I spent 3+ weeks in Russia/ Ukraine in 1993 (2nd trip) and one of my guides was a former officer aboard a Russian attack sub, turned computer programmer. After the horror stories he told me about the Russian sailors the operators screwing up doesn’t surprise me in the least. Unlike the demanding requirements to be in the US navy nuclear program and double volunteer force, most Russian submariners are conscripts. A large number were from the “Stans” and spoke minimal Russian. Many were illiterate in Russian, needless to say it’s rather difficult to follow complicated procedures if you can’t read. He described his job as keeping the enlisted personal from accidental killing the crew.
One similarity between Russia and the US is that the respective Nuclear Naval programs are considered the gold standard for civilian nuclear operators. So if you got out of the Navy after 4 years or so it was easy to get a job in Russian nuclear power industry.
You couple this with the Soviet era joke of “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” and the general work ethic, and the only surprise to me is that even more area in the former Soviet Union aren’t radioactive waste lands
The makeup effects were outstanding, very disturbing. That episode was much more affecting to me than the series finale of a certain show the night before.
@Telefrog mentioned the podcast, but I think it bears repeating. The podcasts have been thoroughly fascinating since you get a lot of extra details as well as hear about scenes that were cut. Definitely check those out if you are a fan of the show.
Since Fukushima I have wondered if Japan has enough engineers/emergency response to cover the situation where two (or more?) plants go down (due to earthquake, tsunami, sabotage, NK attack, human error, whatever) at the same time. Are they in very limited supply? I suppose the specific types of reactors make an important difference, with older ones not being designed with the same safety margins.
The only thing disappointing about that episode was the very start. After they setup that incredible cliffhanger last week: What are they going to do in the absolute dark now that their flashlight went out? It turns out this week the episode starts and they slap the flashlight and it comes back on.
The rest of the episode was fantastic though. I love the introduction of the KGB to the story. Up to now, the Soviet Union was presented as either really hard-working prideful people who do what has to be done, so the introduction of the KGB is finally reminding us of the fear and the sinister side of living there.
As the writer notes, what happened was they basically used the piping to navigate in the dark, but the problem being that this is a television show, not radio.
Those were actual back-up, crank-powered flashlights used in Soviet Russia at the time.
What do you guys think of the portrayal of Gorbachev? I wish they’d picked an actor with a bit more gravitas, more heft, more presence. The real Gorbachev used to remind me of later Vice President Dick Cheney with his exuding kind of a lazy confidence. This guy just looks scared all the time. Now, someone with that kind of confidence and gravitas looking scared? That would be a lot more effective I think.
Don’t have HBO, so waiting for when we can stream this on some other service eventually. But I am reading Midnight in Chernobyl, which I join in recommending. The staggering level of bureaucratic ass-covering, ingrained Soviet-era paranoia and asskissing, and the insane subordination of basic science to political ends is mind-boggling. What is more boggling, maybe, is that many of the operators at the plant were actually pretty well trained/educated, and had good experience. Not all, but many. In so many cases, these guys knew something wasn’t kosher, or needed to be done, but either got stonewalled by aparatchiks or caved in for fear of losing their jobs and the benefits that living in Pripyat brought with it.
Much of what made Chernobyl such a CF was specific to the USSR in that era, but not all. Western enterprises are not immune from some of those bureaucratic (or in our case, financial) imperatives, and the stupidity that happens when those sort of concerns override science and math are universals, not limited to any one place. At least outside of places like the USSR, though, there is a far greater chance of someone actually telling the emperor he’s buck nekkid.
FWIW, I drove by TMI in the summer I think of 1979 (well, in the area, not actually right by the plant). I still only have have the requisite number of appendages, as far as I can tell.
Midnight in Chernobyl is one of those reads that really boils your blood at times, as you watch the stultifying Soviet bureaucracy and Party paranoia exacerbate an already horrible situation. The aparatchiki depicted in the book are the sort of things you would not believe if it was a fictional Cold War novel. Sometimes, stereotypes have a lot of truth.
What is also evident, though, is that there were a lot of true heroes there, too. Most of the people who were in the front lines as it were, military or civilian, the folks who were technical professionals of some sort or trained military types performed well. Some were downright heroic. The Soviet nuclear specialists with naval experience were generally very good, and realistic, and the Army NBC troops tended to be no-nonsense hardnoses who did not quail before Party blowhards. There was a lot of humanity too, in among the smothering blanket of ideological bullshit.
One thing about the show, they mention multiple times about how basically everyone you see is gonna die… but that’s not actually what happened. Only like 30 folks actually died from acute radiation exposure. Mainly folks who got direct, close range exposure to the open core. Only like 150 were even treated for acute radiation exposure.
The 3 dudes who went in with wetsuits to open the valves? Those guys apparently didn’t die at all.
Even in terms of things like secondary effects like cancer, the number of excess cases is way lower than you’d expect.
Now, if they hadn’t managed to drain the tanks, and there was the catastrophic explosion that just scattered all 4 reactor cores across eastern europe, that likely would have been pretty horrific. But still, it’s pretty amazing how little impact it had on humans, given the scale of the disaster.
The scale of the response from the soviets was pretty impressive though, even if a lot of it was misguided. The “Let’s just airlift tons and tons of boron and sand onto the reactor!.. oh no, we made radioactive molten glass lava!” was interesting.
Well, he was expecting that result (or, in reality, the larger group of scientists working on the problem were expecting it). Just, he was working on faulty information about the state of the holding tanks, which meant that that radioactive lava was going to be a much bigger problem, much quicker than anticipated.
