In he HBO TV miniseries Chernobyl, they talk about a cistern holding 7000 cubic meters of water. That is the content of Loch Ness, the deepest lake in the UK. Would the Chernobyl reactor really hold that much water?
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Wikipedia puts the Loch Ness total volume at a total of 7.4 cubic kilometers, not kilo(cubic meters). When expressed in cubic meters, the 'kilo' also gets exponentiated: $$ 1\:\mathrm{km}^3 = 1 \,(1000\:\mathrm m)^3 = 10^9\:\mathrm m^3. $$ This error in your calculation means that you are off by a factor of a million, i.e. Loch Ness is 1,000,000 times larger than (the stated size of) the Chernobyl cistern.
Generally, a volume of $V=7,000\:\rm m^3$ isn't all that big. As a rough estimate, take the cubic root, and you'll be left with $$ L = V^{1/3} \approx 20\:\rm m, $$ i.e. it's the volume of a cube with twenty meters to each side. That size is reasonable for a large building, not a large lake.
Emilio Pisanty
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