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Chernobyl HBO


TwiceHorn

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I’m always curious when film and other media come out that depict another country in a bad light how it’s viewed by those other countries. 

In this case it’s HBO which I don’t believe is available in Russia outside of maybe online viewing with a VPN or something.

Does this actually open any eyes there, or is it viewed as false propaganda? Does Putin murder those that try to broadcast it?

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9 hours ago, AUS-97HORN said:

what the FUCK?

 

is this sarcasm and i'm missing it?

Other than about 5 years from 1996-2001, Russia has been the bad guy since 1946.  And lets not forget this isnt some bullshit story about how the Soviets "were bad"  These guys literally tried to hide a nuclear meltdown accident from the rest of the world for more than 3 days

They only finally came "slightly" clean when almost every fucking country in Western Europe detected significantly higher radiation in the atmosphere from the westerly wind coming from the Ukraine region of Russia, and they couldnt deny it anymore.

 

and even then they never acknowledged the seriousness of the accident, and they refused international help because the Soviet Union didnt need help from the Imperialist West

You are kinda leaving out 1918 to 1946.  1940-1945 they were still the enemy, just also the enemy of my enemy.  That whole communist world domination was a thing until Stalin took over, and remained so until the war, and he was a bit problematic himself.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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13 hours ago, Eskimohorn said:

 


Dude MTV has Lindsay Lohan’s beach club. What are you wasting time on this show?

 

Yuri’s dead.  No, he’s not dead.  He is just sleeping.   That pretty much sums it up.

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18 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

What boggles me a bit, particularly with respect to the committee, who presumably came from outside the reactor complex, is how they didn't notice everything was blown to shit, and the control room people wait until the end of the episode to have anyone check it from the outside.

I’ve read some accounts of the event and I think it was a combination of ignorance and hubris.

they didnt believe this type of reactor could/would blow like that, at least without warning. The graphite on the ground with the round - cylinder shaped orifice was a damper for the rods/reaction.  The fact that it was on the ground was the nuclear equivalent to finding your intel processor laying on the ground 10 feet from your computer.  It should alarm you and clearly it’s bad broken, but it’s so far from the norm that it doesn’t register - the whole fucking thing blew up.

as I understand it there were 4 reactors in line there and we’re lucky only 1 went.

 I read that the first public knowledge of an event was at a Swedish reactor where all the alarms went off.  The engineers all freaked out thinking they had a problem - they didn’t - it was radiation from blown dust all the way from fucking Ukraine. 

im glad this story is being told.

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9 minutes ago, CoTex said:

I read that the first public knowledge of an event was at a Swedish reactor where all the alarms went off.  The engineers all freaked out thinking they had a problem - they didn’t - it was radiation from blown dust all the way from fucking Ukraine. 

Quote

In the morning of 28 April, radiation levels set off alarms at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden, over 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from the Chernobyl Plant. Workers at Forsmark reported the case to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, which determined that the radiation had originated elsewhere. That day, the Swedish government contacted the Soviet government to inquire about whether there had been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. The Soviet government initially denied it, and it was only after the Swedish government suggested they were about to file an official alert with the IAEA, that the Soviet government admitted an accident took place at Chernobyl.

Wiki link

Fuck that whole country.  (Russia, not Sweden.)

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By the end of the episode I was chuckling at that one Ruskie who was in complete denial. “Sir, the core is gone! It exploded!”
“Ok, but how is the core? Were you able to operate the controls?”
“Um sir it fucking exploded. It’s a giant hole in the ground. Also I touched a piece of debris and my hand fell off.”
“Gotcha. Reading you loud and clear. The core is fine.”

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20 hours ago, Red Five said:

By the end of the episode I was chuckling at that one Ruskie who was in complete denial. “Sir, the core is gone! It exploded!”
“Ok, but how is the core? Were you able to operate the controls?”
“Um sir it fucking exploded. It’s a giant hole in the ground. Also I touched a piece of debris and my hand fell off.”
“Gotcha. Reading you loud and clear. The core is fine.”

Yep just staring at him. You are mistaken, that can't happen. Go verify and die

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13 minutes ago, Zepol87 said:

Yep just staring at him. You are mistaken, that can't happen. Go verify and die

And then after observing the damage from the roof he stares back at the soldier who escorted him with his face showing signs of acute radiation syndrome and the look of "I told you fuckfaces this was bad."

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In terms of the committee, it’s important to remember that a lot of these people are being chosen off of party loyalty and corruption. It’s not exactly implausible that there were incompetent dickheads that tow the party line on it. 

In terms of the core, the reactor design had significant flaws that most hadn’t thought of or were aware of. There were multiple, multiple mistakes that lead to the steam explosion inside the core. They didn’t follow the test plan the site engineer designed, they had turned off multiple safety systems, they were manually operating the control rods, etc. The study of what went wrong at Chernobyl lead to most of the modern nuclear safety protocols and guidelines.

Edited by Schulz2.0
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1 hour ago, Schulz2.0 said:

In terms of the committee, it’s important to remember that a lot of these people are being chosen off of party loyalty and corruption. It’s not exactly implausible that there were incompetent dickheads that tow the party line on it. 

In terms of the core, the reactor design had significant flaws that most hadn’t thought of or were aware of. There were multiple, multiple mistakes that lead to the steam explosion inside the core. They didn’t follow the test plan the site engineer designed, they had turned off multiple safety systems, they were manually operating the control rods, etc. The study of what went wrong at Chernobyl lead to most of the modern nuclear safety protocols and guidelines.

 

I read a really long summary of the subsequent investigations and even the limited amount I was able to understand really left one amazed at the cascade of WTF problems in so many contexts.

It can happen anywhere/anytime.  It never occurred to anyone to ask "what if there's a spark" in the Apollo 1 capsule with a pure oxygen atmosphere.

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What's nuts is that as bad as this was, it could have been so much worse if the meltdown had hit all that water below it and caused another, even bigger, explosion.  We're talking the whole of Europe being highly irradiated.  And to solve that problem they just marched a bunch of dudes to their death. 

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On 5/8/2019 at 9:48 AM, Patricio Swayze said:

Horn80 doesn’t think it is action packed and is hell bent on letting us know! Fuck yeah. All we need now is derka to tell us how darkly lit the whole thing is and that in the real world there lightbulbs.

Yes, such drama.  Yawn.

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In terms of the committee, it’s important to remember that a lot of these people are being chosen off of party loyalty and corruption. It’s not exactly implausible that there were incompetent dickheads that tow the party line on it. 
In terms of the core, the reactor design had significant flaws that most hadn’t thought of or were aware of. There were multiple, multiple mistakes that lead to the steam explosion inside the core. They didn’t follow the test plan the site engineer designed, they had turned off multiple safety systems, they were manually operating the control rods, etc. The study of what went wrong at Chernobyl lead to most of the modern nuclear safety protocols and guidelines.

Yep. My bad for forgetting that.

Horn80 stfu
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On 5/7/2019 at 4:42 AM, SpiralOut said:

That one radiation engineer that they forced to go up to the roof?  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that.  I'd be telling them to feed me a bullet because that's a hell of a lot better than spending the next several days melting into goo in agonizing pain.

I figured for sure he was just gonna turn around right there at the edge, flip off the guard and step off.  That's when I knew the whole thing was all a Russian lie.

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18 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Welp, Russia still operates RBMK reactors all over the place with only minor improvements, while Three Mile Island is being shut down.  https://www.npr.org/2019/05/08/721514875/three-mile-island-nuclear-plant-to-close-latest-symbol-of-struggling-industry

I wouldn’t say the RBMK improvements were minor. They removed the graphite tips from the bottom of the control rods. They increased the speed of the control rods. Chernobyl’s reactor #4 was scrammed seconds into the power transient that caused the issue. The control rods were so slow (a full scram would have taken 7-8 seconds due to the height they had withdrawn the control rods) that it didn’t stop it. Safety systems (like the emergency core cooling system testing they were doing) were corrected or implemented. Another big issue was general training and understanding of the plant systems and how they effect the plant/reactor. A big overhaul in training programs was implemented after this.

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5 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

I wouldn’t say the RBMK improvements were minor. They removed the graphite tips from the bottom of the control rods. They increased the speed of the control rods. Chernobyl’s reactor #4 was scrammed seconds into the power transient that caused the issue. The control rods were so slow (a full scram would have taken 7-8 seconds due to the height they had withdrawn the control rods) that it didn’t stop it. Safety systems (like the emergency core cooling system testing they were doing) were corrected or implemented. Another big issue was general training and understanding of the plant systems and how they effect the plant/reactor. A big overhaul in training programs was implemented after this.

All true, but the design lacks containment, and remains a high-void design, which is why it's so susceptible to overheating in the first place.  By western standards, the improved RBMK is still a stationary nuclear weapon.

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32 minutes ago, bschoolprof said:

I’m not sure I can make it through this 1st episode. It’s more upsetting than any horror movie. 

I have a horrible fear of radiation poisoning. I blame the Cold War and that Spock  scene from Star Trek. 

Just duck and cover.

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I made it through, but that was rough. Never knew the Russians all had Brit accents. 

 

Would you have them speaking Russian with English subtitles or are you just used to Russians speaking with Russian accents in English for some reason?

 

This is an English-language production. Why wouldn’t they being speaking their language perfectly amongst each other?

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I think it's pretty standard for foreigners to have British-ish accents when speaking English instead of subtitled native language. It's the Sean Connery rule.

Plus this was made by Sky UK, so it's gonna be British.

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Loved the first episode. Thought it did a great job of showing the general disbelief that the reactor could have blown, as well as the environment that discouraged any truthful reporting of the incident. Only critique is I wish they would have spent a little time setting up the ill-fated safety test and explained what they were trying to do versus what happened. I realize the writer's intention was just to throw the audience in the middle of it all and try to escalate the sense of confusion, but a little more background would have been nice.

I highly recommend "Midnight in Chernobyl." I finished it a couple of weeks before the miniseries came out, and it made me appreciate the show more. Episode one, at least. Does a great job of explaining both the political atmosphere and the nuclear reactor design in layman's terms, and it's a pretty quick read.

 

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Edited by PokerFace
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