How Kodak Exposed Nuclear Testing

This is considerably more concerning than I expected it to be

I love how the map just stops at the Canadian border. As someone who grew up in Saskatchewan I'm very glad that the fallout respected the border 😬

I’m a thyroid cancer survivor who was born in 1954 on a dairy farm and drank raw milk ever day. The Ozarks region is in the area of highest exposure. I’ve wondered what caused it and I believe this video has the answer. I lost half my voice box to the cancer surgery.

7:00 The US government, agreeing to provide Kodak, with advance warning of upcoming nuclear tests, answers a question that has circulated within our family for decades. My paternal grandfather worked at Kodak, in Toronto, Ontario, for over 40 years, retiring in 1967. Although the tests were officially secret, Kodak Canada somehow received notice of impending blasts. The workers were instructed to place large sheets of lead over the sheets of photographic X-ray film. The film was protected, by this means. If the lead sheets were not placed, the radiation would get trapped in the morning dew, on the roof of the Kodak factory, and then pass through six concrete floors and damage the film. If this process was not followed, the film had to be discarded.

As a biologist and just watching the video I think we should be jealous of the organism called Deinococcus radiodurans. This bacterium is able to completely repair its shattered chromosomes after being exposed to high levels of radiation (which cause DNA breaks). While humans experience neurological damages after being exposed to radiation of roughly 30 Gy, D. radiodurans can survive over 10000 Gy, since it is able to very effectively connected fragmented DNA (I'm just making a video about human DNA repair systems). Great video so far!

"We're made of star stuff" -Carl Sagan "We're made of atomic bomb stuff" -Derek Muller

As a child in Calgary I noted an article in Time or News Week that gave a map of the radio active fallout plumes from Soviet tests in the Arctic island of Nova Zemla. It also left out any data for Canada. It interestingly showed high levels in Alaska (no surprise) and about 1/2 the level in Montana. Note this pattern flowed into the Yukon and Northwest Territories then turned south along the East front of the Rocky Mountains toward Montana while spreading out Eastwards. My conclusion as an 8 year old was infuriation that the Canadian Goverment in Ottawa was lying to us in Alberta and the milk I was drinking was contaminated. In 1960 at age 10 I moved to Brisbane Queensland so I was only further contaminated in a much much lesser way by a very few French tests in the South Pacific which had to travel around 5/6ths of the planet to reach our Queensland coastal pastures. The map from this video shows that I was also exposed to flow North along the Rocky Mountain Front of contamination from U.S. tests in the 50s Well fingers crossed -- so far -- cancer free in my 72nd winter.

I remember learning about this when I was in highschool in Rochester, NY. It was super interesting to see how something that happened hundreds of miles away could affect something local.

Can we take a moment to appreciate the consistent quality in Veritasium videos?

wow, that kodak scientist has better sleuthing skills than Columbo.

My mind is blown to realise that ‘Kodak’ helped Christopher Nolan to “film” the Oppenheimer movie about the ‘Trinity test’. The amount of irony here is literally uncanny. Thanks to YT for recommending it now!

Thanks for the history lesson here. (I hail from “Kodak country” in Rochester, NY, USA 🙂.) Also, thank you so much for pointing out the recklessness of the government in not protecting its population from the tests. I do think you give the US government too much credit in not understanding the danger.

Specialist: Advises the military where to safety conducts tests. Military: Lets do the opposite.

I also want to mention the low-background steel. As modern steel is processed using atmospheric air, any steel produced after the testing has significant amount of contamination from radionuclides. However, steel made before Trinity doesn't and therefore has got an application in radiation sensitive equipments such as Geiger counters. This type of steel is usually salvaged from ships that sunk before 1945. There is a Wikipedia article about this with some references at the bottom, and you can probably find more info on the internet.

Its amazing how much these nuclear tests have affected so many industries, I keep learning about more problems from these test, and from the sounds of it there is probably more fallout to be discovered.

Kodak as a company is a shadow of what it once was, but in their day they were really amazing.

A whole different reason for people born after 1945 to be called "boomers".

My dad grew up in southern New Mexico, and was up doing chores that morning. He thought the sun was coming up early since the whole eastern skyline lit up. Later he learned that it was an ammunition dump explosion... Later learned that it was the Atomic bomb.

Thank you for the exposure, no pun intended. Always very appreciative of your content. Keep up the great work.

my favorite thing about videos like this is learning of all the horrible chemicals and particles that have ended up in my water, my food, my body, milk, etc. Love that