Chernobyl is the TV series that recounts what happened in 1986, reconstructing a story of errors and lies that helped cause the worst nuclear disaster in history.
1:23:45. That is the exact time on the night of 25–26 April 1986 when, in a small town in what was then the Soviet Union, the worst nuclear accident in history occurred, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant — an accident whose consequences are still being felt by the inhabitants and the environment today, and for who knows how many more years to come. More than 30 years later, a television series tells the story of what happened, through the experiences of the people who lived it firsthand: those who worked at the plant, those who lived just metres away, those who were called in to help contain the damage, and those who were making (or not making) decisions that would shape the fate of an entire generation.
The series, entitled Chernobyl, produced by Hbo, written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, opens with a question as simple as it is significant, which runs as a fil rouge through all five episodes: "What is the cost of lies?" Then the dark, cold images take us immediately to the night of the accident, when a safety test on reactor number 4 is under way at the V.I. Lenin nuclear power plant. Due to a series of factors, the experiment fails and what was never remotely thought possible occurs: the explosion of the reactor core which, exposed, would go on to release an absurd and unprecedented quantity of lethal radiation.
Rbmk reactors use uranium-235 as fuel. Every atom of U-235 is like a bullet travelling at nearly the speed of light, penetrating everything in its path: wood, metal, concrete, flesh. Every gram of U-235 contains more than a trillion of these bullets. Chernobyl contains more than 3 million grams, and they are now on fire.Valerij Legasov, scientist
Amid warning bells and emergency sirens, the first responses arrive to what is initially communicated as a simple roof fire at the plant — a fluorescent spectacle to go and watch as a community on an April night. The institutional and political responses are clear: contain the leak of information by denying it, to avoid a scandal. And so Pripyat, one of the atomgrad — the "atomic cities" designed in the Soviet Union to house nuclear plant workers and their families — is sealed off.
The official position of the state is that a global nuclear catastrophe cannot occur in the Soviet Union.from the Chernobyl series, Hbo
This opening succession of scenes encapsulates the heart of the series, as well as the approach taken to telling the story of a disaster: through human perception. From a nuclear disaster one expects to see images of chaos, noise, absolute destruction. This series, instead, begins by immersing us in the effects of radiation, which are initially imperceptible, invisible. We are confronted with unsettling and at times almost irritatingly silent and slow scenes that make us feel the weight of every additional minute spent unknowingly breathing that air and being in contact with an environment so heavily contaminated.
The wind carries these radioactive particles across the entire continent: they are billions of trillions of bullets in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat. Many of these bullets will not stop burning for hundreds of years — some for over 50,000 years.Valerij Legasov, scientist
The series also shows the fact that nobody was prepared to manage the consequences of an event of such magnitude. Nobody at all — from the first-response actions of firefighters and hospital medical staff to the timely and lasting management of radiation containment, compounded in particular by the inadequate protection and communication on the part of those who should have informed the population and civilians about the true scale of what had just occurred.
There are two symbols of this: one is graphite — the material used to moderate neutron flux inside the core — which was found among the debris from the explosion but was not recognised or considered as such by many of those in charge, and which should have immediately made it clear to those who refused to believe it possible that the reactor core had exploded. Exploded.
The second is the dosimeters, the instruments used to measure radiation levels in the environment — clearly inadequate, insufficient and limited: the ones available could register a maximum level of 3.6 roentgens per hour, a figure that was initially communicated as the official reading and already considered lethal enough to warrant the evacuation of the entire area. In reality, radiation levels in the atmosphere after the explosion reached peaks of 20,000 roentgens, as though one were being subjected to hundreds of thousands of X-rays. Simultaneously.
Only 36 hours later, when alarming radiation levels had already been detected in Sweden, 400 kilometres away, when children in Germany had already been banned from playing outdoors, and when satellite images of the destroyed plant had begun to circulate in the international media — only then were the inhabitants of Pripyat evacuated.
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As it progresses, the series retraces the days and weeks that followed and examines the many interconnected elements and factors that led to the disaster. From wrong decisions to the incompetence of some personnel, from structural flaws in the reactor system to violated protocols, but above all to denied truths. Each was a link in that chain which, once broken, proved impossible to rebuild for a long time.
Only once Moscow officially announced the disaster — on 28 April — did the cumbersome response machinery begin to move in order to contain the radiation released by the rubble of the exploded reactor core: 30 per cent of the plant's 190 metric tonnes of uranium was already in the atmosphere. It was the first nuclear accident to be classified as catastrophic (level 7), the highest grade on the Ines scale of nuclear accidents, subsequently followed by that of Fukushima (caused, however, by a natural disaster — a tsunami — and resulting in a partial meltdown of the core, unlike the total explosion at Chernobyl, which was caused by human error).
In total, 600,000 people were "enlisted" to work on the consequences of the accident — first the emergency responders tasked with extinguishing the fire and assisting the injured, and then, above all, the liquidators, those who worked to clean up and restore the area: the pilots who dropped sand and boron from helicopters onto the core to put it out, the miners who dug beneath the reactor to prevent contamination from reaching the groundwater (two actions that ultimately proved useless), and soldiers and civilians who became "biorobots", shovelling graphite and other radioactive material away from the plant by hand.
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The V.I. Lenin nuclear power plant, located approximately 3 kilometres from the town of Pripyat, 18 kilometres northwest of the city of Chernobyl, 110 kilometres north of the capital Kyiv and just 16 kilometres from the border with Belarus, released radioactive material and substances for two weeks, subsequently carried by the wind to various parts of Europe and the world — an amount estimated at four times that released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 300,000 people were evacuated from their homes, 115,000 immediately and the rest at a later stage. An area of 2,600 square kilometres (roughly 30 kilometres in every direction from the plant) was designated an exclusion zone and is, and will forever remain, contaminated — or at least for the next 24,000 years. The human cost is still unknown and difficult to quantify. Official figures have remained unchanged since 1987 and record just 31 deaths. Yet United Nations estimates speak to the long-term effects: a significant increase of up to 90 per cent in the incidence of cancers (especially thyroid cancer at an early age) and congenital malformations, and an estimated death toll resulting from the disaster of approximately 4,000 people (according to 2005 data). Other organisations, including Greenpeace, however, cite figures of up to 93,000.
Read also: Chernobyl today, the consequences more than 30 years after the disaster. The effects on people and energy
Today it remains a largely uninhabited territory, abandoned to its ghost towns. It is an area that was once rural and rich in forests, some of which were subsequently cleared, with land turned over and reburied, and animals — domestic and wild alike — slaughtered to prevent the spread of radiation. With the near-total elimination of human impact, however, nature has returned: a comeback and increase in some native animal populations has been recorded, from foxes to elk to wild boar.
Read also: Humans worse than radiation. Wolves, elk and roe deer return to Chernobyl
Before the nuclear explosion, the plant's four reactors produced around 10 per cent of Ukraine's electricity. For this reason, it was not even possible to shut the plant down after the accident: the last reactor was switched off only in 2000. The containment structure, the so-called sarcophagus, over reactor number 4, positioned above the core to prevent any radioactive dispersal, was completed in 2016 — a project costing two billion dollars that is estimated to last a century. Close to the old reactors, Kyiv decided to establish a new power plant, this time from renewable sources: in 2018, the first solar power plant in the Chernobyl exclusion zone came into operation, supplying electricity to thousands of households.
Read also: The solar power plant born from the ashes of Chernobyl is up and running
Since the series began airing, moreover, the locations featured within the exclusion zone have become a destination for a growing number of visitors, triggering a wave of criticism. The series has already become the most-watched European Sky series of all time, with 1,224,000 viewers across its five episodes. Nevertheless, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stated that this could be the moment to overturn the city's reputation and build a more positive story around it. "We need to give new life to this Ukrainian territory," Zelensky said. "Until now, Chernobyl has represented a negative part of the country's face. It is time to change that." The president signed a decree on 10 July to ensure that Chernobyl could officially become a tourist attraction.
The series recounts a historic disaster — one that is, we hope, unique and unrepeatable — that led the entire world to reassess and reconsider the consequences of human impact on our species and on the planet, paying tribute to the stories of those who, in order to remedy human error, gave their knowledge and their strength, sacrificing their own lives. But there is more.
Beyond the more or less faithful reconstruction of events — Chernobyl is not a documentary, so the narrative is fictionalised in certain respects — what stays with you after watching the series is the unsettling mechanism that initiated, fuelled and finally detonated the tragedy. A mechanism made up of various levels in which every single cog leading to the point of no return, even the smallest and apparently least decisive, is disarming in how simple and immediately recognisable it is — perfectly comparable to some of the dynamics we so often witness today. A mechanism dominated by power games, negligence and lies, sustained by a silence that creates a bubble of "passive conspiracy". It is a series that disturbs because, alongside commemorating the lives of those who sacrificed themselves, those who suffered and those who are still paying the price, it is a series that is extraordinarily relevant today.
When the truth is inconvenient, we continue to lie until we can no longer even remember that it exists. But the truth is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes.Valerij Legasov, scientist