If you haven't watched Chernobyl on HBO/Sky/NowTV, you should. It's an excellent mini-series. I've rewatched it 2 or 3 times already.
Jared Harris does an excellent job playing Legasov.
Jared Harris does an excellent job playing Legasov.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rferl.org/amp/belarusian-no...
The steam explosion, and the fear ofbhaving the melted core dropping into the groundwater, actually were real concerns at the time. Concerns that were acted upon rather decisevly, by sending divers under the reactor and by having miners installing a heat exchanges by hand. That those concerns might not have been valod, well, that's 20/20 hindsight isn't it?
The whole affair is dramatic enough that there is no need to graft on some sensational, over-the-top, fantasies.
It probably was a bad report, just a 'worst case scenario', but the meeting, depicted in the series, where it was discussed could have happened with probably different participants. I see it as very similar to the fears that the trinity test would have caused the nitrogen in the atmosphere to undergo a fusion chain reaction. Even though those fears weren't realistic, they were real and are often included in the telling of the history of the Manhattan project.
"And if the uranium reached meltdown temperature - 2,900C -a single sphere of molten fuel would burn through the concrete foundations of the reactor building, and keep going until it reached the water table. At that moment, there would be another explosion, exponentially more devastating than the first; the three remaining reactors would be destroyed in a nuclear blast that would render Ukraine, Belarus and Russia uninhabitable for decades to come.
'That was the most terrifying thing,' says Veniamin Prianichnikov. 'We were petrified of meltdown, walking around like zombies.'"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/26/nuclear.russia
"There was a moment when there was the danger of a nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it - with the water, they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk, but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A European catastrophe."
Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev Deputy head of the executive committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/apr/25/energy.u...
But of course nuclear was very new and these were also the guys that believed an RBMK could never explode.
1) how much modern information, or information only openly available now, was used to determine that.
2) How long it took them to figure that out and what stress they were under trying the calculations. Taking a youtuber a few days to figure it out is already too long.
3) How much CPU processing it took to make the calculation? Just putting it into an Excel doc on a modern computer seems trivial now, but Cray-1's weren't available in the USSR and a modern computer is easily 1000x more powerful than one). Constructing the Fortran simulation would take time to write and debug, then running it on a soviet PDP-11 clone would take a lot of time too. A Cray-1 is 1000x faster, and a modern computer is 1,000,000X faster). Doing the creating and editing of a youtube video, compressing it with the codec and uploading it, would take a significant percentage of 1986's world wide combined computing power.
I'm sure that what most people do in excel now would have been just as feasible on Lotus 1-2-3 running on a 286 in 1986. With the exception of those incorrectly using it as a database for millions of rows :P
That said, the OP is harsh. There are a couple of dodgy “facts” such as this one, but remarkably few for such a long mainstream TV programme.
And that would make sense in the serie. However, there, it's presented as a fact by an apparently perfectly competent physician.
Obviously the show is fictional and dramatized - but I could totally see a normal doctor who knows better telling a grieving mother that this is what happened, that her baby absorbed radiation in order to save her - even though it is a complete lie, it might help her with the grieving process. I don't think they should do it, but I think it's believable enough.