Chernobyl Disaster: Difference between revisions
All in all it's just another brick in the wall of text
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Nobody is too concerned. Nothing goes wrong. Nothing can go wrong. This high up in the party, Soviet designs are flawless. The only flaws are with the people who impliment them.
Legasov is appointed to a Commission to investigate what's happened.
Legasov and the Commission make the long journey to Kiev in Ukraine, then on to Pripyat. It's late evening and the sun has already begun to set. The sky is burning orange - but above the reactor it has turned a sickly purple.
Legasov muses that the big distinguisher between a nuclear power plant and a regular one is that nothing should be coming out of a nuclear power plant.
In Pripyat, there is confusion and indecision amongst the authorities - but the people of the city for the most part remain in the dark. Many citizens of Pripyat go about their days as if nothing has happened. A mayday funfair has just been completed, with a brand-new ferris wheel and dodgem cars. They will never be used. Schoolchildren prepare for the upcoming May Day parades.
Soldiers in respirators walk alongside children in t-shirts. Weddings are held with armoured cars going past. The air around them seethes with radiation - thousands of times more powerful than normal background levels. Film footage taken on the day is blistered by flashes from hot particles. Fragments of the reactor and its fuel rain down from above. Shards of uranium and pulverised graphite sand settle into the soil, into the cracks in the road, into people's hair.
Few realise the danger the plant now represents. Only those who are relatives of the plantworkers, or the firefighters, know better - and only they know that their loved ones haven't come home. At Pripyat hospital, the firefighters are plantworkers are treated for their symptoms. Their contaminated clothes - intensely radioactive with fallout from the core, are dumped in the basement. They remain there to this day, still radioactive enough to give a dangerous dose of radiation.
Lyudmila Ignatenko - wife of Vasily Ignatenko, attends the hospital to try and find her husband. By the time she finds him, he is already on a helicopter, being rushed to a secret hospital in Moscow.
The city council, still trying to grasp the depths of the hazard and what exactly has happened, does what comes naturally to the Soviet authorities. They seal off the city and cut all outside phone lines. The 'radio', piped in by cable, pipes through tepid music rather than the usual propeganda leading to murmured speculation that an important party official has just died and the State was working out how to break the news to the People.
Above all else, the Soviet authorities fear panic. Panic threatens the appearrance of the apparattus to be in control. And this threatens the Apparratus itself. Panic must be avoided, and so the city is not told.
Nevertheless, Ukrainian authorities ready busses at Kiev.
Legasov overflies the reactor the next day. It is immediately clear that, what has happened, involved more than a hydrogen tank explosion. Not only is the entire roof blown off - but it's possible to look straight down into the burning reactor core. Only distance saves the men in the helicopter from the fate of the powerplant workers of the night before. Steaming fragments of the reactor are visible Radiation levels are measured at hideous levels.
Igor Kostygin - a photographer in the holicopter - takes photographs as they overfly the core. The radiation is so intense it destroys the film. Only one image is useable.
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