Chernobyl

[Easo]

I am genuinely horrified if the OP asked the question without the intention to gather replies. This is the biggest nuclear catastrophe ever to happen, information about it and the effects of radiation is widely available. Just open the damn Wikipedia.
HBO makes shows. That alone should tell you about how realistic (read, how overdramatized) their depiction would be.

[cubby]

@chazus got some of his commentary wrong, just fyi - it helps to have actually watched the entire thing instead of "like 10 seconds" of it.

Now to your questions:

Is the recent HBO show Chernobyl accurate?

It's very accurate in regards to events and timelines and dangers presented as the accident unfolds. The director did condense a number of scientists information into one character to make the story a little easier to follow, and the director points that out in the after show commentary.

How much of it is fiction?

Not much - certainly not the events as they play out and the associated dangers. For instance the threat of the reactor being exploded (not exploding) and causing enormous radiation damage throughout Europe and the Soviet Union was true - which is why those poor fuckers had to go into the water.

I was thinking it was a documentary but some of it sounds exaggerated to make the story more interesting.

Definitely not a documentary - but most of it you can assume happen. Obviously not necessarily the little things, but the important events and threats and dangers are true.

Did people receive so much radiation that they bled through their skin?

Yes - radiation is horrific way to go, and it can kill you very quickly if exposed to enough of it (see below re helicopter). A really rough estimate is that if you're exposed, and you start throwing up, you're going to die soon thereafter.

Was it ever possible for the damaged reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb?

Sort of, but no. What they were describing was the water below the reactor detonating in such a way as to be tantamount to the force of a nuclear detonation. And that explosion would have sent the reactor material - from all four reactors (Chernobyl had four, only one of them had the accident) - scattered across a large area, and THAT would have caused several and catastrophic radiation damage throughout Europe and the Soviet Union.

Is it possible to knock a helicopter out of the air with radiation alone?

Yes, but not from equipment failure. What happened with that helicopter was the crew died almost instantly from flying directly into the core exposure. What we saw in the show wasn't the helicopter getting knocked out because of radiation, but the pilot and co-pilot succumbing to radiation sickness to quickly they were almost instantly incapacitated.

At one point the scientist says that if nothing is done, Urkraine and Belarus could be made inhabitable for hundreds of years. True?

If the water below the reactor had detonated, then yes. Otherwise, no. Most of the area now is habitable.

[Adam Jensen]

In the show, after the reactor exploded, exploded not like a nuke but like high explosives and threw all that radioactive graphite all over, they covered the reactor with sand and boron.

Then the lead scientist says there's a chance the reactor will undergo a nuclear explosion, wiping everything out in a 10KM radius.

I highly doubt it would undergo a nuclear explosion. Nuclear detonations require a specific process to achieve critical mass within a core of nuclear material. Nuclear reactors don't undergo this process, at least not the same way it happens in a bomb.

A nuclear explosion really can't "accidently happen," it requires very difficult engineering. There's a reason so few nations have nuclear weapons.

[cubby]

In the show, after the reactor exploded, exploded not like a nuke but like high explosives and threw all that radioactive graphite all over, they covered the reactor with sand and boron.

Then the lead scientist says there's a chance the reactor will undergo a nuclear explosion, wiping everything out in a 10KM radius.

That's the water issue I mentioned above. It wouldn't have been the reactor exploding in a nuclear explosion, but the water exploding like a nuclear explosion. The physics is complicated, obviously, and I'm not doing the best job of explaining it.

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It's on HBO, and you can bet there will be creative interpretation of the actual events.

That being said it's a real good palette cleanser from GoT and I thoroughly enjoy it.

Lol totally agreed.

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I highly doubt it would undergo a nuclear explosion. Nuclear detonations require a specific process to achieve critical mass within a core of nuclear material. Nuclear reactors don't undergo this process, at least not the same way it happens in a bomb.

A nuclear explosion really can't "accidently happen," it requires very difficult engineering. There's a reason so few nations have nuclear weapons.

This. Yes. Precisely. For the reactor to have undergone a nuclear detonation, the core would have to have been specifically and precisely imploded, which takes extreme engineering, and purposeful maneuvers.

[Saucexorzski]

@chazus got some of his commentary wrong, just fyi - it helps to have actually watched the entire thing instead of "like 10 seconds" of it.

Now to your questions:




It's very accurate in regards to events and timelines and dangers presented as the accident unfolds. The director did condense a number of scientists information into one character to make the story a little easier to follow, and the director points that out in the after show commentary.




Not much - certainly not the events as they play out and the associated dangers. For instance the threat of the reactor being exploded (not exploding) and causing enormous radiation damage throughout Europe and the Soviet Union was true - which is why those poor fuckers had to go into the water.




Definitely not a documentary - but most of it you can assume happen. Obviously not necessarily the little things, but the important events and threats and dangers are true.




Yes - radiation is horrific way to go, and it can kill you very quickly if exposed to enough of it (see below re helicopter). A really rough estimate is that if you're exposed, and you start throwing up, you're going to die soon thereafter.




Sort of, but no. What they were describing was the water below the reactor detonating in such a way as to be tantamount to the force of a nuclear detonation. And that explosion would have sent the reactor material - from all four reactors (Chernobyl had four, only one of them had the accident) - scattered across a large area, and THAT would have caused several and catastrophic radiation damage throughout Europe and the Soviet Union.





Yes, but not from equipment failure. What happened with that helicopter was the crew died almost instantly from flying directly into the core exposure. What we saw in the show wasn't the helicopter getting knocked out because of radiation, but the pilot and co-pilot succumbing to radiation sickness to quickly they were almost instantly incapacitated.



If the water below the reactor had detonated, then yes. Otherwise, no. Most of the area now is habitable.

Yeah they did all the due diligence in finding the background story, talking to folks who were there looking at records and came up with a drama filled story about as accurate as Moana!

[cubby]

I am genuinely horrified if the OP asked the question without the intention to gather replies. This is the biggest nuclear catastrophe ever to happen, information about it and the effects of radiation is widely available. Just open the damn Wikipedia.
HBO makes shows. That alone should tell you about how realistic (read, how overdramatized) their depiction would be.

It's actually fairly accurate to events. I do agree that the best answers lie outside this forum, as you pointed out.

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Yeah they did all the due diligence in finding the background story, talking to folks who were there looking at records and came up with a drama filled story about as accurate as Moana!

What did you find that was inaccurate?

[chazus]

Yes, but not from equipment failure. What happened with that helicopter was the crew died almost instantly from flying directly into the core exposure. What we saw in the show wasn't the helicopter getting knocked out because of radiation, but the pilot and co-pilot succumbing to radiation sickness to quickly they were almost instantly incapacitated. .

Uh. How did the 'pilot succumbing to radiation sickness' make the helicopter blades crumple and the crane get smashed apart?

It hit the crane.. not radiation sickness.

[Linkedblade]

Is the recent HBO show Chernobyl accurate? How much of it is fiction? I was thinking it was a documentary but some of it sounds exaggerated to make the story more interesting.

Did people receive so much radiation that they bled through their skin? Was it ever possible for the damaged reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb? Is it possible to knock a helicopter out of the air with radiation alone? At one point the scientist says that if nothing is done, Urkraine and Belarus could be made inhabitable for hundreds of years. True?

The reaction was under control, it was a water pressure issue that caused the explosion (a steam pressure explosion) and it opening obviously released radiation and super hot graphite.

Im not exactly sure of what the levels of radiation would do, but the graphite I would imagine would cause terrible burns.

They covered the open reactor and I believe it and the entire facility continued to produce electricity until the early 2000s.

The biggest issue isn't Chernobyl, it's all of the towns there that had so much radioactive refuse dumped into those nearby lakes. Absolutely crazy.

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I am genuinely horrified if the OP asked the question without the intention to gather replies. This is the biggest nuclear catastrophe ever to happen, information about it and the effects of radiation is widely available. Just open the damn Wikipedia.
HBO makes shows. That alone should tell you about how realistic (read, how overdramatized) their depiction would be.

I think Hiroshima and Nagasaki are worse. At least in Chernobyl people were able to escape.

[kail]

In the show, after the reactor exploded, exploded not like a nuke but like high explosives and threw all that radioactive graphite all over, they covered the reactor with sand and boron.

Then the lead scientist says there's a chance the reactor will undergo a nuclear explosion, wiping everything out in a 10KM radius.

IIRC, the sand and boron would help stop the radiation poisoning in the air but will create lava as a result due to the extreme heat the core is emitting. That lava when in contact with the water supply will explode. I could have misunderstood something here and there.

Having said that, the show so far is quite amazing.

[cubby]

Uh. How did the 'pilot succumbing to radiation sickness' make the helicopter blades crumple and the crane get smashed apart?

It hit the crane.. not radiation sickness.

The pilot was unconscious from severe radiation exposure. Same with co-pilot. Thus the helicopter was unpiloted and veered into the crane, crumpling the rotors and causing it to crash.

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IIRC, the sand and boron would help stop the radiation poisoning in the air but will create lava as a result due to the extreme heat the core is emitting. That lava when in contact with the water supply will explode. I could have misunderstood something here and there.

Having said that, the show so far is quite amazing.

Yes, the above. Thank you - I forgot about the "lava" part of the equation.

Agreed, fantastic show.

[Easo]

The pilot was unconscious from severe radiation exposure. Same with co-pilot. Thus the helicopter was unpiloted and veered into the crane, crumpling the rotors and causing it to crash.

Agreed, fantastic show.

Is that from the show? Because that would be bullshit.

I think Hiroshima and Nagasaki are worse. At least in Chernobyl people were able to escape.

By that logic firebombing was worse than nukes.

[cubby]

Is that from the show? Because that would be bullshit.

I'll wait for you to figure out the logical inconsistency of your statement above. Or can we all start commenting on things we haven't seen?

[Ashnazg]

The helicopter crashed into the crane in the show and in real life. The difference between the show and real life is that in the real life it happened months after the accident, during the construction of the sarcophagus. In the show, the assumption is that smoke and rad exposure had caused the pilot to be disoriented, and coupled with some minor instrument malfunction, led to his inattentiveness and hitting the crane.

The show itself is pretty accurate, and I don't see it as anti-nuclear propaganda at all. There are a couple of creative liberties taken by the writer with the intention of portraying Soviet government and response worse than it actually was (for example, Pripyat citizens were evacuated long before the rest of the world found out about Chernobyl, whereas the show makes it seem like the Soviets started evacuating people only after Germans found out). The commission in Episode 1, where Maester Luwin told the assembled staff to isolate the city from outside contact for the glory of communism never happened. However, it generally does a decent job of portraying bureaucratic inefficiency in the response to that disaster.

[cubby]

The helicopter crashed into the crane in the show and in real life. The difference between the show and real life is that in the real life it happened months after the accident, during the construction of the sarcophagus. In the show, the assumption is that smoke and rad exposure had caused the pilot to be disoriented, and coupled with some minor instrument malfunction, led to his inattentiveness and hitting the crane.

The show itself is pretty accurate, and I don't see it as anti-nuclear propaganda at all. There are a couple of creative liberties taken by the writer with the intention of portraying Soviet government and response worse than it actually was (for example, Pripyat citizens were evacuated long before the rest of the world found out about Chernobyl, whereas the show makes it seem like the Soviets started evacuating people only after Germans found out). The commission in Episode 1, where Maester Luwin told the assembled staff to isolate the city from outside contact for the glory of communism never happened. However, it generally does a decent job of portraying bureaucratic inefficiency in the response to that disaster.

I'm seeing information from sources that states the helicopter did crash in the timeline that the show states.

Here.

Looking for other sources still. Where are you getting your information that debunks the shows events? The scene with maester Luwin seems like something that would be bad just to make up.

[Puzzony]

The "lava" called corium (that's where khorium in wow comes from most likely) would have superheat the thousands of cubic metres of water in the holding tanks under the reactor (it was an approximate of ~20,000 metric ton of water in reality, compared to the 7,000 tons they mention in the show), thus causing a thermonuclear explosion, and eject the contents of all the 4 reactor cores into the air, thus rendering half of the continent into borderline unhabitable (think it as of a 'yellow zone' of the tiberium poisoning in C&C).
What they didnt mention yet, but i reckon they will, it wasnt the only danger of having an explosion, the water table under the reactor was also enough to cause a smaller but still devastating expolosion, but they prevented that (won't say how, the third episode will cover that).

[I Push Buttons]

Is the recent HBO show Chernobyl accurate? How much of it is fiction? I was thinking it was a documentary but some of it sounds exaggerated to make the story more interesting.

According to the creator, via the show's HBO podcast, much of what they depict is accurate based on first hand accounts. They take a lot of dramatic license, but most is still accurate. Some examples of dramatic license are, for example, the female physicist... She wasn't a real person, but is a composite character of many physicists who came forward. Or the guy killing himself (spoilers to the firs 5 minutes of the show) exactly two years later to the minute after the accident; he killed himself that day, but no one knows what time he killed himself; or the implication that the KGB was following him and he had to hide his tapes, that isn't accurate.

Did people receive so much radiation that they bled through their skin?

1. Sure... If your skin becomes sufficiently degraded by the radiation.
2. The scene I think you are referring to wasn't a guy bleeding due to radiation, it was due to injury (I assume you are referring to the scene where one technician holds a shielded door open for two other technicians to go lay eyes upon the non-existent reactor; and afterwards his back starts bleeding). That guy is in fact still alive to this day, so he by no means was dosed with some crazy amount of radiation (or perhaps he was relative to normal people, but it wasn't so much that it was lethal).

Was it ever possible for the damaged reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb?

No, Chernobyl did not explode in such a way; nor can any nuclear reactor. The Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion. That specific type of reactor had a positive feedback loop where it would continually release more and more neutrons and get hotter and hotter, this was mitigated by graphite modulators that absorbed the neutrons and water cooling. The day of the explosion, they were running a safety test. The reactors relied on that constant cool water, and the test was to determine if, in the event of some catastrophic power failure across the area/country, if the reactor could, while being ramped down, still generate enough power on its own to keep the pumps running until the emergency generators could kick in ~1 minute later. The test parameters called for the reactor to be lightly used that day and thus for the reactor to be cooler in terms of thermal output during the test; but that didn't happen, the reactor was used to a much higher capacity and was much hotter by the time of the test. During the test, some water in a cooling tank was flash vaporized; hot gas (water vapor) expanding extremely fast in a confined space (a tank) = explosion. And then the reactor suffered its unmitigated positive feedback loop of increased heat and a meltdown because the graphite moderators were gone and there was no cooling system by which to cool it.

Perhaps you are referring to a later scene where they describe the risk of an upwards of 5 megaton explosion at the plant... That also wasn't a nuclear explosion, and was, once again, a risk of a steam explosion. There was a massive water reservoir under the plant to be used for cooling, it was presumed to be empty at first, but hours and hours of pumps not working and firefighters spraying water on the fire filled it back up. The nuclear material/molten sand was literally melting through the floor of the plant (slowly, because it was shielded concrete). If it melted all the way through and hit the water reservoir, it would flash vaporize thousands of cubic meters of water in an instant, and once again, hot gas + tight space = explosion; it would be an upwards 5MT steam explosion. Which would have obliterated what was left of the plant (and the entire surrounding area) and sent radioactive material far up into the atmosphere and blanketed huge swaths of Eastern Europe; hence the 'suicide squad' at the end of episode two who volunteered to go into the plant despite the presumed risk of almost certain death to drain the tanks. Ironically all three survived and I am pretty sure two of them are still alive to this day.

Steam explosions can be quite large... For example, the eruption of the volcano Mount St. Helens in Washington State in 1980 was a phreatic eruption (steam blast eruption) and had a ~24 megaton thermal yield.

Is it possible to knock a helicopter out of the air with radiation alone?

The helicopter wasn't knocked out of the air by radiation, its blades collided with steel cables dangling from a crane. This scene had a lot of dramatic license as well, but a helicopter actually did crash in such a way, there is even footage of it (see below). In real life the helicopter crashed much later during the operation to extinguish the fire, not right at the beginning, and in the show they imply the crew lost their bearings due to radiation, which probably didn't happen, it was probably just an accident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuNtgYtF4FI

At one point the scientist says that if nothing is done, Urkraine and Belarus could be made inhabitable for hundreds of years. True?

Yes, one of the only reasons Chernobyl can even be visited today is because of a massive cleanup (that was so expensive that it is one of the big contributors to the collapse of the Soviet Union) that simply wouldn't be possible if the above described massive steam explosion occurred... Where they scrubbed surfaces over a large area, disposed of the topsoil across huge swaths of land, etc., involving hundreds of thousands of people (Chernobyl liquidators). If the entire region were contaminated to a similar extent, a cleanup of that extent would not be realistic and/or feasible.

[Polyxo]

The reaction was under control, it was a water pressure issue that caused the explosion (a steam pressure explosion) and it opening obviously released radiation and super hot graphite.

Im not exactly sure of what the levels of radiation would do, but the graphite I would imagine would cause terrible burns.

They covered the open reactor and I believe it and the entire facility continued to produce electricity until the early 2000s.

The biggest issue isn't Chernobyl, it's all of the towns there that had so much radioactive refuse dumped into those nearby lakes. Absolutely crazy.

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I think Hiroshima and Nagasaki are worse. At least in Chernobyl people were able to escape.

My understanding is that the bleeding is a kind of 'skin hemorrhage', where, due to radiation, your cells are degrading, and the smaller blood vessels and capillaries near the skin are just kind of falling apart, and the skin really doing the same.

[Ashnazg]

I'm seeing information from sources that states the helicopter did crash in the timeline that the show states.

Here.

Looking for other sources still. Where are you getting your information that debunks the shows events? The scene with maester Luwin seems like something that would be bad just to make up.

From the book by Adam Higginbotham, who allegedly spend decades doing Chernobyl research and witness interviews:

https://thebulletin.org/2019/05/the-...-of-chernobyl/

Exactly. A thing I was asked about the other day was, “I was disappointed to see that you didn’t report about the helicopter that crashed during the bombing operation.” You’ve seen the film on YouTube. Well, that film was shot of a helicopter crashing beside a reactor on October 6, 1986, months after the fire had gone out, months after this operation had finished.

The crisis meeting with Master Luwin was made up because the writer in charge wanted to present a summary of the local government's reaction to the Chernobyl crisis in a way that would be easily digestible by the viewers. Since this is not a documentary, he took artistic liberties with his representation of the denial and cover-up that was present at that local government level. I believe they address this in the podcast after the show. This is similar to what they did with the girl scientist character - she represents an amalgamation of the scientific community of SU from that time.

Furthermore, people in charge of the plant (Bryukhanov and Fomin) reported directly to Moscow, bypassing any local government or party members. They would certainly not be accountable to anyone at a local government level.

[Donald Hellscream]

It is like an exaggerated recreation of what happened.

Radiation wreaks havoc on the red and white blood cells so puking up blood and spontaneous bleeding can happen if subject to extreme radiation.

It didn't explode like a nuke, what happened was improper procedures following a blackout simulation which caused the reactor core to instantly go critical which immediately evaporated all the coolant when they tried to stop the reaction, which caused a massive steam explosion that blew off the graphite lid and caused a massive graphite fire that burned for days and released loads of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.

[Linkedblade]

Is that from the show? Because that would be bullshit.



By that logic firebombing was worse than nukes.

Firebombing doesn't cause he spread of radioactive particles.