HBO's Chernobyl...

The Atlantic did a picture montage on the incident. More rare shots.

main_1500.jpg


www.theatlantic.com

Photos From the 1986 Chernobyl Disaster

Thirty-three years ago, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl's reactor No. 4, starting a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world—and that was just the beginning of the disaster.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
 
From Forbes (unsure if I should post link)...
‘Chernobyl’ Ends Its HBO Run As The Highest Audience Rated TV Series In History

A few highlights from the article:
Viewers have rated Chernobyl the highest scored television series in history, according to over a hundred thousand votes on IMDB.
The top ten list has not changed since two weeks ago, nor after last night’s finale, which I think everyone can agree was great. But now Chernobyl has more than doubled its number of votes from before, and kept its exact same high score.
  1. Chernobyl (9.7 – 111,000 votes)
  2. Planet Earth II (9.5 – 71,000 votes)
  3. Band of Brothers (9.5 – 317,000 votes)
  4. Planet Earth (9.4 – 147,000 votes)
  5. Breaking Bad (9.4 – 1,200,000 votes)
  6. Game of Thrones (9.4, 1,500,000 votes)
  7. Our Planet (9.4 – 10,000 votes)
  8. The Wire (9.3 – 244,000 votes)
  9. Cosmos (9.3 – 95,000 votes)
  10. Blue Planet (9.3 – 19,000 votes)
I'll leave everyone to find their preferred source for movie reviews and check there. 'Forbes' was simply something that popped up on my screen, yet, is by no means a source I trust for absolute answers.

K2
 
-K2- said:
From Forbes (unsure if I should post link)...
‘Chernobyl’ Ends Its HBO Run As The Highest Audience Rated TV Series In History

A few highlights from the article:
Viewers have rated Chernobyl the highest scored television series in history, according to over a hundred thousand votes on IMDB.
The top ten list has not changed since two weeks ago, nor after last night’s finale, which I think everyone can agree was great. But now Chernobyl has more than doubled its number of votes from before, and kept its exact same high score.
  1. Chernobyl (9.7 – 111,000 votes)
  2. Planet Earth II (9.5 – 71,000 votes)
  3. Band of Brothers (9.5 – 317,000 votes)
  4. Planet Earth (9.4 – 147,000 votes)
  5. Breaking Bad (9.4 – 1,200,000 votes)
  6. Game of Thrones (9.4, 1,500,000 votes)
  7. Our Planet (9.4 – 10,000 votes)
  8. The Wire (9.3 – 244,000 votes)
  9. Cosmos (9.3 – 95,000 votes)
  10. Blue Planet (9.3 – 19,000 votes)
I'll leave everyone to find their preferred source for movie reviews and check there. 'Forbes' was simply something that popped up on my screen, yet, is by no means a source I trust for absolute answers.

K2
Click to expand...
-K2- said:
Band of Brothers (9.5 – 317,000 votes)
K2
Click to expand...

I loved Band of Brothers on HBO one of my favorite shows, but years later HBO did THE PACIFIC about the war in the Pacific and I guess not a lot watched it? To me is was as good a Band of Brothers , I give it a 9.5.
Maybe it's beause the war in Europe is more popular than the war in the Pacific?
 
Photographer Tom Skipp visited Chernobyl and nearby Pripyat, its replacement town Slavutych, and the abandoned sites of the region – meeting the people behind the disaster: from the liquidators who worked at the fallout site, to the resettlers and the community who live and work in the area now

I arrived in Ukraine on the eve of the 32nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. I had not intended for it to be the focus of my time in Kyiv, but leading up to my departure it became an obsession. My arrival in Kyiv on 25 April 2018 was maybe happenstance of planning but I was impelled to head straight from the airport to Slavutych. This was the town built to replace Pripyat and host the evacuated personnel of the Chernobyl power plant, after the decision was made to continue power production following the disaster. All of the Soviet republics were called upon to hurriedly help with the construction of what would eventually be the last atomic town.
Click to expand...
Chernobyl now: 'I was not afraid of radiation' – a photo essay

4000.jpg

Nearby, there are cooling lakes full of oversized fish. They used to be farmed to feed bears for the local fur industry, but after the accident the furs were too contaminated to be worn and the fish were left to their own device.
Click to expand...

:LOL::LOL::LOL: Doesn't these fishes know they are over the regulation? :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO: It is almost as funny as feeding them to bears and then realising they're full of radiation, when the bears get a radiation poisoning and start to lose their fur.
 
Highly recommended! Amazing and terrifying at the same time. You really get a feeling of being there (and you really don't want to be there for real). The music is fantastic too - very minimal and experimental, and for me it's worth it just for that alone.

It's clear that they wanted it to be realistic and scientifically accurate, and as far as I can tell, they succeeded. As others have mentioned, they have captured the period well. You get a very good insight into what happened, even as an layman. The politics are intersting too. I can understand why it got high ratings.
 
I echo what everyone else has said. I feel educated now on the reasons for the accident as I hadn't quite understood the complexity of the situation, or that it was not simply a case of 'operator error'.

It was quite a cast too. I'm sorry, but I just couldn't get over that the dad from 'Friday Night Dinners' was the 'bad guy'. (It was worse than 'Sansa' becoming 'Jean Grey'.) When you saw the photos of the actual people at the end, they had chosen actors who were incredibly good likenesses. Paul Ritter is almost identical to Anatoly Dyatlov.

It was a pity that they needed to create the composite character of Ulana Khomyuk in order to tell the story of all the various scientists who worked behind the scenes. I just feel that fictionalising the story too heavily could have detracted from the message it wanted to send.
 
Hello all,

I watched this with my wife, who is Ukrainian. She felt it was representative of the times, people were generally ignorant of radioactive sources. The government did not do anything to educate before the reactor explosion and certainly did not want to admit they knew of a flaw afterwards.

Her father was offered a job to go and cut trees down in the forest near Pripyat, his wife (Kamila's mother) would not let him go which could be why he is 86 today. (y)

He took another job in a factory where he was management, so got a glass of wine at lunch time to cope with any fall out from Chernobyl. Not iodine but wine :)

Kamila thought the show was fantastically accurate, she was sad so many of them died, had birth defects etc. Due to their dispersal across the USSR it was hard to tell the true toll as there are other reason for such issues. But for some it would certainly be a contributing factor.

Kamila was under no illusion, if they could have hidden the explosion they would have.

A sad but cautionary and very relevant tale.

Andy :unsure:
 
Sad that its gonna be how we end up. The way our world is going we have not seen the last of such disasters. All those films from the 80s showing a destroyed world in like 2100s etc seem more likely now than the cliche joke they were back then. We as a species suck. Whether terrorism or accidental we are going to bring this world to ruin.
 
Just started watching this on DVD. After two episodes I have to say that I'm very impressed.

Just as an aside, thought you people might want a UK perspective after IntoThe Black's Ukranian one. I started in the Nuclear industry days after Chernobyl hit the headlines. To say i had second thoughts is an understatement. A couple of months down the line, myself and a couple of colleagues were sent out specifically to locate contamination from the accident. We were finding it primarily in drains and gutters where rain water deposited it in higher concentrations(about 50 times higher than background in some places). Reconcentration was also the reason the consumption of animals in certain parts of the country was banned. The rain deposited very low levels on pasture but these levels increased significantly as they were reconcentrated in sheep and cattle grazing on the land.

We found one particle that was particularly high and further analysis showed it to contain Zirconium. This metal is part of the alloy used to clad fuel for RBMK reactors and had been deposited by the typical UK wind and rain.
 
Just for the record @Foxbat , I felt the series simply got better each episode. SO if you enjoyed the first two... ;)

K2
 
Foxbat said:
We found one particle that was particularly high and further analysis showed it to contain Zirconium. This metal is part of the alloy used to clad fuel for RBMK reactors and had been deposited by the typical UK wind and rain.
Click to expand...

I bet that wasn't the only particle, that had landed over here. But even then you didn't get a ban on eating berries and mushrooms, or even collecting them for two years, where as in Finland we had to do that, and make sure we had iodine added as a food supplement. Easiest way was to add it on the salt, and use it then on daily basis.

The strangest thing coming out from the series is vodka. For some reason everyone kept drinking it while they worked on the accident site, and it helped people to flush heavy particles out from the body. I don't understand how it works, but there are people alive today, because of it.
 
ctg said:
I bet that wasn't the only particle, that had landed over here.
Click to expand...

It was the only one I found personally but I'm sure there were millions more.

Tritium is a product of nuclear fission (both as a fission product and an activation product). It has a ten year half-life and a ten day biological half-life. It tends to go for the gastro-intestinal tract so vodka would be a good way to flush it out (although experts suggest plenty of water rather than alcohol). Of course, vodka being bottled, would be less likely to be contaminated than local water supplies.

Vodka wouldn't help with other isotopes like Caesium 137 however. It tends to replace Calcium in the bones. It irradiates and kills the bone marrow (where blood is formed) and is why there were so many bone marrow transplants of Chernobyl victims at the time.
 
Now watched four episodes. Really, really, really impressed. In my time, I've sat through dozens of safety briefings concerning various nuclear events throughout the world. I've seen a lot of photographs of the biological effects of radiation and I have to commend the makeup artists. what they have produced in this series is horrific but, sadly, quite authentic.
 
ctg said:
Did it want to make you want to change anything inside the industry? Did it alarm you?
Click to expand...
It certainly alarmed me.

However....
I knew most of what went on already. I knew the utter arrogant stupidity of the management. I also knew about the positive void coefficient. The only thing I really wasn't aware of was that the control rods were graphite tipped- which seems utter madness although it's always easy in hindsight.

What many people will not be aware of is that after 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl, there was a concerted effort by the nuclear industry all across the world to get its house in order to ensure that nothing like this ever happened again. It's called WANO (The World Association Of Nuclear Operators). they are an independent body and their primary task is the conducting of peer reviews. The examiners are picked from nuclear operating plants all over the world to provide a breadth of experience and their primary objective is to hunt out every single negative that they can. They are simply not interested in positives unless they are exceptionally positive. I, and many others, have been under the scrutiny of a peer review and it can be very upsetting as well as deeply unsettling. You just have to keep telling yourself it's not personal. Their job is to find any areas for improvement (AFI) and ensure that these improvements are implemented within a given time period. People being marked for AFI have the right to challenge but the justification must be very strong indeed.

It's a bit like having the Gestapo breathing down your neck but I have no doubt whatsoever that the nuclear industry is much safer because of the existence of WANO.

With all that said, no, I don't regret my decision to enter and spend 32 years in the nuclear industry. I still live close to the plant I worked in and I used to analyse the discharges coming from that plant so I know exactly what's going on. I wouldn't be living so close to it if I thought there was something seriously wrong there because when I'm not there, I'm as much a part of the public as anybody else.

We used to have a bit of gallows humour in the Chernobyl days. it was: If you see me running, it's time for you to start running too. :)

www.wano.info

Leading Nuclear Excellence – WANO

WANO facilitates the exchange of best practices, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration.
www.wano.info www.wano.info
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
ctg HBO's Raised by Wolves - Dark SF series Raised by Wolves 32
ctg HBO's Lovecraft Country General TV Discussion 52
K HBO's The Plot Against America... General TV Discussion 3
Ursa major Catch HBO's Continental Drift.... George R R Martin 1
D HBO's first season for AGOT is 10 episodes long George R R Martin 33

Similar threads


Back
Top