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Jess Battison
Naming dangerous objects that you wouldn’t want to be left in a room with sounds a little like when you’re sat in the back of a car with your nephew, playing an endless game of would you rather.
But there’s one object that has probably never come up in those conversations – no matter how long they go on for. And yet it’s perhaps the most dangerous object on the planet, with the ability to kill you in just two days if you spend five minutes in a room with it.
Yeah, sounds quite dramatic, right? And with a name to match, the ‘Elephant’s Foot’ is certainly not something we should be messing about with.
According to science magazine Nautilus, just 30 seconds of exposure to the thing will hit you with dizziness and fatigue.
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Two minutes and your cells will soon begin to haemorrhage, four minutes and you’ll have vomiting, diarrhoea and fever and then, if you do 300 seconds, you’ll have just two days to live.
While you might be pretty clueless about what the object is, the location might not surprise you – it’s found in a basement in Pripyat, Ukraine – the home of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 80s.
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Essentially, the ‘Elephant’s Foot’ is a big black mass of dangerous waste, tipped to potentially be the most dangerous piece of waste in the world.
Emergency crews fighting the disaster in 1986 eventually made it into a steam corridor beneath failed reactor Number 4 and here they found black lava that has oozed out directly from the core.
With the radiation, they knew not to approach it, but cameras were pushed around the corner, capturing the dangerous mass.
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Since the disaster, the room has been referred to as the ‘Elephant’s Foot of Chernobyl’ as the radioactive mass that gathered here gave off the façade of the wrinkled foot of the mega animals.
Reportedly about one metre in size, the thing consists of concrete, sand and melted nuclear fuel and weighs around two metric tons.
According to readings taken at the time, the still hot portion of molten core emitted enough radiation to cause a human to have a lethal amount in just 300 seconds.
And despite that being in the 1980s, it’s reported this dangerous object will remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
Well, there’s one to add to the next game of would you rather.