Discovering Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot

Discovering Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot
That Chernobyl Guy
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294,690 views  Jan 10, 2026
In June of 1986, dosimetrists Mikhail Kostyakov and Vladimir Kabanov found themselves at the foot of a flight of stairs on the ground floor of the destroyed reactor of Chernobyl Unit Four, investigating something that wasn’t quite right. Despite being on the ground floor, their dosimeters read 25 roentgens per hour. The very bottom of reactor was roughly four floors above them, and more than twenty-five meters away, not to mention all the shielding from the walls of corridors between them. There had to be a very powerful source of radiation at the top of those stairs...


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Sources:
   • Их называли "сталкерами". Неизвестные факт...  
https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/asmol...
The Chornobyl [sic] Accident Revisited-Source Term Analysis and Reconstruction of Events During the Active Phase
http://www.wdcb.ru/mining/thernobl/
   • We've rebuilt the first Chernobyl robot!  
Konstantin Checherov: The Unpeaceful Atom of Chernobyl
Midnight in Chernobyl
“Shelter” Object, 1986-2006.
BBC Horizon: Inside Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus
THE SHELTER OBJECT IN CONDITIONS OF THE NEW SAFE CONFINEMENT
Aleksandr Kupnyi
Sergei Koshelev
And the countless men who documented the Sarcophagus.

Shoutout to Chornobyl Family for rebuilding Microbe!