Chernobyl

Oh, yes. It certainly has that in spades. After the reactor core blew up, every reading of roentgens was off the scale of any device they had. So too with the “refusal to acknowledge government error.” It’s laid on so thick, it leaves you as no doubt about the concept.

And this may have been exactly now it happened. Could be. I don’t really dispute that. What I think is that they did an A-#1 job of recreating the look and feel of a nuclear power plant whose core had exploded. Chillingly so.

I’m just not sure there’s enough left to base a series on. I’m certainly not motivated to watch the next episode.

Instead of talking in theory, if you have a tablet or computer of any kind, you can do the 7-day free trial of HBO NOW and then cancel out.

What is striking (and if Steve shows up here, perhaps he can explain) is how utterly incompetent the Soviets look. Yes, they did build this highly complex nuclear reactor. But if this first episode is anything to go by, nobody really seemed to know what they were doing.

And (so far) there is no background to the accident. I groaned as soon as I saw that this series was opening with a flashback mode from a guy who had witnessed it all and was going to reveal a tell-all story. So instead of a build-up the events leading the the reactor explosion, we’re going to likely be jumping around.

So that’s one reason I have little enthusiasm for watching any more of this. The big event has happened and all that will be left is the recriminations. But I would have loved to have seen the build-up to the accident. Wiki has an article that explains the gist of what went wrong:




en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

The thing to remember about the USSR is actually an old joke, but most jokes have some basis in fact.

"They pretend to pay us , and we pretend to work"

I think that says everything about the Soviets and every other socialist/communist regime ever.

I read a book once about the US ordnance bureau and its manifold failures (and occasional successes). The Allies in World War I relied on US-designed machine guns (Maxim was American) -- but the US had to buy its machine guns from them. For that matter, Holland built his first modern submarine not for the US but for the Fenians. In that case, the Navy saw its value.

On the other hand, the Garand M-1 in World War II was one of Ordnance's greatest successes.

Stellan has been good in quite a few things.

I finished the second episode. They seem to be departing from history. There is a water storage area below the reactor core. If the core hits that, there will be a steam explosion. This checks out with what I read on Wiki.

But in the series it says the explosion would be so catastrophic that the Ukraine would have to be abandoned for 100 years and areas ever further out would be disastrously effected. Wiki mentions nothing to this degree.

I’ve got a few days left on my free trial so I may or may not go on a little longer. But I think this series has pretty much shot its wad in the first two episodes.

Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. I thought I was pretty clear. In the series it says that there was a danger of an explosion so massive that it would make the entire Ukraine uninhabitable for 100 years.

But the article in Wiki, while acknowledging that they had to pump out the holding tanks underneath the core, made no mention of any such danger (other than a steam explosion if the core hit either the water tanks or the water table...so they tried freezing the water table but apparently that wasn't particularly effective). Sounds like the series maker threw in a little cinematic hyperbole.

The fallout was nasty enough. But had there been some danger of a sort of Dr. Strangelove device in terms of devastating effects, I think we would have heard about it.

Even a flawed Soviet nuclear power plant is an amazing piece of engineering.

According to this Wiki article, the design of the reactor was flawed compared to what the West had at the time.

One of the worst flaws was that it would take about one minute for back-up generators to come up to power should the plant lose external power (power needed, in particular, for running the cooling pumps). And apparently that was more than enough time for a working nuclear reactor to go bad.

So what they were trying to do was to see if they could tap enough electricity from their electrical generators as they were winding down (while they still had some momentum) in order to extend the time that the water pumps were in operation cooling the nuclear core.

They had had no success in three previous tries and this fourth one was a clusterfuck.

Have you ever broken something by fiddling with something you didn’t know much about? It may have been fixing something on the car, a home improvement gone bad, or even a piece of software. I think we’ve all done that and got into the situation in the first place because the stakes were low so why no martial on?One error easily compounds another.

It is quite apparent that the shift that came on to complete that fourth test was fiddling with the equipment in ways it was never meant to be fiddled with. It’s as if you or I were in the control room pushing buttons at random and then pushing more buttons trying to fix what we had just previously broken.

But the idea of building a nuclear power plant that was in danger of serious malfunction if the power went off is amazing. I don’t know if the Soviets built these plants as a matter of prestige to keep up with the West and groupthink drowned out any safety concerns. And I don’t understand the physics of it, but other designs (Western designs) dealt much better with over-heating issues. In the Soviet design, a bad feedback loop was obviously more than possible. (Apparently in more modern Western designs, boiling water in the pipes would act as an inhibitor to nuclear fission.)

Liquid water, by its very presence, dampens a nuclear reaction because of its density. So when this water (wrapped around the core in order to transfer heat to the boilers to make steam to make electricity) itself begins to boil, that can be double-trouble for a the RBMK style of reactor used at Chernobyl. Boiling water being less dense, it not only transfers less of the reactor heat to the heat-transfer system but acts to allow that nuclear reaction to be hotter because the neutrons are no longer being slowed down a little by the liquid water.

There were other design issues such as the build-up in this kind of reactor of xenon-15 (which wouldn’t be a bad band name) which “is a reaction-inhibiting neutron absorber," thus "core power ontinued to decrease in the absence of further operator action—a process known as reactor poisoning.”

So during the test, in short (if I understand this right), when they throttled down the reactor to do the test, the power became lower than what they wanted. They started mucking with rods and things — and disabling many of the safety systems as part of the test. And the guy in charge decided they needed to up the power. And then they basically started to pull wheelies and pop clutches with this reactor, trying to do things with it that neither its design nor the laws of physics allowed.

And now, as Mr. Traveler mentions, they have a tourist attraction

I just finished the third episode, “Open Wide, O Earth.” Although the first episode had the most outstanding visuals, this episode has the tightest script yet. The entire episode works well with many individual scenes of note.

Basically the threat of the explosion of the core which would doom the Ukraine to uninhabitability for 100 years has passed. But the danger isn’t over. The water has been pumped out, the fire is extinguished but the core now is beginning to melt. The thick concrete slabs underneath the reactor, built as a safety measure, might hold for two or three months, at best.

If the core gets through to the groundwater, this will supposedly poison the river and eventually the Black Sea and other areas for centuries to come. Legasov’s plan is to mine under the concrete and install a cooling system. He has asked Gorbachev for all the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union as his method of cooling,

The miners who are enlisted know it is a dangerous job. Some of the best scenes are between the foreman of the miners and Shcherbina/Legsov.

Meanwhile Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is the nuclear scientist who is trying to go back and interview the surviving staff of the control room and figure out what happened. The KGB isn't particularly happy about that.

From reading the Wiki article on the accident, it’s clear there isn’t a solid consensus on the cause of the accident. And inside the episode, the opinion is that an explosion as did occur was impossible. Clearly some liberties have been taken in regards to the events. I’m just now sure which ones.

Emil Watson plays the nuclear scientist who is in sync with Legasov. She does not seem too overtly like a girl-power add-on just to appease a certain demographic. But she may be just that. Check out How Accurate is “Chernobyl” Miniseries, which states:



Whatever the case may be, she's a solid character so far.

Chernobyl concludes with the fifth episode, “Vichnaya Pamyat.”

It’s a good concluding episode and this has turned out to be another good series recommended by Steve. I thought there were elements to the first two episodes that made the outlook grim. It was appearing to get stuck in hospital scenes. In fact, the worst storyline in the series was more or less set there. I would continually fast-forward by it.

And that brings up a note about HBO. It streams very well. Nearly all services (including Netflix) will choke if you try to fast-forward streaming conflict. HBO was as smooth as butter. And it would immediately present the streaming content at full resolution. Amazon Prime Video (although it has gotten better) is notorious for taking a long time to build a buffer. Until then, you get somewhat low-res content.

This fifth and final episode starts with Legasov’s Vienna testimony to the Atomic Energy Commission having already been given. He toed the party lie. That is, he lied. The lie is that it was only operator error that led to the accident and that there were no inherent design flaws to the RBMK type of reactor.

Later, at a show trial of three of Chernobyl’s managers (who are indeed guilty of gross incompetence), Legasov concludes his testimony (after having condemned the gross incompetence of the three managers) with notes about the inherent design flaws of the reactors and why they were there: They were cheaper to build.

And then he gives a big Kirk-like speech about freedom. Yes, governments and parties involve themselves in big lies for one reason or another. But the sad irony is that 99% of people watching this are going to consider today’s “big lies” the denial of “climate change,” Trump having colluded with the Russians, any criticism of Darwinism is only by religious fanatics, and “gender” is not a real thing.

So despite lessons to be learned from watching this, I very much doubt that more than a few will draw the correct lessons. But this is certainly a series worth watching, although having browsed HBO’s rather lame fare, I doubt I’ll be going past the free 7-day trial.

I can remember when the movie Quiz Show came out, about the late 1950s scandals and the man at the center, Charles Van Doren. It was an interesting movie that nicely skewered the show's dishonesty -- but it also fictionalized many details in a movie about the moral wrong of doing that. Many pointed this out, and it even came up at the end of the satire of it in MAD Magazine.

I recall that at the end of Sink the Bismarck they actually noted that the main character was actually a composite, though other errors (or changes) of details were glossed over.