The Big Problem With the HBO Chernobyl Miniseries: Vichnaya Pamyat - Power Surge & ORM

The HBO mini-series on Chernobyl stands out as one of the biggest successes in recent TV show-making. Surely that cannot possibly have anything to do with Soviet propaganda crafted by people the show’s creator Craig Mazin refers to as “masters of weaponized narration”. Episode Five of the mini-series is its gripping and chilling climax. Its title is Eternal Memory. Memory is a funny thing, particularly when it’s eternal. In the coming videos we will explore some of the key things episode five misremembers twisting the memory of Chernobyl and of the people involved.
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This script was written by Bobby, who has also crafted an incredible history paper exploring how misinformation and disinformation continues to impact the story of Chernobyl. You can read it here: docs.google.co...

[@Dream25_]

For anyone still either annoyed by or confused about the necessity of going into this level of detail in pointing out the flaws in the Mini series, I want to make 2 points clear: Chernobyl itself is the greatest deterrent to more widespread adoption on Nuclear energy across the world, effectively blocking its acceptance for over 30 years now. The key problem with that being the case is that a lot of the understanding and reasoning the general public holds onto in order to retain that mindset are based on false information (decide on your own if the spread of that misinformation is malicious), and the second problem is that the HBO miniseries may be the single most accessible piece of media about the disaster for 99% of people not as devoted to this cause as we are. Flaws and other general lies (thanks Medvedev) only contribute to the baseless and unwarranted negative perception of Nuclear energy as a whole.

[@markusw7833]

Dyatlov makes an interesting argument in his book, I believe referencing someone else. In general, operator errors cannot be excluded from nuclear power. Soviet experts after Chernobyl, like Legasov, made similar comments on the "man-machine interface". It can never be guaranteed to be perfect. So, if "extremely improbable" circumstances will always be present and, as Chernobyl horrifyingly demonstrated, in the case of nuclear energy they can cause incredible damage and frighten people then nuclear energy cannot be trusted. When an accident occurs, as it inevitably will, the consequences are too great. The problem is this is the inaccurate lesson from this disaster, only due to the fact that Soviet experts were trying to save their own skin and the Soviet government was protecting them. Then the International Atomic Energy Agency didn't make things clear either. Chernobyl could have been literally impossible, and has been since. There are no nuclear reactors with positive power coefficients of reactivity amplifying power and positive scram effects inserting reactivity rather than reducing it. Other incidents are possible, but not the explosive reactivity runaway that caused Chernobyl. The self-centeredness of Soviet experts in trying to pin the disaster on operator actions, on a whole bunch of lies and misrepresentations no less, cost the world much in portraying nuclear energy as more dangerous, unreliable, and unpredictable than it actually is. It was scientists and experts who caused Chernobyl, and it didn't have to be that way. The arrogance of the Soviets reverberates to today. The world would be in a much different spot relative to global warming if the Soviet Union wasn't reckless at the highest level and then lied about it. Craig Mazin didn't have the slightest clue what he was doing relaying the Soviet propaganda he was reading. There is no such thing as operators "pushing the reactor to the brink of destruction". The video next weekend will go further into this aspect.

[@Dream25_]

@@markusw7833 very well said. My stance has always been that even if the operators had pushed the reactor beyond some theoretical point of no return, that only implies they designed and commissioned at least one, if not several active reactors that have the ability to be taken to that point by the operators. Without the extremely unlikely eventual release of A/V recordings from the control room being released we can never truly know every single detail, but I’m still willing to place my bets on the he accounts or those in the room before anyone else.

[@233kosta]

^^^ THAT. Also, yes. Yes it is. As malicious as it gets.

[@alice20001]

Sure, I might agree with the desired result. That doesn't mean I agree with the method. The sarcasm and condescending undertones of the narrator deliver a less-than-ideal impression, sounding more like a stern talking-down-to, rather than a genuine response attempting to teach to the public.

[@markusw7833]

@alice20001 What’s wrong with a stern talking-down-to? You prefer lies and untruths delivered more agreeably?

[@julijakeit]

Thank you, sir, learning more and more about Chernobyl's disaster, I was born that year.

[@LividCreature]

Again, great piece of entertainment the miniseries was, greatly misrepresented and over exaggerated it also was.

[@igorbednarski8048]

Yes, it's a bit like Braveheart or The Gladiator - a masterpiece when viewed purely from an artistic perspective, but just like these movies, it has very little to do with what actually happened

[@thing_under_the_stairs]

For how beautifully filmed and acted that miniseries was, (I still think that Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgaard deserved to split the Emmy for Best Actor that year!), I am deeply disappointed by the misinformation perpetuated and further spread by it. Dyatlov in particular deserved no further scapegoating.

[@etaoinshrdlu927]

@@igorbednarski8048 Agree; the problem is that nobody's making current public policy while feeling "informed" by /Braveheart/.

[@ryszakowy]

i'm watching not because i'm interested in accruacy i'm watching because i'm fascinated by this guy's hatred towards the show

[@markusw7833]

We're glad to have you aboard regardless.

[@ChrisMatthewson]

It is one thing to hate someone or someone just because. In fact, it's a most human thing in all of us, but That Chernobyl Guy at least backs up what he has to say and base his hatred on, with facts and figures taken from many scientific sources. So, he isn't just saying "Well, I thought that the HBO show was crap, he has more or less proved it to be so. It was a beautifully acted and filmed show and no one can take that away from it, but as far as whopping great works of fiction go, it is right up there. And proven with real data to be so. I may hate something or someone just because I want to, but I might also be able to show why my dislike of someone or something is reasonable if I supply evidence and facts.

[@proghostbusters1627]

He hates it because the creator said that historical accuracy was a central goal and at the same time is very wrong every step of the way (and they should have known better) and its hypocritical. At the same time the "now people are interested to look things up" is complete bs (for example in my experience Dyatlov, a very competent man who in all likelyhood broke no operational or safety rules of the time that night is nonetheless considered an idiot by the general public) mainly because the "good" sources are hard to find (cause you have to wiggle through the propaganda) and even these have to be cross-checked (e.g. INSAG-7 is both very hard to read for the general public and also false victim to being somewhat biased in favor of not overthrowing the conclusion of INSAG-1 whilst getting rid of the Soviet propaganda in it (at least in my eyes) and so even that should be taken with a grain of salt (at least whatever it says that is not about the actual events that is widely agreed took place). So the show is either disingenuous or the writers are very bad at historical research, no matter what it did A LOT more harm than good when it comes to literacy about the events of the disaster (while also giving folk the confidence of believing they know what happened which can be infuriating, you'll find categorically false statements in the comments of every video of this channel exactly because people are parroting things they think are true based on the show/things based on the lies told in the Vienna conference). Heck, even wikipedia has many things wrong in the article (lol) as far as i know/remember as it presents information that directly contradicts things Dyatlov himself stated about the events that i believe have been confirmed (i could be wrong here though).

[@IbishuCovet]

this show misinformed its entire viewership and permanently destroyed the legacy of multiple heroes and made multiple villains look like heroes, he has every right to hate this show due to the damage its caused

[@LaurensPP]

Creative freedom has a limit when the creation is about a historical event. Simple as that.

[@IbishuCovet]

this has nothing to do with "the limit of creative freedom", this is them just not caring enough to use accurate sources, and subsequently, misinforming EVERYONE who watched it, and those people now take what they see in that show as fact

[@csszabo1]

This was great again. Thank you for taking precious time to make such a detailed explanation comparing different sources. One side note: It might have been very helpful if the difference between the number of inserted physical control rods and the measurement unit of operative reactivity margin (equivalent manual control rod) had been explained prior entering into the details. This has been/is/will be confusing for most people.

[@Ozzy_Helix_]

its fiction. I used to justify the HBO series by just saying it was an over dramatization and that it was for entertainment but no the facts they get wrong are really bad. I see why former Chernobyl workers and former soviets hate it.

[@ChrisMatthewson]

I that the real give away is that they couldn't even get the right person pressing the AZ-5 button. That may seem like a small, insignificant thing, but if they can't get a well-documented fact like that right, what hope is there for the accuracy with more complicated stuff?

[@babynautilus]

big ups great vid.. so sad nuclear isnt generating the majority of electricity 😭😖 our future was denied

[@maksphoto78]

9:12 - interesting catch there I missed before. There were indeed automatic regulation rods going into the active zone before AZ-5 was pressed. It might have been the reason Toptunov turned around to Akimov and possibly asked him if he should shut the reactor down. Reactivity was rising, compensated by automatic regulation rods.

[@timothyedge6100]

Found this after dabbling in the miniseries and dabblith no longer. No dabbling. Digging. Digging deep and having it shoved in my face whether I understand any of it or not. What a fool I was to dabble.

[@zarzaf6414]

I like the sarcastic war with the comments. You do perfectly fine for the normal, not average audience. Very interesting dissection videos. P.S. disappointed from the HBO mini series of it full of lies.

[@parowOOz]

Tactical comment to raise engagement, thus helping with the allmighty algorithm 😁

[@stanislavnepochatov8381]

As I understood from videos of Chernobyl Famaly that control room was just a front-end for SKALA. And all controls rerouted by computer, logged and processed. Operators can access most recent ORM calculations by outputing value on customazable digital display. As Dyatlov mentioned.

[@markusw7833]

It's unclear what the display in the control room actually was. It's an area of contradiction.

[@233kosta]

The only source of confusion & annoyance I can see is the somewhat disconnected feel of the series. That's unfortunately inevitable, as the level of detail required dictates a very narrow scope for a long video. By the time you've reached the end of the series, all those seemingly unconnected details (when viewed in isolation) will coalesce and form the complete picture. Until then, I can see it being somewhat difficult to follow. Worth it though!

[@RensePosthumus]

Maybe a dumb question but is there a place where we can find time stamped data in a free and open format (i.e. open data) regarding all the events you have mentioned?

[@markusw7833]

There's a paper in the description of the videos. Click on it, you can find accessible sources in the footnotes. In particular the INSAG-7 report has a couple of timelines. You'll also find a link to the INSAG-1 report, which has the interestingly different timeline with respect to control rod movement discussed in this video.

[@RensePosthumus]

@@markusw7833 thanks will look into that, maybe I was not specic enough (and it it already in the sources you mentioned) but I meant raw data dumps from the skala, logging systems etc. Two different time lines makes me (as a mathematician) a bit uneasy.

[@idontneedaname85]

11:15 made me LOL!

[@lukebernick9881]

Magnetic tape is actually the most used storage in terms of raw amount, because it is still used for high capacity storage applications to this day. It's the same technology as in Cassette tapes or VHS essentially. It's slower to access than a hard drive, which is a spinning magnetic disk, but for a log it actually makes a lot of sense as a storage medium. You just write new values sequentially on new tape, and eventually old logs get archived or recycled

[@markusw7833]

What type of information does it store?

[@rwmtinkywinkytube]

@@markusw7833 Any, it can store digital data just as easily as analog. Tape is still common today for computer backups. As of 2021, LTO-9 tapes can store 18TB uncompressed, per tape.

[@markusw7833]

@@rwmtinkywinkytube I was told the data wouldn't be readable by humans?

[@RobertQuinlan]

​@@markusw7833 Not directly readable, yes. You would have to read the tape's data back into a suitable computer, just like data on a hard drive or a CD-ROM. And if the data isn't in a human-readable format (e.g. plain text files) then you'll need suitable software to decode it.

[@markusw7833]

@@RobertQuinlan So interestingly whatever information there was wherever at 01:22:30 may not even have been readable.

[@AtomGradNPP]

Less goo, new vid ❤

[@sanidan2010]

I just watched Chernobyl Abyss for the first time. Just because it was Russian produced I don't think it had much more authenticity than the HBO miniseries. They somehow turned it into a romance set against the historical events.

[@zicokappa1495]

Video suggestion It will be nice if you make a video reviewing chernobyl buttons and giving us the names I don't know why but i have an obsession with switches and buttons Thank you

[@saschakrause2374]

So glad to watch the New Episode. Thank you very much Sir

[@saierali4588]

Thank you for seeking the truth It is not complete or easy or satisfying or beautiful Hollywood movie ending It is not about only nuclear problems but all the society and soviet regime problem

[@jkargoes4glory315]

You are clearly well versed in the subject, specifically the science behind it. But I don’t have to be a nuclear engineer to tell you that with nuclear energy, it’s not if, it’s when. For normal people to accept this near our cities, we have to trust the local government(LMAO) and local power companies that are run by people who get paid to make it appear good for general society. There are too many alternatives to nuclear energy that do not involve multi-billion dollar facilities handling volatile materials, by people that answer to people that behold the almighty dollar. Fukushima is a perfect example. No operator error but a sheer act of god beyond the control of humans resulted in the loss of who know how much tax payer dollars, an entire town and a clean up process that will last longer than the lives of the people that loved to see it happen. This is not an argument against the science, this is an argument of wisdom.

[@1127fctwosw]

hbo is gonna hbo... every "historical drama" they have produced has been sketchy.

[@233kosta]

My semi-educated summary (I only went to inginerding school 😅) of the whole thing thusfar, for the purposes of shutting down malinformed anti-nuclear activists, is "Nah dude, they built a shit reactor. We don't do that here."

[@ChrisMatthewson]

Yeah, it wasn't a great design in the first place but they were trying to constantly make improvements to it. Mostly by experimenting with real working reactors in their downtime by bolting on new bits as they learned about them. Not a good way to go! And all of it done as cheaply as possible with changes mostly based on how to do something cheaper. They possibly could have made a good RBMK reactor had the spent loads of money on it and kept it as experimental until they had sorted out and fixed all the bugs. So, for that reason, it was a disaster waiting to happen as that is the way the Soviets did things. They designed a machine to cut an apple into 4 pieces, but released it as one that could only cut it into 3 pieces and felt that will do.

[@markusw7833]

2:42 for the OTHER average viewers who are notoriously stupid People like to contrast themselves with other viewers, considering themselves above average, belonging to the smart rather than the dumb group. To these people it's obvious the mini-series was meant to be a dramatization, as their never-ending stream of comments reveals, yet they neither understand what and how significantly the mini-series gets wrong nor do they understand that the intent of its creator was not to dramatize, as is stated repeatedly and clearly by the creator.

[@etaoinshrdlu927]

Agree. It's easy to conclude "ok they put in a composite character and compressed the timeline to keep it watchable," but not realize the amount of changes, nor *whose* editorial slant the creator was (inadvertently, but through negligence) endorsing.

[@johnd2058]

Last time I was this early, my mom was relieved that she didn't have to worry about isotopes going into me because she was breastfeeding.

[@MrArgus11111]

A defender posted that people upset about "level of detail" are wrong touched off this post. I'm sorry to the TCG, but this needs to be said. The problem people have isn't the level of detail. The problem people have is that the content creator makes horrifically unclear, rambling videos that really circle back at the end to "what people think about the Soviet system is correct. It was the problem here". I've soured on this content for that reason. He's not a nuclear scientist himself, he's not an expert, and his positions on these matters hold no more weight than the people he claims are getting it wrong by extremely tiny degrees.

[@markusw7833]

You claim the problem isn't level of detail yet you proceed to write that basically you're completely unable to process it. Sorry but reality doesn't work in a simple enough way for you. The relative complexity of the material rather than your inability to handle it drives these particular videos. The priority is trying to get things right, not compromising so it's agreeable to you. That, ironically, is how a conflicting viewpoint from "not a nuclear scientist" can win on merit. The fact you write about "people getting it wrong by extremely tiny degrees" and "the system was the problem" means you're the low quality viewer the mini-series thrives on. If you want stupid content that you understand there are plenty of alternatives, including from people who'll tell you they're experts to some insignificant degree. This channel is about truth and what that is. If that's not what you're looking for or willing to spend the effort on that's on you.

[@Akanint]

The big problem with the HBO miniseries is all the black smoke.

[@OscarHernandez-xx2je]

Whatevs man. It was a good show.

[@IbishuCovet]

cinematically sure, but in historical accuracy it was anything but good

[@EduardoSchifler]

Ok i will try again please do an documentary about the firamans during that night of the acident

[@tjroelsma]

I think the differtences between the miniseries and what really happened are pretty moot. This was a test that, despite having been done multiple times before, went wrong pretty much from the start. Both the miniseries and the official reports make it pretty clear that the reactor was already in un unstable condition BEFORE the test even started, yet Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov decided to go on with the test anyway, both for fear of possible repraisals and/or wanting to be "a good communist who meticulously follows orders". It has been concluded that if they had foregone the test that night and brought the reactor back into a stable condition before trying thye test again the next day, this catastrophy wouldn't have happened.

[@thatchernobylguy2915]

@@tjroelsma You've got official reports backwards. The test didn't go wrong in real life; the surviving data indicates it was successful. The reactor wasn't in an unstable position in real life until the AZ-5 button was pressed, and Dyatlov was never under pressure to complete it. It would have been impossible to shut down and wait, as many of the people necessary to complete the experiment were contracted for that day and wouldn't be available for another year, plus there were no warning signs indicating it would be dangerous to proceed.

[@maksphoto78]

"Tests going wrong" - the results from initial tests were unsatisfactory, upon which certain adjustments were made to the turbines. The test just before the Unit 4th one was successful, but the recording equipment wasn't turned on on time, resulting in no data being recorded. The Unit 4 test was conducted successfully. AZ-5 was pressed in a calm situation to shut the reactor down for the planned maintenance. The design flaw in the reactor cause massive power surge.

[@tjroelsma]

@@thatchernobylguy2915 There are many documentaries that have been made on Chernobyl and most of them support the timeline I've explained. So what makes them all wrong all of a sudden?

[@proghostbusters1627]

Yeah those documentaries are then wrong and every fact mentioned above can be checked and cross referenced

[@markusw7833]

@@tjroelsma Inattention to detail and parroting Soviet propaganda, that's what makes them all wrong "all of a sudden". They were wrong from the start yet people keep repeating the same lies. The series of videos you're watching explains most of what you need to know, yet somehow that isn't good enough for you. The fallacy of authority, if you can even call it that as none of the documentaries you've seen are actually authoritative. The video you're commenting on literally refers to the timeline, yet you for some reason think you know better. What is that reason?

[@madvededvic6280]

Hi TCG, I'd like to ask you something Making a video about Yuri Samoylenko and Viktor Golubev, who I've read were the head on the liquidation after Shcherbina