Chernobyl (2019) Official Trailer.

[Sarmatian]

wow, we have a communist apologist here.

Yeah sure, I have a talent for communist apologizing without even mentioning communists.

Sitnikov was on direct orders from Fomin to asses the state of the reactor by looking directly into it, an absolutely useless and criminal order. The whole intervention at the accident site was criminally negligent. There was no protocol for any of the steps during the intervention, no assessment of safety. The first responders were sent to certain death for very little results. Except for the 2 people trapped during the explosion and the 3 engineers who opened the feedwater valves, the rest were avoidable deaths.

Sitnikov had instructions to assess the damage. Quite unnecessary since it was his job in case of emergency anyway. Nobody forced him at gunpoint, that's a direct lie. He had full freedom to act as he see fit in regards to situation. Everything he did was his own professional decision. The show lies about his sacrifice, turning him from hero to voiceless victim.

And let's not forget why the accident happened in the first place. The RBMK reactor was installed in many places in the USSR and put online despite not having an emergency shutdown capability. That in itself is criminal and the communist leadership bears the full responsibility.

That's another lie. These reactors had well tested emergency shutdown capability. But it wasn't 100% reliable, in certain circumstances it boosted reactor's thermal power output instead of inhibiting it. However since these circumstances where considered highly unlikely the system was considered as safe to use.

What they failed at is to develop necessary procedures and train plant operators accordingly. That's strictly technical mess up on part of design and testing, nothing to do with communism and such. Mistakes like that happens in industry all over the world all the times with multiple deaths as consequence. Only the scale of these instances isn't as big as Chernobyl and deaths aren't as horrible so people tend to consider it as inevitable part of the process.

[Sarmatian]

Why did the nuclear plant explode?

Short version:

There was delay in shutdown procedure. Because of that when reactor runs on low power output it builds up products that make it harder to control reaction (that's same for all uranium reactors). Power output dropped too low for scheduled experiment so they raised it by taking out most of control rods and switching rods into manual control (that was massive mistake). In the process of experiment too much steam formed in cooling system, making it even more harder to control reaction. Formation of steam boosted reaction and it started to rise again. Automatic system countered this rise for some time but it only had control over 12 rods and it wasn't enough. So power surged up unexpectedly, more steam formed, cooling system became extremely hot. Operators responded by activating emergency shutdown system which started inserting all rods back at once. But flawed design of rods produced momentary spike of power. That spike overloaded already critically hot cooling system and steam explosion occurred, breaking some of core's walls. Once air got in through broken lid it ignited chemical components inside and second thermal explosion occurred destroying reactor core.

[Sarmatian]

So we have three versions of events:

1. Sitnikov did that of his own initiative,

2. Sitnikov had orders but nobody "helped" him,

3. Soldiers "helped"/forced Sitnikov to do that,

The movie showed the 3rd version?

Sitnikov had general instructions to assess damage. Nobody ordered him, nobody forced him, nobody pointed a gun at him.

[Sarmatian]

I have watched 4 episodes so far. It's excellent but they could have made it bigger, i think it will end on episode 5.
For example they could have some kind of build up to the accident instead of starting the series with the explosion at the power plant.

There was no point as almost all important and relevant things had happened within 60 seconds before explosion.

[Peterski]

Mind boggling is that the firefighters didn't carry any dosimeters.

They did carry a dosimeter which maxed out at 200 R/h because it had much higher capacity than those small dosimeters (which maxed out at 3.6 R/h).

There is a scene where it is mentioned that they used a dosimeter borrowed from firefighters and got 200 R/h (which was still much lower than reality).

[Aspirin]

Finished the series yesterday. Hard to make a decent conclusion about him, if he was good or bad. In terms of production, everything is good here, but from historical perspective, plenty of bullshit here. Why they portrayed Dyatlov like a totally degenrate and evil man, I don't understad, this man wasn't like that. Drunk soldiers drinking tons of vodka, nude arrogant miners, the scene with the old lady and cow, the depiction of late Soviet Union like some kind of Stalinist totalitarian era, ruined a little bit the final perception of this series. Still, this is the most close depiction of Chernobyl disaster real events in a movie or TV series, such quality production about these events in Russia or Ukraine don't exist.

8/10

[MiloshN]

We don't care about Chernobyl , we have Pancevo

[Jana]

I watched and was impressed. Almost everyone in Hun/Cro watch it. Now it makes us think about Paks power plant, build with Soviet technology and will be extended to 6 reactors in next few years. Brrr

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paks_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[mr.Bombastic]

I saw a lot of films about Chernobyl, but this series struck me, I even went to Pripyat.