Chernobyl

I watched the first two episodes and had the same feeling of dread I got from watching that movie about nuclear fallout in the 80's.

Growing up in PA near 3 mile island we had nuclear evacuation drills in school for years.

This stuff creeps me out.

You probably don't know their names, but 30 years ago, they saved Europe.

A Chernobyl 'suicide squad' of volunteers helped save Europe — here's their amazing true story

Interesting that there seems to be conflicting information on this. The second link is the more recent and, presumably, more accurate.

Show is amazing. Some untrue stuff. But way better than anything else on TV (even GOT).

That hotel room scene where he's explaining that most people in Pripyat are going to wind up with cancer and may die was something else. The head guy then says something like 'yea but we are here now' and he responds 'we're going to be dead in 5 years' and there's just this dead silence for like a minute. Powerful stuff.

Series is good so far. Makes me feel old - I remember this happening when I was at school. Pretty scary as the soviets didn't tell the west very much initially and there was loads of speculation as to what happened. The very radioactive cloud was noticed over the Scandi's someplace and all the scientists were like wtf as it affected the soil across the whole of Northern Europe.

You really have to feel for the poor human beings that went and cleaned this shit up, you see some real footage in docs from a chopper and there's so much radiation from the plume that the camera's electronics are being fried to pieces and it's fucking up the shots.

The zone of alienation is pretty incredible, it's amazing how durable animals and plants are. Even after they nuked the shit out of the area, there's still species heading in there and doing well.

This is the best show on HBO right now.

A really good show, this. Perfectly cast and well written and shot. Too bad it only has 5 episodes this season.

Crooks used to raid Pripyat for stuff to sell. The authorities started executing people for it, then it stopped.

Dom said:

It's interesting to think of what it would be like if someone showed up at my door now, told me I had to leave, and then never seeing my home or belongings again. The knowledge that it all remained behind intact long after I died is a double mindfuck.

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You'd go to your deathbed knowing your browser history had never been cleared. A fate as bad as death, it would seem.

brekk said:

I don't want to start a big political argument, but the USSR was a Fascist state under the guise of Socialism and Communism.

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No. In a Fascist state, private enterprise still exists. However, they both can develop the same issues because Fascist states can direct private enterprise, while socialism just owns the businesses. And in the end, centralized networks lag like a mother fucker because there are too many ape brains trying to communicate 10 times slower than their already slow thinking, and each of those apes need extensive brain prosthesis just to hold the data to communicate, which further slows them down...So you end up with massive blind spots, miscommunication and other factors which allows for corruption to grow and the only way to circumvent that is more and more bureaucracy and rules, but that slows the network down more and so you need people who can cut through it, IE more authoritarianism.

But make no mistake. The Soviet Union was a picture perfect socialist state, the state owned everything. There was no "guise". The Soviet Union is exactly how socialism looks when it grows too large. Its how it ALWAYS looks scaled up. Everywhere, every time when you reach a sufficient number of nodes in the network (People). Please don't try the "that's not real socialism" shit. Millions of people died to this cult, people need to deal with the reality of that. Anyway, I won't bring this up again if you don't, loved the show, came to post about it.

sadris said:

Show is amazing. Some untrue stuff. But way better than anything else on TV (even GOT).

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Really liking it, they are making up characters though and replacing some important figures in the actual story. That chick is total fiction, she's replacing like half a dozen guys who went through some hairy shit to stop the secondary explosion because the authorities wanted to pretend it couldn't get worse.

Dom said:

It's interesting to think of what it would be like if someone showed up at my door now, told me I had to leave, and then never seeing my home or belongings again. The knowledge that it all remained behind intact long after I died is a double mindfuck.

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I actually live within 10 miles of a nuclear plant and although the prospect of an accident on the scale of Chernobyl is extremely remote, that little sliver of possibility makes you think sometimes. There are things like evacuation zones based on where you live but my thought is if there every was something like a meltdown, we're basically screwed anyway.

Dom said:

I wasn't surprised by finding that out in the podcast. She felt really out of place in the episode, and seemed to know too much based in limited info. Very much came across as a plot element more than a character. I like the actress though, so it wasn't a big issue.

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You are talking about Ulana, the Belarussian scientist? From what I can wiki, it seems the full tanks part was true, but was the potential size of the explosion exaggerated for drama?

She claims 2-4 megatons, 30km blast radius, explosion of the remaining 3 reactors, causing a secondary blast radius of 200km, killing everyone in kiev and some of minsk, radiation impacting ukraine, latvia, lithuania, belarussia, poland, czech, hungary, romania, east germany...ruin for 100 years, 60 million people...

is this exaggerated for drama? If not, I gotta say that, even though they might be blamed for the problem, the USSR certainly saved the day, too.

What is dead may never die!