[lostlogin]

Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of Tragedy seems a great text on the subject, and while the tv series is undoubtedly dramatised and many characters are morphed into one, the tv series seems to broadly follow the history of events as described in the book. Serhii seems to have a favourable view of the tv series.

Is there something glaring I am missing?

https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/chernobyl-expert-serhii-plokhi...

[dspillett]

> Is there something glaring I am missing?

It is worth listening to the podcast that accompanied the TV show. One of the things they mention quite a bit is where they deliberately deviated from the truth for practical/dramatic/pacing reasons[†], had to pick a narrative path from conflicting records, or had to make bits up to fill gaps in the (publicly available) records, and one or two cases where they toned down rather than ramped up an issue for tonal or "no one would believe it was quite that way" reasons.

It is both an enlightening insight into the process of making a show like that, and gives useful context to start on your journey if you want to delve deeper into the real reality of the events.

[†] merging many people into a single character, exaggerating immediate effects, reordering/repurposing actual events (a helicopter did crash but not at that point), pretty much that entire courtroom scene in the final episode, ...

[garmaine]

There are quite a few scientific or technical aspects of the HBO show which are completely fantastical and typical Hollywood tropes. Like that the core might blow up like a megaton bomb, or render all of Ukraine uninhabitable.

Edit: oh and that’s without mentioning all the factual errors in the story itself. Like the three volunteers who went into the plant to open the drains didn’t die, but are alive today, cancer free and collecting their pensions. So are most of the people who watched the plant burn the first night on the bridge.

[jacquesm]

From what I know about it whether or not the core blew up (again, a small part of it blew up in the beginning of the incident and spewed radioactive graphite all over the site) was a dime on its side, the core was well underway towards landing in the water underneath it, the resulting steam explosion could have thrown all of the core all over the surrounding site. That it didn't happen is due to the heroics of a couple of people who never really made a big deal of it, they went underneath the reactor core to manually open the valves that drained the basin.

[garmaine]

This is correct. However the writers for the show played it up to be much larger than that. In one of the episodes Gorbachov asked how big the explosion would be, and the reply was somewhere in the multi-megaton range IIRC, complete with a description of the predicted damage to the surrounding area equivalent to a major nuclear blast.

The biggest steam boiler explosions in history were still many orders of magnitude less than that, and those were purpose-built pressure vessels. The core wasn't going to drop into a pressure vessel, just whatever makeshift containment they had enacted at that time. Had the core come in contact with the water it would have converted a large chunk of it into steam, which would within moments blow open whatever cracks or leaks existed in the containment, blowing a lot of radioactive rubble into the surrounding environment.

That would have been a huge setback, but nothing near a multi-megaton nuclear explosion.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The problem wasn't the immediate explosion but the huge cloud of hyper-radioactive fallout it would have produced.

Chernobyl still managed to poison large areas of Europe, but the effects were mercifully localised and temporary.

A steam explosion would have increased those effects and the areas they affected by some orders of magnitude.

[jacquesm]

Temporary is a bit of an understatement, to this day there are large numbers of people in the Ukraine and in Eastern Poland as well as areas of Russia that ended up with Thyroid cancer due to this.

[garmaine]

Nobody knows that. That’s pure speculation based on the linear no-threshold model.

[garmaine]

I'm not debating that. I'm just saying it would not have been a multi-megaton hydrogen-bomb-like explosion physically destroying not just the plant, but the surrounding city as well, like the characters said it would be on the show.

[jacquesm]

Indeed, in fact if that steam explosion had happened it would have likely reduced the chance of the core going critical rather than increased it. It still would have been pretty bad though, especially given that they didn't really have a good way of cleaning up the highly radioactive graphite other than to have guys pick it up by hand...

[arethuza]

The epilogue of the show makes it very clear that the three survived and at the time of broadcast two were still alive.

Also, I believe the Soviet authorities at the time may have incorrectly believed that a large explosion was possible - in that respect the show may be correctly repeating a mistake that was made at the time.

[unicornfinder]

If memory serves this is confirmed in the podcast - i.e. the soviet engineers at the time believed it, even if we now know that it was unlikely.

[hef19898]

I have to read the official reports yet, both of them. But from what I understood, while it turned out the massive steam explosion was no real threat, the sincerely believed it would happen. And the three guys draining the reservoirs lived, one died in 200X (I can't remember), the other two are still alive.

There are other things I don't like about the mini series, but really just minor ones. The last episode was a wasted opportunity, so. Using the Vienna meeting would have been the perfect setting to cover the international reaction as well.

That being said, I saw a lot of similar decision processes in my career in purely capitalist jobs to the ones that lead to the screwed up test in Chernobyl.

[hef19898]

Thanks for pointing the bridge thing out. For starters, nobody knows who was there that night. And since nobody counted deaths, because nobody wanted to know, the series final just put a lot of urban legends out there. Not that the fact the nobody wanted to count isn't troubling enough in itself.

[lostlogin]

> Not that the fact the nobody wanted to count isn't troubling enough in itself.

This crappy trait isn’t limited to that time and place. The incident that comes to mind is gulf war 2 Bush “We don’t do body counts”.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/we-count-they-dont...