Chernobyl

[Deja Thoris]

The scientist said a thermal explosion, which would happen if the core reached the water resevoir underneath the reactor.

Many years ago I worked in a factory that had an arc furnace. It's basically melting metal. It has refractory bricks to insulate and then water pipes behind it to cool.

One day a refractory brick failed and the molten shit instantly melted the water pipe. The water in the pipes instantly vaporised (expanded ie explosion) which basically sharted all the molten stuff straight through the roof etc of the factory. I was about half a kilometer away and it was absolutely terrifying. It's noise like I've never heard and the ground shook so hard I can imagine people closer would have been knocked over. (Noone was hurt somehow)

I'd imagine a nuclear reactor was orders of magnitude bigger than this so if a big core of several thousand degrees Celsius hit water the effect will be....dramatic.

[Kreo]

And yet it is very accurate information. I wish people could find some middle ground between ignorant hostility and know-it-all contempt. Is the HBO Chernobyl precisely accurate? No. Is it close? Yes. Does the director tell you that up front? Yes.

Conclusion: great info in a fantastic forum.

Great logic. If something was exaggerated by a writers, it's fine as long as it's good show. Devil is in the details, you know.
And now tell me how different from what i said? If you want real info, use other sources. Want a good show? Watch HBO "version".

[Stormspark]

Nah, a reactor is not built to explode like a nuke, it was the usual hydrogen gas explosion.

Edit: If it would explode like that then they wouldn't have needed to built the "coffin" in the first place, since the whole reactor area would have been leveled and there wouldn't be much point in trying to contain something.

Actually the initial explosion that blew the reactor and building apart was a steam explosion. Like when a water heater explodes, only much moreso due to the higher temperatures involved. There was a hydrogen explosion after that, that caused a lot more damage and scattered even more radioactive material around. The hydrogen explosion couldn't have happened until AFTER the steam explosion though. The reaction that produces the hydrogen can happen, but it was isolated from the atmosphere until after the steam explosion blew the core and building apart. You're correct in that it is physically impossible for a reactor to explode like a bomb.

Steam explosion isn't chemical or nuclear, it's purely thermal. The water flashes to steam so fast that it creates a massive pressure spike that the structure can't contain, so it blows apart. The hydrogen explosion happened when hot steam reacted with the zirconium coating on the fuel rods to form hydrogen. Which then mixed with oxygen from the air, and exploded due to the temperatures involved. Purely chemical reaction, nothing nuclear there either. Zr + 2H2O → ZrO2 + 2H2. 2H2 + O2 → 2H2O. Basically. Zirconium + hot water + oxygen from the air = Zirconium oxide + more water + BOOM.

The only thing the nuclear reaction does is create heat (and quite a lot of it). And, of course, when the entire structure is blown apart, it scatters those radioactive elements (that are supposed to be contained in the core)...basically everywhere.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Actually the initial explosion that blew the reactor and building apart was a steam explosion. Like when a water heater explodes, only much moreso due to the higher temperatures involved. There was a hydrogen explosion after that, that caused a lot more damage and scattered even more radioactive material around. You're correct in that it is physically impossible for a reactor to explode like a bomb.

Ah might be the case, it's been a while since I read about it. The whole incident is completely documented anyway, if someone actually cared then they'd literally just need to look it up on wikipedia where they have the exact timeline of the events.

[discofleshpot]

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.

I agree with the palette cleansing. I'm going into the show with the mindset that it's a creative interpretation and I'm loving it.

But you already know people are going to be making threads with "OMG STUPID WRITERS THAT/'S NOT WHAT HAPPENED" every episode for the entire duration of the mini-series, if they haven't already.

[Argorwal]

The real explosion was a steam explosion caused by hundred of water cooling channels turning to steam instantly due to the graphite tipped rods operating in violation of every safety limit and the reactor design having a positive moderator temperature coefficient.

Power reactor cannot explode with like a nuclear bomb. Bombs are 95%+ enriched with fissile material and power reactors are limited to 5%.

Also not having a steel reinforced concrete containment building didn't help...

[Dead Moose Fandango]

Get out of here, Stalker!

[stevenho]

The show is extremely accurate on many levels. From the injuries sustained by staff and firefighters, to timeline, the size of graphite chunks ejected and even ambulance vehicle models - it all checks out.
A lot of research must have gone into it.

[cubby]

Great logic. If something was exaggerated by a writers, it's fine as long as it's good show. Devil is in the details, you know.
And now tell me how different from what i said? If you want real info, use other sources. Want a good show? Watch HBO "version".

You lied. Period. Not my fault you did it. You said it was as accurate as a cartoon. If you're confused about what you said, that's understandable - you can scroll up and check it out. Let us know when you're ready to come back to the discussion table, where we don't compare docu-dramas with cartoons and realize that reality impacts what we say.

The show is highly accurate to the facts of events, as we've seen confirmed with several posts in this thread. If it wasn't accurate, the director and producer clarified it. If you're confused about that clarification process, just ask one of us - we're here to help.

But don't shit all over the thread just because you said something stupid and aren't intellectually honest enough to admit you were wrong.

[Kaleredar]

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

You could live in Chernobyl right now, there are people that never left and still live there.

Hell the damn power planet was still in operation and producing electricity until the year 2000.



The issue with "creative liberties" being taken with something like this is that it misrepresents the very real operation of Nuclear power plants, especially if they're purporting that Chernobyl made or might make the surrounding area, let alone entire country, unlivable.

[Polyxo]

You lied. Period. Not my fault you did it. You said it was as accurate as a cartoon. If you're confused about what you said, that's understandable - you can scroll up and check it out. Let us know when you're ready to come back to the discussion table, where we don't compare docu-dramas with cartoons and realize that reality impacts what we say.

The show is highly accurate to the facts of events, as we've seen confirmed with several posts in this thread. If it wasn't accurate, the director and producer clarified it. If you're confused about that clarification process, just ask one of us - we're here to help.

But don't shit all over the thread just because you said something stupid and aren't intellectually honest enough to admit you were wrong.

I like to think of it as a 'dramatization of history'. The facts are there, but they sometimes mess with the timing to be able to show things better for an audience. It's not a documentary, because there isn't enough raw footage and interview access to important people. It's one or two steps removed from a documentary. It's really well done.

[kenoathcarn]

So having watched the first like... 10 seconds, it's probably fiction mostly, considering it's on HBO. I'll watch the entire thing later, but I can guess a lot is exagerrated.

It's a dramatised version of events based on testimony of people involved or lived during that era from inside the soviet union, its mostly historically accurate (so far, only episode 3 is out).

There are some "changes" that you might call fiction, for example, the character of Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Waton) is not a real person but rather an amalgam of a larger group of scientists and ideas involved in the events of Chernobyl condensed down into one character, but the actions of the character and events that happen to the character are based on whats understood to be true events.

The creators do a podcast every week on the hbo channel on youtube that discuss decisions made and why they made them, as well as the parts that are true or loosely accurate etc.

The real plus of the show is that it goes beyond the documentary style that most people are familiar with chernobyl to try and give a real understanding of what it actually felt like to be there rather than just how and what happened.

[Strawberry]

Haven't seen the series yet, but the high level sounds roughly accurate.

The people that fought the fires to try to prevent them from spreading to the other reactors received massive doses of radiation...many of whom died starting a couple of weeks after through a couple of months, so bleeding through the skin is distinctly possible. One of them received a radiation dose of 20,000 mSv (nearly 10,000 times higher than an abdominal xray).

It wasn't a matter of it being a damaged reactor. They were shutting down the reactor when someone wanted to do a test first. They attempted to restart the reactor when it was starting to power down and ended up raising the control rods too far to reverse the reactor to power up. Because of how that style reactor works (graphite moderated), when it did start powering back up, it powered up fully with the control rods up to high resulting in the reactor going prompt critical. This created a steam explosion which has nothing in common with an atomic bomb.

In regards to the helicopter crash, it did happen, but I'm pretty sure it was because the pilot flew it too close to nearby cables.



If nothing was done, you bet the surrounding countries would have been uninhabitable. They avoided that by pouring literally thousands of tons of boron, dolomite, sand, clay, and lead into the core in the following days, then a large concrete shelter was erected (and further improved shelter was put in place a few years ago) to keep radioactive contamination minimized.

I'm no expert when it comes to this, but something very weird happened to that chopper.
The way its tail bends seems unnatural to me. But I don't think it's the radiation. I have no idea what happened there, it just feels weird.

[kenoathcarn]

I'm no expert when it comes to this, but something very weird happened to that chopper.
The way its tail bends seems unnatural to me. But I don't think it's the radiation. I have no idea what happened there, it just feels weird.

The radiation didn't do anything to the chopper, it caused the pilot to become nauseated to the point where he couldnt fly the chopper properly, causing it to fly into a bunch of steel cables and get tangled up and crash.

[Mendzia]

Here is great documetary about whole accident:



And honestly... Some of posts an questions like 'did it look like nuclear bomb explosion??' actually scares me...

[endorus]

I think the HBO "dramatised history" relates to the cast, script adaptation of characters etc, from a disaster point of view its relatively accurate, that said I'm not a nuclear physicist...

Remember how a nuclear power plant works, it's just a big steam engine, but instead of using coal to produce heat you're using nuclear fission.
The radioactive fallout was a consequence of the disaster and its secondary effects caused by the distribution of this.

The explosion was a steam explosion caused by running the reactor at low power (unstable core) with no cooling.
The show makes out that it was part of a test procedure gone wrong but it's widely accepted that it was a result of under-trained staff taking shortcuts.

As for the chopper in the program, aside from the radiation it was likely the insane heat that caused the damage with the radiation being the secondary as that crash didn't happen until much later on in real life. The actual helicopter crash shown in the above video was caused by the blades catching the cranes vertical cables.

There is a reason why the USSR were the only state to use graphite as a moderator, the rest of the world use water to cool and water to moderate, if something goes tits up with a water moderator it converts to steam. Steam can't moderate for fission so the reactor shuts down.
With graphite the reaction continues, there is no safety.

[Ice 9]

I'm no expert when it comes to this, but something very weird happened to that chopper.
The way its tail bends seems unnatural to me. But I don't think it's the radiation. I have no idea what happened there, it just feels weird.

A helicopter can easily chop off its tail if mishandled. I wanted to post an example but the forum won't let me.

[Beazy]

Ill be starting this show tonight!!

[luc54]

I'm no expert when it comes to this, but something very weird happened to that chopper.
The way its tail bends seems unnatural to me. But I don't think it's the radiation. I have no idea what happened there, it just feels weird.

Regarding the helicopters here's website with some info http://www.collectivemag.com/chernobyl-helicopters/

“Before the accident there were huge cranes around the reactor. After the explosion, some of these were literally hanging in the void without support” recalled Colonel Oleg Chichcov years after the disaster. Chichcov was at the time of the explosion at Chernobyl a Mi-26 helicopter instructor that was dispatched as part of the response effort. “I had been assigned to a mission area, but I refused until the cranes had been made safe.” After Chichcov’s refusal, one of the Mi-8 crews on scene was asked to complete the mission, accepting it and ultimately, never returning.

[cubby]

Ill be starting this show tonight!!

It's really well done. Good acting and writing. Very enjoyable.