HBO’s latest miniseries, Chernobyl, takes a dramatized look at what is considered one of the worst man-made disasters in history. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded on April 26, 1986, releasing radioactive material across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Chernobyl is a five-part drama about the accident and the effects it had on Europe. Although Chernobyl has the makings of a science-fiction tale, it is completely based on a true, tragic story. Here’s everything you need to know about it before watching the series. This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. How did Chernobyl explode? According to the International Atomic Energy Agency , a reactor went out of control during a test, which created an explosion and a fire that destroyed a reactor building at the power plant. This released dangerous radioactive materials into the environment. How many people died? The information may not be accurately documented , but it is known that at least two employees of the nuclear plant were killed by the explosion, but most of the fatalities occurred later. After the disaster, 28 first responders died as a result of radiation poisoning, and 134 plant workers who were on-site at the time became seriously ill. Cosmo What happened to the people living nearby? Shortly after the disaster, 116,000 people were evacuated from the area surrounding Chernobyl. This mostly affected a town called Pripyat, which basically became a ghost town overnight. In the years to follow, an additional 230,000 people evacuated. The evacuation area is an 18-mile stretch that is known as the Zone of Alienation . What were the long-term effects? Authorities tried to keep information about the effects concealed, so the exact scale of the disaster is unknown. Many suffered severe psychological effects after relocating. Although there is not verified scientific proof, a team of more than 100 researchers has concluded that up to 4,000 people were killed as a result of the disaster between 1986 and 2005. It is also believed that outbreaks of both cancer (primarily thyroid) and birth defects can be linked to Chernobyl. What is Chernobyl like now? The power plant actually continued to operate for 14 years after the disaster and was eventually shut down in 2000. Ukraine’s Ministry of Atomic Power now allows visitors to tour the disaster site , as long as tourists follow all the radiation safety rules. (Um...what?!) There is a plan to clear the plant out completely by 2065. When will ‘Chernobyl’ air? The first episode airs on HBO on May 6, and the remaining four episodes of the series will air weekly until the finale on June 3. Here’s the Chernobyl trailer. (It’s super tough to watch. Consider yourself warned!) This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Hannah Chambers Hannah Chambers is an entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>HBO's Chernobyl was never going to be light, breezy TV show, but there's no way to prepare for what it does to you. The five-part miniseries is an unmissable television event, but it is one that will harrow you, a horror story in the guise of a historical docudrama. Each second is riddled with nauseous anxiety. Knowing how this story ends does not in any way lessen the terror of watching it unfold in real time. On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant outside of Pripyat in what was then the Soviet Union. The resultant fire in the reactor's graphite moderator led to massive amounts of radiation carrying across the local radius through smoke. The incident is regarded by many as the most catastrophic nuclear accident in history. Image: hbo So why does Chernobyl chill to the bone? There are several contributing factors – recency, realism, hindsight, hubris. The men in power deal in denial and deception; their worst fear is not widespread and gruesome death, but humiliation for them and their nation. Paul Ritter plays deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov with an unwavering commitment to acknowledging anything but the truth. Dyatlov actively gaslights his employees to their faces, telling them what they did or didn't see, what is and isn't happening, without so much as a blink of self-doubt. If nothing else, you go into Chernobyl knowing the answer to its central thematic question: "What is the cost of lies?" In this case, it is the steepest cost of human life. The person asking is chemist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), who led the Chernobyl investigation and died by suicide exactly two years later. On the Chernobyl podcast, creator Craig Mazin compares his series to a horror movie in that an unseen monster is haunting and killing these characters and they can do nothing to stop it. That is the true terror of Chernobyl: This monster has no visible face or form as it stalks its victims. You know there are no ghosts or creatures lurking in your home at night, but you never know, with absolute certainty, what dangers lurk in the very air around us. The series is as unsettling in its breaths as in its action. At the power plant, workers panic and run to prevent a disaster already in motion – but out in Pripyat, citizens continue quiet lives, watching what they believe from afar to be a fire. One of the episode's most chilling moments is a wordless scene of children dancing and playing in snowy ash raining down from the expanding cloud above their home. Some of the most outlandish and ironic moments are drawn from actual fact, such as firemen dousing the flame in water and one of them touching a piece of exposed graphite with his bare hands. Image: hbo A silent killer, radiation poisoning announces its presence in graphic, visceral display. Production designer Luke Hull described the show as his most disturbing research to date. Bodies exposed to radioactive material melt inside and out; men vomit spontaneously; and more than once, a character says they taste metal and leaves us suspended on this ominous note. A shrewd doctor asks if the hospital has iodine tablets, looking ahead to their potential use to protect the thyroid gland from radiation poisoning (the Chernobyl explosion led to over a dozen deaths from childhood thyroid cancer). Hull's production drops you right into the Chernobyl and its surroundings, a dire contrast of Mad Men-esque quaintness and calamity. It's not accidental that scenes from inside the power plant echo Titanic or a treacherous scene from a movie set in space (on the podcast, Mazin and host Peter Sagal briefly discuss the Challenger explosion that occurred mere months before Chernobyl). Mazin began work on the series as early as 2015, when lies were not ubiquitous in American news, when power and pride's mounting death toll wasn't daily mass shootings and a regime seemingly free of consequence. It's nothing short of heartbreaking to watch Chernobyl's tragedy unfurl. As Mazin himself says: "You can contain information. You can't contain nuclear isotopes." Chernobyl airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on HBO.<doc-sep>HBO's new five-episode series Chernobyl depicts the circumstances surrounding the worst nuclear catastrophe of the 20th century. When reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station went critical on April 26, 1986, the resulting explosion spewed radioactive material all over the facility and across the Ukrainain border into Belarus. More than 100,000 people were evacuated in the following days, as first responders fought fires, sometimes absorbing fatal doses of radiation in the process. HBO's Chernobyl miniseries cast includes both characters based on real people and composite characters based on several individuals (like Emily Watson's Ulyana Khomyuk). Adrian Rollins plays Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin, who was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp for violating safety regulations (he was released early after a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt). Con O'Neill plays Viktor Bryukhanov, the plant manager who reported the incident up the chain of command. Other real-life characters had even larger roles in the unfolding Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Chernobyl HBO Cast and True Story Counterparts Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) Played by Jared Harris in HBO's Chernobyl, Valery Legasov was chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster and a prominent member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Legasov committed suicide two years after the Chernobyl disaster—a 1993 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists attributed his death to disillusionment over "the Soviet failure to confront the flaws" in their reactors. In 1996, he was posthumously awarded Hero of the Russian Federation by President Boris Yeltsin. Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard) Where Legasov is the principled scientist, Skargard's character, the real-life Deputy Prime Minister Scherbina, represents the reluctant Soviet government. Shcherbina would rather sweep the Chernobyl disaster under the rug rather than deal with the consequences honestly. He can be seen in the trailer, downplaying the threat of radiation on the site. Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter) Dyatlov was the deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl and the supervisor for the disastrous experiment that resulted in the April 26 explosion. He was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp (and served five) for his role in the meltdown. Despite absorbing a near-deadly dose of radiation, Dyatlov lived until 1995. Vasily and Lyudmila Ignatenko (Adam Nagaitis and Jessie Buckley) Firefighter Vasily Ignatenko was one of 28 first responders, including Power Station employees, who died from radiation in the weeks following the explosion. In Chernobyl, he's played by Adam Nagaitis, who has acted alongside Harris before, in The Terror. His wife Lyudmila Ignatenko, played by Jessie Buckley, is also a real person, who described the horrible process of watching her husband die in Svetlana Alexievich's 1997 book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. While most of the other main characters on HBO's adaptation are administrators and decision-makers, Vasily and Lyudmila are the face of those who did the dirty work and suffered for it. Chernobyl Reactor Operators The HBO miniseries includes many of the real people operating the reactor at the time of the meltdown. Alexander Akimov (Sam Troughton) was the night crew shift supervisor during the early morning hours test that resulted in the reactor explosion. He was initially opposed to conducting the test, but Dyatlov threatened his job. Leonid Toptunov (Robert Emms) operated the control rods, which included a design flaw that lead to the disaster, during the test. Vyacheslav Brazhnik (Adam Lundgren), a turbine machinist operator, ran to the control to report fires, then worked to fight them himself. Viktor Proskuryakov (Karl Davies) and Valery Perevozchenko (Jay Simpson) were sent to manually reinsert the control rods by Akimov, who didn't believe the reactor had been compromised in the explosion. The two looked directly into the exposed reactor core and died within weeks. Proskuryakov had radiation burns covering his entire body. After the explosion, Akimov continued to disbelieve reports of the extent of the damage (including from Proskuryakov and Perevozchenko) and continued to insist the reactor was intact, relaying false information for hours. But while many mistakes were made, both in the lead-up to the test and in the aftermath, Akimov and Toptunov bravely stayed behind and worked for hours to try and pump water into the reactor room to cool it. Both subsequently died of radiation poisoning. While there are plenty of characters and moments in the HBO Chernobyl series that can't be linked directly to real people, a surprising portion of the cast is playing a very real person, many of whom died in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. That makes Chernobyl not just a dramatization, but also a memorial to their heroism, mistakes and suffering.<doc-sep>
What You Need to Know About the Chernobyl Disaster Before HBO's Miniseries Comes Out Decades after the catastrophic explosion at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, HBO gives an in-depth look at the accident in a five-part miniseries that stars Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard, and Emily Watson. The chilling trailer looks as though it's a horror movie, but it's really based on a true story of a full-blown international crisis. The disaster is considered the worst nuclear plant disaster in human history, triggering harrowing health and economic effects. Before you watch the new show, here's what you need to know about the background and consequences of the tragic event. Where was Chernobyl? The Chernobyl plant was located around 60 miles away from Kiev near the small town of Pripyat in Ukraine. During the time of the nuclear disaster, Ukraine had still been part of the Soviet Union. Originally established in the '70s to accommodate plant workers, the now-abandoned Pripyat had a population of between 40,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. What caused the explosions? There's a lot of nuclear science here, so bear with us. Nuclear engineers wanted to see how the plant would operate during a power outage, which created an unsafe and unstable environment in the Unit 4 reactor at the plant. The workers turned off safety systems, which included a turbine system with cooling water, as they would be lost during an outage. The reactor was supposed to be at 25 percent capacity during the test, but it plummeted down to less than one percent. Testers tried to increase the percentage, which led to an unexpected surge in power. The cooling water boiled with limited flow, leading to a buildup of steam. Engineers tried to insert control rods, but a design flaw made them jam. The surge in power caused fuel pellets to explode, which caused a second explosion soon after. The 1,000-ton roof of the reactor blew off, which spewed radiation into the air and created a fire. The radiation levels became dangerous, fast, spreading throughout Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Think 400 times the amount dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. How did the evacuation process take place? Soviet officials were slow to announce the situation to the general public and spearhead evacuation efforts, leading to speculations of incompetence as well as a cover-up. Firefighters first came in to quell the fire, but military helicopters later came to drop in sand and lead to contain the radiation. Thirty-six hours later, evacuation efforts began, and eventually, 120,000 people fled from the exclusion zone with a 19-mile radius. Officials remained tight-lipped until Swedish scientists reported high levels of radiation from 800 miles away. This pushed the USSR to make an emergency announcement on April 28, though officials were evasive about the details. By November, the government installed a hastily built sarcophagus to contain the radiation exposure, though its poor construction would later require a more permanent solution. Two people died from the immediate explosion, while 134 were affected by acute radiation syndrome. Within that number, 28 died (though the number may be much higher). Still, it's hard to isolate the widespread and long-term effects of radiation. About 5,000 people who were children in highly contaminated areas have been affected by thyroid cancer, possibly from drinking milk from cows who grazed on radioactive pastures. Many engineers were held accountable for the likely possibility of human errors, but scientists have contended that there were flaws in the design of the reactor as well. Plant workers did not know about former nuclear accidents or prepare for future ones. What does the aftermath look like? The disaster yielded long-term health effects in addition to financial and psychological ones as people left their homes. Today, Chernobyl has become, shockingly, a tourist spot, even though it's essentially a radioactive ghost town. The wildlife there, still, has flourished, with 400 animal species in the dense woodlands that have cropped up since the disaster. (If you watched Netflix's new series Our Planet, you may remember the lush forest sequence in the disaster zone.) To this day, Chernobyl remains one of the most radioactive places on Earth. Even though decades have passed, nuclear experts say the area will not be inhabitable for at least 3,000 years, though a few locals have relocated or remained there because they consider it home. HBO's miniseries Chernobyl premieres on May 6 — here's the trailer: