Chernobyl miniseries - coming to Sky and HBO in May 2019

mrk said:
Absolutely amazing series so far.

I watched a mini docu on this the other day on YT and it clarified some bits I knew of but didn't know for sure. The RBMK reactors were put in because they were easy and quick to convert for weapons production should the need arise. The safety test was what ballsed up reactor #4, human error.
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Sorry, but I’d fundamentally disagree and say you could lay blame on “human error” for this one. Not as the root cause, anyway.

The operators did everything they should have to shut down the reactor. If anything, it was the flawed design of the reactor and the fact that they were never properly told about the minimum number of rods required to stay in the core.

From memory they needed to leave something like 20+ rods in the core at all times and shortly before the explosion they’d removed all but 8 or so (don’t quote me, but it was vastly below the recommended minimum)

I’ve been a safety manager of a Power Station and can tell you that those guys would have known those systems inside out, and they’d have followed the orders/arrogance of the lead engineer to the letter but human error was merely a contributory factor.

I also feel that those guys probably lived with the shame/blame of such a horrible accident being pinned on them, which doesn’t sit right with me.
 
Why was the design flawed though? Was it rushed so it could simply be put in place and ready for weapons production conversion if ever needed?

I'd imagine that would be pretty accurate given the era and the regime in question I guess!
 
My family history makes watching this that bit more interesting, since my roots are from Belarus and Ukraine region. Strange to think that if it wasn't for 3 engineers 'volunteering' to go into a basement, I might not even be here today.

My parents both lived through it with my dad in the Soviet tank corps at the time of the incident, suppose he got lucky as his unit was never mobilised there.

My grandmother actually volunteered to go support the clean up crew as she was a nurse. This was around 2 years after the accident I think. She was 68 when she died from cancer, close to 20 years after she worked there. Kinda makes you wonder if it had anything to do with it.

My great grandmother who I never met was living in one of villages in Belarus that was affected by radiation cloud but not part of the exclusion zone. She died from cancer in her mid 70s, around 6 years after the incident.

Like many other places affected by the radiation where people were not evacuated, the government provided everyone in her village extra money. It was commonly reffered to as "groboviye" money, loosely translating to coffin/funeral money.
 
Really, really enjoying this series. I know it's not entirely historically accurate but that doesn't really detract from it being great TV!
 
So it's now the highest rated tv show of all time on IMDB overtaking Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad & The Wire. Ratings on IMDB always start high and then gradually drop but Chernobyls just keeps going up and up, its gone from 9.4 up to 9.7 since the first episode aired.
 
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200sols said:
How accurate were the radiation death scenes in ep 3? Those men seemed to be dissolving and it looked horrendous.
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Very. The radiation changes your DNA and basically boils you from the inside out.

Akimov (the guy you never see properly) was described as having black skin (by the people that saw him at the hospital).

Very grim :(
 
What radiation does is damage the DNA. basically the building blocks of you. your body has a natural defence mechanism that when your DNA is damaged, the cell is told to stop reproducing and live out its normal life cycle and let other undamaged cells replace it. This is normal, and it's how we combat cancer naturally.

A small radiation dose would damage some of the cells DNA, your body would tell them to stop reproducing and your body would replace them using the good cells around them.

now, as the dose of radiation goes higher more and more cells get damaged. and told not to reproduce. the cells are still there, but they aren't going to reproduce and be replaced. so, as is normal, your cells die but this time as they die they aren't replaced. you slowly start to break down. There is a set time table, certain cells have a certain life span. your stomach is about a weeks turnover, your blood is a couple of days, your skin can be about a month. So, as the cells die normally, nothing replaces them. From the point of a high dose on, you are already dead. it's just your cells are moving around doing their thing. They won't be replaced you won't heal. You are a dead thing walking, talking, and suffering.

Extreme radiation exposure... thats bad, but in a way more merciful? The radiation at this point is ionising radiation. This is strong enough to actually destroy the molecular bond of stuff. So, it's like getting hit with a really tiny machine gun. your cells, and stuff are shot full of little holes as the radiation particles penetrate your body and destroy some of the molecules. this starts to kill the cells.

Think of a cell like a steak. now picture the steak after tenderising it with a spiked mallet.

thats what the ionizing radiation does. couple that with the fact that your DNA is destroyed in the process means that the damage is completely unable to be healed.

With any luck at this point you just die. Because anything else is torture unimaginable.
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200sols said:
How accurate were the radiation death scenes in ep 3? Those men seemed to be dissolving and it looked horrendous.
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From reading up on this one of the firefighters had his eyes turned from brown to blue due to the intense radiation as he was one of the ones up on the roof so got a crazy amount of radiation. Can't be much more worse ways to die than what those men experienced. That poor chap that picked up that radioactive graphite rock killed himself in seconds and was none the wiser.
 
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