• Chernobyl (HBO) Mini-Series V.1 Megathread
    431 replies, posted
Oh my god it's that stupid webcomic.
Guess it's just lost on you
I'm a nuclear engineer and my first thought when I heard about this coming out was that it would be full of blatant anti-nuke propaganda. I binged the first 3 episodes and this is easily my favorite show I've ever seen. The details of the radiation poison effects, the ionization of the air, the concern of the nurses to get iodine tablets, the nurses knowing how contamination spreads via contact but not having time to explain it, the scientists having to deal with know-nothing officials, its so incredibly well written. Its unnerving when you know what is going to happen to each person as they touch the shattered core components, when they look in the core, when the wife touches the contaminated husband. Although its not 100% historically accurate, the director explains a lot of this well at the end of the episodes and I appreciate that they mention what film liberties they take, given that some of the specific details are lost to history. also the memes are dank keep posting them
The creator said he's pro-nuclear, just against poor design and regulation (among other things that happened in Chernobyl). https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/new-chernobyl-mini-series-delivers-big-drama-without-nuclear-scale-hyperbole/ Like all worthwhile historical drama, Chernobyl contains a tinge of today's politics. Ars asked Mazin how he viewed modern nuclear power in the context of researching the 1986 disaster. His response? "I’m pro nuclear power, I think that nuclear power is essential to combat climate change, and I want people to understand just why [the Chernobyl disaster] happened. "The Soviets... made a flawed reactor more dangerous, and even just the incident itself: they were running a safety test that shouldn’t have been run," the writer added. "Because I think nuclear power is so essential to our future, I think it’s really important that we treat it with as much care and respect as we can, because it can be devastating." Ultimately, Mazin hoped to show that the Chernobyl disaster happened because of lots of small decisions, especially those decisions to hide or downplay truth in the hopes of pleasing superiors. This is even reflected in the "hero" character of Legasov, who has a healthy fear of how devastating the crisis before his eyes is becoming, but who worked in lockstep with the people who created the conditions that led to the disaster. "[Legasov] wasn’t a bad guy," Mazin said. "What he was, was like all of us, I think, going along to get along. When we’re not in crisis… we go along, and we continue to do so until a crisis dislodges us from our daily lives... then one day a nuclear power plant explodes and you can’t keep going through your day pretending that these little decisions don’t amount to big problems."
Yeah the show is clear about the blind trust the technicians and the authorities had in their reactor design. That's absolutely not the attitude of the nuclear industry nowadays. Here the construction of an EPR 3rd generation nuclear reactor was just delayed by 2 years again because nuclear security authorities had doubts about the soldering quality of some pipes, and asked them to be remade, which involves destroying and rebuilding the concrete containement layer around them. The construction of that plant is almost a decade late because they had to rebuild parts of it over and over after a new maybe possible worst case scenario was found + huge pressure from anti nuclear orgs. That plant is the same design as the Taishan chinese reactor operating today and the one being built in Hinkley Point.
This is one thing I didn't understand, could you please explain? I thought it was primarily about not spreading infection to the patient whose immune system is knocked out, but apparently it's about radioactive contamination? Wouldn't the patients have been washed thoroughly?
Exactly this, I just got back from a mate's where we binge watched it. I had two things on my mind... A threat of a 2-4 megaton explosion regarding the molten core hitting water underneath? What? I get it would be a big thermal boom and definitely a critical issue given how it would disperse everything (at any size explosion). But come on -- 2 to 4 megatons? Can people themselves ingest/breathe in enough radioactive material to themselves become a contamination hazard for others? I would have assumed as soon as you strip them of their clothes and thoroughly wash them to remove surface contamination (dust and shit, especially in the hair, under fingernails, so on), then there would be very little to be concerned about. Now, I hand waved this myself as a threat of infection. Fantastic show, though! I'm loving it and my mates certainly are too.
This was discussed a couple of pages back, but water expands greatly when it turns to steam. Like an insanely huge amount. 1L of water being flash heated to steam will instantly cause it to take up 1700L of space. Times that amount by the huge amount of water that was under the reactor and yeah, it was going to be a massive explosion. Was it exaggerated? Maybe, the scientists wanted to make sure that no more nuclear material was going to be released. But personally I don't think they would have been far off in their estimations. As for contamination, I think you're right in saying if they were stripped and washed they would pose a far lower risk of contamination. Zero risk? I doubt it. If you were irradiated to the point of being radioactive and giving off radiation, you're probably long dead m8. Funny you should mention being a nuclear engineer, I was recently in Glasgow, walking back to my hotel after getting some KFC and I heard a couple of guys discussing this show a couple of metres behind me, and we got talking about the show. They were praising it highly, and it turned out that they were nuclear engineers at Hinkley Point in England. I was surprised that people in that industry were praising the show so highly, and one of them joked that it made him not want to go back to work again.
Since then, the writer of the show also addressed this mistake: This is one where I was a little concerned. I took the number from testimony by a former Soviet physicist named Nestorenko, and actually reduced his estimation by a little to err on the side of caution.I did try to get a physicist to work it out for me, but what I was told was basically, "Not enough information to make a reliable calculation." So I stuck with that number as the best information I had. In reality, it was the ensuing radiation, rather than explosion, that would have been disastrous, so that's what I concentrated on in that scene. That part is well established and documented as a serious concern. If I had to do it again, I'd probably define the explosion differently. In my effort to be accurate, I used a number instead of a vague term like "big." If the number is wrong, that's on me, and I'll own it. Anyway, I thank all of you for being inquisitive, and for watching!
Glad to hear it, I figured it was something along those lines. When I heard the number it definitely didn't pass a "oh he's exaggerating for the report" test. The consequences of a detonation of any scale would still have been majorly catastrophic due to dispersal of radioactive material, so I was a little miffed they didn't just drive that point by itself. Now that all said I'd love to see an equally ridiculous XKCD 'What If' article on how much water and how much corium would be required to generate a steam explosion orders of magnitude bigger than the nuclear blast Hiroshima dealt with!
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me waiting for the new episode tonight https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/211198/8e4ee0e2-99dc-4dc2-8b01-f8ea81d7472f/image.png
Your thoughts about infection may be correct, here's my perspective: Removing contamination (radioactive dust) is hard. Even if you wash someone off, its possible for your skin to absorb some of it and you can't really get it out. Or it could get trapped in your hair. At minimum it gets trapped in your clothes but you saw the nurses dispose of the clothes immediately for that reason. If you breathe it in, its trapped in your lungs and possibly circulating through your bloodstream. If you are close enough to someone (ex. sitting right next to them) it is possible for the radiation coming off their skin to directly hit you ("Only 30 minutes, no more"). Most radiation except neutrons are absorbed by air if you are just a few feet away. If you contact someone that is contaminated, the radioactive particles can transfer from them onto you. Any protection you had from the air absorbing the radiation is now gone. The danger of contamination is entirely dependent on where it comes from (worst is a reactor core, less dangerous might be residue on your skin from touching a radiation source) because this determines the flux. The contamination can emit alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, neutrons, etc. In an accident scenario like this you have no idea how bad the source is without a health physicist on site with detectors trying to quantify it all. Nuclear engineers generally know how bad a dose rate is (Roentgen/hr), but the job of identifying what is causing it, and how to deal with it is normally left to a health physicist.
how many episodes of this are there going to be?
5 sadly
The way I see it, it's quality over quantity, so I honestly don't feel too bummed out over it.
Very true, but it's still going to suck when it's over.
A lot of this seems to be driven by passion from the creators, and a lot of care towards the history of the Chernobyl incident itself. But if they ever get around to have another opportunity for another historical drama (or maybe even just something entirely fictional) I'd definitely be on board to see what else they can do.
they should do some more shows about the soviet union; like the gulag archipelago or the sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak
Worth noting that aspects of the Gulag Archipelago are firmly disputed from a historic and factual point of view. Learned that the hard way from my prof at the time when using it for source material. Might be good as a show but it would be hard to navigate the inconsistencies. It would also be hard to translate to film given that it embarks on frequent asides that elaboroate over many pages.
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these episodes just keep fucking me up more and more
That roof scene gave me an anxiety attack
well that was fucking depressing
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Twitter thread for this episode. https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1133199099640074247
Pyp from Game of Thrones as anonymous soldier at the start!!
That's pretty much the headline for the show.
As being an owner of three cats, this episode legit made me nauseous holy shit
I just saw this documentary, looks like a lot of episode 4 was based on this footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk
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