5:45 When Lyudmila goes to hug Vasily when he looks to be recovering, before he turns into a puddle he's "infecting" her because of the skin to skin contact. His sweat is contaminated and as the water in the sweat evaporates it leaves behind some the contamination on his skin which can then be pressed onto his wife. The IAEA even wrote a book about what we learned about the dangers of treating people with high exposure, see section 4.3 dealing with high levels of skin contamination. gnssn.iaea.org/Superseded%20Safety%20Standards/Safety_Series_088_1988.pdf We aren't trying to say anything, we're just correcting something you got wrong. If you can't take receiving a minor correction without being catty you shouldn't take pop culture so seriously. "People who are internally contaminated can expose people near them to radiation from the radioactive material inside their bodies. The body fluids (blood, sweat, urine) of an internally contaminated person can contain radioactive materials. Coming in contact with these body fluids can result in contamination and/or exposure." "Homes can also become contaminated with radioactive materials in body fluids from internally contaminated people. Making sure that others do not come in contact with body fluids from a contaminated person will help prevent contamination of other people in the household." www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/contamination.htm

@@fremenchips the first example you give applies to contaminated skin, which is not the case here. Even the show agrees with that, clearly showing where the contaminated surfaces were placed and remain today (their clothing). The sweat and possible blood contamination would be fairly easily alleviated for the wife, given it could wash off. It would behoove you to check my sources, for you are not merely arguing with me, but this article: www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong argue your point. It is not established yet, so it is not "correcting" until you have made done so. What you need to establish is how the show displays that the specifics of the pregnant woman's danger correctly. That is the argument at hand, and you have not established a sufficient argument against Shellenberger . Do that before saying, "If you can't take receiving a minor correction without being catty you shouldn't take pop culture so seriously." Given you are citing sources, I expect you are capable of defending your position, but that statement indicates otherwise

@@fremenchips and found this by merely searching "Chernobyl contagious radiation." It was the 2nd result: cancerletter.com/articles/chernobyl/ Not only is he one of the people working on the actual disaster, but he also helped with the UN investigations. He makes it very clear that the scene depicted is so inaccurate that it is cause for concern - he's a far better source

I love you videos and agree with you on the nuclear explosion BS. But the dangers or radiation cannot be understated many of the Chernobyl victims weren't even born yet. The silent victims were the countless numbers of children born with severe abnormalities and disabilities. Often these children were abandoned and left in orphanages because families had little ability to care for them. Nobody talks about these victims because they were born years and decades after the accident, countless more babies were still born who don't even class as being person to be counted as a victim. I know that I have no numbers on this stuff I've only seen a short documentary on them but the disabilities were so severe it has really left a mark on me. Thanks for your work and I really like your channel but I will disagree with you on the dangers of radiation but not the BS myth that TV shows often portray.

​@@CynicalHistorian I agree this is great source but he's arguing backwards from 2019 not from the perspective of 1986. He says that the contamination of the firefighters from almost entirely external not internal, he's probably right. But you don't need to bury people with only external radiation contamination in zinc coffins. The REMM handbook says that bodies with external contamination below 100 millirem/hour can be decontaminated and released and those with over 100 millirem/hour should be stored until the rate of decay of fission products is under 100 millirem/hour. While those with internal contamination should be buried in metal coffins with metal or concrete vaults. The Soviets did this with Vasily so clearly they believed at the time he had serious internal contamination. The REMM handbook also states "If the deceased is known or suspected to be contaminated, personnel engaged in handling of the body should be issued personal protective equipment (PPE) and a personal dosimeter. " So an unprotected person interacting with someone believed to have serious contamination is a big breach of safety guidelines. Which gets to my point, it's that the hospital scene is entirely plausible, to say the way the hospital staff reacted is fear mongering is using information we have in 2019 that the Soviets did not have in 1986. www.remm.nlm.gov/deceased.htm

ahhhh.. that's that stuff that comment sections were made for

The KZfaq community is mildly contaminated; He’ll be fine, I’ve seen worse.

@@rev.andyh.1082 Hey, the show IS memeworthy as hell, no denying it. In today's pop culture, that's actually a testament to it's quality.

Nothing contaminate you like anime

The Cynical Historian aka Potential History is confused. RBMK reactor cores don’t explode.

Really? I didn't know that,thanks for the info.

Yeah it would be weird in the Soviet Union meant union union lol

@@mcmasters1484 - Concil Union doesn't sound much better either :D

As in "workers' councils," like Gorbachev says in the clip...

Péter Baán nah lol it’s doesn’t but it makes more sense then union union

Exactly.

Yeah, and the name literary means "councils". Those workers' councils started popping up spontaneously already during the 1905 Revolution, coming back in force during the February Revolution of 1917. Once the Bolsheviks used them for their purposes and took total control over them they were hardly the same thing, so one can argue that the very name of the Soviet Union officially established in 1922 was kinda a lie from the beginning. The real decisions and policies were being made in the hierarchical, centralized structures of the Party, going all the way to the Central Committee, not in the councils. It's funny but if the Soviet Constitution was taken seriously, the most important person in the Soviet Union in the years 1938-46 should be Mikhail Kalinin, as the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (Council) of the Soviet Union, but we all know who was in charge in this period. The only reason Kalinin is remembered is that Königsberg was renamed after him.

Dem wacky Bolsheviks!

The concept of a council democracy lies at the heart of early communism. Inthe German regime change 1918/19 there were attempts to install a "Räterepublik", a republic of councils.

The reactor design itself really wasn't up to what engineers at the time knew to be best practices. For example, using graphite instead of heavy water to get the fast neutrons down to thermal energies is what allowed for the evaporation of cooling water to be an additional factor in accelerating the reaction (they traded off safety in several other points, too, like the design of the control rods). Heavy water was just more expensive. Runaway chain reactions can only happen in some reactor designs and at the time the Soviets decided that a reactor that was mostly safe and significantly cheaper was the way to go. For a nuclear catastrophe of the magnitude of Chernobyl to happen you always need human error and unsafe design. To be perfectly honest I haven't watched the show, so I can't talk about how they portrayed the situation, but if what you got from it was that operation/administrative errors where the big issues, then the series at least omits some things. That would actually fit Chyper's narrative of fearmongering pretty well, as modern nuclear reactors generally are designed such that with rising core temperatures the reaction slows down, in some cases enough that regardless of what you do to the controls the reactor can't overheat to dangerous levels. The lesson of Chernobyl should be about clear communication and not saving money on safety features rather than nuclear power in the abstract.

@@JK03011997 A wise man once told me, "If America is all about cutting corners, than the USSR is a circle."

@@JK03011997 Or they could have just enriched the uranium and used normal water like we do. No graphite.

@@mscheese000 To be fair their enrichment facilities were probably busy doing.... other stuff

@@JK03011997 Human error is NEVER a good reason to give for a catastrophic failure, if it could be caused by operator error then the systems in place were fatally flawed and badly designed from the outset.

Gad Yariv I second it!

I love both channels but CH is the OG!

Gad Yariv history buff was awful, he said bullshit things such as how "the red army rushed men without rifles in german machine guns" and stuff like that.

@@Loup-mx7yt Oh no! He made a one mistake! Lets ignore that everyone including CH also make mistakes. Lets also forget how it was one small point of several to show how Stalin was a bad guy. Oh the humanity!

@@Loup-mx7yt From what I understand people mistaken an event from WWI where Russian soldiers were told to go into combat unarmed and to pick up rifles from the dead and placed it during WWII.

She wasn't a scientist. So, her commentary on those aspects is questionable.

@@Theakker3B And therein lies the conundrum. There is always a way to deny someone's account, even if/when it's true by suggesting the person/s telling it aren't qualified/knowledgeable enough to qualify it as actual truth.

I love this channel but like, this stupid, radiation is contagious, irradiated bodies can irradiate people around them alot of the firefighters were dangerous and that's why they were buried in lead coffins under concrete, it 100% was a real thing and the wife lost her baby because of the radiation she was exposed to, maybe not from just her husband but just all of the people at the hospital and her exposure in the city. Before she got to Moscow. A lot of this is show is fear mongering but people like this going too far and denying facts and not just the fear mongering myths is why people don't trust us.

Exactly. They're dealing with the fears and misconceptions of the time.

@@derekhenschel3191how? By what process? Radiation isn’t a virus. People buried in lead coffins points to the Soviet belief that they’re “contagious”, but does it hold up to actual scientific theory and research?

Zirkel Magister YOU DIDN’T BECAUSE ITS NOT THERE

*throws binder*

@@ElectricBuckeye When my step-daughter asks me to read her a bedtime story: " There, review it!"

omg

I've never seen anything like it

Yeah, this show invokes fear about nuclear power and rightly so. As events like Chernobyl and Fukushima show us, nuclear power plants can get very very dangerous when something goes wrong, especially when they are technically outdated. That's why we need newer and cleaner Technology to produce energy and have to shut down all nuclear power plants.

Yeah I was bothered by Cynical stating radiation is not contagious without any qualifiers. Patients who receive radiation therapy for cancer are not supposed to be in a close proximity to pregnant women for 2 months and they are exposed to far less radiation than the firefighters were. The firefighters' clothes piled in the basement of hospital are still dangerously radioactive to this day, so it's easy to imagine how dangerously radioactive the firefighters themselves were at the time the wife visited.

@@redcrabdue1787 See this is exactly the takeaway you shouldn't get from something like this. This is incredibly ignorant to the problems associated with any other sort of power generation, what all we need reactors for in nuclear chemistry and the industries that rely on reactors, and how actually dangerous nuclear is compared to literally anything else. Like yeah it can be scary and dangerous but so is everything else ESPECIALLAY fossil fuel burning which kills way more people. We'd need multiple Chernobyls a year to keep up with fossil fuel burning. Like nuclear accidents can get really dramatic but are also relatively concentrated and are fairly preventable. Your whole take away just shows off how much fear mongering there is and how much misinformation there is and how context is ignored. Nuclear beign potentially dangerous isn't actually a good reason to shut down all nuclear everything because all power generation has its risks or complications, even clean renewables like hydro and win.

@@redcrabdue1787 uhm... what? fukushima was a success story, it was literally a perfect storm and yet there was only one fatality, and chernobyl was faulty designed, nuclear is literally the cleanest and greenest energy source

@@killian9314 well, one person died, but considering 15,000 people were killed in the earthquake and tsunami that is still shockingly low.

exactly, thank you. I think the purpose of the show was to give people a general idea of what happened, and highlight people that did and gave a lot and we never knew about them (miners, Legasov, scientists, firefighters, etc).

@@arisukak True, but when i watched that part I always thought that maybe they exaggerated things on purpose, i mean, they were trying to convince Gorvachev (who didn't knew anything about radiation/reactors) that it was serious and urgent while all the other officials were telling him that it was nothing. But yeah I see your point, I just gave the show a pass just cause i understood that it was being dramatic.

Let's make a "based on real history" drama where a scientist analyzes how a piece of banana can burn down a house. We're just exaggerating here. This isn't a documentary.

A large swath of Hollywood's audience is convinced that ridiculous films like Kingdom of Heaven or Braveheart are mostly accurate, and yet you expect them to make _that_ distinction without anyone pointing the misrepresentations out ?

The thing is, most people won't bother to seek out the truth from the fiction, and are likely to take the claims made in such historical drama as accurate.

I wonder why the show portrayed him as being disliked. Hmmm... Is it perhaps because, the show is trying to make evidence out of a point instead of a point out of evidence?

Could you per chance link an article or cite something saying that? Sounds interesting

@@CynicalHistorian ok this is for the containment buildings. www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/part050-0150.html

@@CynicalHistorian "The Chernobyl plant did not have the fortified containment structure common to most nuclear power plants elsewhere in the world. Without this protection, radioactive material escaped into the environment." www.nei.org/resources/fact-sheets/chernobyl-accident-and-its-consequences

fascinating, thanks

​@@CynicalHistorian np, all most anything to do with the USSR turns into an bizarre and fascinating rabbit hole.

It’s essentially the same joke from Austin Powers I where they unfreeze Austin after the Cold War ends lol.

FreeJaffa92 the characters in the show never blame atomic energy actually. They’re pretty specific about placing the blame strictly on soviet technological failings, the meddling of authoritarian governments, cost saving measures and human error. In fact, Legasov specifically points to the fact that western nuclear plants are fitted with safeties and redundancies that would prevent Chernobyl-like disasters.

hosank ya like I said it’s only unsafe when human action is taken. If it’s not clear I like the mini series because it doesn’t demonize atomic power.

@@FreeJaffa92 Yeah I understand what you meant and I agree with you.

"In general I wanted to hate the mini-series before watching it, I came around because of what I saw as the lack of demonization of nuclear power, and the focus on people doing what they could to help, endure, and overcome the system / environment they live." Your last paragraph really sums up why I felt this mini-series worked. As you've pointed out, the show places much of the blame of Soviet technology failings, how arrogance and cost-cutting, combined with human error, resulted in a disaster. It really is a fascinating picture as characters like Legasov and others struggle within an authoritarian system to get stuff done. At times, it's clear they want to be blunt and flat-out go, "That's not going to work. You'll make matters worse!" but if they step on too many toes of too many powerful people, then they will be fired and a less-skilled toady more willing to parrot propaganda and play along, would be put in their place. Then they wouldn't be able to save anyone, more people would die, and what good would their knowledge and skill do anyone. So the characters have to walk a thin line, figuring how much of the truth to tell and how to tell it in a way that gets things done, but doesn't alienate important party figures too much.

@@kokofan50 but they didn't say the reactor would explode. They were talking about water flash-boiling in a big metal resivoir underneath the reactors when the molten slag burns a hole in it.

It perpetuates the myth that a nuclear reactor can explode like a nuclear bomb.

Now its the largest unintentional wildlife preserve in Europe lol

Radioactive dust can become embedded in cloth, whereas on humans it can easily be washed off.

I believe the divers were wearing rubber/latex wetsuits that would be generally better at keeping radioactive particles off of them

Yep, the fear was that the corium works its way through the building into a water reservoir causing a massive steam explosion. In this context it doesn't really matter how big the explosion would have really been but what the people at the time were thinking.

@@Doping1234 there was a big concern with the elephants toe burning down into the aquifer but the decent seems to have stopped. But yeah if that steam explosion did happen the world be have changed, not Mad Max or Fallout, but we likely would have that big of a retirement problem

@@dark_fire_ice A steam explosion is not going to be 5 Mt. In fact, the actual explosion in question was estimated at around 10 tons. For comparison, the two most powerful fission bombs ever tested were ~500 kt and ~720 kt, each of which contained far more U-235 than Chernobyl Reactor No 4. The difference in magnitude between the actual steam explosion and the 5 Mt "estimate" on the show is pretty close to this: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mZhkYJyonbK7f30.html versus this: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hs18rcqVx8zJenk.html

cancerletter.com/articles/chernobyl/

Yeah that point is a real hickup here. I guess on some level it's a little unfair to expect from a historian to be familiar with the thermal physics of reactor design (like why is it fair to call the Chernobyl Reactor unsafe) and the complex fallout of Chernobyl and it's health consequences (which are as far as I know poorly understood). But I agree, Chipher seems to have fallen into a trap of dangerous half-knowledge with that bit.

That statement is taken directly from a hematologist who worked on the disaster. I'm putting it in my own words, but you are essentially arguing with the entire World Health Organization. If that is misleading, I don't know what is correctly leading. Here's the source: cancerletter.com/articles/chernobyl/ argue with sources, for you are indeed the one misleading anyone who happens to come across your comment

"Their bodies were rather radioactive due to their severe exposure." This is absolute nonsense. You started off so good. I can hit an atom of U-235 with a neutron and make it break apart into radioactive isotopes. I can't hit an atom of water, for instance, and do the same thing. Just because you're bombarded with radiation doesn't make you magically radioactive. It's because they were CONTAMINATED. They had radioactive particulate on their skin which continued to irradiate them and others around them. The only solution in that case is to vigorously clean the skin and rid them of contamination, and that was never made clear in the miniseries.

@@JK03011997 What does "thermal physics of reactor design" have to do with fireman contamination? Please explain.

@@rars0n Oh I saw an additional issue with Cipher's take in that he omitted what amounts to basically half the story of how Chernobyl happened. For a good take on that one kinda needs to talk about things like fast vs thermal neutrons, water vs steam etc. A take like that would then immediately lead to questions like "why did they use natural uranium and graphite?" the answers of which are highly entangled and great examples of soviet politics which would have been very important to the narrative. Kinda fault by omission (both Cypher and me for not clarifying that)

Yes Alex, thats sooo true. Iam born in the mid sixties in west germany. People always forget: There was no Internet nor google. There were maybe half a dozen books on this subject in libraries. for the whole district. State TV was over cautious with info. Only the young Green Movement had information such as "No spinach from the garden", no mushrooms and no running around in the rain". No milk for babies from the south of the country and further..

Same happened in Japan after the bombs. They survivors were stigmatized, branded as sick and contagious. They even have a word for it. Pretty fucked up.

Yes, the HBO series is actually accurate, while Cypher's critique of it isn't - Radiation sickness isn't normally contagious but in this case, the fireman was directly exposed to it, becoming radioactive himself, and in that case, it is possible to harm people around them.

@@hosank That's kinda what I figured. Especially because often part of cleaning yourself when radioactive things happen isn't just getting rid of the clothes. You have to almost wash your skin off.. Or I guess it might depend on what type of radiation it's but that's not my area at all.. Mostly I go by what was taught to us in school etc. here and it always confuses me that how things what we hear about Russia/Soviet in school or otherwise are so much different to rest of the world. Big or little things.. And about knowledge. Not about political or propaganda type of stuff.. We don't eat or bite that. Our media also wont and can't bite. I guess they're more honest to the country that it's kinda nice to them and was part of them. Dunno really. Or maybe I just had good history teacher.

MrNicoJac I agree, although I did just find it strange that the show ultimately came to the conclusion it was the fault of the government, when it went to great lengths to show the sheer incompetence and lack of care demonstrated by the plant management.

By the way, I really enjoyed the video!

You’re sick, twisted, and I love you for it.

@@pauln4808 its a fallout game thing. People who survived radiation illness and look like that call normal people smooth skin.

@@pauln4808 ah ok, sorry

Kill me

You don't need hindsight to know that a six inch bottle rocket isn't going to level a city block with its explosive charge. That's how insanely unrealistic the 5 megaton claim is.

@@alexanderflack566 wasnt the reactor exploding. It was the fuel melting down into the water supply for most of the ukrane laying beneath it, creating steam, allowing the oressure to build up until it was too much for the ground above it causing an explostion. At the time they though the amount of radiation released and the aera covered would be around the same as if there was a 5 megaton explosion. They used the megaton analagy as its a word people know and can try to visualise.

@@cheasepriest You don't use the word "hurricane" to describe a drizzle with 10 mph wind gusts, even if it covers the same geographical area. Magnitude matters, as does precision. Misusing that term doesn't say "this is a big deal and we should be taking it seriously," it says "this person has no idea what they're talking about and is therefore most likely completely wrong." Besides, since when does the average member of the public have any clue what 5 Mt actually does? Comparing the effects to Little Boy/Fat Man would have been at least marginally less ridiculous ("marginally" in this case being "a few orders of magnitude") and just as relatable to the average person, if not more so.

Kinda ironic cuz this happens in the Gorbachev era and in Russia absolutely nobody loves Mikhail Gorbachev

@@229masterchief I know. For a country that claims to not be the Soviet Union, mocking Soviet leaders seems to be a bit of a no no. Unless your Boris Yeltsin. Mock him all you please.

@@229masterchief Gorbachev had to send some of his most entrusted men to the area to find the people with answers and fast. They were forced to get people at times to talk truthfully at gunpoint, such was the system and the gravity of the situation.

@@ShinigamiInuyasha777 A musical about Evita, is it that funny one with Madonna you mean ?

@@ShinigamiInuyasha777 I like Madonna , but few of her ideas. Her early productions were nice. And musicals are risky business, and rarely is worth seeing imho.

It was made safe the moment Ukraine finished the new Containment Dome and put it over the Reactor. At least for the next 100 years. only 249,900 to go until Radiation Levels are to be considered safe.

@@Exodon2020 "Only after several tense days were the fires doused, and the reactor was ultimately made safe 33 years later"

God, i hated you since the first episode and still do.

Same, i just watched as fiction rather than truth

Honest question: Do you believe the majority of people who watched this are still receptive to nuclear power?

@@bansho7076 No, only morons. The show goes into great detail on how badly you have to fuck up in order to get a reactor core to explode. Modern day procedures are even more strict.

Well at least you know it's not a 100% accurate depiction of the history of Chernobyl, and still enjoy it as a drama show in spite of the inaccuracies

​@T_ C I mean a piece of media like a TV show should be judged on its own merit, especially when it comes to it's messaging. Most people who watched the show probably won't listen to the podcast, so if one tries to evaluate whether they are "fearmongering" the podcast should be kept separate.

I'm quite educated on nuclear power and very pro. I don't see how any of it was fearmongering. At no point did I get the impression that the show was trying to imply that nuclear power is unsafe.

@@mscheese000 Claiming that a meltdown can cause a multi-megaton explosion is INSANE. Hell, even the most powerful fission bombs ever made are nearly an order of magnitude less destructive than that.

@@alexanderflack566 I don't recall the show claiming that it would create a multi Megaton nuclear explosion, but you're wrong on your second point for sure. The Tsar Bomba had 25 megaton yield.

The only radiation source would've been his mouth and perhaps blood, which is not demonstrated in the show. If you disagree, check out this review from one of the hematologists who worked on the actual disaster: cancerletter.com/articles/chernobyl/

If a human is so radioactive that he is radiating he will already be dead. They keep them isolated because of their compromised immune system. It is JUST LIKE AIDES

i think theoretically, if you receive a massive dose of radiation you will be literally sweating and pissing ionized water.

@@estebancastellino3284 No,you will be dead in minutes from massive internal bleeding. This is like suggesting if I walked on the surface of the sun I would be emiinating a looooooooooot of heat, yes but I will also be dead. So in laymens term a human CANNOT BE radiating radiation while being alive, they will be dead already.

www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/how-cancer-treated/radiation-therapy/understanding-radiation-therapy

Anthony M that’s why it’s called a drama and not a documentary. If you want a documentary I suggest you go and watch zero hours 1-2 hour segment on it.

@@soarinskies1105 It's met to be accurate. If it can't do that, don't use history as your clay to form a story that's filled with inaccuracies.

GumgumDookuin Chernobyl’s genre is a drama, the creator of the mini series even said that he wanted to cast a different light on aspects of Chernobyl and wasn’t intending to go for a 100% in terms of accuracy, however he wanted to do the disaster justice by focusing on aspects of Chernobyl that he believed nobody knew or thought of very much. He then used that to his own advantage and inserted references to past and future events throughout the series. There are also plenty of cases where he hypes up the level of danger of certain Events like the divers, and the thermal explosion threat for dramatic effect, while not going too overboard in terms of falsifying historical accounts. This in turn got the audience to go back and look into each of the events for themselves to see if they actually happened which in turn caused many people to love the series because of the things they learned, even if some of the events were slightly changed or moved in terms of chronological order as well as characters being created or changed for the purpose of keeping the audiences focus and interest. One instance of this can be seen with the helicopter crashing after it flew over the reactor core in the miniseries. Now believe it or not this actually did happen, in fact every detail of how the helicopter crashed is perfectly portrayed in the series with the exception of the black smoke coming out of the reactor core. The only issue here is that the helicopter crash didn’t occur until months after the Chernobyl accident occurred but this was most likely inserted here chronologically as a plot device to help the average viewer grasp the desperation danger and hopelessness the people in charge of the clean up were facing at the time which was exactly what they were feeling at the time. Chernobyl is not 100% accurate and there are areas where things were changed or hyped up, but this wasn’t done out of pure ignorance but rather it was done to again be used as plot devices to help the viewer understand and feel the very real feeling of helplessness and even anger that some of the clean up crew was experiencing due to a lack of initiative and a bias for attempting to cover up the incident from the rest of the world rather then use their best efforts to simply fix the problem. Many of the cleanup crew felt powerless with the government taking the stance of political silence for the longest time, at least until foreign countries began to figure out what was going on inside the USSR, but even then the government was still refusing responsibility at times and at times chose to believe in their own twisted fantasy that things weren’t as bad as everyone was saying they were rather then accept the horrifying reality that Chernobyl had evolved into one of if not the worst nuclear disaster in recorded history

@@soarinskies1105 I get what you're saying but the info given from this miniseries is spreading fear mogering. They overrated the possibility of a situation gone wrong. Nuclear Reactors cannot create levels of explosions like that of an atomic bomb. All it can do is spread radiation poisoning and effect the clouds with rad rain, which itself is a much more frightful thought than what's shown. Its true the USSR didn't wish to acknowledge such action existed but it wasn't to cover up the cause and effect of it all. That was later on when it got spread by Europe. They wanted to make sure their citizens were not under a situation where they question their government's word. The same happened when a revolutionary stole a ship from the Soviets and was later shot before they covered up what happened. That's Soviet Russia. They want the whole thing covered in a sheeted blanket, never one small problem. Radiation is not like the flu where it can easily be spread by touch. They left the guy in there because it was to protect his immune system, not the other way around. Hate to say it but the USSR is better at covering up fear mogering than this series. You can say its to create self-awareness but all I see is misinformation, myths, and misconceptions about Nuclear power.

@@gumgumdookuin7963 that part with the explosion that number of megatons was self estimated from the UdSSR sientist at that time and Heatexplosions can create imense force that the area she discribe that would be inhable are to big for sure. But an Nuclear Power reactor that is melted down hold someting around 200-400tons of liquid metal around 1400°C you can self make the calculation how much water it can evaporate.

Thank you Don’t get your science from historians.

I feel compelled to say this. The fuel was already in the water. It had been since April 26th. The concern was that the steam being produced would flood the site and make work impossible due to the high temperature. So they had to drain the water to prevent this.

I highly recommend Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. I did a review of that one too

I was hoping for another season, but so far there hasn't been one, even in Germany.

Their "worst case scenario" is physically impossible, both because 2% enriched uranium can't explode in that way even if you actively tried to make a bomb out of it, and because there wasn't enough U-235 there for anywhere near that kind of energy release.

@@alexanderflack566 the explosion they are referring to isn't combusting nuclear material. They're talking about molten nuclear material flash-boiling the underground resivoirs of water beneath the reactor, which could turn it into an explosive force.

@@MRdrPROkeithSR Obviously. But the idea that the resulting explosion could be in the megaton range is laughably wrong. Like, "don't set off that bottle rocket because you'll destroy the entire city" wrong. Somebody seems to have accidentally slipped like five zeroes onto the end of their worst case scenario in the name of drama; it just makes them sound like idiots (and by "them" I mean "whoever wrote the script").

No, it was about false (made up) concerns over air contamination and radioactive rain. One, at that point in the show the liquidators hadn't triggered a meltdown yet which would cause contamination of the water table. Two, if the water table was contaminated, it would only contaminate the Dniepr river basin.

it's fairly ridiculous to conclude a steam explosion of that magnitude could happen. 2 of the sources in the description (business insider and forbes) specifically state that is egregious hyperbole

their bodies were contaminated, why would you want to have that leak into the soil? but that's doesn't mean this lady's miscarriage was caused by her husband - something even the WHO has denied being a possibility. But let's take some lady's fears over hundreds of scientists. That's fear-mongering for yah

Even if radiation wasn’t the main reason behind her child’s death and there were multiple reasons for the quarantine, being around one if the most radioactive people alive certainly couldn’t have been good for her pregnancy. The series itself also didn’t really strike me as anti-nuclear fear-mongering. Anti-Soviet fear-mongering, absolutely, but the last episode was centered more on why Soviet RBMK reactors were the problem while other countries, countries who didn’t cut as many corners, had safer reactors. As for the Bridge of Death, that wasn’t made up by the show. Whether it’s true or just an urban legend is up for debate, but the show didn’t make it up.

What is infinitely more likely is the trauma of the situation caused the miscarriage, just as the WHO said in 1996 and 2000. As I pointed to before; one lady's misconception of her conception vs. the WHO, I'll always take the organization tasked with health science and staffed by some of the world's most prominent scientists on that subject. The way they portray the RBMK reactor defect is pretty abysmal actually. I'm just not capable of explaining it. Instead, here's Hank Green talking about it: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nq93p7d60su9hWg.html The fact that the bridge thing is a legend is not communicated by the show. They state in a slide you can see in this review as though it is fact that people died from it. No source verifies that, so it should read "the bride _is rumored_ to have been the site of several _alleged_ radiation poisonings" or something of the like. Stating it as fact is fear-mongering.

I did it once a long time ago, but i don't like being predictive

He’s contaminated, he’s full of radioactive material and he is irradiating anybody near him who touches him. Cynical historian embarrassed himself with this failure in knowledge

@theCynicalHostorian

It's kinda irrelevant to the point what they say in the podcast though. The intent of the author has to be seen separate with what the piece of media communicates to the public if we want to find out whether the piece in question is harmful. Otherwise, how would we conceptualize an author miss-communicating?

@@JK03011997 I agree with your point about what the writer intended doesn't correspond with what is portrayed. However, what points in the show make it specifically fear mongering? Like, sure, it shows the consequences of such a disaster. However, the last episode explains on why it shouldn't ever happen again. Provided there aren't any design flaws or operators who fail to follow procedure. Valery Legasov even says in the courtroom that nuclear energy is great provided everything goes right. He didn't advocate for every nuclear power plant to be shut down, he just wanted to make sure the design flaw to be fixed. My personal takeaway was on how lying about and downplaying something this severe will harm others. Which is especially relevant today with climate change. I guess I'm in the minority when I look at the comment section, though.

I liked the video but it's true that the opening scene show us that the story that it is going to be told it's based solely on the testimony on the cassete tapes. So, if the movie it's inaccurate historically must only be meassured by how faithfully was to the tapes, not the actual events. So my question is if those tapes actually existed.

Agreed, I usually like these reviews but this one felt rushed - too much reliance on English language sources and research published decades after the disaster (which the characters would not have known about in 1986). It’s kinda like blaming people in medieval Europe for not knowing that the Black Death could have been prevented with antibiotics

@@hosank That's why I don't really get the criticism of the scene at 5:04 That's literally his first reaction after realising that he is, in fact, standing in front of an open reactor core that's on fire, with no idea if it is even possible to contain that, let alone how long that would take. I don't even think anyone had an idea how much radioactive material an exposed, melting down RBMK reactor could potentially release, until after the fact. All Legasov knew was that the core contained tons of it and was throwing it into the atmosphere for an unforeseeable time. The problem with his prespective is actually addressed in this very scene when Shcherbina asks him how to put out the fire and he replies with: "You are dealing with something that has never happened before." This criticism also ingnores the context of the scence where he isn't having an academic discussion about the disaster, but is trying to convince a bunch of apathetic bureaucrats that shit seriously hit the fan and they need to do something about it.

Brotlowsky rgseg hindsight is always 20/20

Angus Roth I feel the exact same way he’s holding this show to the standard of a documentary instead of as a drama, which isn’t a fair case to make. As a documentary, well yes obviously it’s bad because so many things are wrong, but this mini series isn’t a documentary, it’s a drama. As a drama this show is absolutely amazing, but it felt like he never even reviewed it like a drama and that really annoyed me

Never got to it. Couldn't get a good copy until relatively recently, and now I'm trying to get through 2018 movies. I do have I've review of a 2017 film, but it's been ready to go for months

Correct! An explosion doesn't require fire. An explosion happens when a lot of energy is released in a small area very quickly. Like if the extremely hot fuel did reach a pool of water, it would have caused a very rapid change to a gas that tried to expand. This would have spread even more nuclear material. Granted it may not have been as physically destructive as they made it sound like in the dramatization, but it would have been really really bad. Chernobyl was not a "Oh look it happened there not here. Not my problem" situation. It had continental and global ramifications. They do clear a lot of his points in the podcast and I do think it did a good job of explaining that if we harness nuclear energy, we must use it as safely as possible.

2 and 4 megatons, are you fucking kidding me? ICBMs warheads arent that strong, there is no way you can get explosion so big just from that molten core spilling into pool with water.

If you watch the rest of the scene it's very clear that they're talking about a steam explosion caused by corium melting it's way down into watertanks below. From what I understand she's way overstating the potential force of such an explosion, but it's still something the people involved where concerned enough about that they actually sent three men in there with the full expectation that they might receive a lethal dosis of radiation.

Thermal explosions are rarely measured in more than just tons, with the absolute biggest being very low kilotons. There is no way the plant would have gone within a thousandth of that, and even then a 4 megaton blast would not cause the kind of damage stated. In any case, a steam explosion requires a sealed body to build up pressure and explode, which wasn't really present. The danger was not of explosion, but from the release of radiation by the steam that would result. That was why the pool was a problem.

An explosion of a level you can only achieve with thermonuclear weapons.

That's a shame. What upset her? I got annoyed with Dyatlov in the first episode, but he's literally wrong about everything, you can't take his statements as being indicative of how the writers think nuclear power works.