Wraith, I'm specifically talking about the trial. I don't know how quickly after the trial he came out against the state, but during the trial, he upheld the official state propaganda lines.

6/6/2019 3:13:14 PM

Loved this show

6/16/2019 9:08:49 PM

If you love it so much, why don't you just MOVE there?!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl

6/20/2019 12:08:29 AM

I just Chernobyled my pants a little bit.

6/20/2019 11:47:30 AM

The Reactor Manual is very explicit: When the reactor shuts down and you find yourself in a Iodine pit, you shut down for 24 hours. Yes, we can see how a positive void coefficient is less than ideal, but the obvious operator rules are not only obvious, they're written down. Don't attempt to operate the reactor in a Iodine pit and don't operate the reactor with the automatic system turned off which would have automatically inserted control rods as the slowing pumps produced steam and the positive void coefficient kicked in.

True, only an RBMK reactor explodes so quickly when you do these things, but all reactors will produce a bad day when you do these things. A Western Reactor in a similar configuration would have blown up eventually too, just not as promptly. The biggest difference would be western scram procedures, where the control rods free-fall into the reactor in under a second rather than being pushed in over 14 seconds. But this element is not dramatically more expensive.

And all unnecessary. All the technology they really needed was a telephone line and a tape playback to call someone in charge to warn them "Reactor power fell low yet the operators are not shutting down like they are supposed to. Call the police."

Quote :

"After reading what I've read so far, I can't understand why any municipality would go for an RBMK type reactor. It seems that the ONLY benefit would be that you could use un-enriched uranium. And yes, this is soviet Russia, but I just don't see how the benefits could outweigh the potential safety hazards."

Cheaper is important, especially to an increasingly poor (as the 80s went on) country such as the Soviet Union. Using enriched uranium means building an entire factory with skilled engineers and a workforce that technically does nothing, since an RBMK reactor can run fine without the enrichment. But, human stupidity and "rules are for other people" are why we can't have nice things.

6/22/2019 1:43:40 PM

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-hbos-chernobyl-got-right-and-what-it-got-terribly-wrong/amp

It's interesting to follow criticism of this show. They miss that the point of the show is to draw parallels between a disaster that seemed completely foreign and the present. It can't be true true.


Everyone wants to break apart the scientific bugaboos I or failure to completely understand Soviet politics.

6/23/2019 12:17:25 AM

Radioactive patients. Sounds familiar. Nothing to see here, folks!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49432681

8/23/2019 7:52:02 PM

Really enjoyed the show. Read somewhere that after the Soviet government's slow response in relocating people that actually needed to be relocated (outside of those in Pripyat), that they went overboard and moved some people that didn't need to be relocated to larger cities and actually decreased their life expectancy more by putting them in the polluted cities as opposed to staying in the more irradiated countryside.

8/29/2019 8:30:32 AM

Just plowed through this weekend, really good and interesting

That imgur album is great

6/8/2020 1:34:07 PM

I need to watch it again.

6/8/2020 3:32:12 PM