ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

What HBO's 'Chernobyl' gets right (and wrong) about the world's worst nuclear power plant accident

The HBO series, "Chernobyl," gets plenty of things right about the nuclear power plant disaster that likely exposed hundreds of thousands of people to radiation.

chernobyl
  • To adapt the story for television, "Chernobyl" director Craig Mazin had to invent a character and adjust the chronology of a few events.
  • While some circumstances are still shrouded in mystery, we now know that the incident was far more catastrophic than Soviet officials initially let on.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Retelling the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is an exercise in un-burying the truth.

In the wake of the world's worst nuclear power plant accident, which forced the entire city of Pripyat in the former USSR to evacuate after being exposed to toxic levels of radiation, Soviet officials publicly downplayed the incident. To this day, scientists are still working to understand the effects of the fatal explosion.

ADVERTISEMENT

What we do know is that the core of a nuclear reactor opened, sending plumes of radioactive material into the air. The toxic fumes not only contaminated the local vegetation and water supply, but also poisoned nearby residents, some of whom went on to develop cancer .

Within three months of the disaster, more than 30 people had died of acute radiation sickness.

"We can only estimate the real effects on people's lives," said Jan Haverkamp, a senior nuclear energy expert at Greenpeace, who saidthe catastrophe likely had a severe impact on hundreds of thousands of people.

While developing his HBO series, "Chernobyl," writer and producer Craig Mazin approached conflicting accounts of the event with a degree of caution.

"I always defaulted to the less dramatic because the things that we know for sure happened are so inherently dramatic," he told Variety's "TV Take" podcast.

ADVERTISEMENT

For the most part, the documentary is hauntingly accurate with the exception of a few artistic liberties. We fact-checked some of the major plot points from the series to determine what's true and what verges on myth.

Note: This article contains spoilers of episodes 1-4.

Liam Daniel/HBO

ADVERTISEMENT

Both Chernobyl and the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II were catastrophic nuclear disasters. But Haverkamp said it's difficult to compare the radiation exposure of the two events.

With Hiroshima, he said, the major health impact was caused by direct exposure to radiation. When a nuclear bomb explodes, he said, a person's radiation dose is determined by their distance from the point of exposure.

"What happened [in Chernobyl] was that a lot of radioactive material was brought into the atmosphere," he said. The material was then "spread over a very large area" and ingested by people over a long period of time.

ADVERTISEMENT

Liam Daniel/HBO

In a horrifying scene in episode 4, men throw blocks of radioactive graphite off the roof of the power plant what the series calls "the most dangerous place on Earth." In real life, the men were asked to clear 100 tons of radioactive debris from the area.

At a conference in 1990, the official who oversaw the cleanup efforts, Yuri Semiolenko, said the Soviets had initially tried to clear the site with remote-controlled robots. When the machines started breaking down in the toxic atmosphere, officials resorted to human labor.

Though advanced US robots could have aided the decontamination, tensions between the two countries dissuaded Ukraine from asking for help.

ADVERTISEMENT

Liam Daniel/HBO

One of the series' main characters, Soviet nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk, is an amalgamation of many nuclear scientists involved in the Chernobyl cleanup.

For Mazin, placing a female character at the heart of the investigation made historical sense.

"One area where the Soviets were actually more progressive than we were was in the area of science and medicine," Mazin told Variety . "The Soviet Union had quite a large percentage of female doctors."

ADVERTISEMENT

Chernobyl's chief scientific investigator, Valery Legasov, on the other hand, was a real person. As the opening episode reveals, Legasov recorded his personal account of the disaster before hanging himself in 1988.

Liam Daniel/HBO

One of the most harrowing scenes arrives in episode four, "The Happiness of All Mankind," when a three-person USSR squad is tasked with shooting stray animals near the reactor site.

ADVERTISEMENT

Approximately 36 hours after the explosion, Pripyat residents were given just 50 minutes to gather their belongings and board the throngs of buses that had come to take them away. No one was allowed to bring their pets.

Residents initially believed that they would return after three days, but the move turned out to be permanent. As orphaned dogs wandered the abandoned city, USSR squads were ordered to kill them to avoid the spread of contamination.

About 300 stray dogs still remain in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but few live past the age of six due to radiation poisoning.

ADVERTISEMENT

Liam Daniel/HBO

In the wake of the initial blast, nuclear physicists feared a second explosion caused by melting corium coming into contact with groundwater.

In episode two, Khomyukinforms the USSR that a follow-up explosion would carry a force of between 2 and 4 megatons, which would wipe out "the entire population of Kiev and a portion of Minsk." The release of radiation, she adds, would "impact all of Soviet Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarusia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungry, Romania, and most of East Germany."

Haverkamp said there are too many hypotheticals considered in this scenario.

"They're not saving the world," he said. "That situation might play out if all of the melting corium hit groundwater," but when corium starts melting, it melts "in a very uneven way."

ADVERTISEMENT

The claim that a second explosion would carry a force of up to 4 megatons, he said, is "an exaggeration."

Liam Daniel/HBO

Firefighter Vasily Ignatenko and his wife, Lyudmilla, were scheduled to leave for Belarus the morning of the explosion, but their plans were curtailed when Vasily rushed to the power plant at around 1:30 a.m. He promised to wake his wife when he got home, but his severe radiation poisoning forced him to be taken to the hospital.

ADVERTISEMENT

When Lyudmilla visited her husband, she was ordered not to touch him. "If you start crying, I'll kick you out right away," she recalled being told in the book "Voices from Chernobyl."

Lyudmilla was pregnant at the time, but lied to the radiologist in order to see her husband. Vasily died 14 days after the accident and was buried, as the series shows , in a zinc coffin. The documentary even shows Lyudmilla carrying her deceased husband's shoes, which couldn't fit around his swollen feet.

Lyudmilla eventually gave birth to her baby, who died after four hours.

ADVERTISEMENT

Liam Daniel/HBO

The helicopter crash in episode 2 isn't all wrong, but there are a few inaccuracies. The crash took place after the initial two weeks of recovery not, as the episode suggests, in the immediate wake of the explosion. In a statement to Men's Health , Mazin said it was one the few events that had to be moved around chronologically.

"I wanted people to know that this was one of the hazards that these pilots were dealing with an open reactor. Radiation was flying over it," he told the site.

In the series, the helicopter appears to be toppled by the radioactive core. "They're too close," Legasov says, right before the helicopter starts to fall, seemingly out of thin air.

But Haverkamp said radiation wasn't the cause of the fatal helicopter crash. Real-life footage shows the helicopter colliding with a crane and cascading to the ground.

ADVERTISEMENT

Haverkamp said the air movements surrounding the reactor were unpredictable, but what caused the crash "was indeed hitting the crane."

See Also:

SEE ALSO: A photographer visited the abandoned towns around Chernobyl more than 20 times over the past 25 years, and the captivating photos show just how suddenly time stopped in its tracks after the disaster

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!

Unblock notifications in browser settings.
ADVERTISEMENT

Eyewitness? Submit your stories now via social or:

Email: eyewitness@pulse.ng

Recommended articles

Here's everything to know about being a virgin on your wedding night

Here's everything to know about being a virgin on your wedding night

7 do's and don’ts of the Holy month of Ramadan

7 do's and don’ts of the Holy month of Ramadan

Top 5 sweetest celebrity mother-child relationships that stand out for us

Top 5 sweetest celebrity mother-child relationships that stand out for us

International Women's Day: 5 Nigerian female celebrities championing women’s rights

International Women's Day: 5 Nigerian female celebrities championing women’s rights

Top 5 female directors in Nollywood

Top 5 female directors in Nollywood

6 things that will break a Muslim's fast during Ramadan

6 things that will break a Muslim's fast during Ramadan

5 benefits of fasting during Ramadan

5 benefits of fasting during Ramadan

5 reasons Easter was more fun when we were children

5 reasons Easter was more fun when we were children

Dos and don’ts of supporting Muslims during Ramadan

Dos and don’ts of supporting Muslims during Ramadan

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT