Half-Life Histories

By the fall of 1986, the emergency crews fighting to contain the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant made it into the basement. They turned a corner into a steam corridor beneath failed reactor Number 4 and found not steam, but black lava that had oozed out of the core, eaten through meters of concrete, and settled on the floor. The largest and most famous formation in the corridor was a two-ton wrinkled mass that their radiation sensors firmly told them not to approach. With cameras pushed in from around a corner, the workers documented the dimly lit mass. This is the true story of the Elephant’s Foot.

At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in human history…but it wasn’t supposed to be. On March 1st, 1954, the United States detonated the country’s first thermonuclear or fusion bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a small coral reef and 23 islands almost equidistant from Australia, Japan, and Hawaii. In the days and weeks following the blast, the United States would pay out millions of dollars in settlements, thousands of islanders would be evacuated and re-evacuated, and the Japanese public would deem the test “a second Hiroshima,” a comparison no citizen would dare make lightly.

At 6 AM on New Year’s Day, 1959, Dr. Clarence Lushbaugh began an autopsy. He was about to open up one Cecil Kelley, and remove eight pounds of his organs, muscles, tissues, and bone. He put these tissues, including Kelley’s brain, in a few hastily gathered mayonnaise jars, and took them back to his lab for analysis. This is the true story…

On 13 July 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the path of the 76 GeV proton beam. Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain. This is what happened next

The grisly details of America's deadly first nuclear disaster, SL-1.

As conditions change at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, radiation rates are rising once again. Are they dangerous, and will they lead to another disaster?

On 11 March 2011, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant experienced the worst disaster since Chernobyl. And its people...went through an epidemic of ghosts.

On September 13, 1987, some men cracked open an abandoned source of cesium-137. What followed was one of the world's worst nuclear accidents.

Immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant fell. The radiation in the area began to rise. Is Chernobyl dangerous again?

When Russia took over Europe's largest nuclear power plant, the public was terrified it would lead to nuclear disaster. How secure are nuclear facilities during wartime?

There has only been one recorded death due to an unknown source of radiation. Was it an accident? Was it negligence? Or was it something worse?

The Three Mile Island accident is one of the world's most infamous, but was it more of a communication meltdown than a nuclear one?

On July 19th, 1957, a 2-kiloton nuclear warhead exploded above the heads of five volunteers during “Shot John” of the Operation Plumbbob series of US nuclear tests. Why would anyone volunteer to be at ground zero for such a blast, and what happened to them?

In 1985, a state-of-the-art radiation therapy device called the THERAC-25 started blasting holes through patients' bodies, leading to the world’s first death by radiation treatment overdose. It killed two more people before anyone knew what was going wrong. Why?

Almost half of the people who worked on John Wayne’s “worst” film – The Conqueror – eventually died of cancer. Was it because the movie was shot downwind of an infamous nuclear test site? Or is there something more to the statistics?

On a snowy day in 2001, three men from Lia, Georgia stumbled across two metal cylinders. The ground was steaming beneath them. It would take the work of over 50 people and two years of intensive hospital treatment before the radiological incident was finally over.

In late 2022, a video of an apparent nuclear accident spread rapidly on Twitter and Tumblr. Was it modern history’s first “viral” nuclear accident? Or was it faked for the lolz? This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] attempts an investigation.

On August 6th, 1945, the people of Hiroshima, Japan became some of the only humans to ever witness firsthand the awesome and terrible power of an atom split for offensive purposes. Today, the city is a thriving metropolis. Why isn’t it radioactive? Why isn’t it abandoned like Chernobyl? This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] travels to Japan to explain why.

Fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. on Monday, July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenhemier and his team of Manhattan Project scientists ushered in the nuclear age. And thankfully, after the Trinity test, the Earth was still there. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] is the true story of the day we almost set the world on fire.

On November 17th, 1992 a scientist accidentally stuck his hand in an extremely powerful beam of x-rays at a particle accelerator accelerator facility in Hanoi, Vietnam. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] explains what happened next.

In Germany in 1939, the Uranverein, or “uranium club,” was trying to beat Oppenheimer to the bomb. The scientist believed all Germany needed was enough of a single, incredibly rare substance critical to advancing nuclear physics: heavy water. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] explains what happened next.

After its discovery by Marie Curie, the radioactive element radium was incorporated into everything as a “cure all.” The most famous was RADITHOR, a radium-infused tonic that claimed to treat over 150 different ailments. Eben Byers would drink over 1,000 bottles of Radithor in three years. This episode of [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] explains how Byers’ resulting death would change an entire industry.

Could you see a nuclear explosion on the moon with the naked eye? That was the question posed by the United States military in the 1950s as the cold war was heating up and the space race between the US and the Soviet Union was in full swing. Project A119, details of which were declassified in 2000, tasked scientists to “safely” target and hit the moon with a nuclear weapon in order to send a message to the USSR. We only discovered the details of this unconventional and bizarre plan 40 years later, via a posthumous biography…of the greatest science communicator to ever live: Carl Sagan. This episode of [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] explores the true story of the plan to nuke the moon.

Between 1980 and 1989, four people between two young families would die of leukemia. The connection? They all lived in the same room in an apartment building in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. This episode of [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] explains how a single misplaced capsule became one of history’s worst orphan source accidents.

In Russia in 1997, an unfortunate technician answered the question, “what would have happened if the ‘Demon Core’ was never stopped in 1946?” This episode of [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] explains the counterfactual physics of history’s most infamous criticality accidents.

At exactly 6:06PM on July 24th, 1964, a 38-year-old father of nine poured what he thought was 11 liters of solvent into a mixing tank. What followed was the worst radiological accident in the US nuclear industry's history. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] is the true story of the Wood River Junction criticality accident.

In 1989, 1990, and 1991, there were three back-to-back fatal irradiator accidents in El Salvador, Israel, and Belarus. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] tells the story of how a lack of safety culture and human error can lead to some of the worst fates in industry.

On September 30, 1999, the Tokaimura nuclear accident became the worst criticality accident in modern nuclear history. At a uranium processing facility in Japan, workers accidentally triggered a self-sustaining nuclear reaction while preparing fuel for an experimental reactor. One of the technicians, Hisashi Ouchi, received a massive radiation dose and spent 83 days in intensive medical care before his death. Over time, his story spread across the internet with misleading claims about what really happened. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] is the true story.

On October 10th, 1957, a nuclear reactor fire broke out at Windscale in the UK becoming the first nuclear disaster to directly impact the public. Long before Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Chernobyl disaster, This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] is the true story of the Windscale nuclear fire, the attempted government cover-up and the legacy it created.