
Ten times Chernobyl television series lets artistic licence get in way of facts - thg
https://theconversation.com/ten-times-the-chernobyl-television-series-lets-artistic-licence-get-in-the-way-of-facts-119110
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simonh
It is useful to understand those points where the show diverged from reality.
It was a show and we can’t expect 100% accuracy, but it’s good to know what
was and wasn’t dramatic license. To be fair to the show though, they did
actually highlight some of these divergences in the show itself at the end of
the last episode. It’s really unfair to criticise a show for deviances from
reality, if the show points out those deviances itself.

On the helicopter crash, if you look again at the scene they do show the
helicopter hitting a crane cable. It is implied the pilot lost control due to
radiation exposure but that is never stated. I have no problem with them
moving the incident from later on to when they did, that’s just artistic
license.

On the volunteers that went in to drain the tanks, we know now they received
survivable radiation doses, but there would have been no way to be sure of
that before hand. I have no problem at all with how this was dramatised.

With the mining to cool the core being unnecessary in the end, they say in the
show there was something like a 50% chance this was unnecessary. I think this
is one of the things they point out at the end of the last episode, but that’s
just going on memory. No problem with this.

On treating the exposed firemen and plant workers as hazardous, this actually
happened. It may not have been medically justifiable, but people were kept
away from them on the basis there may be risks of exposure. Also the loss of
the baby is never explicitly blamed on radiation, they just say some people
believed it. That’s probably true.

Most importantly IMHO they make it perfectly, explicitly clear in the show
that the risk of a follow up explosion was a thermal steam explosion, not a
nuclear explosion. The fear was that the molten core would burn down into
water tanks, leading to a massive steam explosion, blasting radioactive
material over a very wide area. This was a genuine concern at the time, and if
it had happened could very well have had the consequences they describe in the
show. Conversations much like the ones portrayed about this did happen. This
criticism is completely unfair.

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johncoltrane
Complaining about the inaccuracies of a work of fiction… We live in a weird
world.

