I can’t wait until trump gets rid of the America press. They are the enemy of the American people afterall
I'm sorry. My comment wasnt directed at you and I'm sorry that it appears that way. I totally agree. In fact, there was a pretty slimy case involving whistleblowers at the South Texas Nuclear Project when they were building it that I only just heard about recently. "The China Syndrome" is a pretty good fictional movie about how things can go wrong with people falsifying test results to save money, but in the USSR, any suggestion of trouble in the worker's paradise would be punishable by the state and The China Syndrome would never have been made. Anybody who pitched that film would have been sent to the gulag. However, I absolutely think there are plenty of people here who don't respect the process and would set up gulags for dissidents if they could get away with it.
Solid series and well made. My only small gripe is that it was a bit off-putting seeing the actors have Russian names and everything you see on the show is written in Russian yet everyone is speaking English with euro accents. I personally would have much rather had Russian actors speaking Russian with English subtitles. I understand they wanted to make it as realistic as possible so to me that would have been the icing on the cake.
I’m sure they could have gotten some extremely good Russian actors to play the parts but at the same time, what helps make the series phenomenal is the work done by Jared Harris, Emily Watson, etc. Having them do a Russian accent or attempt to speak Russian would be awkward and as the writer mentions, the actual language they’re speaking is really irrelevant to the story.
Definitely in the opposite camp here. Having it done in English makes it approachable. As someone who hates watching subtitles, this would have ruined the episode entirely for me.
Yes, forgot to mention that the acting was great regardless. Yea, the language isn't really relevant but I felt it would have given it just a tad bit more of an authentic feel and plus I love subtitles any way. But I was just being nit-picky...Harris, Skarsgard, Watson were all excellent!
Just finished the show. I enjoyed it. Slow at times but acting, editing and sound was excellent. I wish shows would portray scientific facts a little more accurately but I realize they don't for dramatic purposes For example, I don't think radiation is "contagious" like they depicted on the show. Or babies don't absorb radiation and save the mother.. Lack of Russian accent didn't bother me.
But once a person's skin and clothing are washed, his or her ability to expose others to radiation is eliminated, Caracappa said. "If they ingested or inhaled radioactive material and it has been deposited inside of them, there is no way that they're going to transfer that to other people." https://www.livescience.com/13444-radiation-exposure-contagious.html
Is the only example of contact to contact radiation transmission the firefighter and his wife? I can’t remember. That is a true story and she does lose the baby within hours of delivery. Of course that could be completely unrelated to radiation, but I’m not sure it’s a stretch to link the two.
Subtitles would have been awful. How can you appreciate authenticy if you're spending the whole time reading subs? This was discussed in the podcasts. They initially tried to use russian accents but found the actors were spending too much attention to the accent instead of actual acting. This was also discussed in Narcos. Faking accents might pass for a vanilla american who doesn't speak any other languages, but for anyone else, it sounds atrocious and detracts from the show. I prefer easy to understand dialogue.
It's pure folly to contradict a professor of a subject on that subject, but I'm positive he is wrong. Alpha particles can't break the skin. They are basically helium nuclei - two protons and two neutrons. They bounce right off the skin. Beta particles can penetrate but extremely weakly. They are just electrons. Neither alpha or beta particles would injure bystanders. X-rays and gamma rays, however, are ridiculously high energy photons that go right through you. It's how x-ray machines function, and gamma rays are just higher energy x-rays (meaning they penetrate more). The stuff floating around in the air when the firefighters showed up were decay products of uranium that are strong gamma emiters. Iodine-131 and caesium-137 are two of the strongest gamma emitters and they were measured in extremely high concentrations in the particulate matter thrown in the air. Iodine 131 is notorious for going straight to your thyroid where you can't get it out of the body and causing thyroid cancer. It's why people in nuclear war movies always go for iodine tablets - normal iodine competes with radioactive iodine for transport to the thyroid. In one scene they showed the firefighters being buried in zinc coffins and buried in a giant slab of concrete. Apparently if you find the concrete slab in Moscow in the graveyard where the firefighters are buried and was lk over to it with a Geiger counter you can measure a slight background radiation increase through the zinc and all the concrete thirty years later. This is because they breathed in nasty stuff with extremely high penetration of matter. The firefighters breathed in or swallowed enough of the uranium and byproducts or impurities that they were emiting dangerous gamma rays, even after their outsides were decontaminated. They cooked from within, and they emitted enough high energy photons that also cooked people who got too close to them. As far as babies and radiation, there's a reason they won't give pregnant women x-rays, and those are infinitesimally small doses. There are things like radon which only emit alpha particles, which is why it can't hurt you unless you breathe it in and then it hurts only you. The stuff in the air around Chernobyl was a different beast entirely.
Okay, so I'm not a professor of this exact topic either, but alpha's don't just bounce off skin. They have very low penetration depth, but where they hit the skin, they are considering heavily ionizing radiation, (knocking electrons out of their shells), especially if they have much initial energy. Alphas are pretty bad for human tissue, whether skin, lung, or belly tissue. But yes, the damage would stop at your epidermis if the alphas are outside your body. The good thing about alphas is that they are easy to stop, with that low penetration depth. Even thin latex gloves will protect your hands from any skin damage from them, for example. Moar: https://opentextbc.ca/chemistry/chapter/21-6-biological-effects-of-radiation/ PS -- Maybe it's partially instructive to even think about the Rutherford gold foil experiment. Hit a thin metallic foil with a stream of alphas and most of them go right through. If they don't all bounce off a gold foil, they won't all bounce off the outer-most layer of your skin either.
Finished it last night. Tremendous series. One of the best mini-series I've ever watched. Riveting stuff really and they did the best job I think EVER of taking complex scientific situations and explaining it to you in pieces so you understood at a basic level what they were talking about at the trial at the end. Just really well done.
This series and the study of what happened are in no way anti-Russian. This series was a snapshot in time of the Soviet machine in what we now know were its last days. The harshest critics of the Chernobyl disaster I have ever come across were Russians (also many Ukrainians or Belorussians, as you might assume). It was so much more than a nuclear disaster for many of those people.
This was some real class A propaganda. Turns off the reasoning part of your brain with emotional manipulation perfectly. Even brought out the big guns with extended pet death scenes.
