Why the series "Chernobyl" so poorly described nuclear energy

No, Chernobyl radiation did not harm your child

Article by Michael Schellenberger - a famous author and columnist writing about energy and the environment.

Since the beginning of the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl”, which tells about the 1986 nuclear disaster, journalists have praised him for the accuracy of reproducing facts and events, even though its creators allowed some kind of creative liberties.
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“The first thing to understand about the HBO mini-series Chernobyl,” wrote a journalist from The New York Times, “is that pretty much is fiction. However, another, and more important feature of it: it is not so important. " The journalist noted the same inaccuracy as I did in the last article on the topic: “victims of radiation often for some reason turn out to be stained with blood.”

However, “the basic things HBO showed correctly,” he writes, namely, that Chernobyl is “more a topic of lies, betrayal and a rotten political system than questions of whether good or bad nuclear energy is in principle”.

That’s what resisted the creator of Chernobyl, Craig Mazin. “Chernobyl’s lesson is not that modern nuclear energy is dangerous,” he tweeted. “The lesson is that lies, arrogance, and repression of criticism are dangerous.”

Representatives of the nuclear industry agree with this. “Spectators can see the Hollywood interpretation of events and ask what is its relevance outside the USSR,” writes the Institute of Nuclear Energy. - In short: a small.

Personally, I'm not so sure. After seeing all five episodes of Chernobyl, seeing the reaction of the public, I consider it obvious that this mini-series scared millions of people with this technology. “Two weeks after the series ended, I could not stop thinking about him,” wrote a reporter from Vanity Fair. “Basically, the bodies of the first rescuers, infected with radiation, so crippled by radiation, were imprinted in my memory that they slowly and horribly decomposed, trying to cling to life.

“My husband and I looked at the pre-premier records, and for a few days after that we searched Google for information about the catastrophe, transferring terrible facts to each other,” writes a journalist from Vanity Fair, “and my father conducted a survey of all working nuclear power plants in the US.”

“I watched the first episode of Chernobyl,” writes Sarah Todd, a sports journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Then I read all about nuclear energy for a couple of hours.” Now I'm in a panic, and I need someone to explain to me how to live on the east coast in general, when we have this here. ”

And many really decided that the series tells about nuclear energy. “However, nuclear energy itself is probably the most developed character in the series,” writes a critic from The New Republic. - They constantly talk about her, about her nature they argue all the time and describe her. She becomes a demon. ”

And this reaction was observed not only among journalists. “Having finished watching“ Chernobyl ”, I immediately googled all the nearest nuclear power plants,” one viewer tweeted. “It’s scary,” said another, “I watched a lot of horror films and dark films, but this is too much. Why? Because it can happen in real life. ”

“Keep track of what is happening in Belarus,” the artist tweeted me. “We fear our new NPP because it was built by the Russians” [Russia represented by the state corporation Rosatom ranks first in the world in terms of the number of NPPs being built at the same time and is the absolute leader on the uranium conversion and enrichment market / approx. trans.]. “They dropped the first reactor from 4 meters,” she said. - And the second casing was damaged during transportation. And they still installed it. Therefore, when you look at Chernobyl, remember that this may happen quite soon. ”

What is incorrectly described in Chernobyl?

In an interview about the release of "Chernobyl" screenwriter and creator of the show Mazin insisted that his offspring will adhere to the facts. “I am inclined to a less dramatic version of events,” said Mazin, adding: “you shouldn’t slip into sensationalism.” In fact, "Chernobyl" crossed the line of sensationalism right in the first series, and never returned.

In one episode, three characters are dramatically summoned by volunteers to sacrifice their lives by pumping out radioactive water, but there was nothing like that in reality.

“Three of these men were station staff responsible for this part of the plant and were among the shift workers at the time this operation began,” notes Adam Higginbotem, author of Midnight in Chernobyl, a thorough study of the event. "They just received orders by telephone from the reactor manager to open the valves."

Radiation from the reactor did not play any role in the fall of the helicopter, which is clearly hinted at in the series. The helicopter did fall, however, only six months later, and not at all due to radiation. One of its blades hit a chain that hung from a construction crane.


But the most blatant tendency to sensationalize the series is to demonstrate that the radiation is supposedly contagious, like a virus. The character of the heroine scientist, played by Emily Watson, pushes the pregnant wife of a Chernobyl firefighter, dying from acute radiation sickness (ARS). “Go away! Get out of here! ”Shouts Watson, as if every second that a woman spends with her husband, she also poisons her child.

But radiation is not contagious . After the person took off his clothes and washed himself, as firefighters did in reality, and as it was in the series, all the radiation remains inside. It can be assumed that the blood, urine or sweat of the victims of ARS can somehow harm (but not infect), but there is no scientific evidence that this happened to anyone during the treatment of the victims of Chernobyl.

Why, then, in hospitals, victims of radiation are isolated behind plastic screens? Because their immune systems are weakened , and they run the risk of facing a disease that they cannot defeat. In other words, the threat of infection is actually completely opposite to what is shown in Chernobyl.

The child is dying. Watson says: "Radiation would otherwise have killed the mother, but instead she would have passed into the child." Apparently, Mazin and HBO believe that this really happened.

HBO is trying to clean up a little sensationalism in the text at the very end of the series. But there it has never been said that the death of a child from the "absorption" of radiation from his father is the most complete and wildest pseudoscience. There is no evidence that Chernobyl radiation killed the child or even led to the appearance of some kind of birth defects.

“We had the opportunity to observe all children born near Chernobyl,” wrote a doctor from the University of California at Los Angeles, Robert Gale in 1987, “and none of them, at least at birth, had no anomalies.

In fact, the only effect on human health, with the exception of the deaths of members of the rescue services, was 20,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in people under 18 years of age at the time of the incident. The UN concluded in 2017 that only 25% of these cases, that is, 5000, can be attributed to the consequences of Chernobyl radiation. In early studies, the UN estimated that these cases can be counted 16 000.

And since the death rate from thyroid cancer is 1%, this means that the number of expected deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster falls in the range from 50 to 160 in the 80-year interval.

At the end of the series, HBO states that “in Ukraine and Belarus there has been a serious increase in cancer diseases,” but this is completely wrong. According to the report of the World Health Organization, residents of these countries "received radiation doses slightly exceeding the natural background." Additional cancer mortality will be "about 0.6% of deaths expected in this population from other causes."

Radiation is not a super-powerful toxin, which is portrayed in Chernobyl. In the first episode, high doses of radiation lead to bleeding among workers, and in the second episode, the nurse, who just touched the fireman, turns her arm bright red as if from a burn. Nothing like this happened and could not happen.

"Chernobyl" demonstrates an ominous scene in which people gathered on the bridge look at the fire. At the end of the series, HBO states that “according to the stories, none of them survived. Now this place is known as the Bridge of Death. ” However, the “Death Bridge” is a sensational urban legend, in support of which there are no reliable facts.

Also, the series leaves many things offscreen. It creates the impression that all the rescuers who responded to the incident and received the ARS died. In fact , 80% of them survived .

It is clear that even educated and informed viewers, including journalists, accepted most of the series as truth. In the New Yorker, it was repeated for the show that a woman’s child “absorbed radiation” and died. In the New Republic, radiation was described as “supernaturally resistant” and infectious (“the logic of a zombie, according to which every infected person himself becomes a peddler”). Economist magazines, People and others repeated the urban legend about the “death bridge”.

Such a misunderstanding can cost lives. The idea that people who received a dose of radiation, become infectious, used to intimidate, stigmatizing and isolating people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, from Chernobyl and from Fukushima.

Women who lived in areas that received a small dose of Chernobyl radiation in a panic did abortions, which number from 100,000 to 200,000, and women who received a dose of radiation, four times more often reported anxiety, depression and post-traumatic syndrome.

Why the series "Chernobyl" so poorly described nuclear energy

The series allegedly talks about lies, arrogance and repression of criticism under communism, but the series depicts life in the USSR in the 1980s as inaccurate and melodramatic as the influence of radiation.

“It seems that a lot of people in the series are acting under the fear of being shot,” notes The New Yorker journalist. “This is wrong: mass executions or even executions, at the request of officials, have not occurred in the USSR since the 1930s.”

The series’s main line of tensions is connected with attempts by heroic scientists to discover the cause of the failure of the Chernobyl reactor, but Soviet scientists “knew about the shortcomings of the RBMK reactor several years before the catastrophe,” says Higgenbotem, and “reactor specialists came from Moscow 36 hours after the explosion, and quickly pointed to a possible cause. "

However, the mere need to escalate the drama does not explain why the series incorrectly shows nuclear energy. See how one of the hero-scientists explains radiation: he describes it as a “bullet”. He asks us to present Chernobyl as “three trillion bullets in the air, water and food that will not stop shooting for another 50,000 years.”

But radiation is not a bullet. If this were so, we would all have been dead, because every second “radiation bullets” hit us. And some people who receive a large dose of bullets, for example, residents of Colorado, in reality, live even longer.

The bullet from the first episode with the passage of the series turns into a weapon. "The 4th reactor of Chernobyl became a nuclear bomb," the scientist says, claiming that it "explodes hour after hour" and "will not stop until the entire continent is dead."

Until the whole continent perishes? Here we are clearly dealing with the fear of nuclear war. And Chernobyl uses all the same tricks as all other films about nuclear disasters. In the 1979 Chinese Syndrome, the scientist states that an incident at a nuclear power plant "could make an area the size of Pennsylvania forever uninhabited."

Hollywood borrowed the misconception that the melting of uranium fuel amounts to an exploding nuclear bomb from opponents of nuclear energy like Ralph Nader , who in 1974 declared that "a nuclear accident can wipe out Cleveland and the survivors will envy the dead."

As a result, “Chernobyl” from HBO incorrectly demonstrates nuclear energy for the same reason that mankind has misunderstood it for the past 60 years - we just mistakenly transferred our fear of nuclear weapons to nuclear power plants.

In fact, Chernobyl proves that nuclear energy is the safest way to generate electricity. In the worst catastrophes of nuclear reactors, a relatively small amount of radioactive material flows out, which damages a small number of people. The rest of the time NPPs reduce the impact of air pollution on the environment, replacing fossil fuels and biomass. For this reason, nuclear energy today has saved almost two million lives.

If there is something good in the output of “Chernobyl” and pseudoscientific garbage like the “ Survival Instructions ” book from MIT professor Kate Brown, these are new statements by radiation scientists and honest journalists like Higgenbotem.

“NPPs do not emit carbon dioxide, and are statistically safer than any competing energy production industry,” he writes, “including wind turbines.” As for our exaggerated fears of nuclear weapons, the last 74 years of mankind were the most peaceful of the last 700. With the proliferation of bombs, the death toll in wars and battles fell by 95%.

Can a person’s consciousness develop to an understanding of how something so dangerous made the world so safe? My hopes for this are constantly growing. One of the best books I've read lately is Nuclear Ceremonies, the ethnography of Hugh Gusterson, a nuclear scientist who used to protest against him and now became an anthropologist.

At the very end, he admits that “nuclear deterrence played a key role in preventing bloodshed in the framework of the Third World War genocide, and if a world full of nuclear weapons is a dangerous place, then a world without terrible discipline imposed by nuclear weapons is also in its own way will be dangerous. "

If Hollywood suddenly decides to tell the true story of nuclear energy, and to explain to the audience the paradoxical connection between safety and danger, it will not have to slide into sensationalism. Truth and so sensational enough.