A Russian tells us about Russian Media response to HBO's Chernobyl mini-series
Recently HBO aired a mini-series about the Chernobyl disaster, and Russian news media has reacted badly to this. The video names a bunch of problems named in Russian news media about the Chernobyl mini-series. It is suggested the news media is reacting badly because first that most of it is controlled by the Russian Government, and secondly because the mini-series undermines decades of work by Russia to give themselves a good image. The HBO Chernobyl series showed the ugly side of the USSR regime.
A Ukrainian YouTuber summarizes memories from other Ukrainians about Chernobyl accident
There are lots of eyewitness accounts about the Chernobyl accident available online, but they're written in Ukrainian or Russian. Unless you know the key phrases in Russian for the Chernobyl accident, Google won't show you these accounts. This Ukrainian YouTuber who is also fluent in Russian and knows English found these accounts, and summarizes them for us. The video is also full of authentic pictures from the Chernobyl reactor both before, during and after the Chernobyl accident.
A YouTuber spends two days in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
While the area around the Chernobyl disaster site is an exclusion zone, it is possible to book a trip into that area. Besides the broken reactors, there is a large area which used to be occupied by humans. There are old houses and old apartment buildings and old schools and everything else that went with humans living in a town somewhere. The sense this video-maker takes away is what would a post-apocalyptic world look like?
BBC's coverage of Chernobyl disaster immediately afterwards
The USSR did not publicly disclose the Chernobyl accident until Sweden detected a large increase in radioactivity. The BBC put together this excellent news program within a couple days of the USSR admitting to the accident. This report shows the alarm people had at the time. As one of the interviewees pointed out, for radiation to be detectable 700+ miles away in Sweden, there must have been a considerable release at the Chernobyl site. But it's also clear the people speaking in the report were making best guesses because there was no solid concrete information available at the time this report was made. The last thing said in this report is especially telling -- the speaker guesses that the reactor which exploded is a boiling water reactor, a design that's popular around the world. He goes on to say that even for a reactor with a containment building -- the Chernobyl reactor had no containment building -- the economic consequences of a major meltdown accident would be enormous. The Fukushima nuclear disaster of a few years ago proves that point, as the Japanese Government is spending major megabucks cleaning up the site, and they have a 40 year project ahead of them completing that cleanup. There are whole new technologies that must be develop to do the cleanup. And in the meantime there is an exclusion zone of a hundred of square miles or more in Japan.
Pripyat and the abandoned zone around Chernobyl is a patchwork of radiation and amazing wildlife
After the Chernobyl disaster, the Russian government ordered a large zone of land to be abandoned. Even today several thousand square kilometers have been abandoned. While folks generally do not live in the area, it is possible to travel through the area. This video is a British guy taking a tour of Pripyat, the closest city to the Chernobyl power plant. As might be expected after a city is abandoned, the remaining buildings are not in good condition, and wildlife has taken over.
Russia Today gives us possible propaganda about why Chernobyl blew up
RT News, a so-called news arm of the Russian Government, published this video describing the Chernobyl reactor explosion and the response. They showed original film and interviews with the original people. Therefore the program looks to be a truthful story about the Chernobyl disaster. However we are talking about RT News and it is possible this is propaganda.
The human cost of cleaning up the Chernobyl disaster, told by one of the workers
The cleanup operation at Chernobyl attempted to use "robots" to cleanup highly radioactive debris, to spare humans from the task. Humans with experience working around radioactive debris were valuable, and had to be preserved for as long as possible. But in the area of the worst radioactive debris, where extremely radioactive graphite had fallen from the core of the reactor, the robots failed to work. Humans had to go in themselves, wearing the most primitive of protective suits, and working for shifts lasting all of two minutes. It took 3828 men to accomplish the task.
Why did the Chernobyl reactor explode? Detailed physics
With the recent HBO TV program, Chernobyl, we're interested in why the Chernobyl reactor exploded. The TV program did a fairly good job but this video goes deep into the weeds of how nuclear physics works.
