Eight months after the April 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine,

workers who entered a corridor beneath the damaged No. 4 reactor discovered a startling
phenomenon: black lava that had flowed from the reactor core, as if it had been some sort of human-
made volcano. One of the hardened masses was particularly startling, and the crew nicknamed it the
Elephant's Foot because it resembled the foot of the massive mammal.

Sensors told the workers that the lava formation was so highly radioactive that it would take five
minutes for a person to get a lethal amount of exposure, as Kyle Hill detailed in this 2013 article for
science magazine Nautilus.

A decade later, the U.S. Department of Energy's International Nuclear Safety Project, which
collected hundreds of pictures of Chernobyl, obtained several images of the Elephant's Foot, which
was estimated to weigh 2.2 tons (2 metric tons).

Since then, the Elephant's Foot, which is known as a lava-like fuel-containing material (LFCM), has
remained a macabre object of fascination. But what is it, actually?

Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot is a solid mass of melted nuclear fuel mixed with concrete, sand and
core sealing material. It's located in a basement beneath the No. 4 reactor core.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Contents

1. What Is the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot?

2. What Is Corium?
3. How Dangerous Is Elephant's Foot?
4. Studying Corium

What Is the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot?

Because Elephant's Foot was so radioactive, scientists at the time used a camera on a wheel to
photograph it. A few researchers got close enough to take samples for analysis. What they found
was that Elephant's Foot was not the remnants of the nuclear fuel.

Instead, nuclear experts explain that the Elephant's Foot is composed of a rare substance called
corium, which is produced in a nuclear accident when nuclear fuel and parts of the reactor core
structures overheat and melt, forming a mixture. Corium has only formed naturally five times in
history — once during the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, once at Chernobyl
and three times at the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster in Japan in 2011.

"If a core melt cannot be terminated, then eventually the molten mass will flow downward to the
bottom of the reactor vessel and melt through (with a contribution of additional molten materials),
dropping to the floor of the containment," Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for
the Union of Concerned Scientists, explains in an email.

"The hot molten mass will then react with the concrete floor of the containment (if there is one),
again changing the composition of the melt," Lyman continues. "Depending on the type of reactor,
the melt can spread and melt through the containment walls or continue to melt through the floor,
eventually infiltrating groundwater (this is what happened at Fukushima). When the melt cools
sufficiently, it will harden into a hard, rock-like mineral."

Mitchell T. Farmer, a veteran nuclear engineer and program manager at the Argonne National
Laboratory says via email that corium looks "a lot like lava, a blackish-oxide material that gets very
viscous as it cools down, flowing like sticky molten glass. That is what happened at Chernobyl with
the Elephant's Foot."