Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

https://moxie.org/stories/chernobyl-scene-report/

by BCM43 • 7 years ago

397 258 7 years ago

gukov2• 7 years ago

Highly recommend the HBO's new miniseries Chernobyl. One episode left. It's already at the top of IMDB TV show rankings.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/

bitL• 7 years ago

HBO offsets the GoT S8 disappointment, Chernobyl is so far the best show I've watched in the past 5-10 years.

asah• 7 years ago

+1 - we saw last night's episode... the dogs and the baby... this must be seen but it's also something you can't un-see.

legitster• 7 years ago

A bit over-dramatized, but very, very good.

Although I do not really like the decision to reduce the entire engineering team to a single character. I get that it simplifies the writing and casting, but it just perpetrates the lone scientist myth. It could have been really compelling to take the time to show the group effort.

wefarrell• 7 years ago

The lone scientist hero myth is hardly unique to science, it's an abstraction that you see in all narratives that use a leader to represent a group.

There are few scientific characters because the show chooses to focus on the political/systemic failure rather than the technical one. It shows us the leaders who bury their heads in the sand, the clueless residents who suffer as a result, and the liquidators who are aware of the dangers and make the sacrifice regardless.

It's more a show about communism than it is about nuclear power, and I really like their take on the disaster.

equasar• 7 years ago

It amazes me how there can be a small digit number of people that always will be complaining for something that is truly remarcable well done.

gideon_b2• 7 years ago

It's worth listening to the podcast that the screenwriter put out alongside the show.

He discusses the decision to collapse the scientists into one character, and explains why he chose to do it this way. Whether or not you agree it's interesting to see the though process that goes into a decision like this.

SomeOldThrow2• 7 years ago

I don't get the feeling it's very accurate, but it is very entertaining.

EDIT: the accuracy I am referring to is about the actual sequence of events of the plot, which I understand to be simplified as people replying have pointed out :)

orblivion2• 7 years ago

This Twitter thread speaks to this, (supposedly) from a Russian guy. He said that as far as Soviet life goes it's extremely accurate.

https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1132029943297265664

keldaris6• 7 years ago

It varies. The physics part is oversimplified and, at times, overdramatized (the threat of a megaton-range explosion being a particularly egregious example). The range of characters is highly limited by the format of the series (hence the fictional Belarusian physicist meant to be a composite of many characters, but really just serving as a narrative shortcut to compress the whole thing into the length constraints they have). At the same time, the visual setting is very accurate (part of the filming is done at Ignalina, the site of another RBMK reactor plant with a similar workers' town, etc.) and the general atmosphere is vastly more true to life than any other dramatization of the accident I've ever seen.

ghshephard2• 7 years ago

You should listen to the Chernobyl podcast to get a sense of how insanely dedicated they are to capturing every possible detail They took a few dramatic licences (a few characters are composites) - but, by and large, the stories are told lockstep in as close to a factual account as can be told.

lqet4• 7 years ago

I read the English and German Wikipedia articles about the disaster after I watched the first episode and was quite impressed how accurate it was.

lqet4• 7 years ago

Agreed, it's brilliant and imho the best series in years. The last TV episode that left me as speechless and uneasy as the first episode of Chernobyl (the shift worker looking down into the open reactor from the roof!) was the now legendary Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad.

theNJR• 7 years ago

It is not a coincidence that you are seeing lots of old content about Chernobyl resurfacing now.

Still, the show is amazing.

yakshaving_jgt2• 7 years ago

Can anyone explain why the Pripyat hospital in the first episode was so dirty and old? It had only been running for about 15 years at the time of the disaster.

laacz• 7 years ago

I've lived my early childhood though USSR (Latvia; born in 1979), and have been to relatively recently remodeled hospitals on multiple occasions for an extended stay. Plaster and paint easily fell off, tiling was irregular and often cracked, walls were never straight or evenly plasered, bed frames already had rust, springs always squeaked. All that said, it was clean, yet because of build quality, standardized pale paint colors, and poor lighting it seemed very used and in need of repairs. It could give impression of being dirty, when watched over TV. 15 years for that type of build quality is a long time.

KONAir• 7 years ago

I find this one more... down to Earth(?) and despite being more of a love story, it touches almost every subject there is to touch.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2934916/ https://youtu.be/Xe8ptlQ1_FQ

randylahey• 7 years ago

I found it very distracting that none of the ostensibly Russian or Ukrainian characters have an even remotely slavic accent.

heliophobicdude• 7 years ago

I believe you are referring to the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl.

The showrunners explained in a podcast that in auditions, characters used Slavic accents but ended up becoming distracting and could have ended up comical.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2T6ldM41ZbVzuEaL644sef?si=1...

dralley3• 7 years ago

But was it more distracting than the actors attempting a bad accent, and the affect that would have on their overall performance?

Phlarp• 7 years ago

So Soviet characters that speak English with a slavic accent would be less distracting? Surely if you are bothered by this they should be speaking Russian with English subtitles.

akvadrako• 7 years ago

That would have been much better.

dplavery922• 7 years ago

I think we have seen this sort of approach succeed in a major US TV production in Netflix's Narcos. There are English-speaking characters, yes, but most of the drama happens entirely in Spanish.

I think this series would also have been better fully in Russian with English subtitles.

SomeOldThrow2• 7 years ago

I wish they had gone with the actual language + used subtitles, it really destroys the immersion.

freehunter• 7 years ago

I feel the opposite. I always feel like having to read subtitles destroys the immersion, because I can't read the subtitles and also watch the environment and visual cues and facial expressions. If I'm reading subtitles, I might as well be reading a book because I'm not watching the show anymore.

crispyambulance• 7 years ago

The main actors are definitely A-List and they "make it work" beautifully in English with whatever their native accents happen to be.

If it were a Russian language production with Russian actors, that could also be just fine, but it wouldn't get as much distribution.

mikeash• 7 years ago

I hate it when movies try to portray foreign language speakers as speaking accented English. That’s not how any of this works!

If they want to go for accuracy, the actors should speak the actual language. Provide subtitles for outside audiences.

Otherwise, just have the actors speak normally. It’s no less authentic than speaking with an accent, and the actors can focus on acting.

Another prominent Soviet example of doing this well is The Death of Stalin. You actually get a sense of the people as real people instead of scary foreigners.

TaylorAlexander• 7 years ago

I’ve heard some audiences (probably Americans) don’t like subtitles. So it’s a matter of money in some ways.

williw• 7 years ago

It's actually very distracting that most of them speak a perfect british accents. I was quite confused at the beginning whether british engineers or scientists were actually working for Russia or Ukrainian at the time.

PorterDuff• 7 years ago

I thought it was German soldiers who spoke British. It's a crazy old world.

2000YearOldMan• 7 years ago

The creator/writer/director has a podcast where this was discussed. He opted to have the actors speak in their natural accent so that the actors don't act to the accent but instead act to the situation. I may be doing a bad job explaining it but he said something along the lines of actors starting to take on stereotypical traits when doing an accent, and he wanted to focus more on the reactions to the situation at hand.

lyxsus12• 7 years ago

Somebody, please explain me, why out of blue it became fashionable to put that native-sounding flavour of an accent in games and movies even when its story assumes almost every character in it is a native speaker?

I always find it disturbing. As every native Russian speaker, I tend to feel it perceive as beautiful and melodic. Just as any other Russian, Ukranian, Greek or whoever else. Sounds like a joke and not a good one. Makes me skip the whole title.

Why are they doing it? Does it really help anybody with immersion?

ryacko• 7 years ago

I believe accents go along with a campy or cliched artistic aesthetic.

In any case, I think American evening comedy peaked before I was born.

galkk• 7 years ago

I speak with Russian accent, and most of the time I find the representation of it by English actors extremely laughable.

rdtsc• 7 years ago

Being from around those parts, and remembering the time when the accident happened (watching the evening news with my father when they admitted publicly to the disaster and my father shaking his head and saying "hell, if they admitted to this much, the reality must be 10x as worse"). Anyway, I'd have to say the lack of accents were not even noticeable because the acting, the scenery, even down to small details like the clothes, haircuts, paint color schemes were are just incredibly well done.

Yeah they took some liberty with condensing multiple characters into the Khomyuk character, but even she was believable.

dweekly• 7 years ago

The pictures are lovely and the reflections profound. But much of the cited data here appears wrong. For instance, the article states (italicized): "six hundred helicopter pilots were killed" and yet it was only 600 helicopter pilots who _flew_ liquidator missions[1], two of which were killed in an piloting accident and none were registered killed from immediate radiation exposure[2], though at least one eventually died from cancer likely from this exposure[3]. Similarly a claim of "Over six hundred thousand people were directly involved in dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion" is not supported by the evidence[4].

I don't mean any of this to lessen the enormity of what happened and the tremendous, noble effort made by the liquidators to remediate what was there at great personal cost. It's just good when making specific claims for those claims to be substantiated.

[1] https://www.rotorandwing.com/2016/04/26/chernobyl-anniversar...

[2] http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Chernobyl_pilots_knew_risk...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-04-mn-106-st...

[4] http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/liquidato...

baybal22• 7 years ago

equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion

Yep, the man greatly dramatises the story.

Total deaths from immediate "radiation poisoning" were likely less than 100, with possibly 100 more due to radionuclide ingestion.

Immediate DNA damage that does not result in radiation sickness, is much less lethal than popular culture suggests.

Another thing to add, the best protective equipment for nuclear disaster is a good respirator, and a chemsuit, and not the lead "x-ray suit" often portrayed in popular culture. The cause of most deaths during Chernobyl was smoke inhalation, seconded by radionuclide ingestion by people who ate contaminated meals from field kitchens.

joshuamorton2• 7 years ago

> equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion

To be clear, this didn't happen. No one said it did. There was a chance something like this could have happened (the Chernobyl miniseries does a great job of showing this). The issue was that there were large water tanks under the reactor, and that the reactor material would eventually melt into those tanks, superheat the water and cause an enormous steam explosion, further scattering radioactive materials into the atmosphere, and destroying the three other reactors at Chernobyl, scattering their material too.

That said, the idea that a 5MT explosion at Chernobyl would have levelled the city of Kiev is not particularly realistic [0]. (note that the fallout effects from Chernobyl would be much worse than from a nuclear explosion, so given winds, fallout could have made Kiev, or even Moscow, uninhabitable). And in fact, as explained elsewhere, the explosion wouldn't have been 5MT, but much smaller, although that wouldn't have mattered much for the issue of spreading radioactive material.

[0] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=5000&lat=51.3906031&...

gambiting2• 7 years ago

>What about the people who knowingly sacrificed themselves to stop a reaction that would have destroyed most of Europe?

If he is talking about those 3 people who went to drain the pool under the reactor - none of them died. I think they are all still alive to this day, at least they were the last time I checked.

3JPLW2• 7 years ago

Estimates seem to vary wildly — which makes sense given the variety of agents and agendas. It's not really fair to hammer him on facts without acknowledging that the ground truth is far from certain.

Heck, even your fourth citation writes:

Figures for the number of liquidators involved vary greatly from several hundred thousand to nearly a million people. It is likely that at least 300,000 – 350,000 people were directly involved. A report by the Nuclear Energy Agency quotes a figure “up to 800,000”. The International Conference “One Decade After Chernobyl” refers to “about 200,000 ‘liquidators’ who worked in Chernobyl during the period 1986-1987 and estimating the total number of people registered as involved in activities relating to alleviating the consequences of the accident at between 600,000 to 800,000.

moxie3• 7 years ago

I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.

One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

I don't know what the exact numbers are, and I'm not sure if any of us will ever know for sure, but one of the documentaries I like is Discovery's "Battle of Chernobyl," since it includes a lot of interviews with people who were actually there and participated in the events. They interview Nikolay Antoshkin, the colonel general in charge of the helicopter operations there, which is where the 600 pilot deaths number comes from. I'm more inclined to believe that account than what the state published.

charlinski• 7 years ago

Hehe. Discovery channel? I would rather trust Soviet lies. Of course Soviet lied to cover up but i believe there was also symmetric campaign to exagerrate impact o Chernobyl. And the very hbo series is going to be rather scary propaganda. I read a lot on topic. After Chernobyl ca half a million people were relocated. Most of it just for psychical comfort as there was no risk involved.

tptacek5• 7 years ago

I see interviews with Antoshkin about the lack of precautions taken for the pilots, in stories citing the "600" number as the total number of pilots involved, but nothing establishing 600 fatalities.

I screened the Discovery documentary you're referring to and watched all the segments in which Antoshkin appears. It's the narrator of the special who claims 600 helicopter pilot fatalities, not Antoshkin himself, unless I've missed something. Can the 600 number be squared with the number of helicopters involved (the documentary claims 60, I think) and the number of missions the pilots fly (dozens per day), and with the fact that you can find some of those pilots giving interviews just a few years ago?

arcticbull6• 7 years ago

One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

I believe the IAEA report (which you can read yourself) put together by the United Nations and relevant affected governments in the mid-2000s. It shows that over the entire course of time 4,000 people will have died prematurely as a result of the accident at Chernobyl (including people who killed themselves because they feared they were "contaminated"), and between 31 and 54 people died between both the explosion itself and to acute radiation injuries in the immediate aftermath -- including the helicopter pilots you mention. [1]

I also believe that 7.3 million people die every year as a direct result of the burning of fossil fuels. [2]

Everything is trade-offs. The accident was bad, and it could have been an awful lot worse. On the other hand, it's important we not lose sight of the big picture. When humans get hurt, they learn why, and move forward - this should not be an exception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

rootusrootus• 7 years ago

One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

I figure it balances out the people who are extremely critical of nuclear power and accept that there could actually have been a 5 megaton explosion.

I'm not a strong advocate of nuclear power myself, but I tend to discount the value of Chernobyl as an argument for/against nuclear power. It was a terrible design in addition to being old, had little in the way of containment, and the games the operators were playing with the plant were off-the-charts stupid. Compared even to the oldest commercial Western-design reactors, it is a horrid contraption.

roenxi_• 7 years ago

1) If you prefer we can multiply all the numbers by 100, nuclear is still better than what we actually did over the past 40 years since Chernobyl.

2) We have actual evidence of how a similar-era nuclear reactor fails in Fukushima (it was built in the 80s iirc). If we write off the Soviet numbers as misinformation, then using a strictly evidence-based approach and extrapolating from Fukushima, their numbers were overexaggurating the damage.

I doubt they were exaggurating, I think Chernobyl was a lot nastier than Fukushima, but as a commited nuclear advocate, the idea that I'm relying on Soviet numbers is a misrepresentation. I'm relying on the divide-by-40-years, the linear-no-threshold-model-is-not-sensible and the by-gum-we-know-a-lot-more-about-how-to-design-things-safely-since-we-are-now-in-2020 arguments (3 sig. fig). Also the this-thing-is-millions-of-times-more-energy-dense-than-anything-else-it-is-amazing-we-are-talking-orders-of-magnitude-improvment-your-brain-probably-can't-imagine-that-without-special-training motivating factor.

orbital-decay• 7 years ago

Sorry but 600 pilot fatalities in the Chernobyl disaster is just plain nonsense, no matter what you might believe about soviets.

I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.

You seem to be assuming malice when there's mostly incompetence, and giving too much credibility to huge organizations; they aren't perfectly coordinated black boxes in control of everything they are trying to do. Chernobyl disaster has been cross documented top to bottom in that regard. Most of the missing info was due to corruption, see the song "Я вынес из зоны" by Sergey Uryvin as an example. There was an attempt to downplay the incident early on, but one simply cannot hide the disaster of that scale. Neither there was much desire to do this internally, after the scale became apparent. Besides, most of the information wasn't coming from authorities.

The only reason one can be uncertain about such ridiculous claims is unfamiliarity with the details of the disaster, and/or lack of understanding of culture at the time and also the language.

BurningFrog3• 7 years ago

Even if a thousands died from Chernobyl, it reflects the danger of the Soviet system, not of nuclear energy.

Just take the thing we learned in this week's episode: The design flaw on the RBMK reactors that caused the explosion had been observed before, but the report was classified to not put the glorious Soviet nuclear technology in a bad light!!!

In any remotely sane system, security risks are published and compensated for. The operators would have known about this risk, and not pressed the fateful AZ-5 button that caused the explosion

pippy• 7 years ago

since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading

There's also the opposite - cold war era propaganda trying to make the Russians seem backwards and primitive. The Soviet Union at the time was also opening up through glasnost.

On top of this, fossil fuel companies had a lot to gain through scaremongering around nuclear energy. It worked as very well as almost all planned nuclear power plants were mothballed.

holoduke• 7 years ago

Discovery channel where every single documentary is staged, exaggerated and filled with useless emotions. Even the department of information in the Soviet Union is more reliable than that.

onetimemanytime• 7 years ago

>One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

The other posters mentioned the trade-off, or people die in plane crashes but many more would have died had they taken the car. Power needs to be generated one way or another...

Also, can we agree that the Chernobyl plant's design and management might have been lacking? New models are much safer.

paganel2• 7 years ago

I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.

I'd add the Romanian authorities to that list (I'm from Romania). Looking at the areas contaminated with Cesium-137 [1] one can see that Bulgaria is reasonably high in that list while Romania is no-where to be found, even though my country physically stands between Bulgaria and Chernobyl. The reason for that is that Ceausescu's regime was either too incompetent or too ideologically corrupt to correctly measure the Chernobyl disaster's effects on the country's population and ecosystem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Environment...

vidarh4• 7 years ago

It's safe even if you take the worst case estimates. There's no need to accept the Soviet numbers to justify nuclear power.

ChuckMcM4• 7 years ago

Exactly this, the numbers of casualties and description post disaster and the heroics during the disaster are not corroborated by the data.

Given the secrecy of the old Soviet system about such "embarassing" events I doubt we'll ever know exactly how many people died but the massive casualty rates that get casually flicked around make for a good story but aren't supported by any external documents at all. Perhaps we'll find a mass grave somewhere full of radioactive bodies of dead workers but barring that, most data based consensus puts the total death toll from all radiation effects at less than 1,000 and usually less than 100. But even that brings out the challenge right? So if person dies because they fell off an earth mover that was building an earthen berm to shield an area, that is clearly a death, it wasn't due to radiation and it could have happened on any worksite (like building a levy) but happened because this person was working at this disaster, does that count? Do you see how it gets complicated?

What is perhaps most interesting about the exclusion zone has been how effective it has been at recovering its natural state. It it certainly not a "radioactive wasteland" and there are numerous reports of people hunting (and eating) some of the now abundant wildlife there. It isn't the picture "post nuclear disaster" that most people have been given.

freeflight3• 7 years ago

Perhaps we'll find a mass grave somewhere full of radioactive bodies of dead workers but barring that, most data based consensus puts the total death toll from all radiation effects at less than 1,000 and usually less than 100.

The problem is that to this day we struggle to fully understand the effects of long-term low-level radiation exposure because figuring those out usually requires long-term epidemiological studies, which are expensive and complex [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757021/

iooi• 7 years ago

You seem to have cherry picked sources that have a lower estimate for all these figures, i.e., "propaganda numbers".

I think the best source for these numbers is the Wikipedia article "Deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster" [1]. From the article, Russia claims "estimates ranging from 4,000" while scientific and environmental organizations claim "no fewer than 93,000". It's clear that Russia wants to downplay the enormous human and environmental toll this has had and will continue to have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

the_af4• 7 years ago

While later contested, it's not only "Russia" which estimated 4000 deaths. Wikipedia states the United Nations took part in the joint group, and

"[...] worked to establish international consensus on the effects of the accident via a series of reports that collated 20 years of research to make official previous UN, IAEA, and World Health Organization (WHO) estimates of a total of 4,000 deaths due to disaster-related illnesses."

In fact, the sentence you quoted states:

"[...] there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of deaths due to the disaster's long-term health effects, with estimates ranging from 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations and the governments of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia), to no fewer than 93,000 (per the conflicting conclusions of various scientific, health, environmental, and survivors' organizations)."

So it's not just Russia.

trhway5• 7 years ago

while scientific and environmental organizations claim "no fewer than 93,000".

that is on the right scale. The Gomel and Mogilev regions of Belarus took the brunt of the fallout, and the cancer rates there is significantly higher. For example, the rate of the breast cancer (the most frequent cancer - normally more than 1 in 10 women would get it during lifetime) is 2x there (so with total 1M+ women living in those 2 regions more than 100K of them would get the breast cancer due to Chernobyl). In general, comparing Belarus cancer rates to Russia, Ukraine, Poland - the surrounding countries with a lot of similarities wrt. environment, ethnicity/DNA, lifestyle/unhealthy habits/etc. - Belarus gets about 10K extra cancer cases per year (with about 50% mortality).

ggm• 7 years ago

You rejected a primary source and proposed a secondary source of amateur curation?

philshem• 7 years ago

There are all sort of statistical outliers when looking at cancer rates around the rest of Europe. See, for example, testicular cancer in Swiss men in 1987/1988:

https://twitter.com/philshem/status/1131635837878362112?s=21

atombender3• 7 years ago

For a better-researched, well-sourced and grounded write-up of a visit to Chernobyl — with tons of background on the incident itself — see Andrew Leatherbarrow's Chernobyl 01:23:40, which is available as a blog as well as an e-book:

https://leatherbarrowa.exposure.co/chernobyl.

Edit: Posted to HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033770.

the_af4• 7 years ago

Very interesting link, thanks for posting! More informative and detailed than TFA, in my opinion, and it also has cool pictures.

rdslw• 7 years ago

Knowing many Belarusians, they recommend reading book by Aleksievich which is a written down summary of 500 individual discussions with first hand eye witnesses/victims of the event.

Highly recommended.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_from_Chernobyl

abalone• 7 years ago

But much of the cited data here appears wrong.

I don't think this is a fair assessment. First of all you've ignored the most significant claims, that Chernobyl was very nearly a much worse disaster that "would have leveled Kiev and Minsk, and would have ejected the nuclear material from the other 3 Chernobyl reactors with a force that would have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for hundreds of years." Or it nearly irradiated "groundwater for 50 million people" or that 50,000 people "were given 2 hours to pack whatever they could carry and get on a bus" and never come back.

On these points alone it would be inaccurate to say "much" of his data is "wrong" -- that's most of the data data right there and it is unchallenged.

Instead you've focused on whether it was 600K or merely 300K liquidators, or whether the 600 pilots were "registered" killed or merely suspected. These are relatively minor points (compared to ending large swaths of civilization) and even your own sources note that the figures are controversial and give ranges. While I would agree that Marlinspike has favored the worst case end of the spectrum here and his piece ought to cite sources, I think you have misrepresented the certainty of the evidence.

lqet4• 7 years ago

It's just good when making specific claims for those claims to be substantiated.

After watching the Chernobyl miniseries last week, I dug deep into Wikipedia articles related to the accident. One thing I found interesting was the following: to empty the bubbler pools, three men dived below to reactor to open valves: Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov and Boris Baranov. In western media, it was reported that as soon as they emerged from the water, they were told it was a suicide mission and they died a few days later, implying of course that the Soviet Union knowingly send them to death.

However, according to Wikipedia:

Research by Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of Chernobyl 01:23:40, determined that the frequently recounted story is a gross exaggeration. Alexei Ananenko continues to work in the nuclear energy industry [...]. While Valeri Bezpalov was found to still be alive, the 65-year-old Baranov had lived until 2005 and had died of heart failure. [0]

This is a great reminder that propaganda always happens on both sides.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Steam_explo...

blago• 7 years ago

I think the more accurate way to describe it is "(Soviet) propaganda meets (Western media) sensationalism."

Not that we don't do propaganda, but I don't think it was government orchestrated and political in this case.

temp001• 7 years ago

Does anybody know why this helicopter crashes after flying over the reactor core? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICOu7KksgUA&feature=share

Was this a technical issue, or was the pilot affect by the radiation?

paulclinger• 7 years ago

It collided with the crane cables. It can be seen on the video.

xtracerx• 7 years ago

It also says a 5kt explosion would have "levelled" Minsk and Kiev. They are 200 and 60 miles away, so that's just made up.

gk1• 7 years ago

There's a YouTuber who's been traveling around Belarus and recording his daily adventures. Many of the videos are from inside the areas affected by Chernobyl. They're fun to watch: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqWdYjn21PdHRvHB7Nrwl...

cycrutchfield• 7 years ago

Used to be a fan of Bald until his bizarre fake fight video with Harald Baldr. Then I started to notice other little things he was doing that were a bit off-putting and how creepy and exploitative some of his videos felt. Ended up unsubscribing after that.

hackermailman• 7 years ago

The Belarus exclusion zone is huge, and sort of keeps growing whenever there is a forest fire and radioactive materials are redistributed.

poisonarena2• 7 years ago

That guy made a really cringey gopnick video, and comes off as a weird sexpat to me

rasz2• 7 years ago

I thought you were linking bionerd23

https://www.youtube.com/user/bionerd23/videos

HeWhoLurksLate3• 7 years ago

On that score- the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did less overall damage than the Allied's firebombings in other cities- and, IIRC, there were less casualties in the nuked cities as well- the damage was just different.

dalore2• 7 years ago

Well yes, some consider that the atomic bombs saved lives by ending the war. If the bombs weren't dropped and the ware continued then those fire bombings would have killed even more.

robocat• 7 years ago

Your comment is based on the myth that the atomic bombs ended the war.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-stone-kuznick-hi...

""" The atomic bombings, terrible and inhumane as they were, played little role in Japanese leaders' calculations to quickly surrender. After all, the U.S. had firebombed more than 100 Japanese cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just two more cities destroyed; whether the attack required one bomb or thousands didn't much matter. As Gen. Torashirō Kawabe, the deputy chief of staff, later told U.S. interrogators, the depth of devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki only became known "in a gradual manner." But "in comparison, the Soviet entry into the war was a great shock." """

""" Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today. """

dmode• 7 years ago

I have heard this argument so many times, it almost seems like this has been drilled into American minds post fact to rationalize the only nuclear attack in human history. I can never take this argument seriously. There was no way there would have been more deaths unless the bombs were dropped. Imagine someone suggesting dropping a bomb in a dense city as an argument for “saving lives”. It seems absurd. Nobody knows how the exactly the war would have played out. So there was no guaranteed outcome. So, the bomb was dropped at best based on some probability.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

If you are ever in Japan, IMHO, it is really interesting to go both to the Hiroshima peace memorial museum and the Yasukuni shrine war museum in Tokyo. The contrast is really interesting, especially wrt the interpretation of the end of WWII in Japan. I think it's fair to say that whoever you talk to there is a fair amount of propaganda pushing one, mostly political, view over another.

What I can say with some certainty is that after the war more than 1 million people in Japan died of starvation due to the combined effects of the US blockade during the war and the poor food distribution system in Japan at the time. In fact, Japan's protectionist agricultural system of today is based on measures put in place by the occupational government, designed to ensure that such a famine could not occur again.

Japan was already beaten by the time the atomic bombs were dropped. Firebombing would have been completely unnecessary. The US just needed to wait. The main issue, of course, was whether or not there would have been a conditional surrender or an unconditional surrender. Similarly talks of land invasions and militia trying to defend the main islands is also interesting, but actually pretty unrealistic. If you can find it, I recommend reading "Barefoot Gen" which is a manga about the time period written by someone who survived it. It is available in English.

As someone who now makes Japan his home (and hopefully eventually obtain citizenship), I am of mixed feelings about the end of the war. It worked out the way it worked out and I think people would be hard pressed to say that the outcome was ultimately bad for Japan. I suspect that Japan was even dramatically better off for having lost the war. Hindsight is 20:20, of course. However, I think the rationalisation of the use of atomic weapons is pretty darn thin. The argument that it saved lives is incredibly speculative and really not based in any realistic evaluation of the situation at the time. Even today there is a lot of propaganda flying around. I try not to second guess that decision. Whatever reasons there were, it happened the way it did. However, I don't think we need to perpetuate the image of America doing no wrong. We don't have to rationalise the decision. It was what it was.

acct1771• 7 years ago

Yes, their national birthrate, for example...

dang• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033412 and marked it off-topic.

wyldfire• 7 years ago

This cost $1.8 billion to construct, $60 million a year to maintain,

What are the maintenance costs for The Object? Is it monitoring/auditing or is there active construction/repair?

vonmoltke3• 7 years ago

If you are talking about the New Safe Containment structure, then the plan is to disassemble the original sarcophagus and remove as much as can be done safely. Its not merely a static entombment structure (though that is its failsafe function).

tedunangst• 7 years ago

When was this published? I couldn't find a date.

creeble• 7 years ago

Looks like 4 days ago, if I'm reading the Instagram dates correctly.

Cynddl• 7 years ago

I'm confused, did they legally entered the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone? I was told that biking into the Chernobyl Zone, e.g., is forbidden due to the risk of contamination when you exit.

Edit: Indeed it was not. From Instagram, “we spent the night tiptoeing around razor wire fences, coasting through sleeping security checkpoints, and riding frantically away from some surprisingly alert and vigilant guard dogs.” This validates what I know from Ukraine. Entering the exclusion zone is a very lucrative touristic business, with prices around $100-200 for a single day trip in a group.

orblivion2• 7 years ago

Moxie is an anarchist, and has detailed all sorts of adventures like this. Most notably, his Anarchist Yacht Club. There's a documentary out there.

zzzcpan• 7 years ago

There are plenty of videos about this nowadays. Here's a series of videos of a Ukrainian youtuber from this winter, biking into the exclusion zone, etc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=199KDKgO1Uc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5knVD0AnTFw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DePsh2OFNVc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi9rhMn6qTU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY3jyNbbEHY

thesmok• 7 years ago

Price of a day trip is much less if you're local. Higher prices are for tourists, but they include smaller groups and more comfortable buses.

nimnio• 7 years ago

Just FYI, you didn't need to check Instagram. It's in the article.

dmix2• 7 years ago

Standing in the bleachers, listening to the Pripyat municipal overture of resounding bird song, the only thing we could do was stare out at the trees and wonder "how long until New York looks like this?"

I'm curious what the author meant by this. Does he mean how long would it take NYC to look like Chernobyl after a similar nuclear/natural accident happened? Or do they have a fatalistic outlook on the future due to some environmental, economic, or political worldview?

Also the end of the story mentions there are no obvious monuments to the people who worked to help rescue people but there is one in the very city he was reporting from dedicated to the firefighters and others involved: https://oddviser.com/ukraine/chernobyl/memorial

jahewson• 7 years ago

fatalistic

I do not think it means what you think it means.

lqet4• 7 years ago

As a non-native speaker: do you care to elaborate why you think this word is incorrect here?

atombender3• 7 years ago

Looks like a perfectly apt use of the word. A fatalistic worldview can mean, for example, that they expect humankind's destructive impulses will always lead to its own destruction.

YjSe2GMQ• 7 years ago

It just means that on a long enough timeline everyone's and everything's survival rate drops to zero. For NY it may be 50 years, may be 5000 years, may be 5B years.

moxie3• 7 years ago

"Also the end of the story mentions there are no obvious monuments to the people who worked to help rescue people but there is one in the very city he was reporting from dedicated to the firefighters and others involved: https://oddviser.com/ukraine/chernobyl/memorial"

I've seen it and really love it. The distinction is that it's inside the exclusion zone, a guerrilla art installation built by the liquidators themselves, not somewhere people can see it where life goes on, like Kiev or Minsk.

dmix2• 7 years ago

Right, sounds like a fascinating place. Thanks for the article.

I'm interest to learn more about the security of the place (ie, how effective is it, the possible repercussions when caught, etc). Something I plan to read more into one day.

madengr• 7 years ago

Can anyone comment on the validity of the 5 MT explosion when the core material hit water? This was also stated the the HBO show.

I don’t think 5 MT fission bombs are even possible, as they tend to blow themselves apart.

saul_goodman3• 7 years ago

Nothing against Moxie, but this stated fact is clearly nonsense. It certainly would have been terrible for a large volume of water to reach the burning core, but you're not going to get a 5MT blast from a reactor accident. It takes a LOT of things working perfectly to make a nuclear bomb explode correctly. Lots of bad things happen when reactors go critical, a nuclear blast is generally not one of them. It's the spread of contaminated matter that makes reactor accidents bad. Also, sure, explosions can happen with rapid temperature changes like one encounters in these situations, but nothing like an actual nuclear bomb.

moxie3• 7 years ago

"Only 1400 kilograms of uranium and graphite mixture would have needed to hit the water to set off a new explosion. Our experts studied the possibility and concluded that the explosion would have had a force of 3 to 5 megatons. Minsk...would have been razed." - Vassili Nesterenko, director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

I am not a nuclear physicist, but at least some people who are did not find this to be "clearly nonsense."

dzonga• 7 years ago

watching Chernobyl on HBO brought to life some of the stories that happened during that fateful period. Easily the best show on HBO right now

saul_goodman3• 7 years ago

Maby they did sneak in, but fool me once: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

The last time someone posted pictures claiming they rode their motorcycle through the forbidden zone it caused a stir because that is expressly forbidden because of the risk of picking up contaminated dust. Enclosed tour vehicles only for this reason. Then apparently, in the case of kiddofspeed, we find out she rode her motorcycle to the standard meeting place and took the standard tour. While carrying her helmet along with her for effect.

4043D• 7 years ago

Moxie isn't known for bullshiting about stuff like that he's done a fair few things "normal" people would think fairly crazy.

rasz2• 7 years ago

and yet whole article is full of nonsense(death toll, explosion etc).

dTal3• 7 years ago

Mmm, that isn't strictly true. From what I've read his anarchist-leaning sailing documentary "Hold Fast" is... controversial, in sailing circles.

dTal3• 7 years ago

Funny story - dosimeters don't tick. Geiger counters tick.

aquamo• 7 years ago

Loved this story! Also good timing as a lot of us are watching the HBO mini-series now. I especially liked this quote: "The reason it's so beautiful and so peaceful is precisely because we can't consume it. Like, perhaps, all real paradises everywhere."

wst_• 7 years ago

Not so long ago there was a submission about visit of Arkadiusz Podniesiński in Fukushima. Before that, though, he was visiting the zone multiple times and made two long movies about it. Here's a trailer of second one. Worth a look as the visuals are quite nice.

Alone in the Zone 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdCBQA7Z1Y0

ycombonator2• 7 years ago

Coincidentally I just started watching Chernobyl series on HBO https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl

ycombonator2• 7 years ago

I have got a stalker who keeps downvoting each every comment I write.

kyledrake• 7 years ago

All of Moxie's stories are great and I highly recommended them: https://moxie.org/stories.html

The train stories in particular made me recall reading Days of War, Nights of Love in a really good way.

latchkey• 7 years ago

1 gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs.

5 * 8.34 * 3 = 125.1 lbs

yesprabhu• 7 years ago

The book, 'Chernobyl, History of a Tragedy' by Serhii Plokhy gives a very good account of the accident. Days preceding, the burning days ,and political and social repurcussions there after.

dmpanch• 7 years ago

Visited Chernobyl 3 years ago, just before they cover it with Confinement.

https://imgur.com/gallery/uIOOz1p

Btw, you can easily visit it, because of lots of tours here, it cost about $100-$150 per day. I used this company https://www.chernobyl-tour.com/english/48-one-day-trip-to-th...

yakshaving_jgt2• 7 years ago

I was there around the same time as you — a couple of weeks before the new sarcophagus was rolled into place, and just after the last inhabitant of Chernobyl died and her house burned down.

Everyone recommends going, but to be honest I'd give it a miss. There are plenty of nice things to see and do in Ukraine.

arpa• 7 years ago

Five megaton explosion? That's hydrogen fusion bomb range, dude, not a steam explosion.

perfunctory• 7 years ago

When discussing the safety of nuclear power most comments seem to focus on the number of deaths. While death count is tragic in itself, it doesn't capture the full extent of human drama.

Consider this

Fukushima

"the nuclear accident was responsible for 154,000 being evacuated"

"In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion), nearly double the 2013 estimate."

Chernobyl

"In 2005, the total cost over 30 years for Belarus alone was estimated at US$235 billion; about $301 billion in today's dollars given inflation rates."

"between 5% and 7% of government spending in Ukraine is still related to Chernobyl"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

I watched a documentary on the new concrete sarcophagus that they built to contain the reactor.

Its amusing that the EU had to invest billions into the project. Hell even the US put in money and expertise despite being an ocean away. Where was Russia? It was their powerplant that blew up!

nnq• 7 years ago

Q for ppl more knowledgeable - How exaggerated is this claim? :

would have ignited a second reaction that would have been the equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion. It would have leveled Kiev and Minsk, and would have ejected the nuclear material from the other 3 Chernobyl reactors with a force that would have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for hundreds of years

(I can imagine it is exaggerated, but I am not an expert so can't tell the magnitude. I meant 5 megatons is not that much, the tested "Tsar Bomba" was estimated at 50+ megatons. And even will tones of material spread around, most of it would have settled on the ground on a smallish area, right?)

effie7• 7 years ago

It seems extremely exaggerated, such explosions require complicated bomb design, otherwise the first stages of the explosion throw the reacting matter away and it won't react completely.

However, 5 megatons can destroy city completely, and if it explodes close to ground, it will create lots of contamination. Then it is up to the winds. Bad wind will make this contamination a major catastrophe thousands of kilometers away.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

never ceases to amaze..

cambaceres• 7 years ago

"When that material then started to smolder downwards out through the floor of the chamber, it threatened to come into contact with a large amount of water that had pooled there as a result of early firefighter attempts to put it out with hoses. This would have ignited a second reaction that would have been the equivalent of a 5 megaton explosion. It would have leveled Kiev and Minsk, and would have ejected the nuclear material from the other 3 Chernobyl reactors with a force that would have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for hundreds of years. With only days to stop it, Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov went into the ruins of the plant, knowingly facing almost certain death from that level of radiation exposure, to release valves that would drain 5 million gallons of water."

Is this really true? Are there better sources than this blog post?

jaggirs• 7 years ago

The HBO series chernobyl says the same pretty much. I suppose thats a better source, but not by much.

Scene report from the Chernobyl Zone

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