They certainly got a dose of radiation, but any amount of distance and/or building structure between you and the source of radiation would reduce that dose. So a firefighter standing next to reactor graphic and showered with radioactive ash is going to wind up much worse off than someone seated behind multiple wall and under and intact roof.
Of course they were massively irradiated. 30-50 mSv/hour just in the control room. As for walking around outside, well, the statistics speak for themselves.
A propos the control-room people, that guy Dyatlov was hard-core when it came to shrugging off amounts of radiation which would kill most people:
They talked about this a little on the podcast–in fact, speculating that his earlier experience caused him to shrug off concerns about radiation exposure as overblown. Amazing.
ETA: So the men from the control room who were shown in a horrific state in this episode did get a significantly greater exposure than Dyatlov, or no?
Remind me, who was depicted in the episode besides Dyatlov? Toptunov and Akimov? Remember, Dyatlov only looked around outside a bit, while those two spent hours turning valves while knee-deep in radioactive water. While Dyatlov got his 390 rem (enough to kill 50% of people), they received truly massive doses of over 1500.
Ohhh…right.
What about the engineer who got frogmarched up to the roof to look at the reactor and came away with an immediately burned face? Did he not even make it to the hospital?
Was that Sitnikov? He totally died (1500 rad mostly to the head, according to Wikipedia), but not till May 30.
Plenty of time to contemplate one’s imminent gruesome, unbelievably agonizing death even with acute radiation overdose. You might even live a week or two, or even longer at lower doses. There are pictures of people lying in that hospital, but you don’t want to see them.
Yes, checking Wikipedia that is his name. On the show, he initially balked at going to that roof because he was already sure the reactor was destroyed. But his higher-ups insisted (while notably not volunteering to do it themselves–they were hanging out in the hardened bunker) and sent a uniformed guard to escort him. The guard remained sheltered around the corner while Sitnikov shuffled uneasily toward the spot where he could look down at the reactor. The shot of his face, burned just from those few seconds of exposure, was for me the most horrifying moment of a very intense pilot episode.
Then they still didn’t believe him! :smack:
ETA: On Twitter, I noted that the Moscow hospital “definitely needed more euthanasia”. 
It depends. Without the hospital you’re a goner, whereas sometimes there is a chance they can still save you via a bone-marrow transplant, not to mention an array of aggressive medical treatment including cytokines, antibiotics, blood transfusions, stem cells, and the rest.
Depending on your exposure level and amount of damage to your internal organs, no guarantees you will be alive in a year, or a month, but there is not necessarily reason to blow your brains out right at the start.
Did you see the show? I’m talking about the people who basically had no skin.
Sure I saw the episodes. Once you look like that, you’re probably screwed. (I’m not morbidly curious enough to compare what was shown to actual photos of the actual victims.) I’ll refer to the handy guide published by the International Atomic Energy Agency. There is a category ominously marked “supportive/palliative treatment only”. On the other hand, one hopeful footnote says that “With appropriate supportive therapy individuals may survive whole body doses as high as 12 Gy.”
By now some of the actual medical records from that hospital must have been released, but I have enough nightmares Our knowledge of how to deal with acute radiation injuries must have been much advanced thanks to multiple Chernobyl victims
the US has special burn units in some hospitals which I assume would be used for this kind of event. I don’t know if they were in that type of unit after Chernobyl.
Unless you have an identical twin who wasn’t exposed and is willing to donate skin/marrow/etc. yeah, you’re sort of screwed at that point…
And the scientist said your blood vessels are so screwed up, you can’t even get morphine for the incredible pain. That’s where the euthanasia should come in.
ETA: Mazin noted that one of the people she talked to in the hospital was so messed up, they didn’t even show him on screen–just allowing her horrified reaction to stand in. Given how awful the others looked, I can’t even imagine.
Stats: out of 115 patients in the hospital, 30% had burns covering 10-50% of the body, and 11% had over 50% of their skin burned. This exposure was often caused by clothes drenched with radioactive water. Out of 28 deaths, 16 had skin injuries listed among the causes; infection caused more than half of the acute deaths.
+1 This show is excellent.
12 Gy wholebody at once! And he lived? Was it one of the Chernobyl victims? That’s a dose that I would’ve figured was 100 percent fatal from secondary radiation sickness. I.e., 2 weeks of sloughing off tissue painfully until death.
I skimmed through the references given (Exposures and effects of the Chernobyl accident and Medical management of radiation accidents). If I am reading it right, it appears to say that out of 21 Chernobyl patients with average whole-body doses in the 6.5 to 16 Gy range only 1 survived, and he got “only” 8.7 Gy. He received a bone-marrow transplant. So I’m still not sure who was the patient referred to in the footnote who supposedly got 12 Gy and lived even a couple of weeks; the flowcharts seem to indicate that at that acute dose level you’re a goner. This is all based on a really cursory look, however, so maybe I am missing something.
Just started based on your alls recommendation…Jesus Christ, I know its 1986 Soviet Union but do you assholes really not have rad badges and geiger counters all over the place?? I mean I guess it makes sense given the dumbshit experiments they were doing that they just run around all over the place as if they arnt frigging nuclear engineers.
They had Geiger counters, but the only high-limit ones were locked in a safe for some reason. Then they just reported the max reading of the lower limit counters all the way up the chain of command.