https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9APLXM9Ei8
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, Soviet
Union suffered a massive explosion that released radioactive material
across Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and as far as Scandinavia and western
Europe. Chernobyl dramatizes the story of the 1986 accident, one of the
worst man-made catastrophes in history, and the sacrifices made to save
Europe from the unimaginable disaster. Chernobyl premieres May 6 on
HBO.
This looks pretty great.
I'm looking foreword to this as a drama.
I'm not expecting much authenticity to historical fact however.
BoB is filled with historical inaccuracies
It seems fine for a drama, it most of the overall events seem accurate, they tried to downplay the radiation. I was just hope they mention those 2 dudes who knowingly dived into those rad infested waters to drain the basement.
Its too bad media like this always hurt the perspection of Nuclear Energy. Its easy to quantify the damage Chernobyl did, sure. But the death toll from toxic air from fossil fuel and nautral gas power plants is orders of magnitude higher.
Nuclear is just more sci-fi and you can't really make a thriller tv show about 3.0 million premature deaths from air quality a year.
so whats the monster
I'm not holding my breath vis-a-vis accuracy.
If they show the three divers fucking dying from their "suicide mission", I'mma flip a table.
this is a pretty good documentary on youtube using all 1st hand footage of the cleanup called "1986.04.26 P.S." Its separated into 10 min segments, but here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFMlxhKdmGU&list=PL8BTpGAaXEViUgAX3ZqqZMuE1zN8YcOR9&index=25
just thought id post it because its relevant, and you can compare the dramatization to reality i guess
It shows them wearing wetsuits at 1:27
you're right, i wonder whats happening at 2:11
I wrote a paper on Chernobyl back in university for a Ukrainian studies course. I found it and looked back over my summary and it's kind of startling the degree to which this disaster was preventable. Most of my information came from IAEA sources and declassified KGB documents.
[quote=Me, citations omitted]The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (officially known as the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station at the time of the accident) is situated within the town of Chernobyl, a short distance from the “Nuclear City” of Pripyat. Close to the border of Ukraine and Belarus, the Chernobyl power station took its coolant water from the Dnieper River. It operated on the basis of RBMK-1000 Nuclear Reactors, which was a graphite-moderated design that was largely outdated at the time of the disaster. The design was identified by a commission of soviet experts as having several major drawbacks, some of which contributed to the likelihood of a disaster occurring in the first place. This included a lack of automation in the reactor’s safety systems, as well as deficient emergency protection systems that were considered too slow to prevent the reactor from melting down.
Furthermore, internal documents have revealed that it was specifically unreliable throughout its entire cycle of operations. The reactors were put into emergency shutdown 29 times, eight of which were the direct result of human error, between 1977 and 1981. KGB investigation of the site during its lifetime revealed numerous deficiencies, including faulty welding of pipes, faulty equipment, and a lack of adherence to procedure when actually building the installation. As if that wasn’t enough, Reactor #1 actually experienced a limited meltdown on the 9th of September, 1982. According to reports by the Ukrainian KGB, a pipe in the cooling channel of the reactor burst and caused a limited meltdown of the reactor due to lack of coolant. This resulted in a large amount of radioactive contamination within the building, with detectable radioactive pollution out to five kilometers away from the plant. The scale of the accident was relatively small, and there was reportedly no great risk to the local population.
This event was kept secret for some time following the disaster, and only became known following the release of Ukrainian KGB documents to the public. The degree to which this power station was intensely deficient when it came to basic safety and construction standards is simply staggering. In an ideal situation it was unlikely that the reactor would be necessarily safe in the event of a meltdown, and the situation on April 26th was far from ideal.
What preceded the catastrophic failure of the reactor was a catastrophic failure of human intelligence. The procedures that should have been followed to ensure the safety of the reactors were not followed even during the construction or normal operation of the facility. At the time of a test of the emergency shutdown systems, reactor no. 4 was operating with its safety features disabled. The potential catastrophic failure of an RBMK-1000 reactor had been postulated some time before by the designer of the reactors in 1983. A positive SCRAM (emergency shutdown) effect had been thought to be possible if the safety features of the reactor coolant system were disabled. To put it in layman’s terms, the reactor was liable to become an explosive pressure vessel if put into emergency shutdown with the safety systems disabled.
The Chief Engineer of the power station was responsible for disabling the safety features of the reactor, described in the IAEA report as being the result of a “poor safety culture.” It goes on to state that the test of the reactor’s emergency systems was not done according to procedure, but on an ad hoc basis, and that they did not “stop and think” when things started to go wrong. The staff at the plant were not trained properly, and the report states that they were likely to have caused a nuclear accident running the reactor as they did even without the RBMK-1000’s potential to overheat coolant when it is put into an emergency shutdown.
I will defer from going into further detail on the technical aspects of the reactor itself. My intention in explaining the process that built up to the disaster is to highlight just how much of it was the direct result of brazen carelessness and disregard for the potential danger inherent in operating a nuclear reactor, from the day-to-day operation of the station to its very construction. To call this an “accident” is using the term in the lightest possible sense.
[/quote]
when is this due out
Google and Wikipedia both say the first episode comes out on May 6th, but I've no idea where that info actually comes from.
I liked the editing of the trailer
I agree with this, but also i think it's interesting to see the build up and consequences of the catasrophe to get a sense of why why it became such a huge cultural trauma.
Obviously HBO should never be someones only source to learn history but I think they do an overall better job than most at not completely misrepresenting the facts and showing the imapct of history on believable characters. And considering this event isn't old, affected a lot of people still alive, we'll hear about it if they fuck it up badly. Id take everything with a big grain of salt like any movies but still watch it because ik it's going to be damn well made.
It's another important aspect of learning about history to me, understanding the cultural, emotionnal impact of some events, and while shows will never show history objectively by the nature of cinema, and editing, they give you a reflection of that.
There was a clip in the trailer of guys in scuba gear. It was three guys actually, though it was two that didn't come back.
All three came back. Two of them, Valery Bespalov and Alexei Michailovich Ananenko, are still alive today, the other, Boris Alexandrovitch Baranov died in 2005 (of a heart attack, not cancer)
Seems you're right. It's apparently a myth.
The bottom of the video description has the release date.
Wikipedia even listed them as dead until recently, womp womp
Looks very much like the big budget version of this old BBC documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk3-XUe0oEU
My uncle, who lived in Belarus, died of cancer fairly recently and my dad is pretty strongly convinced that the Chernobyl disaster played a part in it.
I don't know how likely that is to be the case but it's a worrying thought.
Somehow it's hilarious seeing faithful Soviet visuals and the modern editing. Makes the Chernobyl accident seem as it was a fucking zombie apocalypse.
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