Review of the HBO Mini-series movie. What is real and what false.
The HBO Mini-series movie about the Chernobyl disaster aired in May 2019 has caused a lot of interest in the public. Many of you have probably seen other documentary movies about Chernobyl, each of them portraying the accident in a different way. In each of those movies some parts were closer to reality, some not. As first we need to say that the HBO Mini-series is not a documentary movie, so we cannot expect to get a real picture of all the events that happened during and after the accident. This movie is focused on the main problem that caused the accident � hiding of truth. We can agree with this statement. However, some scenes portrayed in this movie are very different from real events, some even cause outrage in persons that directly participated in real events. To those not familiar with the disaster, watching the movie might give false impressions about events, persons, actions and their mentality. This is the reason why I decided to write these short comments about the movie.
I wrote each of the following comments right after watching respective episode, so some final clarifications are written after the last episode.
Episode 1.
I especially disliked how the characters were shown, as if all personnel in the NPP were stupid. Akimov was shown as a dull guy totally paralyzed. That's not true, he was a skilled shift-chief and all personnel in the control room were under his command during that shift. And he fulfilled his duties well. It appeared as if Dyatlov was the only one making (wrong) decisions and I strongly doubt that he gave some of those idiotic commands. Though being a tough and demanding person and he made some fatal decisions during the test (reducing power below 700MWt and subsequent restarting of reactor after power fall), his character is exaggerated. Sitnikov appeared as some dosimetrist, but in fact he was a highly skilled nuclear physicist holding the position of deputy chief engineer (so same as Dyatlov). The underground bunker was full of other persons (shift chiefs, workers, political, police, military, etc.) - it was very crowded there, people gathering information, evaluating and giving orders (mostly Bryuchanov, Fomin). Same for the control room - there were many more persons present with various responsibilities. Fomin arrived much later at the plant - they couldn't find him (some say he was out for fishing). And when he arrived, he was the person who made the worst decisions and to whom some of the characters shown would better apply (paralyzed - excited - paralyzed). The movie makes impression that the only decision made in the bunker was political by some old man there (I didn't get who actually that should be). That's a total nonsense! It's the usual way how western media show post-Soviet countries. Many persons present during that night were afraid of what really happened, many refused to accept the reality in the first hours, but no one has escaped or left his place. Everyone fulfilled his duties, tried to help, many of them were true heroes. Fireman - there were no fires on grounds where those firefighters fought. All fires were on roofs (and in the central hall from reactor), some less some more serious. On the roof of turbine hall there were in fact only small inflammations, more serious fires were on the roof of 3rd block. The place where the situation was most serious (except the reactor hall) - the turbine hall is completely omitted. There was no such huge smoke coming out of the reactor as shown in the movie. There was no blast wave perceived in Pripyat. In fact, almost no one in Pripyat noticed during the night that the NPP exploded. Most persons that heard the explosion believed it was a steam release from steam-relief valves (GPK), which was a common phenomenon (and in fact this release happened in the first stage of explosion � but all 8 GPKs opened).
Fiction:
Reality:
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In the morning of 26th V. Bryuchanov made the first request to evacuate Pripyat, but he didn't provide the actual (high) radiation data. Nevertheless, he didn't have the power to order this, for the failure were much higher persons responsible, especially Scherbina. Several other persons, especially from the civil defense (Vorobyev) notified higher authorities about the situation and started preparation for evacuation (Bedrov). Many don't realize that evacuating a 50k city cannot be realized in minutes. Issuing such order without being prepared would indeed result in panic. Of course, the biggest failure here was that people in Pripyat were not immediately and properly notified and iodine tablets given to them. Fireman arrived at the scene immediately after the explosion - the first unit straight from the NPP. By that time no one knew the true radiation levels, but those firefighters knew what they might expect in this territory and many of them knew what was burning inside the central hall. Would they do different if they knew exactly the situation? I believe they wouldn't - they were true heroes (including others of the NPP personnel) as they understood how important it was to stop spreading of fire (especially to the 3rd unit) and avoid a much bigger disaster. Such heroism is not so common nowadays. Also, all things related to nuclear technology and power were treated state secret including radiation levels. So, this was also one of the reasons for delays. The government reacted very promptly and created a commission including several high-ranking persons that immediately made their way to Chernobyl. They arrived in the afternoon-evening of 26th right on place and visited the most dangerous areas. Ministers, generals - none was a weakling - they observed the scene in areas of extreme radiation fields, and they knew it. Even Bryuchanov flew 3 times around the reactor. The problem was that everyone in Chernobyl was waiting for this commission to assemble and take the most serious decisions. Everyone was afraid of admitting that such a huge disaster happened, something that never happened anywhere in the world.
Many 'outside' people don't understand the Russian nature, just like in WWII. And Chernobyl was another war for them. Persons involved in that accident sacrificed their lives to save thousands or millions of others. There are so many stories in Chernobyl where persons risked their lives knowing the real danger. We used to say: after the battle, everyone is a general. I'm wondering how many 'smart guys� would act in that situation. Would they flee the place because of fear of high radiation to save their lives? Then we'd witness a disaster several times bigger than what happened.
Episode 2.
It makes the impression as if the entire accident has been handled by just 2 persons: Scherbina and Legasov. This is of course not true, there were dozens of other specialists, many of them arrived at the scene ahead of Scherbina. Ministers (Mayorets, Sklyarov), deputy ministers (Shasharin, Semenov, Meshkov), representatives of various organizations (Maryin, Sidorenko, Tsvirko, Shishkin, Kizima), military and civil defense personnel (Bedrov, Pikalov, Ivanov), nuclear specialists and NIKIET (Prushinskiy, Ye. Ignatenko, Polushkin, Cherkasov), experts from Kurchatov insitute (Ryazantsev, Velikhov and of course Legasov). Besides that, in the morning of 26th there were already hundreds of other personnel present (MVD, civil defense, etc.), several workers from the NPP were called to arrive. So, the true picture was quite different with many other persons involved. Many of the high-ranking persons visited the plant right upon arrival, even close in areas of extreme radiation. Many of them flew with the helicopter around the plant and by noon of 26th the mobile detachment unit of Kiev Civil Defense (headed by col. V.V. Grebenyuk) had already reliable radiation information from reconnaissance. Also, other persons (S. Vorobyev) from the NPP had measurements using high dose-rate devices in the morning of 26th. So, the scene of Pikalov going alone in a lead-shielded vehicle to the plant in the evening doesn't make sense. And BTW, such shielded vehicles were built only later during the construction of sarcophagus. On 26th there were others (Karpan, Abramov) doing reconnaissance in an armored vehicle around the plant and measuring gamma fields and neutron flux.
The first politburo meeting with Gorbachev didn't take place in such shape. Scherbina has been appointed the head of commission and he immediately made his way to Kiev. From there they went straight to Pripyat by cars and joined the first commision meeting. The entire scene of Legasov convincing others that situation is serious because of a fireman getting burns due to picking up graphite (which is not possible to develop so quick) and that the level of 3.6 R/h is a dosimeter limit is not true. By that time no one in the politburo knew the exact situation. Moreover, most important meetings took place right at the scene - first in Pripyat, later they moved to Chernobyl and then even farther. Those meetings were headed by Scherbina and communicated by phone to Moscow.
Helicopter flights... They were not commanded by Scherbina and Legasov, but Antoshkin (major gen. of the air force), initially from roof in Pripyat. Pushing the pilots (by Scherbina) to fly directly above the reactor is nonsense as well. A helicopter did indeed crash, but in October and not because of being pushed to fly too close.
And who is Ulyana
Khomyuk ?
Addition of this "composite" non-existing character is an offending
spit in the face of many specialists working at the scene in extreme
conditions! [OK, this has been clarified by movie makers at the very end, but
still...]. It's unbelievable how such a person could make it from nowhere
straight into politburo meetings with Gorbachev. It's also fascinating how this
smartest person among all scientists, based only on a spectrometry analysis and
a drawing of the plant could determine the exact state of the reactor, water
tanks and calculate the exact time of corium burn-thru. Radiation was detected
in Sweden (Forsmark) a day later, after the
evacuation of Pripyat. Asking Gorbachev for a permission to kill 3 persons is
an utter nonsense. I really doubt that he was even aware of this action before
it took place. The Government Commision in Pripyat was in frequent contact with
the Government (especially Ryzhkov and Ligachev) and specialists in Moscow.
The entire picture of making decision to evacuate Pripyat was quite different.
Already in the evening of 26th Scherbina made the decision to evacuate despite
that the Ministry Of Health refused to sign it. So this was just a few hours
after the commision arrived in Pripyat! The Civil Defense staff started
preparations ahead and first official request for sending buses is documented at 20:00.
On 27th at 11:00 the official command was given. According to some sources it was actually Pikalov who didn't agree
with that and wanted to wait more...
Episode 3.
Divers - this myth has been refuted several times; I won't talk much about this (search on the web). Water was only knee-deep, work done pretty quick, all lived for several years, some are still alive. Edit: At the end of last episode the authors clarified this as well.
Ananenko receiving order in 2018:
Scherbina was a very powerful person, he was a natural leader, the highest boss in the zone. He could (and did) issue orders to anyone including ministers. It's unimaginable that anyone would speak with him with such a tone like Legasov (and some others) did in the movie. I'm pretty sure that many were afraid of him and no one dared such disrespect.
Same for miners from Tula and the minister. They were hard guys, but there was respect. See original footage from digging the tunnel how the miners looked like - far from how they have been portrayed in the movie.
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Forcing the miners by a soldier with a machine gun is a total nonsense. Such a scene could be only invented by not understanding the real characters and mentality. And btw, none of the high-ranking officials (not even Scherbina) did walk with bodyguards there.
According to most direct witnesses (and SKALA system analysis) there was no power spike observed before pushing AZ-5.
Of course, everything related to Khomyuk is a fiction. All persons involved in the NPP were immediately an extensively interrogated by the KGB.
I realized that I didn't say anything positive yet. So... Most of the scenes appeared pretty authentic in terms apparel, buildings, devices, furniture of that time. Well done! Also, the radiation burns appeared pretty real (except the fireman in first episode, who couldn't get such burns from radiation so quickly).
Episode 4 & 5.
First let me summarize my impression of the entire series. If I look at it as a movie (not a documentary one), it's pretty well. In fact, many scenes, appearance and casting were done perfectly (I mentioned this earlier), there were some scenes where I was surprised how real they looked. There are many real facts shown in the movie, but the way how they happened, who was really involved, their connections and relations have been adapted to their own story. So, for those seeking to learn more truth about this accident it will be misleading. The main idea of the series (lies) is true, the main cause of the accident was indeed the hiding of truth about deficiencies of reactor design, insufficient verification of reactor operation (especially at low power) and design of several systems (especially control rods and reactor monitoring systems). These facts were known long ago to many persons including reactor designer (NIKIET), scientific advisor (IAE), NPP management, chief engineers and some reactor operators, but nothing was done to fix this. Actually, there was an update planned to be done to control rods (USP) right during the planned shutdown of R4 on 25th of April. If this update would be performed before that and we agree that the faulty design of control rods was the final reason that led to the accident, then in my opinion the mentioned update might have avoided at least the final reactivity increase. Perhaps the accident would be much-much less severe.
Now let's go to the 5th episode. Again, many things shown there were based on true facts, but how it really happened was very different from reality. It is true that there was a court in Chernobyl and its result was predetermined ahead of it - that it was caused by human factor and persons accused were responsible for the accident. There was not just Bryuchanov, Dyatlov and Fomin accused, but also Rogozhkin, Laushkin.. The court was not open to public and all evidence is most probably still locked in secret archives, but some witnesses (i.e. Nikolay Karpan) recorded and published exact word-by-word transcripts of the hearings. The hearings were very different from what's shown in the movie; I don't think that Shcherbina attended it at all and I haven't seen anywhere that Legasov would either. The scientific "experts" present were mostly from organizations related to reactor design, so those that knew the truth and insufficient design of reactor, but never admitted that. They were directing all accusations to the personnel, while defendants were pointing to the deficiencies in design and documentation. If anyone's interested more in this, I recommend reading The Chernobyl Trial by N. Karpan. Of course, there was no sensational revelation in the court about the causes like done by Legasov in the movie. But it was a perfect choice from makes of the movie how to explain the (complex) reasons of the accident to the public, without the need to deeply understand physics. Well done! I appreciate that this scene was also quite correct from scientific point of view. And the simple answer to the question "why the rods had such faulty design" - "because it was cheap" was just perfect.
It is true that they attempted the test several times in the past and it failed. But they did adjustments to several systems after those failures and now they expected it to work out. Anyway, I think that there's too much attention being paid to this test and that it's considered as one of the main reasons of the accident. That's not true - it played a certain role, but not so crucial. Similar regarding the postponing of the test by the grid controller. It played a certain role, but the impact on Xenon poisoning is more complex and one needs to analyze more parameters. Toptunov being not experienced enough is true and it played also a certain factor, but the fall in power to 0 (30 MWt) was attributed by some experts to an instrument failure of the power regulator (again, this is a more complex topic and basically we can say that the monitoring systems weren't working properly at low power levels). Would this power fall happen if an experienced SIUR would be at his place? This is difficult to tell, we can only speculate... Regarding Dyatlov.. he actually claimed that he wasn't in the control room from 0:05 till 0:20 on 26th as he was out for an inspection of other premises (not on toilet). And this was the critical time during which the power dropped to almost zero. He said that when he returned, he saw the reactor almost stopped and didn't object against raising the power as proposed by Akimov. In my opinion this is a big lie and other witnesses confirmed that he was present during that time and that it was him who gave the critical commands. I also think that Dyatlov's behavior to others has been much exaggerated in this movie (and several others). The main problem here is that the only complete testimony we have from control room is from Dyatlov. Others either died soon or provided only very simple information. Those that were present in the control room during that night and survived longer either say that they were too far from the place where most critical decisions were made (SIUR console, NSB, ZGIS) or that they were very busy with their own instruments (i.e. B. Stolyarchuk). There were many other factors playing an important role, some of them are difficult to explain to those not familiar with nuclear physics and reactor operation.
Martin Malik, June 2019
If you�re interested in more details, see the my webinary and presentation:
Webinary Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWo5PjWhMdE
Webinary Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL49DQKkS9o
Presentation (also used in the webinary): https://www.hwinfo.com/Chernobyl/mm.pdf
Very good comment about the HBO series by G.A. Kopchinsky (July 2019): https://www.zampolit.in.ua/2019/07/09/%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D1%8C-%D0%BE-%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%8B%D0%BB%D0%B5/