The first few minutes of HBO’s new miniseries, Chernobyl, are almost as harrowing as the nuclear disaster the series is based on itself.
Sitting in his home, Valery Legasov, the deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, records tapes recounting the true account of what happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant in the Ukraine on the day it exploded.
Just moments later, Valery Legasov ended his own life.
You can watch the official trailer for Chernobyl, right here. Post continues after video.
In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, a safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant in the Ukraine went awry when a sudden power surge occurred, causing a series of explosions to the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs to be set off.
In the weeks that followed, hundreds of people were struck down with acute radiation syndrome, while thousands of men began the mammoth effort of cleaning up the toxic mess the deadly explosion left behind.
Valey Legasov, played by Jared Harris in Chernobyl, was one of the many men tasked with cleaning up the mess.
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The Soviet Union was the first to supply electricity from nuclear fission, but like the space to race, they rapidly fell behind the West. Their crash program lead to the RBMK reactors; big, unstable and complicated. Rather than pay to upgrade them they made increasingly large and complicated instructions that if followed to the letter would ensure no accidents would happen.
It followed the Soviet model of close control but came up against the other Soviet problem of increasingly unrealistic production quotas from the workers, leading to the usual corner cutting to meet targets. That’s what the controllers did, skipped some instructions at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear plant at Chernobyl. A flawed system lead to flawed results. The accident was made worse by Soviet secrecy, reactively attempting to deny it as they had with previous accidents and knowing as far back as 1977 that there was a dangerous flaw in the design, graphite tips on the control rods, keeping that a secret from the workers too.
The accident changed Gorbachev, helping to convince him the Soviet Union could not continue they way it was and along with the fall in oil prices and the Afghan war, spelt doom for the evil empire.