Chernobyl
 

Just finished the first episode; I guess I'll be keeping HBO a bit longer after Game of Thrones ends.

It is fascinating, horrifying and infuriating. And spellbinding.

Yes.

Jesus ****.

That was... ****ing horrifying.

I'm ready and eager to watch this. I hope they stay true to what actually happened.

I thought you guys might find this interesting.

I sat in on a lecture at grand rounds given by a physician that was sent to Pripyat/Chernobyl in 1990 for epidemiological studies. They brought along their own equipment to test blood, along with their own supplies (syringes, etc). The nurses were Soviet, and kept blowing through the patient's veins instead of getting a clean stick.

Reason why: the US needles were too sharp. They were used to using the same hypodermics over and over again until they had dulled substantially and were pressing too hard.

Jesus, that sounds awful.

Watched the first episode last night. Horrifying shit, also they did a good job encapsulating how the Soviet governmental structure was just terrible.

In the 90's?

That's horrifying.

So apparently there are people out there who think there are no such things as nuclear weapons and think this was all staged since there are now animals back there?

People are dumb.

As someone who works around radiation, let me tell you that when it comes to radiation, almost everyone is dumb.

It's scary bad shit man.

I look forward to hearing your assessment.

Terrible Soviet engineering and training.

I still think nuclear power gets a bad rap because of shit like this though, deservedly, shit like this is awful.

I really hate doing it, but I feel compelled to watch with a jaundiced eye.

In the first episode, the political and rhetorical aspects of the coverup rang true, but I need a lot more empirical evidence before I quite buy into the narrative of the engineers who kept insisting that the first-person observations of those returning from the site were delusional or mistaken.

I'm not rejecting out-of-hand the possibility that the engineers were locked into a mindset that what people reported was so unbelievable that they summarily rejected it time after time, but it rang more of dramatization than knowing insight.

"I looked right into the open core" - Impossible, water sickness, let him rest
"There's graphite on the ground outside the facility" - There's no way for that to be there, . . . so many delusions
"The Roentgen-meter went off the scale." - So it's broken?
"Well, I took another better meter, and calibrated it, and it still went off the scale" - So it's broken too?

Yeah, that much is a given. I'm just curious as to how accurate it is from a scientific standpoint. Shows like this always take some liberties with the actual events or combine characters for dramatic purposes, but I really hope there's no glaring stupid shit with the science.

Oh I don't have any trouble believing that part at all. I don't need an engineering degree to understand communist ****tardery.

After watching I of course went to the interwebs to do a little reading. It seems as if they were accurate in the story that they didn't believe what happened, could happen. But i'm guessing there was some drama added.

I still think there is a fundamental difference between a political mind and a scientific mind in a situation like that.

Even though Russia had all sorts of tempermental blindspots imposed by their political rhetoric, and had all sorts of logistical limitations placed on their engineering efforts, they still educated engineers fairly rigorously. And it rings suspect to me that, in the face of first-person observations and data drawn from protocols, the ACTUAL engineers would be flatly incapable of even considering that they were receiving an accurate account.

Politically minded functionaries might put on a face of denial, but this first episode was written more that actual engineers were incapable of processing reality.

If you're not a moron, it's really not. Respect it, don't fear it.

True


The word radiation scares people though. So many people try and refuse dental xrays here because of it.

If you want a minute-by-minute accounting of what happened there is a series available on Amazon Prime called Zero Hour. They cover what happened in Chernobyl, including the design flaws of the RBMK, pretty thoroughly for an hour-long show. In short, Dyatlov ****ed up majorly, the engineers knew it wasn't safe, but no one challenged him because they didn't want exiled from a prestigious and well-paying job.

Here's what you should tell them: we are all exposed to natural background radiation. You are exposed to less through X-rays than on a normal commercial flight. Even bananas have small amounts of radiation in them.

Yeah, usually tell them

"you get more radiation from eating a can of Tuna than you do here".

Not going to read the posts yet. I bought HBO so I could watch this series. I’ll be watching the first episode tonight. Chernobyl always fascinated me.

There’s also another show on early next month with original footage from the Memphis Belle, remastered or whatever. Should be good also. “The Cold Blue”.

Just browsing the Chernobyl wiki. Kinda blows my mind that for all of the attention this disaster has garnered over the decades, there were only 28 initial deaths, and 15 later on that were indirectly attributed. Maybe those are artificially low, but given the horrors attributed to Chernobyl one would tend to think that thousands died, maybe tens of thousand sick on top of that.

I thought the trailer was boring, so I wasn't all that enthusiastic about watching it, but maybe I'll give it a go when my queue clears a bit.

Communism at its finest.

Youtube the helicopter trying to drop water on it and crashing because of radiation fun stiff

I am sure some of the liquidators and others containing it probably have a higher incidence of cancer. It was and is a big problem but not one that should shut down an entire method of creating energy.

Is this a dramatization or more of a true accounting of what happened?

It's a dramatization based on factual evidence.

I thought they would start with the events that led to the actual explosion, but given the structure of the narrative it looks like the filmmakers view that as less important than the structures which orchestrated the coverup, which was indicative of the inherent flaw/rot in the Soviet system.

The Cliffs Notes version of what actually happened:

They were going to test the RBMK reactors at low power to see what would happen if they suffered a sudden loss of power (Dyatlov also told them to drop down to a power level far lower than the reactor's design). In the event of a power failure, the diesel generators that would would pump the coolant water would take about 45 seconds to spin up and deliver it to the core to prevent overheating.

The thought was that there would be enough residual steam from the water that it could keep spinning the turbines, and providing enough power to keep the pumps running, and thus, cooling the reactor.

As they slowly reduced power in the reactor they went too far, dropping it to a fraction of the intended power for the test. They couldn't get the power up because of the creation of some of the isotopes in the lower power environment. To compensate, they removed almost all of the control rods and filled the reactor with water, which made the reactor both unstable and highly volatile from a power perspective.

Due to Dyatlov's insistence, they ignored the automatic shutdowns and proceeded with the test. Due to the absence of control rods and the prevalent water, power began to rise uncontrollably. This acted synergistically with another element of the reactor design--the void coefficient, which was the opposite design of Western reactors. As more steam was produced in the core the reactor became even more reactive. This led to a positive feedback loop and an exponential increase in power.

Once the engineers realized that the reactor was getting away from them they panicked and dropped all of the control rods. The problem is that the control rods were graphite tipped, and don't absorb neutrons like the rest of the rod. As they were lowered and displaced the water that hadn't yet boiled off to steam, it created a hot spot in the reactor core, which lead to a massive steam explosion and graphite fire. As the containment vessel itself was also substandard, the reactor blew its top.

So I'm guessing at the time the engineers and physicists didn't know the design flaws or the issues with the RBMK?

Correct. It was a weird design anyway, designed to use far less enriched fuel and actually enrich uranium itself, which is wholly different from Western reactor designs--some for enrichment (weapons, nuclear fuel), most for commercial power.

I probably can't comment on the design much further; I'm far enough over my skis as it is.

The best story of the whole thing is the 3 russian dudes that crawled through the basement in the pitch black covered themselves in radioactive water to drain the pools of the other reactors or the whole thing may have taken out half of Europe.

I've been reading about those designs. Interesting stuff


Nuclear power seems like a real avenue we should be using more of.

Well son of a bitch! I sat combing through the guide last night and saw the Chernobyl on HBO and even looked at the info on it and didn't watch. I will check it out now.

It should be IMO. But this will probably not help that case.

About half the opposition to nuclear is ill-informed hysteria about danger.
About 20% is conspiratorial hysteria about nuclear power being a stalking horse for military funding and proliferation
The rest is grumbling about expense.

But the thing is, a huge, overwhelming almost, portion of the expense is government oversight and licensing. The government is loathe to license until there has been a thorough examination and accounting of every blade of grass in a 50-mile radius of the plant.

Anybody else find it odd that the characters all have British accents?

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I have watched a lot of documentaries and read quite a bit about the Chernobyl disaster, but nothing has manifested the feelings I had watching this show.

I was angry, and beyond frustration when the commies did what commies do.

All of this doesn't hold a candle to the Semipalatinsk Test Site aka "The Polygon"

**** the Soviets. They were truly evil.

ROFL

one of the problems with radiation is it makes people british

Goddamnit why did I google that. All those kids.

Holy balls. How did I not know about this?

I first heard about it on an episode of Vice on HBO a few years back. Awful stuff.

FWIW, it's my opinion that they chose British accents because they're foreign "enough" and it is much easier on the ears than a Russian accent.

If they're going for "realistic" it would be in Russian Subtitled in English, but that drives audiences away. So what good is a Russian accent if you have already dumped "realistic".

Watch the American's. Russian accents are harsh. I didn't mind there and wouldn't mind here, but I think it is intentional.

Yeah, I agree. If you're not going to use Russian speakers, having English-speaking actors aping Russian accents just seems pointless.

I personally don't mind subtitles, especially if it's a really, really good movie, like Pan's Labyrinth. Watching that, eventually I didn't even think it. But I understand that's not for everybody.

It's a joint production with Sky, a British telecom. That would be my guess for the accents.

Sorry I told you.

Excellent documentary on YouTube about it. The part about the class of grade school girls swimming in the pond is horrifying.

The doc might have been on HBO now that I think about it......

No need to apologize.

I didn't get that far. And I'm not going to for now. That shit just eats at me.

I remember watching a B horror movie set inside the place. It was pretty scary and entertaining. Have no idea the name of it.

Chernobyl Diaries 2012

A group of young tourists (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Jonathan Sadowski, Devin Kelley), hoping for an adventure off the beaten path, hires an extreme-tour guide. In spite of warnings, the tour guide takes the sightseers to the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, once home to workers at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant but abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. After briefly exploring the ghost town, the tourists find themselves stranded -- and worse, they are not alone.

Just watched it and it was really good. Assuming it’s accurate that people in the town really did think nothing of it that really shows how in the dark they were about knowledge of the plant and potential dangers.

I remember watching the River Monsters episode where Jeremy Wade went fishing in there and he was surprised how there were fish but when they tested them they were definitely stunted in growth and showed radioactive results but were otherwise fine.

Thought of this scene every time they were discussing the possibility or certainty that the core had exploded.

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I hear you. I do understand, however, the disbelief that the core could have "blown up" and be "gone", in that sense. I'm no engineer but I have no understanding of how that is possible, and they have focused on it -- including the guy who eventually suicides clearly being brought in to explain how those types of cores work -- that I'm expecting a very good explanation around why that was not thought to be possible, but apparently is what happened (in some sense, anyway).

I'm ALL IN on this series, and partly because of exactly what is perplexing the engineers that are in disbelief.

I read quite a bit about Fukushima Daichi when it happened, but not that much on Chernobyl, so it's very interesting to me to see how it all developed etc., and i also hope they stay true to actual events with limited "dramatic license" bullshit.

A nuclear plant hasn't been built in the US in decades, and never will be again. The local, regional and national political headwinds are too great.

Episode 2 tonight.

Super pumped.

Which is dumb

In the abstract, yes. Compared to, say, coal, it burns "clean" and very, very efficiently. In fact, when nuclear power was first coming into play, people literally thought that electricity would be free in the future. That it would be so cheap and plentiful that it wouldn't be worth the time to meter and bill it. THAT is how efficient nuclear power is.

But let's be serious -- would you want anyone to build a nuclear power plant within, let's say, ten miles of your house? Even if YOU are ok with it, you know that it will affect the value of your property when you go to sell, so the answer is "no".

And events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi and other, lesser, incidents keep the dangerousness issue at the forefront of people's consciousness.

Then you have another concern -- terrorism. A nuclear plant makes a FAR more tempting target for some psycho than a solar plant.

Solar and other renewables are the future, not nuclear. There are issues with solar, but they are the type of things that drive up costs not the type of things that result in death. If engineers ran the world, we'd be all nuclear already, but they don't, and that's just how it is.

Sure, feasible issues. But allot of that is due to lack of education. With tech advancing like it is, we should have no problem with nuclear.

It's cleaner, better etc than everything fossil fuel IIRC.

Just finished Episode 2. Goddamn this is excellent. HBO really hits stuff like this out of the park.

Jesus... that ending....

Saw the trailer and gave episode 1 a chance. Holy shit that was compelling well done TV. The inefficient and inept infrastructure of the Soviets to support the plant is as fascinating TV as the actual disaster.

Well it was more that they had no ****ing clue that shit could happen

The last scene was ****ing terrifying

Thought the first two episodes are fascinating on several levels. The main takeaway I got from the first two episodes is that a Communist government doesn’t give a rat **** about the people.

It really is astounding how the communist leaders just immediately said *raspberry* to experts warning that the reactor blew up because they thought the government could do no wrong and they don’t want to question it.

yeah I don’t know why exactly but this show is must see TV. You are hooked once you start.

I wasn't going to watch it because I thought it was too gruesome to watch. But I apparently left my tv on HBO from Sunday night's GoT's and saw half of it when I turned my tv back on last night. It caught my attention. It mesmerized me. It was good. So I am going to click on my HBOGo and watch it from the start—after I finish the Medici Series on Netflix. Nearly done with it already.

Yes. In concept, communism is supposed to be completely FOR the people. In reality, because the party was insulated from any consequences of an unhappy populace, and because power corrupts, they had no reason to give a damn about the sheep, and had a paternalistic attitude (without any love) for them in general.



The system was inherently built around fear. Trying to minimize or redirect any possible blame was built into the core of anyone within that society. There's a certain degree of that in any human, but in Soviet Russia it was exponentially more important not to be blamed for a ****-up of any significance.

The willingness of bureaucrats to ignore experts is stunning, but it's probably something they routinely did. They held all the power, and were probably used to overrunning the opinions of the technocrats.

I wonder how accurate the Gorbachev scenes are. So far, at least, they've portrayed him as fairly thoughtful and reasonable.

Those dudes in real life all sacrificed their lives to save about half of Europe.

That was what he was known for.


Reagan and Gorbachev could actually talk to each other.

This is the best show on TV.

Fantastic acting, they brought in Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, and Jared Harris FFS.


I have read and read about the Chernobyl disaster. This movie is absolutely crushing the story.

Stellan and Harris were just awesome last night. Emily Watson has got some acting chops too.

Damn that ending this week was brutal. Really liking this one so far.

can someone explain to me why the first helicopters' rotors flew off when it went over and then away from the core?

I think being that close to the open core will just make things dissolve.

Hit a crane cable.

Recreation of actual event. 4 casualties, but not radiation related.

If you watch closely on the HBO show, you see the block and hook drop from below the copter as the cable is severed.

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Much the same as happened here [note the carrying cable forming a catenary from the top of the crane to the bottom of the copter]

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