Wow, just watched the first episode. That’s pretty tense television

Harrowing stuff, especially as I can’t see that they’ve taken any dramatic liberties with the facts. The British accents are a bit off-putting until you get used to them.

Is it as good as this version?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0775665/

^^^^ No idea, but I watched the latest one about an hour ago. TV at its best, chilling stuff

Plus it has sexy vicar out of Fleabag wearing a mullet in it.

I’ve just finished watching the first episode 🙁

I know very little about what happened at the site other than it happened.

Gripping and horrific in equal measure.

Got 5* from Will Kompertz.  I have read a lot on Chernobyl, it was happening whilst I was doing/failing  A level physics and got interested in it then.   So I’ll be watching it on catchup

‘Paper’ version is brilliant.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/09/chernobyl-history-tragedy-serhii-plokhy-review-disaster-europe-soviet-system

Will be hunting the Sky series down on NOW TV.

Watched the first episode last night, as said, chilling. Went to download the rest of the series and it looks like i’ll have to wait until the next episode is on!! What the hell, not good enough!

Found the english accents a bit odd at first but it’s fine. Well worth watching.

That was superb. Recall the rest of the world hearing about it once it was discovered and then little bits of what happened.

I’ve heard several reviews of this, all saying it’s edge-of-the-seat stuff.

I’m reading Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima at the moment and have just finished the bit on Chernobyl. It’s horrifying how easily it happened (same for all the other incidents in the book).

Really want to see this. Find it fascinating.

Has anyone visited the place?

The Soviet Union had some trouble with matters nuclear.

Meet the lake so polluted that spending an hour there would kill you

http://mentalfloss.com/article/71026/kyshtym-disaster-largest-nuclear-disaster-youve-never-heard

We very nearly had our own Chernobly in 1957.  If it wasn’t for Cockcrofts Folly a large amount of unpleasant material would’ve blown across the country when the Windscale Reactor caught fire (as it was pushed beyond design limits due to the pressure to make a fusion nuclear weapon).  We had to prove we could build an H bomb to share nuclear secrets with the Americans (long story of American reticence, politics and promises/lies).

Is this available anywhere other than Sky? Had a look on Netflix etc and can’t find it (and not a Sky customer).

The Nuclear Barons by Peter Pringle and James Spigelman is an interesting read.

Is this available anywhere other than Sky? Had a look on Netflix etc and can’t find it (and not a Sky customer).

It’s a Sky production so no, not just yet.

Will be on NOWTV which is streaming pay as you go Sky. Probably worth waiting a few weeks for all five episodes to be released then binge watch on a free trial or day/month pass.

That was excellent. Knowing what the viewer knows makes watching the actions of firemen and sightseers horribly chilling.

I was dating an old school reindeer farmer’s daughter at the time. He would drive his herds up across Norway and across the odd bit of northern Finland.
He was then told the radiation absorbed by the moss the deer ate made impossible to sell the meat. He ended up changing the focus of his business to putting on rodeos with his horse riding employees showing off the traditional herding skills. A very tough and scary bloke.
Shows just how far the radiation spread. I can’t imagine how bad it must have been in the restricted zone at the time. Must track the show down, but that other version linked above with Ade Edmondson in it looks interesting as well.

ah NOWTV is the answer – sure the missus re-signed us up again for Game of Thrones 🙂

Just read the stories on the links above – properly chilling stuff. Especially the state authorities reluctance to evacuate people.

My only memory of the actual disaster is the radioactive cloud watch on the weather & seeing the news footage of them dumping sand & people onto the roof for about 10mins until they’ve had max exposure then swapping them.

It will be on Kodi or popcorn time. PS Amazon and Neflix subscriber before i get flamed.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Always been fascinated by what/how it happened. Watched it twice last night. Really wishing away the time to watch the next episode

Watched the Ade Edmondson one earlier and have just started on this. Whole lines of dialogue seem to have been lifted! It is rather good though, and the Edmondson one is excellent.

There is a documentary called “The battle for Chernobyl” on youtube, that’s well worth a watch. Been both fascinated & terrified in equal measures by it, some serious acts of heroism followed in the days after.

wow, what a piece of tv, haven’t been gripped by anything on tv for a long time. Absolutely terrifying and really feel for the firefighters faced with a mountain of burning building and that they had no idea of the danger they were in.

Windscale and Chernobyl pages on wiki are well worth a read. Both show just how poor our understanding of the safety of these things was back then.

Worth noting Fukushima was a very, very old reactor design. More recent designs are very much informed by the handful of major disasters (and some very-nearly-disasters).

The first nuclear reactors are the proper scary stuff. There was a reason they were called “piles”, it was literally a big pile of stuff, assembled pretty much by hand, just made large enough to start reacting and producing heat. Some of the accidents with early cores (see “demon core”) were pretty diabolical too. The US had a few small military ones go pop, again wiki has a great summary of what has gone wrong and why.

Can’t believe the arrogance at first until they finally accepted the reactor had exploded.

Which incident?

Much of the problem with early stuff was the monitoring was not particularly sophisticated (as I understand it, IANA nuclear reactor designer / scientist / etc) and these well known disasters have a common them of ‘operator not having a clue what is going on’…

“We need to get water moving through the core,” “There is no core,” “It exploded. The core exploded.

Shitting shit on it!

Shitting shit on it!

I was waiting for that the whole episode! Was disappointed 🤮

@fossy Indeed! It’s maxed out our low range geiger counter so we’ll offer that reading as the amount of radiation around instead of getting the higher range one out. Eventually they fetch the higher range one and oh it must be broken… ffs there was lumps of burning graphite in the car park!

Aye ..rather good TV ..

Reminds me of Edge of Darkness, Threads etc. Tonally doesn’t look modern at all which works really well.

Hate the British accents.

Makes a change from the recent run of series’ I’ve watched.

Gripping.

Hate the British accents.

A better decision IMO than having some sort of ‘Allo ‘Allo-style attempts at Russian or Ukrainian accents. I’d have been OK with it being in Russian/Uktainian with subtitles but I think that’d have been a big ask for the cast…

Really want to see this. Find it fascinating.
Has anyone visited the place?

I Haven’t but I have a mate who’s been twice on holiday and done the same tours each time, he loves it and recommends visiting…

Hate the British accents.

Nah they should do it hunt for the Red October style, everyone trying their best to sound Russian and then one defiant old Scot in the middle of it all…

A better decision IMO than having some sort of ‘Allo ‘Allo-style attempts at Russian or Ukrainian accents. I’d have been OK with it being in Russian/Uktainian with subtitles but I think that’d have been a big ask for the cast…

For sure. I get the dilemma. They’ve got to appeal to a large market too.

I would’ve been okay with subs and Ukranian.

The conversations sound less than authentic but you do accept it after a while as the drama is strong.