Top UCLA Doctor Denounces HBO's “Chernobyl” as Wrong and “Dangerous”
forbes.com
forbes.com
... which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show?
Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.
are you kidding? always
edit: making this comment, in response to the person to whom i'm responding to's disbelief made me realize something: it's a really silly thing to sit around and think you're above being influenced by narrative. how much of our indignation at others' naivete is simply privilege? if i couldn't afford a doctor, to whom i could outsource the cognitive burden of figuring it out, i would probably believe all sorts of things about health that had been suggested to me by way of narrative.
edit2: it's fun to watch the score on this comment. up down up down. on the one hand it's glib and snarky - HN loves that - but on the other hand it implicates privilege - HN hates that. i probably should've used a word different from privilege but i can't think of one that wouldn't trigger people just as hard.
I’ve seen this pseudo ad-hom rolled out every time one of his articles comes up on HN. Is he really a nuclear lobbyist? Does that make anything he is saying not factual? Can we engage with the facts of the article rather than just attack the author?
In this case it’s an article about what a doctor who treated some of the Chernobyl patients is saying. Is that a lie? Is he not a doctor who treated the Chernobyl patients?
> which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show?
That’s probably how a majority of people learn things especially about topics they otherwise would never engage in or dig deeper on such as the true details of a nuclear accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger
> Does that make anything he is saying not factual?
it's a smell test - burden of proof goes up
This label “lobbyist” gets used to malign people and cast aside anything they might have to say a lot. It’s usually only used against those which are promoting an idea that someone already disagrees with. So for example an anti-nuclear but pro-wind power person will throw out a “he’s a lobbyist” label to an article by this guy then ignore what he’s saying. But without any irony completely lap up something written by a wind-power producer who makes money selling wind turbines or similar.
If the guy writing this is a lobbyist because he is making the case for nuclear, and thus we must disregard him, then anyone making the case for anything is de facto a lobbyist and we should disregard everything.
I would much rather see people actually try to refute or counter the facts and claims this author presents, but that almost never happens which leads me to believe the only way people have to rebut him is the ad-hom route as the person I replied to did: label him with that despised “lobbyist” word so people tune out.
wrong question. right question: does he have a vested interest misrepresenting the position?
if i own a burger king franchise i'm not a beef lobbyist but i do have a vested interest in misrepresenting the facts on beef farming.
“Another error [in HBO’s “Chernobyl”] was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive,” UCLA’s Robert Gale wrote in “The Cancer Letter,” a subscription-based newsletter.
Gale, who worked for UCLA at the time of the accident, says that the firefighters who suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome were not contagious, as they are portrayed as by HBO's "Chernobyl."
Gale criticizes the portrayal in “Chernobyl” of a baby’s death supposedly from “absorbing” deadly amounts of radiation from her dying father, a firefighter who helped put out the blaze.
“Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room,” writes Gale.
If you read further down, it's apparent that, yes, the guy is clearly pro-nuclear. But his criticisms are on specific matters of fact surrounding radiation poisoning.
This is typical Shellenberger. We are not given any context for the quotes, nor indeed do we even have a reference to the letter itself, to whom it was written, to what it was responding, nor any offsetting quotes that Gale may have made. Why, for instance, are we reading Shellenberger's excerpts of the letter rather than the letter itself?
Shellenberger is a frequently repeating offender at cherry-picking and slanted presentation. Just because an isolated fact may be true, in isolation, does not make the re-contextualization and presentation as an ensemble of facts a "truth". It is entirely possible to assemble a bunch of true quotes together in a manner intended to mislead, or even outright lie.
In this case, the ensemble is presented as a context in which Shellenberger, taken together with his past writing, is trying to convey that Chernobyl wasn't a serious accident, no one should use it as a reason for concern, and anyone talking about it is either uninformed or biased about nuclear power. None of that is true in the larger sense.
Other then that, yes people are influenced by narratives in stories and often take them as broadly "that sort of thing happened". That does not mean this particular dude is about to tell truth, but nevertheless fact checking of fiction is cool and good thing when it happens.
And to me that's actually the best argument against nuclear reactors being "safe". We may have better technology, but we don't have better people or organizations, not really. To the victims, it does not matter whether the mismanagement was due to political careerism, greed and corner-cutting, or just laziness.
For an example look at what can happen without any external event in the nation that invented Six-Sigma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_...
For comparison, two miners for coal die every hour. Similar for bauxite. More for diamond, gold and tantalum. Not even counting residual deaths attributable to pollution.
To get upset that they didn't make a 'debunking Chernobyl' documentary is to miss the entire point of the series.
They did a pretty awful job then. Or that wasn't the point and they actually wanted to entertain viewers.
The fact that the author of the article is part of a pro-nuclear lobbying group doesn't automatically contradict or discredit the opinions of the doctor that's featured in the article. They come from the actual guy who was there for real to treat the people.
This should be common knowledge, but almost no one knows it.
this is a serious question, which of course ties into the concept of "banana equivalent dose", which helps to contextualize claims about radioactivity.
The constant refrain of 'but coal ..' from nuclear advocates is just an admission that nuclear power is un-economic and unable to compete in the marketplace against the best options.
Wind is intermittent. Solar is too (with the exception of solar thermal). Nuclear is, was, and always will be about base load the same as coal.
For more, "There is No One Energy Solution", https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/there-is-no-on...
In my market (Texas/ERCOT) there is no separate market for "firm" power. You either run or you don't on an every-15-minutes basis. You are either a price "taker", or a price "maker". In this market the NPPs are always, always, price "takers". They absolutely compete with the price makers, which are always either wind, solar, or most commonly, natural gas.
Coal is always a price "taker" in this market as well.
Whether a generator is a "taker" or "maker" in terms of pricing is a function of the economic impact to it of not running in a given bid segment, and its ability to compete in the bidding for the "last MW" of the bid-price stack.
Large thermal plants like NPPs rely very much on the economics of being able to get premium pricing for every single minute of the day and night. In a competetive market they can't do that, because gas/wind/solar can under-price them by very large margins. So the NPPs become un-economic to run (if already running), and very much un-fundable to build as new capacity. The same market force applies to coal.
You are essentially using Shellenberger-provided articles as proof that Shellenberger isn't a con artist. It's all bunk. Top to bottom, same game plan.
Nuclear is still the lesser of the two evils compared to coal and oil, which are very much the only other option in many cases.
Germany did not stop using nuclear power, it started phasing it out (which had actually been planned long before Fukushima), and has not been producing more pollution because it has in fact been replacing coal and gas as well as nuclear with renewable sources: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
2002 2018
Total 503 545
Coal+Oil 253 205
Nuclear 156 72
Gas 40 44
Biomass 4 45
Wind+Solar+Hydro 39 177
Other 10 3Coal declined by 48 TWh
Gas increased by 4 TWh.
Nuclear declined by 84 TWh.
Renewables picked up the slack by adding 130 TWh of generation.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
Coal deaths per energy: ~ 100k / PWh
Coal consumption per year: > 40 PWh
Coal deaths per year: >4M
Chernobyl death estimates: 4k to 93k
Which gives 4M / 93k = 43 Chernobyls per year to catch up with coal (best case estimates).
- I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous.
- Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell.
- If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented an there are photos.
- Regarding the Ignatenko's claim that the foetus had somehow protected her from radiactivity by absorbing it, personally I never interpreted it as a statement that the show was claiming as true. I saw it as the character's own interpretation. The show portrays different characters with various degrees of ignorance, and no one in the show portrayed as knowledgeable defends that theory.
- There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5
There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story.
That's the immediate death toll from radiation poisoning, not the total years lost as a result of radiation exposure. The article is correct to point out however that the total death toll must be much less than many other disasters and certainly not comparable to what people commonly believe about the death toll at chernobyl.
>>- Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell.
>> If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented and there are photos.
Those were firefighters who ingested radioactive products in the air. Normal human tissue cannot be induced to be become radioactive. I'm not surprised that they would quarantine a firefighter and bury his body in a metal casket but that doesn't apply to the majority of the victims of radiation poising by Chernobyl. The show at one point shows such a burial for liquidators who wouldn't have radioactive material in their body and is almost certainly ahistorical. The show never makes this clear.
>>- There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5
He was literally standing over a tank of radioactive material when the accident occurred thus explaining the extent of his skin damage. The radiation exposure for the firefighters wouldn't have caused them to suffer skin damage to the same extent and not in the way portrayed in the film. The ingested fission products would have harmed internal tissue before reaching the surface of the body. The show's portrayal of the first responder firefighters is almost entirely completely wrong.
>>There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story.
I disagree and I'm quite concerned about how the show mistakenly portrays the effects of radiation. At the very least they could explained how radiation works and why the firefighters had to quarantined but they never do anything like that. Instead, we hear dramatic warnings of a thermonuclear blast unless our heroes take immediate action which is completely nonsensical.
Being irradiated does not really make human tissue radioactive. You absorb the radiation particles, not the radioactive material emitting it. But ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the material through the skin will not only kill the person (from the inside), it will also make the remains dangerous enough to not want them seeping into the ground. Now the tissue carries around the radiation source. [0]
To use the bullet analogy from the series, what I said above is akin to being shot with bullets or ingesting a gun that's still firing. The first case might kill you, the second case will definitely kill you but it won't really kill others unless they plan on ingesting you, firing-gun and all.
Fear and panic caused more harm than the accident itself - including one million unnecessary abortions.
I think the danger implied is that it could happen again.
Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.
Depending on the person and how late term the pregnancy was, it can be both psychologically and physically harmful.
edit: Pregnancy and childbirth can also be psychologically and physically harmful so net harm is more difficult to talk about.
How is a killing of a person not considered harm?
(Unless, of course, you're some sort of extreme psycopath.)
If someone is covered by fallout without knowing it, they can be dangerously radioactive.
If they inhale or ingest the fallout they'll be much less radioactive, but they could still be dangerous to others if they've ingested an extreme and lethal dose.
Some radiotherapy treatments do in fact make patients slightly radioactive. Friends and family are advised to keep their distance for a few half-lives.
The show was not meant to be a PSA for or against nuclear power, it's a historical fiction and for that it is as accurate as it can be. The story is mostly about propaganda and lies.
[0]:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/apr/25/energy.u...
(Unlike clothing which actually retains some particles in the weave.)
Whether they were actually readioactive or not, people often assumed they are and acted accordingly.
I don't know what you are talking about with irradiated meat. I guess you mean it being disinfected with ionizing light or something? That would be profoundly different besides also having something to do with electromagnetic radiation.
If you somehow ingest something radioactive, you yourself would become a source of alpha, beta or gamma-radiation. This is what happened in Chernobyl. Particles were exploded all over the place.
If that is enough to have glowing kids is another question. But the fear isn't as irrational as claimed. Even if there might have been an overreaction. Or something classified as such as there actually were quite a few cases that suffered from the incident. It just seems not as bad as repercussion became gradually visible.
Chernobyl was the result of lies and deception. Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl.
People, Including the Doctor have taken it incorrectly in my humble opinion.
They even had a separate podcast where they discussed exactly this and more details related to the series in great detail. Look it up on Pocketcast or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts and you'll find it.
What led to Chernobyl is a reactor design flaw (could happen to anyone), and irresponsible behavior of the plant staff, who run the experiment against "the book".
Only the later probably is because of the culture-wide trait. The rest of it could have happened to anyone.
Though I do agree, that the show displays the need for open information through the lack of it in Soviet Union like nothing else.
First, I'm not sure you can claim that people working during the disaster would only suffer external exposure. There was a reactor core on fire, there was probably plenty of isotopes in the air that would have been breathed in and possibly taken up by the body.
Second, neither alpha, beta nor gamma reaction will induce any significant amount of radioactive in materials that are exposed to them. And under normal circumstances, that is all you would be exposed to. But this was, again, an exposed reactor core. There might very well have been a significant amount of neutron radiation present, which does in fact induce radioactivity.
So the claims of the article are way too strong for this very, very exceptional situation.
“Although the 31 immediate Chernobyl-related deaths are sad,” he concludes, “the number of fatalities is remarkably small compared with many energy-related accidents, such as the Benxihu coal mine disaster in China 1942, which killed about 1500 miners, and the 1975 Banqiao dam accident, also in China, which killed about 250,000 people.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties
The dam failure killed approx. 26,000 people, and 145,000 died as a result of subsequent epidemics and famine according to the official record.
While this was a very significant loss of life, inflating it to argue with other numbers you contest seems pretty shallow.
The first news anyone got was from Sweden a few days later.
Please, stop share fakes written by Michael Shellenberger[0] on HN!
[0] http://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/853/exposin...
This organization self-description[1] (emphasis added by me to highlight important phrases):
>> We publish the Nuclear Monitor, a unique international newsletter serving the worldwide movement against nuclear power. Produced 20 times per year, it gives an anti-nuclear perspective on what is happening in the nuclear power industry and the resistance against it.
An anti-nuclear activist group is an interesting choice to use as a reference...
1. Have people speak perfect English, thus letting the actors shine, and not have the viewers have to read subtitles.
2. Have really good British/American actors do a fake (and probably bad) Russian accent, just for funsies
3. Hire actual Ukrainian/Russian actors, and use subtitles all the way.
Option 2 just seems stupid to me, the characters didn't speak in a foreign accent, they spoke in their own. Between Option 1 and 3, I prefer 1.
Of course, I'm glossing over the fact that the actor playing Escobar didn't sound like he was from Colombia at all, but that's not apparent to most of us non-Spanish speakers.
It doesn't sound authentic in English, but its fine that they didn't speak in his native accent even though it wouldn't be authentic?
But Netflix probably wanted well known actors instead, and know lots of people dislike reading subtitles, so chose to use english, which is understandable in some ways. Myself I find documentary(-style) movies in the original language to be much more believable, and reading subtitles is a price well worth paying for e.g. "Der Untergang" and similar.
So are you saying only ukranians should be allowed to make movies about Chernobyl?
So Americans can only make historical movies about events in America and only Scandinavians can make movies about Vikings?
Fair point. But I'm sure there are better examples where a film was made by people from country A, and set in country B using actors that speak B-language for realism.
> So are you saying only ukranians should be allowed to make movies about Chernobyl?
"Be allowed" I didn't say. I said it's an opportunity for extra realism you choose to use or not.
> So Americans can only make historical movies about events in America and only Scandinavians can make movies about Vikings?
I'm 100% sure that if Scandinavians did a movie about historical USA it would be in english. But it's beside the point. Again: it's just a choice whether you think the added trouble of finding actors speaking a language and having your audience read subtitles is worth it for the added realism.
(I'm sure Netflix reasons the same way for some series set in a foreign country)
- The actors are British (with the exception of one main character who is Swedish and speaks with a Swedish accent) so it's easiest for them to just use their own accents.
- For whatever reasons, they didn't want to film it in Russian, with Russian actors and subtitles. And they felt that foreigners trying to feign Russian accents starts to get comical. So they made the decision to just let actors use their own accents (they also felt that American audiences wouldn't process it well if they used American accents).
- I watched the show and the accents are annoying for about ten minutes until you get used to them and cease to notice/care
See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheQueensLatin
You can watch that one and then watch the German version for comparison.
Absolutely the right move IMO.