Chernobyl - HBO Miniseries

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

  1. am16401

    am16401 Praise God
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    As much as I'd love to see stories on other disasters and cover ups I'd rather they just let this stand alone and don't pull a true detective where you're constantly chasing a unicorn. Everything about this was perfect mesh the story, actors, visually true to the era and location.
     
  2. Nelson

    Nelson Can somebody please get Ja Rhule on the phone
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    Russians have Stalingrad in their blood
     
  3. Truman

    Truman Well-Known Member
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    Here's the Ep 5 thread by the russian sports writer. Been loving these

     
  4. Voodoo

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    No weak points whatsoever over 5 episodes. Just phenomenal execution from everyone involved.
     
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  5. tigerbishop11

    tigerbishop11 call Tyrone
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    I can’t believe how well they nailed Brukhanov, Dyaltov, and Fomin at the trial. They were literal dead ringers for the guys in the postscript
     
  6. Bankz

    Bankz Well-Known Member
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    So at the trial the judges ask “why?” And it’s basically answered as the USSR was cheap.

    Is that essentially the larger issue. They built plants on the cheap. And different than the western country’s
     
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  7. Pelican

    Pelican COOL huh
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    Fuck.
     
  8. billdozer

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  9. IvanTheTerrible

    IvanTheTerrible Well-Known Member
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    "The Bridge of Death" scene still confuses me. Because I've read multiple reports that the children playing on the bridge did survive. Similar to the three divers story. Urban myth has taken over that specific situation and clouded the truth.
     
  10. IvanTheTerrible

    IvanTheTerrible Well-Known Member
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  11. Matt Foley

    Matt Foley RIP EARL
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    Didnt make that connection on my first watch but caught it on my rewatch last night. So good.
     
  12. IvanTheTerrible

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    Probably going to start "When They See Us" on Netflix. Just in case you need another smack of real life television.
     
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  13. Jack Parkman

    Jack Parkman Endorsed by Fred McGriff
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    Just finished and wanted to say I still have not recovered from the shooting of the dogs

    Please respect my privacy, that’s all for now
     
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  14. Bankz

    Bankz Well-Known Member
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  15. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    Yeah, listened to all of them this morning.
     
  16. Prospector

    Prospector I am not a new member
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    [​IMG]
     
  17. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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  18. Pelican

    Pelican COOL huh
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    Currently the highest rated show on IMDB with a 9.7 fwiw.
     
  19. BIGASSTITTIES

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    Deservedly so
     
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  20. Jack Parkman

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  21. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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  22. southlick

    southlick "Better Than You"
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  23. allothersnsused

    allothersnsused Wow that’s crazy
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    Really good show. My favorite part was when the man stood up for what is right and true. My least favorite part was when the dogs died.
     
  24. IvanTheTerrible

    IvanTheTerrible Well-Known Member
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    oh good god.
     
  25. IvanTheTerrible

    IvanTheTerrible Well-Known Member
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    This scene will always stick out/get to me.

     
  26. BIGASSTITTIES

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    Fucking great scene
     
  27. Kirk Fogg

    Kirk Fogg "Tell them what they've won Olmec!"
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  28. Henry Blake

    Henry Blake No Springsteen is leaving this house!
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    Somewhat technical comparison of TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima
     
  29. Kirk Fogg

    Kirk Fogg "Tell them what they've won Olmec!"
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  30. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    Top UCLA Doctor Denounces Depiction Of Radiation In HBO's "Chernobyl" As Wrong And "Dangerous"
    A top US medical doctor who treated radiation victims in Chernobyl has criticized HBO’s depiction of the accident and radiation’s health effects as inaccurate and “dangerous.”

    “Another error [in HBO’s “Chernobyl”] was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive,” UCLA’s Robert Gale wrote in “The Cancer Letter,” a subscription-based newsletter.

    Gale has been a world-renowned expert on bone marrow transplantation, which is used to treat radiation victims, since before the Chernobyl accident. After the accident, Gale reached out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who asked Gale to come “immediately.”

    “I spent the next two years mostly in the Soviet Union working with my colleagues at the Institute for Biophysics and Clinical Hospital 6 dealing with a bit more than 200 persons with acute radiation exposures,” Gale writes.

    “In the subsequent 30 years, I have been involved in several studies of the long-term medical consequences of the accident—initially in the ex-Soviet Union and later in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belorussia.”

    Gale, who worked for UCLA at the time of the accident, says that the firefighters who suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome were not contagious, as they are portrayed as by HBO's "Chernobyl."

    “Most radiation contamination was superficial and relatively easily managed by routine procedures. This is entirely different than the [1987] Goiania [Brazil] accident, where the victims ate 137-cesium [from an old x-ray machine] and we had to isolate them from most medical personnel.”

    Gale criticizes the portrayal in “Chernobyl” of a baby’s death supposedly from “absorbing” deadly amounts of radiation from her dying father, a firefighter who helped put out the blaze.

    “The radiation would have killed the mother,” says HBO's fictional scientist-hero played by Emily Watson, “but the baby absorbed it instead.”

    “Chernobyl” suggests strongly that the event actually occurred, I noted in my last column, to which a number of readers emailed or tweeted to claim that the event did, in fact, occur. How did they know? Why, it was described in a book, Voices From Chernobyl.

    “She looked healthy,” says a character from the book. “But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight roentgen. Congenital heart disease. Four hours later they told me she was dead."

    For many readers those few sentences were apparently proof that a) a baby died, b) an autopsy was conducted, c) the autopsy found elevated radiation levels in the liver and heart disease, d) the radiation was traced to Chernobyl, and e) the results of the autopsy were withheld from scientific authorities but shared with the mother.

    But there is no record that the event occurred, and Gale says it could not have happened.

    “Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room,” writes Gale.

    “First, as discussed, none of the victims were radioactive; their exposures were almost exclusively external, not internal,” writes Gale. “More importantly, risk to a fetus from an exposure like this is infinitesimally small.”

    Even high levels of radiation result in few birth defects, Gale notes. “For example, amongst the several hundred pregnant women exposed to high-dose radiation from the A-bombs, there were only 29 children with attributable developmental defects. All were exposed in the second trimester, when cells are migrating to the brain from the neural crest.”

    In HBO’s “Chernobyl,” the radiation victims look terrifying — more like monsters, or zombies, than human. Gale writes, “the effects are portrayed as something horrendous, unimaginable. This is inaccurate.

    "In doing haematopoietic cell transplant, we commonly expose people to much higher radiation doses than received by any of the Chernobyl victims. So do radiation therapists. We know what the toxicities are and we are reasonably effective in mitigating them.”

    As I noted last month, HBO’s “Chernobyl” misrepresents radiation exposure as the main or only factor behind the deaths of 29 firefighters. In reality, writes Gale, there were “synchronous injuries” that “make people more susceptible to radiation damage [and] can kill people even if you successfully reverse the radiation-induced damage.”

    Fear-mongering, Gale noted, resulted in many women unnecessarily terminating their pregnancies.

    “We estimate incorrect advice from physicians regarding the relationship between maternal radiation exposure from Chernobyl and birth defects,” writes Gale, “resulted in more than one million unnecessary abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe. Ignorance is dangerous.”

    The very same doctors whose advice encouraged one million women to seek abortions are also behind the claims by groups ranging from Greenpeace to Helen Caldicott to MIT historian Kate Brown that many more people died from Chernobyl radiation than experts, the World Health Organization and the United Nations, found.

    Gale knew that fear and panic would create more harm than radiation and so “I later brought my family to Kiev to reassure people there was no need to evacuate.”

    Most radiation victims survived, Gale notes. “Our scorecard treating the 204 victims was reasonably good. Sadly, 29 died but we could rescue 175 (86 percent). If we include the two immediate deaths at the Chernobyl NPF, there were 31 deaths.”

    Gale used a novel treatment method, which he tested on himself. “One interesting intervention, suggested by Prof. David Golde (UCLA) was use of a molecularly cloned haematopoietic growth factor,” writes Gale.

    “Sargramostim had been tested in dogs and monkeys to increase granulocytes, but had not been given to humans. We brought it into the Soviet Union from Switzerland—hidden in a passenger’s checked luggage with the permission of a Politburo Chernobyl commission,” Gale writes.

    “The problem was the Soviets didn’t want the Chernobyl victims to be the first humans to receive a new therapy. The solution was for Vorobiev and I to inject one another with sargramostim,” writes Gale.

    “We lived and so, we got permission to proceed.”

    “I’m amazed the producers didn’t get technical advice from a health physicist or radiobiologist rather than basing much of their screenplay on a novel (Voices of Chernobyl),” write Gale.

    In his article, Gale takes issue with the portrayal of Soviet authorities as reluctant to seek outside help.

    “I was immediately invited to come to Moscow and shortly thereafter to bring three colleagues,” Gale writes. “In my experience dealing with nuclear accidents, this is rather unusual and indicates a desire to do everything possible to help the victims—throwing politics to the wind. And whilst in Moscow, we were free to expropriate supplies and equipment from many Russian medical centers.”

    “Even more extraordinary, when I requested the Soviets allow me to bring in an Israeli scientist to help (there were no diplomatic relations with Israel at the time), they agreed, albeit with some arm-twisting.”

    Gale says the accident was impossible to cover-up, as portrayed by HBO. "Anyone looking at the destroyed reactor building, mass of firefighting equipment, and personnel streaming into the reactor complex—the smoke from the fire clearly visible from Pripyat about 4 km away etc.—I cannot imagine anyone would try to cover this up. It would be like standing in lower Manhattan after destruction of the Twin Towers and pretending there was no problem."

    "All governments try to contain bad news of this type," notes Gale. "I see rather little difference between the initial U.S. government reaction to the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident, the initial Japan government reaction to the Fukushima-Daiichi accident, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl."

    “Although the 31 immediate Chernobyl-related deaths are sad,” he concludes, “the number of fatalities is remarkably small compared with many energy-related accidents, such as the Benxihu coal mine disaster in China 1942, which killed about 1500 miners, and the 1975 Banqiao dam accident, also in China, which killed about 250,000 people.”

    “About 15,000 people reportedly die mining coal every year, although the true number may be much higher, and this figure does not consider morbidity from occupational hazards such as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (black lung disease).

    “About 1 million Egyptians are estimated to have become blind from trachoma because of construction of the Aswan High Dam. For reference, about 400 Americans are estimated to die on the highway over Memorial Day weekend.”
     
  31. electronic

    electronic It’s satire!
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    This is absolutely crazy to me. Essentially saying that Chernobyl didn't actually cause any significant increase in cancer deaths or birth defects. That is shocking. Seems like there should be waaaaaaaaaaay more information/coverage of that.
     
  32. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    Yeah. Not sure how much I believe it. I agree that there should be more impacts. But I do agree with the part that just being exposed to radiation doesn't make someone dangerous. It takes contamination from material like ash, dust, things like that that would make someone a mobile radiation source. Even then, a shower would get it off the body unless they breathed it in or swallowed it.
     
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  33. electronic

    electronic It’s satire!
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    Yeah, that scene about the baby absorbing the radiation for the mom was a pretty dumb part of an otherwise excellent series.
     
  34. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    We had a couple of guys in maintenance get uptakes (internal contamination during our steam generator replacement outage). They had to sit at home and crap in bags to be brought to the site and evaluated until they were deemed good to go and could return to work.

    The first time I got contaminated, they took a wire brush to my boots and I lost my upper scrubs. I was also inside the steam generator installing a temporary nozzle dam so we could do eddy current testing though. It was a rush.
     
  35. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    We did have one guy set off the exit monitors when he was coming into work. His wife had radioisotope testing done and they'd had sex that morning without him showering.
     
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  36. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    I bet that was fun to explain to site management.
     
  37. TheGrifter

    TheGrifter It's a trick. Get an axe.
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    The FIRST time?

    How many times have you been contaminated?
     
  38. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    Less than 20 times, but it is all minor. Usually they take my hard hat or shoes and wipe them down.

    Ive had radon gases stick to my clothes pretty often when staying in our Auxiliary Building for extended periods of time. It decays quickly and I’m on my way.
     
  39. Matt Foley

    Matt Foley RIP EARL
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    It’s not a huge deal, fairly routine.
     
  40. Henry Blake

    Henry Blake No Springsteen is leaving this house!
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    What's your yearly limit of exposure?
     
  41. drunk panda

    drunk panda Well-Known Member
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    Federal I think is 5 rem, administrative from the sites is probably around 2 rem.
     
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  42. jplaYa

    jplaYa CHAMPZY/SMOLTZY/CHELSEA
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    2 REM. It can be extended though to 5 REM and more in the event I was required to save a life.

    I have probably 300-400 mREM in my life from the site in my 9 year career.
     
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  43. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    For comparison

    NRC annual limit - 5000 mrem
    Typical site administrative limit - 2000 mrem
    Whole body CT scan - 1000 mrem
    Average US Annual Dose - 620 mrem
    Average US natural background dose - 310 mrem (from radon, cosmic rays, the Earth itself)
    From your body - 40 mrem
    Chest x-ray - 10 mrem
     
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  44. billdozer

    billdozer Well-Known Member
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    I'm probably at 5-10 mrem in 15 years. Managed to avoid going to the RB very often, and not to the Aux building much or for very long.
     
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  45. TrustyPatches

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    I think the show was pretty bad ass. One of my more enjoyable tv experiences
     
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  46. joe-

    joe- yesterday is a hard word for me
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    I for one am shocked and offended that the creators of the tv show took creative liberties
     
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  47. Truman

    Truman Well-Known Member
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    I stumbled across this. This guy grew up in Kiev and was there during the incident. He talks a lot about the slice of life as a normal citizen living at the time and what happened ect.

    He doesnt bash the show at all. Just adds a few more details to things.

    I find this stuff so interesting.

     
  48. 941Gator

    941Gator TMB's resident beach bum
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    Started it today.....the scenes in the hospital in episode 3 :(
     
  49. allothersnsused

    allothersnsused Wow that’s crazy
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    Definitely listen to the podcast if you enjoyed the show. Equal parts fascinating about storytelling, film directing, and the actual events.
     
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