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.