Chernobyl... anyone watching?

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Thursday, April 30, 2026 15:30
VIEWED: 5898
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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Here's a better version of the Discovery Channel show. It goes into the history of the critical people in charge at the reactor and how their minute-by-minute decisions, poor communication between the reactor controllers and the feed water people, led to catastrophe.
I like it because even tho its not fictionalized, I felt dread and horror knowing what was about to happen.

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Thanks for the vid links, Signym. The story is without boundaries imho - at it's human core: hubris, vanity, pettiness, man's over reach, etc etc etc. Bad human traits found in any country. The courage to speak up and say no so hard to find.
I thought the HBO version did an amazing job of creating that constant feeling of dread, both visually and with the droning sound track. Because we know what's coming, the pacing is deliberately slow to play out the drama. I can see why King liked it so much! The burning core was a demon, out of control, ready to consume millions of people and acres of land with the only chance of containment seemingly almost impossible.

"How many men do you need?"
"750,000."

A part of me thought it would take a country like Russia to eff it up like that, but it would ironically also take a country like Russia - with it's dedication and blind sacrifice (heroism) to The State - to actually contain it. I do wonder if it really has been contained? I don't know the total fallout from the catastrophe. Did they cover up the full impact successfully?

I did hear that Russia is filming their own version, naturally. We'll see if they learned anything.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:

I watched 2 eps and I think its the best show on tv at the moment and the best series for a long while

the show is fantastic

The history is hard, morbid and brutal science stuff is fine because they break it down like a Discovery Nat geo show where they try expalin stuff like you expalin to a child, if you throw technical stuff at people watching they might not get it but you see it from the view of different cast / characters who slowly see what is energy power, they learn what is fission and radioactive decay, what kind of damage can be done to an animal or the human body, what is radiation, you learn all these things as the people on the ground might have been suddenly forced to learn about the disaster around them.

While it is bleak it could also make you think....Are we going to evolve or are we doomed. Why when we listen with our radio telescope why is there nothing out there in the stars, no alien life in the universe? Or is there a higher life but it no longer will talk to us as an 'intelligent' civilistaion? Is it the nature intelligence to be corrupted is it a destiny of civilistaions to invent things that eventually destory themselves, are we always going to lie and cover up? They who do this science say we can also collect almost limitless 'free energy' from the Sun and the Winds. So Why the Nuclear push and Is Nuclear power the answer to an 'Energy Crisis' is mankind ever going to make Nuclear 'Safe'?


I think this show is top level, its respecful, dramatic and truthful although it does have moments of hollywood tv drama it is also real and historical, it shows the idiocy, the corrupt nature of people and of Russian communist bureaucracy. The acting is top, the writing very well done, to score weird creepy soundtrack and the music and camera work complements the entire story. More scary than most horror because this story is based on reality the creeping dread atmosphere unfolding.


There is a real genuine feel to the series despite its drama, people might see Left or Trump or whatever in it but I don't really see any left vs right stage show politics. I see a government corrupt during a massive crisis that would wreck the town, the cities, destory lives of people and change the lands, although on the idea of left and right I do agree the socialist leftist USSR system was a terrible political system. Some talk about accidents and disasters like Three Mile Island, the Oil Spills, Fukushima but this historical Chernobyl still ranks as the world's worst man-made catastrophes, maybe its a lesson about cover ups the corrupt secrecy surrounding the disaster, great actors, great writing, great film work.

a great show

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Well said, Jaynestown!

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I saw a thermograph of an experimentally-melted research reactor. There was the cylidndrical-shaped reactor and, inside, you culd see where the fuel rods had been: the top third of the reactor was empty, the bottom two-thirds consisted of warped, deformed fuel and control rods in various stages of meltdown, and the melted fuel rods, control rods, and water tubes (corium) had dripped out the bottom (The control rods and other elements fed in thru the bottom, when those melted away it left something like a colander) in glowing, radioactive "icicles". I wish I could link that picture for you ... it's no longer online but it shows what a nuclear metldown looks like. (It also brings up the ?? ... where was this experimental reactor when it was melted? I'm sure the event left quite a bit of contamination at the site. Two possible sites are just north of Denver, and the Santa Susana hills just north of LA.)

To me, nothing is quite as creepy and horrific as nuclear meltdown, whether it's at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Aside from the obvious explosions and fires, the real danger comes from what can't be seen- small (even microscopic) particles, condensates, dusts, groundwater - highly radioactive elements leaking out invisibly.

I recall that when "they" (usually underpaid underclass Japanese men) were surveying Fukushima for radiation, some of the lower elbows in the vent stacks were EXTREMELY radioactive, even tho there was no visible contamination and no real engineering connection to the nuclear core.

We have a HEPA filter in our livingroom which we keep on most of the time to reduce dust and allergies. So I borrowed our lab Geiger counter (after Fukushima) and surveyed the filter, and am pretty sure I found a radioactive particle on it because the Geiger counter "chirped" at a certain spot no matter which direction I approached it from. I also did the same thing to our car air intake filter and found a couple of probable particles there. And that was all the way across the Pacific!

As a chemist, I have profound respect for the elements. Radioactive elements are implaccable. Once you inhale a particle it sits there and keeps irradiating that spot over and over ...


BTW ... the meltdown at Three Mile Island was a lot more serious that most people knew. Because the excursion had been so brief, the thought was that only a small portion of the fuel had melted, But after the corium had cooled down enuf to take the reactor apart (I think this was over ten years later) they discovered that about a third of the fuel had melted. Same thing with Fukushima ... the fuel melt was far faster and more complete than they anticipated. Apparently it takes only a few minutes to go from "OK" to "holy shit". Not much room for error or timeto correct.

A technology that unstable and that potentially catastrophic should never be used. It leaves me skeptical about Rusia's push to develop and export nuclear power technology. I don't know of any advances that have made it ... or the inherent waste problem ... any safer.


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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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The New Yorker review of Chernobyl. It was pretty negative because the show followed a "disaster movie" script. The actual title of the review is

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What HBO’s “Chernobyl” Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong

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but I would have called it

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Chernobyl: Truth is more horrible than fiction

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*****

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Svetlana Alexievich, the Russian-language Belarusian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2015, for her work with oral history, has said that the book she found easiest to report was her book about Chernobyl. (Its English title, depending on the translation, is “Voices from Chernobyl” or “Chernobyl Prayer.”) The reason, she said, was that none of her interlocutors—people who lived in the area affected by the disaster—knew how they were supposed to talk about it. For her other books, Alexievich interviewed people about their experience of the Second World War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For all of these other events and periods in Russian history, there were widely adopted narratives, habits of speaking that, Alexievich found, had a way of overshadowing actual personal experience and private memory. But when she asked survivors about Chernobyl they accessed their own stories more easily, because the story hadn’t been told. The Soviet media disseminated very little information about the disaster. There were no books or movies or songs. There was a vacuum.

Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl was published in Russian in 1997, more than ten years after one of the reactors at the Chernobyl power plant exploded, in what was probably the worst nuclear accident in history. One of the most remarkable facts about Chernobyl is that the narrative vacuum had persisted for that long, and, in fact, it has persisted since: Alexievich’s book came to prominence, both in Russia and in the West, only following her Nobel Prize win. There have been stories in the media in Russia and abroad, many of them on the odd tourist industry that has sprung up in the disaster zone; there has been a BBC documentary and a bizarre American-Ukrainian documentary. But in the past year two books, one by a historian and the other by a journalist, have attempted to tell the definitive documentary story of the disaster. Finally, the HBO series “Chernobyl,” the fifth and final episode of which aired Monday, tells a fictionalized version. It being television, and very well-received television at that, it is the series, rather than the books, that will probably finally fill the vacuum where the story of Chernobyl should be. This is not a good thing.

Before I get to what the series got so terribly wrong, I should acknowledge what it got right. In “Chernobyl,” which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film—or, for that matter, in Russian television or film. Clothes, objects, and light itself seem to come straight out of nineteen-eighties Ukraine, Belarus, and Moscow. (There are tiny errors, like a holiday uniform worn by schoolchildren on a non-holiday, or teen-agers carrying little kids’ school bags, but this is truly splitting hairs.) Soviet-born Americans—and, indeed, Soviet-born Russians—have been tweeting and blogging in awe at the uncanny precision with which the physical surroundings of Soviet people have been reproduced. The one noticeable mistake in this respect concerns the series makers’ apparent ignorance of the vast divisions between different socioeconomic classes in the Soviet Union: in the series, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a member of the Academy of Sciences, lives in nearly the same kind of squalor as a fireman in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat. In fact, Legasov would have lived in an entirely different kind of squalor than the fireman did.

Herein lies one of the series’ biggest flaws: its failure to accurately portray Soviet relationships of power. There are exceptions, flashes of

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