I watched the first episode this morning. Wow, just fantastic so far. I’m having to summon all my willpower not to go to google and find out what happened next, what can cause a reactor core to explode (which people in the series seem to think is impossible), or any other detail, because I bet this series will reveal answers to all these questions in due time, and I don’t want to undercut those possible reveals.
I watched it last night, and it was pretty amazing. I’m sort of nonplussed that they didn’t show the lead-up to the accident, which despite what that engineer was saying (“We didn’t do anything wrong.”), was a series of colossal and catastrophic fuckups that get drilled and drilled about in nuclear power training. (Source: I was a Naval nuclear power officer for 5 years, and have stood many watches in charge of operating and shut-down nuclear power plants.) They ignored indications, didn’t follow procedures, bypassed safety systems, didn’t understand the power dynamics of the reactor, were doing a complex and potentially dangerous evolution during a shift change in the middle of the night, etc. And crucially, the reactor had several design flaws that, in retrospect, made it unsafe: positive void coefficient of reactivity, control rods with moderator caps, control rods that had to be driven into the core instead of dropped, and on and on. We got training on this (and TMI and other notable reactor accidents.) I can understand, though, that making all that comprehensible for a general audience is an uphill climb, and that the aftermath might make for better drama.
Fascinating. Were you doing this around the same time or earlier/later?
Later. Chernobyl was in 1986. I did naval nuclear power from 1999-2004. I currently work in a kind of related field (plasma physics research), so still wear a radiation dosimeter at work.
I am just curios how much Chernobyl affected our nuclear industry. I know we had 3 mile island but obviously that wasn’t even close to Chernobyl. I didn’t know this but Chernobyl had a partial meltdown 4 years earlier in 1982, curious how that stacked up to 3 mile.
FYI, they’re covering it in order of how it was discovered at the time. The scientists played by Jared Harris and Emily Watson will be doing the investigation in later episodes. (This is per the writer’s podcast.) I don’t know how dry that part will be, but I think they’re doing a pretty good job so far.
Totally agreed here. It’s a breathtaking show. I’m really looking forward to each episode. I love this kind of thing: an event followed by a procedural.
The Three Mile Island accident was actually earlier, in 1979. It’s considered a lesser category of nuclear incident and didn’t release a lot of radiation best I can tell, though there’s controversy.
Edit: Wikipedia says the EPA found “average dose of 1.4 mrem (14 μSv) to the two million people near the plant” which is very small for three mile island. It also says that the UN found a total exposure of “125,000 man-Sv to the populace of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia” for Chernobyl. Assuming you can just multiply out 14 μSv and two million people (anyone know?), that’s 28 man-Sv total to a much smaller area for three mile island.
And this page lists the “largest off-site dose possible” for three mile island as 0.46 mSv, versus the “average dose for the 187,000 recovery workers at Chernobyl” as 170 mSv. That’s only slightly comparable, but the best I found quickly. For comparison, the US average annual dose is listed as 3.66 mSv including natural, industrial, and typical medical sources, though that’s a slow dosage that the body normally handles and any accident will be on top of that.
From some of what I’ve read (someone correct me if you’re knowledgeable), the lesson the Soviets seemed to take from the three mile island accident was that American nuclear technology was inferior to theirs without real evidence for that.
I can’t comment much on Chernobyl reactor 1 (a different reactor than the one that exploded in 1986), but the radiation release seems to have been minor. TMI was probably a bigger deal, and involved a significant release of radiation coupled with a core meltdown, but it turns out to have had little effect on the surrounding area and caused no deaths. It also, unlike the Chernobyl 4 disaster, was caused more by a mechanical failure than by operator error, and it was taken very seriously as soon as the severity of the accident was known–no attempt to cover-up or downplay it. Fukushima was significantly worse than TMI.
This serie is really great.
Theres something to it unique and special. Maybe is because how terrific and real feel.
Great series. I’m having lunch with nuclear submariner tomorrow, I’ve got tot get him to watch this series so he can provide some more context.
But keep this stat in mind.
During the Chernobyl disaster four hundred times more radioactive material was released than at the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Yes, Hiroshima is now a city and Pripyat is not.
I watched the second episode last night. What a crazy scary end to that episode with the dosimeter going crazy and the light going out.
Were there really only 3 men sent in, or is that also like Emily representing a whole lot of scientists, and these 3 men sent to their deaths represent a contingent that went in, I wonder?
That’s a heck of a cliff-hanger though. I don’t know how they can do the work they’re meant to do down there without a working light.
No, there were actually 3 guys that went in, though they weren’t the first to enter the basement, which had been surveyed for radiation levels, and firefighters had already been trying to drain the water. Also, it appears that they didn’t die. (Though western media reports said they did for years.)
Apparently the firefighter’s clothes that they dumped in the hospital in the first episode are still there, and still extremely radioactive
skimmer or bubblehead?
Surface guy. I did my whole tour on Enterprise. We had a bunch of crazy shit happen while I was on board: feedline rupture that filled a plant with steam (and caused many pants crappings, though no one was hurt), major chloride casualty, reactor operating on one loop (during my watch), main engine casualty that required cutting open the hull to fix, big BFPL pressure violation during startup, etc.
Not to mention the non-plant stuff: two planes collided in midair and we went into restricted maneuvering to be sure we could catch them–I was on watch in the plant, and getting an unexpected order for RM is a ballsack tightening moment. I was on watch on the bridge when a plane came in with a fuel indicator that said he was empty (it turned out to be broken.) We set up the nets to catch him. Had one F-14 come in, catch the last wire, and end up with its wheel over the edge of the deck. Some Iranian warships played chicken with us in the Straits of Hormuz and our CO ordered an emergency backing bell to avoid collision, which is fucking insane. I never had an emergency bell ordered before or after. A dude jumped off an elevator in the middle of the Atlantic. (Helicopters went out and dropped swimmers to grab him.) And really just a whole bunch of other more minor stuff. It was both extremely dull and repetitive, and a non-stop parade of terror and stress.
Enterprise was crazy overegineered, having EIGHT freaking reactors. (Nimitz class has two each). That must have been a nightmare to refuel.
Yeah, A4W (Nimitz) design was certainly more elegant and–more importantly–more modern. But we could do some crazy cross-plant configurations that the A4W guys couldn’t. Enterprise was just an old ship. (It was decommed a few years ago.) We were always just trying to strap things together with duct tape and bailing wire enough to get one more decade of use out of it. My corrective maintenance list for damage control equipment and spaces (I was the damage control officer) ran to over 1,000 items. (I remember an inspection crew came on board at one point and them being very impressed that I knew the status of every one of those items.)
Consider that my reactors on the Enterprise had been operating for 4 decades by the time I was there. Chernobyl number 4 (to bring this discussion back to the topic at hand) had been online for 3 years at the time of the disaster. My sympathy for the incompetence of the operators is pretty limited.
Nimitz was blessed during my time on it. No major incidents (other than a very, very specious and local media-driven “scandal” about cheating on qualification tests), no planes running into each other or the flight deck, no extended WestPacs, nobody bothered targeting us during Desert *.