If the lesson is that things always go wrong, and that's why nuclear power is too dangerous for humans, she's right.

Chernobyl is still horrifyingly relevant – the lessons have not been learned

It isn't.

But the lessons she draws are valid, all the same.

What I was afraid of, what hit me square in the chest, was that Chernobyl is familiar in more ways than one. 

I didn’t recognise only those intelligent, earnest Soviet men and women – dying because people more powerful than them needed them to die to protect their own standing – but I also recognised how the mind-numbing lies and the political expediency of the horror is not something we can safely put away into a box. 

We can’t say, “That’s what happened then, and sure, it was incredibly awful and sad, but it doesn’t apply to us.”

Whether it’s the demagogue sitting in the White House, the people who engineered Brexit, or the chorus on the right and corporate interests telling us that the climate crisis is nothing but an alarmist hoax, there are people who do the expedient thing for their own ends all around us. 

Many are powerful enough to decide our collective fates.

Today, I regularly encounter people who think that life in a communist paradise will help humanity solve its current predicaments. 

And who the fuck are they?

Where does she encounter them?

She works in DC, as I understand it.

Some are mean and cruel, delighted by the prospect of purging all those they consider their enemies. 

Some are decent and kind, unable to comprehend the brutalities of life in the USSR and genuine in their belief that Vladimir Lenin, the man whose name the doomed nuclear plant carried, foresaw a beautiful utopia – or, as us Soviets once called it, an age of mercy.

I want to urge such people, as well as the Trumpers, the Brexiteers and everyone else, to watch Chernobyl. 

To do so is to be reminded of the fact that life is precious, and the least we can do is honour each other truthfully as human beings in the time that is allotted to us.