Blog post: swansont: A Hot Mess

By the fall of 1986, the emergency crews fighting to contain the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl made it into a steam corridor beneath failed reactor Number 4. Inside this chamber they found black lava that had oozed straight from the core. The most famous formation was a solid flow that their radiation sensors firmly told them not to approach. With cameras pushed in from around a corner, the workers dubbed the dimly lit mass “the Elephant’s Foot.†According to readings taken at the time, the still hot portion of molten core put out enough radiation to give a lethal dose in 300 seconds.

 

The Elephant’s Foot could be the most dangerous piece of waste in the world.