Kacee: "oh nooo.....the dog!!" Those of us who've watched the whole limited series: Hoo-boy....

Not-so-fun fact. They didn't even have lights IRL. It was pointless to give them lights because radiation would fry it, and they navigated in dark by feel and memory. It's just that there was no good way to show that so they gave them lights to start with.

How the iodine tablets work. One of the decay products from nuclear fuel is radioactive iodine-131. Iodine is accumulated in the human body in the thyroid gland. By eating iodine tablets with non-radioactive iodine the body becomes saturated with iodine so that the body doesn't take up any of the radioactive iodine if you were to get exposed by it.

The General that went and read the radiation in the truck was General Pikalov, he was a ww2 vet, fought from Stalingrad, Moscow and Kursk to Berlin, wounded several times and passed in 2003 in his late 70's, very old school officer, been in some of the hardest battles in the war, he would likely never let his men do anything he had not done, so he went and did it himself.

The scene where they are throwing those firefighters' clothes into a room... that room is still there. And those clothes are still there. And they are still very radioactive.

The reactor exploded two days before my 19th birthday, I was a nuclear weapons specialist in the Army. By the next day we were detecting radiation in West Germany. Great reaction you two.

Fun production fact: The evacuation announcement they used was a recording of the one used during the real evacuation.

This isn't a knock against you two, but you have to understand just how secretive, fearful and dangerous the Soviet Union was back then. The absolute priority was never the people, the priority was always the state. Back then, the Soviet Union was closer to what North Korea is now. Not as closed off, but certainly as secret obsessed. I was a teenager back then, and the U.S. and others found out something had happened within days. Intelligence got reports of what happened and a picture was built, but the Soviets kept denying anything was wrong for almost a month if memory serves. It was a really crazy time. It probably would have been much worse if Gorbachev (the guy with the birthmark on his head) wasn't in charge. He brought forth something called "Perestroika" which was a change in how they dealed with the West. After Leonid Breshnev, and Andropov (his predecessors) he was a welcome change in Soviet leaders.

It wasn’t 8 total roentgen at the lab with Ulana. It was 8 milli-roentgen. Meaning it was .008 roentgen. Which makes sense if they’re 400 kilometers away. ☺️

Don't know how a nuclear reactor works, eh? Oh you will know exactly how an RBMK rector works after watching this show!

The old guy getting on the buss was the one who decided to cut the phone lines in the first episode. Not so cocky then...

The thing I remember most from my first viewing of this series is the radiation. the radiation is almost a full blown character. The production team does an incredible job of making you feel its presence. it just has you on edge the whole time. Great reaction

Fun fact: The guy at 12:16 being dragged away, saying "Dyatlov was in charge" (I forget the guy's name) But that's the same actor who played Harry Potter's father. That's James Potter ratting out Dyatlov ;)

kacee: "people's lives are the priority" the soviet union: ima pretend i didn't see that shit

Skarsgard's reaction to how his life is basically forfeit is sublime. Happiness to terror to sadness to guilt in a matter of 2 minutes. From being gleeful about the success with the Boron, to agony for seeing kids on the street of a town that should be evacuated. Fantastic performance.

Another fascinating "easter egg" about Hildur Gudnadóttir's haunting score for this series: a lot of the "instruments" used in the music are sounds recorded in a decommissioned nuclear reactor facility. So the screeching of metal, echoing pounding, percussive hits... they're literally pieces of a reactor. It's amazing.

"It's called deductive reasoning, bitch!" Love it! This is arguably my fave episode, right up there with the finale. Really powerful stuff, especially with the 3 volunteers.

There is no horror movie that is scarier than real life. This is why Chernobyl is scary to watch... because we know it happened. Imagine how scary it was to live through it. By Ep. 5, you will know how a nuclear reactor works... and how it exploded. Best wishes.

Legasov's face when he heard he was being sent to Chernobyl. He was like "well, that backfired, should have kept my mouth shut"

Anything you hear in russian during this show (like the call to the fire station) is an actual recording from the event.

To this day those firefighter uniforms are still radioactive in the basement 34 years later.

That speech to the workers by Skarsgard was one of the most inspiring and sobering I've ever heard.

just to give a perspective on how far the radiation had spread. the swedish nuclear power plant the detected the radiation was Forsmark, north of Stockholm. and it is over 1200km from Chernobyl

One fun little tidbit, those terrifying sounds in the track, the pulsing and almost alarm like sounds etc, those were recorded in a real nuclear reactor.

I love how you have so much prior knowledge about this incident. It adds a whole different level of horror to what really happened here as you see those stories and articles and books you read before, come to life.

5:30 She's one of the first wave of nurses properly trained with a full scientific background. On the other end of the spectrum you have old doctors who were basically trained up village practitioners who weren't quite on the same level.

That pile of radioactive clothing is STILL there in the SAME SPOT of the Pripyat hospital basement. Seen urban explorers visit it a few years back with dosimeters and they spiked to astronomical levels over the clothing and boots.

One correction: the female scientist measured eight miliroentgens, that's 0.008 roentgens (as compared to 3.6 roentgens). That aside, it's by far the most enjoyable Chernobyl reaction video I've came across so far. It's so refreshing that someone actually did a research on the topic and simply experienced the graphical depiction of these events instead of just getting emotional and jumping into conclusions alternately. Thanks for that. And all the best from a guy who at that time was 3 and, according to his parents' account, on that sunny April weekend was happily running around the playground gathering radioactive dust falling from the first wave of fallout around 500 miles away from the spot these events took place ;)

The ending of the final episode is some of the most moving and emotional moments of tv I've seen this entire show is one of the best I've ever seen you guys have a great channel

The three 'divers' were in fact not volunteers, they were just the guys on shift at the time! The helicopter crash (4 crew died) happened six months after the explosion, but it was included at an earlier point in the series to honour the helicopter pilots and crews that eventually managed to extinguish the fire. The guy getting on the bus was the one in the bunker who had told them to cut the phone lines!

18:09 That beautiful reaction to that scene. 19:40 The horror cliffhanger ending .

The last scene with the water, irl there were no lights. They went by touch by following the pipes. So pitch black, in the heat and water, with the geiger counter going insane. Stuff of nightmares...... they saved several countries..

The music of this series is phenomenal.. keeps you on the edge of your seat

That general who drove the truck himself to get an accurate reading is a badass. That's how an officer should act.

If you do some searching on KZfaq about people going back to visit the area in the past few years, all the radioactive clothes are still sitting in the basement of that hospital, and they are still extremely radioactive. There are several people that gone in there and put a geiger counter near the clothes and the meter jumps into the hundreds.

I was in Kindergarden in Germany when that happened. I remember our teacher telling us in the most simple way she could why we were not going to play outside today and the day after and probably for a while. It didn't click for me but for some reason I remember that talk. It was years later, when I was old enough to understand the circumstances when I realized what happend on that day.

Wading thru hip-high water the dark, wearing a Soviet-era scuba suit with the biggest mitts they could find and your only flashlight burns out. Balls of Steel were a standard-issue back then.

Just a heads-up: beware of spoilers in the comments. I've seen it happen to other reactors and especially after this episode.

10:56 That guy was General Pikalov he was a veteran of WW2 which was known as the Great Patriotic War in the USSR. He fought at Moscow, Stalingrad (the single largest battle in human history ever period fullstop) and the battle of Kursk (the largest tank battle ever). He was wounded several times during his service against the Nazis. Comrade Pikalov was not exposed to the reactor, the reactor was exposed to Comrade Pikalov.

I was almost 3 y old when it happened and I live aproximately 650 km from Cernobyl in neighbour country Romania. I'm telling you, it was really scary when people found out about it and everybody was ready for worse to happen. Luckly it didn't but I think still many people from all around were effected because the cancer rate exploded after, fear of another similar incident created panic and tensions between countries. This show is not just a show, at least not for me. It is a painful way to relive history all over again through other people's perspective. I'm really glad tough you've chosen to react to it. Keep it positive and God bless!

Great reaction! Such a scary situation those people find themselves in, but the courage on display by those 3 guys was astonishing.

5:30 It's not explicitly adressed why the head nurse is the only one who knows how to handle radiation burns, while her superior seemed clueless about it, but there's a reasonable hypothesis that can be made, and it relates to their respective age. This is 1986 and the doctor in chief looks like he's close to the end of his career, probably in his late 60's or 70's, meaning he's probably finished medical school before nuclear technology (civilian or military) was a thing, or at best when it was in its infancy (40's / 50's). And while radioactivity was known for several decades at the time, it was mostly confined to research labs in universities, it would take many more years before we learn about the effects of high level radiation exposure on the human body and how to treat them, let alone for this information to seep from top secret military data to being taught at medical school. Also, he's a specialist (obstetrician), not a generalist, so most of his efforts to stay up to date with the medical knowledge post med-school would have been focused on his speciality field, not on radiation sickness. The head nurse, on the other hand, looks pretty young, meaning she's gone to med school during the late stages of the Cold War. Knowledge about acute radiation sickness has had time to spread into the public scientific and academic communities. There was also a very high incentive to teach it to medical students, even if it wasn't their speciality of choice, because you never have too much trained personnel when there's a constant threat of the Cold War escalating into a nuclear war.

The divers did not have flashlights in real life to go through the tunnels, they immediately burned out because of the radiation. The divers were in pitch black darkness orienting themselves only from memory. The series production changed this (and the beginning of episode 3) so we would be able to see what they are doing, which is understandable. Also, the divers were not volunteers. They were the only people who knew the setup so they were very much obligated to go. Amazingly though, two of them are still alive today.

The place in Minsk actually got a 8 milliroentgen reading which is a smaller amount than 3.6 full roentgen but from 400 kilometers away that's still insane. And the type of reactor it was shouldn't have been capable of exploding because of the way it works but it did. They explain it later on.

I live in Alaska, This event took place just over a year before I was born. My parents told me that for weeks after the explosion there were weather reports about the airflow from USSR to Alaska.

That episode failed to talk about Colonel Grebeniouk who was actualy the first to measure high radiation levels (2080 Roetgens) a few hours before Legasov and Chtcherbina even arrived onsite. Also the chopper crash actualy happened a few monthes AFTER the boron drops, during the assembly of the sacrophagus shelter. Appart from that, pretty accurate.

At extreme levels radiation fries electronics and such. They showed that in this series when the robot they tried to use almost immediately died. The same thing happened to robots at Fukushima. That's an immense problem because to bring nuclear meltdowns under any sort of control, you have to remove the core materials, but if there is nothing, neither man or machine, that can survive getting close to the reactor core, then you can literally never stop the ongoing disaster.

The two words that kept coming to me throughout this season were "Courage" and "Naivety"

I'm not sure which I love more: your reactions or your in-depth discussions before and after. 💖

The firemen's clothes are still highly radioactive to this day. Only recently has the area been bricked off to prevent people viewing them and getting to close.

To get the feeling for what times were like back then you might want to listen to the song "Russians" made by Sting in 1985.. It really describes the feeling what it was to be growing up in the 1970`s-1980`s.. It also helps to set the tone along with some other songs from that era ("Dancing with tears in my eyes" by Ultravox, "Forever young" by Alphaville, "Land of confusion" by Genesis) . This series also shows how far apart the Soviet Union and USA felt to be ... Here in Sweden every TV News show sent debates on the "Cold War" situation, not for a week or two... for years.. !! To me the Chernobyl accident was just another sign of that we all need to learn more about eachothers situations... btw..Here we were told not to eat Meat, Berries and Mushroom from the forrests for several years.. Who knows what the final result actually got to be ?? Thanks for bringing up some very important topics.. always needed..

Actually Kacee is right, RBMK reactors were designed to prevent explosion (it did explode) and also some people helped afterwards.. and it will be shown later in the series and the good thing about this show is they would explain the events very well and also u will learnt how those nuclear reactor really worked... Nothing more I want to say, cos although its a true story but a spoiler is a spoiler

The actor who plays Boris, believe it or not, plays Erik Selvig in the MCU, specifically the Thor films and Avengers 2012. Hard to believe it's the same person but he's such a good actor.

Every Show Ever: Yeah, we just had the best cliffhanger EVER!!!! Chernobyl: Hold my vodka, comrades....

Always makes me laugh with how deadpan he says “you’ve made lava” 😂

Fair play you showed the most important scenes from this episode hear and reacted. Meanwhile all other channels skipped this exact ones so my respect for that. Best reaction out of this episode

Thanks God it was fast (I was thinking that you guys would take much more time to release EP 2) Thanks! o/

It's so cool that you're so informed on the issue already!

also minor sidenote, the helicopter crash happened months after the reactor explosion

It's insane that episode 2 is probably the least shocking of the five.

You guys are awesome! Thank you for reacting to this fantastic show! Subscribed.

You guys are great! Subscribed. Look forward to seeing the rest of your reactions. Cheers!

This was a really great episode, love watching your reactions to it. P.S... Love the Baby Yoda pic in the background. :)

This is like the Titanic and much worse. They're not supposed to explode, in fact they are designed very intelligently not to explode. Yet, like the engineer says in the first episode, they do. This is another lesson from Chernobyl: All these supposedly "smart" people start to eventually start to believe their own bullshit and think they're unsinkable.

11:00 "why cant you do it from there?" for the same reason you can't get an accurate temperature from a turkey without sticking a thermometer into it to measure its internal temperature. Think of it like trying to get a feel for how hot a bonfire is, if you're standing 100 feet away, its gonna feel warm, but not necessarily hot, if you take a piece of metal and stick it right into the center of the bonfire though, its gonna come out red-hot after a moment or two

It happened in 1986, when the Cold War era was still on the table so to speak. The USSR was obsessed with the state, its secrets, army and scientific programs, but definitely not the average people. That's why they didn't admit the disaster until other countries did measurements and found out something odd. In reality, the evacuation of Pripyat was done before the Swedish power plant found out the problem, although the time frame of 36 hours after the accident is real. They had to get about 1000 buses from cities around. Experts nowadays say, the evacuation was so successful because of paradoxically non-democratic regime in the USSR, because when the police came to evacuate the city, everybody obeyed. By the way, there are several real records used in the series. In EP1, the emergency phone call is one of them. In EP2, you can see USSR and USA newsflash on TV and also the evacuation broadcasting in russian language. In EP4 there is another real scene on TV. Boris Scherbina was originally a construction engineer, so when he says "...I know a lot about concrete", he is right. The estimated explosion between 2-4 megatons is now claimed as exaggerated, but they used such numbers at that time.

Aww Kacee such a beautiful reaction to the men that sacrificed themselves to go down into the water❤. Yea I think their flashlights went out because 1. The radiation might have drain their lightbulbs 2. That places is haunted or 3. They forgot to put new batteries in them lol.

Love the Baby Joda(Don't know the species) Artwork in the wall..

I know this was a year ago, but I heard you ask how the Iodine tablets were meant to work. Basically one of the products of radioactive decay is radioactive iodine. Typically if you absorb it, it goes to the thyroid in your throat and just sits there emitting its radioactive particles. Naturally, this increases the risk of thyroid cancer exponentially dependant on the dose you've absorbed. Standard Iodine which is not radioactive essentially appears the same to the body. So you take the Iodine pills in the hope that the non-radioactive iodine within the pills saturates your thyroid so it doesn't absorb any of the super harmful radioactive iodine.

The 3 men who wait into that water all lived. 1 died of heart failure the other 2 are still alive today.

Fun Fact the clothes of the firefighters are still in the Hospital basement and tourists would go to scan the boots and they are still deadly readioactive so i think in 2016-18 they sealed off the basement

you should listen to the podcast where they talk about the books and these events are based on.

This is making me rewatch the whole thing!

When you guys are finished this you should react to band of brothers if you haven't seen it before, it's a 10 episode miniseries HBO did with Steven Spielberg in 2001, it's about a paratrooper regiments journey during ww2, it's one of the greatest tv shows every made it has a 9.5 rating on IMDB and 94% on rotten tomatoes

The General who went in, Vladimir Pikalov, was the commander of the Soviet Army Chemical Corps for 18 years at this point. He was a veteran of WWII and fought at Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad. He went in himself because he knew that if it was anybody else, they would be accused of lying about the reading. He knew that if he did it, they'd have no choice but to believe him.

Keep them coming, great reaction :)

The firemen’s uniforms that were collected by the nursing staff are still in the hospital basement to this day. It is still to radioactive to enter that room safely. All from just the uniforms.

Great reaction guys as always big fan from Saudi Arabia 💚❤️

I heard the three men that went into the nuclear plant to let the water out survived and 2 are still alive today.

Aw, you left out the best line--Legasov telling the helicopter pilot "If you fly over that building, in one week you'll be begging for that bullet!"

this happened when I was 8 years old in 86...I'm irish and I clearly remember watching the news reports and the government sending out iodine pills to every single home in the country because the radiation was traveling across Europe on the winds...this show is no joke with it's reality it was serious serious shit that was averted..."you are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before"..man..thats some serious dialogue right there.

Great reaction and analysis.

love the reaction, gonna follow ur reactoin to the series...

If you think about it, the nurse actually did know the personal risk to herself when she took the firefighters’ clothes off them and carried them down to the basement. She already seemed sufficiently knowledgeable about the dangers of nuclear radiation. She knew she had no Hazmat suit or protective gear for it. But she also knew that if the clothes stayed in the patient rooms, everyone in the hospital would be irradiated. Whether the others knew what they were doing to themselves is another matter, but in her case, she knowingly sacrificed herself. Also, if you want to know how big the explosion would have been - for context, the explosion we had in Beirut earlier this year was around 1.1 kilotons. The bomb in Hiroshima was 12-18 kilotons. 1 kiloton is 1,000 tons, and 1 megaton is 1,000,000 tons. They said that the explosion would have been 3 to 4 megatons.

5:12 One of the most dangerous components of radioctive fallout is Iodine 131 - a radioactive isotope of Iodine. Iodine is use by the body to regulate basic functions, like heartbeat, blood pressure and breath rithym. And stay for a long time in the body. Breathing Iodine 131 is basically insert radioactive elements that will make a part of your body for a considerable amount of time. Iodine pill function by saturating the organism with non-radioactive Iodine, forcing the body to get rid of the excess, eliminating the radioactive Iodine 131 in the process.

on the flashlights going out: strong radiation just shredds electronic circuits. even just in space, where backgroundradiation is higher than on earth without an protective atmosphere, electronics need shielding and are build extra durable and less sophisticated(donno correct word, but less tiny elements etc?) where possible.

just a side note, Before Chernobyl, there wasn't a lot of progress in radiation poisoning research, and the little that was there, was studied by the new generation of doctors more than the old, that's why it makes sense that a young nurse would know more than the old doctor. It was Chernobyl and the research the came afterwards that gave us the information we needed in order to deal with the hazards of nuclear power.

In Poland every children have to take the jodin. We are 1000km away of Charnobyl.

Great reactions! Not sure, if you already knew this, but there is an official podcast to the show. One podcast for each episode and one final podcast. It is a great companion podcast. Link to first episode of podcast (covering the first episode of the show): kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qLuVe7N0vtq7iYU.html The show creator Craig Mazin talks about the whole process including the difficult decisions they had to make and all the uncertainties they faced while creating the show and researching the topic. He also explains his approach to conflicting reports (always go with the less dramatic version) and also points out when and why he chose to take some liberties in specific details or condensed real events. You get a great sense of the care that was put into the show.

Can't wait to see your reaction to the rooftop sequence.

Great reaction keep up 😍

To be fair, in reality Boris Shcherbina actually ordered the evacuation before the radiation was detected in Sweden. That’s one of the very few deviations of the show from real timelines and events. Also the helicopter crash didn’t happen when they dropped the sand to kill the fire but much later on. And of course the idea of the possible thermal explosion was widely disregarded by almost all scientists later on and still is today, nevertheless the water mixing with the lava would have probably caused a significant additional emission of nuclear material into the atmosphere...and they did really send that divers in there to prevent it.

Nice reaction and video cut. You choose the right parts.

Radiation indeed kills electronics. You can also see it on the original pictures, white dots and noise.

"I feel like" There is your mistake. Assuming the world works the way you feel it should. That is a very rare occurence. Good reaction!~

General Pikalov - the man who drove the truck with the dosimeter attached - was completely real, and he really did do that. He had served in World War II, fought in the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, _and_ Kursk, and was wounded three times. Chuck Norris lists General Pikalov Facts.

Great show. So hard to watch. Gets harder and harder and man was tough at times. Episode 4 was super tough. Episode 5 was some of the best television I've seen in a while. Enjoy the greatness of the show.

They do a good job of answering most people's questions about what happened as the story progresses. As for taking Iodine, your big risk from low doses of radiation is thyroid cancer. There is a radioactive isotope of Iodine component to the radiation and it can damage your thyroid. Taking Iodine pills saturates your thyroid with safe Iodine so it can't absorb the radioactive Iodine. By the time you get higher doses that can cause burns or radiation sickness, Iodine is pretty much useless. One thing to keep in mind is even people who know radiation protocol aren't prepared for the scale of this event. There had never been a nuclear event of this magnitude on the planet.

when they evacuated, they were only told that they were be back in 3 days, and to leave pets behind.

Those 3 volunteers saved over 100 million lives that day! They are the real superheroes.