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The Battle of Chernobyl
La Bataille de Tchernobyl
2007 · Film · documentary · 94 min
Directed by Thomas Johnson, Tom Jennings
On April 26, 1986, a 1,000 feet high flame rises into the sky of the Ukraine. The fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant just exploded. A battle begins in which 500,000 men are engaged throughout the Soviet Union to "liquidate" the radioactivity, build the "sarcophagus" of the damaged reactor and save the world from a second explosion that would have destroyed half of Europe. Become a reference film, this documentary combines testimonials and unseen footage, tells for the first time the Battle of Chernobyl.
6 positivefrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.
One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.
I don't know what the exact numbers are, and I'm not sure if any of us will ever know for sure, but one of the documentaries I like is Discovery's "Battle of Chernobyl," since it includes a lot of interviews with people who were actually there and participated in the events. They interview Nikolay Antoshkin, the colonel general in charge of the helicopter operations there, which is where the 600 pilot deaths number comes from. I'm more inclined to believe that account than what the state published.
Also interesting if older is the The Battle of Chernobyl (2006) film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1832484/), on youtube here under a different title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS3WvKKSpKI .
Has interviews from the likes of Gorbachev saying even he didn't know what was going on at the time.
There's an amazing documentary about this that contains a lot of footage of the actual incident and cleanup called the "Battle of Chernobyl".
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/
Things that still haunt me: the helicopter pilots who put the initial fires out flew in 120-180C temperatures and pretty much all died of radiation. And the sequence that starts about here:
https://youtu.be/ezohqY-vg4s?t=3430
Where they are picking up radioactive materials by hand and throwing it off the roof next to the reactor because the robots they were trying to use all break down. Even 1 hour of exposure was deadly so they rotated through shifts, and the guys who did it were called "Bio Robots"
The Battle Of Chernobyl is also well worth watching : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdMLFJJyWnM
Your image reversal point is a good one. It might be that it was reversed in the images, I don't really remember.
I couldn't find the photographs, but they are mentioned at some pointsin the "Battle for Chernobyl" movie: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/ (Highly recommended movie, btw. Very freaky.)
(Also noticed that it's at Google video. Watch it while you can!)
The Battle of Chernobyl http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5384001427276447319# is a good documentary to check out.
They sacrificed hundreds of men in a rush to stave off a secondary explosion that would have made a far larger uninhabitable zone.