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Comment by gukov | Hacker News Reader

Highly recommend the HBO's new miniseries Chernobyl. One episode left. It's already at the top of IMDB TV show rankings.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/

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A bit over-dramatized, but very, very good.

Although I do not really like the decision to reduce the entire engineering team to a single character. I get that it simplifies the writing and casting, but it just perpetrates the lone scientist myth. It could have been really compelling to take the time to show the group effort.

The lone scientist hero myth is hardly unique to science, it's an abstraction that you see in all narratives that use a leader to represent a group.

There are few scientific characters because the show chooses to focus on the political/systemic failure rather than the technical one. It shows us the leaders who bury their heads in the sand, the clueless residents who suffer as a result, and the liquidators who are aware of the dangers and make the sacrifice regardless.

It's more a show about communism than it is about nuclear power, and I really like their take on the disaster.

It is a show about what happens when the state officials and secret state organizations have all the power to keep that power. It corrupts the people, because there is not much left to keep them honest.

It amazes me how there can be a small digit number of people that always will be complaining for something that is truly remarcable well done.

What is remarkable? Everyone who recommended it to me didn’t articulate an actual reason. I find this quite often. It was over hyped to me

There’s nothing amazing about people disagreeing, surely?

I feel you... that pesky people with different and well argumented opinions... tsk tsk...

It's worth listening to the podcast that the screenwriter put out alongside the show.

He discusses the decision to collapse the scientists into one character, and explains why he chose to do it this way. Whether or not you agree it's interesting to see the though process that goes into a decision like this.

HBO offsets the GoT S8 disappointment, Chernobyl is so far the best show I've watched in the past 5-10 years.

Agreed, it's brilliant and imho the best series in years. The last TV episode that left me as speechless and uneasy as the first episode of Chernobyl (the shift worker looking down into the open reactor from the roof!) was the now legendary Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad.

I don't get the feeling it's very accurate, but it is very entertaining.

EDIT: the accuracy I am referring to is about the actual sequence of events of the plot, which I understand to be simplified as people replying have pointed out :)

This Twitter thread speaks to this, (supposedly) from a Russian guy. He said that as far as Soviet life goes it's extremely accurate.

https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1132029943297265664

Yes. I lived in Soviet Ukraine at the time. While the British actors do take away some authenticity from it, the look and feel of 1980's Soviet Union is incredibly accurate. I showed a clip to my parents and they were like "wait, what, this is not a documentary?"

It varies. The physics part is oversimplified and, at times, overdramatized (the threat of a megaton-range explosion being a particularly egregious example). The range of characters is highly limited by the format of the series (hence the fictional Belarusian physicist meant to be a composite of many characters, but really just serving as a narrative shortcut to compress the whole thing into the length constraints they have). At the same time, the visual setting is very accurate (part of the filming is done at Ignalina, the site of another RBMK reactor plant with a similar workers' town, etc.) and the general atmosphere is vastly more true to life than any other dramatization of the accident I've ever seen.

The question about the series, when something particularly unrealistic occurs, like the movie trope of three heroes volunteering to open the sluice gates, and having to swim through water, and having their lamps all go out at the same time - that happened - is whether the mini series is showing something unbelievable, but true, or something that just didn't happen.

By and large, the creators always tried to be biased away from the fantastical elements. That is, they left parts out of the movie, that while 100% true, just sounded too unrealistic.

The three workers wading through water to open the sluice gates did indeed happen, but it's worth noting that all of them survived just fine and at least two were still alive as recently as a few years ago.

I agree, though, I love how many tiny things that are actually true they managed to squeeze in there. As another example, the part where the firefighter's wife bribes her way into the closed hospital in Moscow - that really happened too.

"all of them survived just fine and at least two were still alive as recently as a few years ago." People keep saying this... any citation or link you happen to know of offhand? I've heard only exactly the opposite in various articles, that the three guys died within weeks.

Certainly. The most accessible source in the popular English press is an article in Business Insider [1] (probably reprinted elsewhere, I didn't check). It accurately refers to claims made in a very well researched book by Leatherbarrow [2]. If you read Russian, I've also seen several interviews with one of the survivors, but couldn't quickly find a link for you. I can look for it later if you're interested.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-volunteers-divers-...

[2] https://leatherbarrowa.exposure.co/chernobyl

Ah that's great, thanks. I can't read Russian so not a big deal (though Google Translate exists, of course! haha) . Cheers! :)

I like the naked miners

At least they wore hats!

The show's writer actually reduced the number: https://www.reddit.com/r/TVChernobyl/comments/boo19f/did_she...

It's actually wrong on several levels. First of all, in the show the characters explicitly state that they are referring to a steam explosion. A steam explosion in the megaton range isn't just implausible, it's patently absurd. The upper bound on the real number is lower by 4-5 orders of magnitude. Don't get me wrong - it would still have been extremely disasterous and could have increased the total radionuclide emissions by up to an order of magnitude, but all the stuff about half of Europe being uninhabitable or everyone in Kiev dying immediately is nonsense. Instead, the only way to get remotely close to a megaton range estimate is to assume the steam explosion would cause a nuclear explosion in one or more of the reactor cores. That possibility was briefly considered and quickly dismissed as improbable in the extreme, which it was.

In the context of a drama about the explosion and aftermath, I'd say it's quite reasonable to use an absurd number from one of the physicists involved.

Perhaps it was indeed wrong, but it sounds like that might be actually what those involved believed at the time.

That is very unlikely, at least at the higher executive commitee level. It's impossible to exclude the possibility entirely, of course, but there is no surviving evidence of it and it certainly doesn't appear in Legasov's original report (or any subsequent study).

>That possibility was briefly considered and quickly dismissed as improbable in the extreme, which it was.

A nuclear explosion would require Uranium enriched to at least 85%, whereas the fuel in RBMK reactors was only enriched to 2%. It's not just unlikely it's actually impossible.

That's not entirely correct. There is no specific level to which uranium (or any other fissile material) must be enriched before supercriticality may occur, the level of enrichment simply determines the critical mass required. For instance, the critical mass for pure U-235 is around 50kg, while for 20% enriched U-235 you'd need about half a ton or so. [1]

In the case of Chernobyl, the concern was that upon contact with water (which acts as a neutron moderator in these circumstances) and given the inevitable sequence of steam explosions that would follow, some regions of superheated corium might be forced into prompt criticality events. These would technically qualify as nuclear explosions, but the sequence of events required to get from this set of increasingly improbable assumptions to anything remotely close to a megaton range explosion is, as I said, improbable to the point of being trivially dismissable.

[1] EDIT: I realized I should probably point out for clarity that I'm referencing the traditional measures for a critical mass - the mass required for a homogenous sphere of a given material to go critical. Determining the critical mass for a highly inhomogenous material of complex geometry, highly varied temperature and potentially surrounded by neutron reflecting substances is not a trivial task.

Prompt critical is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a nuclear weapon to go boom. In a weapon the neutron multiplication time is a million times faster than in a prompt criticality transient in a thermal reactor. Otherwise it would disintegrate before it could develop any significant yield.

But yes, certainly the melted fuel becoming critical and/or causing more steam explosions could have made the Chernobyl accident worse than it already was.

You should listen to the Chernobyl podcast to get a sense of how insanely dedicated they are to capturing every possible detail They took a few dramatic licences (a few characters are composites) - but, by and large, the stories are told lockstep in as close to a factual account as can be told.

Also the series creator, Craig Mazin, is active on Twitter as @clmazin and on reddit as clmazin.

I read the English and German Wikipedia articles about the disaster after I watched the first episode and was quite impressed how accurate it was.

+1 - we saw last night's episode... the dogs and the baby... this must be seen but it's also something you can't un-see.

I find this one more... down to Earth(?) and despite being more of a love story, it touches almost every subject there is to touch.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2934916/ https://youtu.be/Xe8ptlQ1_FQ

Can anyone explain why the Pripyat hospital in the first episode was so dirty and old? It had only been running for about 15 years at the time of the disaster.

I've lived my early childhood though USSR (Latvia; born in 1979), and have been to relatively recently remodeled hospitals on multiple occasions for an extended stay. Plaster and paint easily fell off, tiling was irregular and often cracked, walls were never straight or evenly plasered, bed frames already had rust, springs always squeaked. All that said, it was clean, yet because of build quality, standardized pale paint colors, and poor lighting it seemed very used and in need of repairs. It could give impression of being dirty, when watched over TV. 15 years for that type of build quality is a long time.

I recently stayed at a hotel built with this quality. Everything was rusty, from the door hinges to the windows, to the front gate. There were cracks in the foundation that shot up the walls.

I asked the manager when they opened and he told me they had been open for less than a year. The building was less than 3 years old.

It is not a coincidence that you are seeing lots of old content about Chernobyl resurfacing now.

Still, the show is amazing.

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