Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

In my previous blog about the HBO series Chernobyl I wrote about "The Cost of Lies, The Futility of Truth". Scientist Valery Legasov led the Soviet delegation at a UN IAEA conference held in Vienna in August 1986. As I noted previously Legasov shaded the truth. He not only left out of his report the fact of design flaws in the design of the Soviet RBMK 1000 reactor, of which there were at least a dozen other copies still running, but denied it repeatedly when asked by international scientists and journalists. When the facts of this came out a few years later the IAEA rewrote its report, holding design flaws rather than operator error the chief cause of the explosion. Yet despite his dishonesty he was lauded as a hero at the time by the world.

How was it that he was praised so much while misleading the world?



Understand that expectations for honesty from the USSR were low. Remember, the Soviets weren't even going to admit the reactor blew up in the first place. It was spewing as much radiation as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki every 12 hours, and they didn't want to tell anyone. They only admitted it 2½ days later after a nuclear power plant in Sweden over 600 miles away detected the radiation.

Interesting aside: As I understand it, an alarm at the Swedish Forsmark plant was triggered when radiation was detected on a plant employee's shoe. The employee was arriving at the plant, though; so authorities knew the radiation source was outside the plant.

And even once the Soviets admitted something happened at Chernobyl they downplayed it. They said only that "an accident occurred" that "damaged" one of the reactors. The rest of the world only understood how bad it was from measuring the radioactive fallout across Western and Northern Europe and from observing the site & activity around it through spy satellites and other forms of secret intelligence.

Plus, when the Soviets did acknowledge a problem at Chernobyl, they followed their brief & vague description with a whataboutism screed criticizing Three Mile Island and other nuclear accidents in Western countries. This approach of deny, distract, counterattack was a standard technique of Soviet propaganda. Back in the late '80s and early 90s books on communication styles referred to them as "Soviet-style negotiation". If these techniques seem familiar now it's because Donald Trump has used them publicly pretty much every day since he announced his first run for the presidency in 2015.

So yeah, Legasov was more forthcoming than expected at Vienna— but still didn't say anything other countries hadn't already figured out. Western European nations were measuring radiation in their own countries. Scientists could extrapolate from that how bad the situation must be. And spy satellites confirmed additional details. Legasov's presentation was remarkable primarily that he didn't deny the obvious facts. But still it made him unpopular with many of his peers & many government officials back home.

People who remember that era in Soviet relations might say, "Well, wasn't there Glasnost going on?" Although General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev mentioned glasnost (literally, "openness") when he became chief executive in 1985 it wasn't until 1986— specifically after August 1986— that he spoke of it as actual policy direction. It's believed that it was through seeing the handling of the Chernobyl cleanup and communication with the world community that Gorbachev recognized it was crucial to do to preserve the country's remaining power.

The fourth episode of HBO's five-part miniseries Chernobyl is mostly about liquidators. They were the 400,000 - 700,000 men (nearly all were men) conscripted to clean up in the exclusion zone. They came in once the destroyed nuclear reactor was at least stabilized so as not to risk causing imminent additional explosions and the region was evacuated— though some residents were... reluctant... to leave.

Liquidators had a variety of tasks. One big effort was to till all the soil in the exclusion zone, burying the radioactive dirt so it wouldn't be exposed to dusting or runoff. Another, which I wrote about in my previous blog on the movie, was to kind and kill all the abandoned pets in the zone. Other combed through fields and streams looking for irradiated items that had been carried away from near the reactor and then abandoned. But the most dangerous jobs were at the reactor itself. While the open core had been rendered safe from further imminent explosion it was still highly radioactive.

In particular, there was radioactive debris on the roofs of several connected buildings in the power plant. Among these was the roof of reactor 3. Yes, there was another reactor right next to the one that exploded— and it was still running. (In fact the last of the 3 remaining reactors at Chernobyl didn't shut down until 2000.)The radioactive debris needed to be removed because it was a danger to the environment in general and to remaining plant workers in particular.

At first the Soviets deemed the roof areas too dangerous for people to work in. The debris on the roof of reactor building 3 emitted such intense radiation a person would absorb a fatal dose in less than 2 minutes standing there. Thus they sent robots to clean the roof.

The robots were basically remote-operated bulldozers. They were meant to collect radioactive debris and sweep it off the edge of the roof, into the pile around the core of reactor 4. But the radiation there was too intense. Ionizing radiation at the level of 10,000-15,000 Roentgen/hour or higher quickly fried the control circuitry of every robot brought in.

Thus the Soviets turned to bio-robots.


Bio-robots, as you might have guessed, is a euphemism for people. But that's what they called it. Bio-robots People cleared 90% of the debris from the roofs.

The areas still were highly radioactive. Leaders determined that a liquidator could spend just 90 seconds on the roof. And that wasn't "90 seconds, then you're done for the day"; it was "90 seconds, then you're done with radiation for your entire life. Don't come back." But records show some workers did go back out on the roof for a second or even third sortie.

Per records there were 3,828 bio-robots at Chernobyl. Every one of them is a brave soul as they had to work with minimal protection. And those who went back a second or third time beyond the call of duty are especially selfless.

Next in this series: The Cost of Lies, the Futility of Truth

The fourth episode of HBO's miniseries Chernobyl (2019) is entitled "The Happiness of All Mankind". It's a slogan from a propaganda banner left hanging at a civic center in one of the towns in the exclusion zone near Chernobyl that were evacuated after the nuclear reactor explosion. Showrunner Craig Mazin notes that the banner is described in first-hand accounts from liquidators as described in Svetlana Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl.

"Liquidators" are what the hundreds of thousands of men sent to Chernobyl in the weeks and months after the explosion called themselves. If "liquidators" sounds more ominous than "cleanup crew"... well, it is. I'll get to that in a subsequent blog.

First I want to write about the opening scene of episode 4. Soldiers are evacuating people from the 30km exclusion zone. Not everyone wants to go.

In this scene one soldier confronts a babushka who doesn't want to leave. Babushka, BTW, is a transliteration of the Russian word for grandmother. It appears in Polish, too, as a borrowed word. It's used in both languages more loosely than in English as a term for any older woman.

Babushka doesn't want to leave. The soldier tells she must and explains it's for her own safety. She refuses again, giving a litany of all the deadly hardships she's lived through on this land: the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, the Holodomor, World War II, etc.

While she's arguing with the soldier she continues milking her cow. The soldier grabs the milk pail from her, steps outside the barn, and pours it out on the ground. BTW, the soldier is not doing this to punish her for disobedience. The reality is cows in this region are eating irradiated grass, and their milk is dangerously irradiated. It's poisonous to drink. That's why people have to be evacuated.

But the babushka is undeterred. She picks up the empty bucket, sets it back under the cow, and starts milking again.

The soldier, seemingly in a fit of anger and her stubborn disobedience, pulls out his pistol. We hear the BANG! of a shot— followed by WHUMPF! as the body hits the ground.

( Spoiler! (Open to read more...) )

It's worth calling out a word the babushka used in this scene. A single word. Holodomor. The miniseries doesn't explain it but instead leaves it there like a clue, an easter egg for curious people to use as the starting point for further research. And OMG, what a terrible easter egg. Holodomor was a genocide Stalin perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in the early 1930s by starving them. It's estimated that up to 5 million people died.

For this episode, for this scene, that background puts into better context why a person who lived through that isn't afraid of invisible radiation or a soldier with a pistol.

Next: Find out what else they shoot in Our Goal is the Happiness of All Mankind

Episode 2 of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl ended on a cliffhanger. Three engineers headed into flooded tunnels beneath destroyed reactor 4 to open sluice gates. These valves need to be opened to drain huge water tanks that could cause an enormous explosion if molten nuclear core material burned through them. The engineers were moving through dark, flooded corridors, with only flashlights to guide them, their Geiger counters clicking away like mad... and then all of their flashlights failed!



Episode 3, Open Wide O Earth, shows how the "divers" complete their mission successfully— and live to tell about it. In the HBO series they have hand-cranked flashlights as backups. They move quickly to valves, open them, then back to the surface. An account from one of the engineers acknowledges that their flashlights died... but does not mention backups. He says they navigated in the dark! That's why it was critical the men sent for this job were intimately familiar with the layout of the plant. Although they're referred to as "divers" they were plant engineers.

BTW, it was widely believed these three men suffered such strong radiation doses that they died not long after. That's not true! They were treated at hospitals and released. One of the men died of a heart attack in 2005, nearly 19 years later. The other two are apparently still alive today!

The engineer-divers weren't the only people who braved hard, deadly conditions to prevent a wider tragedy at Chernobyl. After the water tanks were drained there remained another peril. If the nuclear core melted down through the (dry) tanks and then through the concrete pad beneath it would reach groundwater eventually, causing an explosion and an enormous cloud of radioactive particulates. This is the so-called China Syndrome.

To prevent a China Syndrome, Legasov and other scientists planned to build a heat exchanger beneath the concrete pad under the reactor. Getting underneath the concrete meant tunneling in from the side. For this they needed the best diggers in the Soviet Union.



Some 400 coal miners were recruited for the digging. It had to be done by hand— no power machines— because of the delicate situation. The miners toiled in harsh conditions, where temperatures in the tunnel were up to 130° F (50° C), and of course radiation levels were high. The fates of the miners is not known as the Soviets kept few to no records of their health, and the USSR in 1988 made it unlawful for doctors to record radiation sickness as a cause of death, but it's estimated that 1/4 of them suffered early deaths.

The stories of the divers and the miners, along with the firefighters in episode 1, are stories of heroic sacrifice. Some had no idea of the danger they faced while many knew it was likely a death writ; yet person after person put themselves at risk to prevent harm to countless others.

Making the story of the miners even more bittersweet is that ultimately the heat exchanger was never built. The core cooled down enough that it no longer threatened to burn through the lower concrete shield and trigger the China Syndrome. Scientists like Legasov were aware of that possibility, though. Part of their tragedy was knowing that there was only a chance of some of these really terrible outcomes happening, yet having to send courageous men to sacrifice themselves just to prevent that chance.

Keep reading: Burying the Dead

In the climax of Chernobyl miniseries episode 2, "Please Remain Calm", scientist Khomyuk has warned lead scientist Legasov that his plan to put out the nuclear fire in the open core has a fatal flaw. The water tanks below the core are full, not empty. The core will remain hot even as it's buried with sand and boron (in an attempt to stop it from spewing radioactive material into the air). If the core melts down through the concrete and steel pad to the water tanks, it will flash all that water to steam, causing an explosion potentially big enough to damage the other three reactors at the plant. The water needs to be drained out of the tank. Fast.

The rub? The control systems in reactor #4 were all broken by the explosion, so the valves to drain the tanks need to be opened manually. They are underground, in an area flooded with radioactive water, in the dark. Three plant workers familiar with the layout need to go down there to open the valves. It's believed that this task will be fatal, due to radiation exposure— but is necessary to prevent a tragedy that could kill and injure vastly more people.


Link: YouTube video (2:18)

In the HBO miniseries, three workers volunteer. The clip above shows them responding to a gruff speech by Shcherbina, appealing to national pride to put the wellbeing of the country ahead of one's own life. One by one, they stand. "Ananenko." "Bespalov." "Baranov," they announce their names.

It's disputed whether the men actually volunteered. One eye-witness account holds that they were volun-told. "It's not like you could say no," the witness quipped.

The episode ends with the three men descending into the bowels of the plant. They're wading through chest deep water. Their Geiger counters are clicking like mad. Then one man's flashlight dies, followed shortly by the other two. The episode ends with all three left in the dark, the only sounds being their frantic breathing over the rapid clicking of the Geiger counters.

This cliffhanger ending is one of the reasons we stayed up until 2am to binge-watch all 5 episodes in one sitting.

Next in this series: Those Accents, Tho!

What kind of a show do you call Chernobyl? The 2019 HBO miniseries isn't a documentary. It's not as... dry... nor does a narrator recite facts while a camera pans over photographs. Its Wikipedia page (external link) calls it a historical tragedy. That non-category includes too wide a variety to be meaningful. Chernobyl is not a costume drama. It's about something that really happened and it sticks relatively close to the facts. I think the best term is docudrama.

In the podcast made about episode 1 showrunner Craig Mazin talks about why he took the docu- part of that term seriously. He sees accuracy as a matter of respect for the people who died. And he noted that, stylistically, the first episode also matches another genre. Horror.

He's right. The first episode, 1:23:45, is very much like a horror film. There's a monster killing people. Worse, it's an invisible monster. But like in a horror movie, we know it's there even when (most of) the characters in the story don't. Worse than that, the monster kills its victims slowly. They absorb deadly doses without realizing it. They become dead men walking. Again, we know that before they do. We watch in suspense as people go around corners and open doors— and we're like, "Don't go there! The monster's there! It'll you!" But as is the trope in horror flicks, they do anyway. And the monster tags them for death.

The later episodes are different. The "monster" is still present but its dangers are better understood. But even a week later episode 1 haunts me. As it's quiet during the day at home, or quiet late at night, little creaks and groans around the house startle me. I know they're ordinary things like the thermostat switching the heater on, or pipes expanding with the heat. But every sound is creepy. My animal hind-brain asks, "What if something's going to blow up? What if the air we breathe is poisoned?"

In many ways knowing as much as I do makes it better. But in some ways knowing as much makes it worse.

Keep reading: Please Remain Calm

Yesterday I wrote about 1:23:45, the first episode of HBO's 5-part miniseries Chernobyl. In that blog I addressed just the opening scene of the episode, a crackling monologue by scientist Valery Legasov. There's a lot more to the episode than just that scene, of course. Don't expect a ratio of 1 episode = 1 blog as I write about this miniseries. There's too much to unpack. Just episode 1 will stretch to at least 3 blogs.

While the episode starts with Legasov, portrayed by actor Jared Harris, who'll be the main character of the miniseries, it switches away from him after the opening few minutes. It does that with an arrangement that is very unusual for narrative storytelling. ( Episode 1 plot twist )

The show next introduces two minor recurring characters, Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko. They are awakened in the middle of the night in their Pripyat apartment by the sudden explosion less than 2km away. They see the burning reactor through their window.



Vasily is a firefighter and is shown in the poster for the episode. He knows he will be called to fight the fire so he starts getting ready. As we see later in the episode, the firefighters go right up to the wreckage of the exploded nuclear reactor. They are not afraid.

Of course, part of their fearlessness is ignorance. They literally don't know how dangerous it is. They've never been trained on what radioactivity is, despite working as emergency responders in an "atom city" devoted to staffing a nuclear power plant. The specific dangers of this accident haven't been explained either. The nuclear core has exploded, and radioactive material is literally on the ground at their feet as they carry hoses toward the fire, yet they've been told they're fighting a "roof fire" with burning tar.

The lies that left initially hundreds of people, and soon millions, unaware of mortal danger, started within seconds of the explosion. This is shown in the third scene of episode. In the control room plant operators are stunned by the explosion.



In the control room we meet characters Anatoly Dyatlov (pictured above, played by Paul Ritter), Leonid Toptunov (pictured, background), and Aleksandr Akimov (not pictured). They're all a bit stunned. They're not sure what's happened. Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, goes immediately into damage control mode. And by "damage control" I mean personal damage control.

Dyatlov blames Akimov and Toptunov for screwing up even though they were a) following his orders, and b) nobody's even sure what's going on yet. Despite nobody in the control room being sure what's happened, Dyatlov asserts it's an explosion in one of the control tanks. As other operators stumble into the control room to report that, no, it's not the control tanks, it's the whole reactor core, he dismisses them as delusional.

Dyatlov also blocked objective information that would've indicated the dangerous nature of the situation. Radiation dosimeters carried by the operators reported 3.6 Roentgen/hour— a level that's series but not "OMG, run away!" But as various technicians pointed out, 3.6 was the top of the scale for those dosimeters. The techs wanted to get to meters with higher scales; Dyatlov shut that down as a waste of time. It should be a requirement for passing even high school science classes to know that when a meter is pegged at the top of its scale the true measurement is likely well above that level.

The lie of 3.6 took on a life of its own. Dyatlov reported it to the plant manager and chief engineer, who relayed it up through the bureaucracy all the way to Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the local executive committee in Pripyat. 3.6 was key to the lie in that it was dangerous but not that dangerous. The local committee added to the situation of lies by deciding that the appropriate thing to do in this circumstance was to seal the city, so nobody could get out, and also cut the phone lines. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublethink to hold simultaneously that 1) the accepted "truth" isn't that bad yet 2) it's also so dangerous that it must be kept from people.

Thus, because information was suppressed, a number of people sacrificed themselves without realizing their danger in the moment. The firefighters took the brunt of it as they rushed in to a situation with false information and no protection.

There were instances of informed sacrifice, though. As the episode frames it, most of the operators in the plant knew what happened. Dyatlov was in denial for his own reasons, but most of the others figured it out from the information available. I mean, there was at least one person who entered the control room and said he saw the containment vessel destroyed. Others subsequently went and saw it themselves— knowing that even to look meant taking lethal doses of radiation. They knowingly walked to their own deaths believing that by doing so they would save countless other lives. Instead Dyatlov and his superiors rebuked them as liars when they confirmed reports of an open core and a full-on meltdown.

Update: keep reading: Why I watched Chernobyl - same as why Mazin created it!

Last night Hawk and I watched the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. It's about about the 1986 nuclear accident at the Soviet power plant Chernobyl near the city of Pripyat in what is today Ukraine.



The miniseries aired in 2019. It's been on my watch list basically since then. As a scientifically educated person I've always been curious to learn more about what happened there. I knew from cursory reading years ago that the gist of it was that operators disabled or ignored multiple safety systems and protocols while running a horribly misconceived "experiment". I looked forward to learning more about it through this series critically acclaimed for its accuracy and depth of research.

Chernobyl spans five episodes, each about an hour long. We surprised ourselves by bingeing all five in one sitting Friday night, staying up until 2am Saturday. I'll post thoughts episode by episode soon.

Update: keep reading: 1:23:45. The Cost of Lies.