The Russian government hates HBO's Chernobyl, vows to set the record straght - Sensationalist Headlines

Uuh. I don't care how the fuck you slice it. Having your genes deteriorated is no joke.

the general public was dangerously misled on the dangers of radiation, if you portrayed everybody as being all nuclear physicists when dealing with the radiation at chernobyl you'd be misleading everything

We're debating this because there's still not a perfect understanding of radiation as far as i know and it's certainly not something that's public knowledge, especially outside the era of the nuclear race. People don't know and are asking questions, that's not the shows fault and regardless it's portraying the lack of understanding of radiation at the time and makes it exceedingly clear. I should also mention a common phrase in relation to Vasily Ignatenko is that by the time he died he had taken enough radiation in to be a small reactor in his own right. I don't know for sure of the validity of that, but the fact that it's used as a statement should indicate how irradiated he was and how much of a danger it was for his wife to be near him. Radiation is no joke, regardless of your level of knowledge on it, that should always be the take away.

Ah yes, set the record straight Russia's official death total for the Chernobyl Disaster is still to this day just 31

I'm not sure I buy this "they're actually wrong on purpose" argument, especially when the characters' ignorance is consistent with the show's own, and the lines sound like they're written to appeal to the audience..

I really never thought I'd meet a radiation denier in my time but wew

let's be honest here, radiation is not real, have you ever seen radiation? No? That's what I thought. How can it hurt us if it isn't even there? Just more fear mongering. Remember "asbestos"? They told me to vacate my home 10 years ago but here i am, still standing, probably wanted me to leave so they could build another road.

There is no debate, radiation is bad. Explicit exposure to radiation causes burns throughout the whole body and also contaminate some parts of it. Weaker radiation may do DNA damage and that can vary a lot which opens a lot of speculation as all DNA related things do.

Theoretically. Except, practically speaking, wifi and your mobile's electromagnetic emissions are non-ionizing radiation energy. That makes all the difference in the world. If you glued your phone to the side of your head and then had it put out its maximum rated power for an entire year you might start to suffer medical problems above and beyond the basic problems caused by having something glued to your head for a year.

These Mini Series are incredible. Russian Goverment can stick it up their metro tunnel.

This seems to be based on already speculative research, with little evidence towards the function of these cells (if any), and no evidence that it happens in response to an organ injury in the mother (or that it could kill the baby).

I don't know what to say. After all this time I honestly expected better from you than to deliberately misrepresent my viewpoints.

Yes, you're right. I didn't mean to convey that wi-fi is dangerous but that it's a boogeyman that theoretically can be linked to some DNA damage over some prolonged exposure. But that's just a public perspective. A better example is the sun - people have a lot more trust for the sun meanwhile it's definitely more dangerous than wi-fi, the sun exposure can definitely give one the skin cancer. The ionizing radiation is bad, there's no debate about it, it just goes past our senses that's all.

Nobody is saying that radiation is harmless.

Pretty sure he's not denying outright that radiation is dangerous, just that the way it's portrayed by the show is approximate and not necessarily evidence-based.

That would be it. Okay I understand it's authentic to have the scientists freaking out about it because back then they didn't know how bad it was or wasn't. I'm just worried that it'll still act as fearmongering for the general public who don't how safe nuclear power is, especially compared to fossil fuels.

The show isn't even anti-nuclear to begin with. What are you talking about? There is no point in the show that's advocating for anti-nuclear. In fact, its just shows how Nuclear is not a thing to fuck around with. And focuses why bureaucratic red tape, Ignorance, Corruption, and anti-intellectualism of the Soviet Union almost led to what could've been the worse human-made disaster in history. And the end of the show is the scientists stressing how the rest of the Soviet Nuclear Reactors need to be redesigned to stop another Chernobyl incident, but the Soviet Union's "We must never admit we fucked up" mentality almost led to the reactors not being redesigned. It wasn't until the suicide of Valery Legasov that pushed them to finally redesign the reactors.

Everything you say is true, but are we to believe that the general public is informed enough about nuclear power to begin with that they can see through the immediate fear of the Chernobyl disaster and see that the problem was with bureaucracy and flawed design and not the underlying technoilogy? They don't teach nuclear science in gradeschool, which leads me to suspect that the average Joe isn't going to see all the chaos, destruction, loss of life, and general disasterous unfolding of events in the series and go "Yep, if only they had designed the RBMK better, they wouldn't have had an explosion on their hands! Good thing all of this is a distant memory and a thing of the past!" I watched this series with my college-educated 60-something year-old medical professional of a mother, and she hersself couldn't get past the fear of nuclear catastrophe to see that the flaws inherent in the design of the RBMK led to the disaster and that modern nuclear energy is orders of magnitude safer. The show is clear about the science behind what happened, and yet it also depicts scenes of immense destruction and suffering at the hands of nuclear radiation. The latter is arguably more shocking and therefore memorable to the viewer, and with no prior knowledge of the applied technology and the flaws in it at the time, I really think that fear will drive people's opinions more than the actual facts of the event that the show portrays as well.

You need to organize your arguments and actually explain what your viewpoints are, then? Your posts read like you're denying the power plant vented loads of dangerously irradiated material into the atmosphere. You hadn't made any affirmative statements before my posts, just contradicted and denied what other people were saying.

Ironically the irrational fear of nuclear power, that is holding back the construction of the newer safer plants. Means we end up continuing to use the existing older reactors, ie Fukushima.