The Button That Blew Up Chernobyl (What Really Happened)

April 26, 1986. 1:23 AM. An engineer presses the emergency shutdown button at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Seconds later, Reactor 4 explodes. It was supposed to be a safety test. Instead, it became the worst nuclear disaster in history, and for days the Soviet Union told the world nothing. In this animated story, Nickel and his nervous new co-host Volt (a light bulb who takes this very personally) break down exactly what went wrong. We cover the delayed test, the hidden reactor design flaw, the control rods that sped things up instead of slowing them down, the firefighters who were never told the truth, the city of Pripyat that was evacuated "for three days" and never came back, and the cleanup that took more than half a million people. Chapters: 0:00 The Button 0:37 Meet Nickel and Volt 1:02 The Chernobyl Plant and Pripyat 1:52 The Safety Test 2:34 Midnight in the Control Room 3:25 1:23 AM: The Explosion 4:19 The Firefighters 4:56 Evacuating Pripyat 5:30 How Sweden Exposed the Secret 6:04 Helicopters, Divers and Biorobots 7:08 The True Cost 7:42 Chernobyl Today 8:16 The Real Lesson What disaster should we explain next? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe for more animated history stories, explained simply. Note: Some figures, like the long-term death toll, are still debated by researchers. We use widely cited estimates and say so in the video. #Chernobyl #History #Animation