adapted and thrived.

527
00:26:46,519 --> 00:26:49,440
Speaker 1: The videos of those cooling ponds from around twenty sixteen

528
00:26:49,519 --> 00:26:50,519
are mind blowing.

529
00:26:50,599 --> 00:26:51,359
Speaker 2: They're huge.

530
00:26:51,440 --> 00:26:55,960
Speaker 1: You have these absolutely massive, giant wells catfish swimming freely

531
00:26:56,039 --> 00:26:58,160
in water that would set off a Geiger counter from

532
00:26:58,160 --> 00:27:02,279
the shoreline. They look prehistoric, easily growing over eight feet long.

533
00:27:02,359 --> 00:27:03,799
Speaker 2: And people assumed they were mutants.

534
00:27:03,920 --> 00:27:07,240
Speaker 1: Of course, when the footage first leaked, the Internet immediately

535
00:27:07,279 --> 00:27:11,240
branded them as mutant monsterfish, assuming the radiation had caused

536
00:27:11,279 --> 00:27:12,799
them to grow to godzilla proportion.

537
00:27:12,920 --> 00:27:13,480
Speaker 2: But they aren't.

538
00:27:13,720 --> 00:27:17,240
Speaker 1: No biologists confirmed they aren't mutants at all. They are

539
00:27:17,359 --> 00:27:19,799
just regular catfish that have been allowed to live out

540
00:27:19,839 --> 00:27:23,240
their full natural lifespans, which can be over fifty years,

541
00:27:23,599 --> 00:27:27,400
with an unlimited food supply and zero human interference.

542
00:27:27,759 --> 00:27:31,359
Speaker 2: The catfish and the bores are thriving despite the radiation

543
00:27:32,000 --> 00:27:35,640
purely because the absence of humans is a greater benefit

544
00:27:35,680 --> 00:27:38,119
to their survival than the radiation is a detriment.

545
00:27:38,319 --> 00:27:40,279
Speaker 1: Humans are the bigger threat exactly.

546
00:27:41,039 --> 00:27:44,200
Speaker 2: However, if we want to discuss organisms that are thriving

547
00:27:44,240 --> 00:27:46,880
because of the radiation, we have to examine one of

548
00:27:46,960 --> 00:27:50,599
the most astonishing biological discoveries of the modern era.

549
00:27:51,079 --> 00:27:54,680
Speaker 1: You're talking about the organisms that are literally eating the radiation.

550
00:27:54,960 --> 00:27:55,160
Speaker 2: Yes.

551
00:27:55,319 --> 00:27:56,880
Speaker 1: When I read this part of the research, I had

552
00:27:56,880 --> 00:27:58,200
to read it three times to make sure I was

553
00:27:58,279 --> 00:27:59,359
understanding it correctly.

554
00:27:59,480 --> 00:28:02,160
Speaker 2: It sounds like science fiction, but it is pure reviewed

555
00:28:02,240 --> 00:28:06,599
cellular biology. Deep inside the ruined remains of Chernobyl's Reactor

556
00:28:06,680 --> 00:28:11,200
four and increasingly documented in the Fukushima Zone, scientists have

557
00:28:11,240 --> 00:28:15,039
discovered specific species of fungi that have fundamentally altered their

558
00:28:15,160 --> 00:28:16,640
energy processing mechanics.

559
00:28:17,079 --> 00:28:20,519
Speaker 1: Explain the exact mechanism of how a fungus eats radiation

560
00:28:20,960 --> 00:28:24,319
because it defies everything we learn in high school biology.

561
00:28:23,880 --> 00:28:29,839
Speaker 2: It really does. These specific radiotrophic fungi, such as Cladusporium Spherrospermum,

562
00:28:30,400 --> 00:28:32,640
contain extremely high concentrations of.

563
00:28:32,640 --> 00:28:35,200
Speaker 1: Melanin jelanin like in our skin, the.

564
00:28:35,119 --> 00:28:38,839
Speaker 2: Exact same dark pigment found in human skin, hair, and eyes,

565
00:28:39,160 --> 00:28:42,480
which typically serves to absorb and protect against ultraviolet light

566
00:28:42,519 --> 00:28:43,039
from the sun.

567
00:28:43,279 --> 00:28:46,079
Speaker 1: Okay, so it blocks radiation usually, right.

568
00:28:45,880 --> 00:28:49,160
Speaker 2: But these fungi are utilizing their melanin to perform a

569
00:28:49,200 --> 00:28:50,920
process called radiosynthesis.

570
00:28:51,000 --> 00:28:54,920
Speaker 1: So it's like photosynthesis, but with nuclear fallout instead of sunshine.

571
00:28:55,039 --> 00:28:59,000
Speaker 2: That is an excellent analogy. In photosynthesis, a plant uses

572
00:28:59,039 --> 00:29:01,960
the green pigment CLO to capture the energy from visible

573
00:29:02,039 --> 00:29:05,400
light photons, using that energy to get carbon dioxide and

574
00:29:05,440 --> 00:29:07,240
water into glucose.

575
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:08,359
Speaker 1: So it makes food from light.

576
00:29:08,759 --> 00:29:12,960
Speaker 2: Yes. In radiosynthesis, the fungi use their heavy melanin concentrations

577
00:29:13,039 --> 00:29:16,720
to capture highly toxic gamma radiation. The high energy gamma

578
00:29:16,799 --> 00:29:21,000
rays strike the melanin molecules, violently exciting the electrons within

579
00:29:21,039 --> 00:29:25,359
the pigment. The fungus then channels those excited high energy

580
00:29:25,400 --> 00:29:30,160
electrons through an electron transport chain, fundamentally converting the deadly

581
00:29:30,200 --> 00:29:34,440
ionizing radiation directly into chemical energy to fuel its own growth.

582
00:29:34,960 --> 00:29:39,079
Speaker 1: They are taking the exact microscopic bullets that tear human

583
00:29:39,160 --> 00:29:41,559
DNA apart and using them as a protein shake.

584
00:29:41,759 --> 00:29:42,599
Speaker 2: Basically, yes, that.

585
00:29:42,680 --> 00:29:45,440
Speaker 1: Is unbelievable, and it allows them to spread rapidly in

586
00:29:45,599 --> 00:29:48,400
environments that would be instantly lethal to almost any other

587
00:29:48,519 --> 00:29:49,720
carbon based life form.

588
00:29:49,799 --> 00:29:53,720
Speaker 2: It represents a staggering evolutionary pivot and the implications are.

589
00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:57,160
Speaker 1: Vast, which naturally leads to a massive question. If we

590
00:29:57,279 --> 00:30:00,559
know these fungi can literally consume gamma rae radiation and

591
00:30:00,599 --> 00:30:04,799
converted into biomass. Why aren't we blanketing these exclusion zones

592
00:30:04,839 --> 00:30:07,799
in massive industrial scale mushroom.

593
00:30:07,319 --> 00:30:09,079
Speaker 2: Farms like a biological scrubber.

594
00:30:09,240 --> 00:30:12,720
Speaker 1: Yeah, are we missing out on an incredible, naturally occurring

595
00:30:12,759 --> 00:30:16,039
cleanup mechanism to scrub the Earth of our nuclear mistakes.

596
00:30:16,079 --> 00:30:19,799
Speaker 2: The scientific community is intensely focused on studying these radiotrophic

597
00:30:19,839 --> 00:30:22,480
fungi for exactly those applications.

598
00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:22,559
Speaker 1: Are they testing.

599
00:30:22,720 --> 00:30:26,039
Speaker 2: There are active experiments on the International Space Station testing

600
00:30:26,079 --> 00:30:29,519
whether panels of this melanin rich fungus could be used

601
00:30:29,559 --> 00:30:33,319
to shield astronauts from deadly cosmic rays during deep space

602
00:30:33,359 --> 00:30:34,160
travel to Mars.

603
00:30:34,400 --> 00:30:35,759
Speaker 1: That is so cool it is.

604
00:30:36,079 --> 00:30:39,079
Speaker 2: However, using them to clean up a terrestrial exclusion zone

605
00:30:39,200 --> 00:30:42,920
is incredibly complex. The critical misunderstanding is that while the

606
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:46,640
fungi absorbed the radiation to grow, they do not transmute

607
00:30:46,759 --> 00:30:49,279
or erase the radioactive isotopes from existence.

608
00:30:49,519 --> 00:30:52,400
Speaker 1: Ah the law of conservation of mass. The caesium is

609
00:30:52,440 --> 00:30:54,680
still there, It's just inside the mushroom now.

610
00:30:54,839 --> 00:30:58,599
Speaker 2: Precisely, the radioactive heavy metals are simply incorporated into the

611
00:30:58,599 --> 00:31:02,240
fungal biomass. Matter still exists within the ecosystem, so it's

612
00:31:02,279 --> 00:31:05,960
not gone, just moved right. And as these hyper successful

613
00:31:06,039 --> 00:31:09,960
fungi spread across the contaminated landscape, they become the foundation

614
00:31:10,079 --> 00:31:12,680
for a new, highly toxic food web.

615
00:31:12,720 --> 00:31:17,240
Speaker 1: Which perfectly explains the terrifying explosion of spider populations documented

616
00:31:17,279 --> 00:31:20,519
in the Fukushima zone. The spiders, yeah, the radiation weakens

617
00:31:20,519 --> 00:31:23,759
the traditional prey insects. The flies and beetles become slower,

618
00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:28,960
neurologically disoriented, and physically deformed, making them vastly easier.

619
00:31:28,559 --> 00:31:30,519
Speaker 2: To catch, like a buffet for predators.

620
00:31:30,559 --> 00:31:34,759
Speaker 1: Exactly. The spiders, operating as the apex predators of the undergrowth,

621
00:31:35,079 --> 00:31:39,319
feast on these sluggish, irradiated insects, causing the irraqneve population

622
00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:40,359
to boom.

623
00:31:40,519 --> 00:31:43,200
Speaker 2: And every time a spider eats a contaminated insect, or

624
00:31:43,240 --> 00:31:47,160
an insect eats a radiotrophic fungus, the radioactive isotopes move

625
00:31:47,200 --> 00:31:49,359
one step higher up the food chain.

626
00:31:49,279 --> 00:31:52,480
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the most terrifying logistical problem of

627
00:31:52,519 --> 00:31:57,160
the atomic age. These thriving highly radioactive animals, the bores,

628
00:31:57,200 --> 00:32:00,920
the birds, the spiders, they don't understand you political borders.

629
00:32:01,119 --> 00:32:04,240
Speaker 2: They don't respect the invisible boundaries of a government mandated

630
00:32:04,279 --> 00:32:05,720
exclusion zone, they.

631
00:32:05,599 --> 00:32:10,279
Speaker 1: Migrate, and this introduces the critical ecological concept of bioaccumulation

632
00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:14,319
and the reality of a mobile radioactive food web. Let's

633
00:32:14,400 --> 00:32:17,480
break down bioaccumulation for the listener. Okay, how does an

634
00:32:17,519 --> 00:32:20,480
isotope travel from the soil of an exclusion zone into

635
00:32:20,519 --> 00:32:22,640
the broader, supposedly safe environment.

636
00:32:22,839 --> 00:32:25,799
Speaker 2: Let's trace the atomic path. When a nuclear meltdown or

637
00:32:25,799 --> 00:32:29,880
detonation occurs, heavy long lasting isotopes like caesium one thirty

638
00:32:29,920 --> 00:32:33,000
seven and strownium ninety are dispersed and eventually settled deep

639
00:32:33,039 --> 00:32:33,279
into the.

640
00:32:33,279 --> 00:32:34,599
Speaker 1: Soil like invisible dust.

641
00:32:34,920 --> 00:32:38,759
Speaker 2: Yes, plants absorb water and nutrients from that soil through

642
00:32:38,759 --> 00:32:42,720
their root systems. The cellular receptors in a plant's roots

643
00:32:43,039 --> 00:32:47,599
are incredibly efficient, but they can be tricked. Tricked how well.

644
00:32:47,920 --> 00:32:50,759
Caesium one thirty seven, for example, sits in the same

645
00:32:50,799 --> 00:32:54,000
column on the periodic table as potassium. It shares very

646
00:32:54,000 --> 00:32:55,279
similar chemical properties.

647
00:32:55,359 --> 00:32:57,200
Speaker 1: So the plant acts like a bouncer at a club

648
00:32:57,319 --> 00:32:59,519
and the caesium shows up with a fake id that

649
00:32:59,599 --> 00:33:00,920
says potassium.

650
00:33:00,960 --> 00:33:04,079
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. The atomic structure of the caesium is

651
00:33:04,119 --> 00:33:07,480
similar enough to pick the biological locks of the plant's roots. Wow,

652
00:33:08,160 --> 00:33:11,839
the plant absorbs the radioactive caesium, mistakenly believing it is

653
00:33:11,839 --> 00:33:16,039
gathering essential nutrients for growth. The plant is now fundamentally toxic.

654
00:33:16,319 --> 00:33:20,960
And then what next. A primary consumer, an herbivore like

655
00:33:21,000 --> 00:33:23,920
a rabbit or a der, eats that contaminated plant.

656
00:33:24,079 --> 00:33:26,319
Speaker 1: And the rabbit doesn't just pass the isotope through its

657
00:33:26,359 --> 00:33:28,119
digestive tract like normal waste.

658
00:33:28,200 --> 00:33:31,759
Speaker 2: No, Just as the plant mistook caesium for potassium, the

659
00:33:31,839 --> 00:33:35,200
rabbit's body mistakes the radioactive isotopes or essential minerals.

660
00:33:34,960 --> 00:33:36,039
Speaker 1: It builds its body with it.

661
00:33:36,359 --> 00:33:40,359
Speaker 2: Yes, strontium ninety is chemically similar to calcium, so the

662
00:33:40,440 --> 00:33:45,480
rabbit's body physically incorporates the radioactive strontium directly into its

663
00:33:45,480 --> 00:33:49,079
skeletal structure, its bones, and its teeth. The caesium is

664
00:33:49,119 --> 00:33:50,519
bound into the muscle tissue.

665
00:33:50,559 --> 00:33:51,359
Speaker 1: That's terrifying.

666
00:33:51,440 --> 00:33:54,400
Speaker 2: As a rabbit continues to forage on contaminated plants day

667
00:33:54,440 --> 00:33:58,400
after day, the concentration of these isotopes steadily builds up

668
00:33:58,440 --> 00:34:02,119
in its body. This defying effect is bioaccumulation.

669
00:34:02,480 --> 00:34:05,000
Speaker 1: And then a predator like a coyote or an eagle,

670
00:34:05,200 --> 00:34:10,199
eats the rabbit ingesting a massive, highly concentrated dose of radiation.

671
00:34:10,039 --> 00:34:12,800
Speaker 2: All at once, exactly. It multiplies up the chain.

672
00:34:12,719 --> 00:34:16,119
Speaker 1: And the true nightmare is that animals move. A perfect

673
00:34:16,159 --> 00:34:19,320
historical example of this is the Hanford site in Washington State.

674
00:34:19,519 --> 00:34:22,719
Speaker 2: Hanford is a fascinating and deeply concerning case study in

675
00:34:22,800 --> 00:34:24,280
environmental containment failure.

676
00:34:24,440 --> 00:34:29,039
Speaker 1: Hanford was this massive, highly classified plutonium production complex built

677
00:34:29,119 --> 00:34:31,800
during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project.

678
00:34:31,920 --> 00:34:33,239
Speaker 2: It was crucial to the war effort.

679
00:34:33,440 --> 00:34:36,239
Speaker 1: It manufactured the plutonium used in the Trinity Test and

680
00:34:36,280 --> 00:34:40,000
the fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It operated throughout

681
00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:42,920
the Cold War, and today it is recognized as one

682
00:34:42,920 --> 00:34:47,719
of the most toxic radioactively contaminated sites in the Western Hemisphere.

683
00:34:47,840 --> 00:34:52,039
Speaker 2: The Department of Energy and teams of wildlife biologists maintain

684
00:34:52,119 --> 00:34:56,159
a constant, active surveillance protocol on the local wildlife.

685
00:34:55,599 --> 00:34:58,239
Speaker 1: There, with a specific focus on the rabbit population.

686
00:34:58,360 --> 00:35:00,199
Speaker 2: Right. Yes, the rabbits are a huge.

687
00:35:00,400 --> 00:35:04,199
Speaker 1: Because these rabbits burrow into the contaminated soil, they forage

688
00:35:04,239 --> 00:35:09,400
on the irradiated vegetation. Their bodies bioaccumulate tremendous concentrations of

689
00:35:09,480 --> 00:35:12,119
caesium one thirty seven, and then they just hop right

690
00:35:12,199 --> 00:35:15,599
past the multimillion dollar security fences of the facility.

691
00:35:15,679 --> 00:35:17,639
Speaker 2: They don't know they're not supposed to leave exactly.

692
00:35:17,800 --> 00:35:22,039
Speaker 1: They become these little furry mobile radiotion dispensers. They spread

693
00:35:22,159 --> 00:35:27,079
highly radioactive particles across the broader public landscape through their droppings, which.

694
00:35:26,920 --> 00:35:29,119
Speaker 2: Spreads the contamination miles away.

695
00:35:29,280 --> 00:35:32,039
Speaker 1: Right, And when an eagle swoops down and catches one

696
00:35:32,039 --> 00:35:35,599
of these radioactive rabbits miles outside the zone, the contamination

697
00:35:35,800 --> 00:35:37,159
enters the broader food web.

698
00:35:37,440 --> 00:35:40,039
Speaker 2: It is an uncontrollable vector of contamination.

699
00:35:40,360 --> 00:35:42,800
Speaker 1: Think of it like dropping a heavy vial of red

700
00:35:42,800 --> 00:35:46,199
food coloring into the deep end of a massive swimming pool.

701
00:35:46,239 --> 00:35:48,800
You can watch the red cloud bloom in the water, but.

702
00:35:48,880 --> 00:35:50,639
Speaker 2: You can't just take a net and scoop the red

703
00:35:50,719 --> 00:35:51,360
die back out.

704
00:35:51,440 --> 00:35:54,400
Speaker 1: Nope. Especially once the fish starts swimming through the cloud

705
00:35:54,480 --> 00:35:57,639
and dragging the die across the entire pool, it seamlessly

706
00:35:57,679 --> 00:35:58,719
becomes part of the water.

707
00:35:58,920 --> 00:36:03,280
Speaker 2: That physical analogy is frighteningly accurate to the atmospheric reality

708
00:36:03,320 --> 00:36:06,400
we observed in Scandinavia following the Chernobyl disaster.

709
00:36:06,599 --> 00:36:10,360
Speaker 1: Wait, Scandinavia, that's so far away from Ukraine, it is.

710
00:36:10,760 --> 00:36:14,599
Speaker 2: But the radioactive plume from reactor I didn't stay in Ukraine.

711
00:36:15,159 --> 00:36:19,320
The prevailing winds blew massive clouds of fallout across northern Europe,

712
00:36:19,480 --> 00:36:22,079
where it eventually rained down and settled heavily into the

713
00:36:22,119 --> 00:36:23,480
soil of Norway.

714
00:36:23,079 --> 00:36:25,840
Speaker 1: And Sweden, where it was rapidly absorbed by the local

715
00:36:25,880 --> 00:36:26,519
fungi and.

716
00:36:26,639 --> 00:36:30,880
Speaker 2: Moss, specifically a type of lichen known as Cladonia rangiferina

717
00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:36,039
or reindeer moss. This specific lichen is unique because it

718
00:36:36,039 --> 00:36:37,880
doesn't possess a traditional root system.

719
00:36:37,960 --> 00:36:39,199
Speaker 1: How does it get nutrients?

720
00:36:39,559 --> 00:36:42,559
Speaker 2: It absorbs all of its nutrients and moisture directly from

721
00:36:42,599 --> 00:36:45,440
the air and the surface moisture. This makes it an

722
00:36:45,440 --> 00:36:49,719
incredibly efficient natural sponge for atmospheric radioactive.

723
00:36:49,239 --> 00:36:52,559
Speaker 1: Fallout, and reindeer moss is the absolute staple diet for

724
00:36:52,599 --> 00:36:54,559
the massive herds of reindeer in the region.

725
00:36:54,719 --> 00:36:58,480
Speaker 2: The reindeer grazed heavily on this saturated, highly contaminated lichen.

726
00:36:59,280 --> 00:37:01,519
The biomation was swift.

727
00:37:01,199 --> 00:37:04,119
Speaker 1: And severe, so the reindeer became radioactive.

728
00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:07,639
Speaker 2: Yes, the radiation levels and the reindeer meat spiked traumatically,

729
00:37:07,960 --> 00:37:12,559
rendering it entirely unsafe for human consumption. To understand the scale,

730
00:37:12,599 --> 00:37:14,760
we measure this in becherels.

731
00:37:14,599 --> 00:37:17,679
Speaker 1: Break down exactly what a becquerel is for everyone listening,

732
00:37:17,760 --> 00:37:20,320
because we see that term constantly in these reports.

733
00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:24,280
Speaker 2: A bekerel is the standard international unit of radioactivity. It

734
00:37:24,280 --> 00:37:27,719
measures the activity of a quantity of radioactive material. One

735
00:37:27,760 --> 00:37:30,039
bekerel is defined as the activity of a quantity of

736
00:37:30,119 --> 00:37:33,639
radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second.

737
00:37:33,719 --> 00:37:35,800
Speaker 1: So if we think of a decaying atom like a

738
00:37:35,840 --> 00:37:39,960
microscopic firecracker popping inside a cell, one beckerel means one

739
00:37:40,360 --> 00:37:43,079
tiny explosion every single second.

740
00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:47,719
Speaker 2: A very apt visualization. In a healthy, uncontaminated environment, the

741
00:37:47,760 --> 00:37:52,559
background radiation in food is negligible. But following Chernobyl, the

742
00:37:52,559 --> 00:37:55,800
reindeer meat in Norway was testing at over one hundred

743
00:37:55,880 --> 00:37:58,000
thousand bekerels per kilogram.

744
00:37:58,079 --> 00:37:59,800
Speaker 1: Oh my god, one hundred thousands.

745
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:02,840
Speaker 2: That means one hundred thousand sub atomic explosions were occurring

746
00:38:03,119 --> 00:38:06,079
within every kilogram of that meat every single second. That

747
00:38:06,199 --> 00:38:10,239
is insane. Even today, nearly four decades later, the crisis persists.

748
00:38:10,840 --> 00:38:13,320
The caesium has a long half life and it cycles

749
00:38:13,360 --> 00:38:17,039
through the ecosystem during certain weather patterns that cause massive

750
00:38:17,039 --> 00:38:20,199
fungal blooms. The reindeer gorge on the toxic mushrooms, and

751
00:38:20,199 --> 00:38:23,280
the radiation in their meat can suddenly spike back above

752
00:38:23,320 --> 00:38:25,599
two thousand becrels of per kilogram.

753
00:38:25,119 --> 00:38:29,239
Speaker 1: Which completely devastates the indigenous semi populations and local communities

754
00:38:29,239 --> 00:38:31,719
who have relied on reindeer herding for their economic and

755
00:38:31,760 --> 00:38:33,599
dietary survival for centuries.

756
00:38:33,599 --> 00:38:35,199
Speaker 2: It destroys their entire way of life.

757
00:38:35,239 --> 00:38:38,079
Speaker 1: It's an invisible horror. You can look at a healthy,

758
00:38:38,119 --> 00:38:40,920
majestic reindeer grazing on a snowy hill and you have

759
00:38:41,039 --> 00:38:44,639
absolutely no visual indication that its muscle tissue is coursing

760
00:38:44,679 --> 00:38:47,079
with toxic levels of caesium one thirty seven.

761
00:38:47,159 --> 00:38:50,159
Speaker 2: And this exact same invisible bioaccumulation is happening in the

762
00:38:50,159 --> 00:38:51,039
oceans right now.

763
00:38:51,320 --> 00:38:54,920
Speaker 1: The marine ecosystem surrounding the Fukushima Daichi plant is a

764
00:38:54,960 --> 00:38:59,280
primary area of ongoing concern and intense monitoring, very intense.

765
00:38:59,440 --> 00:39:01,639
In May of twenty twenty two, which is more than

766
00:39:01,639 --> 00:39:04,280
a full decade after the melt downe researchers in the

767
00:39:04,320 --> 00:39:07,840
Tokyo Electric Power Company, we're still conducting routine tests on

768
00:39:07,920 --> 00:39:10,639
marine life in the Inner Harbor, and they caught a

769
00:39:10,679 --> 00:39:11,920
black rockfish.

770
00:39:12,119 --> 00:39:15,159
Speaker 2: The species is critical here. The black rockfish is a

771
00:39:15,199 --> 00:39:17,039
benthic or bottom dwelling.

772
00:39:16,760 --> 00:39:20,320
Speaker 1: Species, right it spends its life hovering near the ocean floor,

773
00:39:20,519 --> 00:39:24,440
feeding directly off the sediment where the heavy radioactive caesium

774
00:39:24,440 --> 00:39:27,039
particles have settled over the last ten years, So it's.

775
00:39:26,920 --> 00:39:29,119
Speaker 2: Eating the most contaminated food possible.

776
00:39:29,480 --> 00:39:32,599
Speaker 1: To put this in perspective, the Japanese government's strict safety

777
00:39:32,599 --> 00:39:35,880
limit for radioactive caesium in food meant for human consumption

778
00:39:36,360 --> 00:39:39,679
is one hundred becquerels per kilogram.

779
00:39:39,079 --> 00:39:40,679
Speaker 2: Which is a reasonable safety margin.

780
00:39:40,880 --> 00:39:44,199
Speaker 1: But this single black rockfish was tested and found to

781
00:39:44,239 --> 00:39:47,400
contain levels one hundred and eighty times over that legal limit,

782
00:39:47,719 --> 00:39:50,159
And when they tested the sediment on the ocean floor

783
00:39:50,199 --> 00:39:53,760
where it was feeding, it contained over one hundred thousand

784
00:39:53,800 --> 00:39:57,400
becquerels per kilogram. It was a thousand times over the

785
00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:01,199
safety line. You literally cannot vacuum the ocean floor. The

786
00:40:01,239 --> 00:40:04,320
poison is permanently embedded in the geography.

787
00:40:03,880 --> 00:40:08,280
Speaker 2: And because radiation spreads so insidiously, hitching riodes on wind currents,

788
00:40:08,440 --> 00:40:13,440
ocean tides, migrating rabbits, and bottom feeding fish, human attempts

789
00:40:13,440 --> 00:40:16,400
to contain it frequently border on the deeply absurd or.

790
00:40:16,400 --> 00:40:18,920
Speaker 1: Worse, attempts to cover up the messes left by our

791
00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:20,079
past weapons testing.

792
00:40:20,320 --> 00:40:23,960
Speaker 2: Exactly when we transition from examining the resilience of nature

793
00:40:24,239 --> 00:40:27,559
to analyzing the response of human institutions, we move from

794
00:40:27,599 --> 00:40:30,079
biology into the realm of absolute hubris.

795
00:40:30,159 --> 00:40:33,599
Speaker 1: The sheer arrogance of our containment strategies is staggering. If

796
00:40:33,599 --> 00:40:35,599
you want a masterclass in hubris, we have to look

797
00:40:35,599 --> 00:40:36,440
at the Marshall.

798
00:40:36,119 --> 00:40:37,920
Speaker 2: Islands, specifically the Bikini Atoll.

799
00:40:38,079 --> 00:40:41,360
Speaker 1: Yes. Between nineteen forty eight and nineteen fifty eight, during

800
00:40:41,360 --> 00:40:43,719
the height of the Cold War arms race, the United

801
00:40:43,719 --> 00:40:48,440
States military commandeered this pristine, vibrant Pacific paradise and used

802
00:40:48,440 --> 00:40:52,039
it as a remote testing ground for forty three distinct nuclear.

803
00:40:51,639 --> 00:40:54,159
Speaker 2: Weapons, the most infamous of which was the Castle Bravo

804
00:40:54,199 --> 00:40:55,440
test in nineteen fifty four.

805
00:40:55,760 --> 00:40:59,719
Speaker 1: Castle Bravo was a catastrophic miscalculation. It was a first

806
00:40:59,760 --> 00:41:03,719
delay verable hydrogen bomb, and the physicists wildly underestimated the

807
00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:05,559
yield of the lithium deuteride fuel.

808
00:41:05,679 --> 00:41:06,920
Speaker 2: They thought it would be much smaller.

809
00:41:07,440 --> 00:41:11,519
Speaker 1: They expected a five megaton blast. It detonated with the

810
00:41:11,559 --> 00:41:17,400
force of fifteen megatons, completely vaporizing three entire islands, blowing

811
00:41:17,440 --> 00:41:20,360
a crater a mile wide into the ocean floor and

812
00:41:20,400 --> 00:41:24,880
sending a massive plume of highly radioactive ash into the atmosphere, which.

813
00:41:24,800 --> 00:41:28,199
Speaker 2: Rained down on the surrounding inhabited atolls and a Japanese

814
00:41:28,239 --> 00:41:31,760
fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon Number five. They completely,

815
00:41:31,800 --> 00:41:34,559
irrevocably decimated the ecosystem.

816
00:41:34,079 --> 00:41:37,760
Speaker 1: And the subsequent remediation effort, launched decades later, stands as

817
00:41:37,800 --> 00:41:40,840
a prime example of governmental half measures in the face

818
00:41:40,880 --> 00:41:42,320
of deep geological trauma.

819
00:41:42,440 --> 00:41:43,880
Speaker 2: It was a band aid on a bullet wound.

820
00:41:44,119 --> 00:41:47,719
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, facing mounting international pressure, the US

821
00:41:47,840 --> 00:41:50,400
government decides they need to clean up the Marshall Islands

822
00:41:50,440 --> 00:41:52,800
so the displaced indigenous population can return.

823
00:41:52,920 --> 00:41:53,599
Speaker 2: So what did they do?

824
00:41:53,960 --> 00:41:57,400
Speaker 1: They allocate roughly one hundred million dollars for this grand operation.

825
00:41:57,800 --> 00:42:00,400
Their brilliant, state of the art solution. They bring in

826
00:42:00,440 --> 00:42:03,159
the military to essentially screep the top layer.

827
00:42:02,960 --> 00:42:04,679
Speaker 2: Of the islands to scrape the dirt away.

828
00:42:04,840 --> 00:42:08,199
Speaker 1: Yeah, they scoop up roughly eighty thousand cubic yards of

829
00:42:08,320 --> 00:42:12,840
highly contaminated, irradiated topsoil and debris, mix it into a

830
00:42:12,880 --> 00:42:17,039
slurry with concrete, dump the entire toxic mess into one

831
00:42:17,079 --> 00:42:20,400
of the unlined craters left by a previous nuclear blast

832
00:42:20,440 --> 00:42:24,000
on Rune Island and cap it with a massive eighteen

833
00:42:24,079 --> 00:42:26,000
inch thick concrete dome, a.

834
00:42:25,960 --> 00:42:29,320
Speaker 2: Structure that the local marshal lease populations now chillingly and

835
00:42:29,480 --> 00:42:32,360
accurately referred to as the tomb.

836
00:42:32,800 --> 00:42:36,119
Speaker 1: But the tomb didn't solve the biological problem. During the

837
00:42:36,199 --> 00:42:39,280
years of bulldozing and scraping, all that radioactive sediment in

838
00:42:39,320 --> 00:42:41,840
the lagoon got violently stirred up and suspended in the

839
00:42:41,880 --> 00:42:42,519
water column.

840
00:42:42,519 --> 00:42:44,400
Speaker 2: It just agitated the problem exactly.

841
00:42:44,719 --> 00:42:47,840
Speaker 1: The local sea turtle populations feeding on the contaminated sea

842
00:42:47,880 --> 00:42:51,199
grass ended up swallowing massive amounts of this radioactive sand.

843
00:42:51,639 --> 00:42:54,400
Scientists later studied these turtles and found them swimming around

844
00:42:54,400 --> 00:42:58,119
the Pacific with permanent, measurable radiation embedded directly into the

845
00:42:58,199 --> 00:42:59,320
keratin of their shells.

846
00:43:00,119 --> 00:43:03,079
Speaker 2: Literally, engineered radioactive sea turtles we did.

847
00:43:03,480 --> 00:43:06,719
Speaker 1: And the structural integrity of the tomb is now severely.

848
00:43:06,400 --> 00:43:08,480
Speaker 2: Compromised because the creater was unlined.

849
00:43:08,559 --> 00:43:12,559
Speaker 1: Right. Yes, the radioactive isotopes are leeching directly into the

850
00:43:12,599 --> 00:43:16,519
porous coral rock below, and with modern rising sea levels,

851
00:43:16,559 --> 00:43:20,280
the dome is actively cracking, threatening to spill its contents

852
00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:22,760
directly into the Pacific Ocean.

853
00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:26,840
Speaker 2: And the absolute darkest, most dystopian irony of this entire tragedy.

854
00:43:26,920 --> 00:43:29,760
Speaker 1: Oh, this makes me so mad. Today, if you look online,

855
00:43:29,920 --> 00:43:34,000
Bikini Atoll is actively promoted as a high end niche

856
00:43:34,039 --> 00:43:38,280
scuba diving destination. Thanks are because the US military used

857
00:43:38,320 --> 00:43:41,480
a fleet of captured World War II battleships and aircraft

858
00:43:41,519 --> 00:43:44,760
carriers as target practice during the blasts. The lagoon is

859
00:43:44,800 --> 00:43:48,719
filled with these massive irradiated shipwrecks. People are paying thousands

860
00:43:48,760 --> 00:43:50,639
of dollars to go on vacation and swim through the

861
00:43:50,639 --> 00:43:53,000
submerged graveyard of our nuclear hubris.

862
00:43:53,079 --> 00:43:55,679
Speaker 2: It is deeply unsettling treating the scars of weapons of

863
00:43:55,719 --> 00:44:00,920
mass destruction as a recreational novelty. It's just gross industrative arrogance.

864
00:44:01,039 --> 00:44:04,320
Isn't isolated to the Pacific, we see a remarkably similar

865
00:44:04,400 --> 00:44:09,079
tragic history play out in the deep Australian outback mar Linga. Yes,

866
00:44:09,400 --> 00:44:12,960
between nineteen fifty six and nineteen sixty three, the British government,

867
00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:16,239
seeking to establish its own nuclear deterrent, carried out a

868
00:44:16,280 --> 00:44:20,000
series of highly toxic atmospheric tests at Marlinga.

869
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:24,039
Speaker 1: They detonated seven full scale atomic weapons above ground and

870
00:44:24,119 --> 00:44:29,480
conducted over six hundred minor highly secretive trials, specifically involving

871
00:44:29,519 --> 00:44:33,000
the burning and dispersal of plutonium and uranium to test

872
00:44:33,079 --> 00:44:34,599
weapons safety mechanisms.

873
00:44:34,800 --> 00:44:38,760
Speaker 2: The impact on the local indigenous Aboriginal communities, the n

874
00:44:38,800 --> 00:44:42,280
Angou people was devastating and largely ignored at the time.

875
00:44:42,360 --> 00:44:43,960
Speaker 1: They were just completely disregarded.

876
00:44:44,239 --> 00:44:47,880
Speaker 2: Many nomadic groups were never properly warned about the invisible dangers,

877
00:44:48,159 --> 00:44:51,639
they were not adequately relocated, and they were directly exposed

878
00:44:51,639 --> 00:44:54,400
to the black mist, the radio octave fallout rolling across

879
00:44:54,400 --> 00:44:55,320
the desert.

880
00:44:55,000 --> 00:44:58,239
Speaker 1: And the British cleanup effort, which didn't truly happen until

881
00:44:58,280 --> 00:45:01,960
decades later, was a mass and sweeping dirt under the rug.

882
00:45:02,239 --> 00:45:05,000
Global scientists have heavily criticized the methodology.

883
00:45:05,079 --> 00:45:06,199
Speaker 2: It is incredibly flawed.

884
00:45:06,559 --> 00:45:10,039
Speaker 1: In many areas, the official remediation strategy was essentially just

885
00:45:10,360 --> 00:45:15,880
bringing in bulldozers, scraping the plutonium contaminated red dirt into shallow,

886
00:45:16,079 --> 00:45:18,559
unlined pits and burying it under a few feet of

887
00:45:18,599 --> 00:45:19,320
clean soil.

888
00:45:19,760 --> 00:45:22,719
Speaker 2: Some of the most heavily contaminated plutonium areas were only

889
00:45:22,800 --> 00:45:26,159
partially remediated. Given that plutonium two thirty nine has a

890
00:45:26,199 --> 00:45:29,519
half life of over twenty four thousand years. Burying it

891
00:45:29,559 --> 00:45:33,559
in shallow trenches guarantees it remains a severe environmental and

892
00:45:33,639 --> 00:45:35,960
health risk for hundreds of generations.

893
00:45:36,159 --> 00:45:39,280
Speaker 1: The full health impact the cancer clusters and the genetic

894
00:45:39,400 --> 00:45:43,599
damage inflicted on the indigenous people remains a profound, largely

895
00:45:43,679 --> 00:45:45,239
unaddressed historical tragedy.

896
00:45:45,320 --> 00:45:47,519
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate out of sight, out of my mentality.

897
00:45:47,760 --> 00:45:50,079
If we can't see the glowing dirt, it must be safe.

898
00:45:50,119 --> 00:45:53,840
Speaker 1: We see this exact same panicked bearying mentality with the

899
00:45:53,880 --> 00:45:57,960
massive concrete tombs we construct over our civilian disasters. We

900
00:45:58,039 --> 00:45:59,960
have to discuss the original chernobylsarcos.

901
00:46:00,559 --> 00:46:04,559
Speaker 2: The sarcophagus represents an incredible desperate feet of brutalist engineering

902
00:46:04,760 --> 00:46:06,400
borne out of absolute necessity.

903
00:46:06,719 --> 00:46:10,320
Speaker 1: Desperate is the only word for it. It was constructed

904
00:46:10,559 --> 00:46:14,280
in a frantic two hundred and six days immediately following

905
00:46:14,280 --> 00:46:18,360
the nineteen eighty six explosion. It was this massive, hastily

906
00:46:18,400 --> 00:46:22,000
designed shield of steel beams and concrete, designed with a

907
00:46:22,039 --> 00:46:23,719
single panicked goal.

908
00:46:23,679 --> 00:46:25,480
Speaker 2: Stop the atmospheric venting of.

909
00:46:25,480 --> 00:46:28,880
Speaker 1: Radiation, exactly to throw a heavy lid over the gaping,

910
00:46:29,079 --> 00:46:33,440
spewing maw of reactor four. The environment was so intensely

911
00:46:33,519 --> 00:46:37,519
lethal that machines broke down. The radiation fried the circuitry

912
00:46:37,559 --> 00:46:40,199
of the remote controlled bulldozers they try to use.

913
00:46:40,119 --> 00:46:42,239
Speaker 2: Which meant they had to rely on human capital.

914
00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:44,960
Speaker 1: They called them the liquidators, hundreds of thousands of men

915
00:46:45,039 --> 00:46:47,920
sent into a meat grinder. The radiation levels on the

916
00:46:47,960 --> 00:46:50,360
roof of the reactor were so high that the workers

917
00:46:50,360 --> 00:46:53,039
could only be exposed for a maximum of ninety seconds.

918
00:46:53,079 --> 00:46:53,800
Speaker 2: That's horrifying.

919
00:46:54,000 --> 00:46:56,679
Speaker 1: Some sources say they were doing seven minutes suicide shifts.

920
00:46:56,719 --> 00:46:59,559
Deep in the rubble. They would literally sprint out, shovel

921
00:46:59,599 --> 00:47:02,760
a single load of highly radioactive graphite debris off the roof,

922
00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:05,679
and sprink back inside, because lingering for even a minute

923
00:47:05,719 --> 00:47:09,639
longer meant a guaranteed fatal dose of acute radiation poisoning.

924
00:47:09,960 --> 00:47:14,280
Speaker 2: Thousands of these men suffered horrific health consequences, aggressive cancers,

925
00:47:14,519 --> 00:47:16,760
and early deaths in the years that followed.

926
00:47:17,320 --> 00:47:20,639
Speaker 1: And what that sarcophagus was built to contain is genuinely

927
00:47:20,719 --> 00:47:25,199
the stuff of nightmares. Deep in the flooded basement corridors

928
00:47:25,239 --> 00:47:28,920
beneath the ruined reactor lies a mass known as the

929
00:47:29,039 --> 00:47:29,960
Elephant's foot.

930
00:47:30,280 --> 00:47:34,239
Speaker 2: The elephant's foot is a completely surreal, terrifying object.

931
00:47:34,519 --> 00:47:37,679
Speaker 1: During the peak of the meltdown, the internal temperatures reach

932
00:47:37,880 --> 00:47:42,119
such unimaginable extremes that the uranium nuclear fuel rods, the

933
00:47:42,159 --> 00:47:45,679
metal control rods, the sand they dropped from the helicopters,

934
00:47:45,679 --> 00:47:49,199
and the actual concrete of the containment building all melted together.

935
00:47:49,519 --> 00:47:55,159
Speaker 2: It formed this glowing molten mass of radioactive lava scientifically

936
00:47:55,159 --> 00:47:56,039
known as chorium.

937
00:47:56,159 --> 00:47:59,400
Speaker 1: It literally burned its way right through the thick steel

938
00:47:59,440 --> 00:48:02,320
and concrete floorboards of the reactor and pooled in the

939
00:48:02,400 --> 00:48:07,039
dark basement, slowly cooling into this massive, wrinkled solid lump

940
00:48:07,199 --> 00:48:10,679
that distinctly resembles the rough gray skin of an elephant's foot.

941
00:48:10,880 --> 00:48:14,239
Speaker 2: At the time it formed, its radioactivity was practically incomprehensible.

942
00:48:14,320 --> 00:48:16,960
It was emitting approximately ten thousand rogins per hour.

943
00:48:17,079 --> 00:48:19,079
Speaker 1: What does that mean for a person to put.

944
00:48:18,920 --> 00:48:21,320
Speaker 2: That in perspective, standing in the same room with the

945
00:48:21,320 --> 00:48:24,960
elephant's foot for just three hundred seconds five minutes would

946
00:48:24,960 --> 00:48:27,840
deliver a one hundred percent lethal dose of radiation.

947
00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:30,559
Speaker 1: It's literally a modern day Medusa.

948
00:48:31,480 --> 00:48:34,519
Speaker 2: It really is. When scientists first attempted to document it,

949
00:48:34,760 --> 00:48:37,360
they couldn't even point a camera at it directly. Because

950
00:48:37,559 --> 00:48:41,840
the intense gamma radiation instantly destroyed the photographic film.

951
00:48:41,599 --> 00:48:44,440
Speaker 1: You physically cannot look at it directly without it killing you.

952
00:48:44,800 --> 00:48:47,119
They had to mount a camera on a remote controlled

953
00:48:47,119 --> 00:48:51,360
toy tank and bounce the image off strategically placed mirrors

954
00:48:51,400 --> 00:48:54,519
around a concrete corner just to get a blurry photograph

955
00:48:54,559 --> 00:48:54,760
of it.

956
00:48:54,800 --> 00:48:58,679
Speaker 2: And while Chernobyl's the most famous example, we have these precarious,

957
00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:03,239
highly toxic scattered everywhere. Going back to the Hanford site

958
00:49:03,280 --> 00:49:05,480
in Washington State, there was a facility known as the

959
00:49:05,559 --> 00:49:07,280
K East Basin oh Man.

960
00:49:07,400 --> 00:49:10,360
Speaker 1: The K East Basin was a massive, twenty foot deep

961
00:49:10,519 --> 00:49:14,960
indoor concrete pool originally designed to store spent highly radioactive

962
00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:18,000
nuclear fuel cylinders from the nineteen fifties weapons program.

963
00:49:18,119 --> 00:49:20,159
Speaker 2: The plan was just to leave them underwater to cool,

964
00:49:20,760 --> 00:49:23,599
but over the decades, the protective cladding on the fuel

965
00:49:23,639 --> 00:49:25,159
cylinders corroded and broke down.

966
00:49:25,760 --> 00:49:30,480
Speaker 1: The highly radioactive uranium fuel essentially dissolved and mixed with

967
00:49:30,519 --> 00:49:34,800
the water and dust, creating a thick layer of incredibly toxic,

968
00:49:34,960 --> 00:49:39,239
highly radioactive sludge covering the entire bottom of this massive pool.

969
00:49:39,320 --> 00:49:42,760
Speaker 2: The remediation of that specific basin was a logistical nightmare.

970
00:49:42,880 --> 00:49:45,079
Speaker 1: They couldn't just drain the pool because the water was

971
00:49:45,119 --> 00:49:48,800
acting as the only radiation shield, so the cleanup required

972
00:49:48,840 --> 00:49:52,360
workers to be suspended on metal grates directly over this

973
00:49:52,480 --> 00:49:54,599
twenty foot deep pool of legal water.

974
00:49:55,039 --> 00:49:57,199
Speaker 2: Imagine slipping on that grate, No thank you.

975
00:49:57,800 --> 00:50:01,519
Speaker 1: They had to use massive, heavy vacuum poles guided by

976
00:50:01,559 --> 00:50:06,840
grainy underwater cameras to painstakingly blindly suck up fifty five

977
00:50:06,920 --> 00:50:09,119
cubic yards of this radioactive ooze.

978
00:50:09,159 --> 00:50:10,480
Speaker 2: And what do they do with the empty pool?

979
00:50:10,679 --> 00:50:12,920
Speaker 1: Once they finally got the sludge out and transferred it

980
00:50:12,960 --> 00:50:16,519
to massive underground tanks, they realized the concrete walls of

981
00:50:16,559 --> 00:50:19,599
the pool itself were entirely saturated with radiation. Of course

982
00:50:19,639 --> 00:50:22,000
they were, so their ultimate solution they just filled the

983
00:50:22,159 --> 00:50:25,760
entire empty basin to the brim with specialized grout, effectively

984
00:50:25,920 --> 00:50:27,960
entombing the radioactive concrete forever.

985
00:50:28,280 --> 00:50:31,480
Speaker 2: It is a recurring theme when we cannot clean the poison,

986
00:50:32,039 --> 00:50:36,199
we entombe it. But perhaps the most glaringly absurd example

987
00:50:36,239 --> 00:50:39,639
of this containment strategy is found in Weldon Spring, Missouri.

988
00:50:39,960 --> 00:50:43,280
Speaker 1: Weldon Spring is my absolute favorite, if you can use

989
00:50:43,280 --> 00:50:47,079
the word favorite for an environmental disaster example of how

990
00:50:47,119 --> 00:50:50,239
absurd our psychological response to radiation can be.

991
00:50:50,559 --> 00:50:51,719
Speaker 2: It's truly mind bobbling.

992
00:50:51,800 --> 00:50:54,719
Speaker 1: During World War Two, the site was a massive munitions

993
00:50:54,760 --> 00:50:59,039
plant manufacturing TNT. During the Cold War, the government repurposed

994
00:50:59,079 --> 00:51:01,199
it as a uranium in richment facility and then they

995
00:51:01,280 --> 00:51:04,000
just left. Yeah. When they finally decommissioned and abandoned the

996
00:51:04,039 --> 00:51:06,840
site in the late nineteen sixties, they basically just locked

997
00:51:06,880 --> 00:51:10,119
the gates and walked away, leaving massive open air pits

998
00:51:10,239 --> 00:51:15,159
filled with unrefined uranium, radium, TNT residue, and asbestos, a

999
00:51:15,280 --> 00:51:19,800
giant exposed toxic stew sitting right near the Missouri River, and.

1000
00:51:19,760 --> 00:51:23,079
Speaker 2: Their eventual solution for this multi generational hazard.

1001
00:51:23,239 --> 00:51:26,639
Speaker 1: Their grand solution was to just pile all the toxic rubble,

1002
00:51:26,880 --> 00:51:30,039
the contaminated soil, and the radioactive sludge into one giant

1003
00:51:30,039 --> 00:51:32,119
heap and build a massive hill over it.

1004
00:51:32,199 --> 00:51:33,880
Speaker 2: Just a giant hill a dirt.

1005
00:51:33,800 --> 00:51:37,360
Speaker 1: Literally just cover the apocalypse with a multi layered mound

1006
00:51:37,400 --> 00:51:40,679
of clay, rocks and dirt forty five feet high and

1007
00:51:40,719 --> 00:51:44,239
covering forty one acres. But here is the absolute kicker.

1008
00:51:44,719 --> 00:51:47,800
Local officials eventually decided to build a staircase up the

1009
00:51:47,840 --> 00:51:51,119
side of this massive radioactive tomb and open it to

1010
00:51:51,159 --> 00:51:53,000
the public as an educational park.

1011
00:51:53,400 --> 00:51:56,199
Speaker 2: They literally nicknamed it the Nuclear Wasted Venture Trail.

1012
00:51:56,440 --> 00:51:59,840
Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance required to name a uranium disposal mound

1013
00:51:59,880 --> 00:52:02,719
in adventure trail is truly staggering.

1014
00:52:02,800 --> 00:52:03,360
Speaker 2: It really is.

1015
00:52:03,559 --> 00:52:06,159
Speaker 1: I look at photographs of families standing on top of

1016
00:52:06,199 --> 00:52:09,760
this mound, and I am just bewildered by human psychology.

1017
00:52:10,079 --> 00:52:14,039
Who packs a picnic basket, grabs their binoculars and says, hey, kids,

1018
00:52:14,079 --> 00:52:16,280
let's go bird watching on top of the Nuclear waste

1019
00:52:16,280 --> 00:52:16,920
Adventure Trail.

1020
00:52:17,039 --> 00:52:20,480
Speaker 2: It's our deeply flawed, subconscious way of conquering our fears.

1021
00:52:20,679 --> 00:52:23,480
We turn the physical sites of our greatest, most terrifying

1022
00:52:23,519 --> 00:52:27,960
technological failures into literal tourist traps just to prove to

1023
00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:30,039
ourselves that we are still in control of the earth.

1024
00:52:30,199 --> 00:52:33,519
Speaker 1: We literally pave over the terror and erect an observation deck.

1025
00:52:34,000 --> 00:52:35,639
We attempt to sanitize the trauma.

1026
00:52:35,800 --> 00:52:38,199
Speaker 2: But as we pivot from these environmental cover ups and

1027
00:52:38,199 --> 00:52:41,840
structural tombs, we have to confront a reality that cannot

1028
00:52:41,880 --> 00:52:45,159
be paved over, no matter how much concrete we pour. Yeah,

1029
00:52:45,199 --> 00:52:48,880
we've discussed mutated flora bioaccumulating animals, and the hubris of

1030
00:52:48,880 --> 00:52:52,480
cleanup crews. But to truly understand the atomic age, we

1031
00:52:52,559 --> 00:52:56,320
must look at the absolute darkest reality, the precise moment

1032
00:52:56,360 --> 00:53:01,360
this incomprehensible power was intentionally strategic turned against human.

1033
00:53:01,159 --> 00:53:04,119
Speaker 1: Beings Ground Zero, August nineteen forty five.

1034
00:53:04,519 --> 00:53:07,159
Speaker 2: The raw facts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

1035
00:53:07,199 --> 00:53:10,840
are incredibly sobering, and they demand our complete, unflinching attention

1036
00:53:10,960 --> 00:53:12,960
to understand the true weight of the sources we are

1037
00:53:12,960 --> 00:53:16,480
discussing absolutely. On the morning of August sixth, nineteen forty five,

1038
00:53:16,679 --> 00:53:19,880
the uranium two thirty five atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy

1039
00:53:20,440 --> 00:53:23,679
was detonated approximately nineteen hundred feet above the city of Hiroshima.

1040
00:53:24,039 --> 00:53:27,639
It delivered a blast equivalent to fifteen thousand tons of TNT.

1041
00:53:27,960 --> 00:53:29,559
Speaker 1: Fifteen thousand tons.

1042
00:53:29,639 --> 00:53:32,639
Speaker 2: The sheer, kinetic and thermal force completely vaporized five square

1043
00:53:32,639 --> 00:53:35,480
miles of the urban center in an instant causing estimated

1044
00:53:35,519 --> 00:53:38,280
seventy thousand direct instantaneous deaths.

1045
00:53:38,079 --> 00:53:40,599
Speaker 1: And just three days later, on August ninth, the United

1046
00:53:40,599 --> 00:53:44,400
States dropped the second weapon, the plutonium implosion type bomb

1047
00:53:44,440 --> 00:53:45,360
known as Fat Man.

1048
00:53:45,519 --> 00:53:50,239
Speaker 2: Yes, a crucial historical detail often overlooked is that Nagasaki

1049
00:53:50,320 --> 00:53:52,960
was not the primary target for that second strike. The

1050
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:56,119
bomber boxcar was ordered to target the city of Kukura,

1051
00:53:56,360 --> 00:53:58,079
which housed massive arsenals.

1052
00:53:58,320 --> 00:53:59,480
Speaker 1: So why Nagasaki.

1053
00:54:00,000 --> 00:54:02,760
Speaker 2: The obscuring cloud cover and smoke from a previous fire

1054
00:54:02,840 --> 00:54:06,119
bombing raid forced the crew to divert to their secondary target.

1055
00:54:06,639 --> 00:54:09,039
They dropped the ten thousand pound weapon over the Urakami

1056
00:54:09,119 --> 00:54:12,800
Valley in Nagasaki. The topography contained the blast somewhat, but

1057
00:54:12,880 --> 00:54:16,559
it still generated a twenty two kiloton explosion. Between sixty

1058
00:54:16,599 --> 00:54:18,480
thousand and eighty thousand people were killed.

1059
00:54:18,760 --> 00:54:21,559
Speaker 1: The eyewitness accounts and the physical evidence of the immediate

1060
00:54:21,599 --> 00:54:24,639
aftermath are almost too visceral for the human mind to process.

1061
00:54:24,840 --> 00:54:28,320
The temperatures at the hypocenter, the point directly below the detonation,

1062
00:54:28,679 --> 00:54:32,159
reached upward of three thousand degrees celsius or five four

1063
00:54:32,239 --> 00:54:33,079
hundred degrees.

1064
00:54:32,840 --> 00:54:34,559
Speaker 2: Fahrenheit, unimaginable heat.

1065
00:54:34,480 --> 00:54:39,079
Speaker 1: At that extreme thermal intensity. Solid everyday materials don't just melt,

1066
00:54:39,159 --> 00:54:42,880
They behave like fluid boiling lava. If you visit the

1067
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:46,119
Peace Memorial Museums today, you see these artifacts where a

1068
00:54:46,239 --> 00:54:51,559
glass and metal fused together into these twisted, otherworldly grotesque shapes.

1069
00:54:51,639 --> 00:54:55,280
It's horrifying to see a delicate ceramic sake bottle warped

1070
00:54:55,320 --> 00:54:58,400
and melted directly into a thick metal fence, a cluster

1071
00:54:58,480 --> 00:55:02,239
of copper coins melted together into a single unrecognizable lump

1072
00:55:02,280 --> 00:55:06,400
of slag bicycles, which are symbols of everyday mundane life,

1073
00:55:06,639 --> 00:55:10,599
turned into these warped, twisted sculptures of absolute devastation.

1074
00:55:11,039 --> 00:55:13,719
Speaker 2: And then, perhaps the most haunting physical evidence of the

1075
00:55:13,719 --> 00:55:16,440
thermal flash, the nuclear shadows.

1076
00:55:16,480 --> 00:55:18,679
Speaker 1: The shadows are the images from your sources that I

1077
00:55:18,719 --> 00:55:21,920
simply cannot stop thinking about. When the bombs detonated, the

1078
00:55:22,039 --> 00:55:26,400
intense instantaneous flash of thermal radiation, pure blinding heat and

1079
00:55:26,519 --> 00:55:30,639
light was so profound that it permanently bleached the exposed stone, asphalt,

1080
00:55:30,719 --> 00:55:32,199
and concrete across the cities.

1081
00:55:32,480 --> 00:55:35,079
Speaker 2: But if a person or an object was standing between

1082
00:55:35,119 --> 00:55:37,639
the blasts and the wall, their body absorbed that intense

1083
00:55:37,679 --> 00:55:41,199
thermal radiation, acting as a shield for the surface behind them.

1084
00:55:41,039 --> 00:55:42,440
Speaker 1: So they cast a permanent shadow.

1085
00:55:42,679 --> 00:55:46,880
Speaker 2: The mechanism is a brutal form of photographic exposure. The

1086
00:55:46,960 --> 00:55:49,840
unshielded stone is bleached white by the heat, while the

1087
00:55:49,840 --> 00:55:54,159
shielded stone retains its original darker color, creating a permanent,

1088
00:55:54,239 --> 00:55:57,480
ghostly silhouette burned directly into the architecture.

1089
00:55:57,599 --> 00:55:59,480
Speaker 1: You can walk up to a set of stone steps

1090
00:55:59,480 --> 00:56:01,960
at the Sumi Tomo Bank in Hiroshima and see the

1091
00:56:02,039 --> 00:56:06,199
exact dark outline of a human being sitting down, forever

1092
00:56:06,280 --> 00:56:08,960
captured in the literal fraction of a microsecond before their

1093
00:56:09,000 --> 00:56:11,079
body was entirely vaporized by the heat wave.

1094
00:56:11,239 --> 00:56:14,960
Speaker 2: It provides an immediate, deeply unsettling connection to a human

1095
00:56:15,000 --> 00:56:18,760
life that was abruptly violently erased from existence, and.

1096
00:56:18,719 --> 00:56:22,639
Speaker 1: The personal artifacts recovered from the rubble heavily reinforced that intimacy.

1097
00:56:23,239 --> 00:56:26,239
They found numerous pocket watches and wristwatches, and the ruins

1098
00:56:26,239 --> 00:56:29,760
that were permanently frozen the internal gears warped by the blast,

1099
00:56:29,840 --> 00:56:32,800
with the hands locked exactly at eight fifteen am, the

1100
00:56:32,880 --> 00:56:35,400
precise moment the blast wave hit Heroshimada.

1101
00:56:35,480 --> 00:56:36,800
Speaker 2: Time literally stopped for them.

1102
00:56:36,960 --> 00:56:41,360
Speaker 1: They found intact, heavily charred metal lunch boxes beneath collapsed

1103
00:56:41,400 --> 00:56:44,840
schools that still contained the blackened, carbonized remains of the

1104
00:56:44,920 --> 00:56:47,480
rice and peas that mothers had carefully prepared for their

1105
00:56:47,559 --> 00:56:51,599
children that very morning. They found pairs of wire rimmed glasses,

1106
00:56:51,639 --> 00:56:54,119
completely twisted and fused by the heat.

1107
00:56:54,440 --> 00:56:57,800
Speaker 2: There are these tiny intimate glimpses into quiet everyday morning

1108
00:56:57,880 --> 00:57:01,000
routines that were shattered in a microscae of atomic fire.

1109
00:57:01,119 --> 00:57:03,599
Speaker 1: And for those who were far enough from the hypocenter

1110
00:57:03,679 --> 00:57:07,519
to survive the initial thermal flash and the crushing pressure wave,

1111
00:57:08,119 --> 00:57:11,519
the survivors known as the hybocutia, the horror was only

1112
00:57:11,639 --> 00:57:12,239
just beginning.

1113
00:57:12,440 --> 00:57:15,920
Speaker 2: The immediate destruction gave way to the insidious, invisible killers.

1114
00:57:16,840 --> 00:57:21,519
They faced acute radiation sickness, severe deep tissue burns, complete

1115
00:57:21,519 --> 00:57:25,840
hair loss, uncontrollable internal hemorrhaging, and the catastrophic failure of

1116
00:57:25,880 --> 00:57:26,760
their immune systems.

1117
00:57:26,800 --> 00:57:29,920
Speaker 1: And then the meteorological nightmare arrived, the Black Rain.

1118
00:57:30,159 --> 00:57:33,800
Speaker 2: The Black Rain. It sounds entirely biblical, like an ancient plague,

1119
00:57:34,039 --> 00:57:37,760
but it was just terrifyingly real brutal atmospheric physics.

1120
00:57:38,000 --> 00:57:42,639
Speaker 1: The unprecedented power of the atomic explosion created a massive updraft,

1121
00:57:42,920 --> 00:57:47,719
sending thousands of tons of radioactive soot, pulverized debris, vaporized

1122
00:57:47,719 --> 00:57:52,440
building materials, and highly radioactive fission products high into the stratosphere.

1123
00:57:52,480 --> 00:57:55,960
Speaker 2: As this massive toxic brew cooled and mixed with the

1124
00:57:56,039 --> 00:58:00,400
natural moisture in the atmosphere, It condensed into mass, massive,

1125
00:58:00,519 --> 00:58:01,239
heavy rain.

1126
00:58:01,159 --> 00:58:04,519
Speaker 1: Drops, and the survivors, many of whom were desperately thirsty

1127
00:58:04,559 --> 00:58:07,599
and suffering from severe burns, looked up and found themselves

1128
00:58:07,719 --> 00:58:11,559
drenched in this thick, sticky, black downpour. They were opening

1129
00:58:11,559 --> 00:58:15,079
their mouths to catch the rain, completely unknowingly ingesting and

1130
00:58:15,079 --> 00:58:18,480
inhaling hyper concentrated lethal radioactive particles.

1131
00:58:18,639 --> 00:58:22,199
Speaker 2: The black rain acted as a devastating vector, spreading severe

1132
00:58:22,360 --> 00:58:26,960
concentrated contamination miles beyond the original blast radius, affecting thousands

1133
00:58:26,960 --> 00:58:28,840
of people who thought they had escaped the worst of the.

1134
00:58:28,760 --> 00:58:31,400
Speaker 1: Weapon, and the legacy of that exposure didn't end when

1135
00:58:31,440 --> 00:58:34,840
the rain stopped. It lasted for decades. In the years

1136
00:58:34,880 --> 00:58:38,840
following the war, hospitals documented a massive shocking spike in

1137
00:58:38,920 --> 00:58:42,360
leukemia and other aggressive cancers among the survivor populations.

1138
00:58:42,719 --> 00:58:47,400
Speaker 2: The ionizing radiation aggressively attacked the human DNA, causing severe

1139
00:58:47,400 --> 00:58:51,000
genetic mutations that were tragically passed down to the next generations.

1140
00:58:51,559 --> 00:58:55,679
Children born with cleft palates, clubbed feet, fused fingers, and

1141
00:58:55,760 --> 00:58:57,280
severe microceeedfully, and.

1142
00:58:57,199 --> 00:58:59,800
Speaker 1: That is strictly the biological toll not to mention them

1143
00:59:00,000 --> 00:59:05,159
immense crushing psychological trauma and intergenerational PTSD of surviving the

1144
00:59:05,280 --> 00:59:06,760
end of the world, which.

1145
00:59:06,559 --> 00:59:10,280
Speaker 2: Brings up a very profound, almost uncomfortable paradox when we

1146
00:59:10,320 --> 00:59:12,360
look at the modern state of those cities today.

1147
00:59:12,519 --> 00:59:14,840
Speaker 1: I really want to hear your analysis on this today.

1148
00:59:14,960 --> 00:59:19,519
If you travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are these beautiful, vibrant,

1149
00:59:19,719 --> 00:59:24,519
thriving modern metropolises. Right the background radiation is completely back

1150
00:59:24,559 --> 00:59:28,159
to normal, entirely safe levels. Millions of tourists visit them

1151
00:59:28,159 --> 00:59:31,480
every single year. The rubble is gone. The physical ability

1152
00:59:31,480 --> 00:59:34,039
of human beings to completely rebuild a city from atomic

1153
00:59:34,079 --> 00:59:37,159
ash is incredible, But does that erasure of the physical

1154
00:59:37,239 --> 00:59:39,960
ruins somehow mask the prominence of the trauma.

1155
00:59:40,039 --> 00:59:44,039
Speaker 2: It creates a profound historical tension. The physical rebuilding of

1156
00:59:44,079 --> 00:59:47,519
the cities is a necessary testament to incredible human resilience

1157
00:59:47,880 --> 00:59:51,639
and the desire to endure. But the trauma, the genetic

1158
00:59:51,760 --> 00:59:54,920
damage recorded in the DNA of the Hibakusha. The silent

1159
00:59:55,000 --> 00:59:58,039
story is told by the frozen watches, the permanent shadows

1160
00:59:58,039 --> 01:00:01,880
burned into the surviving stone. There remains eternally frozen time.

1161
01:00:02,079 --> 01:00:05,199
Speaker 1: So the city heals, but the scars don't fade exactly.

1162
01:00:05,480 --> 01:00:08,039
Speaker 2: The city moves forward, but the scars are anchored to

1163
01:00:08,119 --> 01:00:12,199
nineteen forty five. And this concept of spaces being frozen

1164
01:00:12,199 --> 01:00:15,320
in time, violently detached from the normal flow of history

1165
01:00:15,719 --> 01:00:18,480
is recurring theme when we look at the geographic aftermath

1166
01:00:18,519 --> 01:00:19,360
of nuclear events.

1167
01:00:19,440 --> 01:00:22,519
Speaker 1: It truly is the trauma leaves behind this lingering eeriness.

1168
01:00:22,760 --> 01:00:25,239
You look at the massive exclusion zones and they feel

1169
01:00:25,280 --> 01:00:28,440
like museums of sudden panic. Let's shift our focus back

1170
01:00:28,480 --> 01:00:30,239
to the abandoned spaces.

1171
01:00:29,719 --> 01:00:31,360
Speaker 2: Of the Chernobyl Zone Rupiat.

1172
01:00:31,440 --> 01:00:33,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, the city of Pripia, which housed the plant workers,

1173
01:00:34,239 --> 01:00:36,960
is a massive ghost town that is slowly being devoured

1174
01:00:37,000 --> 01:00:40,039
by the surrounding pine forests. But when you step inside

1175
01:00:40,079 --> 01:00:42,760
the decaying buildings, the human panic of the nineteen eighty

1176
01:00:42,760 --> 01:00:46,400
six evacuation is perfectly chillingly preserved.

1177
01:00:46,760 --> 01:00:50,840
Speaker 2: The medical facilities within Pripiat are particularly evocative of that

1178
01:00:50,920 --> 01:00:51,840
specific terror.

1179
01:00:51,960 --> 01:00:55,440
Speaker 1: The hospitals are deeply unsettling. You walk down these peeling

1180
01:00:55,480 --> 01:00:59,239
corridors and the floors are completely littered with hundreds of

1181
01:00:59,280 --> 01:01:03,800
discarded ringes, rusted scalpels, and scattered medical supplies. It's a

1182
01:01:03,840 --> 01:01:07,280
snapshot of the frantic, desperate rush as doctors realize the

1183
01:01:07,320 --> 01:01:10,639
sheer scale of the radiation poisoning walking through their doors.

1184
01:01:10,719 --> 01:01:14,320
Speaker 2: There are rusted hospital beds sitting in empty wards. But

1185
01:01:14,400 --> 01:01:17,960
the strangest, most unnerving detail from the photographic.

1186
01:01:17,400 --> 01:01:18,960
Speaker 1: Surveys oh the chair.

1187
01:01:19,280 --> 01:01:24,960
Speaker 2: Yes, someone at some point dragged a massive, incredibly heavy,

1188
01:01:25,119 --> 01:01:28,800
rusted gynecologists' examination chare out of the hospital and just

1189
01:01:28,880 --> 01:01:31,159
left it sitting entirely alone in the middle of the

1190
01:01:31,159 --> 01:01:32,559
surrounding overgrown woods.

1191
01:01:32,639 --> 01:01:37,400
Speaker 1: It creates a deeply jarring, almost surrealist tableaux. It makes

1192
01:01:37,440 --> 01:01:39,960
absolutely no logical sense. Why would someone do that?

1193
01:01:40,039 --> 01:01:42,599
Speaker 2: It would take significant effort for multiple people to carry

1194
01:01:42,599 --> 01:01:45,239
that heavy metal chair out into the trees in a

1195
01:01:45,360 --> 01:01:49,239
zone where lingering outside means absorbing radiation. It feels like

1196
01:01:49,280 --> 01:01:51,800
a piece of dark performance art borne out of pure trauma.

1197
01:01:52,079 --> 01:01:55,280
Speaker 1: And the schools are just as bad. You find classrooms

1198
01:01:55,320 --> 01:01:59,159
completely covered in hundreds of child sized rubber gas masks,

1199
01:01:59,400 --> 01:02:03,840
just scattered blindly across the floor, rotting dolls, open textbooks

1200
01:02:03,840 --> 01:02:06,159
and toys left behind by children who were told they

1201
01:02:06,159 --> 01:02:08,559
were only evacuating for a three day weekend.

1202
01:02:08,679 --> 01:02:09,440
Speaker 2: It's heart wrenching.

1203
01:02:09,559 --> 01:02:13,719
Speaker 1: There's the alley of memory, This incredibly sad quiet walkway

1204
01:02:13,719 --> 01:02:17,000
in the zone, lined with wooden signs bearing the names

1205
01:02:17,000 --> 01:02:20,360
of all the erased, bulldozed villages that people had to flee,

1206
01:02:20,760 --> 01:02:24,239
communities that literally no longer exist on any modern map.

1207
01:02:24,440 --> 01:02:28,079
Speaker 2: And within the decaying ruins of these abandoned structures, urban

1208
01:02:28,159 --> 01:02:32,599
explorers and researchers have stumbled upon some truly bizarre, unexplained

1209
01:02:32,679 --> 01:02:35,360
artifacts that defy immediate logic, like.

1210
01:02:35,360 --> 01:02:37,880
Speaker 1: The discovery made by the photographer Miriam Weaser back in

1211
01:02:37,920 --> 01:02:41,679
twenty sixteen. She was exploring an abandoned, highly irradiated laboratory

1212
01:02:41,679 --> 01:02:44,360
building deep in the Chernobyl Zone, and she stumbled upon

1213
01:02:44,360 --> 01:02:48,440
this massive, forgotten collection of old glass pickle jars.

1214
01:02:48,559 --> 01:02:50,679
Speaker 2: But they weren't filled with preserved vegetables.

1215
01:02:50,920 --> 01:02:54,920
Speaker 1: No, someone had used them to store these weird, unidentified,

1216
01:02:54,960 --> 01:03:00,199
grotesque animal and fish specimens, suspending them in murky formaldehyde,

1217
01:03:00,440 --> 01:03:04,480
just rows and rows of creepy mutated jarfish sitting in

1218
01:03:04,480 --> 01:03:08,159
the radioactive dark. To this day, no one knows exactly

1219
01:03:08,239 --> 01:03:11,840
who collected them, whether they were pre disaster biological samples,

1220
01:03:12,159 --> 01:03:15,639
or if some rogue scientists was secretly cataloging the mutated

1221
01:03:15,679 --> 01:03:17,039
wildlife after the blast.

1222
01:03:17,159 --> 01:03:19,960
Speaker 2: The environment of the exclusion zone has itself become a

1223
01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:24,599
hazard in totally unexpected, highly complex ways. The human interventions

1224
01:03:24,639 --> 01:03:26,800
often worsened the ecological.

1225
01:03:26,199 --> 01:03:28,719
Speaker 1: Reality, like with Copachi Village exactly.

1226
01:03:29,079 --> 01:03:32,039
Speaker 2: Take the fate of the Copachi Village. Located dangerously close

1227
01:03:32,039 --> 01:03:36,079
to the Chernobyl reactor. Like Pripiat, it was heavily contaminated

1228
01:03:36,079 --> 01:03:38,960
by the initial fallout, but the Soviet authorities decided to

1229
01:03:38,960 --> 01:03:42,079
handle it differently. Instead of leaving the wooden houses standing,

1230
01:03:42,480 --> 01:03:45,760
they brought in heavy machinery and completely bulldozed the entire

1231
01:03:45,840 --> 01:03:48,400
village into the earth, attempting to permanently bury.

1232
01:03:48,199 --> 01:03:51,920
Speaker 1: Their radiation, which turned out to be a massive catastrophic mistake.

1233
01:03:51,960 --> 01:03:57,719
Speaker 2: A profound hydrological miscalculation. By burying the highly contaminated wooden

1234
01:03:57,800 --> 01:04:01,840
structures and top soiled deep underground, they brought the radioactive

1235
01:04:01,840 --> 01:04:06,920
isotopes into direct sustained contact with the local shallow water table.

1236
01:04:07,039 --> 01:04:10,599
Oh no, no. This accelerated the spread of the radiation, poisoning

1237
01:04:10,599 --> 01:04:14,039
the underground aquifers far more severely and rapidly than if

1238
01:04:14,039 --> 01:04:17,039
they had simply left the contaminated buildings standing above ground

1239
01:04:17,360 --> 01:04:18,679
to slowly weather away.

1240
01:04:18,840 --> 01:04:20,760
Speaker 1: We just keep trying to bury the monster and it

1241
01:04:20,840 --> 01:04:22,880
keeps poisoning the well. And it's not just the water

1242
01:04:22,960 --> 01:04:26,760
that's broken, it's the actual cycle of decay. The zombie

1243
01:04:26,840 --> 01:04:29,679
leaves phenomenon in Prypia is terrifying.

1244
01:04:29,760 --> 01:04:32,360
Speaker 2: The lack of decomposition is a fascinating anomaly.

1245
01:04:32,519 --> 01:04:36,000
Speaker 1: Scientists conducting soil surveys notice that in the most heavily

1246
01:04:36,039 --> 01:04:38,840
I radiated parts of the Red Forest, the dead pine

1247
01:04:38,840 --> 01:04:42,079
needles and leaves that fall from the trees simply aren't decomposing.

1248
01:04:42,360 --> 01:04:45,360
They just lay there perfectly intact, year after year.

1249
01:04:45,639 --> 01:04:47,840
Speaker 2: We have to look at the microbiology to understand why

1250
01:04:48,639 --> 01:04:51,800
the ambient radiation levels in that specific soil are so

1251
01:04:51,960 --> 01:04:55,880
intensely high that they have essentially sterilized the ground. The

1252
01:04:55,960 --> 01:05:00,719
radiation has completely killed off the microscopic ecosystem microbes that

1253
01:05:00,760 --> 01:05:04,239
specialized fungui, the worms, and the insects that naturally feed

1254
01:05:04,280 --> 01:05:05,920
on a breakdown organic mass sous.

1255
01:05:05,920 --> 01:05:09,960
Speaker 1: You have decades of dry, highly radioactive leaves and deadwood

1256
01:05:10,039 --> 01:05:13,000
just piling up on the forest flour, perfectly preserved in

1257
01:05:13,039 --> 01:05:17,400
a state of suspended animation, which creates this massive terrifying

1258
01:05:17,480 --> 01:05:20,639
risk fire. Yes, if a lightning strike or a careless

1259
01:05:20,679 --> 01:05:24,480
spark ignites that deep layer of dry radioactive tender. It

1260
01:05:24,519 --> 01:05:27,800
could trigger a massive, uncontrollable forest fire that would pull

1261
01:05:27,840 --> 01:05:31,480
all that trap caesium and strontium back into the atmosphere,

1262
01:05:31,519 --> 01:05:34,920
sending a highly toxic cloud of radioactive ash right back

1263
01:05:34,920 --> 01:05:36,199
over the populations of Europe.

1264
01:05:36,239 --> 01:05:39,199
Speaker 2: The entire environment is just completely frozen, acting as a

1265
01:05:39,199 --> 01:05:40,119
ticking time bomb.

1266
01:05:40,320 --> 01:05:44,480
Speaker 1: It highlights the ultimate paradox of humanity's relationship with radiation.

1267
01:05:45,000 --> 01:05:49,239
We recognize it as an invisible, omnipresent death. And yet

1268
01:05:49,519 --> 01:05:51,639
and this is perhaps the most confounding element in the

1269
01:05:51,679 --> 01:05:54,880
sources were reviewed. While the vast majority of us rightly

1270
01:05:54,920 --> 01:05:57,960
fear and flee from these exclusion zones, there is a

1271
01:05:58,000 --> 01:06:03,280
subculture of people who actively intentionally seek out heavily irradiated.

1272
01:06:02,800 --> 01:06:04,719
Speaker 2: Environments the radon health minds.

1273
01:06:04,760 --> 01:06:07,639
Speaker 1: You are referring to the absolutely wild phenomenon of the

1274
01:06:07,719 --> 01:06:10,039
radon health mines. When I read this, I was stunned.

1275
01:06:10,400 --> 01:06:13,039
In places like Boulder, Montana and parts of Germany, there

1276
01:06:13,079 --> 01:06:17,960
are these old, abandoned deep shaft uranium mines because they

1277
01:06:18,000 --> 01:06:21,639
are surrounded by decaying uranium or the caves naturally fill

1278
01:06:21,719 --> 01:06:24,760
with concentrated radon gas. Now, just for context, radon is

1279
01:06:24,760 --> 01:06:28,039
a highly radioactive, colorless, odorless.

1280
01:06:27,480 --> 01:06:29,119
Speaker 2: Gas is extremely dangerous.

1281
01:06:29,159 --> 01:06:32,599
Speaker 1: The United States Environmental Protection Agency literally lists long term

1282
01:06:32,679 --> 01:06:35,400
radon exposure as the second leading cause of lung cancer

1283
01:06:35,400 --> 01:06:37,079
in the country, right behind smoking.

1284
01:06:37,360 --> 01:06:42,239
Speaker 2: It is a well documented, highly dangerous, scientifically prove in carcinogen.

1285
01:06:41,920 --> 01:06:45,239
Speaker 1: And yet despite all the medical warnings, people actively travel

1286
01:06:45,320 --> 01:06:47,719
to these mines. They pay a hefty admission fee to

1287
01:06:47,760 --> 01:06:50,320
the mine owners, They take a rickety elevator eighty five

1288
01:06:50,360 --> 01:06:53,440
feet deep underground, They sit in folding lawn chairs in

1289
01:06:53,440 --> 01:06:55,679
the damp dark for hours at a time, and they

1290
01:06:55,719 --> 01:06:59,599
just intentionally inhale deep breadths of this radioactive gas.

1291
01:07:00,119 --> 01:07:03,440
Speaker 2: They firmly believe in a fringe theory called radiation hormesis,

1292
01:07:03,800 --> 01:07:07,079
the idea that a low dose of toxic radiation actually

1293
01:07:07,119 --> 01:07:11,119
stimulates the immune system and cures their severe arthritis, their

1294
01:07:11,159 --> 01:07:13,840
chronic asthma, and their debilitating joint pain.

1295
01:07:14,360 --> 01:07:18,480
Speaker 1: It is a fascinating, deeply ingrained psychological paradox. How do

1296
01:07:18,519 --> 01:07:21,320
we possibly reconcile this? How do we justify a species

1297
01:07:21,360 --> 01:07:24,880
that flees in absolute justified terror from the invisible death

1298
01:07:24,920 --> 01:07:28,079
clouds in Ukraine and Japan, but then turns around and

1299
01:07:28,159 --> 01:07:30,599
willingly pays a premium admission fee to sit in a

1300
01:07:30,639 --> 01:07:34,079
folding chair and breathe in radioactive gas deep inside a

1301
01:07:34,079 --> 01:07:35,239
mountain in Montana.

1302
01:07:35,320 --> 01:07:38,679
Speaker 2: It speaks to a desperate, ancient human desire to harness

1303
01:07:38,679 --> 01:07:42,719
the uncontrollable, to believe that this awesome, universally destructive power

1304
01:07:42,760 --> 01:07:46,360
of the atom can somehow be tamed, inverted, and utilized

1305
01:07:46,599 --> 01:07:49,159
as a miracle cure for our own physical.

1306
01:07:48,719 --> 01:07:51,199
Speaker 1: Frailties, like trying to put a leash on a hurricane.

1307
01:07:51,239 --> 01:07:53,719
Speaker 2: We split the atom to prove our dominance, and the

1308
01:07:53,719 --> 01:07:56,079
people in those minds want to believe they are the

1309
01:07:56,199 --> 01:07:59,559
ultimate masters of the invisible world, capable of bending a

1310
01:07:59,679 --> 01:08:01,920
lethal carcinogen into a healing vapor.

1311
01:08:02,079 --> 01:08:05,079
Speaker 1: But as our deep dive today has thoroughly proven, nature

1312
01:08:05,199 --> 01:08:09,079
fundamentally rejects being mastered. And when we push the natural

1313
01:08:09,159 --> 01:08:12,800
order too far, when we scramble the basic building blocks

1314
01:08:12,800 --> 01:08:17,840
of reality, nature pushes back in unpredictable, horrifying ways, Which

1315
01:08:17,840 --> 01:08:20,840
brings me to the perfect way to cap off this exploration.

1316
01:08:20,960 --> 01:08:22,000
Speaker 2: I know where you're going with us.

1317
01:08:22,079 --> 01:08:25,880
Speaker 1: We've spent the hour talking about real documented mutations, the

1318
01:08:26,239 --> 01:08:30,479
giant twisted sunflowers, the fasciation of the Fukushima daisies, the

1319
01:08:30,520 --> 01:08:34,239
massive bores. I want to connect those real, terrifying botanical

1320
01:08:34,279 --> 01:08:38,239
facts back to humanity's oldest, darkest fears of avengeful Earth,

1321
01:08:38,640 --> 01:08:41,159
because long before we split the atom, we had the

1322
01:08:41,199 --> 01:08:44,319
folklore of carnivorous flora, the primal.

1323
01:08:44,039 --> 01:08:48,119
Speaker 2: Deeply rooted mythological concept that the plant kingdom could rise up,

1324
01:08:48,199 --> 01:08:51,720
abandon its passive state, and violently consume human life.

1325
01:08:52,000 --> 01:08:55,560
Speaker 1: Exactly before we were afraid of invisible radiation, we were

1326
01:08:55,640 --> 01:08:58,640
terrified of the deep jungle. Let's look at the historical

1327
01:08:58,680 --> 01:09:02,680
hoaxes and legends. In eighteen eighty seven, an author named J. W.

1328
01:09:02,800 --> 01:09:06,760
Buell wrote a terrifying account of the Yachtaveo tree, supposedly

1329
01:09:06,840 --> 01:09:08,960
hidden deep in the jungles of South America.

1330
01:09:09,640 --> 01:09:10,760
Speaker 2: The man Eating tree.

1331
01:09:10,840 --> 01:09:13,680
Speaker 1: He claimed to possess a thick, short trunk surrounded by

1332
01:09:13,800 --> 01:09:18,079
massive muscular tendrils resting on the ground. The legend stated

1333
01:09:18,079 --> 01:09:20,960
that if a traveler stepped near the trunk, the tendrils,

1334
01:09:21,000 --> 01:09:23,920
which were covered in vicious hooked barbes, would spring up

1335
01:09:23,920 --> 01:09:26,800
with the speed of striking snakes, wrap around the victim,

1336
01:09:27,039 --> 01:09:29,760
and slowly crush them to death to absorb their blood.

1337
01:09:29,880 --> 01:09:32,640
Speaker 2: A legend that echoes the architecture of the famous eighteen

1338
01:09:32,760 --> 01:09:36,760
seventy four journalistic hoax perpetrated by Edmund Spencer.

1339
01:09:36,600 --> 01:09:41,039
Speaker 1: The Madagascar Tree. Spencer published a highly detailed, entirely fabricated

1340
01:09:41,079 --> 01:09:43,600
letter in the New York World allegedly written by a

1341
01:09:43,600 --> 01:09:45,399
German explorer named Carl Leech.

1342
01:09:45,720 --> 01:09:47,199
Speaker 2: It was incredibly detailed.

1343
01:09:47,359 --> 01:09:51,000
Speaker 1: The letter claimed Leech had discovered a brutal, isolated tribe

1344
01:09:51,000 --> 01:09:54,920
in Madagascar called them Codos. He claimed he witnessed the

1345
01:09:54,960 --> 01:09:58,520
tribe violently sacrifice a woman by forcing her at spear

1346
01:09:58,560 --> 01:10:02,000
point to climb the trunk of a giant pineapple shaped tree.

1347
01:10:02,399 --> 01:10:06,439
According to the hoax, the tree's massive palmate leaves violently

1348
01:10:06,520 --> 01:10:09,640
snapped shut around her, crushing her to death, while the

1349
01:10:09,680 --> 01:10:13,880
trunk secreted a thick, intoxicating fluid that literally drank her blood.

1350
01:10:14,199 --> 01:10:15,239
And people believed it.

1351
01:10:15,279 --> 01:10:18,319
Speaker 2: And we see these botanical myths continuing into the modern era,

1352
01:10:18,640 --> 01:10:21,600
reflecting ongoing anxieties about the untamed wilderness.

1353
01:10:21,600 --> 01:10:24,680
Speaker 1: Totally, it wasn't just Victorian hoaxes. In eighteen ninety one,

1354
01:10:24,800 --> 01:10:28,520
a naturalist named Leroy Dunstan claimed he barely escaped the

1355
01:10:28,600 --> 01:10:32,319
vampire vines while exploring the remote swamps of Nicaragua. The

1356
01:10:32,399 --> 01:10:35,479
local guide supposedly called it the devil snare, like in

1357
01:10:35,520 --> 01:10:39,119
Harry Potter exactly Dunstan claimed his hunting dog got hopelessly

1358
01:10:39,159 --> 01:10:42,000
tangled in a dark, creeping vine, and when he tried

1359
01:10:42,000 --> 01:10:44,359
to hack the plant away with his knife, the severed

1360
01:10:44,439 --> 01:10:48,079
vine actively secreted a thick, black tar like sap that

1361
01:10:48,159 --> 01:10:52,279
instantly burned and blistered his flesh like a concentrated industrial acid.

1362
01:10:52,439 --> 01:10:53,800
Speaker 2: And there are modern examples too.

1363
01:10:54,079 --> 01:10:56,800
Speaker 1: Yeah. Even as recently as two thousand and seven, villagers

1364
01:10:56,840 --> 01:10:59,199
in a remote region of South India panicked over a

1365
01:10:59,239 --> 01:11:02,319
tree they called the Killara or the tiger tree. A

1366
01:11:02,359 --> 01:11:05,039
local herder swore he saw the branches of this tree

1367
01:11:05,079 --> 01:11:08,520
actively reach down, yank one of his heavy cows entirely

1368
01:11:08,560 --> 01:11:11,880
off the ground, and begin physically consuming it. The entire

1369
01:11:12,079 --> 01:11:15,359
village allegedly had to run out with axis to furiously

1370
01:11:15,439 --> 01:11:18,000
chop the branches back to save the panicked animal.

1371
01:11:18,520 --> 01:11:21,439
Speaker 2: These stories from the Adveo to the Tiger Tree are

1372
01:11:21,479 --> 01:11:25,359
spectacular fictions, but they serve a crucial grounding purpose in

1373
01:11:25,439 --> 01:11:30,199
human psychology. We have always been deeply, primely terrified at

1374
01:11:30,239 --> 01:11:32,960
the natural world turning its immense power against us.

1375
01:11:33,319 --> 01:11:36,760
Speaker 1: We've always imagined the forest seeking active, violent vengeance for

1376
01:11:36,800 --> 01:11:39,319
our intrusions. But as we've seen today, when we look

1377
01:11:39,319 --> 01:11:42,039
at the actual legacy of the atomic age, the truth

1378
01:11:42,079 --> 01:11:43,199
is far more sobering.

1379
01:11:43,239 --> 01:11:46,479
Speaker 2: We didn't need cursed vampire vines or mythological blood drinking

1380
01:11:46,520 --> 01:11:47,960
pineapples exactly.

1381
01:11:48,239 --> 01:11:51,560
Speaker 1: We didn't need ancient witchcraft or unexplored jungles. We just

1382
01:11:51,640 --> 01:11:54,319
needed to split the atom to turn a simple, beautiful

1383
01:11:54,359 --> 01:11:57,920
field of sunflowers into a nightmare of twisted, mutated giants.

1384
01:11:58,359 --> 01:12:01,199
We just needed a specialized reaction to melt down, to

1385
01:12:01,239 --> 01:12:04,520
turn the life giving rain into a black, toxic poison

1386
01:12:04,560 --> 01:12:06,520
that alters the DNA of generations.

1387
01:12:06,840 --> 01:12:08,960
Speaker 2: Let's pull all these threads together to wrap up this

1388
01:12:09,039 --> 01:12:10,079
massive exploration.

1389
01:12:10,319 --> 01:12:14,319
Speaker 1: We've journeyed from massive crumbling concrete tombs attempting to cover

1390
01:12:14,720 --> 01:12:18,319
glowing multen nuclear lava to the tragedy of an eight

1391
01:12:18,399 --> 01:12:20,680
legged frog outside a decommissioned plant.

1392
01:12:21,159 --> 01:12:24,479
Speaker 2: We've looked at the deeply somber, permanent shadows burned into

1393
01:12:24,479 --> 01:12:28,159
the stone steps of Hiroshima, the catastrophic hubris of burying

1394
01:12:28,199 --> 01:12:32,079
plutonium and shallow dirt pits, and the wild radioactive bores

1395
01:12:32,119 --> 01:12:34,600
aggressively reclaiming the abandoned farmlands of Japan.

1396
01:12:34,880 --> 01:12:38,520
Speaker 1: We've seen funguy that literally eat gamma radiation for breakfast,

1397
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and people who pay a premium to sit in a

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dark cave and breathe in carcinogenic gas.

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Speaker 2: It leaves us with a profound, almost uncomfortable realization about

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our place in the world. We split the atom to

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master the universe, to prove our ultimate, unassailable dominance over

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the physical laws of nature, but in doing so we

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created massive silent exclusion zones on our own planet, where

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humanity is now permanently physically exiled.

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Speaker 1: We created zones where nature, freed from our presence but

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poisoned by our technology, has been forced into entirely new,

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chaotic and deeply unpredictable evolutionary paths.

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Speaker 2: Before we sign off, consider this one final note from

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the research. A concept that completely reframes everything we've discussed.

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Speaker 1: Go ahead.

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Speaker 2: Some prominent geologists and scientists now theorized that because our

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modern world has unleast so much atomic energy, future archaeologists,

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perhaps millions of years from now, won't track the existence

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of our human civilization by our ruined concrete buildings or

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our rusted bridges.

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Speaker 1: What will they look for.

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Speaker 2: They will track us by the distinct artificial layer of

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radioactive isotopes, the caesium and the plutonium that we have

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permanently compressed into the Earth's crust. We haven't just scarred

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the surface with our bombs and our meltdowns. We've essentially

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engineered our own geological epoch. The radioactive layer will be

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our ultimate fossil.

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Speaker 1: A permanent glowing signature in the stone. That is a

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heavy thought to leave on. So, after diving through all

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of this, here's my direct question for you, the listener.

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Speaker 2: I'm curious to hear the answers to this.

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Speaker 1: Knowing everything we just discussed about the chaotic, invisible, and

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mutated reality of these spaces, if you were guaranteed absolute

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one hundred percent safety from the radiation like magical suit

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with no health risks, whatsoever, would you ever venture into

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one of these deep exclusion zones to witness this bizarre

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reclaimed reality firsthand? Or do you believe that some doors,

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once we've locked them, are better left permanently respectfully closed.

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Speaker 2: Tough call, it really is.

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Speaker 1: Leave a comment down below to let me know what

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you think. Thank you for providing these incredible sources and

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thank you for joining us on this intense journey. Today

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on Thrilling Threads, we promise more mind bending explorations next time.