Putin’s Media Struggle to Deal with HBO’s Chernobyl | Hacker News Reader

Putin’s Media Struggle to Deal with HBO’s Chernobyl

themoscowtimes.com

199 pointsokket148 comments

One thing I found really eye-opening about this show is that it really showed both the bad side as well as the good side of Soviet culture.

It is unquestionably the case that Soviet authoritarianism and disregard for safety is to blame for what happened. But one thing that is often forgotten, but I think the show highlights, is how well the aftermath was handled.

Yes, Pripyat should have been evacuated earlier, and yes, they should probably have notified the rest of the world sooner. But think of this: the Soviet Union mobilized 500,000-750,000 people to clean up the enormous exclusion zone. They got thousands of men to don full lead suits (that could only be used once) to run out on a roof for 90 seconds each to throw off radioactive rocks one at a time. They built the enormous containment structure in just a few months, arguably the greatest feat of civil engineering in history. One of my favorite scenes in the show is when Legasov says he immediately needs 5,000 tons of sand and boron to cover the core, and Scherbina basically just walks off and gets it for him (along with a full fleet of helicopters to drop it).

All of this was necessary, and they did all of it, no matter the cost. This was unquestionably a real strength of the Soviet Union. Can you imagine that the US would have been able to respond like this? Either today or in the 80s? I can't. With the exception of wartime mobilization, I can think of almost nothing else that even compares. There are few (if any) societies in history that could have done what the Soviet Union did in response to Chernobyl. In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else.

USSR in 1986 was not autharitarian as depicted in the series.

There were no inspections at gunpoint - people went to certain death to save lives of others. Knowingly. This is Cold War's 80s, even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation, including symptoms of radiation sickness etc.

Evacuation started as soon as disaster recovery team got evidence of dangerous levels of radiation, there were sanitary norms and pre-planned measures for any kind of problem at the station.

> even schoolchildren knew dangers of radiation

And yet crowds of schoolchildren were made to March in Kyiv for International Workers' Day right after the disaster, where they were exposed to radiation. Had Soviet society really been aware of the dangers, and leadership truly concerned with the welfare of the local people, that march would have never happened.

There was publication ban on the disaster, no one knew it was that serious.

Many people listened to BBC Russian Service, Radio Freedom/Radio Free Europe, RFI, VOA, etc. broadcasts on short waves. It wasn't that much of a secret.

Many? I doubt it. I went with my family to the parade and no one knew anything. We were living close to Minsk. My uncle was a policeman and one of the liquidators(later time, outer zones) and despite been high ranking officer he didn't know.

Pretty much everyone I knew, knew. Those who did not have a shortwave radio got gossip. Some of the details were murky, but the big picture was clear within a couple of days, way before official acknowledgement.

So by comment history, there is a pretty good chance this is someone working for the famed "Russian troll farms". Should we allow this kind of poster on HN?

Not sure about other comments, but this one isn’t necessarily wrong. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher... also takes issue with the execution threats.

I just read the comment history. Clearly a patriotic Russian, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable making this accusation.

I find it more fascinating to presume the comments are made by someone in good faith, who simply may be misinformed on some topics due to persistent exposure to their State’s propaganda.

I particularly liked the comment about not needing permission to protest. No, no, in Russia you do not need permission, but if your chosen time and place is not available the State will kindly select a suitable alternative for you!

Reminds me of some college campuses.

Hang around reddit enough and you see the pattern.

Comments only ever on one side of the issue. Lots of magical upvotes for any post. Any dissenting posts gets mass reported to the mods.

I hope my comment history will satisfy you. Basicly, some scenes in series are overdramatized. For example, Sitnikov was not convoyed by soldier to reactor roof - he went willingly, Dyatlov wasn't so bad as he portrayed and so on.

Luckily, it is a pretty recent period of history and many witnesses of it are still alive or died in recent past. You may be interested to see explaination from Dyatlov at first hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVthWR4cR1g This interview has been recorded in 1994, year before he died, but I'm not sure if there are English subtitles for it.

Thanks. Could you summarize what he has to say for us who don't understand him? I think that would be very interesting to many people, after watching the series.

He says everything in the control room was pretty routine, no misdeeds, no risky experiments, no drama, no questioning of orders, no worries as unpredictable behavior of the reactor happens, the reactor was just poorly designed. After the explosion he was confused and didn't know what happened and what to do. At some point after looking around, etc. he figured out that he needs to take measures to prevent new fires on the exploded reactor building. While they were busy taking measures they got sick, started vomiting. Eventually he got taken by the ambulance to the clinic. In the clinic he was questioned, eventually got arrested. Complains about USSR, that soviets wanted to blame the disaster on the reactor personal and that the judge only did what the politburo ordered.

Thank you. So it seems in assigning the blame between the personnel and the officials responsible for design, both parties were blaming the other party. I read somewhere that Legasov criticized the steps done in the control room and also the design and lack of oversight in designing/building the reactor. So the truth is probably somewhere in between and the blame is shared between the personnel and the officials/system.

Commenter in this branch put it all together just right. Also Dyatlov notes all industrial disasters was attributed to personnel error in Soviet Union, no matter which real reason it was, for political reasons.

I'll let myself add some reasoning about accusations against Dyatlov. Even if he violated some instructions (it is still not so clear), environment and way operations conducted in SU (and maybe in some modern countries too) implicitly require that. Management requires real results, not obedience to rules and instructions. Senior personnel has to deliver what is expected from them no matter how. But if something goes wrong, negligence to rules will be formal reason to blame. So, there was no evil layman who got himself near top of hierarchy and made evil decisions. All hierarchy consists of people who was installed at their positions for a reason and they do what is expected from them. Otherwise, replacement occurs.

Basically, if you replace in this situation Dyatlov with somebody of same rank, outcomes could be eventually same or even worse.

Interesting. So in short, even if Dyatlov did make some shortcut and violated safe practices, this was probably mainly due to corrupt system that forced people to violate the rules to maintain their jobs. This helped the higher ups to easily exploit the workers and easily find a scapegoat when necessary. The soviet system was real sick.

It's not just about losing job or other penalities, it is also about futility of resistance to corruption. If you are openly against system, you get replaced and your place will be taken by less experienced but more convenient person. Good leader in such situation should play politics and follow common rules in order to retain at least chance to make some decisions on his own and step in when situation is critical.

However, that trait is not unique to Soviet system only. If you look wider, you probably will be able to resemble Volkswagen scandal, Boeing MAX, Fukusima and so on. Boeing case looks clearly as outcome of "just make it fly" decision.

I glanced at their history and it seems that, yes, they are Russian, and a lot of their posts seem to have some anti-US sentiment, but automatically saying that makes them a member of the troll farm is a stretch. I see plenty of other Europeans, especially on sites like reddit, openly hating on the US. Hell, there are plenty of people from the US who do that. Unless I'm missing something glaring from their post history, which maybe I am, I don't think it's fair to say "this person is Russian, they are clearly a paid troll and should be banned."

I think a lot of people would think the fact that a nuclear power plant core had exploded was evidence enough that an evacuation was needed.

At first there were no signs of contamination outside of the station and it was unclear if reactor has exploded or not. Evacuation started as soon as that fact was established.

In one of the US nuclear incidents people died while evacuating in panic though no one got hurt at the power plant .

Oh, evacuation of Party leaders' children started right away. General population, not so much.

Maybe because to call wife and say "take the children and leave" is easier than to evacuate the whole city for a few hours?

Or maybe because some people have access to the information and means to get somewhere else, and some are just proles and can be made to march under radioactive rain without being told anything.

It's true. The totalitarianism of the USSR in 80-th is greatly exaggerated. I was born in 1974 and the first time when I heard the words "KGB" and "GULAG" was about 1989. Вefore that, I did't even realise that I lived in a totalitarian country. Everyone said what they wanted and thought what they wanted at home or whith friends (not publically). Agitation for communism was perceived like today's agitation for a green planet. My mother was a common worker and she became a member of communist party because (surprise!) she dreamed make the world better (it didn't work very well). And yes, I was a child. But these are my memories of the USSR, this is a fact. Do you think I'm lying? Now I am for democracy and even ran away from the police when we were protesting against our dictator Lukashenko.

USSR tried to cover up information on the disaster. They said to soviet people: don't worry, we have this under control and refused to cancel May 1st parade in Kiev. People in affected areas found out about the dangers from western media first, only later the state admitted what had happened. The state later (months, years after the disaster) tried to suppress what Legasov had to say and refused to give him the medal.

Pretty bad record for the USSR government, and pretty well depicted in the series.

> Can you imagine that the US would have been able to respond like this? Either today or in the 80s? I can't.

You are exactly right:

U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open (washingtonpost.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19959889

Stop posting this. That's isolating some weapons testing fallout from the 1950s, not civilian reactor spent fuel.

The topic under discussion is response to any serious disaster, not specifically civilian.

Except the US doesn't need a response like this to the correct the dome, the dangers aren't even remotely comparable.

And of course the US can respond like this when needed. The WWII move from a pacifist nation to building more war materials than every other nation combined, happened in months.

>a pacifist nation

I think you mean isolationist.

It wasn't isolationist: the US was a big player in the naval disarmament treaties in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The US in the inter-war period had a very strong pacifist movement, to the point that one member of Congress was unable to vote for the declaration of war on Japan, even after Pearl Harbor.

They're events of different classes and wholly different magnitudes. What's happening in the Pacific relative to what happened in Chernobyl is like a fender bender is related to a major airline disaster.

They were talking less about disaster response and more about the ability to mobilize and utilize resources in response to an urgent need.

While the cracking dome is an issue that should be of high priority, calling it critical or urgent is a disservice to those words and to critical or urgent disasters.

Where as the dome issue in the south Pacific can still be neglected or ignored for years, possible decades, without dramatic impact, the Chernobyl disaster required a response on the order of days or weeks to prevent massive negative consequences to the surrounding environment. By trying to draw parallels to the Chernobyl disaster you're minimizing the immediacy and criticality of Chernobyl level disasters.

If such parallels go unchallenged, when we have another Chernobyl level disaster, the "we ignored the dome for 60 years" argument becomes valid.

I guess that's a type of radiation beneficial to the Pacific marine ecosystem. /s

Do you think this could happen in the U.S. with all the regulations? Do you think either Ukraine or Russia could put that much manpower together to handle an event like that today¿

Theres a pretty good book about Soviet era mega-project disasters, and how the soviet answer to "thats impossible" was always "nah we will just throw more people at it, itll work" It was kind of their MO, they were well practiced for Chernobyl.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_of_the_Executed_Engi...

>Joseph Stalin had an ideological outlook for economic advancement in the Soviet Union that set unrealistic goals that required massive human effort. Stalin emphasized that all industrial establishments should be of great size (preferable the largest in the world). This came to be known as "gigantomania" by the Western observers. The results of taking on these astronomical industrial establishments were high accident rates and shoddy production. The high death rate and exposure to disease was an acceptable cost for Stalin. Stalin's motto was that "technology decides everything" no matter at what cost. After Peter's death, in 1929 the Soviet Union launched the first five-year plan, a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the economy.

>Three of the monumental projects in the early Five-Year Plans were the building of the world's largest hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the construction of the world's largest steel plant (Magnitogorski) and the digging of the White Sea Canal. These Soviet industrialization projects were greatly flawed and wasteful, costing many people who worked both voluntarily and involuntarily their lives.

>Many engineers, including Peter Palchinsky warned the USSR not to rush and go ahead with the building of the dam. They argued that the water flow was ultimately going to be too slow and no good studies had been made of the flow patterns of surface and underground water in the area. Ultimately, 10,000 farmers were forced out of their farmland with little or no compensation

>Construction began in 1929 at the site of one of the country's richest iron deposits, known as Magnetic Mountain. Peter Palchinsky published articles in 1926 and 1927 complaining that the Soviet government was going ahead with plans for the construction of the mining plant without adequate studies of geological resources, availability of labor, economics of transportation and supplying proper housing for the work force.

If one wants to delve deeper into the murkiness and absurdist hilarity ot the society in the freshly minted Soviet empire, I can't recommend Ilf and Petrov more, their books about the charming and combining hustler Ostap Bender are a great read for entertainment alone but also a good picture of the 20s and the great changes that the Revolution brought.

> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else.

I understood your comment to reflect decisiveness in responding to a crisis, but just on a loosely related tangent, with nuclear issues NIMBY standards fall apart.

In Germany, hunters are required to take boars they shot to get tested for radiation - direct result of Chernobyl's aftermath. Over a third of them are over the radiation limit. Same thing is happening in Japan right now. Even if they could kill off all the animals, there's the problem of disposal.

[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/1...

The German dose limits are beyond ridiculously low due to a scientifically unjustifiable fear of radiation. A person would have to eat 28 lbs of contaminated meat to get the same low-level radioactive effects of being on a transatlantic flight [1]. Longitudinal studies of air crew who fly every day for decades have shown no increase in health risk from low doses.

The linear no-threshold model of radiation at super low levels is unsupported by any evidence. The terrifying death rate numbers people calculate are like saying that since CO2 can suffocate someone at a certain level, millions of people die suffocating on low levels of CO2. It's really wild.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/05/germans-b...

I only have one question for you: would you eat it?

Served on a plate, cooked just right. With a side dish of sauteed mushrooms from the area?

Of course I would eat it. I'm a scientist. I understand that radiation at these low doses has never been shown to cause any harm. It's not some mysterious boogeyman to me. I've read the papers. I understand that natural background radiation is all around me all the time, and has been since the dawn of life. Biological systems are well-adapted to dealing with low-dose radiation. I understand that in certain parts of the world like Ramsar, the natural dose rate is 50x my dose rate, and that the hundreds of thousands of people living there show no increase in health effects.

If you'd like to send me some, we can arrange a live-stream of me eating it. I will measure it with my Geiger counter and then eat it in front of the world.

I’m predicting a new trend on YouTube and Twitch ...

Having checked the levels to see that they seems reasonable? Sure.

Every steak you eat is radioactive. Every potato you eat is radioactive. To say nothing of bananas, one of the most radioactive fruit.

You're eating radioactive things every day of your life. Your body is adapted to deal with that, and with all the other carcinogens you encounter daily. It is only once the damage caused by that radiation gets to a high enough level that your body's defence systems can't deal with it any more that it starts getting dangerous.

Exactly. German culture and government is highly nuclear-energy phobic.

It's an unpopular view, but the biggest problem with environmental radiation from nuclear incidents is you can easily detect it. Unlike crap like PCBs, mercury, glyphosates, pesticides and so on; all of which are much more fearsome than radiation from Fukoshima or Chernobyl.

And yes, I put my money where my mouth is, literally, by eating game meats in Ukraine.

Exactly. The incredible ability of radiation detection equipment to detect literally single nuclei decaying is a huge part of the problem. People hear clicks and assume it's dangerous. When I took my Geiger counter on a flight (carry-on), my neighbors were a bit surprised at the continuous clicking.

I didn't realize you could bring a counter on flight. I am going to have to buy me one of those. For science.

My favorite muons on international flights story: LBNL guys used to have film badges. One of them took a long international flight to go to some conference. He may have stashed his badge in his luggage where it was X-rayed as well. It was reported at a "head of DoE" level as a terrible human radiation incident. Nope, just the normal thing from flying (plus maybe some extra). There were still some old timers around with film badges, so everyone got to hear about the story so they don't do it again.

Anyway, while I don't want to be around too much ionizing radiation, I'd much rather avoid the numerous insane chemicals we put into the environment. Ukraine/Belarus food isn't as saturated in that sort of thing: they can't afford the costs.

I don't think the limit is unscientific. The official limit 600 Bq/kg for Cs-137 containing meat is accepted by scientists.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275270427_The_radio...

Activity of boar meat varies greatly, in some regions they found meat with 10x the acceptable activity.

There's a difference between simply being exposed to radiation and consuming radioactive substances since they get absorbed into your organs where they deal more direct damage.

Taking this into account, I would like to know how the "same low-level radioactive effects as" claim was calculated.

Very good observation, in case of some radioactive nuclides their effect is insidiously long term as they may accumulate in body (strontium-90). Many pro-nuclear people and outlets oversimplify the effects of radioactivity. Single number comparisons are not always adequate, since there are many types of radiation, exposure and effects.

For food contamination by radioactive nuclides such as Cs-137 limits were introduced in EU regulation from 1987 and this was last expanded and numbers updated in 2016:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

For Cs-137 the limit is 1000 Bq/kg, in some countries it is lower - 600 Bq/kg.

The document does not seem to indicate how the number was determined, but it seems reasonable that scientists who understand radioactivity and impact of various radionuclide ingestion had some weight in the final decision.

This paper explains how the limit values were arrive at. In short, the rule is to assume that the contaminated food is the only source of food for the most sensitive ones (children). That's why the limits seem to be very strict.

http://www.fao.org/3/U5900T/U5900T08.htm

The limits were increased after Chernobyl in Germany and were even lower.

I'm no expert in radiation but it's a field that has no definitive point what is harmful and what isn't harmful.

A physics teacher of mine wasn't as easy going as you and said to us to be careful.

>All of this was necessary, and they did all of it, no matter the cost.

From Wikipedia:

The official contaminated zones became stage to a massive clean-up effort lasting seven months.[71]:177–183 The official reason for such early (and dangerous) decontamination efforts, rather than allowing time for natural decay, was that the land must be re-peopled and brought back into cultivation. ... Yet this land was of marginal agricultural value. According to historian David Marples, the administration had a psychological purpose for the clean-up: they wished to forestall panic regarding nuclear energy, and even to restart the Chernobyl power station.

> they did all of it, no matter the cost

That's the beauty of authoritarian state - people who did the job had no choice, authority who ordered had no sympathy. E.g. helicopter pilots summoned from Baltic states didn't even know where they were flying or what will be the task. And even if they knew, do you think they could argue not to participate? In this sense slavery could be called "strength" of some country because it allows unprecedented workforce mobilization.

This would have ben handled by military personnel in the (democratic) west, who would also "have no choice".

If a western country has conscription, agreed. Where there's no conscription, they had a choice to join up or not.

Is it a choice when alternatives are die poor and homeless? Oh wait, that is their fate after they leave the army.

Think about how many people take jobs they don't like: why did they choose it? Pretending like you have a "choice" when the other choice is dying/suffering, is harmful to growth imo.

I'm not commenting on the SU fetishism in this thread, but just making a general statement.

Of course they had a choice to join. But romanticism of the military is (thankfully) starting to die out, much like the people forced to die as part of a radiation cleanup.

Most people join the military at a young age, when their brains aren't fully developed, so stating "Well, they shouldn't have signed up if they didn't want to die a horrible, unpredictable death" is easy to state, but hard to wrap your head around at that age. Hindsight is always 20/20.

> Of course they had a choice to join.

Really? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Russia#Late_So... "The late Soviet Armed Forces were manned by mandatory draft (with some exceptions) for all able-bodied males for 2 years (3 years for seagoing parts of the Navy and Border troops), based on the 1967 Law on Universal Military Service"

I'm unclear from the article whether this was discontinued in 1989, but chernobyl was 1986 so that's moot.

No. Full stop. Your initial comment suggested that choosing to join the military implied that a long-drawn out death due to radiation poisoning was "a choice", as its written.

Now you're trying to deflect and act like I'm arguing about whether or not conscription existed, which is nowhere near the point I was countering.

Slow down, I think it's crossed wires. I'm not suggesting that they chose a nasty death by rad poisoning, I'm saying that a military career is risky in many aspects, war being being what it is. The military tend to get used for other risky things as well.

> Now you're trying to deflect and act like I'm arguing about whether or not conscription existed

I thought you were saying they had a choice to join up, I said they certainly didn't. I guess I misunderstood your point. No offence.

I think we're in violent agreement. My apologies.

Don't forget the unknown unknowns. There's always cost-benefit analysis (no matter how flawed) done by people who decide to enlist. But you can't account for leaders blatantly lying to you about what is and isn't safe: agent orange, proximity to constantly running burn pits, Lejeune's water toxicity, "shaking off" PTSD symptoms, etc.

Conscription was the norm for Western Europe in 1986 (and mandatory military service still exists in several European countries such as Sweden).

Conscription in Sweden was stopped between 2010 and 2017.

But this is not akin to asking our military to do a dirty job, it's akin to us having military personnel from other NATO nations to do the dirty work for our mistakes when they had very little to do with what was going on.

This is one thing that worried me during the Fukushima disaster, they were quite concerned about the safety of the responders and many things were delayed until they could figure out a way to do them safely.

If things deteriorated even further, a mega-disaster couldn't have been averted since the Japanese wouldn't have sent people to die to do what had to be done.

I remember this happening several times during the accident. At one point there was discussion that bubbled up in the media of completely abandoning the plant while meltdowns were in progress because they were worried about workers going over 250 mSv. Even though they did stay, there were critical actions that were repeatedly delayed that contributed to making the accident worse. Sometimes you have to say "your job is to keep people safe, and to do that you're going to have to take some risk."

You see this in the U.S. too with police officers. At Parkland and at the Pulse nightclub, police prioritized "officer safety" over public safety. People just want to follow a fixed rulebook about what is an acceptable risk, when in certain situations, an abnormally great threat justifies abnormal risks to avert it. This used to be understood intuitively.

You cannot expect the actual workers in radioactive disaster area to make such reckless decisions on their own. Such worker typically is not competent enough to decide that the directive of maximum acceptable risk should be overruled to make further work possible. The decision to expose workers to extraordinary risk should be made by the people in charge of the recovery effort, who should either be nuclear/biology experts or largely rely on what such experts tell them.

Of course not. Much of the story has never really been comprehensively told, but just look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

The Prime Minister calls the plant manager to ask why a valve hasn't been opened that's critical to avoiding a large radiation release. He's told that because they have no electrical power, it can't be opened electrically, and due to radiation, they haven't sent someone in to turn the valve manually. After a call from the Prime Minister of the country, the valve still wasn't turned for another 7.5 hours. From a resourcefulness standpoint, I question why there wasn't enough electrical power to actuate a valve, and from a human standpoint, why there wasn't enough bravery to send someone to do the essential job, certainly involving a far lower radiation dose than is accepted willingly by astronauts who go to the International Space Station, when the safety of their country is not on the line.

> the Soviet Union mobilized 500,000-750,000 people

It's normal for Soviet Union and modern Russia, they don't care about people in general, just use them. Conflicts in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria shows it pretty well too.

IMO the US would and could respond this quickly via the military. Coordination between branches, Army Core of Engineers, etc.

It’s one of the reasons that I’m a firm believer that the US Navy should be the primary operators of government funded nuclear facilities.

Wasn't the US military responsible for the shoddy levies that contributed to the Hurricane Katrina disaster?

It also has repeatably failed to stabilize several middle eastern countries - In about a year, adults born after the start of the Afghanistan war will be eligible to serve in it.

And on the "cyber" front it repeatedly gets caught flat-footed by smaller, less funded operations in Russia and China and has to go to congress, hat-in-hand, asking for more money while the cyber command budget is already 10x the rest of the globe's.

If you think that's bad, just wait till you see what private industry is doing for the government.

It's time to come to terms with the fact that we're bad at doing hard things.

Did land person on moon. Do have world's biggest tech companies / Vertical landing rockets / AI leadership etc. Doesn't sound like we are bad at hard things although we do have our fair share of screw ups.

Landed on the moon, ok that one was hard. But let’s get realistic here. There are events like the Manhattan Project, the Operation Overlord/D-Day landings, the Apollo missions, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl... these are the things that required coordination and cooperation across tens to hundreds of thousands of humans, organised into hundreds of subgroups responsible for aspects of the overall outcome in complex interdependent ways... these are significant human achievements.

And then there’s things like Google, Amazon, SpaceX and Microsoft, these are for the most part companies driven by money. Either the accumulation of it for a secondary goal (SpaceX needs money to pay for a mars colony), or the accumulation of it as the primary goal (Microsoft has a quarterly earnings target to hit)

Comparing across these two categories feels horribly unfair to the people who aren’t in it for the money. The astronauts, the soldiers, the scientists and the liquidators (a term for the people involved in the Chernobyl cleanup)... this isn’t to say the achievements of today’s companies are nothing, just that these two categories are driven by two tremendously distinct drives and comparing the results directly as though 100% equivalent feels inappropriate.

Working on AI, search, IT security, etc. is currently lucrative, but a lot of people do it because they are interested in it.

That's pretty far from the heroics of going over or under an actively melting open reactor core, but also far from doing it for the money.

It’s also responsible for the flawless operation of multiple mobile nuclear reactors.

I didn’t say the military would be good at everything, but when you need massive coordinated response to an emergency, the military is the absolute best equipped to do it from a capability and coordination standpoint.

They already do tons of work for major mobile disaster relief.

The self-inflicted ... sigh

Btw japan

It’s not luck that made it happen there. It happened in the USSR because that same authoritarian state couldn’t be bothered to build safe reactors.

> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else.

Its a mixed bag, while that might be true its important also to remember that kind of accident could have really only occurred in the USSR. Western countries simply couldnt muster the political support to build reactors with that lack of concern for safety, or those kind of design flams. The USSR? No problem.

Just wow to think they build power reactors without even a containment structure.

That is naive, the western countries had their share of failures. For example, the UK officials pushed hard on becoming part of the big boys club in 1950's and this resulted in relaxed safety and resulting disaster in Windscale. The politicians didn't care or know too much about safety even in this western country.

Windscale was bad but it was at least three orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl in terms of radiation release.

Cockcroft had also insisted that the chimneys at Windscale be fitted with expensive scrubbing equipment, which everyone thought was idiotic until the fire. Not exactly "relaxed safety" there.

One dude insisting on one safety measure being added to a catastrophically stupid and unsafe design, while being resisted by everyone else, is very much within the realm of “relaxed safety.” In fact, I’d say that’s a rather mild and understated way to describe it. “Utterly negligent on safety” would be more accurate.

I agree with your sentiments. Though the system had major flaws that allowed the disaster to occur, the unchainable heroism of the men and women on the ground is absolutely astonishing. If anything, this event showcases that the people of the former USSR exemplify qualities that all humans hold dear: self-sacrifice, courage, intelligence, alactrity. Despite the Soviet system of that era, these people fought for all citizens of the Earth, and especially for the lives of their 'enemies'. If there are silver linings in the diaster (and there a quite a few), one of them is that even the most average person of a repressive regime has incredible heroism baked into their bones. Those people are the same heroes of myths and all humans are now comming to recognize their sacrifice for us all.

EDIT: The medal awarded for participation in the clean-up can be seen in the below link. The page has more information on it that details the many pecularities of this medal and it's true uniqueness in world history (hopefully forever). Wikipedia has a good overview of the liquidators and their efforts and their subsequent lives. I've also included the wiki article on the Fukushima 50.

Aside: Though nuclear power is, to me, a God-send for human energy woes, I cannot look away from the horrible cost that these heroes paid for our energy future. Nuclear power plants must be considered after a careful reading of the liquidator's sacfifices to determine the depths of risk to our neighbors and ourselves. Though deaths per thousand may be less overall, we should soberly study those deaths and decide if we want to risk that sort of trade-off.

http://collectinghistory.net/chernobyl/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50

Well, they showed only very mildly bad stuff about the Soviet Union. It was much worse than that. Millions of people were affected, not just in Pripyat. They were kept in the dark, they were not allowed to take vacations, they were lied to about being affected and were exposed to huge levels of radiation. Medication became immediately unavailable. Train tickets to leave were impossible to buy. There was a lot of disregard towards personal protection and anything related to human life. In Kiev grass on the ground was extremely dangerous, but that's a lot of people, so they were focusing on preventing panic at any cost, not helping people.

> There are few (if any) societies in history that could have done what the Soviet Union did in response to Chernobyl.

I completely disagree. Soviet Union handled the Chernobyl disaster very poorly. It's too bad the show gave you the opposite impression.

"They built the enormous containment structure in just a few months, arguably the greatest feat of civil engineering in history" Slow down Igor have you not seen the B2 stealth bomber that at 172 ft long has a radar signature of a bumblebee, the Us highway system or the Hoover dam, which used so much concrete that it is still curing to this day 83 years later and hot to the touch. While the dome of Chernobyl and the bravery of the Russian clean up workers is admirable, As someone who has seen some of the worlds best feats of engineering and is an actually engineer I think you are getting ahead of your self with that statement.

plus the fact that the "enormous containment structure" had to be rebuilt twice in under twenty five years, speaks to its flawed design and the soviets lack on engineering know how

I came across this yesterday but wasn't sure what to make of it.

I have no prior for themoscowtimes.com. When I googled for corroboration (as a non-Russian speaker) all I found was blogspam citing this article.

It gives me pause because, as reported, it seems almost comically reactionary. "We're going to make our own Chernobyl show but with CIA saboteurs because some historians don't say it didn't happen." From the article:

> Still, an attempt will be made to put an entirely different spin on those events. Russia’s NTV channel has already announced that it is shooting its own “Chernobyl” series based on the premise that the CIA sent an agent to the Chernobyl zone to carry out acts of sabotage.

Can someone with access to Russian media corroborate this or provide insight?

This new series by NTV is widely discussed news here and completely true. Also, The Moscow Times is a newspaper that, I believe, dates back to at least the 90s.

What does the public think of the show there?

Everyone I talked to absolutely loved it. It's a common theme on Russian twitter (which is mostly anti-government, pro-western, pro-LGBT, as opposed to general population of the country) that the show is awesome and the fact that it was filmed in UK and never could've been filmed in Russia is a testament to the state of our cinema.

Also, set design is stunningly truthful to the soviet era, I've seen quite a few comments after the first episodes about how familiar it looks, and can testify so myself. Also, the Kremlin corridors look exactly like they did in reality, despite some critics. The only thing, sometimes the apartments and material things look a little bit too nice for the era, may be.

It was actually filmed in Lithuania. They are real soviet era apartments, just retrofitted and those with a sharp eye noticed plastic windows, etc.

While it doesn't look like anyone else interviewed Alexei Muradov, number of reputable western publications (not blogspam) seem to have taken this source seriously and are citing it. Washington Post did verify by way of Hollywood Reporter that it seems to be happening.

"The series was commissioned by NTV, a top free-to-air network, owned by Gazprom Media, the media arm of the natural gas giant Gazprom. It was partially financed by the culture ministry, which provided 30 million rubles ($460,000). The total budget has not been made public."

That number is not something the Moscow Times reported on, so it looks like corroboration: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/russia-making-own-tv-...

Additionally, this claim makes it seem they hurried to catch up - "Principal photography was done last year in neighboring Belarus and the series is currently in postproduction."

number of reputable western publications (not blogspam) seem to have taken this source seriously and are citing it

These days, I don't think that's enough of a guarantee.

Indeed. We can't tell if this is genuine because while it is sadly plausible it might also be a troll, and we don't have a media competent enough to detect the difference or credible enough to believe either way.

Thankfully it doesn't matter; if there really is going to be a Russian version of Chernobyl it will be awful and everyone except the inveterate whataboutists will point and laugh. That is a metaphysical certitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_Times

moscowtimes is tabloid level. i don't imagine even 1% of the article is true. it's anti-putin fake news

This article is blatant advertising for this show. 'Hacker' 'news' fell for the bait.

How ironic. The main theme of the Chernobyl mini-series is that lies do not only not make things better, they exacerbate them. Now, in order to fix PR "fallout" there's another "lie" emanating from almost the same source - Kremlin and surroundings. As the lessons of history teach us - this does not work. This "blockbuster" will obviously not be seen at a level comparable to HBO's mini-series. But even those who might see, will most likely see it for what it is - attempt to cover-up and put up a good facade in front of a disaster. It is almost unbelievable that Craig Mazin captured this essence - "the nation that is scared of humiliation will humiliate itself".

I know that it's most likely a PR stunt, and there's probably not going to be any movie made, and the money grant from the government will be gone and not accounted for, and yet. And yet. How ironic that in attempt to whitewash the national disaster portrayed in this mini-series, Russia is doing what has been presented in this show as a main cause of the Chernobyl incident.

I loved the show but in case you missed it this was a very eye opening take that seems genuine.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-cher...

Just read this a few hours ago, is there any other published information for corroboration?

From what I gather from the New Yorker piece, this mini-series is ok as long as one takes into consideration that it's a historical drama, not documentary?

On the technical/nuclear side, there's a strong critique here [1]. They really embellished on the characterization of the health impacts. For instance, in the epilogue they said: "Between 4,000 and 93,000 people died" where the correct statement is "A large international team of expert scientists estimated that up to 4,000 people will eventually die from early cancers on top of a population where millions would have without the accident, and a fringe group of anti-nuclear people said 93,000 without basis."

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06...

> fringe group of anti-nuclear people said 93,000 without basis

This is the line being pushed by pro-nuclear people every time this show comes up on social media. Thankfully we have better sources than a random person's blog on Forbes!

Let's take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

"an April 2006 special report in the peer-reviewed, scientific journal Nature detailed in response—the accuracy and precision of this United Nations-led joint group's projected death toll of 4,000 were immediately contested, with several of the very scientists, physicians, and biomedical consortia whose work the joint group had cited alleging publicly that the joint group had either misrepresented their work or interpreted it out of context"

"By 2016, some Ukranian and Belarussian physicians charged with treating large numbers of former liquidators in the decades since the accident were calling for more comprehensive studies and urging that the IAEA's estimated toll of disaster-related deaths from long-latency diseases be revised upwards"

Uh huh. From one of the guys who says 93,000:

"Grodzinsky says low-dose radiation causes genomic instability, which induces mutations in affected cells that can only be detected after they have divided several times. The damage inflicted on the victim's DNA is then passed to their children, thus explaining the health problems suffered by liquidators' families." [1]

This is without basis. Many studies have failed to find any real support for this kind of conclusion. For instance [2]. Many people in the area THINK more people must have died from Chernobyl. Problem is, there isn't strong evidence for it.

Also from [1]:

Not all experts from the region are critical of the Chernobyl Forum's findings. Viktor Opekunov, chairman of the atomic energy subcommittee of the Russian State Duma, told an interviewer earlier this month: “These are serious specialists who can be trusted and I consider that the conclusions made by the Chernobyl Forum reflect reality.”

Members of the Forum's research team have defended its findings in the run up to the anniversary, saying it could not allow health effects to be attributed to Chernobyl without scientific evidence of a link.

Yury Sayenko, a professor from the Institute of Sociology of Ukraine's Academy of Sciences, says he agreed with the report's finding that the mental health impact of the disaster was greatest of all.

“There has been a cult of suffering around Chernobyl”, he says. “Our research show victims' subjective assessment of their circumstance is usually twice as bad as the reality. We need to help them recover their hopes for the future.”

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104294

There is a long series of photos and text after the final episode that explains most of the fictionalized parts of the series and the real life outcome for most of the major players. IMHO the New Yorker piece has the perspective of a Soviet history expert who is extremely unhappy that their version of what is important to be shown was not shown or not accurately portrayed, watch Chernobyl for entertainment and a little enlightenment, but not for 100% fidelity to history. I can give a small example of what people complained about (spoiler like New Yorker piece). A helicopter crash in the TV series for which one can also view the historical footage - the historical footage is inexplicable - there's no obvious reason for it to happen but the TV show changes it so it has visible, plausible reasons to the viewer.

In each case the helicopter crashes when a rotor blade strikes a heavy crane cable.

Yes, but an attempt at brevity in my post and to not spoil too much - the history shows the copter in clear skies and strikes, to an outside observer ignorant of all the facts, easily avoidable (crane with ) cable, where the show introduces a smoke cloud and talks about the radiation danger and has the comm equipment start to fail as the copter gets closer to the smoke, telling a slightly different but more complete story than just viewing the historical footage.

There's an accompanying podcast with the writer that's excellent and goes into great depth on some of these decisions "the cheronbyl podcast"

The budget and format of the series required this kind of concentration of information in the form of the single scientist and the "villains." Anybody with 10th grade reading comprehension can see these as literary devices. I walked away with a clear understanding that the Soviet system was to blame, that was expressed clearly. The "villains" were simply artistic manifestations of the overall system. The author of this piece is being pedantic.

I have a problem that it fictionalised what it was claiming to criticise. Did soldiers point guns at miners? No. Did a soldier frog march Anatoly Sitnikov to the roof of the reactor? No. Was the minister of mining some weasly beurocrat ignorant of mining? No he was an ex-miner.

I do have a problem where the important reality of how the scientic problems were solved by a large team working together is reshaped into single superwoman who works weekends and sleeps at her desk in a continuation of our bullshit work myths. How teams work successfully is much more valuable thing to dramatically explore.

And ultimately, I am skeptical about the popular framing that this was a "could only happen to Soviets" disaster. Western governments/companies have lengthy history of suppressing profound chemical disasters causing mass cancers (tobacco, roundup etc.), suppressing information about known safety problems allowing more people to die (Boeing), putting a brave face on a crisis using their own family (BSE and John Gummer) and being slow/callous about the health of civilians in a crisis response (Katrina) and suffering nuclear safety accidents due to contravening procedures e.g. Los Alamos is being shutdown due to it's poor safety culture.

I see the root causes as fundamentally human and not unique to the Soviet system but people are not taking that message. Instead it's being used to stir up anti-Soviet sentiment in the current and absurd Cold War II that we are currently brewing. Sigh.

That said, great series, loved it!

> And ultimately, I am skeptical about the popular framing that this was a "could only happen to Soviets" disaster.

No doubt that callousness towards humanity abounds throughout the world, and of course in the US and the rest of the west. Soviet/Russian socioeconomics are so fascinating because they are a superpower on a budget. Callousness + shoddiness + scale, in my eyes, make this disaster uniquely Soviet. While your examples show profound inhumanity, their scale pales compared to Chernobyl.

I agree the clean-up is stunning in scale but in terms of the causes then I only see a regularly repeating pattern. The China Syndrome maps out quite nicely how it would happen in a commercial reactor i.e. pressure to not report problems leading to falsifying safety reports leading to potential critical situations. Commercial companies often have existential pressure to cut costs to meet goals leading to safety violations and it happens all the time PG&E, South West, PCA... it's an endless list.

I thought the show was brilliant. Nightmarish, and hard to stop thinking about. One of my first jobs was working on presentation materials for a book on Chernobyl. This was quite some time ago, but the photos and the story have always stuck with me. What I didn’t really grasp until watching the show was how strong a case could be made that (despite the common narratives) Chernobyl was the real catalyst for the fall of the USSR. Epic, expensive, embarrassing, disaster only a short time before the fall.

I was fine with the creative liberties the show takes. You have to. Otherwise you should just have people read five books on the subject. But books don’t reach as many people and television is a strong medium in its own right. A lot of the criticism feels like “the book was better than the movie” arguments. For the most well rounded impression of actual events, do both! Read the books, and watch the drama.

But keep in mind that humans are driven by stories and narrative. The “official” events are a narrative, as is the reporting, the opinion columns, and yes, the show too.

I watched episode 1 out of curiosity. The first minutes tapped into my half life nostalgia so I was happy. But then I couldn't bear the fact that this is no novel, people did have to deal with these events for real.

Yeah right. I think, it also has an atmosphere of the Alien movie. Yet, it is a depiction of real events, and that reality is so overwhelming.. I think, I wish they make a similar movie about people in World War II.

One thing that surprised me as I watched the show, is that it really didn't have a single antagonist, or a consciously evil act by anyone depicted - the evil that lead to the accident was always in the design of the system itself, not in any particular person. Everyone making decisions, even the worst ones, was working with information he had on hand, with assumptions and logic he was taught as gospel from very young age.

It's very unusual to see a western show that would so truthfully depict a societal story, instead of slipping to the usual level of character-driven drama.

>It's very unusual to see a western show that would so truthfully depict a societal story