I just finished watching HBO’s remarkable 5-part miniseries Chernobyl, a dramatization of the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and the attempts to mitigate the damage. It is a grim series but an outstanding one. Some of the best stuff HBO has shown and that’s saying something.
Here’s a few thoughts.
- Acting, directing and writing are all great. I expect Chernobyl to do well at award season. It deserves to. Even as the quality of films falls, we are in a golden age of television. There’s almost too much good content to keep up with.
- Each episode is accompanied by a Chernobyl podcast where writer, creator and executive producer Craig Mazin discusses the episode. These are well worth your time. Mazin was previously known for his comedies (the Hangover sequels) and people are surprised he had this in him. I’m not. First of all, comedy is harder to do than drama. But second, the podcast makes clear that this was his passion, his obsession. This was the story he wanted to tell. And that shows.
- The series takes certain liberties with history. For example, Emily Watson’s Khomyuk is a composite character representing dozens of scientists. None of this is a real problem.
- As a scientist, I have always been intensely curious about what exactly caused the Chernobyl explosion. I’d read enough to have a crude grasp. The series does an excellent job of explaining the extremely technical details of what went wrong that fateful night using the exact paradigm I would use if explaining it to an introductory physics class. I should note that there is still some scientific debate over exactly what happened. But the series presents what is generally agreed upon as the most likely scenario.
- All five episodes are great. But they all have a different emphasis and tone. Episode One, for example, plays like a horror movie, conveying the full terror and confusion over what has happened. The sight of Chernobyl 4’s open core is one of the most frightening things I’ve seen on television.
- I have a deep interest in the music used in television and movies. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for Chernobyl is minimalistic, being composed from ambient sounds recorded in a decommissioned nuclear plant in Lithuania. It has few themes, no cues to underscore the drama. It’s a unsettling growling menacing presence, like the radiation that is slowly (or not so slowly) killing everyone. It works perfectly.
- One of the most talked-about aspects of the series is the incredible work put into the details of 1986 Ukraine. There have been numerous posts and Twitter threads about how accurate everything is, down to the trash buckets. This isn’t just a nice detail. I think it’s a key part of why the series is so good, providing a verisimilitude to the proceedings and helping the actors live their parts. There is a growing emphasis on this in television (e.g., Stranger Things) and I welcome it.
- Chernobyl is not anti-nuclear, as Mazin has clarified a number of times. It’s indictment is aimed at the system of the Soviet Union. And more generally at how lies and deceptions can lead to tragedy.
- One of the wonderful things about the series is that while it indicts the Soviet system, it does not indict the Soviet people. Time after time, people are asked to risk their lives for the greater good and … the just do. It’s not hyped up as heroic; it’s not underscored by soaring music; many of the volunteers aren’t even named. It just … is. Much like it was in real life. There were thousands of people who kept the disaster from getting much much much worse. Most of them didn’t think of themselves as heroes; they were just doing what needed to be done. And that quiet everyday courage is where the series draws a lot of its strength from.
- In case the idea of Chernobyl turns you off nuclear power, consider this: when you account for the effects of extracting and burning fossil fuels upon both the environment and human health, it’s like having a Chernobyl every year. Maybe every day, depending on what numbers you believe. It doesn’t seem that way because when a power plant explodes, it is a historical event. But the slow quiet damage done by fossil fuels — the ravishing of the countryside; the pollution-induced respiratory illness; the spread of pollutants like mercury (and, for a long time, lead) — doesn’t make headlines. That’s even without taking into account global warming. Nuclear power, even in its current form, has probably saved about two million lives by replacing fossil fuels. All policies are trade-offs. And nuclear, even with Chernobyl, is the least bad trade-off when it comes to energy.
Michael, thoughts?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong/Report
I usually like Shellenberger on this subject but I think he’s way too defensive in that post. Much of the things he complains about was dramatic license. And he seems to think that a few people expressing their concerns on social media says … something. The movie is pretty explicit that this accident would not have happened but for the flaw in the RBMK design (a flaw that was not corrected until after Legasov killed himself).
Moreover, he’s wrong on one specific point — radiation can spread like a disease. Maybe not quite as dramatically as it does in the show. But in the podcast, Mazin talks about one man who got a hand-shaped burn on his back from where one of the firefighters touched him. And Lyudmilla Ignatenko did, in fact, lose her baby after caring for her husband. Was it radiation sickness or just coincidence? Hard to tell. He sites Fukushima but the firefighters at Chernobyl were exposed to WAY more radiation than Fukushima.Report
I think one of the important things that always gets lost is that being exposed to radiation, even lethal amounts, does not make a person radioactive. You have to ingest or inhale isotopes undergoing radioactive decay in order to be “radioactive”, or be covered in a layer of such matter (which is why you shower after exposure, to remove anything on your skin, not to wash away the radiation)..
So the firefighter probably had isotopes on his hand/glove, which caused a contact burn. Likewise, the husband could have inhaled or ingested particles and was thus emitting radiation, or exhaling them and thus exposing his wife. If isotopes are still present, then a person could be ‘contagious’ (they could trigger a meter).
But the people who had no exposure to the isotopes, just the energy? They might get sick, but they are not ‘contagious’.
And this is something the media rarely gets right. Radiation is energy, it can be harmful, but it will not make you radioactive. Decaying isotopes, if they get into your body, still don’t make you radioactive, but they don’t necessarily exit the body quickly (which is why we have chelating therapies), so the energy they emit continues to cause damage.
And depending on the emitted particles, and where they are in the body, you might not even be radiating enough to be dangerous to anyone else.Report
Yeah this. I wish more people understood enough basic physics to understand the difference between “radiation” and “radioactive material.”Report
Yes, agreed. Chernobyl was unusual because of the sheer degree of contamination. But you can also get induced radioactivity (although probably not from a person) where things exposed to high levels of radiation become radioactive (e.g., component of nuclear power plants).Report
Can something exposed to high levels of radiation become radioactive? How does that happen?
I get how radioactive dust can make something radioactive. That’s obvious. But how can mere radiation do that?Report
Busy unpacking from the move right now, so I can’t look up the specifics, but IIRC, some materials can become so bombarded that the atoms of the material begin to slowly decay themselves. Living things can’t tolerate that level of exposure, and quickly die. The remains of a living thing can continue the decay and emit radiation, but those remains are also decomposing, so they won’t stick around for long (&, IIRC, there are bacteria that love a good bit of radiation with their decomposing matter, and will accelerate the process).Report
As Spock would say, fascinating.Report
Can something exposed to high levels of radiation become radioactive? How does that happen?
Over time, induced radioactivity is very much a thing, mostly through neutron activation*. Every one of the existing nuclear reactors will, when retired, have several hundred tons of steel that is mildly radioactive and some amount from the internal structures that is quite radioactive. Depending on the design, there may be a bunch of mildly radioactive concrete as well. The good news is that most of the isotopes involved have short half-lives. In a hundred years or so, all of the stuff will have decayed down to “harmless” levels.
* Eg, an iron-58 atom captures a neutron, then decays to cobalt-59. Cobalt 59 can capture a neutron and then decay to cobalt-60, which is either useful or nasty stuff, depending on your perspective.Report
Ah. I can see how that works. Thanks.Report
Silver is rather easy to activate with a mild neutron flux.Report
Yep. And as Oscar said, organic material is generally not resilient enough to become radioactive. it will die instead.Report
Though it doesn’t stop being radioactive after it dies, or even after bacteria cause it to decay. If a person’s bones absorb strontium or plutonium, they’re radioactive, and after that kills them, their remains will be radioactive as well.Report
Moreover, he’s wrong on one specific point — radiation can spread like a disease.
*contamination* can spread like a disease. It’s the particulates (i.e dirt) that contain radioactive elements that can spread on contact (like dirt), get dissolved in water & then ingested, and become airborne and then inhaled. (And then of course if a plant or animal absorbs this contamination from any vector, and then is eaten by humans, that contamination is also ingested and magnified thru bioaccumulation)
Also, of course, the human fetus is far more susceptible to the effects of radiation (& every other environmental ‘not normal’) than humans at other stages of life.Report
It’s the difference between radiation and contamination that is often glossed over in popular media and news reporting, such that audiences come to conflate one with the other.
If I was running a show like this, I would try real hard to make sure that the audience understood the difference between the two.Report
Is that a picture of Jabba the Hutt after Leia strangled him with her own chains?Report
OMG. When you see it next to Kristin’s post, the similarity is amazing.Report
Chernobyl has apparently replaced The Shawshank Redemption as IMDb’s most highly rated show of all time.
But some in the Russian media aren’t happy.
The Moscow Times’ take on all that.
So they’re going to make a new show about the real heroes of Chernobyl, the patriotic Russian military people who were battling the CIA agents at the plant, which pretty much confirms everything HBO showed about the Soviet system.Report
The rating will fall; IMDB ratings, like RBMK reactor cores, tend to shoot up than slowly come back down to Earth..
As for Russia doing their take on it, I now like the HBO series even more.Report
If the Russians understand American politics as well as I think they do, it will be the patriotic Russian military/ KGB fighting the American DEEP STATE, with a cameo appearance by Hillary Clinton where she says “We need to put those nuclear workers out of a job!”Report
What is the best legal way to watch Chernobyl without having to sign up for HBO or and HBO service? I just want to pay for the miniseries rather than everything HBO has to offer.Report
HBO often releases series on DVDs which are then often available in public librariesReport
Assumes people have DVD players. The content providers are being annoyingly more intelligent in an evil way when it comes to making money in the streaming age.Report
If you want to watch more content but don’t have a DVD player and don’t want to spend money on streaming, then I suggest this article.Report
You don’t have $25 for a USB DVD drive?
People who have a TV newer than about 15 years, a computer newer than about 15 years, and a USB DVD drive have a DVD player, although they may need a couple of cheap cables to make it work. I think that puts almost all households within a relatively few bucks of having a DVD player.
Our family room TV, new several months ago, will recognize if I plug the USB DVD drive into the TV’s USB port and play it. Actually, it will recognize all sorts of USB mass storage devices and will play all sorts of video formats from them. Almost all TVs sold these days have some sort of ARM-based Linux running if you dig down deep enough — some just make more of it available to the users than others.Report
I spent $36 on a Keedox 1080p video player at Amazon, which plays just about any video format out there and outputs it to HDMI. There are similar units that might be a bit better, but it’s very easy to use.
I bought it because it’s hard to figure out which TV supports which video formats. Some primarily handle AVI but not MKV, and some are the opposite, etc.Report
it’s indictment is aimed at the system of the Soviet Union.
That’s an oversimplification. Certainly Soviet communism made everything it touched worse, but reckless stupidity can happen anywhere. And the immediate cause of the disaster had nothing to do with communism: it was the people in charge being more interested in personal gain than in doing their jobs responsibly, with their underlings going along because they were afraid of being fired.Report
It was the Soviet system that insisted on building reactors on the cheap. No other country built reactors that way because of the problems that came to manifest at Chernobyl. The RBMK system was fundamentally flawed. The problems that created Chernobyl had been identified and buried so as not to bring disgrace upon the State.
It was the Soviet system that spent days denying there was a problem, then denying the scope of the problem, then denying the nature of the problem. It was only years later that they could even admit the RBMK system was flawed and repair the other 16 reactors that used that design.
It was also the Soviet system that drove Legasov — a loyal party member — to professional ruin and eventual suicide for trying to tell everyone that not only was the problem fundamental, but it would occur again unless changes were made. It was only after he killed himself that anyone paid attention.
Yes, the operators did some dumb things. But those dumb things would not have created this catastrophe without the Soviet of lies, deceptions, loyalty to the State and utter obedience to authority. Nuclear power plant operators sometimes make mistakes. Only the case of Chernobyl did it literally blow up the reactor.Report
Certainly no American company has ever built something unsafe to save money, tried to hide that, or done their best to discredit whistleblowers.Report
It’s a bit different when you have the power of a totalitarian state behind that and when there’s literally no one to blow the whistle to.Report
Agree 100%. Things are much worse when the state. the industry, and the media are all the same actor. That doesn’t mean that Chernobyl has no lessons for the US, just that they’re not identical ones.Report
One more thought: The reason an American plant operator, unlike a Soviet one, could refuse to obey an unsafe order is that his union would back him up.Report
Wasn’t the Soviet Union one big Union? I mean, it was the Workers Paradise…Report
The only thing worse than a company union is a brutal totalitarian state union.Report
Its the gateway drug.Report
Compare the NOAA forbidding its employees to tell the truth about Dorian to protect Trump’s lies.Report
We can tell we’re not in a totalitarian state, because we can openly mock Trump for this.
That said, he remains a wannabe authoritarian.Report
“Whineabee”.Report
The other day I read an amusing article at Pajamas Media.
Liberal Critics’ Bizarre Take: HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’: It’s Not About Communism
Having two colons in one headline was amusing in itself, but the article gives some choice quotes from journalists bending over backwards to make the series an indictment of pretty much anything except the Soviet system, portraying it as a warning about Trump, climate change, or any other hobby horse.Report
And by “bending over backwards”, they mean “quoting the guy who wrote it.”Report
OK, let’s talk about the Trump administration’s (non-)response to the virus, focusing on lies, deceptions, and loyalty and utter obedience to the Dear Leader. Also, since we’re in a capitalist society, grift.Report
Chernobyl is not anti-nuclear, as Mazin has clarified a number of times.
I saw a comparison of Chernobyl to a documentary that talked about the efforts to remove Thimerosal from vaccines.
The intention might not have been to poison the well for support of Nuclear power, but that’s where we are anyway.Report
Barnum said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Nuclear is in the opposite position, where all publicity is bad. At the very least, the only things considered newsworthy are bad things. A miniseries about Chernobyl; WIPP leaking radioactive gases; the latest news from the Hanford site, or the INL; the Vogtle reactors running even further over budget. Nobody does stories about the Fast Flux Test Facility that was safely doing all sorts of useful and interesting research at the same time that Chernobyl happened.Report
IMHO, it’s because those kinds of stories are difficult to do and the journalists feel like they have to spend a lot of time doing dry explanations better suited to an episode of Nova or something.
But accidents are full of scary radiation stuff and no one needs to explain about radiation and isotopes and exposure limits and danger with long time horizons, etc to get eyeballs. Kinda like how news articles never talk about L/D when discussing toxins/poisons/etc.Report
“If we had screwed up the recovery, we could have rendered half of Europe uninhabitable” is kind of newsworthy.Report
Indeed. But “With the EBR-II operating at full power, we shut off its coolant circulation pumps. Instead of going all Chernobyl, reactor output fell to effectively zero within 300 seconds,” is not.
It’s a moot point. Starting with Carter in the late 1970s, the federal government under both Democrats and Republicans decided that they were not in the new reactor design/testing business beyond paper studies.
Regular readers know where I stand. The Western Interconnect, where I get my electricity, can become a robust, reliable, low-carbon grid in a straightforward manner without nuclear. We should get on with it promptly, at least to the extent the feds allow it. How the Eastern and Texas Interconnects solve the problem is up to them. I will point out that with the Vogtle 3 and 4 nukes approaching $12/watt in capital construction costs, it’s not clear that they can afford for nuclear to be part of their solutions.Report
Are power plants (nuclear or otherwise) going to be part of the Internet of Things? That’s a pretty terrifying idea.Report
I am now bingeing in the podcast, which is excellent, though it’s a bit weird that the interviewer is the host of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.Report