Chernobyl series

I'm loving the series. A friend posted this article questioning the science in the series. It's an interesting read.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michael...ycEe3fp864bmd1MS2zcIj_AspJjG_gOM#76616c657269

 

You know something crazy about Chernoble, after the incident they planted alot of cannabis all around there because it sucks up heavy metals and radiation from the ground. Must be atleast a few kids w/radiation poisoning running around there from the toxic weed, lol.

 

I'm looking forward to Chernobyl, Fukishima (?) is waiting to be told also. I support nuclear power as clean energy but that dam duality thing about nuclear is like a story of mankind. Take something fantastic and bungle it. (Don't build on shore lines, I mean c'mon)

 

After watching the series "The Americans" it seems they blamed the CIA for everything bad that happened to them. Crop failure? "CIA used genetic modified wheat to starve us to death"
I'm still fascinated by the way they are lawless yet rigid and no one (over here, maybe even over there) knows what in the hell they are really thinking about everything. I mean who does things like this?


BTW, I didn't remember this right, was in Kazachstan, not Siberia.

 

they should have filmed this in russian with subtitles or at least use actors with russian accents.

 

I thought the same thing. Some of them seem to have English accents. There's something about a Russian accent that makes everything sound more devious.

 

Its is great show and hats off for people making it to remind people of history, but as usual some things are way blown out of proportion to make it very good show, quite a few things are just plain incorrect. So please take it with grain of salt. Some of us lived through it and remember it to well, and know friends/family that lost their lifes their life hood in that disaster.

 

I'm sure the Russians want to counter with a more 'Our heroes sacrificed their own lives to save the Motherland' (they did and hats off but it was descentagrating into world wide disater and lots more ' Uranium is not an exact science, lots of luck is always at play'.

The truth is really 'We were broke and needed cheap entergy'.

The real politics of all 3 superpowers is impossible to ever put into 1 movie even w/o a disaster clouding the story. I really would like to see that told though. the last 100 yrs. since Russia's revolution.

 

I would bet this would be very subjective statement, but then again alot of truth does come out 50, 60, 70+ years after and u do find truth is not always as pretty as it sounded back then, i am sure we have few of these here in US.

 

The creator talked a little bit about this decision on the accompanying podcast and he said that having english speaking actors try to use a russian accent often times sounds like Boris and Natasha from Bullwinkle... and it takes you out of the story even more.

 

Then just use Russian actors. I don't need to see a familiar face when the story and acting are on point.

 

I must be the only person on the planet who hated this series...

ok hated is a bit strong, but I thought it was too fake dramatic. The acting was over the top grim/depressing, the music/sound effects were manipulative, cinematography was shit (why the need to use filters and various other lighting effects to make everything look dark/green/yellow??? Last I checked, the real world doesn't look that way...). Overall, the series felt propagandistic to me... like I was supposed to walk away hating nuclear energy or something.

And the dude running the reactor control room (forgot his name) was just awful. Who talks like that in real life?? I mean really... I've heard of bad bosses, but his tone/acting was just over the top.

 

I felt similarly after the 1st episode, I was really skeptical about the way they were depicting the event especially when there are a lot of accounts of what happened being far lass dramatic than how the show expresses it. But it did encourage me to do some reading about Chernobyl (up until recently I really didn't know anything other than it was a nuclear plant disaster), and the level of lying and cover ups the Russians did and still maintain to this day is astounding, though not really surprising.

I watched the rest of the show and I did really like it, especially the last couple of episodes. At the end during the credits they explain a little about the real story and which parts the dramatized and for what reason, there's a good article from the director about it too somewhere on the web that I read about.

Anyway I thought it was good, definitely an awful situation that as bad as it was, could have ended up far far worse. The story about the professor that the show focuses on is accurate in how he prevented it from being an even bigger disaster.

 

Yeah I will admit I did like the last episode

 

Haven't seen but I always think of Russia as dark.

Had they said the accident was caused by not enough light I would have thought "That figures"

 

The Wife and I watched it and talked about the different things that we each remembered from when it happened. They could have done a 30 year follow up episode and it would have made it better just my.02​

 

Look up the PBS documentary "Command and Control". It is based on the book of the same title by Eric Schlosser. It details an incident that took place in 1980 near Damascus, Arkansas, when a fully fueled Titan II ICBM, fully armed with a 9 megaton warhead, exploded in its silo, throwing the nuclear warhead hundreds of yards away from the site. The reasons the nuclear warhead itself did not detonate that day are fully explained in this book. Extremely well researched and written.

You may also like the book "Midnight in Chernobyl" by Adam Higginbotham. This is the book that the HBO series "Chernobyl" was based on. Like all book/movie pairs, the book contains more detail than you could ever possibly fit into a single 2 hour movie or even a 5 part mini-series. In particular the book does a great job of explaining in detail just how and why the Soviet system was so massively f'd up, and how that led directly to the problems with the RBMK reactors and the eventual catastrophe at Chernobyl. It made me hate the Soviets all over again...

 

I have my own peculiar recollection of Chernobyl. In 1986 my wife and I took the "trip of a lifetime" to Australia and New Zealand. We were gone for 4 weeks (2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks unpaid leave). After 33 hours of airplanes and airports we finally arrived in Adelaide, Australia, on the south coast. We had booked a hotel there for three days and purposely did not schedule much in order to allow time to get over the jet lag. Each morning we made ourselves get up and take a walk on the beautiful pedestrian mall in downtown Adelaide. One of the buildings we walked by every morning was a big old-fashioned newspaper building with an old-timey scrolling electronic "news ticker" on the outside.

On the third and last morning we were there, as we approached the newspaper building, we could not see the news ticker from the direction we were approaching (it was "around the corner" from our vantage point) but we could see several hundred people just standing in front of the building looking up at the ticker. As we rounded the corner we finally saw what captured their attention: "REAGAN BOMBS LIBYA". My wife and I were both working in the aerospace industry, doing engineering, and we were both avid science fiction readers. One popular genre in that era was the "nuclear-war-end-of-the-world" saga and I had read and seen plenty about that topic. For a moment my mind reeled with the ironic thought "well, at least we are in the southern hemisphere if the cold war turns hot, and most of the fallout will not make it across the equator due to the normal circulation patterns of the atmosphere...". But, of course the Rooskies didn't lift a finger to help Ghadafi, so we did not have to live out our lives as refugees in Australia...

Don't worry - I will bring it back to Chernobyl shortly!

After that we continued with our tourist activities and a couple weeks later wound up on Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. We spent 4 days on the tiny island, with no phones or TVs to distract us from the wonders of a tropical island. When the time came to leave and head back to the mainland we opted for an extra $100 or so to take a helicopter instead of a near-sea-sickness-inducing boat ride. The copter ride was great (our pilot was an ex-pat American who had flown 'copters in 'Nam!) and when we got back to the small air port at Gladstone, we were walking through the terminal when I saw a newspaper box containing papers with a giant headline: "SOVIET NUCLEAR ACCIDENT".

I guess I was all primed for Nuclear Armageddon after the Libyan raid, because all I could think was WTF?!?! What happened? Did a warhead go off in a silo, or accidentally fall out of an airplane? And where did this happen - in Russia, or somewhere else in the world? My mind went into overdrive for a moment or two... But after I walked a few more paces I saw another newspaper box with a slightly more explanatory headline: "SOVIET N-PLANT ON FIRE". So, once again, we avoided having to live out our natural lives in Australia, which in retrospect, based on our experiences there, might not have been the worst thing in the world after all...

So, yeah, Chernobyl. It was a Real Thing!