That’s what I got from it too. It’s only really critical of the Soviets in charge that cut corners to compete with the United States.
Acute radiation poisoning seems like one of the most painful ways to die. Even being burned to death isn't as bad because at least it's over relatively quickly. Shit is no joke. Those guys look like they were slowly melting over the course of 2 weeks. Fuck me.
Yeah. That was absolutely terrifying. The one firefighter in the show was an otherwise healthy young man, but he just starts deteriorating from the inside out over the course of days. I actually read up on how accurate that was. That’s only scratching the surface of how bad it was. They were literally shitting out their own internal organs. If I’m ever exposed to radiation like that, someone better have the decency to shoot me in the head or inject me with poison. No one should have to endure that kind of pain.
Yeah, supposedly you start to lose your mind too. As if it wasn't bad enough already. Imagine how Lois Slotin felt knowing what he was about to endure. He wasn't even exposed to as much as these poor guys at Chernobyl were.
And I just read too that they can’t even ease their suffering near the end with pain medication either as the walls of your veins would be breaking down. If that’s not scary enough, feeling better after initial exposure is actually a bad sign and you can relapse into sickness again weeks later. That’s gotta mess with your head even before the radiation starts to do it.
What happened to Slotin was awful, no doubt. But really he should have known better than to do what he did. His colleague had already died horribly from being careless with the same plutonium core. At the very least he clearly understood how risky it was. As far as the firefighters at Chernobyl the reports are mixed but it seems likely that many did not understand the danger.
Personally I’ll be shocked if Comrade Putin doesn’t make the radiation retreat by virtue of the awesome power of his dad bod.
Fun fact: when your system is that badly damaged, injections won't work. Your bloods' too badly diluted to carry any other chemicals. That includes painkillers.
A little late to the party, but yeah, WOW... just wow. Absolutely wonderful and wonderfully heartbreaking stuff. My wife got me into this series and I have been glued to it. I found the earlier episodes with the accident itself to be like a train wreck in slow motion, then the end with the cover up and trial to be infuriating. The fact that the official Russian big-shots are not pleased with the series just cements my anger. Really great stuff.
I didn't finish, but had learned years ago about it. My wife though was shocked at basically everything. She asked me how something like that and how it all transpired could happen. My only response was "cause Soviets."
What's kind of a trip is that the same building you see in the last episode is one of the buildings you move through in COD Modern Warfare 2. Remember the part where you visit Chernobyl? That oddly shaped building shortly before the standoff and helicopter rescue? That's the same one in the pictures they show at the end of the series. I instantly recognized it. Just shows the attention to detail they put in that game (best game of that franchise, even 10 years later). That was always one of my favorite levels.
I think that simplifies how dangerous nuclear power is. Did Fukushima or 3 Mile Island happen “because Soviets”? The common factor in all of these incidents is how it’s impossible to predict all of the possibilities. So therefore you can’t put a plan in place to prevent them.
I got engrossed in the show like 2 -3 weeks or so ago & had to pull myself away to play COH but what I saw in the scene Spoiler Where the Russian dudes volunteer to turn off the reactor that is heroism
On the last ep that I'll finish on my commute home. Great series. I love conspiracy theories (JP Morgan and the Titanic is one of my favs) but I've never heard of the CIA being involved. Curious how good it'll be. Glad to see the HBO Chernobyl is really popular in Russia.
Right now I'm in the middle of watching a couple of documentaries on the event, some of which feature reenactments of the situation in the control room before and after the explosion, with varying degrees of accuracy and acting talent. I can't help but notice that Mazin apparently took a lot of inspiration from those documentaries. According to survivors (such as Oleksiy Breus, who was not featured in the series), the infamous Anatoly Dyatlov may have been feared among the workers, but he was apparently not quite the incompetent, abrasive bully the show presents him as. The 2004 documentary "Zero Hour: Disaster at Chernobyl" co-produced by the BBC and History Channel features scenes in the control room (with actors speaking Russian!) in which a lot of Dyatlov's abrasive mannerisms are already present, and the 2006 documentary "Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster" co-produced by the BBC, History Channel, ProSieben and France 5 also features scenes in the control room (which doesn't resemble the actual Chernobyl control room a lot, and the acting is particularly amateurish) in which Dyatlov's "That can't be, take them to the infirmary" attitude already appears. So Mazin most likely based his vision of these scenes on those (and presumably also other) documentaries, using the lines and ideas he liked best, with little regard to actual eyewitness testimony. Another aspect I'd like to address is Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of one of the firefighters who died as a result of the radiation they were exposed to when trying to put out the fire following the explosion. Apparently, the real Lyudmilla was never contacted by the producers of the show about including her story (as documented in the book "Voices from Chernobyl" by Belarusian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich, one of the primary resources cited by Mazin), and never gave them permission to do so, which the show's creators insist is not true at all. (Lyudmilla also claims that her story was severely misrepresented in Alexievich's book.) In any regard, one of the main criticisms many experts on nuclear radiation have brought forward against the show is that radiation does not quite work that way. Specifically, radiation victims are not radioactive themselves once their clothes have been removed and they have been properly decontaminated, and they are not "contagious". The notion that Lyudmilla somehow got "infected" by the contact with her dying husband is absurd, and the claim (by Emily Watson's character) that her unborn baby "absorbed the radiation instead" is downright ludicrous. The plastic Vasily Ignatenko's hospital bed was surrounded by was not there to protect potential visitors, but to protect him, since one of the effects of Acute Radiation Syndrom (ARS) is a complete failure of the immune system. Hooowever, on the other hand, the fears displayed by the hospital staff might have been unwarranted from a medical perspective, but they are nontheless historically accurate. Likewise, the fears of a further thermal explosion (brought up in episode 2, which prompts the divers' mission) and of a meltdown (brought up in episode 3, which prompts the recruitment of the miners) might have been overblown (certainly a steam explosion can't possibly be in the megaton range - you'd need to make an entire lake full of water vaporize instantly for that to happen!), but the fears themselves were historically true, and those operations as depicted on the show were undertaken because of those real fears. So you can't really fault the show for depicting the possibilities the scientists at the time were seriously considering just because we today know that those fears ultimately turned out to be unwarranted. (For that matter, the surviving miners, while rolling their eyes at some of the stereotypes depicted in the series, like their portrayal overall, particularly their defiance of authorities, and are proud of their contribution, while acknowledging it's a good thing the work they did was ultimately unnecesseary. The alternative would have been taking a massive risk that could have cost millions of lives.) One scene that is frequently misinterpreted by a lot of viewers is the helicopter crash in episode 2. A lot of people apparently seem to think that the radiation somehow made the helicopter's rotors disintegrate, or killed the pilot immediately or somesuch. The crash is actually an anachronism; in real life, it didn't occur the day after the explosion, but actually several months later, during the construction of the containment "sarcophagus" (which is never really shown in the series, only briefly mentioned as a future measure in episode 4 - it's the very reason they're trying to get the radioactive graphite off the roof). Just like in real life (there's actual footage), the cause of the crash is the helicopter's rotors getting caught in the cables of a crane - a crane which has no real point in being there in the show's timeline! It appears the thick black smoke (which is also historically inaccurate) and the angle and zoom for the shot as seen in the show makes this scene somewhat hard to properly understand for audiences. The biggest historic liberties the show took can be found in episode 5. In addition to Dyatlov, former plant manager Viktor Bryukhanov and former chief engineer Nikolai Fomin, three more people were on trial (namely shift director Boris Rogozhin, chief of Reactor 4 Aleksandr Kovalenko, and USSR safety inspector Yuri Laushkin), although they all received shorter sentences (Dyatlov, Bryukhanov and Fomin were all sentenced to 10 years in labor camps, but were pardoned early). The trial took several weeks rather than a single day, was a lot more boring, no models or flipcharts were presented, and neither Legasov nor Shcherbina were actually present at the trial. Legasov's public and academic ostracism that eventually led to his suicide occurred much less dramatically. Overall, though, despite all these nitpicks, the show is still a very fascinating watch regardless. The explanation for the cause of the explosion as shown in episode 5 is pretty accurate to what we have come to understand about it. Meanwhile, Michael Bay's theme park version as featured in Dark of the Moon wants us to believe that the reactor exploded because they simply tried to hook up untested alien technology to a nuclear power plant. Which completely undermines the lessons we should learn from Chernobyl. I'm not even getting into the "nuclear power yes or no" argument here. Even if you're still pro nuclear power, there are a lot of things we can hopefully all agree on regardless of where you stand: A) Don't use graphite as a moderator. Use water-moderated nuclear reactors. If the reactor gets too hot, the very water that powers the turbines vaporizes... and because that same water was used as a moderator, the reaction automatically stops. B) Build a ****ing containment building around your reactors. Before you turn it on, not just after it already exploded. Trust me, it's cheaper that way in the long run. C) Don't use the same material that acts as a moderator on the tips of the control rods, which are supposed to bring the reaction down. D) If you're aware of a critical design flaw of your nuclear reactors, let the people who operate those reactors know. Don't make it a state secret. E) Don't ever, EVER combine the following: 1) Remove almost all the control rods completely, 2) turn off the steam turbines. F) If the rules say to shut the reactor down completely in case of a potential xenon poisoning, FOLLOW THE ****ING RULES. G) Perform your important sefety tests before you put your nuclear reactor into operation, not afterwards. H) LISTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS WHO TELL YOU THAT THING IS BAD. I) The most important lession of them all: The truth doesn't care about politics, ideologies, beliefs or agendas. You can lie as much as you want, the truth won't care. It will come to bite you in the ass eventually. Sometimes, the result is the explosion of a nuclear reactor. (Other times, it's something else people will deny is happening at all.) By the way, tourism in and around of Chernobyl has apparently thrived ridiculously as a result of this series. And yes, it's seriously possibe to visit the town of Chernobyl, the ghost city of Pripyat and even parts of the now decomissioned power plant as a tourist, but only as part of professional guided tours. There are illegal intruders in Pripyat, both looters (which are a serious problem, stealing all sorts of contaminated items to sell them on the black market, which is extremely dangerous) and your run-of-the-mill insane morons who completely disregard the dangers of radioactive contamination in their search of an "extreme experience". Even so, the legal tourists also don't always act appropriately: Far too many who have watched the show seem to be under the impression they're visiting a real life "theme park" and perform all sorts of stupid actions, such as... Yeah, that. Fuck those morons. Still, if you want to go, apparently prices are surprisingly low (maybe not that surprisingly), though they might have gone up recently as a result of the sudden surge in popularity. Yeah, that story has been making the round for months. I read comments where people call that very story into question and claim the Russian version has actually been in production for X years already, so to call it a "response" to the HBO series is supposedly inaccurate. Haven't seen anything solid yet on that one other than variations of the same story from the same source.
1) Because TFW2005 is a Transformers website, and thus it's a related tangent. 2) I've criticized its use of Chernobyl before, but thought it would be relevant to point out the contrast again here.
