I worked in the soviet nuclear industry (Sredmash) in the 1980s.
The dialogs and characters are completely unrealistic and made me cringe.
Everyone looks overemotional and infantile.
The hierarchical interactions are comical - a minister would never go to talk to miners, he would just phone a subordinate and tell them to organize people, they don't need armed soldiers present to enforce something, it is not the Wild West. The authors have no clue about the soviet mentality and how soviet society operated.
Easy but boring. Realistically, the workers would be gathered in a hall and their immediate boss would give a speech: "The party and the government want you to serve the Motherland at this heroic moment and volunteer for a hard job. Whoever goes gets apartments ahead of the waiting list".
"Verbal abuse" isn't a concept that existed in the Soviet Union. Giving or receiving instructions with as many "suka blyat" inserted between each word as possible wasn't abnormal.
It was concept that existed in the Soviet Union. And yes, people complained about those, got rid of them first thing whenever they could and retaliated when they could.
Soviet Union people knew the concept of "non-asshole boss" and could distinguish it from "asshole boss". They would use those terms. Where they could vote for boss (and yes they could vote for boss in some institutions) they would avoid voting for assholes (unless they expected them to be assholes to external people).
This concept existed also in literature, movies, music and general entertainment. It shown up there and the "good boss" always won (else it could be constructed as a critique of the system). Asshole boss was typically foreign ennemy in disguise.
Higginbotham uses Medvedev's book as a source. Medvedev worked in the Ministry of Energy and he was their special representative in Chernobyl after the incident. His task was to cover the asses of the ministry and the reactor designers, so this book invented a lot of "facts" to put the blame on the operators, Dyatlov and Fomin.
No, the show is not accurate. The last episode repeats the lies that Legasov told at the IAEA meeting in 1986, that were published as INSAG-1, and the show completely ignores INSAG-7. There was no drama in the control room, no indications that anything was wrong with the reactor, no power spike before AZ-5 was pressed.
The TV show pretends to be historically accurate, and many people believe that it is true. I would suspect that the majority of people have no other sources of information about Chernobyl other than this TV show.
How does it make sense that the show ignores INSAG-7 when the whole plot point about the design of the control rods increasing the reactivity isn't from INSAG-1 but from INSAG-7? The same with the plotline about this defect being known, but kept from the operators. And Legasov lying about all this at the IAEA meeting? All-in-all INSAG-1 paints a picture of operator failure, INSAG-7 paints a picture of systemic failure and the show paints a picture of systemic failure.
And to nitpick: INSAG-7 doesn't disagree with INSAG-1 about the power rising just before AZ-5. From page 8 of INSAG-7: "When the turbine was tripped, the four pumps it was powering began to slow
down as the turbine speed was reduced and the associated generator voltage fell. This
reduced rate of core flow caused the void content of the core to rise and caused an
initial positive feedback of reactivity which was at least in part the cause of the acci-
dent." (page 8) This happens ~30 seconds before AZ-5 is pushed.
The same event described in Table I on page 21-22 of INSAG-1, with the part deprecated by INSAG-7 marked with {}:
01:23:04 {The personnel blocked the two-TG trip signal.} Emergency stop valve to the turbine was closed. The reactor continues operating at a power of 200 MW(th).
01:23:10 One group of automatic control rods start driving out
01:23:21 Two groups of automatic control rods begin reinsertion.
01:23:31 Net reactivity increasing with subsequent slow increase in reactor power.
The textual description on page 25 of INSAG-1 isn't much different: "When the emergency stop valve to the turbine was closed, the steam pressure began to rise. The flow through the core started to drop because four of the main cooling pumps were running down with the generator. Increasing pressure, reduced feedwater flow and reduced flow through the reactor are competing factors which determine the volumetric steam quality and hence the power of the reactor. It should be emphasized that the reactor was then in such a state that small changes in power would have led to much larger changes in steam void, with consequent power increases. The combination of these factors ultimately led to a power increase begninning at about 01:23:30."
> neither the reactor power nor the other parameters (pressure and water level in the steam separator drums, coolant and feedwater flow rates, etc.) required any intervention by the personnel or by the engineered safety features from the beginning of the tests until the EPS-5 button was pressed. The Commission did not detect any events or dynamic processes, such as hidden reactor runaway, which could have been the event which initiated the accident. “
Sure, I'm just saying the power increase did happen, according to both INSAG-1 and INSAG-7. Neither INSAG-1, INSAG-7 nor Legasovs report claims there is a rapid increase in power before AZ-5 is pushed. The claim in INSAG-1 is that this power increase was the start of a positive-feedback loop that caused the explosion. The claim in INSAG-7 was that the power increase was not a safety problem, except to the extent it caused the operator to push AZ-5.
I can't find any description of the test across the three reports mentioning that that emergency stop button is supposed to be pressed as part of the test. AFAICT the test wasn't even completed when the button was pressed as the purpose of the test was to demonstrate that the emergency core cooling system could run for at least 40 s (INSAG-1 page 17) after closing the turbine emergency stop valve. That valve was closed at 01:23:04 and AZ-5 was pressed at 01:23:40.
For the rundown test, after the valve cut-off, it is irrelevant whether the reactor was shut down or not. The working plan for the test only specified that it was supposed to run before a planned maintenance period, so the shutdown was implied. During previous tests, the AZ-5 signal was wired to the valve cut-off signal and was sent automatically at the same moment. It is not clear why this changed in 1986, but the outcome would have been the same if AZ-5 had been pressed 35 seconds earlier.
Can you point to anywhere in INSAG-7 where they talk explicitly about that? Because if not your point about the show ignoring INSAG-7 falls a bit flat.
This information is not discussed in INSAG-7. It is from trial testimonies sourced from the book by Nikolai Karpan (deputy chief engineer of Chernobyl NPP), who was present at the trial and made notes himself.
In the USSR, you usually don't have a spare guest room. An unmarried young man would be lucky to live in a separate apartment; otherwise, it is usually just a bed in a dormitory. At best, it is a one-room (12-20 m2) apartment with a kitchen (10 m2). A hotel is too expensive, so you put your guests into your bed, a folding chair, or a folding cot and go to the kitchen to sleep on a mattress. There were families of 4-5 people who lived in such apartments permanently.
Even in the US, I don't know many friends with enough living space to have an entire spare guest room.
When friends visit, they sleep on the living room couch or an air mattress. Is this not typical?
Flippant answer: in the U.S., in your twenties, you have no spare space, and visiting friends sleep on your couch. In your forties, you have a guest bedroom, and visiting friends stay at a hotel.
Possibly more accurate answer: it depends on what kind of housing people live in, if they have kids, and if they work at home. Most residential houses were built for couples with children, so if someone owns a house and is single and/or childless, they likely have spare bedrooms that serve as a home offices, hobby spaces, or guest bedrooms. People living in apartments usually don't pay for more space than required for their daily needs.
Somebody else was likely sleeping in the living room already. The reality of living conditions in the USSR was harsh.
You were typically allocated spacious 9 square meters (96 sq. ft.) of living space per person, with an additional 18 square meters for the head of the family. So a 4-person family would get about 45 square meters (485 sq. ft.)
And these were _typical_ numbers, not a guarantee. Plenty of families had less space.
In most of the Eastern block the accommodation given to a family was sized for that family. Few had the luxury of a completely unused room.
The kitchen was routinely used as a room for two reasons, one that it was obviously a room, the second because it was easy to heat with the stove being right there. A lot of families were using the kitchen as permanent living space, usually relegating the grandparents to that worst room so the young ones could get a decent start in life.
It doesn't seem that crazy that there would be very little space. Visiting parents and/or grandparents probably got the bedroom, some friends the living room.
It's less common than it used to be, but in India it's still kind of normal for newlyweds to live in the groom's parents' kitchen for a while until they get their own place
There is an old practice of having an alternative `toor` user with UID=0, with a different shell and password, in case someone screws the primary `root` account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toor_(Unix)
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