9 ms·

Top UCLA Doctor Denounces HBO's “Chernobyl” as Wrong and “Dangerous”

61 points by krzyk 7y ago

BrockSamson 7y ago
Coal power stations produce around 5-10 tonnes of radioactive waste every year. This seems to be ignored for the most part when discussing nuclear energy.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  +1. Just to add an explanation, they do so by taking naturally occurring radioactive particles that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in the atmosphere. This should be common knowledge, but almost no one knows it.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    how does the rate of radioactivity added to the air compare to farming? Plants with deep roots also extract radioactivity from the ground and then we eat it. this is a serious question, which of course ties into the concept of "banana equivalent dose", which helps to contextualize claims about radioactivity.
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      For one thing, plant life is merely repeatedly recycling the mineral content of an only slowly-varying topsoil, while coal-burning is adding new sources.
- jhayward 7y ago
  It is not useful to use the many failings of coal as a fuel to promote nuclear power. Nuclear power does not compete against coal, it competes against wind/solar and natural gas. The constant refrain of 'but coal ..' from nuclear advocates is just an admission that nuclear power is un-economic and unable to compete in the marketplace against the best options.
  - bsaul 7y ago
    Then why do i keep hearing that germany has been producing a lot more pollution since they stopped nuclear power because of coal and gaz being used as a subsitute source of energy ?
    - cygx 7y ago
      No idea why you keep hearing that: Failure to meet your reduction goals does not equate an increase in pollution. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/5_abb_trend-emi_2019.png https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
    - brazzy 7y ago
      Because people are misrepresenting facts (aka. lying) Germany did not stop using nuclear power, it started phasing it out (which had actually been planned long before Fukushima), and has not been producing more pollution because it has in fact been replacing coal and gas as well as nuclear with renewable sources: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
      - cygx 7y ago
        Germany has actually slightly increased its gas usage - though compared to other energy sources, its currently more of a rounding error in magnitude: 2002 2018 Total 503 545 Coal+Oil 253 205 Nuclear 156 72 Gas 40 44 Biomass 4 45 Wind+Solar+Hydro 39 177 Other 10 3 https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...
        brazzy 7y ago
        More significantly, the increase in gas is more than offset by a decrease in coal and oil.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Coal is so bad that we'd have to have one Chernobyl nearly every week all the time to catch up with death rates. Coal deaths per energy: ~ 100k / PWh Coal consumption per year: > 40 PWh Coal deaths per year: >4M Chernobyl death estimates: 4k to 93k Which gives 4M / 93k = 43 Chernobyls per year to catch up with coal (best case estimates).
emiliobumachar 7y ago
The key point is that radiation victims of Chernobyl did not became radioactive themselves -and harmful to others- as depicted in the series. Fear and panic caused more harm than the accident itself - including one million unnecessary abortions. I think the danger implied is that it could happen again.
- bartwe 7y ago
  Question is if the series portrayed actions taken back in '86 or creating new misrepresentations and fears
- tssva 7y ago
  For someone concerned about facts he presents no actual facts to backup his claim of 1 million unnecessary abortions. What is this based upon? How did they identify which were abortions driven by bad medical advice and which were abortions which women claimed were based upon the medical advice but for which that was just a cover to avoid the social stigma often associated with abortion? Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.
  - emiliobumachar 7y ago
    If a woman chooses to abort a pregnancy she otherwise wanted because of a perceived high risk of defects, and that risk is actually wildly inflated, that is definitely harm to her, regardless of any considerations of the fetus.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm. Depending on the person and how late term the pregnancy was, it can be both psychologically and physically harmful. edit: Pregnancy and childbirth can also be psychologically and physically harmful so net harm is more difficult to talk about.
  - otabdeveloper4 7y ago
    > Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm. How is a killing of a person not considered harm? (Unless, of course, you're some sort of extreme psycopath.)
michaelgiba 7y ago
Not to mention everyone in the show has a British accent, even Gorbachev. Hilarious
- ToddBonzalez 7y ago
  The reason for this was explained in the companion podcast.
  - woodgrainz 7y ago
    Curious, can you post the reason here? I have not yet watched the show.
    - wayoutthere 7y ago
      Dunno if this is the podcast response, but this is generally done in movies / TV when they have foreign characters speak English as a proxy for their native language. They almost never use American English unless the character is American; they’ll either use British English or a heavy accent.
      - alistairSH 7y ago
        Do you have a citation for this? I've never heard of using British English as a proxy for a foreign language. Instead, I always assumed it was because there are a lot of popular British actors, and if portraying non-English speakers, there's no good reason to "fake" an accent (so they just use their native accent), as was the case with "Chernobyl".
        mimixco 7y ago
        Most non-native English speakers around the world will be taught British rather than American English, so this 'accent' would be what you could expect from them in real life if they were to speak English.
nrjames 7y ago
The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show.... ... which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show? Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  All the time: See CSI
- jhayward 7y ago
  Agreed. The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe, not to debunk the misconceptions, misinformation, and bad science that was present at the time. To get upset that they didn't make a 'debunking Chernobyl' documentary is to miss the entire point of the series.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    > The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe They did a pretty awful job then. Or that wasn't the point and they actually wanted to entertain viewers.
- mlevental 7y ago
  >Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show are you kidding? always edit: making this comment, in response to the person to whom i'm responding to's disbelief made me realize something: it's a really silly thing to sit around and think you're above being influenced by narrative. how much of our indignation at others' naivete is simply privilege? if i couldn't afford a doctor, to whom i could outsource the cognitive burden of figuring it out, i would probably believe all sorts of things about health that had been suggested to me by way of narrative. edit2: it's fun to watch the score on this comment. up down up down. on the one hand it's glib and snarky - HN loves that - but on the other hand it implicates privilege - HN hates that. i probably should've used a word different from privilege but i can't think of one that wouldn't trigger people just as hard.
app4soft 7y ago
Dear, YCombinator Admins! Please, stop share fakes written by Michael Shellenberger[0] on HN! [0] http://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/853/exposing-misinformation-michael-shellenberger-and-environmental-progress http://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/853/exposin...
- pdkl95 7y ago
  > wiseinternational.org This organization self-description[1] (emphasis added by me to highlight important phrases): >> We publish the Nuclear Monitor, a unique international newsletter serving the worldwide movement against nuclear power. Produced 20 times per year, it gives an anti-nuclear perspective on what is happening in the nuclear power industry and the resistance against it. An anti-nuclear activist group is an interesting choice to use as a reference... [1] https://www.wiseinternational.org/what-we-do https://www.wiseinternational.org/what-we-do
WAHa_06x36 7y ago
The claim that external exposure to radiation does not make you radioactive is true in most cases. However, Chernobyl is not most cases. First, I'm not sure you can claim that people working during the disaster would only suffer external exposure. There was a reactor core on fire, there was probably plenty of isotopes in the air that would have been breathed in and possibly taken up by the body. Second, neither alpha, beta nor gamma reaction will induce any significant amount of radioactive in materials that are exposed to them. And under normal circumstances, that is all you would be exposed to. But this was, again, an exposed reactor core. There might very well have been a significant amount of neutron radiation present, which does in fact induce radioactivity. So the claims of the article are way too strong for this very, very exceptional situation.
alex_young 7y ago
It's sad to see them use inflated numbers to criticize the numbers they claim are inflated: “Although the 31 immediate Chernobyl-related deaths are sad,” he concludes, “the number of fatalities is remarkably small compared with many energy-related accidents, such as the Benxihu coal mine disaster in China 1942, which killed about 1500 miners, and the 1975 Banqiao dam accident, also in China, which killed about 250,000 people.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties The dam failure killed approx. 26,000 people, and 145,000 died as a result of subsequent epidemics and famine according to the official record. While this was a very significant loss of life, inflating it to argue with other numbers you contest seems pretty shallow.
- 292355744930110 7y ago
  Sort of like how people try to conflate the problems of the earth quake and tsunami with those of Fukushima Daiichi.
kamarad 7y ago
I lived in socialistic country in Eastern Europe and government DID try to cover it up. There were no new for at last several days. Then they said everything is fine, go outside, eat vegetables, drink mil, everything is OK.. it is just Western propaganda that there are problems. We trust our comrades in Soviet Union. While the news in Western Europe was: Minimize your stay outside. Do not drink mil. Do not eat vegetables (the farmers in West were actually destroying crops so it cannot be consumed).
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Yeah, scientists in Poland were told to shut up and smart ones immediately took potassium iodide to protect thyroid. The first news anyone got was from Sweden a few days later.
ishanjain28 7y ago
People are taking the wrong takeaway from the show. The point of Chernobyl(HBO) was not to show the dangers of Nuclear reactors, It was to show, The Lies, Politics and other disgusting elements can and will ruin lives of thousands of people. Chernobyl was the result of lies and deception. Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl. People, Including the Doctor have taken it incorrectly in my humble opinion. They even had a separate podcast where they discussed exactly this and more details related to the series in great detail. Look it up on Pocketcast or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts and you'll find it.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  > Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl. What led to Chernobyl is a reactor design flaw (could happen to anyone), and irresponsible behavior of the plant staff, who run the experiment against "the book". Only the later probably is because of the culture-wide trait. The rest of it could have happened to anyone. Though I do agree, that the show displays the need for open information through the lack of it in Soviet Union like nothing else.
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
I'm not an expert, but this doesn't look too credible to me: - I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous. - Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell. - If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented an there are photos. - Regarding the Ignatenko's claim that the foetus had somehow protected her from radiactivity by absorbing it, personally I never interpreted it as a statement that the show was claiming as true. I saw it as the character's own interpretation. The show portrays different characters with various degrees of ignorance, and no one in the show portrayed as knowledgeable defends that theory. - There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story.
- mjames083 7y ago
  >> I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous. That's the immediate death toll from radiation poisoning, not the total years lost as a result of radiation exposure. The article is correct to point out however that the total death toll must be much less than many other disasters and certainly not comparable to what people commonly believe about the death toll at chernobyl. >>- Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell. >> If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented and there are photos. Those were firefighters who ingested radioactive products in the air. Normal human tissue cannot be induced to be become radioactive. I'm not surprised that they would quarantine a firefighter and bury his body in a metal casket but that doesn't apply to the majority of the victims of radiation poising by Chernobyl. The show at one point shows such a burial for liquidators who wouldn't have radioactive material in their body and is almost certainly ahistorical. The show never makes this clear. >>- There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 He was literally standing over a tank of radioactive material when the accident occurred thus explaining the extent of his skin damage. The radiation exposure for the firefighters wouldn't have caused them to suffer skin damage to the same extent and not in the way portrayed in the film. The ingested fission products would have harmed internal tissue before reaching the surface of the body. The show's portrayal of the first responder firefighters is almost entirely completely wrong. >>There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story. I disagree and I'm quite concerned about how the show mistakenly portrays the effects of radiation. At the very least they could explained how radiation works and why the firefighters had to quarantined but they never do anything like that. Instead, we hear dramatic warnings of a thermonuclear blast unless our heroes take immediate action which is completely nonsensical.

61 points by krzyk 7y ago

Coal power stations produce around 5-10 tonnes of radioactive waste every year. This seems to be ignored for the most part when discussing nuclear energy.

emiliobumachar 7y ago
+1. Just to add an explanation, they do so by taking naturally occurring radioactive particles that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in the atmosphere. This should be common knowledge, but almost no one knows it.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  how does the rate of radioactivity added to the air compare to farming? Plants with deep roots also extract radioactivity from the ground and then we eat it. this is a serious question, which of course ties into the concept of "banana equivalent dose", which helps to contextualize claims about radioactivity.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    For one thing, plant life is merely repeatedly recycling the mineral content of an only slowly-varying topsoil, while coal-burning is adding new sources.
jhayward 7y ago
It is not useful to use the many failings of coal as a fuel to promote nuclear power. Nuclear power does not compete against coal, it competes against wind/solar and natural gas. The constant refrain of 'but coal ..' from nuclear advocates is just an admission that nuclear power is un-economic and unable to compete in the marketplace against the best options.
- bsaul 7y ago
  Then why do i keep hearing that germany has been producing a lot more pollution since they stopped nuclear power because of coal and gaz being used as a subsitute source of energy ?
  - cygx 7y ago
    No idea why you keep hearing that: Failure to meet your reduction goals does not equate an increase in pollution. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/5_abb_trend-emi_2019.png https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
  - brazzy 7y ago
    Because people are misrepresenting facts (aka. lying) Germany did not stop using nuclear power, it started phasing it out (which had actually been planned long before Fukushima), and has not been producing more pollution because it has in fact been replacing coal and gas as well as nuclear with renewable sources: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
    - cygx 7y ago
      Germany has actually slightly increased its gas usage - though compared to other energy sources, its currently more of a rounding error in magnitude: 2002 2018 Total 503 545 Coal+Oil 253 205 Nuclear 156 72 Gas 40 44 Biomass 4 45 Wind+Solar+Hydro 39 177 Other 10 3 https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...
      - brazzy 7y ago
        More significantly, the increase in gas is more than offset by a decrease in coal and oil.
H8crilA 7y ago
Coal is so bad that we'd have to have one Chernobyl nearly every week all the time to catch up with death rates. Coal deaths per energy: ~ 100k / PWh Coal consumption per year: > 40 PWh Coal deaths per year: >4M Chernobyl death estimates: 4k to 93k Which gives 4M / 93k = 43 Chernobyls per year to catch up with coal (best case estimates).

emiliobumachar 7y ago

The key point is that radiation victims of Chernobyl did not became radioactive themselves -and harmful to others- as depicted in the series. Fear and panic caused more harm than the accident itself - including one million unnecessary abortions. I think the danger implied is that it could happen again.

bartwe 7y ago
Question is if the series portrayed actions taken back in '86 or creating new misrepresentations and fears
tssva 7y ago
For someone concerned about facts he presents no actual facts to backup his claim of 1 million unnecessary abortions. What is this based upon? How did they identify which were abortions driven by bad medical advice and which were abortions which women claimed were based upon the medical advice but for which that was just a cover to avoid the social stigma often associated with abortion? Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  If a woman chooses to abort a pregnancy she otherwise wanted because of a perceived high risk of defects, and that risk is actually wildly inflated, that is definitely harm to her, regardless of any considerations of the fetus.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm. Depending on the person and how late term the pregnancy was, it can be both psychologically and physically harmful. edit: Pregnancy and childbirth can also be psychologically and physically harmful so net harm is more difficult to talk about.
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm. How is a killing of a person not considered harm? (Unless, of course, you're some sort of extreme psycopath.)

michaelgiba 7y ago

Not to mention everyone in the show has a British accent, even Gorbachev. Hilarious

ToddBonzalez 7y ago
The reason for this was explained in the companion podcast.
- woodgrainz 7y ago
  Curious, can you post the reason here? I have not yet watched the show.
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    Dunno if this is the podcast response, but this is generally done in movies / TV when they have foreign characters speak English as a proxy for their native language. They almost never use American English unless the character is American; they’ll either use British English or a heavy accent.
    - alistairSH 7y ago
      Do you have a citation for this? I've never heard of using British English as a proxy for a foreign language. Instead, I always assumed it was because there are a lot of popular British actors, and if portraying non-English speakers, there's no good reason to "fake" an accent (so they just use their native accent), as was the case with "Chernobyl".
      - mimixco 7y ago
        Most non-native English speakers around the world will be taught British rather than American English, so this 'accent' would be what you could expect from them in real life if they were to speak English.

nrjames 7y ago

The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show.... ... which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show? Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
All the time: See CSI
jhayward 7y ago
Agreed. The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe, not to debunk the misconceptions, misinformation, and bad science that was present at the time. To get upset that they didn't make a 'debunking Chernobyl' documentary is to miss the entire point of the series.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe They did a pretty awful job then. Or that wasn't the point and they actually wanted to entertain viewers.
mlevental 7y ago
>Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show are you kidding? always edit: making this comment, in response to the person to whom i'm responding to's disbelief made me realize something: it's a really silly thing to sit around and think you're above being influenced by narrative. how much of our indignation at others' naivete is simply privilege? if i couldn't afford a doctor, to whom i could outsource the cognitive burden of figuring it out, i would probably believe all sorts of things about health that had been suggested to me by way of narrative. edit2: it's fun to watch the score on this comment. up down up down. on the one hand it's glib and snarky - HN loves that - but on the other hand it implicates privilege - HN hates that. i probably should've used a word different from privilege but i can't think of one that wouldn't trigger people just as hard.

app4soft 7y ago

Dear, YCombinator Admins! Please, stop share fakes written by Michael Shellenberger[0] on HN! [0] http://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/853/exposing-misinformation-michael-shellenberger-and-environmental-progress http://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/853/exposin...

pdkl95 7y ago
> wiseinternational.org This organization self-description[1] (emphasis added by me to highlight important phrases): >> We publish the Nuclear Monitor, a unique international newsletter serving the worldwide movement against nuclear power. Produced 20 times per year, it gives an anti-nuclear perspective on what is happening in the nuclear power industry and the resistance against it. An anti-nuclear activist group is an interesting choice to use as a reference... [1] https://www.wiseinternational.org/what-we-do https://www.wiseinternational.org/what-we-do

WAHa_06x36 7y ago

The claim that external exposure to radiation does not make you radioactive is true in most cases. However, Chernobyl is not most cases. First, I'm not sure you can claim that people working during the disaster would only suffer external exposure. There was a reactor core on fire, there was probably plenty of isotopes in the air that would have been breathed in and possibly taken up by the body. Second, neither alpha, beta nor gamma reaction will induce any significant amount of radioactive in materials that are exposed to them. And under normal circumstances, that is all you would be exposed to. But this was, again, an exposed reactor core. There might very well have been a significant amount of neutron radiation present, which does in fact induce radioactivity. So the claims of the article are way too strong for this very, very exceptional situation.

alex_young 7y ago

It's sad to see them use inflated numbers to criticize the numbers they claim are inflated: “Although the 31 immediate Chernobyl-related deaths are sad,” he concludes, “the number of fatalities is remarkably small compared with many energy-related accidents, such as the Benxihu coal mine disaster in China 1942, which killed about 1500 miners, and the 1975 Banqiao dam accident, also in China, which killed about 250,000 people.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#Casualties The dam failure killed approx. 26,000 people, and 145,000 died as a result of subsequent epidemics and famine according to the official record. While this was a very significant loss of life, inflating it to argue with other numbers you contest seems pretty shallow.

292355744930110 7y ago
Sort of like how people try to conflate the problems of the earth quake and tsunami with those of Fukushima Daiichi.

kamarad 7y ago

I lived in socialistic country in Eastern Europe and government DID try to cover it up. There were no new for at last several days. Then they said everything is fine, go outside, eat vegetables, drink mil, everything is OK.. it is just Western propaganda that there are problems. We trust our comrades in Soviet Union. While the news in Western Europe was: Minimize your stay outside. Do not drink mil. Do not eat vegetables (the farmers in West were actually destroying crops so it cannot be consumed).

AstralStorm 7y ago
Yeah, scientists in Poland were told to shut up and smart ones immediately took potassium iodide to protect thyroid. The first news anyone got was from Sweden a few days later.

ishanjain28 7y ago

People are taking the wrong takeaway from the show. The point of Chernobyl(HBO) was not to show the dangers of Nuclear reactors, It was to show, The Lies, Politics and other disgusting elements can and will ruin lives of thousands of people. Chernobyl was the result of lies and deception. Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl. People, Including the Doctor have taken it incorrectly in my humble opinion. They even had a separate podcast where they discussed exactly this and more details related to the series in great detail. Look it up on Pocketcast or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts and you'll find it.

lostmsu 7y ago
> Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl. What led to Chernobyl is a reactor design flaw (could happen to anyone), and irresponsible behavior of the plant staff, who run the experiment against "the book". Only the later probably is because of the culture-wide trait. The rest of it could have happened to anyone. Though I do agree, that the show displays the need for open information through the lack of it in Soviet Union like nothing else.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago

I'm not an expert, but this doesn't look too credible to me: - I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous. - Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell. - If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented an there are photos. - Regarding the Ignatenko's claim that the foetus had somehow protected her from radiactivity by absorbing it, personally I never interpreted it as a statement that the show was claiming as true. I saw it as the character's own interpretation. The show portrays different characters with various degrees of ignorance, and no one in the show portrayed as knowledgeable defends that theory. - There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story.

mjames083 7y ago
>> I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous. That's the immediate death toll from radiation poisoning, not the total years lost as a result of radiation exposure. The article is correct to point out however that the total death toll must be much less than many other disasters and certainly not comparable to what people commonly believe about the death toll at chernobyl. >>- Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell. >> If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented and there are photos. Those were firefighters who ingested radioactive products in the air. Normal human tissue cannot be induced to be become radioactive. I'm not surprised that they would quarantine a firefighter and bury his body in a metal casket but that doesn't apply to the majority of the victims of radiation poising by Chernobyl. The show at one point shows such a burial for liquidators who wouldn't have radioactive material in their body and is almost certainly ahistorical. The show never makes this clear. >>- There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5 He was literally standing over a tank of radioactive material when the accident occurred thus explaining the extent of his skin damage. The radiation exposure for the firefighters wouldn't have caused them to suffer skin damage to the same extent and not in the way portrayed in the film. The ingested fission products would have harmed internal tissue before reaching the surface of the body. The show's portrayal of the first responder firefighters is almost entirely completely wrong. >>There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story. I disagree and I'm quite concerned about how the show mistakenly portrays the effects of radiation. At the very least they could explained how radiation works and why the firefighters had to quarantined but they never do anything like that. Instead, we hear dramatic warnings of a thermonuclear blast unless our heroes take immediate action which is completely nonsensical.