Chernobyl

[HaemishM]

Goddamn. I binged this over the last two days and it is very very good. All the Emmys. Just an amazingly put together depiction of the event with both real human costs and a detailed analysis of what went wrong. Stellan Skarsgaard was the standout for me but they all did brilliantly. I'm glad they decided to just let the actors act in their normal dialects rather than try to "Boris and Natasha" it up, it gave some authenticity to it that it wouldn't have had if the actors were more worried about their dialect slipping in and out. The choice of casting certain accents for certain roles (specifically the Scots as coal miners) was pretty smart too.

Episode 4 with all the pets is the one that got me though. All this human tragedy and seeing dogs get put down is what almost brings me to tears.

[calapine]

Basically, the only reason we were not completely screwed by this was pure luck about where the winds were blowing (literally), because Hungary got relatively little fallout despite being adjacent to Ukraine...

Yeah, funnily I am just learning that Austria was one of the the western countries that got hit worst.



Translated Wikipedia

Austria was one of the countries most affected. The average 137Cs contamination was 18.7 kBq/m². The maximum values reached almost 200 kBq/m² in some areas. Higher values were only measured in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine as well as some areas of Scandinavia.[29]

In the most heavily contaminated areas of Germany, in the southeast of Bavaria, soil contamination was up to 74 kBq/m² 137Cs.

Longterm consequence:

Long-term effects
Within 20 years, radiation exposure has dropped from an initial dose of about 0.7-0.4 mSv for the first year to 0.003 mSv per inhabitant (2001) and in the 2010s is below 1 ‰ of total radiation exposure (approx. 4.3 mSv/a). Overall, the average Austrian may have been exposed to an additional effective dose of 0.6 mSv due to the reactor accident until 2006, which is only 1⁄5 to the usual one-year exposure from natural sources (natural radon, cosmic radiation, etc., approx. 3 mSv/a).

To date, 30 years after Chernobyl in April 2016, the contamination of game is still so high that hunted animals must be checked for their radiation exposure before they can enter the food cycle. If the permissible values are exceeded, the hunted animals must be sent for professional rendering. In some areas, mushroom picking can still be classified as critical without a more precise knowledge of the local contamination.

Would be intersting to tally up Chernobyl's death count and compare them to cancer & deaths caused by other forms of power production. Coal seems rather nasty:



I don't remember much about the incident itself, execpt that I wasn't allowed to run barefeet  and couldn't eat the wild strawberries (those tiny ones) we had in our garden.

[SurfD]

And in other news:

Russia apparently feels so threatened by the coverage that this show is getting that it is planning to make it's own state sponsored show in response, to show "What Really Happened Back Then".  Their angle? The CIA did it.........

Talk about going full retard.

[HaemishM]

All the lessons learned must be unlearned.

[01101010]

I assume Russia is going with the fake news thing regarding this show? 

[calapine]

I assume Russia is going with the fake news thing regarding this show? 

AFAIK the show was very well received by Russian viewers.

[SurfD]

True.  The Russian people seem to love it.  The Russian government not so much so.

[Tale]

Translated Wikipedia

In the most heavily contaminated areas of Germany, in the southeast of Bavaria, soil contamination was up to 74 kBq/m² 137Cs.

I was there for 3 months in 1987-88, and did a lot of wandering through farmers' fields.

[Brolan]

There is a website I found years ago about a motorcyclist that explores the Exclusion zone. I don’t know how secure this website is so I would make sure your security software is updated.  http://www.kiddofspeed.com/

[calapine]

I am kind of sad this isn't an 8 year series. Miss all the speculation, theories and back and forth of the GoT thread.

[calapine]

Here is a very interesting chernobyl video:

https://youtu.be/B1OMuHEImP0

Reactor 3 being shutdown in December 2000(!)

The offscreen conversation at the beginning is, if I understand right, a teleconference the Ukrainian president.

Skip to 1:00 for the AZ-5ing. It's worth watching a bit longer for the human element. I ended up feeling sad for a nuclear reactor.  

[calapine]

As you can see the AZ-5 here is a switch. This got changed as  the original setup require the button to be pressed and held down: the control rods only moved as long as one had the finger on the button, letting go before full insertion would stop them in their current position. Not great from a usability perspective.

[Threash]

I am kind of sad this isn't an 8 year series. Miss all the speculation, theories and back and forth of the GoT thread.

No disappointment either though.