Features combined footage from the HBO miniseries Chernobyl Episode 5 (Final Episode) and Episode 1, Cassette Tapes and Suicide of Valery Legasov and the Trial final scene. All rights reserved to Home Box Office Inc. and Sky.
People know he killed himself on the 2nd anniversary, but no one knows the exact time. That was an assumption made by the show, he may have, maybe not.
John Ochiltree No one does. In the series they assumed he did it at the exact time, but no one knows for sure. Todd probably assumed that the series is all accurate, so he *must* have done it at the exact time, but no one knows.
"...we all die, we don't choose when, where or how, but you can choose why. Don't let anyone make that choice for you, because its the only choice you can make that will mean anything at all."
@77Nex77 the state is not God you a$$. The state was wrong and they refused to admit it. They covered up flaws, the extent of the damage, and any ongoing danger, because the state can't fail. It did, people realized it and threw off communism. Communism dies as all statist ideologies must.
Thanks for capturing that quote. As soon as I heard it, I wanted it. These types of wisdom can only be spoke by people with nothing to loose (and thus truly free)
I hadn't noticed one of the last things he did was set out multiple bowls of food for his cat. That's a really heartbreaking and touching detail - he knew he would no longer be there to feed her and wanted to ensure she would have something to eat between the time he died and the time his death was discovered.
U god damn right. Also those weren't control rods. Part of the problem with Chernobyl is one of the control rods snapped and was jammed 1/2 way in the core there was noway to stop it. Its very sad
his handkerchief has dabs of blood on it. Valery was likely beginning to notice early symptoms of complications related to radiation exposure, which combined with overwhelming depression (not his first suicide attempt), made for a tragic cocktail of grief.
That "why" scene always gets me. When Legasov explains that they basically cut corners while playing with the most powerful and volatile force known to mankind. The look of shock on the man's face as he looks to the others, effectively saying "are you guys serious? How can you justify playing fast and loose with this shit?"
That's not what his reaction was about. He's angered because Legasov is exposing the ignorance and corruption of the Soviet Union in an interrogation that will absolutely be covered by international news. To suggest that the Soviets' reactors were cheaper and of less quality than western ones was exactly what the government didn't want him to say.
It’s actually that the graphite displacer tips - which were to replace the control rod during the normal operation state where the reactor was at full power - were cut short to save on fuel and as a band-aid fuel burn inequality fix to allow the main feature of the reactor - the fact that you could refuel it while it was still running - to remain effective. It was to save effort rather than just money, which is just as bad but harder to make sound as simple and make a one-liner out of. Perfectly understandable though as this is still a drama
It helps to realize that at the time Chernobyl was built, the idea of a power plant going critical was unthinkable, it had never happened. They thought it was impossible. It's easy to judge in retrospect, and with something like Chernobyl we absolutely should judge, however we must remember that the people involved didn't know what we know now. That cheaping out on your reactor design could turn a perfectly safe reactor into a bomb
Okay yes wall, it is fucking scary to see the control rods jump. They didn’t actually jump when the thing exploded. I’m just trying not to get misconceptions proliferated about a pretty big nuclear disaster if you do not like the information sorry
@@naviblogger Add Covid deniers to the list, I think. A handful of leaders in each country made the difference between mild and gut-wrenching losses for their people.
@@dexterpoindexter3583 Covid deniers ? What do you mean ? The so called vaccines were never tested for engulfing contamination, it was a lie. I don't know how covid occurred, I do not believe it was deliberate, nor a lab accident. What I DO know though, is that in my country, France, I was denied public sphere for refusing to get a shot of a product I felt under informed about, and that my so called constitution didn't provide no help.
He was exposed to a fatal dose of radiation. Just because someone did not absorb enough for Acute Radiation Syndrome to develop does not mean fatal consequences would not set in later in the form of leukemia or cancer. Legasov certainly was exposed to a dose sufficient to cause ARS.
Computer models indicate the power output went supercritical to beyond 330,000MW at the instant the core exploded. It accelerated exponentially in a runaway reaction in the course of 5 seconds from 200MW to 330,000MW. The pressure blew the 2,000,000lb lid off the core and it bounced off the ceiling and wall, landing sideways back onto the core, with the fuel and control rod channel tubes sticking out mangled in every direction. The burning reactor spewing over 15,000R/hr at the source with zero water flow to cool it down. As the uranium melted, it mixed with the dumped sand and boron creating corium and it flowed down underneath the core chamber into the infamous Elephant's Foot, where it still sits today.
What I find most fascinating is that you can actually visit the Elephant's Foot today and it not kill you. In fact, the deputy direct went down and took pictures of it. I wouldn't have thought that much radiation would have decreased by now.
@@Aeradom2000 My layman's theory is that because corium is a mixture of a lot of things within the plant is what's making the radiation go down. Without it, the radiation levels might have been much higher.
That's incorrect. Supercritical is a specific nuclear term that has a defined meaning. It DOES NOT mean "runaway reaction". ALL nuclear power plants go supercritical. In normal operation. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Because what "supercritical" means is "more than the critical mass" - that is, the mass is sufficient to support self-contained fission. That's literally how a nuclear power plant produces heat - through chain reactions. The condition of supercriticality is REQUIRED for a nuclear plant to generate power. What happens is that in each fission event, there are two releases of neutrons: the Prompt and the Delayed ones. The Prompt ones come from the actual split of the fissionable element, while the Delayed ones come from radioactive decay of the products of the fission. Once the fission process is started, it is known as Supercritical. However, if, in order to sustain the chain reactions the process requires both the Prompt and Delayed neutrons, then it is merely supercritical. And it won't ever explode itself. However, if the mass gets to a certain point where only the Prompt neutrons are required to keep the chain reaction going, that is known as Prompt Critical. Things that go Prompt Critical tend to go BOOM withing a few milliseconds. Going Prompt Critical means you have a nuclear explosion. Only specifically designed weapons can do this. Chernobyl went Supercritical when it was turned "on", just like any other reactor would. What happened at Chernobyl was not that it was on a path to become Prompt Critical, because that's pretty much impossible for anything other than a specifically designed weapon to do. Rather, Chernobyl had the problem that it was running at far above the normal design levels of chain reactions, and that caused an excessively huge amount of heat. Which had the effects described. People confuse supercritical with prompt critical. They are VERY different.
@@mopedman666 - I remember it well during the 80’s era. There was a similar accident before that of Chernobyl on three mile island in America. The American accident, half of the core melted with no explosion. The Chernobyl accident explosion spewed radioactivity through Europe. It was paramount to the dissolution of the USSR and the heroic efforts by thousands who died from radiation poisoning- unknown to this day. I remember the cover up by Russia new agency and the fear we had because of the radioactive cloud that emanated from the core. It extended to the northern parts of Italy. It is meticulously made very close to the real deal.
The graphite tips did have design reasons beyond just cost reductions. They helped to restart the chain reaction after a reactor shutdown by allowing to temporarily increase the reactivity. In normal operation an inconsequential side effect, as the operational rules as written ensured that there would always be enough control rods in the core to stop the reaction. On the night of the test almost all, far more than was allowed, had been fully retracted out of the core. Directly violating of both the operational procedures and the test procedures, and the inconsequential became fatal.
@@Astrocat-od5cy A homeless person doesn't have the resources to buy a house. But a government definitely has the resources to build safe nuclear reactors. Especially ones that don't explode if you press the button to TURN THEM OFF.
He went into this with open eyes and gave no BS to a government that, in his own words, preferred a lie over the truth. Chernobyl would forced so many to face that fact and take a long hard look at themselves. All the glory their predecessors had built up since the Revolution was long over and now the due to their ways was set to come. Valery Legasov was a braver man then he ever knew. That is why he deserves honor of "Hero of the Russian Federation."
He's 100 times the hero of anyone who ever fought in the Russian military except maybe the guy who drove the truck into the hot zone to get a dosimeter reading.
shame it wasn't quite accurate in its details. Decent enough to give a lot of people with no clue, but not really accurate. Especially the design of the control rods. Wasn't because it was cheaper, was because it made the mechanism to control the reactor simpler and more effective. But they stole those designs from a research reactor and no other country implemented that design at large scale because it had a lower safety margin.
@@Darthquackius Yeh, the " it´s cheaper" moment was for effect. I listened to a guy who explained the real details of the control rods design. There were many "for effect" things, I remember I disliked all these a lot the first time I watched it, irritated me. I also missed the feel of communist "apparatchiks" and the overall atmosphere wasn´t "socialistic country" enough for me. Still, not badly executed...
Legasov took his own life not only due to the realization of the futility of his efforts (the Soviet state would simply cover everything up) but also because he knew they would have him killed sooner or later. Edit: also he probably didn't have that much longer to live anyway as the radiation poisoning was taking it's toll on him.
In the last episode, the head of the KGB said that Legasov would not be killed, he’d simply be forced to live the rest of his life in enforced solitude.
In a previous episode of the HBO series, Legasov explains to the government official he worked with that the last stage of radiation sickness is excruciatingly painful. He also said that, if I remember correctly, the radiation sickness causes the cells to break open. As a result, morphine won't work to alleviate the pain. Is that why he chose suicide?
I don't think so - from what I understood there is a difference between ARS (Acute radiation sickness), which is what anybody in the vicinity of the reactor or who'd received high doses of radiation had to endure, and long term exposure to mild levels of radiation. What Legasov describes is ARS, the firefighter, the plant workers and some liquidators on the roof went through that excruciating fate. Legasov was never exposed to fatal high levels of ionising radiation, but his prolonged stay in the exclusion zone (along with the 600k other liquidators) meant that he developed illnesses quite rapidly including cancer: that is why he loses his hair towrads the end of the series. He probably knew he had a few months or years left to live and didn't want to go through the pain (albeit infinitesimally lesser than that of ARS).
Guillaume Roux Even though he doesn’t receive a dosage sufficient for acute radiation sickness, he does receive a fatal dose. Radiation is a hard poison to quantify its deadliness. A high enough dose will kill you quickly and dramatically in the short term, but a low dose over a long time will do the same but through different means, in his case, he had chronic radiation sickness signs (hair loss) and at least lung or esophageal cancer from the coughing of blood. The way in which radiation kills us (either actually or long term) is that gamma radiation rips through our DNA, destroying it. Too much DNA lose and are bodies decay and fall apart spectacularly and quickly. Little lose, but that more importantly causes the right mutations to DNA and you get cancer
I feel like people are ignoring a huge reason why he committed suicide, not only was he suffering from the effects of radiation exposure he also just exposed the KGB and the Soviet Union in front of the entire World, he was a dead man walking.
"What is the cost of lies? Not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all." Pay heed, America.
" we do not know how high the final power went, we only know the final reading. Chernobyl reactor number four, designed to operate at 3300 megawatts, went beyond 33,000." So, in reality, the scale of the design flaw and/or human error could have been even WORSE than an entire magnitude of error, if not for the inaddequacy of the insruments used to measure it
Do you think that they put all the scenes together in chronological order before the explosion, before the trial, after the explosion and after the trial and such right up to valery legasov's suicide and the epilogue
I was two years old when the accident happened, I don't think I ever heard about it til much later through zero hour although this series opened my eyes as there was so much they didn't explain in Zero Hour that I now understand what really happened.
@@saintroddy *The first Wuhan Doctor who recognized it* "The Virus is spreading and we have no way to treat it, we have to shut down the city" *PRC official* "you didn't see a new virus... YOU DIDNT BECAUSE ITS NOT THERE!!"
He actually had a wife & children. Really heartbreaking. I'd be interested to know if there is any links between radiation & depression or other mental health crisis.
Lemme put it like this for you. Ever hit the mystery box? Thats radiation. Random (there will be common symptoms of course, but) Radiation deletes/erases DNA/RNA structures. Sometimes it just "modifies" the DNA/RNA structure - thus a mutation is born. So - depending on your dose. Yes what you said can happen - or quite literally anything else
he knew he was dying of radiation poisoning, and I believe he knew that his msg would be heard if he committed suicide. His story wouldn’t go unnoticed… unfortunate
Quite possibly. Although my guess is that he was already sick and he knew what was coming. So he decided to end it while he was still "healthy". No one could blame him.
No idea if there's a direct correlation between radiation and depression, but there definitely is between chronic pain and depression. It's fair to say that radiation causes chronic pain as things break down, so that's probably a one degree of separation link.
3:56 Each light on that control panel lights up when a control rod/fuel channel cap is removed, such as during refueling. You can see the entire panel start to light up all at once. Then at 3:59, the entire top half lights up, and then the bottom half.That's because the biological shield is, in that moment, in the process of blowing off.
Also something else watching this little series has shown me one thing. At the center of almost all things like this it is never a machine failure or something like that. It is always the human mind. One that cares about its image so much that it goes out of its way to keep secrets
@@CandleWisptrue, but it’s actually the truth here regardless, even in the mechanical aspects. It all starts well before the failed test, or even the construction of the plant at all. It starts with Soviet pride. They desired to be seen as an equal to the United States, but the lacked the financial weight to design a comparable reactor. So they conspired to build one that could emulate the appearance of an equal, but they’re lack of funds meant it couldn’t actually *be* equal. That money had to be saved somewhere, and that somewhere comprises a rather tragic chain. The reactor design they came up with has an issue at low power levels, one that caused issues in trying to actually start the reactor. Actually solving that problem legitimately would have been costly, so they tipped the rods in graphite such that when they were first inserted, they aided in priming the reactor to build power. This on its own is sufficiently bad to cause major issues, but it’s just one example of how cost cutting measures, which I must remind you are necessary due to human pride, reduced the safety of the plant. There was no doubt a failure to install sufficient redundancy within the plant for failures, another reason the plant blew. The fact a single failsafe was expected to save the reactor was in of itself a horrid oversight, one no doubt intentionally overlooked as redundancy adds to cost without improving performance, only safety, and under ideal conditions, there is no difference without it. At the core of every Nuclear Power disaster, and frankly every other disaster in Industry, is a story of human errors. It is, after all, the job of engineers to design in such a way that safety is ensured. When this does not happen, you can always find someone to trace it back to, and it’s never one person, always a system. After all, redundancy is the nature of the process, one engineer does not have sole discretion. If a flaw goes unresolved, it is far more likely it was a product of mismanagement than the subsequent mistake of many engineers.
This happened a year before I was born, and I've tried for years to understand all the literature about what happened. A friend who is very intelligent engineer claims is the best 'general purpose' understanding you'll get on what happened.
Yea! Sweden initially thought one of their own facilities as having a melt down. They went bonkers until they realized that the radiation was coming from the outside, not the inside……. A quick check if wind direction, and Sweden basically blackmailed Russia to tell a partial truth. “Either you tell them, OR WE WILL”. Yea. Sweden may of been a neutral nation during the Cold War technically, but I was not shocked when they applied to join NATO after 2022.
CHili_420 _ no it wasn’t. Nothing was paid, Russia’s architecture is still dogshit and people die to this day, some still live in the radiated zone, nothing was paid.
7:43 we hear him say "It is (The Truth)... still there" and the camera pans towards that row of red plaques detailing what the truth means here. A radioactive core gone critical doesn't care about what anyone thinks about it. It'll still happen and it'll still kill you. I liked that touch a lot. Good job camera-crew.
Episode 1 and 5 are interchangeable to begin this series. You could watch episodes in this order 5, 1, 2, 3, 4 all well within 3.5 Roentgen (not great not horrible). Only issue I have with the series is it should have been about 10 or 12 episodes as it is one of the most consequential pieces of story telling and acting in recent history.
The one detail i find interesting in the first episode when Legasov hangs himself, he does it on the exact same date and time the disaster took place, only two years in advance. obviously not accurate, at least i don't think so, but i love the creative and symbolic attempt they made to reference the accident in the first episode.
So he says the rods were tipped in graphite to save money but they can make reaction rates skyrocket in wrong situation. So, if they had had standard rods (whatever that is), would Chernobyl have still occurred or would it have been to a lesser extent? Prevented?
It's a little more complicated than the just tips having been 'tipped' in graphite. AFAIK the boron control rods had graphite on the other end which was pulled into the reactor when the boron rods were pulled out. Because when you pull out the boron rods what's left is water - which is still good at absorbing neutrons and halting the nuclear process - that's why you need to accelerate the reaction with graphite. So really, to prevent the accident, from a purely technical aspect, a different reactor design was needed. But as you know it wasn't only the reactor design flaw which led to the explosion.
The series boils the cause down in my opinion a bit too much. The rods aren't necessarily tipped with graphite, but instead are two rods connected essentially one side being an inhibitator (boron), the other being an accelerator (graphite). When the shutdown begins the rods are pushed in and the first thing that enters the area is the graphite causing the reaction to speed up until the boron part of the rods can get in a slow the reaction down, which this process results in an initial power surge and then goes down as the reaction stops. The big culprit to the explosion was Xenon Poisoning that the crew manning the reactor didn't realize. Xenon-135 is the product of Iodine decaying from the reaction. Normally Xenon isn't a big deal most of it is burned off from the heat of the reaction. The problem started when they dropped the rate of reaction too low to burn off Xenon at a consistent rate. Iodine still decayed and Xenon was still forming at the lower rate but was accumulating instead of being burned off. This lead to a slowing of the reaction to a point where the reactor can shutdown also known as Xenon poisoning since Xenon absorbs neutrons and being a noble gas is really stable. In the case of Chernoybl Reactor #4 suffered this while it was being setup for the test, obviously the crew manning the reactor didn't know this was happening because the designers of the reactor never said anything about it. So when the control rods (the boron side of the rod) was removed this allowed the reactor to produce enough heat to start burning off Xenon, but this must be controlled correctly to achieve proper balance again as if you leave the graphite in too long the Xenon will burn off too quickly thus causing a runaway reaction. And by the time the AZ-5 button was pressed the reactor was past the proper balance and was a runaway timebomb. Thus creating the worst nuclear disaster to date.
In addition to the graphite explanation above, the design flaw was pretty subtle and not discovered during the design phase. It turned out that the graphite in its intended position in the middle of the reactor accelerated the reaction less than the same graphite at the bottom of the reactor on its way out. This resulted in a brief power spike when many rods were inserted at once and a lot of graphite moved down at the same time. The issue was reported by other crews performing planned AZ-5 shutdowns but it was within safety margins (because those other crews were running with a reasonable number of rods withdrawn instead of almost all of them) so it was not considered very important.
I wish we could get an in-depth look at the generations upon generations of birth defects that this disaster STILL causes in children to this day. The topic gets some mention here and there but nobody has thoroughly done justice to this particular angle of the story. Some of the defects are truly and utterly horrific …. I wish we could hear that story.