I tried to watch “Černo-NE-byľ” but the English captions only went so far and my Russian isn’t that good yet
The narrative goes that it was the KPSS that tried to obscure what happened, but I want to know the ML side of the story.
i don’t have much to add to this topic, besides pointing out it was 1986, soviet union was… you know
In terms of technical/scientific explanations of what happened, I think Scott Manley and Kyle Hill have done great videos on that.
In terms of the political side, I think it was Viki1999 who did a video discussing that a bit more. It could have been another lefty YouTuber though.
I’m hesitant to watch videos on Chernobyl from Kyle Hill.
A YouTube link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same video on Invidious, which is a YouTube frontend that protects your privacy:
It’s a story of questionable reactor design, abysmal safety practices/culture, heroic responders, and government denials to try to save face on the international stage.
Chernobyl #4 was an RBMK-1000 reactor, which is a graphite moderated light-water cooled design. This is an important distinction to make, compared to water moderated/water cooled designs. This page (specifically the void coefficient section) explains the relevant science, but essentially, the RBMK-1000 design does not include one of the critical design safety features of most Western reactor designs.
Couple this missing design safety feature with the absence of safety culture and a lack of adherence to thoroughly written and reviewed procedures, and it’s unfortunately no real surprise that there was such a disaster.
The immediate response is full of stories of the bravery of workers and first responders, some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the disaster did not get worse.
[Disclaimer: this is the part I’m least familiar with] And the government did all they could to sweep the incident under the rug and avoid the West learning about it, as is their MO (this attitude has persisted into the 21st Century, even. See: The Kursk disaster in 2000
