Ten times Chernobyl television series lets artistic licence get in way of facts
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
On the helicopter crash, if you look again at the scene they do show the helicopter hitting a crane cable. It is implied the pilot lost control due to radiation exposure but that is never stated. I have no problem with them moving the incident from later on to when they did, that’s just artistic license.
On the volunteers that went in to drain the tanks, we know now they received survivable radiation doses, but there would have been no way to be sure of that before hand. I have no problem at all with how this was dramatised.
With the mining to cool the core being unnecessary in the end, they say in the show there was something like a 50% chance this was unnecessary. I think this is one of the things they point out at the end of the last episode, but that’s just going on memory. No problem with this.
On treating the exposed firemen and plant workers as hazardous, this actually happened. It may not have been medically justifiable, but people were kept away from them on the basis there may be risks of exposure. Also the loss of the baby is never explicitly blamed on radiation, they just say some people believed it. That’s probably true.
Most importantly IMHO they make it perfectly, explicitly clear in the show that the risk of a follow up explosion was a thermal steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion. The fear was that the molten core would burn down into water tanks, leading to a massive steam explosion, blasting radioactive material over a very wide area. This was a genuine concern at the time, and if it had happened could very well have had the consequences they describe in the show. Conversations much like the ones portrayed about this did happen. This criticism is completely unfair.