There are photos floating around the darker corners of the Internet, think ogrish and the like, of aftermath treatment photos of either Chernobyl workers or victims of a criticality accident in Japan. They are absolutely horrifying. Similar in treatment and appearance, to victims of large coverage full thickness thermal burns. A difference is that, in secondary radiation sickness cases, the burns are also on the inside of the body.
A horrific, unusually protracted, way to die.
Okay, so I just got around to watching the first episode. I watched the first 20 minutes. Before I continue, I was hoping someone could tell me something. Do they ever show, via a flashback or other methods, what lead to the disaster?
Because so far, it’s bullshit. They start at the explosion, and not before, so they don’t explain what lead up to it. But what appears to be misleading is that they made it seem like this was just a routine day at the reactor, and it just exploded unexpectedly, and no one had any idea what was going on. In fact, during the last scene I watched, they were in the control room, barking out orders to get the reactor cooling pumps flowing, and one of the control room technicians says “we did everything right”
What? That’s complete fucking nonsense. Chernobyl happened after like 25 separate mistakes that the human operators made. Everyone there would know that a reactor meltdown and explosion wasn’t unexpected because they just fucking disabled like 6 separate safety systems to try to run their test. They literally bashed some of the safety systems with mauls to bypass them. They had to know they were courting disaster and did it anyway. They basically did everything they could to make the reactor melt down and explode. The way it went down was not at all like a normal day at the plant where something went haywire. It was a day where a crew that was not trained or briefed on a test was conducting a test that they knew was dangerous after spending all day manually disabling safety systems because the plant would not let them do what they wanted to do. None of them would’ve been surprised or said “we did everything right”
So before I continue, is this addressed at some point? Because if not, this is basically bullshit anti-nuclear propaganda, pretending that Chernobyl was just a run of the mill plant that exploded for no good reason and it could happen anywhere because the people there “did everything right” and that still happened. Absolute fucking bullshit. And anti-nuclear propaganda, if that’s what it is, in the age of climate catastrophe is criminal.
Sorry, typo on my part; it was Reactor 3 that was finally decommissioned in 2000.
Have they finished broadcasting the series in any region? If not, not many will be able to say what is addressed, though detailed aspects of the reactor design may be a bit too technical for a TV show.
But you are essentially right: the reactor didn’t spontaneously go critical and explode, more like the night shift engaged in what was, in retrospect, a ludicrous violation of operating procedures and safety protocols, including disabling the automatic shutdown system, pulling out all the control rods, etc. Note that some of them were threatened with losing their jobs if they refused to go along with the botched test; they weren’t all fucking suicidal. It did not help that due to certain features of this early-generation model of reactor it was physically possible to put it in such an unstable state in the first place.
As I mentioned, this exact type of graphite-moderated reactor is still in use at multiple sites today; they are not necessarily inherently unsafe.
I don’t mean to malign the average worker at the plant. It just seems like they went way out of their way to accurately portray the horror of the incident - and I fully support this - but they should, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, also show what lead up to the incident, which was some crazy shit that you could probably only realistically see in somewhere like the USSR. I don’t even think China has such reckless disregard for human life as to do the sort of thing they did.
If the message people get from this series is “oh shit, any nuclear reactor could explode like that at any time even when everyone does everything right!” that’s pretty horrific lie.
I wish I could remember where I saw it, but I read a deeply technical article in a magazine - maybe it was national geographic, maybe popular mechanics, something like that - which listed, IIRC, 26 mistakes (or more accurately, reckless and negligent decisions) for Chernobyl to have resulted.
Off the top of my head - they were originally scheduled to conduct a test to see if the momentum of the reactor cycle could keep the core cooled down long enough for the backup generators to kick in. This is an inherently dangerous test, because if the answer to this is “no”, you’re risking a meltdown. They had no backup plan. During the scheduled time of the test, another power plant went offline and they required that the reactor at chernobyl stay up for another 18 hours. So after that 18 hours, they had an entire different shift at that plant which had not been briefed or trained on the test they wanted to conduct. And the few managerial/supervisory types who were overseeing the test had been running all that time on no sleep. And yet they forced the test to occur then.
The reactor prevented their attempts to operate it in an unsafe way, and then they manually bypassed those safeties, and then another safety system kicked in to prevent them from doing what they wanted to do, and they bypassed that - all the way to the point where I remember that they had to get hammers from the tool repository to physically bash or destroy some of the physical safety features to get the plant to operate in the way they intended. I can’t imagine a group that just manually disabled 6 safety systems could possibly think “What’s happening!? We did everything right!”
It’s actually a lot more detailed, horrifying, and with many more reckless and negligent decisions than I just listed. It’s utterly staggering when you read what they did. It’s as if they were daring the plant to explode, and the safety systems defeated them 6 separate times, but finally human ingenuity and some fucking hammers to physically destroy safety systems won out.
I’m sure the people working at the plant wanted nothing to do with it, but it was a very soviet “these are what the higher ups say, let’s make it happen no matter how fucking incredibly stupid or negligent or unsafe this is” type of affair. Something like Chernobyl would never happen in a first world country. Which isn’t to say that other types of nuclear accidents aren’t possible, but it’s grossly unfair to look at Chernobyl and think “yep, that’s what can just happen at a nuclear plant even if you do everything right”
Chernobyl is horrific not only because of the loss of life and contamination, but because it hardened the public’s resolve against nuclear power, and here we are, 30 years later, paying the price for that. So if this miniseries doesn’t portray that, if it only shows the horror, if it gives the public the impression that this is just something that happens with nuclear power, and it galvanizes and reinforces the public’s hatred of nuclear power even as we now know how devastating to our environment such an attitude is, the miniseries itself is negligent and reckless.
I don’t normally refuse to watch things on principle, but if that’s the way they’re going to portray it, I’m just not going to watch it. I turned it off as soon as the guy said “we did everything right” - but I figured I’d come here and see if maybe they did portray all of this and just the first part is misleading.
Showrunner Craig Mazin has said they will loop around to what led up to it. He wanted to start with a framing device, then in media res. I like it.
In addition to on the podcast, he has said so on Twitter.
And I didn’t interpret those technicians’ insistence “we did everything right” to mean “we were just hanging out checking levels in routine operation” but more like people who are throwing up psychologically protective mechanisms against the massive guilt implicit in having juiced it up too far past the redline. Seems this belief that it was theoretically impossible for this type of reactor to explode (which appears IIRC to be the prior of every scientist shown so far) gave them the feeling that they had guardrails on the side of the cliff.
There’s only been two episodes so far, so it’s not possible to say exactly. However, there’s a bit of a theme developing of bureaucratic coverup, and growing realization by scientists and some of the more savvy Party people that something has gone very badly wrong indeed. I’d stick with it - there’s a dramatic moment of incredible tension in the second episode that is well worth experiencing.
It’s not that unfair. Gross incompetence is always a possibility. Planners have been known to oversee risks. Physicists have been known to be mistaken in their assumptions. Engineers have been known to make errors in their calculations. Contractors have been known to cut corners for profit. Workers have been known to be poorly trained or incompetent. Not even counting deliberate sabotage, terrorism and, of course, military attacks.
I think it’s rather the attitude you’re displaying here that is problematic. Tchernobyl? Well, doesn’t count because they were incompetent. Fukushima? Doesn’t count because a peculiar risk was ignored. Next time what? Doesn’t count because someone mistook feet for meters and it was monumentaly stupid?
Nuclear plants are potentially extremely dangerous. You can’t rely on the idea that if everything works the way it was intended, if nobody is incompetent, mistaken, careless or corrupt, then they’re totally safe. Humans are faillible, highly so, and in a lot of ways. Inevitably, another serious accident will occur, for some new reason. Maybe something worst than what we’ve seen so far. Assuming that it won’t happen is like assuming that cars are 100% safe because if you’re a good driver, are sober, follow all traffic regulations, respect the speed limits, aren’t distracted, drive defensively and it doesn’t rain you won’t have an accident.
Just started and it’s absolutely terrifying storytelling. Just wonderful.
I enjoy the way it’s rolled out as a mystery (how did it happen) that will eventually be solved/uncovered. i don’t know any of the details of why this happened, so maybe that helps.
I watched the first episode and I don’t understand what was the near-miss or how it could have been worse, in your opinion.
Maybe if the fire had reached reactor 3, is that it?
It’s more like saying “cars are unsafe because someone removed the brake pads, cut the brake lines, removed the seat belts, disabled the air bags, and then drove it 90 miles an hour down an incline at a brick wall to see if the parking brake worked, and it didn’t.”
Regards,
Shodan
The second episode clarifies this.
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I imagine future episodes will make clear what the worst case scenario was. We’ve only seen what, 6 hours after the meltdown?
EDIT: Doh! Ninja’d.
Thanks, I’m gonna watch it tonight.
Are these future episodes available On Demand, or did they just start broadcasting it a week earlier in Europe or something?
Here in the 'States, the premiere was 3 days ago and the second episode airs this coming Sunday.
As far as I can tell HBO and Sky are showing the episodes on the same schedule (taking timezone differences into account). Both have shown the first two.
Sweet, I’ll definitely watch the second episode tonight then, woohoo!
Not sure what happened there; I guess I was busy last week and spaced out.
Think about how it took over 30 years to build a stable containment structure. And how it was barely possible to construct a temporary one, even with robots and kamikaze liquidators. And how three more operational reactors were on site.
Now imagine the area with additional subsequent explosions, stuff collapsing, damage to adjacent buildings, everything unstable + impossible to get near, an order of magnitude more radioactivity released, the exclusion zone expanded by a factor of whatever, contamination of food and water not merely in the immediate area, and so on, if you want to start imagining all kinds of worst-case scenarios. Idem concerning Fukushima.
In the second episode, they say they are on the verge (a day or two away) from a massive, I don’t know how many megaton explosion that will instantly incinerate everything within a pretty large radius, unless they drain the water tanks. Sounds worse than an H-bomb. I had no idea they were anywhere close to anything like this.
Events in episode 2 are historically true but seem somewhat exaggerated and fictionalized by artistic license. Just somewhat because the real events are really truly dramatic. But I’m still skeptical of the figures being mentioned (and the way the steam explosion risk is presented as a near-miss).