7 ms·

The Legasov Tapes (2019)

147 points by atomicnature 4y ago

oryades 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD96LhCaf-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD96LhCaf-4
- azangru 4y ago
  This is an audiobook, in which a narrator reads the printed transcripts; not the original tapes.
  - mkoryak 4y ago
    where are the original tapes? I didn't see them on the site linked.. but I didnt look that hard. I assumed they were not easy to find because not everyone speaks russian who reads that site.
H8crilA 4y ago
BTW, there is an even more (much more) polluted left-over of the Soviet Union, Ozersk/Ozyorsk/City40: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast It's the place where nearly all the fissile material for nuclear weapons was produced. The nearby Lake Karachay received so much nuclear waste that it evaporated entirely from the heat. Just this one small lake received as much radiation contamination as was released in all of Chernobyl.
- Dah00n 4y ago
  >it evaporated entirely from the heat Hmm, that is not what your source (Wikipedia) says happened: >"After a drought caused water levels to drop, revealing contaminated silt, which was then wind blown, further polluting surrounding areas, it was decided to completely fill in the lake."
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  They put so much effort into containing Chernobyl. Why was it not needed (I hope it wasn't) for this incident? Airborne vs liquid maybe?
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    I guess the need was different in the .. khm .. political sense. One could argue that nature does not care either way and the Chornobyl exclusion zone has shown a lot of natural diversity/activity. No dead wasteland at all. I wonder whether the true wastelands are more specific poisoning than radiation related.
    - Mistletoe 4y ago
      I wouldn’t say nature doesn’t care, it’s more complex than that. Insects and arachnids in particular seem very sensitive to it as opposed to mammals. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19324644/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19324644/ Reduced abundance of insects and spiders linked to radiation at Chernobyl 20 years after the accident And genetic mutations in plants and animals increased by a factor of 20. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000632071100317X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
      - jnsaff2 4y ago
        Nature as a whole may change, habitats change. That is not caring tho, no? Also, mutation (as in variation) is one of the pillars of evolution. That said, I would rather we don't mess with nature without a very good reason and lots of care.
  - lajosbacs 4y ago
    They only admitted that Chernobyl happened when elevated levels of radioactivity were detected by other countries and you could not hide it anymore. That was not the case of this lake and the related Mayak plant disaster -- world learned about it only when the Soviet authorities said that they have previous cleanup exp during the Chernobyl disaster. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouiFZrrVKIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouiFZrrVKIQ
- proxysna 4y ago
  That is a leftover after Kyshtym disaster (Кыштымская авария), which is relatively well documented even though it is not well known in the west. City-40 is the name of the movie about the city, city was named Chelyabinsk-40 (Челябинск-40) at the time of the incident. >so much nuclear waste that it evaporated entirely from the heat. That's just bs.
azangru 4y ago
After an (admittedly, cursory) search, I was unable to locate the audio original. The only original that seems to be available is the published [0] Russian transcript of the tapes; and an audio recording of the Russian transcript, referenced in another comment in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966474). But no original, with the real Legasov's voice, anywhere. [0] - Or maybe not even properly published. I can't find bibliographic record of the original publication. Serhiy Plohiy, in his book on Chernobyl, for example, seems to reference a website with the text.
- throwaway41982 4y ago
  From what I've found on russian sites, the original tapes are still kept secret. I've also read that a part of them might have been erased. The russian transcripts are the only things available. And you'll find youtube videos of people reading them in russian too, but not the original tapes.
- this_steve_j 4y ago
  If there is an audiobook version in English of the Legasov Tape transcripts out there anywhere, I would very much like to give it a listen. I'm completely naïve about the business of audiobook and podcast production, but would certainly support the production of something like that in the only way I know how, which is to say I would pay money for it. Given the recent interest I imagine others would too.
jamesfmilne 4y ago
If you haven't watched Chernobyl on HBO/Sky/NowTV, you should. It's an excellent mini-series. I've rewatched it 2 or 3 times already. Jared Harris does an excellent job playing Legasov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
- shakow 4y ago
  I'm not fond of the serie, to be honest. The actors are stellar, but there are such liberties taken with basic physics (the steam explosion supposedly ventilating half of Europe, the baby protecting the mother from radiations, ...) that it seems to me that they were this close to have a great thing, and they just made useless melodrama out of it.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    The baby thing wasn't necessaey, as was some of the stuff at the end of the last episode, e.g. the bridge of death. After all so, it is entertainment. They also took some liberty with the timeline when it comes to the evacuation of Prypyat. The steam explosion, and the fear ofbhaving the melted core dropping into the groundwater, actually were real concerns at the time. Concerns that were acted upon rather decisevly, by sending divers under the reactor and by having miners installing a heat exchanges by hand. That those concerns might not have been valod, well, that's 20/20 hindsight isn't it?
    - shakow 4y ago
      They were valid concerns, but I don't think anyone seriously thought it would have an amplitude such as described in the serie. The whole affair is dramatic enough that there is no need to graft on some sensational, over-the-top, fantasies.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        If memory serves well, it is a while I read the Chernobyl reports (Soviet and IAEA), they actually did think that might happen. After all, it was the forst time something of this magnitide happened ever, so nobody knew anything for sure. And one thing is sure, the Soviets didn't take any risks during clean up. I actually have a hard time imagining a similar clean up, and Fukushima was nowhere near as bad, in the West. It is also true that everyone, first and foremost the USSR and then the West, was happy to downplay the accident and, as rather direct consequence, screw over the liquidators when it came to compensation. The collapse of the USSR didn't help neither.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
Interestingly Legasov makes the case that the actual on the ground handling of the firefighting situation was correct: "Sometimes they say that many firemen got high radiation doses pointlessly, because they were standing at certain spots monitoring that new fires don’t start. They say that this was a poor and uneducated decision. That is wrong because the engine room had a lot of oil, hydrogen inside the generators and other sources that could not only start a fire, but could even cause another explosion that would devastate the 3rd block. This is why their actions were not only heroic but very professional, educated and correct from the point that they took the first precise steps to localize the accident and prevent it from spreading." Contrary to popular culture speculations since.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Though organizational dynamics are the same everywhere it appears... "As for the physics and technology of reactors, it was a forbidden area for me—both because of my own education and because of the taboo imposed by Anatoly Pavlovich Aleksandrov [president of the USSR Academy of Sciences] and his subordinates working in this area. They really did not like interference in their professional work by outsiders. I remember how once Lev Petrovich Feoktistov, who had just started working at our institute, attempted to conceptually analyze questions about a more reliable reactor, a more interesting reactor, that would eliminate—this problem was worrying then—the production of such fissile materials that could be removed from the reactor and used in nuclear weapons. But his proposals were met with hostility; as well as the proposals about a new safer reactor from Viktor Vladimirovich Orlov who had come to the institute. They were somehow not considered by the existing reactor community. Since I didn’t have administrative authority over this department but generally understood many specific details of what was going on, and because I was concerned, I began to suggest to the reactor department an engineering, not physical, approach to solving problems. But, naturally, I couldn’t considerably change this situation. And Anatoly Petrovich had such a humanly understandable and even likeable trait, namely, reliance on people with whom he has worked for many years. He trusted certain people who worked on, say, naval equipment, station machinery or specialized devices; and really didn’t like the appearance of new faces who could somehow bother him or make him doubt the decisions made earlier. This roughly is how things were." He recounts after being promoted to the first deputy director of the Institute of Atomic Energy by Aleksandrov himself! And after it was transferred to the control of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building...
muthas 4y ago
Fascinating stuff: > ...but at that time we were mostly worried about whether the reactor was still working. That is, was it generating short-lived radioactive isotopes... > ...the most precise information about the state of the reactor was gathered from the ratio of short-lived and long-lived isotopes of iodium 134 and 131. Then, by making radiochemistry measurements quite quickly we established that no short-lived iodium isotopes were being produced and hence the reactor was not operational and was in sub-critical state. I wonder where and how they were able to do the radiochemical measurements so quickly - did the facility have that sort of capability on-site, or were samples repeatedly flown to a research institute that had the appropriate gamma spectroscopy equipment to analyze?
this_steve_j 4y ago
I enjoyed the HBO series, and appreciate the book and podcast recommendations contained in this thread. "Voices of Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich is definitely at the top of my list of books to read for next year, as the characters in the show seem to have been distilled from her stories based on hundreds of interviews with liquidators and survivors. The following [0,1] news articles describe Ms. Alexievitch's other works including "War's Unwomanly Face" about female combatants in WWII, and "Zinky Boys" about the Soviet-Afghan war. Only a few of her titles have been published widely in English despite her having won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160822202409/http://www.ibtimes.com/4-books-read-svetlana-alexievitch-nobel-prize-literature-winner-ukrainian-belarusian-2132614 https://web.archive.org/web/20160822202409/http://www.ibtime... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160906203202/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/08/svetlana-alexievich-wins-2015-nobel-prize-in-literature https://web.archive.org/web/20160906203202/https://www.thegu...
- vintagedave 4y ago
  On ‘War’s Unwomanly Face’, may I recommend the translation ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’? It’s a much more recent translation and reportedly — I haven’t read the version you refer to — the older one was heavily edited or censored to focus on war as victory, as positive, rather than the real history and personal impact she wrote about. This Guardian review mentions the original vs the newer translation briefly towards the end: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/02/unwomanly-face-of-war-svetlana-alexievich-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/02/unwomanly-face... Also — and I know this is a weird thing to say about such a horrific topic — I find the translation of the newer title, ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’, much more poetic or fluid phrasing than ‘War’s Unwomanly Face’. It’s English language as beauty rather than the slight awkwardness present in the 1980s translation’s title. It reminds me of ‘A Remembrance of Things Past’, which has a certain je ne sais quoi compared to the newer translated title ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (not that that’s a bad title, it just sounds a bit like the title of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel compared to the nostalgic beauty of Remembrance.)

147 points by atomicnature 4y ago

oryades 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD96LhCaf-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD96LhCaf-4

azangru 4y ago
This is an audiobook, in which a narrator reads the printed transcripts; not the original tapes.
- mkoryak 4y ago
  where are the original tapes? I didn't see them on the site linked.. but I didnt look that hard. I assumed they were not easy to find because not everyone speaks russian who reads that site.

H8crilA 4y ago

BTW, there is an even more (much more) polluted left-over of the Soviet Union, Ozersk/Ozyorsk/City40: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast It's the place where nearly all the fissile material for nuclear weapons was produced. The nearby Lake Karachay received so much nuclear waste that it evaporated entirely from the heat. Just this one small lake received as much radiation contamination as was released in all of Chernobyl.

Dah00n 4y ago
>it evaporated entirely from the heat Hmm, that is not what your source (Wikipedia) says happened: >"After a drought caused water levels to drop, revealing contaminated silt, which was then wind blown, further polluting surrounding areas, it was decided to completely fill in the lake."
cuteboy19 4y ago
They put so much effort into containing Chernobyl. Why was it not needed (I hope it wasn't) for this incident? Airborne vs liquid maybe?
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  I guess the need was different in the .. khm .. political sense. One could argue that nature does not care either way and the Chornobyl exclusion zone has shown a lot of natural diversity/activity. No dead wasteland at all. I wonder whether the true wastelands are more specific poisoning than radiation related.
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    I wouldn’t say nature doesn’t care, it’s more complex than that. Insects and arachnids in particular seem very sensitive to it as opposed to mammals. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19324644/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19324644/ Reduced abundance of insects and spiders linked to radiation at Chernobyl 20 years after the accident And genetic mutations in plants and animals increased by a factor of 20. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000632071100317X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
    - jnsaff2 4y ago
      Nature as a whole may change, habitats change. That is not caring tho, no? Also, mutation (as in variation) is one of the pillars of evolution. That said, I would rather we don't mess with nature without a very good reason and lots of care.
- lajosbacs 4y ago
  They only admitted that Chernobyl happened when elevated levels of radioactivity were detected by other countries and you could not hide it anymore. That was not the case of this lake and the related Mayak plant disaster -- world learned about it only when the Soviet authorities said that they have previous cleanup exp during the Chernobyl disaster. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouiFZrrVKIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouiFZrrVKIQ
proxysna 4y ago
That is a leftover after Kyshtym disaster (Кыштымская авария), which is relatively well documented even though it is not well known in the west. City-40 is the name of the movie about the city, city was named Chelyabinsk-40 (Челябинск-40) at the time of the incident. >so much nuclear waste that it evaporated entirely from the heat. That's just bs.

azangru 4y ago

After an (admittedly, cursory) search, I was unable to locate the audio original. The only original that seems to be available is the published [0] Russian transcript of the tapes; and an audio recording of the Russian transcript, referenced in another comment in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966474). But no original, with the real Legasov's voice, anywhere. [0] - Or maybe not even properly published. I can't find bibliographic record of the original publication. Serhiy Plohiy, in his book on Chernobyl, for example, seems to reference a website with the text.

throwaway41982 4y ago
From what I've found on russian sites, the original tapes are still kept secret. I've also read that a part of them might have been erased. The russian transcripts are the only things available. And you'll find youtube videos of people reading them in russian too, but not the original tapes.
this_steve_j 4y ago
If there is an audiobook version in English of the Legasov Tape transcripts out there anywhere, I would very much like to give it a listen. I'm completely naïve about the business of audiobook and podcast production, but would certainly support the production of something like that in the only way I know how, which is to say I would pay money for it. Given the recent interest I imagine others would too.

jamesfmilne 4y ago

If you haven't watched Chernobyl on HBO/Sky/NowTV, you should. It's an excellent mini-series. I've rewatched it 2 or 3 times already. Jared Harris does an excellent job playing Legasov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)

shakow 4y ago
I'm not fond of the serie, to be honest. The actors are stellar, but there are such liberties taken with basic physics (the steam explosion supposedly ventilating half of Europe, the baby protecting the mother from radiations, ...) that it seems to me that they were this close to have a great thing, and they just made useless melodrama out of it.
- hef19898 4y ago
  The baby thing wasn't necessaey, as was some of the stuff at the end of the last episode, e.g. the bridge of death. After all so, it is entertainment. They also took some liberty with the timeline when it comes to the evacuation of Prypyat. The steam explosion, and the fear ofbhaving the melted core dropping into the groundwater, actually were real concerns at the time. Concerns that were acted upon rather decisevly, by sending divers under the reactor and by having miners installing a heat exchanges by hand. That those concerns might not have been valod, well, that's 20/20 hindsight isn't it?
  - shakow 4y ago
    They were valid concerns, but I don't think anyone seriously thought it would have an amplitude such as described in the serie. The whole affair is dramatic enough that there is no need to graft on some sensational, over-the-top, fantasies.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      If memory serves well, it is a while I read the Chernobyl reports (Soviet and IAEA), they actually did think that might happen. After all, it was the forst time something of this magnitide happened ever, so nobody knew anything for sure. And one thing is sure, the Soviets didn't take any risks during clean up. I actually have a hard time imagining a similar clean up, and Fukushima was nowhere near as bad, in the West. It is also true that everyone, first and foremost the USSR and then the West, was happy to downplay the accident and, as rather direct consequence, screw over the liquidators when it came to compensation. The collapse of the USSR didn't help neither.

MichaelZuo 4y ago

Interestingly Legasov makes the case that the actual on the ground handling of the firefighting situation was correct: "Sometimes they say that many firemen got high radiation doses pointlessly, because they were standing at certain spots monitoring that new fires don’t start. They say that this was a poor and uneducated decision. That is wrong because the engine room had a lot of oil, hydrogen inside the generators and other sources that could not only start a fire, but could even cause another explosion that would devastate the 3rd block. This is why their actions were not only heroic but very professional, educated and correct from the point that they took the first precise steps to localize the accident and prevent it from spreading." Contrary to popular culture speculations since.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
Though organizational dynamics are the same everywhere it appears... "As for the physics and technology of reactors, it was a forbidden area for me—both because of my own education and because of the taboo imposed by Anatoly Pavlovich Aleksandrov [president of the USSR Academy of Sciences] and his subordinates working in this area. They really did not like interference in their professional work by outsiders. I remember how once Lev Petrovich Feoktistov, who had just started working at our institute, attempted to conceptually analyze questions about a more reliable reactor, a more interesting reactor, that would eliminate—this problem was worrying then—the production of such fissile materials that could be removed from the reactor and used in nuclear weapons. But his proposals were met with hostility; as well as the proposals about a new safer reactor from Viktor Vladimirovich Orlov who had come to the institute. They were somehow not considered by the existing reactor community. Since I didn’t have administrative authority over this department but generally understood many specific details of what was going on, and because I was concerned, I began to suggest to the reactor department an engineering, not physical, approach to solving problems. But, naturally, I couldn’t considerably change this situation. And Anatoly Petrovich had such a humanly understandable and even likeable trait, namely, reliance on people with whom he has worked for many years. He trusted certain people who worked on, say, naval equipment, station machinery or specialized devices; and really didn’t like the appearance of new faces who could somehow bother him or make him doubt the decisions made earlier. This roughly is how things were." He recounts after being promoted to the first deputy director of the Institute of Atomic Energy by Aleksandrov himself! And after it was transferred to the control of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building...

muthas 4y ago

Fascinating stuff: > ...but at that time we were mostly worried about whether the reactor was still working. That is, was it generating short-lived radioactive isotopes... > ...the most precise information about the state of the reactor was gathered from the ratio of short-lived and long-lived isotopes of iodium 134 and 131. Then, by making radiochemistry measurements quite quickly we established that no short-lived iodium isotopes were being produced and hence the reactor was not operational and was in sub-critical state. I wonder where and how they were able to do the radiochemical measurements so quickly - did the facility have that sort of capability on-site, or were samples repeatedly flown to a research institute that had the appropriate gamma spectroscopy equipment to analyze?

this_steve_j 4y ago

I enjoyed the HBO series, and appreciate the book and podcast recommendations contained in this thread. "Voices of Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich is definitely at the top of my list of books to read for next year, as the characters in the show seem to have been distilled from her stories based on hundreds of interviews with liquidators and survivors. The following [0,1] news articles describe Ms. Alexievitch's other works including "War's Unwomanly Face" about female combatants in WWII, and "Zinky Boys" about the Soviet-Afghan war. Only a few of her titles have been published widely in English despite her having won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160822202409/http://www.ibtimes.com/4-books-read-svetlana-alexievitch-nobel-prize-literature-winner-ukrainian-belarusian-2132614 https://web.archive.org/web/20160822202409/http://www.ibtime... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160906203202/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/08/svetlana-alexievich-wins-2015-nobel-prize-in-literature https://web.archive.org/web/20160906203202/https://www.thegu...

vintagedave 4y ago
On ‘War’s Unwomanly Face’, may I recommend the translation ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’? It’s a much more recent translation and reportedly — I haven’t read the version you refer to — the older one was heavily edited or censored to focus on war as victory, as positive, rather than the real history and personal impact she wrote about. This Guardian review mentions the original vs the newer translation briefly towards the end: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/02/unwomanly-face-of-war-svetlana-alexievich-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/02/unwomanly-face... Also — and I know this is a weird thing to say about such a horrific topic — I find the translation of the newer title, ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’, much more poetic or fluid phrasing than ‘War’s Unwomanly Face’. It’s English language as beauty rather than the slight awkwardness present in the 1980s translation’s title. It reminds me of ‘A Remembrance of Things Past’, which has a certain je ne sais quoi compared to the newer translated title ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (not that that’s a bad title, it just sounds a bit like the title of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel compared to the nostalgic beauty of Remembrance.)