As everyone knows, the Soviet Union has always been characterized by endless secrets, but sometimes the truth is superimposed despite any level of confidentiality, what happened in the nuclear power plant Vladimir Llich Lenin located in present-day Ukraine, gave step to a series of truths about what the government of that moment really was or what the Soviet Union meant, often overlapping security principles only to get to operate at low costs, one of the main causes of what happened at dawn April 26, 1986 taking into account, of course; a fatal human error. Today it is considered one of the greatest environmental disasters in history, and located at level 7 on the international nuclear disaster scale. And it is considered that it was a main cause for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

If you like history, I recommend 100% this mini HBO series that has every minute details of what happened before and after the disaster, the truth is the effort made by many people who gave their lives to protect the planet of a disaster of catastrophic level was incredible, they are heroes and deserve to be remembered.

Source

The History of the disaster

It explains detail in detail of how the mix of human error along with the greed of some managers looking for a promotion and the low levels of security can cause a complete disaster. These causes are controversial because from the day before the accident had been made advice and meetings about a test that was necessary to perform and for this had to reduce the power of the reactor, specifically the reactor four that was the one that suffered the disaster. A superheating of the nucleus caused a huge fire, flying the reactor lid of thousands of tons by which huge amounts of radioactive material were expelled into the atmosphere, whose contamination reached parts of Europe and even North America. The materials expelled were uranium dioxide, europium oxide, boron carbide, zirconium and graphite; these were estimated at 500 times more than what I released the fatal Hiroshima bomb. According to the figures of the Soviet Union 31 people died and they were evacuated to 116,000; the international alarm on the level of active radioactivity, since radioactivity was detected in at least 13 countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

After the accident, a decontamination process was started, which was enhanced by 600,000 people, who called them liquidators; an area of ​​30 km was isolated around this nuclear power plant (now called the exclusion zone). Of the employees of the plant two died as a result of the explosion and the others (29) died months later. This is just a number that holds the Soviet Union, but the truth is different, thousands died immediately and some time later as a consequence of the high levels of radioactivity.

After several negotiations with the Ukrainian government, the international community managed to finance the closure of the plant, completing it in 2000, after the accident a kind of sarcophagus was built to isolate the interior (this is at risk of collapsing), for the year In 2004, a new sarcophagus was rebuilt and the rest of the reactors in the plant are totally inactive. For 2016, after 30 years, a new sarcophagus was inaugurated, a mobile structure, in the shape of an arch, built 180 meters from the reactor and then located on it, it is estimated that it will last about 100 years, the cost of this It was 1,500 million euros.

Source

The HBO Series

What I liked the most is the detail and the light it has given, a banner of truths in which everything that many times you do not want to tell is counted, something very characteristic of the Soviet Union and its desire to cover the truth despite all. The fight of thousands of anonymous heroes who did everything possible to avoid giving the worst to the worst nuclear disaster in history and that could have a much greater extension ending with half a planet. Mainly they are narrated the facts in the accident, the origin, the protagonists, the details and the errors that many times are motivated by the desire to obtain to the force impossible results violating norms of security and overcoming on many, this was what happened to him to the manager of the reactor "Anatoly Dyatlov" who wanted to perform a test despite the conditions were not given, just to get a promotion, in addition to force the team to perform the test even though they warned that you could not do such a thing, they were young engineers and they were under the gaze and commands of someone hungry for a promotion, who dismissed the disaster that was going to cause.

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear catastrophe is caused on the planet, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes, the story of the series is based on the women and men who gave their lives to save the planet. focuses on the figure of Boris Shcherbina Vicepresident of the council of ministers and head of the office of fuels and energy in the Soviet Union, who was assigned the task of leading the commission of government in Chernobyl the first hours of the accident; long before knowing all the serious consequences that had been caused. Shcherbina is found living under a bureaucratic political system that does not care at all about the human losses that have been caused by the disaster. The series is starring Stellan Skarsgard and Emily Watson.

Source

The characters in the series and in real life

The dark politics that surrounded Chernobyl was not something that prevented the remarkable fidelity of characters in the HBO series, one of the main Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is the only one that is fictional because it represents the immense community of scientists who worked in the investigation of the terrible accident.

Valeri Legásov (Jared Harris)

Source

Soviet scientist in the field of inorganic chemistry, key member of the government commission responsible for the investigation of the causes of the accident, two years after the catastrophe this is hanged, victim of the effects of radiation and a deep depression due to that it was set apart by the Soviet government, leaving taped tapes in which it denounces all the design flaws in the Chernobyl reactors and many errors of incompetence that the system wanted to silence.

Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard)

Source

Member of the central committee of the communist party of the USSR and vice president of the council of ministers, is the Ukrainian politician who managed the crisis on behalf of Mikhail Gorbachev, after denying the seriousness of the situation, then Shcherbina admits the catastrophe and orders the evacuation of Prypiat , after 36 hours of the explosion, two years later he received a similar mission after the Spitak earthquake, he died in Moscow in 1990.

Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter)

Source

Engineer in charge of reactor 4, supervisor of the experiment that caused the accident, sentenced to 10 years of forced labor for his responsibility together with the designer of the plant (Viktor Bryujanov) and the engineer Nikolai Fomin, Diatlov fulfilled half of the sentence , and died in 1995 due to the effects of radiation.

Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley)

Source

Neighbor of Prypiat, and wife of the firefighter Vasili Ignatenko, a liquidator firefighter who participated in the extinguishment of the fire that night in the power station, this one died due to the lethal dose of radiation that it received, put in risk his life and the one of the baby that waited He died 4 hours after his birth and Lyudmilla refused to leave Vasili during the agony he suffered at the Moscow hospital. Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 after her overwhelming book "Voces de Chernobyl" where she collected testimonies such as Lyudmilla's.

Source

How do you see the Series in Russia?

After the success of the mini-series, Russia's state television announced that it is working on its own series about what happened, I assure that it will be based on historical facts and show how the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA (the CIA) was involved in the disaster. In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, the most read Russian newspaper, Muradov said that his version only proposes an alternative vision of the tragedy of Pripyat.

Hollywood Reporter magazine reports that the Russian Ministry of Culture contributed 30 million rubles for Russian television production. According to Sarah Rainsford correspondent of the BBC, there was much recognition in Russia for the authenticity of Chernobyl.

Many have been sharing their own Chernobyl stories after the series on social networks and many young Russians hear them for the first time. In addition to this there were also criticisms, where some say it is a plot to finish the atomic agency of Russia.

In the end the truth only know those who lived the moment, I think these are things that should be counted to avoid similar disasters, the effects after the radiation have been huge despite the fact that things were done to avoid a major disaster, today this is a zone of exclusion where nobody lives, in spite of everything guided visits are made where many tourists go and visit this area but can not touch anything.