*CHERNOBYL* made me furious ♡ FIRST TIME WATCHING TV REACTION ♡
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ค. 2024
- Enjoy my reaction to the tv show miniseries Chernobyl (2019)! 📼 FREE Full Length watch-along for episode 1 at: / 100133
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🎞️ Reaction edited by the fantastic Steph G!
00:00 Episode 1
13:54 Episode 2
37:00 Episode 3
58:52 Episode 4
01:19:51 Episode 5 - บันเทิง
How true is this miniseries to actual events?
TRUE DETECTIVE Playlist: th-cam.com/play/PLQHhQlj8i5dpWW52yWmhYQBObQrhos89L.html&si=OtzR6yUOKR4ENQ2b
It is true in the broad strokes, some details have been changed and they consolidated a bunch of historical personalities into fewer characters. In particular, Khomyuk (I hope I spelled that right) was a composite of all the different women scientists that contributed to the understanding of the incident.
It's not just 80s USSR
Take a look at Covid 19 lies told in USA that cost thousands of lives or even Lies about Presidential election results that cost lives and to this day threatens democracy
Quite a bit is true, but they definitely hyped some things. At one point they talk about a risk of a one megaton steam explosion which is physically impossible - it was a huge disaster, but there was no risk of an even larger explosion. Many characters who die in the series are still alive today. Of course, there is no doubt that the incident shortened many lives. The commentary on the politics and bureaucratic issues is pretty accurate.
Some of it is overdramatized, but the account of the actual event (in episode 5) is pretty damn accurate.
Craig Mazin (the series creator/producer) did a podcast with Peter Sagal from NPR talking about each episode in the series and the decisions they made and how hard they worked to keep the truth of the events. It's called simply "The Chernobyl Podcast". Highly, HIGHLY recommend it.
"Every lie we tell incurrs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid." Is a quote that has stuck with me ever since I saw this. Great writing.
same
I like the ending quote better, though - but this one hits too.
It has a meaning for us, now.
Really wish some people (activists, news, politicians) pay their debt asap
the power of truth is absolute, and you must bend to its power or live a lie
I'm a nuclear engineer, and I really appreciate this series. They take some liberties with the science for drama, but it evokes so well the dread that this incident deserves. I really appreciate how visceral it makes the experiences of the people that were at the plant.
I've not watched the whole video yet, but enough to see what respect you have for the people involved.
My beautiful, Darling wife died from the long term results of Chernobyl. Her village was on a direct South-westerly path from the explosion and so many people subsequently developed cancer. My wife joked that she must be invincible... until.
Much love and respect to you Jen. And God bless all those who have been and still are affected by Chernobyl. I never imagined as a 16 year old in Britain when it happened, that something 2000 miles away would one day break my heart.
I'm sorry for your loss 🌹
@@jenmurrayxo Bless you, Jen. And thank you xx
Damn... so sorry to hear about your story. I can't imagine and feel so poorly for not knowing what to say
So sorry to hear. And yes, any tragedy anywhere on the globe can come to haunt is anywhere. Only the truly uncaring are immune.
That's a heart-breaking story. My wife got thyroid cancer in the aftermath of Chernobyl; fortunately they caught it early and she got proper treatment. 15 years later she's still alive. We were in a town about 400 miles from there, to the south-east thus not in the direct path of the prevailing winds. I was lucky, at the time I was stuck indoors due to a soccer injury - to this day I say that my left leg is the least irradiated part of my body because it was in a big plaster cast. But not being able to go outside played a big part too. They didn't tell us anything or distribute iodine pills until more than a week later.
One of the great storytelling choices in the miniseries was starting right when the reactor exploded. They left the scenes showing the lead up to the accident until the last episode with the trial. This makes you feel the confusion they did, not knowing how it happened, only knowing that it did and the aftermath has to be dealt with even when the cause is still a mystery.
The whole series in one video!? Is it my birthday? Nope, but a pleasant surprise either way
My thoughts.
yes,yes,yes :):):)
I just recently watched Chernobyl last week and I was excited to see this reaction. I watched the whole reaction in one sitting, something I don't usually do for long videos.
It's always funny to me (maybe shocking is a more appropriate word) when people say "You don't have to go." When in fact you couldn't say no in the Soviet Union. People take freedom for granted.
"This is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause." -Senator Amidala
"I have no idea what you're supposed to do in this type of situation" - that's the thing. Nobody did. Nothing like this has EVER happened before.
And you could be sure that the people who knew what the dangers could be were not allowed to tell. Nuclear energy was a staple of the Soviet-Unions success and negative consequences of it were not supposed to reach the general public just as regular public information.
Which is why the Soviet-Union as a whole declaring that something had gone wrong not only to the general public but eventually also to the rest of the world was quite rare, and is seen as the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.
I don't think I have ever said the words "Oh, you d**khead!" so many times during one show or movie because of the dumb decisions people made. But, the best thing for me was the relationship between Boris and Legasov, how they hated each other at the start, and by the end they were almost best friends.
For those interested, Khomyuk was not a real person. Her character is a representative of multiple physicists who helped to solve the issues involved. Many movies combine entities into one character who is a composite of several separate people. It is done this way to make the storytelling more effective, efficient and compelling.
I heard someone put it this way: "Think of every scene she's in. Now imagine she was replaced by a brand-new person we'd never seen before, every single time." Definitely the right choice!
Everyone is aware of that. It's stated explicitly in the series.
@@RenegadeShepTheSpacerits stated at the very end tho, some people may not have watched that far so its not completely unnecessary to reiterate imo 🤷🏻♀️
best example I can think of is the warden in shawshank redemption. Most of the movie is faithfully adapted from short story, but the biggest change I can recall is making the many wardens that served over the course of Andy's sentence the singular Warden Norton. This simplifies the narrative and gives a clear villain for the entire movie, on top of meta things like simplifying casting.
and she made a giant lie, there was never enough nuclear material in that reactor to create the explosion she was talking about, Tchernobyl was bad and a ticking timebomb, but not as bad as she made it out to be.
I have a friend in Romania who was 6 years old when this happened. The radioactive cloud hit her area a week or so after the explosion, and nobody was prepared. She now has a very weak immune system and her mother has fought tumours all her life. Romania did not have any iodine pills to help people. My friend is now a nurse.
30:19 Yah, that's what I meant - admitting they had a problem with Chernobyl would have meant a "loss of face" for the Soviets. That's why they tried to play everything down and initially didn't evacuate. WHEN the rest of the world finally learned about it suddenly keeping the citizens there made the Soviets look bad - so then they started evacuating.
Totalitarian systems are like that, no matter if they have a thin layer of red paint or not.
I like the gruff soldier doing animal control. It's a horrific job, but a bullet is more merciful than letting them die from radiation and he's adamant about not letting them suffer.
The reason of "destroying" them was not about letting them suffer. It was because they could spread a lot of radiation in any mean (including dust, biomaterials etc) to non-contaminated areas. Thats why they had to be "destroyed". It is hard to say what "destroyed" actually meant for them...
You asked why won't they tell the truth. It was the Soviet Union. What the party said was the truth. If they said it was a record harvest, but you couldn't find bread, it was a record harvest and you can't find bread because you failed to look for it not because it didn't exist.
There's a long history of shooting the messenger if he brings bad news. So no one could actually say what happened there because the party said it couldn't happen, therefore didn't happen.
Best mini-series I've ever seen.
I watched all 5 episodes on a 10 hour flight to Japan a few weeks ago.
I watched them again on the flight home.
The next day, I bought the blu-ray box set.
If you haven't seen this in it's entirety, do it now.
To sum it up in three words to describe the tragedy - It’s horrifying, it’s infuriating, and it’s above all, heartbreaking.
No really tbh.
They did not show Akimov's face when she interviewed him and his face had literally fallen off. Great reaction. This series was more horrifying than any horror film i have ever seen.
Not It did not, just necrosis.
I'm from Romania, but i was born a few years after it all went down. It was a weird thing, because i feel like i knew about Chernobyl, even before i knew what it was. Like a ghost story, or the boogeyman or Voldemort or something. You always kinda heard people whispering and wondering if all the illnesses were caused by it or was it just a coincidence. Also, the denial of the people in charge was pretty common, you were not allowed to take an L under a regime like that, under any circumstances, even if you had to lie yourself to death.
I think your best reactions to watch are the ones that get you emotional, this was heartbreaking actually to watch.
You wondered about how accurate to true events this series was, I would say as far as history recreations go this is pretty good, it doesn't cover all the nuclear scientists who worked on chernobyl at the time, and the trial was invented for drama in the show, but besides those and the kind of clothes they would have likely been wearing at the time, its very accurate. You have to remember, its not like it was WW2 back in the 1940's, this was like 40 years ago, there are still a lot of people alive today who experienced it and even had a role to play in the event itself, so the showrunners were able to get a lot right.
Also, as someone who's favourite subject in school was physics, I can tell you the acute radiation poisoning they portrayed fantastically imo. First sickness and weakness, then later the radiation will cause all of your organs to shut down one by one and fail, including your skin (hence why they looked the way they did in the hospital), so it essentially falls off. This also means you bleed from all over, and your veins and arteries will be slowly disintergrating as well. Thats why you can't even medicate them for the pain.
Honestly, its probably the worst way to die frankly. There are very few other ways you can die with no way to dial down the pain.
Considering this show implies that the reactor had the potential to explode with enough power to wipe Minsk of the map, something that would be a larger explosion than a hydrogen bomb let alone an atomic one (not that a nuclear reactor could ever explode like an atomic bomb anyway), I would say they could have gotten much more right if they weren't more concerned with making compelling TV. Oh and lets not forget that all of those liquidators survived and lived long ass lives in real life. I wouldn't be so cheesed about the inaccuracies in this show if people didn't go around believing they were accurate.
Rather crude way of describing it, but essentially yes.
I live in Germany and was 5 years old when this happened. No playing outside anymore for weeks - too dangerous. Tons of fresh local produce had to be destroyed. Some of it actually made its way into what was then East Germany, where people were mostly unaware of what had happened at first due to state propaganda (Even the West didn't know anything until 2 days after it had happened when that Swedish nuclear plant measured alarming high radioactivity (as mentioned in the show) but soon found out it had to come from behind the "Iron Courtain"). They were quite happy about the sudden and unusual abundance in fresh produce on the shelves. There are still some areas in southeast Germany, mostly Bavaria, where you can't eat mushrooms from the forest or hunt game. The whole story of denial, political incompetence and not listening to scientists reminds me so much of the Covid pandemic. The parallels are quite obvious and saddening.
Yes, the politicians and Fauci all lied about covid. Fauci said if you take the jabs, you will not get covid or spread it. Lies.
It's not just 'ignoring' scientists, it's the politicization of Science because 'The State is always right and never makes mistakes'--and it keeps on eye on folks just to make sure they don't get any silly ideas like the State is not, in fact, infallible.
I'm also from Germany. My dad was a teenager when it happened. He told me about not being able to do much outside even before i watched this show . When they talked anout Germany in episode 2 i immediately remembered what my dad told me
I was 13 years old
but not in east germany right? my mother told me she didnt need to stay inside and she was 9 when this happened
To answer the question about why a reactor needs water and why it's not self sustaining:
The nuclear fuel uses nuclear fission to generate heat. This heat is used to heat up a (usually) liquid medium, in most cases some kind of water (regular, light, heavy, supercritical etc), but research is being done using other liquids like liquid salt, liquid metal etc, but I'll use water here for simplicity.
In some reactor types the water boils and creates steam. This steam is the used to directly drive the turbine that spins a generator that generates power. In some other reactors the water is kept under pressure to prevent it from boiling. The superhot (far higher temperature than the normal boiling point but the pressure keeps it from boiling) then goes through a heat exchanger which in itself boils secondary water to create the steam that drives the turbine.
After the water or steam has passed through the heat exchanger or turbine, pumps (the ones that they are supposed to test in the failed test) moves it through a condenser which cools it down to cool water again. After that, it is pumped back into the reactor. This cold water is then used to cool down the reactor.
Without cooling it down you would have a high risk of a nuclear meltdown (the nuclear fuel gets so hot that it melts and fuses together which then increases the reactivity which increases the heat).
The pumps are not driven directly from the nuclear reaction, they are driven by the generator. But if you need to do an emergency shutdown, you will stop the chain reactions inside the reactor. This means that no steam will be generated and thus, the turbine will stop spin and the generator will not generate electricity anymore.
But as Legasov describes, the nuclear fuel does not cool down just because you stopped the chain reactions. You still need the cooling of the water to prevent the temperature increase which leads to a meltdown. Therefore you still need a way to drive the pumps, and since the generator has stopped working (because the lack of steam) it can no longer drive the pumps. That is why you have backup generators to always have a way to drive the pumps if the reactor has to shut down.
As far as I know, every nuclear reactor in the world uses the same basic principle of boiling water (either directly or through a heat exchanger) into steam which is used to drive a turbine. It's the same everywhere in the world, not just in the former Soviet Union. Even the new type of reactors that are being researched uses this type of basic principle even though the cooling medium that goes through the reactor might be something totally different, it is still used to boil water.
I know this is a super simplified description but I hope that it clears up any confusion about why water and diesel generators are needed in the first place.
The Soviet Union was a communist regime. All aspects of life were controlled by the state, including the government-controlled press. Any form of opposition was eliminated by whatever means they deemed appropriate.
Any display or admittance of weakness was a direct reflection on their society and government, and so was not tolerated. Any accusations denied, deflected, and/or lied about.
Even with a few needed artistic embellishments and adjustments to make this story into a miniseries, the heart, core, and soul of it, and many of the characters, is true.
Thank you for reacting to this series. We still live in world that embraces lies. The story, though nearly 40 years old, is still relevant.
People love to complain about nuclear power, but the sad sad reality is that any day a nuclear plant fails (and failures are quite rare) it still manages to do less damage to the planet on that day than fossil fuels do to the planet on a day *when everything is working perfectly as intended*
I sometimes wonder if all the nuclear power hate isn't secretly funded by the fossil fuel industry, like how big tobacco used to fund studies that said smoking was safe!
I remember reading somewhere that a lot of the money for anti-nuclear movies or interest groups comes from big oil. Sadly I don't remember the source, so I'm not sure to what extent this is true, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.
The sad reality is that nuclear energy has the potential to destroy an entire continent like it almost happened in Chernobyl. we cannot pretend this is not going to happen again and maybe soon. they said such an accident would never happen in thousands of years and yet it already happened twice in my lifetime (Chernobyl and Fukushima).
One of the things I remember that is accurate is the clothes from the hospital. When the nurse is telling them to strip off the clothes of people coming in because they are contaminated. I remember watching something where it showed all the clothes still piled up in the basement of the hospital, and those clothes were still significantly radioactive 20-30 years later.
Yes, it is still highly radioactive by this day, the clothes is still giving a good amount minimum of 1000 uSv/h (microSieverts) which is far away from lethal dose but is still much more than expected from background radiation. Also fun fact. As a smoker I take a 160 mSv/y (miliSieverts) every year, which is much closer to the lethal dose and cancer posibility. Not only me but every smoker. So it is trully the most radioactive behaviour.
Might've been a Veritasium video. He did a mini-series on Chernobyl several years ago.
@@buoyancydabl Yes, actually, one of the primary carcinogens in smoking is the nicotine itself, because it usually contains trace amounts of uranium. If you're vaping nicotine or using a hookah, that won't prevent that source, either, unfortunately.
This show was amazing. The way the core is revealed and the whole aura vibe around it akin to cosmic horror. Which it really is.
It's invisible, intangible, it goes through walls, and only certain very esoteric things will stop it or clean it up. Everything it touches is contaminated, tainted and twisted. It corrupts and taints every living thing it touches. It kills without warning, and even then it takes you in the worst possible way. You might think you're getting better, but it's just the calm before you die screaming for release.
Nuclear radiation is as close to a true Eldritch Abomination as you can get in reality.
Jen, you took a very serious subject and treated it with reverence and respect. Well done, well done. Here's to you.
As brutal as this series was. It was also beautiful in how much it honored and respected the actual victims who had to live and die through it.
just to provide some level of explanation, if a full on nuclear meltdown ocurrs, nothing 'explodes', the reason that this particular reactor exploded (explained in episode 5) was due to both inherent design flaws with the way the reactor was built, as well as SEVERE human error.
as the name suggest during a 'meltdown', the fuel rods super heat and literally melt everything, they then merge with whatever material was surrounding them and create a nuclear lava/sludge which if left unchecked will not only continue to eat away and melt anything else it comes into contact with, but will keep going through the various layers of whatever building it is in until it hits earth, it will continue until either the mass no longer has enough neutrons to keep the fission reaction going, or until it is quenched by something causing the reaction to either cease, or slow down to the point where it no longer has enough energy to keep going, whichever comes first.
to this day, the 'elephants foot' of Chernobyl is still giving off heat, almost 40 years on from the initial event, and the sarcophagus housing that was deployed around the remains of reactor 4 will have to monitor and keep track of the site until a new enclosure can be built and deployed ~100 years from now, this site is something that will never be 'clean' for at least a good few centuries to come (assuming there's no gargantuan leap forward in technology that allows the most dangerous portions of this site to be cleaned up properly between now and then).
There's a documentary called The Battle of Chernobyl here on TH-cam, I highly recommend it as a companion to this miniseries. It's a straight forward look at the facts and timeline. The real footage of the bio-robots on the roof is surreal and haunting.
Oh wow I literally just watched that before watching this reaction. I can say that the show is very very accurate. It's very rare for a true to life adaptation to be this accurate.
I was very worried to see this as one video as this is like "Anxiety: The Series". Glad you paced it over several days of watching.
Powerful reaction to an incredible series. The invested so much emotional weight so you felt everyone's sacrifice fully. Raging as Dyatlov, coming to appreciate and love that they sent "the one good man", the necessary but crippling role of the liquidators who had to euthanize animals. It's real unflinching.
Take care
General pikalov (the guy who said I’ll do it myself) is a legit badass in his own right. 3 times he looked death in the face and lived to tell about it. He did it because a) i don’t know if he said it or that it’s a general rule of thumb is don’t spend your troops to do anything that YOU yourself wouldn’t have done or B) if it was any other private they would tell him to do it again and send the kid to die but since he was a high ranking member of the Soviet Union NO ONE would have dared to question or doubt him
No idea how I didn't know you'd reacted to this Jen , I have to watch the full versions now but to help a quick post here in comments 🎉 hope you had a wonderful weekend and your days going well
Thank you! Hope you did too :)
Thank you Jen for your reaction. I was crying with you in the episode 5 and in the ending, when they show the raw footage. Thank you!
I am so glad you reacted to this series! I remember when this happened and the fear it spread worldwide! The Cold war politics were still ongoing. The fear of nuclear war was still in the back of people's minds and the denial the Soviet leaders to tell the truth was horrendous! The story did happen but they did have theatrical license to make a stronger impact. Thanks again Jen for your reaction to this series! Luv ya Jen ❤️💛
Fantastic show and one of the scariest non-horror shows ever (i.e., that clicking as the lights go out at the end of the one episode)
I did a history project on Chernobyl. I read books, reports, interviews from people who lived there. The things that I learned about how the USSR was ran their country and how they handled the accident was disgusting. They hid the truth and only told the world and their own citizens when their reputation was at risk. Even then the statement they put out to the people grossly under stated the severity of the situation claiming that it was a minor roof collapse. The people who were in charge of cleaning it up were given poor protection, equipment, and information. After those people left the area of Chernobyl their health was no longer tracked and they were not given much, if any, compensation for their duty. Perhaps what’s even worse is that when the were designing that reactor model people noticed multiple faults in the design that could lead to accidents but it was ignored and covered up. During the building of Chernobyl they were not given the proper resources or parts got there broken, so instead they used the cheap stuff. Yes, Dyatlov, Fomin, and Nikolai were at fault for the explosion but there were a ton of other factors that caused it. During my research I found quotes from citizens that said that after the explosion every booking talking about radiation was removed from libraries, another person said that when her child came out deformed and ill the doctor said that they had been ordered by higher ups to put on the chart as “general sickness”. The way that Chernobyl, and nuclear programs in general, were handled back then was truly sickening
Anyway I could rant forever about this so I should probably stop here
This was such a great series. So profound.
Someone should have warned you about the dogs...
It's worth pointing out that nuclear power is remarkably clean and safe. In 70 years, there have been a total of 3 disasters... There are 5000 sailors living on each nuclear carrier in the US fleet.
The Chernobyl series, while a good drama series, is awful in the facts around nuclear power, even the one surrounding the Chernobyl reactor.
With that, its worth saying that Chernobyl was a RMBK design that was never ment for civilian operation, but was designed for military use, it was just that USSR was in a terrible economic disaster in the early 1970s and they replaced a lot of the more expensive, but really good VVER reactor with the much cheaper and quite terrible RBMK reactors. Peak government incompetence.
This was also done with a lot more project like a dam in China that failed and killed a quarter of a million people that people is never talking about
To answer your question, there is no evidence to state that radiation is "contagious," in the way that, say, leprosy or smallpox are. You can _almost_ certainly touch a radiation poisoned person's skin without catching anything. It's a different story when it's about human remains like bones, though, which is why people who pass away from radiation need to be eliminated and/or buried beneath concrete. But a living person with radiation burns cannot pass it on to others.
HOWEVER, the part about doctors recommending visitors to avoid touching the patients is true, but for a different reason: since they are poisoned and burned by radiation, their immune system is extremely fragile, so it's actually dangerous *for* *the* *patient* to be touched by people or anything that's not sterilized. So the danger would be greater for the person affected by the radiation than for their visitor.
@@amandac.d.4216 Along with the situation that the people who worked at Tsjernobyl were not just affected by radiation, but the amount of particles they might have breathed could have made them actually radioactive, and thus capable of contaminating people by skin contact.
But yes, the situation of non-sterile surfaces is also a very real problem: it's basically the same like with severe burn victims.
So glad you watched this. Not sure if you mention this towards the end or already know this but Praxis' explosion in Star Trek IV The Undiscovered Country was inspired by Chernobyl. It led to the fall of the Soviet Union and Praxis to the end of the Klingon Empire as it was in Kirk's time.
Jen: Will they kill animals? I don't want to see it.
Me: You don't have a choice, honey.
I remember when this happened. It was devastating and the Russian government's response was nonexistent. They tried to cover it up. And it'll be centuries before anyone can go back.
Until it went public and America once again bailed them out and provided the engineering to finish the work they started. Eventually the cap later. Crazy.
nonexistent? Cut the bs please,hundred of thousands of people were send to put this thing out ,every one from Russia,Ukraine,Bielorussia and others former republics had at least one relative alive or dead who worked to stop it.
@@MarcoInaros-ns7ut The public knowledge of the response took a long time to be known iirc. I bet those that heard nothing at the time don't remember Russia doing anything because they never heard of it. I remember correctly the CIA had some knowledge of the Russian response but the true story didn't even start to come out until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Or I could be completely wrong but that seems to be what would makes most sense.
One thing you can remember in times like episode 4, is that all the animals you see on screen are exceptionally well cared for and trained working animals. And that all the bodies you see are things made by a prop or special effects department. I know that doesn’t reduce the emotional impact and the empathy knowing that that did have to happen. But at least for the version we are seeing they are all probably fine (it was filmed in 2018/2019 so it’s possible natural lifespans could have passed by now, but working animals on tv/movies have strict care guidelines)
It is always jarring to realize that so many people have little to no knowledge of this. I was a Soviet Studies major in University when this happened. Being from Pennsylvania, I also remember Three Mile Island vividly.
The regular people had next to zero knowledge about radiation or its effects. Think of it this way; it’s almost forty years later and most people watching this TV show still don’t know what they’re seeing.
Of course they denied it. The State could not be wrong. Don’t even get me started on the current government sacred cows.
Six years ago an new cover was put over the reactor building. The cover was built away from the building and then rolled into position using railway tracks. The cover holds the record for the largest moving object ever built. It gives us 100 years to finish the cleanup.
It was very hard seeing you cry like that, but sometimes tears are required.
Thank you. I've been looking forward to your take on this one. Soviet bureaucracy, Cold War politics, and general ignorance of anything of this scope combined to create this extraordinary event. Your frustration was, and still is, widely shared. I appreciate the single video. So, here we go!
Well, look at modern day’s populist politicians and their lies:
- global warming “eh, not man-made, has happened before in nature”
- election results “fake news”
- vaccines “cause autism”
and the list goes on and on and on.
What has humanity learned from Chernobyl? Judging by observation, pretty much nothing is my depressing conclusion.
I had the same feeling of anxiety when the workers' flashlights failed in the basement.
Oh for sure! As if their job wasn't dangerous and time-sensitive enough!
Jen, thank you so much for reacting to this series, and thanks for putting all of the episodes into one video. Your choice made the viewing experience unique. I know how you feel about the poor pets. The soviet union had other accidents with radioactive waste before Chernobyl, and when the families were evacuated, the pets and farm animals were all killed so that no one would want to return to an area made dangerous by radiation. My source is a book called "Meltdown."
One thing to note about Dyatlov is that he was in a meltdown about ten years before the Chernobyl disaster. I believe it was a nuclear submarine that malfunctioned. I truly think he did not believe it was possible, and was in denial- he actually denied it until the end of his days.
Excellent miniseries, very much looking forward to your reaction, Jen. I traveled to Germany soon after the accident, and it definitely colored the experience. Jared Harris is outstanding in this. I first saw him in the amazing series Mad Men, which I recommend highly.
Thanks for putting this supercut together, Jen, we can see how much it took out of you. This show is a work of art.
I remember seeing this unfold in the news as a young teenager and being quite nervous and concerned. Great reactions, Jen.
If I remember correct, after the Accident happend in Japan retired nuclear workers, volunteered to help with the cleanup, since (as they said) they would most likely not experience the long term effect of the radiation such as Cancer.
Your reaction to the killing pets is same as I had to the firefighters in the hospital, knowing how long they suffered, the first time I watched Chernobyl.
Thank you so much for this supercut, Jen. I've been unable to watch Patreon uploads due to different framerate and this helps immensely. I'm gonna enjoy this much more :)
My honest thought when I saw the thumbnail was "Oh no, this is going to ruin her!"
But I also know the series is so good and a necessary watch that my hope is that by the end you'll be appreciative of its quality and know that as many people as possible should watch. Loved your reaction as always ✌️
"Did this really happen? Did they stop people from leaving?"
Hawaii fires
I was serving overseas in the army at the time. Cold War was so effed up. Everybody was playing a very dangerous game. The world has changed so much since then. Yet still basically the same.
I can only imagine what could happen then if there was no accident at ChNPP, world didnt aknowleged the nuclear danger and the Cold War might have been turned to Really fking Hot War.
This series did Television honour - it is one of the best things ever made in that medium.
Agree. Well put.
you also have to realize this is a tv series, with stuff changed and made up to draw attention. For instance, the 3 men who went into the plant to manually drain the water survived, and unlike the tv show they said that the radiation where they were at wasn't high and wasn't like the tv show, it was a routine procedure and they had no troubles doing the job and manually draining the water. The tv show hyped up that part to seem super dangerous, high radiation, etc. It wasn't like that. Other parts of the show was like that also. Of course much of it actually happened, but a lot of it was changed to enhance the viewing experience.
Jared Harris puts in a masterclass of a performance in this series - and fun fact he is son of the first Dumbledor .... sometime the apple doesnt fall far from the tree
its such a well made series, it really captures how things were - the dreadful mistakes and coverups. I remember when this happened, I was 24, we were told to stay inside on the day the cloud came over the UK and when the rain came too a day or so later. The radioactive cloud passed over the whole of the UK, we had to slaughter lots of livestock in the hills of Wales and Scotland and the sheep were radioactive for many years after that, in fact their movement was restricted until quite recently (the grass was radioactive so the poor sheep have been consuming it for a long time afterwards). I remember we tested a few things at the time as one of my brothers had a Geiger counter for his work (stripping old WW2 aircraft) he bought it home, my sisters woolly jumper was radioactive, she had been wearing it for days.
It frightened everyone, it was unreal - a bit like those first days of lockdown, you felt like you had entered another reality. Ordinary things became scary, we were frightened of the rain, frightened of the air we were breathing. Later in the 90's I made a friend from Belarus, all the women in her family died of breast cancer very early on except her, she came to the UK, she was okay for a few years but them developed a rare and aggressive cancer in her bones and died quickly. Russia still claims only a few people died... such a monstrous lie. People and animals died from all over Eastern and Western Europe, are still dying from cancers. Chernobyl isn't safe now, and it never will be. Just like Fukushima Dai-ichi.
I imagine the poor sheep consuming the grass suffered about as much as all the wildlife that lives in the Chernobyl area now, which is to say not at all. Chernobyl is safe enough now that people have taken pictures with the elephants foot people are so afraid of, and given the Geiger counter readings I've seen out of there you'll rarely run into more radiation then you would get on a passenger plane at altitude, which is about 40x background. Usually not even that much. As for Fukushima, the earthquake killed a lot of people, the reactor and radiation killed exactly zero. The hysteria over radiation is insane and inaccurate shows like this really don't help. We actually know a lot about it and can deal with it quite well, it helps that it's so easy to detect so little of it which is part of what makes it so scary to the uninformed.
@plmokm33 that's partially true. Birds and large mammals around chernobyl are doing fine. In fact, animals found tere shelter for themselves. Wolves, deers, bisons etc. But ground (dirt) is still pretty radioactive, so insects, spiders, rodents etc live there short.
And most of metals there still radiating, so that staying in the area longer than one day may be paid with cancer in future.
There are even some metal tools like excavator bucket used to clear debries and build dome over reactor, which if caught with a bare hand still results in burns.
Before the war, trips were organized there, the guide talked about these things. I don't know if they will be there again after the war, because of course the intelligent Russians ordered their soldiers to dig trenches there and during the retreat from Kijov they mined the area. Disdain for life is still a living tradition in Russia 😅
@@imcbocian Yea I'm gonna need some citations on that metal tool thing. First of all, metal doesn't just become radioactive by being around radioactive material, nothing does. If something is radioactive it's because there's radioactive material in it, so using an excavator bucket to build a dome over the reactor or even to move debris would not make it magically become radioactive. Second, if something is radioactive enough to physically burn you then you will likely die of acute radiation poisoning in a few days pretty horrifically, and there's nothing left in Chernobyl that's that level of radioactive. If staying there for longer than one day gave humans cancer then all of those animals you talked about would also be ridden with cancer, which they aren't. I've never heard of anything to do with short lived insects and I'm not even sure how you would measure that given how short lived they are to begin with, most tend not to live longer than a year.
Hey remember it’s a movie. They are being kind and not wanting the animals to suffer. They are showing the Russian soldier is a person too, it hurts.
It's likely there wasn't a russian soldier there. The protagonist Pavel is Ukrainian, Bacho is Georgian and Garo is Armenian
I'll always remember, shortly after the accident I saw broadcast TV footage taken from a helicopter circling the reactor building. Down in the center of the ruins was the remains of the reactor, and within the remains was a purple glow. That glow gave me chills, since I knew it was ionizing radiation and that you should never, ever see that glow. That glow is like the medusa, if you see it, you die. The helicopter was far away and off to the side, but I knew that glow meant something terrible. Get as far away as possible, as fast as possible. I'll always remember those few seconds of video.
That "all victories inevitably come at a cost" is such a strong line. I like how the actor portrays the ease with which the Soviet State exercised its power over people's lives with almost total impunity, but also the heaviness of someone who understands that there really is no other way to avoid the situation getting worse but to have three men die a gruesome death
The context of how this happened and how they responded is much more clear if you grew up during the height of the cold war. A great book on what this period was like is, The White Pill by Michael Malice. It was so much worse than we knew. Fear of 'the bullet' was very real.
Well done for making it all in one vid most have to split it but this was far more satisfying (if that is the right word for this series). Great show and reaction!
The Fukushima disaster is the focus of a miniseries similar to this one. It is called "The Days" and is available on Netflix. Fukushima was just as serious as Chernobyl, but the Japanese responded very differently from the Russians. The series is worth watching.
when Chernobyl happened, i was 3 and living in germany. my mom still tells me about the time, we weren't allowed to play in sand, or spend a lot of time outdoors, and mushrooms were contaminated for a very long time (you're actually not supposed to eat a lot of wild mushrooms still, since they soak up radiation. it's gone waaaaaay down, but... yeah)
Your reaction was heartbreaking, especially during the pets killing scenes. As a dog 🐕 owner, it always makes me cry too...
This gave nuclear power a bad name, but the mortality rates per billion kWh according to the WHO (World Health Organization) are 100 for coal, 36 for petroleum products, 24 for biomass, 4 for natural gas, 1.4 for hydropower, 0.44 for solar power, 0.15 for wind power, and 0.04 for nuclear power.
How is there a mortality from the solar power? I know it might cause a "short circuit" trough the body but is it really that unsafe?
@@buoyancydabl They must include the entire life cycle of the technology from mining the raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and disposal.
@@buoyancydablmanufacturing or installation mistakes and workplace accidents on site not related to the tech itself most likely.
While we probably agree that nuclear is the safest form of energy harvesting, I disagree that they gave nuclear power a bad name with this show. In my opinion it's about the dangers of lies, corruption, state secrets and incompetence told through the story of a nuclear disaster.
Agree 💯
The writer of the book 01:23:40 by Andrew Leatherbarrow (who is credited and given special thanks in the credits, it’s a good read) opens it with the statement “I want to make it clear that I am for nuclear power, as long as strict health and safety regulations are adhered to”.
And he’s right. Here in the UK we’ve demolished almost all of our coal fired power plants, and although we intended to transition to renewables, there’s a gap that needs to be accounted for in producing the electricity that we’re no longer producing via coal, the government is considering the installation of small modular reactors.
Think of all the excess deaths coal use and coal mining causes, just to get it out the ground is a dirty dangerous often anti social activity as it is, or was, here in Britain.
Nuclear hazards are tiny in number by comparison, as long as you know what you’re doing. Chernobyl as a historical event is proof of what happens when you don’t know what you’re dealing with, i.e. the men being told the RBMK was a flawless reactor design when they knew it had flaws. There’s only a few of them still in operation in Eastern Europe and Russia and even then, heavily modified and brought up to good standards of safety.
The disposal of fuel and waste is the only serious drawback to nuclear power and what to do with it.
This show is wonderful, but it’s not an anti-nuclear show, it’s anti-negligence, anti-“people screwing up what should be treated with care and upmost respect and the repercussions that has”.
Regarding radiation, damage, and danger: keep in mind, this is a simplified and probably quite incorrect summary, meant to give you an idea of the way it works. Any actual nuclear physicist or healthcare professional with experience in the field would know far more than me.
Exposure to the actual radiation causes, simply put, damage. This can be generally understood as IN SOME WAYS similar to being unprotected in the sun, and it shares some effects with severe sunburn, except it penetrates the body much more than the sun does. The electromagnetic radiation travels in relatively straight lines and does THINGS to the atoms in its path, mostly knocking electrons loose, changing the charge of the atom, making molecules break apart or warp. When you're exposed to radiation, there's two general outcomes. If the dose is small enough, it harms you a lot and then, if you get away, you may be able to heal from it without too much issue, though there's no guarantee. Much like a severe sunburn may cause you to shed skin for a while and feel awful and then be fine later, or it could have harmed your skin cells and caused a cancer that kills you. But as long as the radiation isn't too severe, this is possible, even relatively likely, to survive. If the dosage is too much, you instead die relatively quickly. This can be likened to being exposed to a dangerous chemical or poison - it can be very deadly, but if you survive it, you may simply recover.
The more insidious threat is radioactive particles. Atoms that are unstable and will, at some point, change, and emit radiation. If you absorb these into your body, or even if they cling to your skin, you can no longer GET AWAY from the radiation to heal. You keep getting low to medium doses of radiation. And some of these particles (atoms) can be hard-to-impossible to get rid of. One of the ones that you can partially protect against is mentioned in the show; radioactive Iodine. If your body does not need Iodine it will not absorb much of it if and when it enters your system, instead expelling it again. If there's places where the body needs some of it (such as in the thyroid gland), it will be used to build the structures there that use Iodine, and there it will emit radiation, destroying the DNA there and causing cancer. It's much more dangerous because it's an ongoing threat that we can't medically solve. When you're exposed to simple radiation damage, the treatment is to make sure you don't die from the symptoms, because the threat is now absent. When you're exposed to radioactive atoms in your body, the threat is still there, making the symptoms come back even if you somehow treat or cure them, worsening the damage. If you liken the radiation to poison, these are more like flesh-eating bacteria that infect your body and keep spewing that poison into you. Granted, they do not generally multiply, but that's the other problem.... if you're exposed to enough of this, you become a dangerous, poisonous radiation source to others, though less so than whatever you are exposed to - and you may pass the particles on to others, giving them the same problem. This is one of the reasons you see a lot of washing and rinsing of vehicles and equipment in this show.
The firefighters were exposed to massive amounts of radioactive atoms. A lot of it carbon, which burns, forms ashes, and gets everywhere. They breathed it in, it got in their clothes, everywhere. However, they ALSO received huge doses of direct radiation from some of the debris, like the piece of graphite that one guy tried to pick up. So they got the worst from every side. The people staying around the site doing clean-up are simply not capable of avoiding breathing in, drinking and/or eating low, but very concerning amounts of radioactive atoms. The dosage is too small to immediately kill them, but large enough that statistically, there is only what one could describe as a "non-zero" chance of them avoiding cancer over time ("non-zero" here means it could technically happen, but it won't, like a 99.9999999999...% certainty that it will happen within a few years).
16:00 The clothes of those fireman are in the basement of a hospital in chernobyl. And they are still, to this day, extremely radioactive.
The music in this series was created from the recordings of sounds from an actual nuclear reactor, that's why it's so eerie
Oh wow that's crazy
Uhm, apologize for ruining the dramatic moment, but the nuclear reactor itself doesnt actually make sounds, just sometimes boiling water and thats it, not those you can hear in compositions. The only things that makes sound and sounds kinda eerie to me is all the pumps and the turbine(s).
@@buoyancydabl Most people dont know how reactors work..... Its nothing but a big steam generator.... just the fuel to heat up the water is done by Uranium rods....
The 3rd episode is always the toughest for everyone. Animal lovers are an interesting bunch. I should know, I am one. My little chihuahua is my little girl. If it would've been me, and I couldn't sneak my puppy out somehow, I would've stayed and died with my puppy. Crazy thing is, I was a firefighter and medic in the city of Fort Worth Texas for many years. I've dealt with the worst injuries and death that one can imagine. People getting obliterated by vehicles, a shotgun blast to the head, a person being stabbed to death over 40 times. Decapitations. And so on. I learned to deal with that and do my job. Yet if I see a dog get hit by a car, I am a blubbering crying mess for hours. There's no way in the world I could've done what those 3 men had to do. None.
That's most likely cause you & most other people (including the reactor - edit: interesting pun :D) can't even think/comprehend what happened to the firemen and the others with such radiation poisoning and what kind of pain they experienced. Each one of the deaths that you mentioned, scratch that - maybe even all other possible deaths (in terms of pain) would be better.
That coupled with the fact that you perceive that a human can "take care of himself"/"was partly responsible for putting himself in the situation" or similar stuff you're doing subconsciously as opposed to viewing the animal as innocent being killed. I am the same but I realise it fully.
The creators didn't even show what happened to the fireman accurately + longer ON PURPOSE cause it would be way too gross AND STILL EVEN THEN IT WOULDNT BE ABLE TO CONVEY THE PAIN.
HIS MEAT WAS LITERALLY COMING OFF HIS BONES WHILE HE WAS ALIVE WHILE HIS CELLS WERE DYING AND HE COULD FEEL ALL THE PAIN THROUGH HIS NERVOUS SYSTEM STILL WORKING - ALL. NERVES. AT. THE SAME. TIME.
getting a limb cut off compared to that is like getting slapped on the wrist.
The animals that got shot/killed got off easy and the men killing them was an actual act of mercy towards them, instead of the possible extreme suffering/dying from radiation poisoning and/or subsequent diseases.
To put it into show Legasov's words: "You will be begging for that bullet!"
These men were extremely strong to do what that they did & that goes for everyone that has worked on the Chernobyl disaster and the years after that.
@@6kembe4orba I can't understand or comprehend what the firefighters and others suffering radiation exposure, were going thru? And you deduced this.....how exactly? As I mentioned already, being I was firefighter, I believe I'm fully aware of what these people had to go thru. To think that you alone have the capacity for such understanding, is rather arrogant, is it not?
Just because some people tend to have that affinity and empathy for certain animals, equal to or even greater than that of humans, doesn't make them oblivious to the plights and hardships of other people. You mention some of the reasons yourself. The animals were totally unaware and defenseless to what happened to them. Had the firefighters and others, educated themselves on nuclear reactors and acute radiation poisoning, or had those in authority taken a more active role in educating them, many of those hardships could've been avoided. The animals had no such option. The people were eventually given the opportunity to leave the area. The animals were abandoned and left there to die. These things add to that desire by many to want to protect the animals. This doesn't mean we're not aware that many people suffered far worse deaths than that of most of the animals. You seemed to have totally misunderstood what those like me were talking about when it comes to the animals at Chernobyl.
@@jeremybr2020 you just proved what I'm talking about and you don't even realise it.
I've never said I'm the only one btw.
@@6kembe4orba Nope, you did not say you were the only one. But what you did say is "[me] and most other people. Which is still more than enough to make you out to be an arrogant ass.
And I should probably point out that had I actually proved what you were talking about, you would no doubt follow it up with just how I did so. But you didn't do that, because you can't do that. You know why? Because the entirety of your initial comment is suggesting that you have some sort of insight into our inner thoughts. You make claims to what you BELIEVE we are thinking or not thinking about. Even though we never actually said it. Are you a mind reader? I'm guessing not. So good luck with proving that point.
"they should put that on our money". Best line of the series.
I grew up in USSR. This TV show is a very important historical snapshot of how Soviet bureucracy really worked. It's not about the radiation - it's about the oppressive, gray Soviet reality which has so rarely been portrayed accurately on film, if ever.
This show does accurately reflect it. Truth didn't matter in USSR. Lives didn't matter in USSR.
My mom has a thyroid issue that needs to be operated on. My classmate's mom has the same issue, she had her thyroid removed. His younger brother has a thyroid issue. And sometime in 2000 I started developing an autoimmune dry eye syndrome that's been getting worse over the years.
We lived in Moldavian SSR, which neighbored Ukrainian SSR. I remember watching the 15-second Chernobyl announcement on TV when it happened. It was very matter-of-fact and very calm.
What is the cost of lies?
Thank you Jen for watching this. It's a modern horror story of the hubris of human kind. Great acting and empathy both by the actors. Peace 🕊
And more specifically the failures of how basically everything worked in the Soviet union.
I have an eternal amount of respect for all the workers that stepped up knowing they would probably die and just as much hate for the politics and lying.
Right? And the irony is that now the lies are being told against nuclear power, like the Three Mile Island accident that didn't kill anybody and didn't spread any radiation outside the building but it's told like a catastrophe, or the Fukujima tsunami accident which again, didn't cause any death and barely any radiation got out of the facility so it was super easy to clean up it took less than a decade to become safely livable again.
I think the best way of describing radiation damage to the body is imagine an extreme sunburn but one that penetrates throughout your whole body, inside and out. It's why they turn red. Similar how getting too much sun can cause skin cancer, radiation can cause all forms of cancer throughout the body after it penetrates. In extreme cases it can kill the bone marrow, and damage your DNA to a point it's irreversible. The Recovery and fall he describes at 42:16 is the body without DNA and Bone Marrow no longer having the ability to replicate and build new Cells, so as your old cells naturally die off as they do, you basically turn into a living rotting corpse, unable to replicate new cells.. your body slowly falls a part until something critical fails, and you die.
The man who drove the struck with the high-range dosimeter was General Vladimir Pikalov. He commanded the USSR Chemical Corps from 1968-1988. He was a certified badass in every way. This man was a World War II veteran and a survivor of the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. He had been a soldier nearly all of his adult life. He believed that driving the truck himself to the site of the disaster would carry more weight to the "leaders" in Moscow. Thus, he would be able to firmly convince them of the true scope of the catastrophe. Pikalov survived the radiation of Chernobyl, and died in 2003 at the age of 78. There were many villains at Chernobyl, but he was truly one of the heroes.
Appropriate that you're putting this up just after putting up Star Trek VI. The Praxis explosion in that film was very much inspired by the Chernobyl disaster, and Kirk/Spock's conversation about being too old and too inflexible a reflection on the Cold War fears that needed to be put aside as the Soviet Union spun down.
Thats exactly what I was just thinking!
Just to give some insight on nuclear power plants. They're not supposed to or designed to explode, the reason Chernobyl did was due to a design oversight hidden by the soviet government. To this day, nuclear plants are some of the most safe and energy efficient source of energy available. Just for your own information, there's some great review channels by actual nuclear scientists who give their thoughts on the show and point out the scientific errors.
There is a list of nuclear powerplant incidents, everything from containment water leaks, leaky valves, steam pressure explosions. They have never been safe or efficient and have never turned a profit.
@@nightfall902 Still kills less than fossil fuels especially coal
@@nightfall902water leaks and leaky valves are things that will happen with any kind of industrial system and don't warrant losing any sleep over if you're not responsible for fixing those leaks
@@senorelroboto2 Most "industrial systems" do not use enriched uranium or plutonium. Who said anything about losing sleep? Here's the thing, the generation before mine was terrible. Those poor people, war, the great depression, civil rights etc..etc... I have lived in the best time. We had everything. Took whatever we needed, polluted the air and water, chopped down rain forests. All the problems that we created are a new generation's water leaks and leaky valves to fix. I'm not losing any sleep :)
34:17 "any volunteers will be rewarded"
J $tacks - "with death!"
hahahahahaha!!!! i snorted!
15:55 No, people that come into contact won't get poisoned. The important parts with radiation is the direct glow from highly radioactive material, so the graphite on the ground, used nuclear fuel etc, those things will kill you for just being in 10m from them. The second part is radioactive dust and ashes and other elements, they are just as radioactive as the fuel, but there is a lot less of them, with them you don't want them sticking on your skin, so decontamination is very important. Another very important thing to avoid with radioactive dust is avoiding breathing it in or eating it. If you ingest radioactive material it is 100 times more damaging to you, since radioactivity is reduced by the distance and time near it. If you ingest something it's inside you, and it stays a long time. You can wash off your clothes in one hour, but radioactive material can become part of your body and radiate inside of you for days or months until it's cycled out, that can easily be 100X the dose compared to touching it and washing it off in 1 hour.
The reason they were taking iodine pills is because one of the common materials released from nuclear fuel is iodine 137, which is highly radioactive and it moves a lot. This iodine if it gets inside you, it gets absorbed by your thyroid and it concentrates there. Another problematic one is strongtcium, that is also a common product and it's very radioactive. Strongtcium gets processed by your body the same as calcium, and it gets integrated in your bones, so it stays in your body your entire life. Absorbed strongtcium can easily give you 100000 times the dose compared to touching it and washing it off. This process is called bioaccumulation and it's a problem, especially because animals can absorb it, and then those animals either produce stuff like milk, or get eaten by something else, so the radioactivity gets passed along.
Get boxes of tissues Jen for 2-3-4 episode. YOU WILL NEEDS THEM. :( My family members in Latvia still pick up radiation fallout from Chernobyl to this day!
What? How is that possible? Why me, living 100 km from ChNPP doesnt pick up anything EVEN including the 2022 incident where some idiots where digging "Red Forrest" throwing tons of still radioactive dust in air sending it all to Kiev?
I come from Berlin in germany, almost 2000 km from Chernobyl and I was not allowed to play outside all year. Even the break at school we had to stay inside. I have also seen some scenes on TV news. The series is very accurate
Did you understand what was going on at the time? I live in Canada, and I remember when it happened, but I was only 5 years old, so I didn't understand what had happened.
@@kovacs88 Unfortunately yes. Physics was my hobby at that time, so I understood it quite well although I was only 11 years old.. My parents talked to me about it and in school we had gone through the subject in detail in physics lessons. I can still remember exactly when I heard about it on the news for the first time. I saw the scene where the helicopter crashed on the news. I have not forgotten that to this day. I can still remember exactly when I went with my mother to the pharmacy to buy iodine tablets.
You might be happy to hear that there is a huge, thriving population of dogs, descended from the pets left behind, in the exclusion zone. It's a wonderful testament to the resilience of life on earth
I have this soundtrack on my phone. The composer is amazing. The fact she used actual reactor sounds for the ambient music is genius.
Amazing as always Jen. Keep up the good work.
Thank you so much for one whole video!!!!!! So great!!
The baby didn't absorb the radiation from the mother. This is what they thought at the time when they didn't understand radiation. The baby couldn't absorb the radiation from the mother anymore than it could absorb a bullet wound from the mother.
For reference, monthly salaries were around 70 roubles. So 400 roubles offered to the 3 workers were about 6 months salary.
Truly heartbreaking to watch you suffer through the dog hunting. Much credit for continuing through it. Outstanding reaction, Jen.
I was 16 when Chernobyl happened, in school. The news didnt get out quickly, and I remember it took days before anyone outside the Soviet Union knew anything big had happened.
It is believed Chernobyl had a part in the breakup of the Soviet Union, along with other things that were happening in the 80s.
It could have been worse. This is a good miniseries.
A few facts about radiation:
1: They say that if you can taste metal, then you're currently being exposed to high levels of radiation.
2: In the event of nuclear disaster, you can't bring any of your belongings if you live within the exclusion zone, since radiation can be spread as easily as germs.
3: Geiger counters (those devices that make clicking sounds) can only measure a certain amount of radiation. If the clicking gets really frequent (like what you heard when the crew were in the water) and suddenly stops, then you're being exposed to so much radiation, not even the radiation counter (geiger counter) can pick it up
I don't know if anyone told you or if you looked it up, but the 400 rubles the 3 men who drained the tanks, Oleksiy Ananenko, Valery Bezpalov and Boris Baranov got paid, was worth an equivalent of USD$560, meaning they did what they did for what was at the time in the USSR a couple of months worth of salary. These 3, alongside everyone else involved with cleaning up the roof debris and figuring out the scale of the situation saved countless of lives in their sacrifice, yet we never hear about them in school, we are never taught their names. Not even here in Europe where day to day life would've looked a lot different if it weren't for them.
This is a pretty good drama series. The issue with it is that is sells it self as a documentary, but the factual part, specially those touching nuclear power is god awful, just terrible. The on touching the USSR government is quite a bit better.
There is a bit to many people that wached this and think they learned anything about nuclear power.
Hi Jen hope you are having an great and awesome day ❤
Thanks John you too :)
For example the water and steam explosion was impossible to be a nuclear explosion for all kinds of reasons with first being the Uranium was nowhere near as enriched as a weapon must be. Also the 3 guys who pumped out the water all survived. One died in 2005 and the other 2 are still alive today.
Please nobody be mad at the firefighters wife, Lyudmilla. Her husband Vasily was not dangerous to be around, she did not put her baby in danger, there’s was nothing bad or wrong or dangerous about her being around him. I will explain why below….👇
Her husband was not dangerous to anyone because by that point he would have been bathed and given new clothes, thus any contamination he had on him would have been gone. He still had however much he absorbed up until that point but it wouldn’t be “contagious” like the show depicts. Its more like getting ash on your skin, once you wash it off your fine. It’s not like a virus, it doesn’t spread just by being around them. It only affects others if the person still has the stuff on them, once they bathed and get new clothes, they’re fine they’re not dangerous. They didn’t know this AT THAT TIME (it wasn’t until some years later they figured out how it works) so that’s why everyone freaks out about touching him.
While it is accurate to WHAT THEY THOUGHT AT THE TIME, it’s actually contrary to how it works in ACTUAL REALITY. The show never makes a distinction or clarification about this and so thusly everyone blames Lyudmilla.
When this series came out Lyudmilla Ignatenko actually got a LOT of hate mail and received actual death threats against her and her family even because the way the show made it sound like “by touching him she also killed her baby” - which is absolutely NOT what happened. She lost her baby because of how much radiation she was exposed to while in Pripyat (along with scarring from a previous miscarriage which also contributed to losing the baby). It was NOT because of her being around her husband (who would have been decontaminated by that point and thusly would not have been dangerous to anyone). But because the show didn’t explain accurately or specifically enough about how radiation works so unless someone researched it on their own they would assume that she was at fault and blame her.
Its really horrible they left out the specifics of what ACTUALLY happened with her baby and why. The misinformation may have made for more dramatic tv but they really did her dirty by skewing it the way they did. This poor woman had suffered enough 😞😭