The World's Most Radioactive Object Is An Elephant's Foot

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]If I said to you that there was a deadly elephant's foot inside the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, you'd probably say, "What? An actual elephant's foot?" Well, it's not actually an elephant's foot, but it's instead a melted core of the destroyed reactor number four that encountered severe problems during the Chernobyl disaster of the 26th of April, 1986.

[00:00:22]This was the reactor that exploded and caused immense damage to human life and also the infrastructure around. The Chernobyl disaster is said to have been the most expensive disaster in human history with it costing a huge $700 billion.

[00:00:39]But what is the elephant's foot? And how could a few minutes stood next to it cost you your life?

[00:00:46]The elephant's foot looks like a large blob or mass on the floor, and it looks like something really haunting and eerie. What it actually is is cororeium.

[00:00:55]It's a mixture of the material that was created inside the reactor's core during a nuclear meltdown. It's made up of the nuclear fuel, fish products, control rods, structural material from the destroyed parts of the reactor, and also byproducts of the chemical reactions.

[00:01:11]All this had with the air, water, and steam. It was found remarkably 8 months after the nuclear accident took place and a group of scientists discovered it.

[00:01:21]They went into a corridor beneath the damaged reactor number four and they found this huge globular style mass almost like black frozen lava. Some compared it to a stallagmite or a stallagite.

[00:01:34]It was called the elephant's foot because some said it looked like the foot of an elephant obviously. However, when the Geiger counters were turned on, there was a huge amount of panic.

[00:01:46]The formation was incredibly radioactive, as expected, but it was calculated that in just 5 minutes, being stood near to the elephant's foot, a person would receive a lethal dose of radiation that would kill within days.

[00:02:01]But from a distance, a camera was wheeled towards the blob, and it was discovered that was actually made up of a small amount of fuel, melted concrete, and the shelving which went around the reactor's core. All of this had melted and flowed like lava. As mentioned, this was known as cororeium, obviously, because it all came from the core of the destroyed reactor. When the disaster happened, there was a loss of coolant in reactor 4 which caused a meltdown of the fuel and a lot of it flowed towards the bottom of the reactor and then melted through this. Eventually, it went through the pipes and then went through the concrete leaving a mass which cooled enough to solidify. The result was the elephant's foot. Today, it still radiates heat and also is still incredibly dangerous. It's held today within the confinement structures set up around Chernobyl.

[00:02:51]The elephant's foot weighs around two tons and radiation wise it emitted 10,000 runt guns per hour. What this means is that in just 5 minutes it would cause death. The equivalent for this would be a human having almost 5 million chest x-rays continuously.

[00:03:10]A 5minute dose is around a thousand times stronger than the exposure which would lead to someone having an increased risk of cancer. Death by radiation is rather slow. However, high doses of radiation and the body cannot cope. The substance known as the elephant's foot was even shot at by a police marksman to try and break it up so material could be dropped onto it to try and cool it down and restrict the radiation it was emitting. But what would the effects on the body be with regards to being close to the elephant's foot? Well, after 30 seconds of being next to it, someone would get quite dizzy and they would then begin to feel very tired. After 2 minutes, the cells inside the body begin to go into immense shock and they begin to malfunction.

[00:03:55]But if you were there for 5 minutes, then you'd probably only have 2 days roughly to live. That was all recorded in the months after the disaster. Today, there would be less effects of the radiation, but it would still be enough to be deadly. The elephant's foot today, though, is still causing problems within the nuclear power plant. The rent guns per hour of it have been reduced to around 100, meaning it could still deliver a fatal dose if someone was near to it for a period of 5 hours. If you did some work close by for 8 hours, then it would deliver that fatal dose. The elephant's foot inside of Chernobyl power plant today is considered one of the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous object on Earth. only a small samples of it have ever been collected.

[00:04:41]And there's a huge amount of questions that still looms. One of them is how on earth could you destroy something so radioactive without causing even more suffering and pain? And that question is still yet to be answered. Thank you for watching. If you did find this video interesting, maybe click subscribe or check out one of our other videos.

[00:05:02]Thanks again for giving me your time to watch one of these videos.