Though that particular speech is fiction, it's in line with the bureaucratic indirectness of Soviet speech, favoring the "fruits of labor" over the individuals who produced them, not to mention the complete lack of concern for human life. It's true that a helicopter crashed, but it happened over five months later on October 2, 1986. He and his wife do wonder if the exposure is what led to their daughter Tatiana developing asthma two years later and ultimately dying from the condition at age 19. The official website for Chernobyl, the Emmy and Golden Globe winning miniseries on HBO. Why? This is a gross exaggeration. The first time audiences see this aspect is when Lyudmilla goes to the hospital to see her very sick husband, Pripyat firefighter Vasily Ignatenko, who is dying from severe radiation sickness. It's true that Legasov dictated his memoirs about the disaster into a recording machine. The 'Bridge of Death' The unforgivably late response of the authorities meant that citizens of Pripyat … Chernobyl is a fantastic miniseries and it won’t be a surprise if it cleans up at the Emmy Awards in September. "Only one was mandatory. Chernobyl is the gripping new HBO drama people are rating higher than Game of Thrones. They were then sent away from Chernobyl. Side-By-Side Footage Of Chernobyl Shows How Accurate The Series Is. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor." Much of the miniseries focuses on the heroic scientists, specifically Legasov and the fictional Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), trying to discover what caused Chernobyl's Reactor Number 4 to fail. This intense scene is misleading in relation to the Chernobyl true story. They had been assigned to dig out an area under the concrete pad so that a heat exchanger (refrigeration unit) could be installed that would cool the space above it using liquid nitrogen. Surprise, surprise: Legasov's shining moment in the final … Amelia Ward. In reality, once all the radioactive clothing he was wearing was removed and his skin was washed, there is no serious radiation threat to those around them. According to Midnight in Chernobyl author Adam Higginbotham, Soviet scientists "were well aware of the faults of the RBMK reactor years before the accident" and "reactor specialists came down from Moscow within 36 hours of the explosion and quickly pinpointed its probable cause." Breus admits that Dyatlov was strict but says that he was "still a high-level professional." Though Legasov (Jared Harris) tells Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) this in the HBO miniseries, fact-checking Chernobyl reveals that Legasov actually wasn't an expert on Chernobyl's reactors. One of the men, Valery Khodemchuk, was the … Though there is evidence that the real Dyatlov was hoping for a promotion, he is largely a fictionalized villain. The trial was heavily compressed for the film. No. Yes. Despite the Chernobyl miniseries depicting much of the culture of the Soviet Union accurately, Valery Legasov, a member of the Academy of Sciences, would not have been living in similar squalor as a fireman in the town of Pripyat, even after Legasov was shunned by the Soviet state. Such false logic was used to isolate, terrify, and stigmatize people not only in Chernobyl, but also in places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recently in Fukushima. The initial fear of birth defects became so bad that women who lived in areas that were subjected to low levels of Chernobyl radiation terminated 100,000 to 200,000 pregnancies in a panic. The nurses and doctors are adamant about her not seeing her husband for fear that she could be affected by the radiation. How accurate is the Chernobyl miniseries on HBO to the actual events ? The Chernobyl miners faced certain death to dig a tunnel. For example, Alexander Yuvchenko, the man who props open the door to the reactor hall in the HBO miniseries, begins to bleed excessively in patches on his body. At his desk, the apparatchik then pours himself a glass of vodka from a carafe. To the miniseries credit, it doesn't actually show birth defects, though it is subtly implied as we see a number of pregnant women and babies. The Bhopal chemical disaster in 1984 claimed the lives of approximately 15,000. HBO The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built between 1970 and and 1983 , … While there is a lot of dramatic license taken, as to be expected, the creators also took great pains to make sure that most of the basic facts of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl are historically accurate and for that they deserve a lot of credit. Our fact check confirmed that the real Valery Legasov hung himself on April 26, 1988, two years after the Chernobyl disaster (his body was found by his son on the 27th). 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