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Chernobyl HBO


TwiceHorn

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How did she surmise that there was still water in the tanks? 


Because she rightly figured out the explosion had busted all the water pipes and that the fire hoses had been pumping water in the building for going on two days.

Thus draining down into the tanks and filling them - and all the structure around them with water.

And holy shit those divers. What a horrific way to die. I can’t imagine the panic.
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55 minutes ago, JOSEYWALES66 said:

How did she surmise that there was still water in the tanks? 

she said it herself, she knew that no matter which of the 4 reactors blew, the force of the reactor blowing would have ruptured every waterline in the whole plant, and the water had to go somewhere, so it was going to flow via gravity to the lowest point, which happened to be the "empty" holding tanks directly under the reactors. and since every pipe was broken, the water went into those tanks. 

 

I had heard about the scuba teams and what they had to do briefly, but I didnt realize it was so immediately after the accident.   I did read about the helicopter pilot  Anatoly Grishchenko who basically hovered over the reactor to make sure the sand and boron made it on top of the correct part of the reactor.

although I dont know enough about the accident to know if the world was really 72 hours away from a 4 megaton nuclear explosion.  

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5 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

 


Because she rightly figured out the explosion had busted all the water pipes and that the fire hoses had been pumping water in the building for going on two days.

Thus draining down into the tanks and filling them - and all the structure around them with water.

And holy shit those divers. What a horrific way to die. I can’t imagine the panic.

 

I think I read where someone managed to track them down and they lived.

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for me the frustrating part of watching the show is seeing how often the party members, who obviously had no fucking clue what they were doing, would immediately accepted the most minimal and 'safest" explanation, and then immediately turn on anyone who dared to say things were worse than that.

the idea that neither the Chief Engineer nor the Deputy Director of the plant had bothered to actually inspect the fire from anything other than a safe distance away while telling everyone else "all is well" is just mind blowing. 

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22 minutes ago, AUS-97HORN said:

for me the frustrating part of watching the show is seeing how often the party members, who obviously had no fucking clue what they were doing, would immediately accepted the most minimal and 'safest" explanation, and then immediately turn on anyone who dared to say things were worse than that.

the idea that neither the Chief Engineer nor the Deputy Director of the plant had bothered to actually inspect the fire from anything other than a safe distance away while telling everyone else "all is well" is just mind blowing. 

Yeah, it's frightening.  It's the specter of having total government/political control of everything.  You get Rick Perrys everywhere, and usually for life.

I'm reading Gorky Park, and it has a lot of side references to Soviet life at all levels.  We tend to forget that allegiance to whatever communo-socialist orthodoxy was de rigeur was an absolute daily feature of Soviet life:  and failure to do so could be hazardous to your health, or liberty.  There were no failures of the Soviet state, government, or people.  Ever.  There were only flaws introduced by capitalism.  Political commisar-types were everywhere and the final word on anything, no matter how illogical or counterfactual.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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This show is great. 

The scene with the scuba divers was tension x 1000.  I guess I should spoiler it. 

Spoiler

The poor guys are fucking lost in a radiation pool, while the Geiger counter is going nuts.  And then the flashlights go out?  I was gripping the edge of the couch.

Going back to the Geiger counter I understand why they added it, it really ratcheted the tension to the scene, but in reality they knew the radiation was off the charts before going in, they really didn't need them.  All it did was make them nervous and distracted.

 

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Don't really have a lot of substance to add but I'm going on the record as loving this show. Yeah, that's quite a limb to climb out on.

Like ChiTown, Chernobyl was such a mystery when it was going on and I distinctly remember being in high school and watching Peter Jennings report on those shitty black and white photos and blurry Soviet camera shots where it was just a smoking mass. Also, the graphics they would put up showing it spread across Europe.

Gotta be honest, a couple of years later when I was planning to become an exchange student it still made me a little nervous knowing I was going to be eating European farm products and livestock for a year.

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“We’ve compiled a list of individuals to hold accountable.”, or something like that, but it was a knee slapper when it happened.

Did a helicopter really go down after getting too close, or was that added for TV effect?

Yes. Wiki says the main rotor hit a construction crane and crashed near the reactor.
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3 hours ago, Texas_Rocks said:

“We’ve compiled a list of individuals to hold accountable.”, or something like that, but it was a knee slapper when it happened.

Did a helicopter really go down after getting too close, or was that added for TV effect?

Yea that was the first thing said. Crazy with all that going on that is what they were worried about.

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2 hours ago, Quagmire said:

always had interest in this since I was young .

I remember being scared shitless. First Three Mile Island, then this. I was calculating how far I was from the Comanche Peak kill zone.

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The estimates of the blast zone and the after effects had the fuel hit the water are almost incomprehensible. Entire nations devastated.

I’m pretty pro-nuclear power but the potential for disaster is chilling (no CR, I know they are built much differently these days).

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33 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

The estimates of the blast zone and the after effects had the fuel hit the water are almost incomprehensible. Entire nations devastated.

i found that terrifying, especially since they had like 50 hours or something to figure it out. i had no idea.

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I have a feeling that scene might become legendary. I’m gonna go back and watch it again. And they’re talking to Mikhail Fucking Gorbachev!

 

And MG is all like “Do you understand how bad this could be for our reputation?” and then Valery and Ulyana drop the serious knowledge on him. Oh, and we’re going to need to kill three people to have a chance at stopping this.

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Some of you are total pussies.  The UN can only directly link under 50 deaths to this event.   And this was fucking bad.  Some of you act like thousands (millions?)  have died from nuclear power.  That's just not the case.  We should be maxing out our nuclear power capability and reducing coal power.  

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2 minutes ago, HouTex said:

The UN can only directly link under 50 deaths to this event.   And this was fucking bad.  Some of you act like thousands (millions?)  have died from nuclear power.

Wouldn't see you white knighting if they waited 72 hours. You see, radiation gives zero fucks.

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On 5/12/2019 at 9:09 PM, Red Five said:

There was also The Day After, which I was made to watch in the 8th grade. 

I still watch that every now and then. I find that 3 minutes after they all start getting out of their cars to still be pretty intense.

Only through the first episode, but as others have mentioned, the clear denial of the core exploding is just amazing.

“I walked around the exterior of building 4. I think there’s graphite on the ground, in the rubble”

”You didn’t see graphite.”

“I did.”

”You didn’t...YOU DIDN’T BECAUSE IT’S NOT THERE!”

 

 

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