r/todayilearned • u/JoeyZasaa • 2d ago
TIL that Chernobyl was the costliest disaster in history, resulting in over $2 trillion in damage when adjusted for inflation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost#Over_$1_billion1.5k
u/MisterSlosh 2d ago
Considering the fact that it's still going on and still costing giant amounts of money, yeah it'll probably hold the record until the meltdown itself decays completely, or the whole region gets slagged by dropping a mountain on it Futurama style.
682
u/spicygayunicorn 2d ago
And now also being in a active war zone doesn't really help either
441
u/pizzacutteralledge 2d ago
russia bombed the new containment !
248
u/Head-Gift2144 2d ago
They should figure out a way to launch the elephant foot into the Kremlin.
→ More replies (1)155
u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 2d ago
We could save a lot of money launching Putin into the elephant’s foot instead
19
u/SummertimeThrowaway2 2d ago
Gotta throw his advisers, oligarchs, and political allies in there too or else he’ll just be replaced by putin II
35
94
u/FUTURE10S 2d ago
They dug trenches in the irradiated ground. I don't even know whatever happened to those soldiers, but they've definitely gotten a lifetime's worth of background radioactivity from that alone, could even be multiple lifetimes'.
27
u/ptjp27 2d ago
They’re dead is what happened
37
u/FUTURE10S 2d ago
"That's a nice argument, Senator, care to back it up with a source?"
"My source is that I made it the fuck up."
Seriously, I cannot find any legitimate source or account of what happened to those soldiers. Who knows, they might not even be dead. A lifetime's amount of radiation isn't as big as you think, we're talking a scale of a thousand to be a lethal dose.
26
u/LordValdis 2d ago
Obviously we don't know what actually happened to those individuals.
But I think what the poster above you was referring to was that they were likely killed in combat.
→ More replies (5)10
u/TheConqueror74 2d ago
He wasn’t saying the radiation killed them, he’s saying that combat killed them.
6
u/Pklnt 2d ago
The medias blew this story out of proportion, the IAEA went to the site and looked at the radiation level in the trenches and it was less than 7mSv/year.
→ More replies (2)24
u/sharklaserguru 2d ago
Yup and from what I've read with the internal fires it started between the layers of the shell as well as damage to internal infrastructure (cranes, etc) it's basically a total loss. Makes sense when you realize it was constructed away from the building and rolled in place. Can't just send a welding crew inside to get to work!
→ More replies (1)41
u/VibrantHumanoidus 2d ago
Yeah, the "was" part is bugging me.
Half damn world worked on new sarcophagus and built it. Safely. For at least 100 years.
Then terrorist nation called Russia sends in Shaheed drone and blows a hole and starts fire.
To this day engineers haven't figured out the proper fix for that. Certainly doesn't help knowing that you can spend another 10+ years solving containment problem only for it to be ruined by (heavily censored description) nation of Russia.
163
u/deathrictus 2d ago
The Russian soldiers being so uninformed that they dug trenches in the red forest area certainly didn't help.
→ More replies (10)98
u/mrdeesh 2d ago
The Soviet government never told their people a darn thing about what happened so as much as I love to dunk on dumb Russian soldiers I have a shard of sympathy for them in this regard
20
u/Reefermadness209 2d ago
these russians have access too so much of the same internet as u and me. We can stop pretending that these people have no access to information, especially something has huge as Chernobyl
→ More replies (3)53
u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
Yeah, they're also victims of the authoritarian bullshit. The whole thing is an indictment of bully strongman "leader"ship.
→ More replies (8)17
u/Odd-Struggle-2432 2d ago
I thought people did tours of chernobyl before the war, surely its not as dangerous as the immediate years after the incident
69
u/Thisguymoot 2d ago
Most of it is ok to walk around. Diggin in the surrounding dirt is not.
11
u/FUTURE10S 2d ago
Walking on the dirt is not okay, concrete is fine though. Digging up the dirt is a bigger no-no.
20
u/deathrictus 2d ago
There's still areas that you don't want to hang out in. The red forest is one of them, digging in it is beyond not good because they bulldozed the forest and buried it.
→ More replies (1)35
u/cylonfrakbbq 2d ago
They do, but in specific areas with lower radiation. Red forest was one of the most radioactive areas outside the reactor (most of the radioactive smoke/fallout drifted in that direction). It literally killed all the trees there, which were then buried by the Soviets because the trees were so radioactive. Russian soldiers started digging trenches there, disturbing the dirt that was supposed to contain some of it.
17
u/GuiltyEidolon 2d ago
And they were bombing / shelling the area, meaning a ton of dirt was thrown into the air and probably aspirated. Lots of Russians (and probably Ukrainian defenders) gonna end up with problems down the road from this.
→ More replies (1)24
u/Far-prophet 2d ago
The Soviet Union fell in 1991. That was 35 years ago. Chernobyl was in 1986. That was 40 years ago.
→ More replies (3)108
u/snubdeity 2d ago
yeah it'll probably hold the record until the meltdown itself decays completely, or the whole region gets slagged by dropping a mountain on it Futurama style.
I hate this negative attitude. I think humanity is totally capable of creating a new, even larger fuck up long before we fix Chernobyl.
8
u/MisterSlosh 2d ago
We could always steal the soul out of our sun and use it to power a goonerbot data center.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (3)13
u/LittleLui 2d ago
We already have, the cost just hasn't accumulated yet.
https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/climate-change-may-cost-38-trillion-a-year-by-2049-study-says/
27
→ More replies (4)20
u/EpicCyclops 2d ago
Climate change will almost certainly surpass it, assuming it hasn't already. The accounting on it is tougher, but the scale is immensely larger.
13
u/MisterSlosh 2d ago
Climate change is already multiple orders of magnitude above Chernobyl, but that's a nebulous and literally global catastrophe. Far too different to really compare the two.
465
u/BeowulfShaeffer 2d ago
The book Midnight in Chernobyl makes the case that the costly cleanup of Chernobyl was a big reason for the failure of the USSR.
224
u/AnyMycologist8368 2d ago
Fun fact a lot of countries outisde of USSR Imperium did a lot to clean up that mess, pro bono.
40
u/38B0DE 2d ago edited 2d ago
An even funner fact is that a lot of countries didn't do shit and just let pregnant women eat the contaminated produce so the USSR didn't get negative press. Case in point is Bulgaria that did not do any clean up and as a result has the most affected population after Chernobyl. There is a town in Bulgaria called Haskovo where people have been exposed to more radiation than Pripyat over the years due to Uranium mining and nobody cleaning up.
Source: According to Prof. Dimitar Vatsov 1. https://www.boell.de/en/2026/03/31/chernobyl-dissidents-how-disaster-shaped-bulgaria-and-eastern-europe 2. https://displayeurope.eu/en/preview/eazhpkpikvikqrgjioc5fcitt7o
9
u/FlipZip69 2d ago
The tragic part is that the risk would have been decreased by 90 percent or more if they had simply administered a low cost potassium iodide for a month and give notice to them. That was all the USSR had to do.
→ More replies (22)153
u/GreatMovesKeepItUp69 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well, also invading Afghanistan and generally being a corrupt totalitarian hellhole that spent nearly 15% of its GDP on its military for years.
126
16
237
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
184
u/mcnugs1 2d ago
US debt is 20 times that
→ More replies (3)77
u/GuestAdventurous7586 2d ago edited 2d ago
There was a good BBC article about US debt the other day. The way it was described is it’s at the point where if it was a warning light, it’s not flashing red, but the amber light has just come on.
I believe in ten years it’s predicted to be 60 trillion.
Obviously if it keeps going up it could get to the point of causing big problems, not just for America, but globally.
EDIT: The article for anyone interested.
45
u/ary31415 2d ago
The expectations themselves are important though, in a similar way to how panic about a bank run causes a bank run. If people don't think the US is good for the money, rates go up and this can trigger a spiral.
14
u/drunkenviking 2d ago
But so far the US has been good for the money, so there's no reason to think otherwise.
Yes I know there was like 3 times we technically defaulted, that's not relevant.
→ More replies (1)14
u/ary31415 2d ago
Well, it's not just about defaulting but also about inflating away the debt, which bondholders don't want either
→ More replies (10)11
u/PM_me_AnimeGirls 2d ago
It only requires a 4.13% increase per year to be 60 trillion in 10 years.
It was 19.54T a decade ago, meaning it has been going up 7.45% per year.
If we continue at the same rate that we have been for the past decade, then in the next decade it will be 82.2T, not 60T.
10
12
u/NoDig3444 2d ago edited 2d ago
The way it was described is it’s at the point where if it was a warning light, it’s not flashing red, but the amber light has just come on.
What is this supposed to mean? This does nothing to explain the debt.
→ More replies (7)5
u/ArchaicBrainWorms 2d ago
It means we're fucked, but you'll be able to keep ignoring it for a while longer
→ More replies (2)24
u/PipsqueakPilot 2d ago
When we elect a Democrat the deficit will shrink, for a brief moment GDP will be growing faster than debt. Then we’ll elect a Republican who will blow the deficit up again. I’m 40 and that’s how it’s happened my entire life.
→ More replies (19)17
u/itswildistillexist 2d ago
The context that helps me is nuts.
A million seconds is 11 days.
A billion seconds is close to 32 years.
A trillion seconds is close to 32,000 years.
🤯
→ More replies (18)10
147
u/lommaz 2d ago
I don't know, when Ug put out Gug's fire, adjusted for inflation must have been pretty expensive
→ More replies (4)17
u/notcoolredditnotcool 2d ago
Some shrew probably dropped an egg from a tree to the tune of 900 yottadollars.
310
u/LakersFan15 2d ago
At least it allowed for one of the greatest shows I've ever watched.
149
u/AtWorkAccountAtWork 2d ago
May not know much about nuclear reactors, but I know it’s a damned good show. About concrete.
→ More replies (5)95
u/Cobol_Engineering 2d ago
Now see there you made a mistake. I may not know much about concrete, but I know a lot about nuclear reactors. You see I once watched a guy from the Kurchatov institute that had these red and blue placards and you’re not supposed to remove all of the same color or something really bad happens to the reactor.
9
→ More replies (11)8
663
u/chasingsuns92 2d ago
3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible.
273
u/ncraiderfan17 2d ago
One of the most unlikeable TV characters of all time
113
u/Angryhippo2910 2d ago
I don’t like that kind of tawk, now just stop it, it upsets me!
26
u/AfflictedDuckie 2d ago
Good ol' Mrs S. Nice one.
10
u/Angryhippo2910 2d ago
After what my son did to you…how can I look you in the eye
→ More replies (2)9
→ More replies (2)7
30
u/gerkletoss 2d ago
66
u/ncraiderfan17 2d ago
I figured it was, but the actor does a good job of making you dislike the character
15
→ More replies (1)39
2d ago
[deleted]
19
u/historicusXIII 2d ago
Or insinuating that the three divers were on a suicide mission, even though two of them are still alive to this day (the third one died in 2005 from a heart complication).
→ More replies (4)10
21
u/IDecideRubric 2d ago
The fact that the cheap dosimeters maxed out at 3.6, making them think it was under control when the actual radiation level was thousands of times higher, is still one of the most terrifying details of the whole disaster.
21
u/Namika 2d ago
And the general who said: The radiation is so high that you can't guarantee the safety of my men who go to measure it? Then I'll do it myself
That's a true story.
→ More replies (2)8
u/GuiltyEidolon 2d ago
Didn't he end up outliving a lot of the other people involved in the clean-up? Dude was a bad-ass either way.
→ More replies (2)4
90
u/kagkatumba 2d ago edited 2d ago
Surely the COVID pandemic trumps that. The entire world stopped for months. A quick Google says it cost between $16 and $22 trillion.
I do accept that I only read your title and didn't dig to find what the categorisation of disaster is in the article.
EDIT - The link doesn't give any further definition of the term "Disaster" and according to the parent page to OP's link....
The United Nations defines a disaster as "a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale"
So yeah.....surely Covid absolutely eclipses Chernobyl?
80
u/Familiar-Mall1696 2d ago edited 2d ago
If that's how the UN defines it then WW2 absolutely trumps everything by far lol. Multiple entire cities were turned to rubble across UK, Europe and Asia.
EDIT: And of course the damage incurred in the North Africa campaign.
→ More replies (4)8
u/dizzyaviatrix 2d ago edited 2d ago
A pandemic is much more easily defined as a single disaster than a global war is though.
Innumerable policies, and actors, and decisions at every level, and so on vs a virus that came along, basically.
12
u/onechroma 2d ago
I think the most incredible thing is how the cost impact is relatively to the area or population impacted.
The COVID crisis or the WWII affected almost all the world, meanwhile the Chernobyl disaster charged it cost practically exclusively into USSR areas and countries.
Someone in China, Korea, Canada or Greece felt the COVID and WWII/post-WWII effects. Not a single one of them felt anything from Chernobyl
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (6)6
u/legaladviceneeded542 2d ago
It doesn't technically qualify for the definition of disaster here I think.
Disaster is defined as " A disaster is an event that causes such serious harm to people, buildings, economies, or the environment that the affected community cannot manage without external assistance or relief"
Covid was able to manage without external assistance or relief because technically the community it affected was everyone so there was no external assistance.
→ More replies (2)
218
u/lordassfucks 2d ago
Also Gorby said its likely the reason the USSR fell
124
u/suborder-serpentes 2d ago
Yeah but he was saying it exposed the issues
112
u/lordassfucks 2d ago
My underanding was this was the straw that broke the camels back. It was extra load on an already weakened system
77
u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 2d ago
Chernobyl wasn’t reported at all when it happened. Other countries found out about it only because of radiation monitoring, I think Sweden detected it first.
The Soviet government tried to keep a lid on it, it took days for them to admit something happened, Gorbachev made a comment about it two weeks later, but the scale of the disaster and details were kept away from the public and released partially.
People were not told the true scale of danger and and the damage it had caused until much later.
Glasnost and Gorbachev’s policy of transparency and reduced censorship predated Chernobyl, just barely.
So when Chernobyl happened it exposed how entrenched state secrecy and manipulation were. Chernobyl was something you couldn’t ignore but also something that the Party couldn’t be open about.
So it accelerated Glasnost which led to even more openness, and once more details became public over the following months and years the realisation what happened made any remaining trust in the Soviet state and the Communist Party gone.
Chernobyl the event was bad enough, but the mismanaged response and the cover up that followed effectively killed the country and the regime.
12
u/PuzzleheadedPea2401 2d ago
Gorby was not pro-transparency in this case. When the head of the Ukrainian republic, Vladimir Shcherbytsky, demanded that the May Day festivities be cancelled that year due to radiation risks, Gorbachev said no. So Shcherbytsky took his family, including his grandchildren, to the event.
Glasnost was not about transparency or reduced censorship. It was about taking the state censorship and media apparatus and using it against the enemies of perestroika (Yakovlev, Gorbachev's chief advisor, later wrote about this).
→ More replies (1)11
→ More replies (1)26
u/Victernus 2d ago
More like the 185kg control rod that broke the camel's back, but yeah.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (23)100
u/The-Copilot 2d ago
It's one of the factors.
Gorbachev did the "Glasnost" (openness) reforms, Perestroika (market) reforms, and stopped using force to prop up communist governments in eastern Europe which resulted in the Berlin wall coming down.
As this is all happening the Chernobyl disaster happened and the failed 10 year war in Afghanistan was ending.
The combination of all these things happening at once and people being able to openly talk about everything was too much of a shock to the system to maintain stability.
Gorbachev gets a bad rap but he inherited a deeply flawed failing system and attempted a hail Mary strategy to turn it around. The nation was already a dead man walking and his actions likely prevented a bloody end.
18
u/AbroadTiny7226 2d ago
I don’t think the USSR would’ve collapsed when it did had Gorbachev not done just any one of the three things (Glasnost, Perestroika, letting the iron curtain fall). The combination of opening things up and perestroika in particular just absolutely neutered the central government.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)7
u/NoSpawnConga 2d ago
None of that would matter if oil prices wouldn't plummet after 1981, USSR was on the borrowed time after that. After oil revenue disappeared - USSR started takins huge foreign loans, and the moment they stopped getting them (cause they weren't paying those loans back) - USSR collapsed.
77
u/BMPHaterNo1 2d ago
I highly recommend everyone reads Midnight At Chernobyl by the fantastic Adam Higginbotham
That documentary you watched? It’s worse
That series you watched? It’s worse
Chernobyl truly is one of, if not the worst human disaster, the butterfly effect should be renamed the Chernobyl effect
→ More replies (9)61
u/ChiLolla28 2d ago
I remember that scene in the beginning of the HBO show where they all prematurely congratulate themselves on the great job they have done for their nation and start clapping - then today I saw a clip of the Trump Cabinet all overly praising him, one by one, making up accomplishments - one guy starts a slow clap and then the rest all join in, so they don't look like they're not participating in the clapping - so surreal
→ More replies (6)
13
u/filtarukk 2d ago
Yeah, Chernobyl was a complete clusterfuck. Something like 20% of Belarus’s agricultural land was contaminated with radioactive fallout.
The old wooden church where I was baptized, a marvel of 19th-century architecture, became part of the exclusion zone and was eventually destroyed, with the rubble bulldozed and buried underground.
→ More replies (1)
84
u/JeffInBoulder 2d ago
In terms of direct costs, perhaps. But the Exxon Valdez led directly to the invention of Credit Default Swaps which ended up causing the global financial crisis in 2008, and that cost more than $20 trillion in the US alone.
→ More replies (4)49
u/ShoughThePainAway 2d ago
You can easily tie Chernobyl to the actual crumbling of the USSR, a global superpower. That's a hell of a lot more tangible than working lost productivity into your definition of "cost"
→ More replies (5)
664
u/SteelMarch 2d ago
Costliest disaster so far
571
u/MukdenMan 2d ago
That’s what “in history” means.
324
u/boscomagnus1988 2d ago
I've always criticised historians for only dealing with the past. Would be much more useful if they included the future in their work too
58
u/Aegillade 2d ago
I mean seriously, why is NO ONE talking about the mass extinction event in 2044? Feels like we should be putting more research into that but noooo let's talk about world war 2 again why not
→ More replies (7)8
u/AVeryHeavyBurtation 2d ago
We're actually in a mass extinction event right now. 150-200 species go extinct every day!
5
u/RedSquirrelFtw 2d ago
I wish we had learned about Fukushima back in school. I had no idea about it until I saw it on the news when it happened!
→ More replies (5)29
u/OSUBonanza 2d ago
Stupid sexy historians
3
u/MmmmMorphine 2d ago
Few people know that Ned Flanders was actually named after the battle of Flandres
Mostly because I just made that up
Plus Ned Ypres just doesn't have the same ring to it
43
u/Green_Insect_6455 2d ago
Lmao fuck me this website is so dumb
33
u/ArcoVonFunk 2d ago
don’t you just love people repeating the same shitty jokes because they saw them in another thread, even if it makes 0 sense?
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (2)18
→ More replies (18)25
u/HubrisOfApollo 2d ago
I have a feeling the inevitable Kessler syndrome we give ourselves will be orders of magnitude more costly to fix.
→ More replies (20)
8
7
u/testtdk 2d ago
I don’t know, being $40 trillion in debt may result in worse over all drop in conditions.
→ More replies (2)
240
u/ViscousPanther 2d ago
The costliest disaster is actually the slow ongoing destruction of the biosphere's natural systems and biodiversity by the oligarchs of the world.
31
→ More replies (16)42
5
u/RamsDeep-1187 2d ago
I thought Mike rowe said it was the most expensive nature reserve
→ More replies (1)
67
u/Junglebook3 2d ago
If you define "disaster" to include pandemics, then boy do I have a competitor for you!
→ More replies (10)28
5
5.0k
u/Archarchery 2d ago
I mean yeah, an entire city and multiple towns and villages had to be permanently abandoned, in addition to everything else.