Chernobyl

The HBO series about the accident well repays repeated viewings.

I've watched it a couple times in the last few days.

Absolutely horrifying from the first moments.

The spin is mostly anti-Soviet liberal propaganda.

The reality is the accident in Japan was as bad or worse, and that can't be laid at the feet of a totalitarian regime covered wall to wall with official lies.

The reality is humans are too stupid, irresponsible, corrupt, and bloody-minded for nuclear power.

Who would build nuclear plans on the earthquake belt?

Humans, that's who, and it wasn't the Russians.

As for Chernobyl, or anyway the events as portrayed in the video, there were two major issues.

The first is that both that and how the core of a reactor of that sort could explode was a state secret kept even from all those responsible for nuclear energy, including the best trained engineers.

So those in charge did pretty much exactly what would be needed to cause such an explosion never knowing for a second that such at thing could happen - though in doing so they had already departed knowingly and frightfully from the limits of safe operational and testing procedure.

The second is that all up and down the lines of authority stupid people were proud of their ignorance and refused to accept judgements, opinions, and recommendations of relevant experts.

Out society is doubtless less endangered by the first sort of problem than Soviet Russia was.

But we are surely every bit as exposed to the second.

And why didn't those non and even anti-Christian Marxist Russians kill those people whose ends were inevitable and filled with unbearable and uncontrollable pain and horror?

Surely not because of scruples about the sanctity of life, eh?

You'd kill a cat to prevent it suffering like that.

Throughout the film dozens of people knowingly incur certain and even awful death to prevent the worst, but Valery Legasov does not dare tell the truth in Vienna in order to ensure the government will actually fix the 16 other reactors subject to the same fatal flaw, though he believes that his exposure to radiation has doomed him to die in about five years, anyway.

The containment building over the ruined reactor cost two billion dollars and is planned to last a century.

Over how many centuries will it be necessary to continue replacing containment buildings?