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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
I mean, yes - but authorities realized very quickly how bad Chernobyl is, and started cleanup operations immediately. International knowledge of the incident had nothing to do with the starting the procedures. It's quite clear from Legasov's tapes that at least in the early days, Soviet Union and its leadership was genuienly interested in containment and cleanup.
So yes, I'm also interested in the same question as op - why has Chelabynsk-40 not caused the same reaction? Was it because it was a military installation?
That is propably the worst factual error in the otherwise brilliant series about Chernobyl. The series made it look like the Soviets woupdn't uave done anything without international preasure. Truth is, Prypyat was evacuated before anyone in the West was aware what happened.
If you are interested, you can read the IAEA (?) incident report and the translation of the latest, not hiding anything, report from Soviet authorities. Both are available online, and both should be mandatory reading in any engineering studies. For both, how to investigate incidents and what to learn from incidents / how incidents can happen.
Because the final Soviet report (the series over dramatized in the last episode) is really good. For added fun, read the official incident reports on the 737 Max and compare both. Because the parallels are staggering.
As I said, it is the one of the very few things the series kind of got wrong. It was unneeded, sure, but overall it showed everyone who helped the clean up in a "good" way. E.g. by having them speak without an accent to show they are Russian. Or by showing the efgort of the Liquidators on the ground. I can live with some dramatization, it is after all entertainment.
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). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
There was a report, at that time, that the melting uranium mixed with water would go critical, as water would become a moderator not that it was flash into steam. The estimated yield was in the megaton range.
It probably was a bad report, just a 'worst case scenario', but the meeting, depicted in the series, where it was discussed could have happened with probably different participants. I see it as very similar to the fears that the trinity test would have caused the nitrogen in the atmosphere to undergo a fusion chain reaction. Even though those fears weren't realistic, they were real and are often included in the telling of the history of the Manhattan project.
"And if the uranium reached meltdown temperature - 2,900C -a single sphere of molten fuel would burn through the concrete foundations of the reactor building, and keep going until it reached the water table. At that moment, there would be another explosion, exponentially more devastating than the first; the three remaining reactors would be destroyed in a nuclear blast that would render Ukraine, Belarus and Russia uninhabitable for decades to come.
'That was the most terrifying thing,' says Veniamin Prianichnikov. 'We were petrified of meltdown, walking around like zombies.'"
"There was a moment when there was the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it - with the water, they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe."
I think a lot of people now have calculated that it wasn't possible, but I wonder;
1) how much modern information, or information only openly available now, was used to determine that.
2) How long it took them to figure that out and what stress they were under trying the calculations. Taking a youtuber a few days to figure it out is already too long.
3) How much CPU processing it took to make the calculation? Just putting it into an Excel doc on a modern computer seems trivial now, but Cray-1's weren't available in the USSR and a modern computer is easily 1000x more powerful than one). Constructing the Fortran simulation would take time to write and debug, then running it on a soviet PDP-11 clone would take a lot of time too. A Cray-1 is 1000x faster, and a modern computer is 1,000,000X faster). Doing the creating and editing of a youtube video, compressing it with the codec and uploading it, would take a significant percentage of 1986's world wide combined computing power.
I agree with your points except for this: a Cray-1 is much less powerful than my desktop yes. But that doesn't mean we take advantage of that power. Most of it is wasted drawing transparency effects and YouTube videos.
I'm sure that what most people do in excel now would have been just as feasible on Lotus 1-2-3 running on a 286 in 1986. With the exception of those incorrectly using it as a database for millions of rows :P
The baby thing is from an interview with the firefighters wife in the Nobel Prize winning book Voices from Chernobyl. I dont remember how its depicted in the series, but in the book, it is clear that this is the woman's personal belief
I don’t remember the details in the series but this was jarring. It was asserted as a fact (by the lady, IIRC, so not a specialist) without any nuance whatsoever.
That said, the OP is harsh. There are a couple of dodgy “facts” such as this one, but remarkably few for such a long mainstream TV programme.
I mean, physicians are still people and can hold stupid beliefs. Our family doctor, who is otherwise fully licenced medical professional and finished actual medical school not some quack university, would regularly recommend my mother herbs and various folk treatments, maybe in a belief that it's better to prescribe us a course of herbal tea(which will do nothing) instead of yet another course of antibiotics for what appears to be a normal cold.
Obviously the show is fictional and dramatized - but I could totally see a normal doctor who knows better telling a grieving mother that this is what happened, that her baby absorbed radiation in order to save her - even though it is a complete lie, it might help her with the grieving process. I don't think they should do it, but I think it's believable enough.
I think the video miniseries is based on a book, Voices of Chernobyl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_from_Chernobyl). I'd be curious if anyone on HN has read it and if they have comments on how the miniseries and book compare and contrast.
Its an amazing book. The author, Svetlana Alexievich, won the Nobel Price for literature a few years ago, the only journalist that has ever won it. The book consists entirely of interviews, and opens with an interview with the wife of the firefighter depicted in the beginning of the series.
There is an accompanying podcast which went into the decisions behind the series, such as the character design and which events to show and how they were dramatised. The original page is dead[0] but it seems to be available on most podcast platforms. I can highly recommend a listen-along for your next rewatch
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."
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...
And finally the key insight as to how the Soviet safety standards had declined over time:
"More and more resources were spent on creating facilities that were not directly related to nuclear energy. Capacities were created for the production of ... metallurgy and extractive metallurgy facilities. A large number of construction resources was spent on creating objects that were not related to the field of the department. Science organisations began to weaken, not strengthen. Slowly, once the most powerful in the country, they began to lose the standard of modern equipment. The staff began to age. Fewer young people joined. New approaches were not welcomed. Gradually, imperceptibly, but it was happening. The habitual rhythm of work persisted and the usual approach to solving problems prevailed.
I witnessed all this, but it was hard for me to intervene in the process purely professionally while general declarations on this subject were received with hostility. Because an attempt by a non-professional to bring some kind of insight into their work could hardly be acceptable.
...
And so a generation of engineers came up who were very competent, but not critical of the devices themselves, not critical of all the systems that were ensuring their safety; but mainly knew the systems and required an increase in their numbers. This situation was not normal for a science centre."
> ...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?
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.
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...
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.)
44 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadIt'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.
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."
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.
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/S00063...
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.
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
So yes, I'm also interested in the same question as op - why has Chelabynsk-40 not caused the same reaction? Was it because it was a military installation?
Because the final Soviet report (the series over dramatized in the last episode) is really good. For added fun, read the official incident reports on the 737 Max and compare both. Because the parallels are staggering.
How else you show what Russkies - bad?
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Jared Harris does an excellent job playing Legasov.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
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?
The whole affair is dramatic enough that there is no need to graft on some sensational, over-the-top, fantasies.
It probably was a bad report, just a 'worst case scenario', but the meeting, depicted in the series, where it was discussed could have happened with probably different participants. I see it as very similar to the fears that the trinity test would have caused the nitrogen in the atmosphere to undergo a fusion chain reaction. Even though those fears weren't realistic, they were real and are often included in the telling of the history of the Manhattan project.
"And if the uranium reached meltdown temperature - 2,900C -a single sphere of molten fuel would burn through the concrete foundations of the reactor building, and keep going until it reached the water table. At that moment, there would be another explosion, exponentially more devastating than the first; the three remaining reactors would be destroyed in a nuclear blast that would render Ukraine, Belarus and Russia uninhabitable for decades to come.
'That was the most terrifying thing,' says Veniamin Prianichnikov. 'We were petrified of meltdown, walking around like zombies.'"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/26/nuclear.russia
"There was a moment when there was the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it - with the water, they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe."
Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev Deputy head of the executive committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/apr/25/energy.u...
But of course nuclear was very new and these were also the guys that believed an RBMK could never explode.
1) how much modern information, or information only openly available now, was used to determine that.
2) How long it took them to figure that out and what stress they were under trying the calculations. Taking a youtuber a few days to figure it out is already too long.
3) How much CPU processing it took to make the calculation? Just putting it into an Excel doc on a modern computer seems trivial now, but Cray-1's weren't available in the USSR and a modern computer is easily 1000x more powerful than one). Constructing the Fortran simulation would take time to write and debug, then running it on a soviet PDP-11 clone would take a lot of time too. A Cray-1 is 1000x faster, and a modern computer is 1,000,000X faster). Doing the creating and editing of a youtube video, compressing it with the codec and uploading it, would take a significant percentage of 1986's world wide combined computing power.
I'm sure that what most people do in excel now would have been just as feasible on Lotus 1-2-3 running on a 286 in 1986. With the exception of those incorrectly using it as a database for millions of rows :P
That said, the OP is harsh. There are a couple of dodgy “facts” such as this one, but remarkably few for such a long mainstream TV programme.
And that would make sense in the serie. However, there, it's presented as a fact by an apparently perfectly competent physician.
Obviously the show is fictional and dramatized - but I could totally see a normal doctor who knows better telling a grieving mother that this is what happened, that her baby absorbed radiation in order to save her - even though it is a complete lie, it might help her with the grieving process. I don't think they should do it, but I think it's believable enough.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rferl.org/amp/belarusian-no...
[0] https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl/article/podcast
"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.
"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...
"More and more resources were spent on creating facilities that were not directly related to nuclear energy. Capacities were created for the production of ... metallurgy and extractive metallurgy facilities. A large number of construction resources was spent on creating objects that were not related to the field of the department. Science organisations began to weaken, not strengthen. Slowly, once the most powerful in the country, they began to lose the standard of modern equipment. The staff began to age. Fewer young people joined. New approaches were not welcomed. Gradually, imperceptibly, but it was happening. The habitual rhythm of work persisted and the usual approach to solving problems prevailed.
I witnessed all this, but it was hard for me to intervene in the process purely professionally while general declarations on this subject were received with hostility. Because an attempt by a non-professional to bring some kind of insight into their work could hardly be acceptable. ...
And so a generation of engineers came up who were very competent, but not critical of the devices themselves, not critical of all the systems that were ensuring their safety; but mainly knew the systems and required an increase in their numbers. This situation was not normal for a science centre."
> ...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?
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.ibtime...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160906203202/https://www.thegu...
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...
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.)