Chernobyl - HBO Miniseries

Discussion in 'TV Board' started by VoodooChild5, May 6, 2019.

  1. Voodoo

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    I assume this is reasonably accurate. Radiation is terrifying. Those poor fucks.
     
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  2. TrustyPatches

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    Holy shit was that hard to watch
     
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  3. IvanTheTerrible

    IvanTheTerrible Well-Known Member
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    I completely forgot about this starting last night. Will watch tonight.
     
  4. LetItSoak

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    Definitely enjoyed the first episode
     
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  5. BellottiBold

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    It's pretty wild watching a show where literally every character is like instantly getting cancer as a *best case* scenario.
     
  6. IvanTheTerrible

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    The entire scene with the citizens watching as the ash falls on them made my skin crawl.
     
  7. AptosDuck

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    One thing to remember is how little most of those people understood about the effects of radiation. The engineers at the plant would know, but the technicians wouldn't. The Soviet system placed a premium on compartmentalization of info and knowledge, and people were discouraged from asking questions or learning about stuff they didn't need to know. So if you're a plumber or electrician or firefighter, you have no idea what you're up against.
     
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  8. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    The acute radiation killed 20-30 firemen and first responders primarily because they didn’t have the knowledge of the different types of radiation nor the magnitude of it and in that culture they did what they were told anyway.

    There were probably another couple dozen cancer related deaths to those as well in the next few years as well but aside from that and the occasional thyroid cancer discovery, the adverse effects from the disaster on the health and safety of the public have been sensationalized. I am planning on watching e1 soon and look forward to seeing how it plays out.

    The fascinating part to me is that the world was unaware of it until radiation monitors went off at a nuke plant in Sweden. Large swaths of Belarus were affected but people still live in pathway and have survived and lived the typical poor post USSR collapse.
     
  9. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    The other piece I didn’t mention and am unsure if the show does is the fact that their dosimeters and rad equipment were totally pegged out because their range was so small. They were measuring sieverts at orders of magnitude less than what the actual were due to limited rad protection equipment.
     
  10. AptosDuck

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    The show talked about the dosimeters topping out at 3.6 roentgens/hour, and the one functioning dosimeter that went much higher was locked in a safe where nobody seemed to have a ready key for.

    Hoping that the miniseries is about the cover-up and how the system fails its people and not anything hyperbolic about how dangerous nuclear power is. Not sure if this had been dropped elsewhere on this board, but this is as good a place as any

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-nuclear-power.html
     
    #10 AptosDuck, May 7, 2019
    Last edited: May 7, 2019
  11. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    Great article and the absolute truth. We just put WBN Unit 2 online but it cost close to 6bn with a lot of existing infrastructure. THhe reality is NRC regulations and INPO evaluations need to change. We spend billions on things that have an infinitesimally small chance of happening when we could evaluate the risk like we with literally everything in life and move on.

    The design piece in the article is funny and true though. Calvert Cliffs is a two unit site with totally different reactor designs and turbines (I think a Babcock and Wilcox and Westinghouse). As a senior reactor operator there, you get qualified to each unit individually because the set points and designs are different whereas most dual unit sites are identical. The reasons? Some combination of whatever was cheaper and the great desire to buy stuff from everyone to allow the industry to continue to get competitive and grow.

    My plant is located near what used to be Combustion Engineering’s home office and they designed tons of reactors for plants across the country. Not us, we utilize a Westinghouse 4 loop design with a giant ice condenser because “they gave us a deal”.

    The maintenance and design documentation revisions on the ice condenser alone have cost probably more than tenfold the design.
     
  12. Voodoo

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    The scene I can’t stop thinking about is the one dude just staring straight into the blue fire. So fucked.
     
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  13. TLAU

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    This. Said at least three times in the episode “I’d just tell them to fuckin shoot me”. It would be a better way to die than going to “pump water into a ditch” or stare at a smoking pile of nuclear waste on the roof
     
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  14. IvanTheTerrible

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    or the three dudes going down to the core. The one guy holding the door open and immediately starting to bleed after they returned. His sense of despair while smoking a cigarette. My goodness.
     
  15. IvanTheTerrible

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  16. IvanTheTerrible

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    [​IMG]
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    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-...tv-series-a8902981.html?utm_source=reddit.com
     
  17. BellottiBold

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    I appreciate the merit of the commentary from those of you with experience in the field who would rather we understand that nuclear power generation is easily done in a safe manner, but at the end of the day we are not masters of this planet and Fukushima should remind us that we cannot forsee every incident that may yet come :twocents:
     
  18. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    Very true. You don’t know what you don’t know. In Fukushima’s case, a combination of ethnocentrism, lack of implementing vendor recommended design changes, and very poor design decisions were only brought to light due to a massive earthquake that resulted in a greater than design basis tsunami.

    My primary argument would be that you can’t engineer or design humanity out of something. It’s impossible. People will make decisions that can’t be overcome by all the margins of safety. Nuclear as much and likely more than the other most regulated industries in the world do their utmost to do this as referenced by plants that are inland and landlocked spending billions on Fukushima modifications.

    Nuclear is safe, green, and relatively inexpensive and should be the future. If the cumbersome and overburdened regulations lessen ever so slightly, it could and should take off.
     
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  19. LetItSoak

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    Is there a reason it's not feasible to use wind and solar instead? Seems like the safer route although there are likely limitations I'm unaware of
     
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  20. Prospector

    Prospector I am not a new member
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    Where does the waste go? What do you do w them when shut down?
     
  21. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    We store the used up fuel rods on site in large cylindrical canisters with passive cooling systems. That’s the standard across the industry. All of the totally used up fuel across the entire industry could easily fit on a single regulation football field. It’s not that much.

    San Onofre is currently being decommissioned in California right now. It’s about a 20 year process. A coworker just went out there to finish his career doing it. To my knowledge SCE will keep personnel onsite indefinitely.
     
  22. TLAU

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    Definitely was waiting for Zharkov to tell someone to send a raven in his speech in the board room
     
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  23. gus_chiggins

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    Kinda weird seeing Maester Luwin in that context
     
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  24. ramszoolander

    ramszoolander Known for Buns
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    So the in-mountain storage wherever that was supposed to be is officially dead now thanks to NIMBY?
     
  25. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    Yucca mountain was intended for the purpose of high level radiation storage. Obama pulled funding on the site in 2012ish I believe and the Trump administration has continued to not fund it moving forward. Plants in the mid 2000s began to supplement their licenses with what’s called dry cask storage which is what I mentioned earlier. It’s covered under its own process 10CFR72.48.

    Every site has a safety analysis report. With dry cask there’s a totally different and separate safety analysis that covers removal from the spent fuel pool, transportation, and final storage.

    Yucca mountain would be nice but there’s not any angst about not having it and being forced to store used up fuel onsite in casks. It also commanded tremendous upkeep as it required a site license just like a nuclear plant did. Last I checked the NRC had requested like $50m just to maintain the site license.
     
  26. tjosu

    tjosu This is kind of like the breakfast club, huh?
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    Watching the first episode made me very aware at just how little I know about Chernobyl and nuclear power in general. This thread has reaffirmed that
     
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  27. Virgil Caine

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    Yeah, that was real dark and real good. And that’s with me not understanding what was going on, technically, for most of the episode.
     
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  28. Bankz

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    Really fantastic episode. I echo a lot of the comments on not knowing enough about the incident or nuclear. I felt horrible knowing all those people are fucked.
     
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  29. Mix

    Mix I own a Fuddruckers with Scottie Pippen
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    Am I the only one who was annoyed by everyone speaking in a British accent?
     
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  30. tjosu

    tjosu This is kind of like the breakfast club, huh?
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    I did think it was odd but I prefer that to having to read subtitles the whole time
     
  31. BellottiBold

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    I find it easy to move past that after initially finding it odd, particularly if I like the casting, which so far I do.
     
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  32. Bankz

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    At first yes, 20 minutes in I got past it
     
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  33. Voodoo

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    Didn’t even notice the accent. Was too busy being horrified of radiation.
     
  34. IvanTheTerrible

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    I'm ready for tonights episode.
     
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  35. BIGASSTITTIES

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    Holy fuck what an amazing show
     
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  36. Voodoo

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    This is so fucked up.
     
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  37. Bankz

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    The last 3 minutes or so when they are in the water was so fucking intense and then ending the episode in pitch black. Some amazing directing in this show.
     
  38. BIGASSTITTIES

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    This show is fucking captivating. I’m a huge fan and honestly hate that it won’t get the attention it deserves.
     
  39. gus_chiggins

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    This show also gives you a taste of how Russia treated its soldiers during both world wars
     
  40. BlazingRebel

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  41. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    The main problem is they can be unreliable due to weather and they produce their peak power when the need isn't there. Power usage spikes in the morning and evening, when the sun and wind is usually not blowing as much. So they are best utilized with some type of storage, be it the battery technology that isn't there yet or pumped hydro storage.

    For example, last summer, the wind stopped blowing in Britain for over a week and the wind turbines that could theoretically produce up to 20 gigawatts of power produced almost no power. Nuclear and natural gas picked up the slack.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...t-heads-into-9th-day-with-no-relief-for-weeks

    This is why it's good to have a mix of power sources.
     
  42. Bankz

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    I found it unbelievable that as the core was exposed and they were facing the possibility of destroying half of Europe that they still had the 3 other reactors operating.
     
  43. Bankz

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    Also I would highly recommend downloading the podcast for this show. They go in more detail about events or people and stories they didn't have time to include.
     
  44. BP

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    If anyone is interested in further reading the book Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy is really good. Just finished in time for this. Starts right before things went to shit, breaks down what everyone was doing, the evacuation, how Russia handled it, the political fallout, what their leaders were doing etc. Very Comprehensive.
     
  45. Pelican

    Pelican COOL huh
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    I’m enjoying this a lot so far. Episode two had me all like

    [​IMG]
     
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  46. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    This is a great point. Over time, emergency core cooling systems have improved, but back then it was probably safer for them to keep their other units online. A lot of this has to do with unit autonomy. Think of it this way. If you have one car in your garage that is leaking oil and making horrible engine noises, you turn it off and call a mechanic. You don’t also turn your other perfectly normal operating car off as well. You drive it. This is also evidenced by the fact that units 1-3 continued to run many years after the unit 4 meltdown.

    Each unit has their own supervisor and team that handles everything that goes on for that unit. You have a shift manager who manages the unit supervisors for each of the online units who would be the decision maker for the entire plant. In my lexicon unit is the same thing as an individual reactor; a 4 unit site has 4 reactors.

    The other important piece to this is that when you shut a reactor down, it’s not like turning a light switch off. You can even SCRAM a reactor instead of a guided procedural manual shutdown and you’ll still be dealing with immense amounts of decay heat. When you shut a reactor down you still have to continually cool it for a long time and the idea here is that they didn’t want to put stress on all their emergency core cooling systems simultaneously. There were fires that were threatening unit 3 but those were extinguished before they became too much of a threat. I believe unit 3 finally shut down around the same time the fires were extinguished and likely because its unit supervisor cared about the safety of his crew. Only the people he needed to run their emergency core cooling stuck around and they were given potassium iodide tablets to block iodine uptake and respirators. Units 1 and 2 I believe kept running continually because Soviet Ukraine was starved for electricity.
     
  47. IvanTheTerrible

    IvanTheTerrible Well-Known Member
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    Episode two of the podcast is a good listen on this. Apparently, the three other reactors operated throughout the '90s with the last one shutting down in the summer of 2004.
     
  48. BIGASSTITTIES

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    It’s wild to me that during that time the entire government that supported them collapsed and fractioned
     
  49. Bankz

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    You seriously are the MVP of this thread. I appreciate all the added knowledge you are giving us.

    In this hypothetical had they shut down all the reactors and not been able to release the remaining water tanks resulting in the mass explosion they feared would the end result be the same?
     
  50. Bankz

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    My only knowledge of this entire event is that something exploded and some people died.

    No real detail so this show is blowing my mind on all levels.

    Its nuts how uneducated even those in power at the plant itself where.

    I also found it crazy that it took nearly 48 hours for the united states to figure out what happened. How technology has advanced. If something like that occurred today we would know without hours one would think.