The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show....
... which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show?
Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.
>Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show
are you kidding? always
edit: making this comment, in response to the person to whom i'm responding to's disbelief made me realize something: it's a really silly thing to sit around and think you're above being influenced by narrative. how much of our indignation at others' naivete is simply privilege? if i couldn't afford a doctor, to whom i could outsource the cognitive burden of figuring it out, i would probably believe all sorts of things about health that had been suggested to me by way of narrative.
edit2: it's fun to watch the score on this comment. up down up down. on the one hand it's glib and snarky - HN loves that - but on the other hand it implicates privilege - HN hates that. i probably should've used a word different from privilege but i can't think of one that wouldn't trigger people just as hard.
> The author of this piece is the President of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear lobbying group. He's posted multiple articles to Forbes to try to discredit the Chernobyl show....
I’ve seen this pseudo ad-hom rolled out every time one of his articles comes up on HN. Is he really a nuclear lobbyist? Does that make anything he is saying not factual? Can we engage with the facts of the article rather than just attack the author?
In this case it’s an article about what a doctor who treated some of the Chernobyl patients is saying. Is that a lie? Is he not a doctor who treated the Chernobyl patients?
> which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show?
That’s probably how a majority of people learn things especially about topics they otherwise would never engage in or dig deeper on such as the true details of a nuclear accident.
Is he paid by the nuclear industry is what I was wanting to know?
This label “lobbyist” gets used to malign people and cast aside anything they might have to say a lot. It’s usually only used against those which are promoting an idea that someone already disagrees with. So for example an anti-nuclear but pro-wind power person will throw out a “he’s a lobbyist” label to an article by this guy then ignore what he’s saying. But without any irony completely lap up something written by a wind-power producer who makes money selling wind turbines or similar.
If the guy writing this is a lobbyist because he is making the case for nuclear, and thus we must disregard him, then anyone making the case for anything is de facto a lobbyist and we should disregard everything.
I would much rather see people actually try to refute or counter the facts and claims this author presents, but that almost never happens which leads me to believe the only way people have to rebut him is the ad-hom route as the person I replied to did: label him with that despised “lobbyist” word so people tune out.
I know insinuating that "you didn't read the article" is against the rules here, so I will take the risk: did you read the article?
“Another error [in HBO’s “Chernobyl”] was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive,” UCLA’s Robert Gale wrote in “The Cancer Letter,” a subscription-based newsletter.
Gale, who worked for UCLA at the time of the accident, says that the firefighters who suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome were not contagious, as they are portrayed as by HBO's "Chernobyl."
Gale criticizes the portrayal in “Chernobyl” of a baby’s death supposedly from “absorbing” deadly amounts of radiation from her dying father, a firefighter who helped put out the blaze.
“Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room,” writes Gale.
If you read further down, it's apparent that, yes, the guy is clearly pro-nuclear. But his criticisms are on specific matters of fact surrounding radiation poisoning.
The author, Shellenberger, is cherry-picking small quotes from a "letter" supposedly written by Robert Gale, who was a leading radiation poisoning treatment responder during the crisis.
This is typical Shellenberger. We are not given any context for the quotes, nor indeed do we even have a reference to the letter itself, to whom it was written, to what it was responding, nor any offsetting quotes that Gale may have made. Why, for instance, are we reading Shellenberger's excerpts of the letter rather than the letter itself?
Shellenberger is a frequently repeating offender at cherry-picking and slanted presentation. Just because an isolated fact may be true, in isolation, does not make the re-contextualization and presentation as an ensemble of facts a "truth". It is entirely possible to assemble a bunch of true quotes together in a manner intended to mislead, or even outright lie.
In this case, the ensemble is presented as a context in which Shellenberger, taken together with his past writing, is trying to convey that Chernobyl wasn't a serious accident, no one should use it as a reason for concern, and anyone talking about it is either uninformed or biased about nuclear power. None of that is true in the larger sense.
In particular, this concrete show was praised for realism and details, so people do.
Other then that, yes people are influenced by narratives in stories and often take them as broadly "that sort of thing happened". That does not mean this particular dude is about to tell truth, but nevertheless fact checking of fiction is cool and good thing when it happens.
> Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.
And to me that's actually the best argument against nuclear reactors being "safe". We may have better technology, but we don't have better people or organizations, not really. To the victims, it does not matter whether the mismanagement was due to political careerism, greed and corner-cutting, or just laziness.
For comparison, two miners for coal die every hour. Similar for bauxite. More for diamond, gold and tantalum.
Not even counting residual deaths attributable to pollution.
Agreed. The point of the HBO series was to depict what people experienced during the catastrophe, not to debunk the misconceptions, misinformation, and bad science that was present at the time.
To get upset that they didn't make a 'debunking Chernobyl' documentary is to miss the entire point of the series.
Unfortunately it's very easy for the uninformed masses (especially with topics such as nuclear power, not the most accessible for most people) to pick up on some of the more unrealistic details and build on their preconceptions or misconceptions. And the "entertainment" part tends to leave a more lasting impression also because they are more dramatic. And then there's that misconception that shows based on true events are somehow more documentary than art. So in such cases movie fiction easily turns into urban legend "facts".
The fact that the author of the article is part of a pro-nuclear lobbying group doesn't automatically contradict or discredit the opinions of the doctor that's featured in the article. They come from the actual guy who was there for real to treat the people.
Coal power stations produce around 5-10 tonnes of radioactive waste every year. This seems to be ignored for the most part when discussing nuclear energy.
+1. Just to add an explanation, they do so by taking naturally occurring radioactive particles that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in the atmosphere.
This should be common knowledge, but almost no one knows it.
how does the rate of radioactivity added to the air compare to farming? Plants with deep roots also extract radioactivity from the ground and then we eat it.
this is a serious question, which of course ties into the concept of "banana equivalent dose", which helps to contextualize claims about radioactivity.
For one thing, plant life is merely repeatedly recycling the mineral content of an only slowly-varying topsoil, while coal-burning is adding new sources.
It is not useful to use the many failings of coal as a fuel to promote nuclear power. Nuclear power does not compete against coal, it competes against wind/solar and natural gas.
The constant refrain of 'but coal ..' from nuclear advocates is just an admission that nuclear power is un-economic and unable to compete in the marketplace against the best options.
Nuclear power does not compete against wind and solar, as wind and solar are intermittent power sources. Nuclear is a firm energy source, in that we can use it to create steady-state power during periods that intermittent sources are not available. Coal is also a firm energy source, so coal and nuclear definitely compete.
This mis-states how electrical generation markets work and relies on the fallacy of "baseload", which is an artifact created by the past-grid domination of large thermal plants for generation.
In my market (Texas/ERCOT) there is no separate market for "firm" power. You either run or you don't on an every-15-minutes basis. You are either a price "taker", or a price "maker". In this market the NPPs are always, always, price "takers".
They absolutely compete with the price makers, which are always either wind, solar, or most commonly, natural gas.
Coal is always a price "taker" in this market as well.
Whether a generator is a "taker" or "maker" in terms of pricing is a function of the economic impact to it of not running in a given bid segment, and its ability to compete in the bidding for the "last MW" of the bid-price stack.
Large thermal plants like NPPs rely very much on the economics of being able to get premium pricing for every single minute of the day and night. In a competetive market they can't do that, because gas/wind/solar can under-price them by very large margins. So the NPPs become un-economic to run (if already running), and very much un-fundable to build as new capacity. The same market force applies to coal.
Your rationale does not address the core argument of the piece, which is that as reliance on intermittent energy sources approaches 100%, their cost will rise steeply.
It's not necessary to do a piece by piece rebuttal of a professional "skeptic", who is a neuroscientist, and whose reasoning relies on someone who worked at Shellenberger's "breakthrough institute", which existed solely to provide pseudo-scientific buttressing for the message that renewable energy is bad, and the climate change, if it's happening, isn't really that bad.
You are essentially using Shellenberger-provided articles as proof that Shellenberger isn't a con artist. It's all bunk. Top to bottom, same game plan.
I refer to them because their arguments make sense to me - they seem measured and nuanced. I've encountered a lot of pseudo-science, and this has none of the hallmarks that I associate with it. The argument is not that renewables are bad, but they alone are not enough. Can you point to something that provides a counter-argument?
Once you combine them with storage and peakers, intermittent renewable sources do compete with other base load providers. It's still a work in progress, though.
Unfortunately, in practice nuclear does still compete against coal. It would be wonderful if the choice was between nuclear and renewables, but that is not yet where we are.
Nuclear is still the lesser of the two evils compared to coal and oil, which are very much the only other option in many cases.
Then why do i keep hearing that germany has been producing a lot more pollution since they stopped nuclear power because of coal and gaz being used as a subsitute source of energy ?
Because people are misrepresenting facts (aka. lying)
Germany did not stop using nuclear power, it started phasing it out (which had actually been planned long before Fukushima), and has not been producing more pollution because it has in fact been replacing coal and gas as well as nuclear with renewable sources: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
I'm not an expert, but this doesn't look too credible to me:
- I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous.
- Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell.
- If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented an there are photos.
- Regarding the Ignatenko's claim that the foetus had somehow protected her from radiactivity by absorbing it, personally I never interpreted it as a statement that the show was claiming as true. I saw it as the character's own interpretation. The show portrays different characters with various degrees of ignorance, and no one in the show portrayed as knowledgeable defends that theory.
- There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5
There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story.
>> I know that many death estimates for Chernobyl are highly exaggerated, but sticking to the official Soviet death toll of 31 seems ludicrous.
That's the immediate death toll from radiation poisoning, not the total years lost as a result of radiation exposure. The article is correct to point out however that the total death toll must be much less than many other disasters and certainly not comparable to what people commonly believe about the death toll at chernobyl.
>>- Lyudmilla Ignatenko existed in real life and there are interviews with her telling how they didn't let her hug her husband at the hospital due to radioactivity, and she had to hid her pregnancy to be let in. Of course she could be lying, but those would be strange lies to tell.
>> If victims could not be radioactive, why were they buried in metal caskets covered in concrete? This is well documented and there are photos.
Those were firefighters who ingested radioactive products in the air. Normal human tissue cannot be induced to be become radioactive. I'm not surprised that they would quarantine a firefighter and bury his body in a metal casket but that doesn't apply to the majority of the victims of radiation poising by Chernobyl. The show at one point shows such a burial for liquidators who wouldn't have radioactive material in their body and is almost certainly ahistorical. The show never makes this clear.
>>- There are photos of radiation victims from various incidents and they look not unlike what is seen in the series. Here are some (trigger warning, very graphic images): https://imgur.com/gallery/3x7RcLk#QrTJTm5
He was literally standing over a tank of radioactive material when the accident occurred thus explaining the extent of his skin damage. The radiation exposure for the firefighters wouldn't have caused them to suffer skin damage to the same extent and not in the way portrayed in the film. The ingested fission products would have harmed internal tissue before reaching the surface of the body. The show's portrayal of the first responder firefighters is almost entirely completely wrong.
>>There may be things to criticize about the show but this person looks like he is telling a quite biased story.
I disagree and I'm quite concerned about how the show mistakenly portrays the effects of radiation. At the very least they could explained how radiation works and why the firefighters had to quarantined but they never do anything like that. Instead, we hear dramatic warnings of a thermonuclear blast unless our heroes take immediate action which is completely nonsensical.
You are perfectly right. This series was a good opportunity to actually show people how radiation works. They did make a good step by step of how the disaster unfolded though, which is great. Just above I made the point that most people don't understand how radioactivity works and they will probably mostly pick up the details of the series that are added for dramatic effect since they're mixed with real events. TV series have a strong influence on people's beliefs. My comment wasn't too appreciated.
Being irradiated does not really make human tissue radioactive. You absorb the radiation particles, not the radioactive material emitting it. But ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the material through the skin will not only kill the person (from the inside), it will also make the remains dangerous enough to not want them seeping into the ground. Now the tissue carries around the radiation source. [0]
To use the bullet analogy from the series, what I said above is akin to being shot with bullets or ingesting a gun that's still firing. The first case might kill you, the second case will definitely kill you but it won't really kill others unless they plan on ingesting you, firing-gun and all.
For someone concerned about facts he presents no actual facts to backup his claim of 1 million unnecessary abortions. What is this based upon? How did they identify which were abortions driven by bad medical advice and which were abortions which women claimed were based upon the medical advice but for which that was just a cover to avoid the social stigma often associated with abortion?
Of course this also assumes that an abortion is some kind of harm.
If a woman chooses to abort a pregnancy she otherwise wanted because of a perceived high risk of defects, and that risk is actually wildly inflated, that is definitely harm to her, regardless of any considerations of the fetus.
Doesn't this depend on the exact emitters? Alpha and most neutrons will be blocked by body tissue, beta may have an effect at close proximity, and humans are almost transparent to gamma rays.
If someone is covered by fallout without knowing it, they can be dangerously radioactive.
If they inhale or ingest the fallout they'll be much less radioactive, but they could still be dangerous to others if they've ingested an extreme and lethal dose.
Some radiotherapy treatments do in fact make patients slightly radioactive. Friends and family are advised to keep their distance for a few half-lives.
The problem is that the show is historically accurate, the lady that lost her baby said in an interview by Svetlana Alexievich[0] that she was told about the danger of contamination from her husband.
The show was not meant to be a PSA for or against nuclear power, it's a historical fiction and for that it is as accurate as it can be. The story is mostly about propaganda and lies.
The animals were really shot and realocated people from Czernobyl area were discriminated (avoided) for that very fear. Men who helped to mitigate disaster were seen as not too good partners to have kids with.
Whether they were actually readioactive or not, people often assumed they are and acted accordingly.
The question of children is more complicated than that. Exposure to radiation can cause mutations in reproductive organs that persist long after the radiation is gone, and will be passed to your children.
This is the same fallacy that many people suffer from when they discuss irradiated meat. Much of the opposition is around the fear of radioactive food.
Irradiated foods are bombarded with ionizing alpha and/or beta particles. This causes cell damage to organisms responsible to spoiling or contaminating the food (thus improving safety and shelf life), but does not cause any of the matter to become radioactive itself. In a nuclear accident, there is a chance that a victim becomes exposed to neutron or gamma radiation, both of which can induce arbitrary matter (including in a victim's body) to become radioactive. Whether or not their bodies actually became radioactive sources, it's pretty clear that the medical staff assumed that was the case, considering victims of ARS from the incident were burried in zinc coffins after their deaths.
Depends on the process. You wouldn't want to drink the cooling water of Fukushima now.
I don't know what you are talking about with irradiated meat. I guess you mean it being disinfected with ionizing light or something? That would be profoundly different besides also having something to do with electromagnetic radiation.
If you somehow ingest something radioactive, you yourself would become a source of alpha, beta or gamma-radiation. This is what happened in Chernobyl. Particles were exploded all over the place.
If that is enough to have glowing kids is another question. But the fear isn't as irrational as claimed. Even if there might have been an overreaction. Or something classified as such as there actually were quite a few cases that suffered from the incident. It just seems not as bad as repercussion became gradually visible.
The cooling water from Fukushima reactor would be no worse than "radon water" from some sanatoriums. Not too bad. Except it has fluorine contamination. Chemistry and not physics is why you shouldn't drink it.
Depends on where you swim. Water does indeed absorb radiation quite effectively withing a few meters. Radon water sounds like the modern equivalent to leeches
People are taking the wrong takeaway from the show. The point of Chernobyl(HBO) was not to show the dangers of Nuclear reactors, It was to show, The Lies, Politics and other disgusting elements can and will ruin lives of thousands of people.
Chernobyl was the result of lies and deception. Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl.
People, Including the Doctor have taken it incorrectly in my humble opinion.
They even had a separate podcast where they discussed exactly this and more details related to the series in great detail. Look it up on Pocketcast or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts and you'll find it.
> Soviet Russia's wanted to be number 1 everywhere while completely disregarding how they got there, That is what led to Chernobyl.
What led to Chernobyl is a reactor design flaw (could happen to anyone), and irresponsible behavior of the plant staff, who run the experiment against "the book".
Only the later probably is because of the culture-wide trait. The rest of it could have happened to anyone.
Though I do agree, that the show displays the need for open information through the lack of it in Soviet Union like nothing else.
The claim that external exposure to radiation does not make you radioactive is true in most cases. However, Chernobyl is not most cases.
First, I'm not sure you can claim that people working during the disaster would only suffer external exposure. There was a reactor core on fire, there was probably plenty of isotopes in the air that would have been breathed in and possibly taken up by the body.
Second, neither alpha, beta nor gamma reaction will induce any significant amount of radioactive in materials that are exposed to them. And under normal circumstances, that is all you would be exposed to. But this was, again, an exposed reactor core. There might very well have been a significant amount of neutron radiation present, which does in fact induce radioactivity.
So the claims of the article are way too strong for this very, very exceptional situation.
It's sad to see them use inflated numbers to criticize the numbers they claim are inflated:
“Although the 31 immediate Chernobyl-related deaths are sad,” he concludes, “the number of fatalities is remarkably small compared with many energy-related accidents, such as the Benxihu coal mine disaster in China 1942, which killed about 1500 miners, and the 1975 Banqiao dam accident, also in China, which killed about 250,000 people.”
I lived in socialistic country in Eastern Europe and government DID try to cover it up. There were no new for at last several days. Then they said everything is fine, go outside, eat vegetables, drink mil, everything is OK.. it is just Western propaganda that there are problems. We trust our comrades in Soviet Union. While the news in Western Europe was: Minimize your stay outside. Do not drink mil. Do not eat vegetables (the farmers in West were actually destroying crops so it cannot be consumed).
This organization self-description[1] (emphasis added by me to highlight important phrases):
>> We publish the Nuclear Monitor, a unique international newsletter serving the worldwide movement against nuclear power. Produced 20 times per year, it gives an anti-nuclear perspective on what is happening in the nuclear power industry and the resistance against it.
An anti-nuclear activist group is an interesting choice to use as a reference...
Option 3 can work really well. Narcos had folks speaking in Spanish with most of the world reading subtitles. As someone not from South America, it felt more authentic than if Escobar was speaking English throughout.
Of course, I'm glossing over the fact that the actor playing Escobar didn't sound like he was from Colombia at all, but that's not apparent to most of us non-Spanish speakers.
Arguably, the artistic choice was a strong for one Narcos because the foreignness of the majority of the setting to the viewpoint characters was central to the theme; that's arguably the opposite of what Chernobyl was aiming for.
It's like how as ridiculous as it was to have Sean Connery in Hunt for Red October playing a Russian naval officer who talks like Sean Connery, it's much less ridiculous than Sean Connery playing a Russian officer who talks like Sean Connery faking a Russian accent.
No one so far has mentioned that actual Russians who learned English would be learning British English and not American so that 'accent' for them seems totally on point. Making people read subtitles would only serve to eliminate 75% of the audience.
In a realistic movie they'd speak Russian/Ukrainian. I think wrong accents in that case would be ok because only Ukrainians would notice (it won't air in russia I'm guessing).
But Netflix probably wanted well known actors instead, and know lots of people dislike reading subtitles, so chose to use english, which is understandable in some ways. Myself I find documentary(-style) movies in the original language to be much more believable, and reading subtitles is a price well worth paying for e.g. "Der Untergang" and similar.
> Der untergang is a german movie so they speak German.
Fair point. But I'm sure there are better examples where a film was made by people from country A, and set in country B using actors that speak B-language for realism.
> So are you saying only ukranians should be allowed to make movies about Chernobyl?
"Be allowed" I didn't say. I said it's an opportunity for extra realism you choose to use or not.
> So Americans can only make historical movies about events in America and only Scandinavians can make movies about Vikings?
I'm 100% sure that if Scandinavians did a movie about historical USA it would be in english. But it's beside the point. Again: it's just a choice whether you think the added trouble of finding actors speaking a language and having your audience read subtitles is worth it for the added realism.
- The actors are British (with the exception of one main character who is Swedish and speaks with a Swedish accent) so it's easiest for them to just use their own accents.
- For whatever reasons, they didn't want to film it in Russian, with Russian actors and subtitles. And they felt that foreigners trying to feign Russian accents starts to get comical. So they made the decision to just let actors use their own accents (they also felt that American audiences wouldn't process it well if they used American accents).
- I watched the show and the accents are annoying for about ten minutes until you get used to them and cease to notice/care
Dunno if this is the podcast response, but this is generally done in movies / TV when they have foreign characters speak English as a proxy for their native language. They almost never use American English unless the character is American; they’ll either use British English or a heavy accent.
Do you have a citation for this? I've never heard of using British English as a proxy for a foreign language. Instead, I always assumed it was because there are a lot of popular British actors, and if portraying non-English speakers, there's no good reason to "fake" an accent (so they just use their native accent), as was the case with "Chernobyl".
Most non-native English speakers around the world will be taught British rather than American English, so this 'accent' would be what you could expect from them in real life if they were to speak English.
I would also partly chalk it up to the ubiquity of American TV and movies. The midwestern accent is the norm for spoken English on TV, and most of those are set in America with American characters. If you want to say someone is from somewhere else but they’re all speaking a non-English language, speaking in a British accent sounds “foreign enough”.
If this topic interests you I highly recommend "Conspiracy" which is also available on HBO Now. It's a depiction of the 1942 Wannsee Conference done with all UK actors.
You can watch that one and then watch the German version for comparison.
I dunno, that’s a decision you make for a mass-market show like this. If you have to watch subtitles and you’d likely have lost 3/4 of the audience before the end of the first episode. It makes the show more accessible.
... which is a TV show meant to entertain people. Since when did people get their authoritative facts about science from a dramatized TV show?
Anyhow, the people and their horrifying decision making processes are the real enemies presented in Chernobyl, in my opinion.