Elephant's foot was the name my mother gave the sock under my desk
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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jesus fucking christ dude
Jesus fucking sock am I right
Good grief, the noise on that picture tells a terrible story.
Deep-fried memes were a lot more dangerous to produce back in the day.
Real photo info: Picture of the "Elephant's foot" which is a melted mess of radioactive fun from Chernobyl post accident.
More info here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/the-elephant-foot-of-the-chernobyl-disaster-1986/
Probably the last picture that guy ever took.
The article says at that point ('96) a lethal dose would take 500 seconds of exposure. Still not good though.
Isn't the term for the melted fuel/reactor bits corium
It is, though this deposit of Corium is called the elephant’s foot due to its shape.
Yes, actually "Corium" is a word that was made for the occasion, meaning "Element made by the core of nuclear reactor"; the elephant's foot is that particular blob of corium that is under Chernobyl's reactor
No one is going to talk about the elephant (foot) in the room?
So that guy definitely got a lethal dose of radiation, right? I thought a couple minutes near that thing meant certain death.
According to an article posted in the comments, this was in '96 and it was emitting 10 times less radiation. It says over 500 seconds would be lethal.
Still, that close and without full face coverage. I certainly wouldn't want to be there.
Do you think that the suit he's wearing somehow protects against the gamma radiation and neutrons screaming through his body? It's just to keep from tracking dust / tiny radioactive particles.
Yes, I did think that.
Isn't there a suit that can protect from radioactivity? Whats the point of the suit if the user gets fucked either way?
No, there's nothing human+portable that will provide enough protection for it to be worthwhile:
Unlike charged particles, a certain percentage of gammas will always make it through the absorber, and it is useful to consider the half-value thickness of a given absorbing material for the gamma ray energies of interest.
Neutrons require similar shielding.
It's possible to block alpha emissions with skin/paper and beta with a sheet of foil, gamma and neutron are scary
Definitely agreed. The article said he just took a quick reading while the picture was taken. Apparently no long term effects would happen from the little exposure, but I'm not sure their reference for that.
Either way, the further away to it from me, the better.
No; that photo is from 1996 (a decade after the incident) where the vast majority of short lived fission products are well into their decay chains.
It's not safe to be around it for a long period now (and it still wasn't then), but it'd take at least a few minutes of getting up close and personal with it to see any short term effects.
FWIW NYT interviewed him in 2014. He may have since passed (I didn't look it up) but certainly not as a result of acute radiation exposure.
Fun fact: the film had to be exposed for several seconds for each of the images in this series due to the low light levels, which contributes to the amount of radiation 'fuzz' in the images. Think 1800s camera levels of staying still for a photo, just in front of a giant radioactive chunk of corium.
Why didn't they just bring bigger lights I wonder? Space constraints? Is this sitting inside a collapsed basement?
That appears to be the Elephant's foot in Chernobyl. When it was first discovered it apparently could cause radiation poisoning within 4 minutes.
That being said, the half life decay of the elephant's foot has been going on for awhile. Artur Korneyev, who took photographs appears to be alive to this day.